Showing posts with label Animals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Animals. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 14, 2026
Paradise Revisited
The Galápagos Islands owe their place on rich travelers’ bucket lists to the vision of them as an unfallen Eden, touted as “the laboratory of evolution” that inspired Charles Darwin to write On the Origin of Species. When he visited, humans’ presence here was limited to whalers, buccaneers, and political prisoners. Today, more than 300,000 people visit the archipelago each year. Every tourist desperate to see an untouched paradise is part of a constant influx that risks despoiling the very thing they came to see.
On his arrival, in 1835, Darwin marveled at the lack of fear shown by all the animals, thanks to their limited exposure to humans. “Met an immense Turpin: took little notice of me,” he wrote in his field notebook about encountering a tortoise on September 21. Perhaps the poor turpin should have been more wary: By October 12, Darwin was recording that he had been “eating Tortoise meat / By the way delicious in Soup.” Soon he was trying to ride them. “I frequently got on their backs,” he wrote in the published version of his diaries, “and then giving a few raps on the hinder part of their shells, they would rise up and walk away;—but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.”
On these parched islands, the tortoises were prized for their ability to slurp moisture from prickly pear cacti, and to drink enough at the rare springs to sustain them for months on end. Thirst-racked sailors would catch and kill them purely for the contents of their bladders. “In one I saw killed, the fluid was quite limpid, and had only a very slightly bitter taste,” wrote Darwin, having sportingly chugged some tortoise urine for science.
Today, none of this is allowed. El Chato Ranch, which I visited in the pouring rain, permits selfies with its resident tortoises but absolutely no touching, eating, or disemboweling. Most of the Galápagos have been designated by Ecuador as a national park, with a $200 entrance fee—up from $100 just two years ago—and a strict injunction to stay six feet away from the animals. The archipelago is also home to the flightless cormorant, whose former wings are now stumpy nubs; a species of batfish that looks like it is wearing bright-red lipstick; and the marine iguana, which ejects excess salt from its body by sneezing. (Catch a big group at the right moment and they can go off like the cannons in the 1812 Overture.) These animals all exist in the Galápagos and nowhere else.
The usual story of Darwin’s visit is that he cataloged the small differences that had emerged in animals across the islands—discrepancies in the beaks of the finches being a prime example—as each species responded to the unique conditions. In a flash of insight, he understood the mechanism of evolution: survival of the fittest. The truth is more complicated, and more interesting. His ship, the H.M.S. Beagle, spent only five weeks here, and Darwin landed on just four of the 13 major islands. At first, he did not recognize the importance of the variation among the islands, and did not label many of his bird specimens with their precise origins. The greatest study of what we now call “Darwin’s finches” was done by a British couple, Peter and Rosemary Grant, who visited the same uninhabited island, Daphne Major, every year from 1973 to 2013.
Darwin also didn’t notice the numerous subspecies of giant tortoise until the vice governor called attention to their variety and declared “that he could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought,” the naturalist wrote in his field notebook. Tortoises on Hood and Charles Islands, for instance, had evolved shells that were curved upward at the front like a saddle, allowing their necks to reach higher vegetation. Oh, and Darwin didn’t even coin the phrase survival of the fittest. That came from one of the early reviewers of Origin, Herbert Spencer. Darwin liked it so much that he incorporated it into later editions.
The mythology of blinding-inspiration-in-paradise is so appealing that it has outcompeted the truth. The actual story—the one that drove me here—is that Darwin was above all an empiricist. He took nothing on trust. He wanted to see things for himself, measure them, catalog them, and perhaps even eat them, and he was willing to endure any combination of boredom, nausea, and danger to do so. He was an omnivore, as interested in geology as biology when he toured South America, and his most famous theory drew on economics as well. He had an ego, definitely, but he was also open-minded and curious; he wanted to understand nature, not just plunder it like so many colonial explorers. (In later life, he supported animal charities and called for vivisection to be regulated.) He was willing to push back against editors, too, such as the one who suggested that he should reframe Origin to focus only on pigeons, because “everybody is interested in pigeons.”
All of that should make him any writer’s hero.
The British first named the individual islands in the 1600s—Charles Island after King Charles II, James Island (where Darwin spent most of his time) after the King’s brother, and so on—although most guidebooks now use the official Spanish names. Today Ecuador treats the Galápagos as precious jewels for both noble and commercial reasons. To enter, you need to complete a biosecurity declaration, promising not to introduce any plants or animals that could rampage through this delicate ecosystem. There are no international flights into the archipelago. For me, the two-hour flight to the territory’s main airport, on Baltra Island, came at the end of a tiring slog from London to Miami, and then on to Quito, the high-altitude Ecuadoran capital, where the thin air gave me a headache the instant I stepped off the plane.
I consoled myself on the long journey by reading accounts of Darwin’s five years on the Beagle, which were marked by seasickness so intense that he traveled overland by horse whenever he could, catching up with the ship farther along its journey. “I hate every wave of the ocean, with a fervor, which you, who have only seen the green waters of the shore, can never understand,” he wrote to his cousin William. His captain, Robert FitzRoy, recorded that Darwin was “a martyr to confinement and sea-sickness when under way.”
One of the great mysteries of Darwin’s life is how he made such a success of his five years at sea, which came between a directionless youth and an adulthood blighted by anxiety and illness. When he left England, at age 22, he was a dilettante who had washed out of medical school and was wavering about becoming a parson. His main interaction with birds and mammals was shooting them. He returned from his sea voyage a more serious and ambitious man, but one plagued for the rest of his life by vomiting, palpitations, “extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence,” and vague, shifting symptoms of mental distress. He installed a lavatory behind a screen in his study at Down House, in Kent, so that he could void himself from either end as necessary and quickly return to work.
During his half decade on the Beagle, though, Darwin worked steadily, sending crates of specimens home on passing ships, and he endured the loneliness and ennui of the voyage with remarkable fortitude. Time at sea was notoriously hard on sailors’ mental health; the Beagle’s previous captain, Pringle Stokes, had killed himself during the bleak southern winter. (The weather was so dreary, he wrote in June 1828, that “the soul of man dies in him.” A month later, he put a gun to his head in his cabin.) FitzRoy took over as captain soon after, and decided that on his second Beagle voyage, he would take a gentleman companion to jolly him along. He and Darwin ate meals together and talked about current affairs, tiptoeing around their different political backgrounds (FitzRoy was a Tory; Darwin was from a Whig family) and intensity of religious belief (FitzRoy was a creationist; Darwin, even then, was a doubter). He gave Darwin the affectionate nickname Philos, for “natural philosopher.”
In addition to seasickness, Darwin had to brave an equatorial climate far removed from the English Midlands, where he (and I) grew up. The midday sun is directly overhead, and on the youngest islands, which have little soil and therefore little vegetation, there is no shade to hide in. “Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance,” he wrote on landing at Chatham Island (now San Cristóbal, the seat of government). “The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noonday sun, gave to the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.” And this was in September, the cooler of the two seasons! I had come during the first half of the year, the hotter rainy season, when the seas are warm, the air temperature is about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity wilts you like spinach.
On the first full day, crossing a scorching beach on the way back from seeing the marine iguanas at Tortuga Bay, I began to suffer from some sort of humidity-induced delirium, despite unfurling a legionnaire’s hat over my neck and shoulders. I distinctly remember thinking at one point that I had to “lock in,” the kind of extreme-sports jargon that my fully operational mind would disdain. After I had arrived safely at the hotel and rehydrated aggressively, I was amazed once again that Britons managed to explore and conquer so much of the globe, despite our manifest maladaptation to anything other than mild drizzle. That we did so before the advent of wicking fabrics, bug spray, and SPF 50 is even more implausible; I felt as ill-prepared for the climate as Captain Scott did when he relied on ponies rather than sled dogs in Antarctica, or the equally doomed Burke and Wills expedition, which took 20 tons of equipment, including a Chinese gong, into the Australian outback.
Unfortunately, what drove some of those early explorers was an unfounded (and occasionally fatal) sense of racial superiority: Europeans knew best. On FitzRoy’s previous Beagle voyage, in 1830, a whisper of this attitude crept into the ship’s scientific mission to map the South American coastline. At the southernmost tip of the continent, Tierra del Fuego, FitzRoy effectively kidnapped four Indigenous people as revenge for the theft of one of his boats. He gave them allegedly English names—York Minster, Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket, and Boat Memory—and took them back to England. (The birth names of the first three were Elleparu, Orundellico, and Yokcushlu; Boat Memory’s name has been lost.) The idea was that they would be “civilized” and returned, accompanied by a missionary, to convert their benighted fellow Fuegians to Christianity.
