The Incredible Journey of a Migratory Shorebird

On a sunny June morning, in a bog outside Beluga, Alaska, I met a Hudsonian godwit. She had inky eyes and a long, slightly upturned beak that was pinkish-orange at its base and brownish-black at its tip. The feathers on her back were of mottled sepia tones, and those on her belly were rusty brown and painterly white. Her legs reminded me of the slender inserts of spring-loaded ballpoint pens, and her feet were refined pterodactyl claws. Her name (among humans) was A34, and she was about the size of a city pigeon. She was in the hands of Nathan Senner, a conservation biologist, who removed and replaced her geotag; measured her head, beak, wing, and leg; weighed her; and took two tail feathers and a sample of her blood. From that small number of data points, he can deduce where she’s been, how her feathers have grown, what genetic subgroup she belongs to, and her degree of exposure to mercury.

Senner leads a research laboratory at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, that is largely focussed on how migratory shorebirds, such as godwits, respond to environmental change. He grew up in Anchorage, where school loudspeakers announced the street corners on which moose had been sighted. In high school, he wrote an occasional “Birding with Nathan” column for the Anchorage Daily News. Senner’s father, Stanley, has devoted more than five decades to the conservation of migratory shorebirds. Starting in the nineteen-seventies, Stanley and his colleagues have been sounding the alarm on the vulnerability of shorebirds and working to protect key habitats, such as Alaska’s Copper River Delta. “Back then, no one was even talking about climate change,” he told me recently. Since 1980, roughly half of migratory shorebird species’ populations have declined by more than fifty per cent.

Migratory shorebirds are usually not a person’s first bird crush. They lack the supernatural aura of the resplendent quetzal, and they don’t go in for outlandish mating displays like that of the prairie chicken. As the Princeton University biology professor and shorebird-lover David Wilcove put it, migratory shorebirds can give an impression of being “little brown guys, buzzing around in the mud, not too big and not too small, and, whether one is a stint or a phalarope or a knot or a godwit, they’re just kind of there.” And yet, Wilcove told me, they are a birder’s kind of bird. Once people get to know them, they tend to fall in love. [...]

Migratory birds in captivity develop Zugunruhe, an agitated fitfulness, at certain times of year. Scientists don’t know precisely what provoked A34 to set off northward one spring afternoon, with a flock of her fellows, though, if they did, they might better know how her species will be affected by the shifting seasons of our changing climate. Godwits cannot soar like hawks or glide like albatrosses. They migrate by continuously flapping their wings. They must navigate crosswinds and headwinds, storms and maybe an occasional hurricane, continuing on day after day, night after night. As best as we can tell, they do not, while flying, eat or drink or sleep (at least not with more than one hemisphere of their brain at a time). After a journey of hundreds of hours and thousands of miles, they descend on a snow-covered shore at the Cook Inlet of southern Alaska or another favored breeding ground. They land considerably lighter than when they took off. “Many arriving shorebirds seem to be tired,” the ornithologist and conservationist Joseph Archibald Hagar wrote, in his foundational monograph, “Nesting of the Hudsonian Godwit at Churchill, Manitoba,” from 1966. In a field-diary entry, Hagar describes a group of birds that “within a minute or two dropped into some sunny spot out of the wind, tucked heads into scapulars, and went to sleep, not to move again for as long as we watched.”

In 1976, the young ornithologist Robert Gill took a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage. He was dispatched to the Alaska Peninsula to do biological inventories on public land that was up for lease to private companies. During those long-lit Alaskan summer days, walking across salt marshes and through the foothills of the mountains, Gill encountered thousands upon thousands of migratory shorebirds. He told me, “In Alaska, where the seasons are so prominent, it’s very dramatic. It feels like all the birds turn up over the course of one weekend in May.” Along with godwits, the peninsula was a summer home to yellowlegs, dowitchers, sandpipers, Arctic terns, and other species. But almost no one was aware that so many birds relied on this land. How the birds managed their journeys, where they might stop along the way, even how many of them there were—no one knew for sure. “In the vast expanses of wetlands and coastal tundra, you could see why,” Gill said.