In fact, the missionary bailed after experiencing a few days of harsh Fuegian life, and the Fuegians quickly reverted to their ancestral ways. “Captain Fitz Roy could never ascertain that the Fuegians have any distinct belief in a future life,” Darwin observed in his diaries. To the average Victorian gentleman, this was proof enough that they were “savages.” I wonder, though, if the assertion gnawed at Darwin, given that his research was already drawing him away from religious faith. “Science has nothing to do with Christ; except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence,” he would write to a friend toward the end of his life, adding: “As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.” [...]
Today, Darwin is known as the great heretic, the man whose work shocked the Victorian establishment and undermined the Church. But the exact heresy he committed is not well understood. He was not the first person to suggest that species evolve—in fact, his own grandfather Erasmus had suggested that all warm-blooded animals might have arisen from “one living filament” in his 1794 book, Zoonomia. Darwin was also not the first person to notice that the boundaries between species were more fluid than the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus had acknowledged. (The Comte de Buffon, a French biologist, had done so at the time.) And he was far from the first Victorian intellectual to question the spurious biblical chronology suggesting that the Earth was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C.E. He didn’t even come up with the idea of selection pressures, per se—he got that from an economist, Thomas Malthus, who suggested that human populations tended to outgrow their available food sources and suffer famines as a result.
No, what offended some of Darwin’s early readers was that his vision of the universe counted humans as just another animal, rather than God’s special creation. Accepting evolution meant having “an ape for a grandfather,” as one observer put it. From the start, Darwin understood the political and religious implications of this, and he knew that advancing the notion publicly would make him a controversial figure. His own wife, Emma, was a devout Christian; some of his friends and colleagues were too.
After returning from the Galápagos, he spent more than two decades noodling in his “transmutation notebooks” without having the courage to expose his ideas, and his evidence, to universal scrutiny. In 1844, he wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker: “At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” It is like confessing a murder. Another decade-plus passed before he was driven into print by the unwelcome discovery that another scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had independently arrived at the same conclusion.
The publication of Origin, in 1859, gave everyone in Victorian polite society the opportunity to have an argument that had been brewing for many years. Soon after its release, Darwin’s critics and defenders clashed in a public debate that pitted the fierce Darwinian Thomas Henry Huxley against the bishop of Oxford and the former Captain FitzRoy, who preferred to believe that the fossils they had seen together in Patagonia had been deposited there by the biblical flood. (Darwin was too anxious and flatulent to attend himself.)
On these parched islands, the tortoises were prized for their ability to slurp moisture from prickly pear cacti, and to drink enough at the rare springs to sustain them for months on end. Thirst-racked sailors would catch and kill them purely for the contents of their bladders. “In one I saw killed, the fluid was quite limpid, and had only a very slightly bitter taste,” wrote Darwin, having sportingly chugged some tortoise urine for science.
Today, none of this is allowed. El Chato Ranch, which I visited in the pouring rain, permits selfies with its resident tortoises but absolutely no touching, eating, or disemboweling. Most of the Galápagos have been designated by Ecuador as a national park, with a $200 entrance fee—up from $100 just two years ago—and a strict injunction to stay six feet away from the animals. The archipelago is also home to the flightless cormorant, whose former wings are now stumpy nubs; a species of batfish that looks like it is wearing bright-red lipstick; and the marine iguana, which ejects excess salt from its body by sneezing. (Catch a big group at the right moment and they can go off like the cannons in the 1812 Overture.) These animals all exist in the Galápagos and nowhere else.
The usual story of Darwin’s visit is that he cataloged the small differences that had emerged in animals across the islands—discrepancies in the beaks of the finches being a prime example—as each species responded to the unique conditions. In a flash of insight, he understood the mechanism of evolution: survival of the fittest. The truth is more complicated, and more interesting. His ship, the H.M.S. Beagle, spent only five weeks here, and Darwin landed on just four of the 13 major islands. At first, he did not recognize the importance of the variation among the islands, and did not label many of his bird specimens with their precise origins. The greatest study of what we now call “Darwin’s finches” was done by a British couple, Peter and Rosemary Grant, who visited the same uninhabited island, Daphne Major, every year from 1973 to 2013.
Darwin also didn’t notice the numerous subspecies of giant tortoise until the vice governor called attention to their variety and declared “that he could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought,” the naturalist wrote in his field notebook. Tortoises on Hood and Charles Islands, for instance, had evolved shells that were curved upward at the front like a saddle, allowing their necks to reach higher vegetation. Oh, and Darwin didn’t even coin the phrase survival of the fittest. That came from one of the early reviewers of Origin, Herbert Spencer. Darwin liked it so much that he incorporated it into later editions.
The mythology of blinding-inspiration-in-paradise is so appealing that it has outcompeted the truth. The actual story—the one that drove me here—is that Darwin was above all an empiricist. He took nothing on trust. He wanted to see things for himself, measure them, catalog them, and perhaps even eat them, and he was willing to endure any combination of boredom, nausea, and danger to do so. He was an omnivore, as interested in geology as biology when he toured South America, and his most famous theory drew on economics as well. He had an ego, definitely, but he was also open-minded and curious; he wanted to understand nature, not just plunder it like so many colonial explorers. (In later life, he supported animal charities and called for vivisection to be regulated.) He was willing to push back against editors, too, such as the one who suggested that he should reframe Origin to focus only on pigeons, because “everybody is interested in pigeons.”
All of that should make him any writer’s hero.
The British first named the individual islands in the 1600s—Charles Island after King Charles II, James Island (where Darwin spent most of his time) after the King’s brother, and so on—although most guidebooks now use the official Spanish names. Today Ecuador treats the Galápagos as precious jewels for both noble and commercial reasons. To enter, you need to complete a biosecurity declaration, promising not to introduce any plants or animals that could rampage through this delicate ecosystem. There are no international flights into the archipelago. For me, the two-hour flight to the territory’s main airport, on Baltra Island, came at the end of a tiring slog from London to Miami, and then on to Quito, the high-altitude Ecuadoran capital, where the thin air gave me a headache the instant I stepped off the plane.
I consoled myself on the long journey by reading accounts of Darwin’s five years on the Beagle, which were marked by seasickness so intense that he traveled overland by horse whenever he could, catching up with the ship farther along its journey. “I hate every wave of the ocean, with a fervor, which you, who have only seen the green waters of the shore, can never understand,” he wrote to his cousin William. His captain, Robert FitzRoy, recorded that Darwin was “a martyr to confinement and sea-sickness when under way.”
One of the great mysteries of Darwin’s life is how he made such a success of his five years at sea, which came between a directionless youth and an adulthood blighted by anxiety and illness. When he left England, at age 22, he was a dilettante who had washed out of medical school and was wavering about becoming a parson. His main interaction with birds and mammals was shooting them. He returned from his sea voyage a more serious and ambitious man, but one plagued for the rest of his life by vomiting, palpitations, “extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence,” and vague, shifting symptoms of mental distress. He installed a lavatory behind a screen in his study at Down House, in Kent, so that he could void himself from either end as necessary and quickly return to work.
During his half decade on the Beagle, though, Darwin worked steadily, sending crates of specimens home on passing ships, and he endured the loneliness and ennui of the voyage with remarkable fortitude. Time at sea was notoriously hard on sailors’ mental health; the Beagle’s previous captain, Pringle Stokes, had killed himself during the bleak southern winter. (The weather was so dreary, he wrote in June 1828, that “the soul of man dies in him.” A month later, he put a gun to his head in his cabin.) FitzRoy took over as captain soon after, and decided that on his second Beagle voyage, he would take a gentleman companion to jolly him along. He and Darwin ate meals together and talked about current affairs, tiptoeing around their different political backgrounds (FitzRoy was a Tory; Darwin was from a Whig family) and intensity of religious belief (FitzRoy was a creationist; Darwin, even then, was a doubter). He gave Darwin the affectionate nickname Philos, for “natural philosopher.”
In addition to seasickness, Darwin had to brave an equatorial climate far removed from the English Midlands, where he (and I) grew up. The midday sun is directly overhead, and on the youngest islands, which have little soil and therefore little vegetation, there is no shade to hide in. “Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance,” he wrote on landing at Chatham Island (now San Cristóbal, the seat of government). “The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noonday sun, gave to the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.” And this was in September, the cooler of the two seasons! I had come during the first half of the year, the hotter rainy season, when the seas are warm, the air temperature is about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity wilts you like spinach.
On the first full day, crossing a scorching beach on the way back from seeing the marine iguanas at Tortuga Bay, I began to suffer from some sort of humidity-induced delirium, despite unfurling a legionnaire’s hat over my neck and shoulders. I distinctly remember thinking at one point that I had to “lock in,” the kind of extreme-sports jargon that my fully operational mind would disdain. After I had arrived safely at the hotel and rehydrated aggressively, I was amazed once again that Britons managed to explore and conquer so much of the globe, despite our manifest maladaptation to anything other than mild drizzle. That we did so before the advent of wicking fabrics, bug spray, and SPF 50 is even more implausible; I felt as ill-prepared for the climate as Captain Scott did when he relied on ponies rather than sled dogs in Antarctica, or the equally doomed Burke and Wills expedition, which took 20 tons of equipment, including a Chinese gong, into the Australian outback.
Unfortunately, what drove some of those early explorers was an unfounded (and occasionally fatal) sense of racial superiority: Europeans knew best. On FitzRoy’s previous Beagle voyage, in 1830, a whisper of this attitude crept into the ship’s scientific mission to map the South American coastline. At the southernmost tip of the continent, Tierra del Fuego, FitzRoy effectively kidnapped four Indigenous people as revenge for the theft of one of his boats. He gave them allegedly English names—York Minster, Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket, and Boat Memory—and took them back to England. (The birth names of the first three were Elleparu, Orundellico, and Yokcushlu; Boat Memory’s name has been lost.) The idea was that they would be “civilized” and returned, accompanied by a missionary, to convert their benighted fellow Fuegians to Christianity.
In fact, the missionary bailed after experiencing a few days of harsh Fuegian life, and the Fuegians quickly reverted to their ancestral ways. “Captain Fitz Roy could never ascertain that the Fuegians have any distinct belief in a future life,” Darwin observed in his diaries. To the average Victorian gentleman, this was proof enough that they were “savages.” I wonder, though, if the assertion gnawed at Darwin, given that his research was already drawing him away from religious faith. “Science has nothing to do with Christ; except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence,” he would write to a friend toward the end of his life, adding: “As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.” [...]
Today, Darwin is known as the great heretic, the man whose work shocked the Victorian establishment and undermined the Church. But the exact heresy he committed is not well understood. He was not the first person to suggest that species evolve—in fact, his own grandfather Erasmus had suggested that all warm-blooded animals might have arisen from “one living filament” in his 1794 book, Zoonomia. Darwin was also not the first person to notice that the boundaries between species were more fluid than the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus had acknowledged. (The Comte de Buffon, a French biologist, had done so at the time.) And he was far from the first Victorian intellectual to question the spurious biblical chronology suggesting that the Earth was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C.E. He didn’t even come up with the idea of selection pressures, per se—he got that from an economist, Thomas Malthus, who suggested that human populations tended to outgrow their available food sources and suffer famines as a result.
No, what offended some of Darwin’s early readers was that his vision of the universe counted humans as just another animal, rather than God’s special creation. Accepting evolution meant having “an ape for a grandfather,” as one observer put it. From the start, Darwin understood the political and religious implications of this, and he knew that advancing the notion publicly would make him a controversial figure. His own wife, Emma, was a devout Christian; some of his friends and colleagues were too.
After returning from the Galápagos, he spent more than two decades noodling in his “transmutation notebooks” without having the courage to expose his ideas, and his evidence, to universal scrutiny. In 1844, he wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker: “At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” It is like confessing a murder. Another decade-plus passed before he was driven into print by the unwelcome discovery that another scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had independently arrived at the same conclusion.
The publication of Origin, in 1859, gave everyone in Victorian polite society the opportunity to have an argument that had been brewing for many years. Soon after its release, Darwin’s critics and defenders clashed in a public debate that pitted the fierce Darwinian Thomas Henry Huxley against the bishop of Oxford and the former Captain FitzRoy, who preferred to believe that the fossils they had seen together in Patagonia had been deposited there by the biblical flood. (Darwin was too anxious and flatulent to attend himself.)
by Helen Lewis, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Will Matsuda for The Atlantic
Wednesday, July 8, 2026
Air Conditioners to Anchovies
China keeps the U.S. and Japan Cool. And most other places. The Chinese make more than 80% of the world’s air-conditioners. And they could… stop.
The demand for Chinese air-cons is rising world-wide, as heatwaves proliferate. Viral videos this week show customers fighting over the devices at shops in Europe.
by Nury Vittachi, X | Read more:
The tiny fish may sound utterly mundane, but its importance to the global economy is far larger than just foodies’ craving for the umami taste. The anchovy sits at the bottom of a crucial supply chain that sustains the $500-billion-a-year global aquaculture industry. Anchovies are the main ingredient in fishmeal, and without enough of it, global production of salmon, seabass, shrimp, oysters and other seafood will suffer, pushing up supermarket prices. Soon, the shortage could catch the attention of Wall Street and central banks.
Peru is the Saudi Arabia of anchovies — its annual catch, after drying and milling, accounts for about 20% of the world’s supply of fishmeal. Add the catches of neighboring Ecuador and Chile and you have nearly a third of global output. And therein lies the problem.
Because the South American anchoveta species has a relatively short lifecycle, its population can rise and fall substantially every year depending on environmental variables. The key one is El Niño, the weather event that regularly warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean near the Equator, reducing the stock of nutrients and, therefore, of fish. [...]
Once upon a time, this would have been a first world problem. Not anymore. Back in 1997-1998, the last time the world faced a very strong El Nino and, as a result, a fishmeal shortage, the aquaculture business accounted for less than a quarter of the world’s fish supply. Since then, the size of the industry has exploded, and today the world consumes more than half of its fish and seafood from farms, requiring a huge fishmeal supply. At the same time, fish consumption per capita has also jumped, reaching 21.3 kilograms per year in 2024, up from 14.3 kilograms on average in the 1990s, according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
If the industry’s fears are confirmed, salmon prices are likely to rise to an all-time high by 2027. Salmon is the highest-value farmed fish worldwide. The rise of the aquaculture industry transformed it from a luxury into an everyday supermarket purchase, with its price dropping from about $8 per kilogram in the early 1980s to an all-time low of $2.50 per kilogram in the early 2000s. Since then, it’s risen above $10 per kilogram. Industry executives are tight lipped about how much prices could increase, but 20% to 25% seems like a reasonable expectation.
The world’s biggest fan clubs for air-conditioning are the United States, and two Asian allies/ vassals, Japan and South Korea. In these three places, 88% to 91% of homes have such devices (IEA estimates).
Is there any risk of China halting exports, in the way the US might do? Thankfully not, at the moment, analysts say. China keeps the industry entirely politics-free: We build, you buy, at a price that benefits both sides.
The 'Assembled In...' Trick
The world has 2.4 billion air conditioners, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency. But few people around the planet are aware that their aircons come from China, because of branding techniques.
by Nury Vittachi, X | Read more:
***
One of the world’s current hottest commodities is in the midst of a huge disruption. It may sound like I’m talking about oil and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, but this is even more severe. The supply shock is far greater — and so is the price response: Global production has plunged as much as 40% from a year ago; prices are up 80% over the same period to an all-time high. The commodity in question? The humble anchovy.
The tiny fish may sound utterly mundane, but its importance to the global economy is far larger than just foodies’ craving for the umami taste. The anchovy sits at the bottom of a crucial supply chain that sustains the $500-billion-a-year global aquaculture industry. Anchovies are the main ingredient in fishmeal, and without enough of it, global production of salmon, seabass, shrimp, oysters and other seafood will suffer, pushing up supermarket prices. Soon, the shortage could catch the attention of Wall Street and central banks.
Peru is the Saudi Arabia of anchovies — its annual catch, after drying and milling, accounts for about 20% of the world’s supply of fishmeal. Add the catches of neighboring Ecuador and Chile and you have nearly a third of global output. And therein lies the problem.
Because the South American anchoveta species has a relatively short lifecycle, its population can rise and fall substantially every year depending on environmental variables. The key one is El Niño, the weather event that regularly warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean near the Equator, reducing the stock of nutrients and, therefore, of fish. [...]
In mid-May, Peru imposed a 15-day ban on anchovy fishing; the moratorium was later extended until June 10. Then, the government in Lima shocked the fishing business with an indefinite ban. The South American anchoveta is the world’s largest single-species fishery. The ban has triggered a dramatic drop in global fishmeal production, which industry executives estimate to be down 30% to 40% from a year ago.
With demand from the aquaculture industry still strong, the cost of fishmeal in the wholesale market has nearly doubled over the last year to an all-time high of $2,990 per metric ton in late June. Further increases are likely. As feed prices rise, aquaculture companies will respond by trimming output, and the cost of cultivated fish and seafood will climb over the next year. [...]
With demand from the aquaculture industry still strong, the cost of fishmeal in the wholesale market has nearly doubled over the last year to an all-time high of $2,990 per metric ton in late June. Further increases are likely. As feed prices rise, aquaculture companies will respond by trimming output, and the cost of cultivated fish and seafood will climb over the next year. [...]
Once upon a time, this would have been a first world problem. Not anymore. Back in 1997-1998, the last time the world faced a very strong El Nino and, as a result, a fishmeal shortage, the aquaculture business accounted for less than a quarter of the world’s fish supply. Since then, the size of the industry has exploded, and today the world consumes more than half of its fish and seafood from farms, requiring a huge fishmeal supply. At the same time, fish consumption per capita has also jumped, reaching 21.3 kilograms per year in 2024, up from 14.3 kilograms on average in the 1990s, according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
If the industry’s fears are confirmed, salmon prices are likely to rise to an all-time high by 2027. Salmon is the highest-value farmed fish worldwide. The rise of the aquaculture industry transformed it from a luxury into an everyday supermarket purchase, with its price dropping from about $8 per kilogram in the early 1980s to an all-time low of $2.50 per kilogram in the early 2000s. Since then, it’s risen above $10 per kilogram. Industry executives are tight lipped about how much prices could increase, but 20% to 25% seems like a reasonable expectation.
by Javier Blas, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: REDA/Universal Images Group Editorial[ed. Globalization and supply chain logistics.]
Attempted Coop
Images: Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post
[ed. That coop looks better than some Seattle apartments. My son and family raise chickens (and ducks). They're pretty cool. The ducks are way cooler, though.]
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Home Invasions
At four in the morning I heard a scratching that sounded like someone was trying to break into our new home. J. and I were not yet fluent in the house’s natural yawning and moaning—the way it sighed when stretching its pilings and beams, or grunted against a pummeling Florida gale, or shuddered when thunder clapped—and I often startled at sounds, trying to discern which ones required attention. And I’d recently been diagnosed with partial hearing loss in my right ear, which meant I couldn’t make out certain sounds but also imagined noises that weren’t there.
In the predawn dark it was hard to tell if my tenuous hearing was playing tricks on me. Then I felt a paw press my calf. Arrow was awake. The dog had heard it too.
I got up to ensure the windows were locked. Outside, a gentle wind stirred the mango tree’s canopy. A distant streetlight flickered on and off like a lighthouse beacon.
J. groaned and rolled over. “What is it?”
“I heard something.”
Arrow growled, jumped off the bed, and began sniffing along the baseboards, moving the length of the room. When he galloped down the stairs, J. and I dutifully followed.
Arrow stood by the back door, ears up, eyes on us. Everything was just as we’d left it. Everything was silent—until it wasn’t. A scraping so violent it made my fingernails ache issued from a corner of the dining room. Afraid of scaring whatever it was away, J. eased open the back door, and the two of us stepped outside.
Frogs chirruped. Something—a bird, a fish, a single, lonesome alligator—shattered the glassy black surface of the pond. J. ran a flashlight over the siding, the eaves, the roof. Nothing.
“It’s already inside,” he said.
“Squirrels?”
“Maybe.” He sounded unconvinced.
“Not squirrels,” said the pest-control specialist who came later that morning, after J. had left for work. Squirrels are daytime animals, he explained. They sleep at night.
I hoped he would say opossum. I hoped he would say, even, raccoon. Either would have been inconvenient and unpleasant but more easily remedied—a Havahart trap, a relocation to a nearby nature preserve, a single hole to fill. Instead he said exactly what I didn’t want to hear.
In the Chinese zodiac, people born in the Year of the Rat are shrewd, fickle, creative, thrifty, and wise. They are a litter of cowardly, hot-tempered, picky musicians, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and writers. They may be plagued by a weak constitution and prone to head colds and other viruses. I was born in the Year of the Rat and, coincidentally or not, possess many of these characteristics. Though I’ve always considered myself hardy, my partial hearing loss—the cause of which doctors were yet unable to explain—suggested otherwise.
Each year of the Chinese zodiac has a corresponding element. Mine is water, which makes me a water rat. Water is an element of hiding and suggests an inability to choose something and stick to it. At times I’ve been true to my watery nature, having been accused of being unable to commit to a job, a person, a responsibility. My initial ambivalence about moving to Florida supported such accusations, and buying a house with J. was my attempt to act against type.
Still, I hadn’t counted on real, live rats. “I’m surprised you hadn’t heard them before,” said Rat Guy #1, as he came to be known. “From the looks of it they’ve been here a while.” He wore a utility belt below a belly like unproofed bread dough. As he walked, his belt jangled with keys, flashlight, laser pointer, measuring tape, Swiss Army knife. He sweated beyond what was socially acceptable, even by Florida standards.
I hadn’t heard them before, but it turned out other people had. J. confessed to noting some rustling when he’d been up late a few weeks earlier. And my brother said he’d heard something when he and my sister-in-law had stayed overnight. Earlier in my life I might have been surprised, angry even, to learn they’d withheld the truth, but by then I’d come to believe it was human nature to look away, to plead ignorance. That was precisely what I’d done for months when my ear had begun to alert me, persistently, that there was a problem.
“I’ll close up the entry points,” said Rat Guy #1. “Set traps, fog the attic.” The fogging, he assured me, was safe for humans and canines—so safe, in fact, that it wouldn’t even kill the rats. Instead it left behind a perfume they found intolerable, driving them away.
This was my introduction to the pest-control business, and over the next several months I discovered that exterminators each have their own predilections, their preferred baits and traps, their brands of flashlights and trash bags in which to dispose of their prey. I also learned that, along with sound machines promising to transmit high-frequency pitches detected only by vermin, fogging is a scam.
Criminal or immoral tricksters are called “dirty rats” or “rat finks,” but Rat Guy #1 didn’t strike me as either of these. For one of what would be many visits, he arrived with his octogenarian mother who had been “bored outta my gourd” and “wanted a look-about.” Our generally discriminating dog loved him. When his truck appeared in the driveway, Arrow wailed at the front door, anxious to be let outside to spastically run circles around the man with an excitement he rarely demonstrated for anyone else, including J. or me. This was the most persuasive argument in favor of trusting Rat Guy #1.
In the predawn dark it was hard to tell if my tenuous hearing was playing tricks on me. Then I felt a paw press my calf. Arrow was awake. The dog had heard it too.
J. groaned and rolled over. “What is it?”
“I heard something.”
Arrow growled, jumped off the bed, and began sniffing along the baseboards, moving the length of the room. When he galloped down the stairs, J. and I dutifully followed.
Arrow stood by the back door, ears up, eyes on us. Everything was just as we’d left it. Everything was silent—until it wasn’t. A scraping so violent it made my fingernails ache issued from a corner of the dining room. Afraid of scaring whatever it was away, J. eased open the back door, and the two of us stepped outside.
Frogs chirruped. Something—a bird, a fish, a single, lonesome alligator—shattered the glassy black surface of the pond. J. ran a flashlight over the siding, the eaves, the roof. Nothing.
“It’s already inside,” he said.
“Squirrels?”
“Maybe.” He sounded unconvinced.
“Not squirrels,” said the pest-control specialist who came later that morning, after J. had left for work. Squirrels are daytime animals, he explained. They sleep at night.
I hoped he would say opossum. I hoped he would say, even, raccoon. Either would have been inconvenient and unpleasant but more easily remedied—a Havahart trap, a relocation to a nearby nature preserve, a single hole to fill. Instead he said exactly what I didn’t want to hear.
In the Chinese zodiac, people born in the Year of the Rat are shrewd, fickle, creative, thrifty, and wise. They are a litter of cowardly, hot-tempered, picky musicians, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and writers. They may be plagued by a weak constitution and prone to head colds and other viruses. I was born in the Year of the Rat and, coincidentally or not, possess many of these characteristics. Though I’ve always considered myself hardy, my partial hearing loss—the cause of which doctors were yet unable to explain—suggested otherwise.
Each year of the Chinese zodiac has a corresponding element. Mine is water, which makes me a water rat. Water is an element of hiding and suggests an inability to choose something and stick to it. At times I’ve been true to my watery nature, having been accused of being unable to commit to a job, a person, a responsibility. My initial ambivalence about moving to Florida supported such accusations, and buying a house with J. was my attempt to act against type.
Still, I hadn’t counted on real, live rats. “I’m surprised you hadn’t heard them before,” said Rat Guy #1, as he came to be known. “From the looks of it they’ve been here a while.” He wore a utility belt below a belly like unproofed bread dough. As he walked, his belt jangled with keys, flashlight, laser pointer, measuring tape, Swiss Army knife. He sweated beyond what was socially acceptable, even by Florida standards.
I hadn’t heard them before, but it turned out other people had. J. confessed to noting some rustling when he’d been up late a few weeks earlier. And my brother said he’d heard something when he and my sister-in-law had stayed overnight. Earlier in my life I might have been surprised, angry even, to learn they’d withheld the truth, but by then I’d come to believe it was human nature to look away, to plead ignorance. That was precisely what I’d done for months when my ear had begun to alert me, persistently, that there was a problem.
“I’ll close up the entry points,” said Rat Guy #1. “Set traps, fog the attic.” The fogging, he assured me, was safe for humans and canines—so safe, in fact, that it wouldn’t even kill the rats. Instead it left behind a perfume they found intolerable, driving them away.
This was my introduction to the pest-control business, and over the next several months I discovered that exterminators each have their own predilections, their preferred baits and traps, their brands of flashlights and trash bags in which to dispose of their prey. I also learned that, along with sound machines promising to transmit high-frequency pitches detected only by vermin, fogging is a scam.
Criminal or immoral tricksters are called “dirty rats” or “rat finks,” but Rat Guy #1 didn’t strike me as either of these. For one of what would be many visits, he arrived with his octogenarian mother who had been “bored outta my gourd” and “wanted a look-about.” Our generally discriminating dog loved him. When his truck appeared in the driveway, Arrow wailed at the front door, anxious to be let outside to spastically run circles around the man with an excitement he rarely demonstrated for anyone else, including J. or me. This was the most persuasive argument in favor of trusting Rat Guy #1.
by Lenore Myka, The Sun | Read more:
Image: © Doug McMains
[ed. I had a rat problem in my last house. The constant rustling in the walls drove me crazy, day and night. After setting traps in the attic, I'd remove on average one, sometimes two dead ones every other day. They kept coming until I finally found their entry point - a small crack in the foundation the size of a quarter. I'd skipped it before because it just didn't look like something a rat could squeeze through. But that was it, and I eventually got them under control after barricading their front door. My friend Jerry in Texas had an even bigger problem. I forget if it was a warning light that kept turning on and off, or a hose leak or whatever, but the problems kept escalating until he finally took his car into the shop to have it checked out. That's when they discovered that a rat family had built a nest up inside the car frame, just behind the gas tank. Apparently they'd been there a long time, as evidenced by all the chewed wires, hoses, and other debris they found. The funny thing is that during the previous month or two after he'd started noticing these problems he'd driven over 700 miles between various states, many on bumpy, dusty backroads. Hard to imagine what that must have felt like for those guys, burrowed way up there in the undercarriage. Tough, scrappy little animals.]
[ed. I had a rat problem in my last house. The constant rustling in the walls drove me crazy, day and night. After setting traps in the attic, I'd remove on average one, sometimes two dead ones every other day. They kept coming until I finally found their entry point - a small crack in the foundation the size of a quarter. I'd skipped it before because it just didn't look like something a rat could squeeze through. But that was it, and I eventually got them under control after barricading their front door. My friend Jerry in Texas had an even bigger problem. I forget if it was a warning light that kept turning on and off, or a hose leak or whatever, but the problems kept escalating until he finally took his car into the shop to have it checked out. That's when they discovered that a rat family had built a nest up inside the car frame, just behind the gas tank. Apparently they'd been there a long time, as evidenced by all the chewed wires, hoses, and other debris they found. The funny thing is that during the previous month or two after he'd started noticing these problems he'd driven over 700 miles between various states, many on bumpy, dusty backroads. Hard to imagine what that must have felt like for those guys, burrowed way up there in the undercarriage. Tough, scrappy little animals.]
Monday, June 22, 2026
The Modern Efficiency of Squid Fishing
How Japanese Fishermen Use Robots To Catch Billions Of Squid (IE).
Video: YouTube
[ed. For calamari lovers. Squid fishing has gotten pretty efficient these days (and they land some big ones!). I remember catching them at night with my brothers in Kona, to use as bait for over-night tuna fishing (Ika Shibi). We'd go a ways offshore, put out a parachute anchor, then turn on the floodlights to attract them to the boat. Soon there'd be hundreds of them darting in and out of the light, coming from nowhere, out in the middle of the ocean. Using a multi-pronged snagging jig we'd catch our needed supply in no time. Fun! But wierd too - being surrounded by darkness except for the lights illuminating a small circle around the boat. It felt like fishing in a swimming pool.]
Wednesday, June 17, 2026
Sunday, June 14, 2026
The Last Great Wilderness
If you want to follow in the footsteps of the great explorers, forget the moon and Mars: the ocean floor is where the real action is. The deep ocean, the part that’s deeper than 200 metres, covers about 66% of the Earth’s surface. Most of it has never been surveyed in detail. Even less has been seen up close. If the current rate of observation continues, a complete visual survey of the ocean floor will take about 5m years. [...]
The deep ocean is the largest ecosystem on Earth. It is also in many ways the most extreme, home to crushing pressures, extremes of heat and cold, and a near total absence of sunlight. Animals inhabiting this midnight world tend to be equally extreme. It is a menagerie that abounds in superlatives: the largest, the oldest, the blackest, the most luminous. But those are only the ones we know about. Most of the animals dwelling in the benthos, the true deep, remain unknown to science. Virtually every scientific expedition to reach this zone of darkness returns with new species in tow. In the past year, scientists have discovered more than 1,100 new marine species. Among them are a ghost shark (not really a shark), a ping-pong ball sponge (which does look like a cluster of ping-pong balls), a number of luridly coloured worms and a floating something that resembles a tiny jet plane made out of pale pink jelly, and which scientists have not yet been able fit into any of the primary categories of animal life. [...]
For over 50 years, would-be industrialists and entrepreneurs have floated the idea of mining the ocean floor, but without much happening in practice. But in our search for new sources of metals needed for batteries and microchips, we may now be on the cusp of destroying the world’s largest – and strangest – ecosystem before we get a chance to understand it.
by Jacob Mikanowski, The Guardian | Read more:
Images: Jim Maragos/AP; Nekton Ocean Census/Schmidt Ocean Institute
Saturday, June 13, 2026
Don't Feed the Ducks
Don’t Feed the Ducks! A Zany Animation Predicts the Absurd Outcomes of Ignoring the Rules (Vimeo)
How many people actually heed the warnings about not feeding ducks waddling around public parks? If you’ve taken a flippant approach to these guidelines in the past, we recommend you watch AJ Jeffries’ new animation, “DUCKS.” What opens as an innocuous jaunt around a pond quickly turns into a dark comedy full of strange contortions and feathered villains sure to pop into your head the next time you throw a chunk of bread.
How many people actually heed the warnings about not feeding ducks waddling around public parks? If you’ve taken a flippant approach to these guidelines in the past, we recommend you watch AJ Jeffries’ new animation, “DUCKS.” What opens as an innocuous jaunt around a pond quickly turns into a dark comedy full of strange contortions and feathered villains sure to pop into your head the next time you throw a chunk of bread.
Thursday, June 11, 2026
If You're To Die
There’s an expression “live every day as if it’s your last.” Now, obviously, you shouldn’t do that. You should save for retirement. But it’s worth giving some serious thought to the question of what kind of legacy you want to leave. You should live some days as if they were your last. If you died tomorrow, what kind of impact would you want to have had on the world? Would you have done all you wished?
I’d talk more about factory farming. I want, by the end of my life, to have done something to combat the torture farms that cage and torment on an industrial scale—where poor, innocent, defenseless animals are mutilated, where open wounds fester, where babies are ground up, where lung problems develop because the animals live in feces and filth, where they mostly can’t walk, where they are genetically engineered to be in constant pain, and so on. If hell lives on Earth today, it lives in the factory farms.
I’d like to do more to stop wild animals from suffering in hideous numbers. These poor innocent animals have no voice, and almost no one cares much when they starve and die. But I care, and I hope to do what I can to make the world care. The deer in the forest, even the mayfly who starves, deserves better than the near-total neglect of the present.
I’d want to do more to ensure that the world lives on, if I cannot. That the far future is as glorious as it can be—full of people with experiences so good that they regard those of us alive today with a mixture of pity and horror. Where their lives are so good, that they cringe thinking about what even the best lives in the 21st century were like. There’s so much that’s been done and so much more to do.
I’d like to do more to prevent people from dying. It’s quite easy to prevent people from dying. It costs just a few thousand dollars to prevent one extra person from being ripped from the world. When I imagine potential incoming death, and how awful that would be, and when I think about how awful it was when my extended family members died, it motivates me to do more to make sure others don’t have to endure such a fate. We all ought to do more to prevent this scourge, to the extent we can.
The Giving What We Can people tell me I’ve convinced about 34 people to give 10% of their income to effective charities. Each of these pledges return about $10,000 in counterfactual revenue. If those numbers are to be believed, that will save 68 lives. I hope with each passing day to make effective charitable giving more and more popular, so that the number of Giving What We Can pledgers isn’t only 10,000, but instead hundreds of thousands or millions of people take the pledge.
If I were to die tomorrow, in driving this, I would think I’d achieved something important. If you give your money to effective charities, you can know that whenever it is you leave Earth, there will be more people in it because of you. If you give 10% of your income to effective charities, and earn about the U.S. median, you can save about a life every year.
And, of course, I’d want to do what I could in my remaining months to save the shrimp—the shrimp who are tortured by the hundreds of billions because we enjoy how they taste when they die. The shrimp who can be helped by the thousands with a single dollar, who die alone without any thought paid to their pain.
Those without a voice, without any advocates, have their interests neglected to an enormous degree. There is almost no limit to the harm people will cause via their actions, so long as the victims aren’t salient, and no limit to how little effort one will expend to provide benefits to nameless, faceless, and far-away victims. This is where the moral low-hanging fruit lies.
by Matthew Adelstein (Bentham's Bulldog), Newsletter | Read more:
I don’t think that how you’d behave if this day was the last is the only question that you should think about. But it’s at least among the questions you should consider, upon occasion. You should think about whether you conducted yourself honorably in interpersonal relationships. You should think about who you wished you’d said you loved more often, whether there are people you love but to whom you haven’t made that adequately clear.
If I had another year on Earth, what would I want to achieve? I’d want to keep writing. My guess is I’d write more about the things I think are most important. I’d spend more time talking about the big picture on important topics, less on frivolous culture war issues.
I’d like to do more to stop wild animals from suffering in hideous numbers. These poor innocent animals have no voice, and almost no one cares much when they starve and die. But I care, and I hope to do what I can to make the world care. The deer in the forest, even the mayfly who starves, deserves better than the near-total neglect of the present.
I’d want to do more to ensure that the world lives on, if I cannot. That the far future is as glorious as it can be—full of people with experiences so good that they regard those of us alive today with a mixture of pity and horror. Where their lives are so good, that they cringe thinking about what even the best lives in the 21st century were like. There’s so much that’s been done and so much more to do.
I’d like to do more to prevent people from dying. It’s quite easy to prevent people from dying. It costs just a few thousand dollars to prevent one extra person from being ripped from the world. When I imagine potential incoming death, and how awful that would be, and when I think about how awful it was when my extended family members died, it motivates me to do more to make sure others don’t have to endure such a fate. We all ought to do more to prevent this scourge, to the extent we can.
The Giving What We Can people tell me I’ve convinced about 34 people to give 10% of their income to effective charities. Each of these pledges return about $10,000 in counterfactual revenue. If those numbers are to be believed, that will save 68 lives. I hope with each passing day to make effective charitable giving more and more popular, so that the number of Giving What We Can pledgers isn’t only 10,000, but instead hundreds of thousands or millions of people take the pledge.
If I were to die tomorrow, in driving this, I would think I’d achieved something important. If you give your money to effective charities, you can know that whenever it is you leave Earth, there will be more people in it because of you. If you give 10% of your income to effective charities, and earn about the U.S. median, you can save about a life every year.
And, of course, I’d want to do what I could in my remaining months to save the shrimp—the shrimp who are tortured by the hundreds of billions because we enjoy how they taste when they die. The shrimp who can be helped by the thousands with a single dollar, who die alone without any thought paid to their pain.
Those without a voice, without any advocates, have their interests neglected to an enormous degree. There is almost no limit to the harm people will cause via their actions, so long as the victims aren’t salient, and no limit to how little effort one will expend to provide benefits to nameless, faceless, and far-away victims. This is where the moral low-hanging fruit lies.
Image: via
[ed. A representative EA example. Had me there until the shrimp. Here's a guy really putting his money where a mouth is. Great respect (Guardian).]
Sunday, May 31, 2026
The Way We Treat Pigs is a Sin
I consider myself a pretty good and decent guy, overall. I don’t commit crimes. I’m nice to the people I meet. I help out my friends. I take good care of my pet rabbit, and I donate lots of money to other people who take care of abandoned and sick rabbits. My politics might not always be correct or wise, but I want things like the end of poverty, the end of war, and so on.
And yet just down the highway from me, there are facilities for the mass torture of animals. In the United States, there are 73 million pigs in “concentrated animal feeding operations”, more commonly known as factory farms:
There are many horrors experienced by chickens and other animals on factory farms, but the way pigs are forced to live is probably the worst. For most of their lives, female pigs (sows) are kept in tiny cages — either “gestation crates” when they’re pregnant, or “farrowing crates” when they’re nursing. A sow will spend most of her life in one of these cages.
In a gestation crate or a farrowing crate, sows don’t have enough room to turn around — all they can do is either stand or lie down in a pile of their own feces. Imagine living your entire life in an airline seat, where you couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom or take your seatbelt off. That’s how these pigs live.
Pigs are social creatures — they exhibit “emotional contagion”, meaning that when one pig is scared or happy, other pigs start to feel the same, and they give comfort and support to other pigs who are in distress. Research suggests that they’re at least as smart as dogs, and probably smarter. But a pig in one of these crates will never get any social interaction in her entire adult life — she can’t even turn around to look at her babies.
This is torture. The pigs who are confined this way bite the bars of their cages, desperate for a freedom that will never come. They have their tails chopped off as babies (generally without anesthetic), so that they can’t chew each other’s tails in anguish. But no relief ever comes — they live out their entire lives and die in these tiny torture-cages.
I have no other word for this except “sin”. This is a sin. If there is a God, and if that God is in any way good and moral, then that God is looking down with disgust on the way my society treats pigs. I go about my daily life — hanging out with my friends, petting my rabbit, going out to eat at nice restaurants — never thinking about the horrible suffering that has engulfed the entire lives of those tens of millions of pigs. [...]
On top of the obvious and demonstrated inability of individual action to solve this problem, it’s insufficient even from a moral stance. Suppose that our society farmed human beings for food. Would simply refusing to eat human flesh be enough to absolve me of culpability? I don’t think so. I would still have a responsibility to try to abolish the evil system.
In fact, “abolish the evil system” is exactly what voters in California and some other states are trying to do. In 2018, by an almost 2-to-1 margin, California voters enacted a law called Proposition 12 that heavily restricted the sale of meat from pigs, hens, and calves that weren’t raised with a minimum amount of space. Crucially, the partial prohibition extended to meat from animals raised inhumanely in other states. This followed on the heels of a similar law in Massachusetts two years earlier.
Courts have upheld the law, but Republicans in Congress are trying to undo it from the federal level. In 2025 they proposed the Save Our Bacon Act, which would ban states from enacting animal welfare laws like the ones voters approved in California and Massachusetts. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, but this year it got incorporated into the Farm Bill, which has passed the House and is now being considered in the Senate:
Companies and industry groups have also worked with members of Congress for over a decade to introduce federal legislation to nullify laws like those in California and Massachusetts. The latest iteration is called the Save Our Bacon Act, originally proposed last year…This effort, which for years went nowhere as standalone legislation in Congress, now has a decent chance at becoming law as part of the new Farm Bill…Lewis Bollard has a good post explaining what’s at stake. In fact, the current Farm Bill wouldn’t just reverse the recent anti-crate laws in California and Massachusetts — it would roll back much of the progress that has been made in farm animal welfare over the decade, as well as preventing any future welfare laws along similar lines:
In late April, the House of Representatives passed its version of the Farm Bill, which included the language from the Save Our Bacon Act…It’s “really a Save Our Crate Act,” Brent Hershey, a hog farmer who opposes it, told me. “A vote for the farm bill,” he said, “is a vote to cage an animal that can’t walk or turn around.”
The [Save Our Bacon] Act would stop any state or locality from regulating the sale of meat based on how it’s produced in another state. This would likely invalidate state and local bans on foie gras, crated veal, and more…It would also halt future legislative progress. Congress hasn’t passed a farm animal welfare law in decades. State laws are where reforms actually happen. The SOB Act would gut them by mandating they contain a giant loophole for out-of-state imports.Why should Congress prevent the voters of California and Massachusetts from taking a stand against the evils of factory farming? First and foremost, it’s a case of a concentrated interest group — the pig farming lobby — making headway against a diffuse interest (voters with a conscience). In fact, if you believe the polls, a majority of the country — even a majority of those who regularly eat pork — would probably support measures like the ones in California and Massachusetts: [...]
In fact, I suspect that the American public is still in a mood to support animal welfare laws like this. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, and its supporters had to end up sneakily burying it within the much bigger Farm Bill; to me, this suggests that even the SOB Act’s proponents knew how bad it would make them look if people started paying attention.
by Noah Smith, Noahpinion | Read more:
Image: Humane Society via Wikimedia Commons; Our World in Data; YouTube
[ed. Is anyone surprised this continues? Everything Congress does (or doesn't do) is purely transactional. The Congress/lobbyist/fundraising/election process/system is a contagion on our society (... and pigs). See also: Leadershit.]
Thursday, May 28, 2026
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Dognosis
At a former pomegranate farm on the outskirts of Bengaluru, a team of specially trained dogs is doing something that some of the world's most sophisticated medical machines cannot — detecting multiple types of cancer from a single breath, at early stages, for two dollars a test.
Dognosis, the Indian startup behind this system, published the results last week of its Phase 2 clinical trial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology — the world's most influential cancer journal — making it the largest study of its kind ever conducted and placing canine-based diagnostics firmly into the mainstream of medical science.
What Dognosis Does
The company was co-founded by Akash Kulgod, who built on his Honours thesis at Berkeley, and Itamar Bitan, who brings a decade of Special Ops K9 training experience from Israel. What the two founders realised was that the solution to early cancer detection had been living in our homes the whole time — the dog's nose, a product of fifteen millennia of co-evolution with humans, can detect the faint chemical trace of cancer in breath at a resolution that machines, algorithms, and laboratory tests have never come close to matching.
Therefore, Dognosis is building an ultra-affordable, non-invasive breath-based multi-cancer early detection test that combines trained dogs' exceptional olfactory abilities with brain-computer interfaces and machine learning to create quantitative signatures of disease.
How the Test Works
The test is straightforward: a person breathes normally into a cotton face mask for 10 minutes. The mask is sealed, stored, and later evaluated by trained detection dogs at a central laboratory. Each sample is assessed independently by at least three dogs and their assessments are combined using an advanced Bayesian statistical model that weighs each dog's track record and the participant's background information. No blood is drawn, no scan is needed, and no fasting is required.
The Science: What the Dogs Are Smelling
The dogs are detecting changes in volatile organic compounds — substances produced by the body when diseases like cancer are present. These VOCs create a unique odour signature or volatilome that trained dogs can identify, just as they are trained to detect explosives and drugs.
According to Dognosis, over 40 double-blind trials published in peer-reviewed journals have demonstrated that dogs can detect various diseases, including different types of cancer, with high accuracy, and this ability is now well-established in scientific literature spanning journals including Nature and The Lancet.
The Phase 2 Trial: What It Found
According to the paper published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the study was conducted across six hospitals in Karnataka — three each in Hubballi and Bengaluru — in an assessor-masked, multi-centre case-control format. A total of 3,275 participants were enrolled, with 1,773 used for training and 1,502 for testing. The test cohort included 283 treatment-naïve, biopsy-confirmed cancer cases spanning seven major cancer groups and 1,219 controls including healthy volunteers.
The Phase 2 data showed 91% accuracy in detecting cancer-associated VOC breath signals across seven cancer groups, with accuracy stable across cancer types as well as in early stages — when detecting cancer early matters the most. The study was conducted in collaboration with Medical Detection Dogs, a UK-based charity and world leader in canine bio-detection research.
"We've known for over two decades that dogs are capable of detecting multiple types of cancers with high accuracy," said Akash Kulgod, chief executive officer of Dognosis. "The challenge has always been building a system around canine olfaction that is reproducible, scalable, and aimed at a clinical problem worth solving."
"Multi-cancer risk stratification from a single breath sample in countries like India is that problem, and this study shows that it can be done," Kulgod said.
Why It Matters
The rise of multi-cancer early detection tests and AI-powered imaging has created an acute need for effective first-tier screening, which breath-based testing is uniquely positioned to fulfil — particularly in low- and middle-income countries where expensive imaging infrastructure remains out of reach for the majority of patients.
At $2 per test, Dognosis's system costs a fraction of existing screening tools, many of which also fail to detect cancer at its earliest and most treatable stages.
Dognosis, the Indian startup behind this system, published the results last week of its Phase 2 clinical trial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology — the world's most influential cancer journal — making it the largest study of its kind ever conducted and placing canine-based diagnostics firmly into the mainstream of medical science.
What Dognosis Does
Therefore, Dognosis is building an ultra-affordable, non-invasive breath-based multi-cancer early detection test that combines trained dogs' exceptional olfactory abilities with brain-computer interfaces and machine learning to create quantitative signatures of disease.
How the Test Works
The test is straightforward: a person breathes normally into a cotton face mask for 10 minutes. The mask is sealed, stored, and later evaluated by trained detection dogs at a central laboratory. Each sample is assessed independently by at least three dogs and their assessments are combined using an advanced Bayesian statistical model that weighs each dog's track record and the participant's background information. No blood is drawn, no scan is needed, and no fasting is required.
The Science: What the Dogs Are Smelling
The dogs are detecting changes in volatile organic compounds — substances produced by the body when diseases like cancer are present. These VOCs create a unique odour signature or volatilome that trained dogs can identify, just as they are trained to detect explosives and drugs.
According to Dognosis, over 40 double-blind trials published in peer-reviewed journals have demonstrated that dogs can detect various diseases, including different types of cancer, with high accuracy, and this ability is now well-established in scientific literature spanning journals including Nature and The Lancet.
The Phase 2 Trial: What It Found
According to the paper published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the study was conducted across six hospitals in Karnataka — three each in Hubballi and Bengaluru — in an assessor-masked, multi-centre case-control format. A total of 3,275 participants were enrolled, with 1,773 used for training and 1,502 for testing. The test cohort included 283 treatment-naïve, biopsy-confirmed cancer cases spanning seven major cancer groups and 1,219 controls including healthy volunteers.
The Phase 2 data showed 91% accuracy in detecting cancer-associated VOC breath signals across seven cancer groups, with accuracy stable across cancer types as well as in early stages — when detecting cancer early matters the most. The study was conducted in collaboration with Medical Detection Dogs, a UK-based charity and world leader in canine bio-detection research.
"We've known for over two decades that dogs are capable of detecting multiple types of cancers with high accuracy," said Akash Kulgod, chief executive officer of Dognosis. "The challenge has always been building a system around canine olfaction that is reproducible, scalable, and aimed at a clinical problem worth solving."
"Multi-cancer risk stratification from a single breath sample in countries like India is that problem, and this study shows that it can be done," Kulgod said.
Why It Matters
The rise of multi-cancer early detection tests and AI-powered imaging has created an acute need for effective first-tier screening, which breath-based testing is uniquely positioned to fulfil — particularly in low- and middle-income countries where expensive imaging infrastructure remains out of reach for the majority of patients.
At $2 per test, Dognosis's system costs a fraction of existing screening tools, many of which also fail to detect cancer at its earliest and most treatable stages.
by NDTV Profit News | Read more:
Image: uncredited via
Friday, May 15, 2026
Monk Seals Under Attack
A week after a bystander’s cellphone video appeared to show a tourist heaving a coconut-sized rock at a Hawaiian monk seal swimming in calm waters off Lahaina, barely missing its head, federal authorities charged the Seattle resident with harassing the endangered animal.
On Wednesday, they arrested the person believed to be in the video: Igor Mykhaylovych Lytvynchuk, 38. He’s expected to appear in court in Honolulu on May 27.
Those decisive moves followed near-universal outrage as images of the startled male monk seal and a defiant Lytvynchuk went viral in Hawaiʻi and beyond, prompting calls for action.
Protecting the mammals from human harm, advocates say, remains a complex and uphill battle.
Most incidents don’t get caught on camera. Federal enforcement is stretched awfully thin across the Pacific region. Misinformation about the seals competing with fishermen for food, seal advocates say, continues to spread through local communities and spur attacks. [...]
On Maui, Mayor Richard Bissen vowed to personally see that Lytvynchuk, who was vacationing there, would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. If convicted, Lytvynchuk faces up to one year in prison for each charge plus fines of up to $50,000 under the Endangered Species Act and up to $20,000 under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Initially, authorities believed the seal nearly hit was a female named Lani but later determined it was a different, male seal, Bissen said in an Instagram post Thursday. [...]
Enforcement Challenges
Out of at least 16 incidents of confirmed, intentional monk seal killings by humans in the past 17 years that remain unsolved, federal officials have only managed to prosecute one case. That incident, on Kauaʻi, dates back to 2009.
On Maui, Mayor Richard Bissen vowed to personally see that Lytvynchuk, who was vacationing there, would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. If convicted, Lytvynchuk faces up to one year in prison for each charge plus fines of up to $50,000 under the Endangered Species Act and up to $20,000 under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Initially, authorities believed the seal nearly hit was a female named Lani but later determined it was a different, male seal, Bissen said in an Instagram post Thursday. [...]
Enforcement Challenges
Out of at least 16 incidents of confirmed, intentional monk seal killings by humans in the past 17 years that remain unsolved, federal officials have only managed to prosecute one case. That incident, on Kauaʻi, dates back to 2009.
Maria Sagapolu, assistant director of the office’s Pacific Islands Division, said in 2024 that there were fewer than 12 people to cover enforcement of the entire U.S. Pacific region, including Hawai‘i, Guam and other U.S. territories.
The Pacific represents the smallest of the OLE’s five divisions but has to cover the largest area, according to Sagapolu, representing some 1.7 million square miles. [...]
Among the $7.5 million in green fee tourism outreach funding cut by the Legislature was a $700,000 proposal to work with the tourism industry on better visitor outreach and more “culturally grounded messaging that promotes safe wildlife interactions,” according to a statement from the Department of Land and Natural Resources on Thursday.
Those dollars also would have funded a pilot marine protected species reporting app, the agency said, for the community to help report a host of threats related to Hawaiʻi’s wildlife, including monk seals. The project was recommended by Gov. Josh Green’s volunteer Green Fee Advisory Council, but the Senate removed its funding last month.
by Marcel Honoré, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: Hawaiʻi District Court document/2026; The Marine Mammal Center, NOAA Permit #24359/2023
[ed. The human capacity for stupidity and cruelty can never be underestimated (which appears to have infected Molokai as well). When a witness confronted the man, he said “he did not care and was ‘rich’ enough to pay any fines,”. Video here (Hawaii News Now).]
Sunday, May 3, 2026
Friday, May 1, 2026
Friday, April 24, 2026
Super Bird
Before it took off, the bird ate parts of its own liver, kidneys, and gut. That was the only way to be light enough to fly. Then it flew 8,425 miles from Alaska to Australia, in 11 days, without eating, drinking, or landing once.
The bird is called B6. It's a bar-tailed godwit, four months old, weighing about as much as a can of beans. In October 2022, scientists at the US Geological Survey tracked its flight from Alaska all the way to Tasmania. The trip took 11 days and 1 hour. It is still the longest non-stop flight of any animal on Earth.
For two weeks before takeoff, godwits eat until they almost double in weight. Fat ends up being 55% of their body, more than any bird ever measured. Then they shrink their own insides. About a quarter of their liver, kidneys, stomach, and intestines gets broken down and reused for fuel, making room for the extra fat and cutting weight. Their heart and wing muscles grow bigger at the same time.
They never drink along the way. The water they need comes out of burning fat, the same reaction their muscles use for energy. They also never really sleep. B6 flapped its wings for 264 straight hours, cruising around 35 miles per hour with help from storm tailwinds. By the time it landed, it had lost almost half its body weight. The shrunken organs grew back over the following weeks. Scientists still cannot explain the navigation. B6 had never made this flight before. Adult godwits leave Alaska weeks earlier, so young birds fly alone with nobody to follow. How a four-month-old bird finds its way across 8,425 miles of open ocean to a place it has never seen is still an open question. About 100,000 bar-tailed godwits leave Alaska every fall. Most of them land in New Zealand or Australia 10 or 11 days later, having eaten parts of themselves to get there.
by Anish Moonka, X | Read more:
Image: All Day Astronomy
Saturday, March 28, 2026
Friday, March 27, 2026
Fuzz: Wildlife Conflict in the Modern Era
Recently, I read Fuzz: When Natures Breaks the Law by Mary Roach. Like all of her books, it is a meandering journey that touches on a common theme. Although the subtitle makes it seem that the theme is nature crime, the theme is more about conflicts between bureaucracy, modernity and nature rather than crime itself. A more accurate but worse title would be Fuzz: The Weird Ways Humans Deal with Nature while Navigating Bureaucracy and the Impossibility of People Wanting to be around Wildlife without Ever Being Inconvenienced. Some examples Roach explores include the Indian government’s attempt to sterilize monkeys, how the city of Aspen deals with bears raiding trash cans, and the many failed attempts at getting rid of birds including the infamous Australian emu war.
Reading Fuzz was often frustrating because most of the problems share the same basic structure regardless of time or place. Humans disturb a local ecosystem through moving there or extracting resources. Animals then wander into human settlements in response to ecosystem change that has worsened their food supply, altered the predator-prey ratio, or made it easier to get caloric rich food. Humans react by engaging in one of two strategies. Strategy one is to kill everything, which is usually ineffective because it does not affect the population levels or results in extinction (at least in the region) which results in further ecosystem change. Strategy two is to feed the wild animals because that seems like the nice thing to do except that feeding them encourages the animals to keep going into the human settlements which makes the animals bolder which leads to more conflict and potentially leads to attacks. Once this has started, the animals become so used to relying on people for food that they cannot be integrated back into the wild. Sometimes people become so frustrated and angry that they go back to the first strategy of kill everything.
These problems can seem intractable. People have a hard time being convinced that killing everything doesn’t work and the people who don’t want to kill the animals have a hard time accepting that their help may makes things worse. They continue to feed the wild animals, resist methods that would discourage the animals (such as locking trashcans), and mainly advocate translocation (moving the animal to a different area) even though translocation rarely works. Whether because of blinding love or hate, people have a hard time handling wild animals wandering into their homes and cities.
Even though reading about these issues was frustrating, Fuzz left me feeling more inspired than dejected. There are examples of humans humanely and successfully addressing human-wildlife conflict and limiting the presence of introduced flora and fauna. They do so through careful study of local ecosystems, which includes the humans who live there and how they feel about wildlife. What was the most inspiring thing in the book was seeing how much the animal rights and environmental movements have changed how the public handles these wildlife issues. Before the 1970s, the kill everything approach was the norm. Now it is not.
Throughout these stories, Roach makes the case that the best way to deal with wildlife conflict is to find better ways to live with animals that isn’t killing them or making them reliant on humans. Sometimes the solution is simple and easy. After multiple chapters of ridiculous attempts to stop birds from eating crops, Roach argues that it’s better to do nothing or to hire a human to scare the birds off. Other times the solution is complicated. In New Zealand, there’s research being done on using genetic engineering to induce infertility among mice and other destructive, introduced species as a way to reduce the population without mass poisoning. The researchers are trying to limit unintended consequences but there will always be risk. The important question is whether the unknown risk of doing something is worth the known risk of doing nothing. I appreciate that there are people out there doing the often thankless work of trying to make humans and wildlife happy. Roach did an excellent job of showing the myriad of ways this plays out and, unlike other books I’ve read, Roach discusses these issues without claiming that now is the first time humans have tried caring about nature and ecological balance.
These problems can seem intractable. People have a hard time being convinced that killing everything doesn’t work and the people who don’t want to kill the animals have a hard time accepting that their help may makes things worse. They continue to feed the wild animals, resist methods that would discourage the animals (such as locking trashcans), and mainly advocate translocation (moving the animal to a different area) even though translocation rarely works. Whether because of blinding love or hate, people have a hard time handling wild animals wandering into their homes and cities.
Even though reading about these issues was frustrating, Fuzz left me feeling more inspired than dejected. There are examples of humans humanely and successfully addressing human-wildlife conflict and limiting the presence of introduced flora and fauna. They do so through careful study of local ecosystems, which includes the humans who live there and how they feel about wildlife. What was the most inspiring thing in the book was seeing how much the animal rights and environmental movements have changed how the public handles these wildlife issues. Before the 1970s, the kill everything approach was the norm. Now it is not.
Throughout these stories, Roach makes the case that the best way to deal with wildlife conflict is to find better ways to live with animals that isn’t killing them or making them reliant on humans. Sometimes the solution is simple and easy. After multiple chapters of ridiculous attempts to stop birds from eating crops, Roach argues that it’s better to do nothing or to hire a human to scare the birds off. Other times the solution is complicated. In New Zealand, there’s research being done on using genetic engineering to induce infertility among mice and other destructive, introduced species as a way to reduce the population without mass poisoning. The researchers are trying to limit unintended consequences but there will always be risk. The important question is whether the unknown risk of doing something is worth the known risk of doing nothing. I appreciate that there are people out there doing the often thankless work of trying to make humans and wildlife happy. Roach did an excellent job of showing the myriad of ways this plays out and, unlike other books I’ve read, Roach discusses these issues without claiming that now is the first time humans have tried caring about nature and ecological balance.
by Mia Milne, Solar Thoughts | Read more:
Image: Fuzz
[ed. This issue has played out forever in my old hometown of Anchorage, Alaska (as you can imagine), and will probably never be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. It's a form of politics. What's the science say, and what are the options? How feasible are mitigative policies, and how much will they cost? Finally arriving at the most relevant question: what kind of city do you want to live in (that would perpetually kill its animal populations and modify its natural environment)?]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)