The extinction of the once common passenger pigeon, famously described by the naturalist John Muir in his memoir (“I have seen flocks streaming south in the fall so large that they were flowing over from horizon to horizon in an almost continuous stream all day long, at the rate of forty or fifty miles an hour, like a mighty river in the sky”), was part of the impetus behind the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Godwits are protected under the act, so killing them or holding them captive, even for scientific purposes, is highly regulated. Also, they’re difficult to capture. Gill’s means of learning more about them was limited, he said, to “the kind of observational work done by old-school naturalists.”

In October of 1987, Gill received a call about nine bar-tailed godwits that had crashed into a radar dome near Cold Bay, Alaska, and died. “They were greaseballs,” he recalled. “They made any Christmas goose look lean.” The carcasses were sent to a lab to be analyzed. Fifty-five per cent of their body mass turned out to be fat. Gill suspected that these chubby godwits were preparing to fly non-stop from Alaska to New Zealand, where this species wintered. However, at that time, the longest known non-stop migration flight was barely half that long. “But, if they were going to stop in French Polynesia, why carry all that baggage?” Gill reasoned.

The lab also measured the birds’ internal organs. Gill’s collaborator, Theunis Piersma, noticed something peculiar: the guts, gizzard, liver, and kidneys of these birds were very small—it was like cutting open a lion and encountering digestive organs the size of a house cat’s. Then, in March of 1992, some forty godwit carcasses were seized from a poacher in New Zealand. These were birds in a very different part of their migratory cycle, and their digestive organs, when analyzed, were of more normal proportions. In 1998, Piersma and Gill published their findings in a paper titled “Guts Don’t Fly: Small Digestive Organs in Obese Bar-Tailed Godwits,” concluding that the birds shrank their digestive organs to reduce their weight and their metabolic demands during a non-stop migration. And then, somehow, regrew them. [...]

A female godwit, E7, took off on March 17, 2007, from near the Piako River, on New Zealand’s North Island. She flew more than six thousand miles non-stop to a nature preserve on the Yalu River, near the China-North Korea border; she stayed there for a little more than a month; she arrived at her nesting area in Alaska on May 15th and spent the summer there. The tracker was still working on August 29th, when E7 started flying southeast, over the Pacific. Gill’s team was doing field work in western Alaska and had only spotty internet service; the team would gather around a laptop, waiting for the updates on E7’s location to come through. North of Kauai, she took a slight right turn and continued flying. On September 7th, after more than two hundred hours aloft, she landed at the mouth of the Piako River, back on the North Island of New Zealand, where Gill had first met her.

Before E7, the longest documented non-stop migratory-bird flight was that of a Far Eastern curlew who had flown about four thousand miles. E7 flew some seven thousand without a break. The flight defied reason. “I had an engineering professor at M.I.T. call me up and say he gave his students an assignment to compare the size and flight range of E7 to a 747 jet,” Gill said. 

by Rivka Galchen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ash Adams
[ed. Stan Senner was a friend and collegue. Didn't know Bob Gill personally but used his work frequently in my habitat protection efforts.]

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Butchering a £5,000 Bluefin Tuna With a Sushi Master

We break down the entire fish from head to tail, exploring the different cuts of tuna, how the fat content and texture change throughout the fish, and which parts are best suited to sushi, sashimi, grilling and cooking. Along the way, we taste some of the most prized and unusual cuts.

In this video:

•⁠ ⁠Break down a whole 200kg bluefin tuna
•⁠ ⁠Learn professional tuna butchery techniques
•⁠ ⁠Explore the different cuts of bluefin tuna
•⁠ ⁠Taste lean, medium-fatty and fatty tuna
•⁠ ⁠Learn how tuna is prepared for sushi and sashimi
•⁠ ⁠Discover rarely seen cuts
•⁠ ⁠Learn traditional Japanese sushi techniques 

•⁠ ⁠See how different parts of one tuna can taste completely different

Humpback Whales Are Interrupting Orca Hunts to Rescue Completely Different Species

It’s not a story anyone would have believed if it weren’t so thoroughly documented. A pod of killer whales in Antarctica is chasing a Weddell seal that’s taken refuge on a small ice floe. The orcas swim shoulder to shoulder to create a wave that washes the seal off the ice and into the water. Death looks certain. And then, without warning, a pair of humpback whales arrives. The seal, panicking, swims towards them. A wave tosses it onto the chest of the closer humpback, which is by this point rolling belly-up at the surface. The humpback arches its chest out of the water to keep the seal high and dry, above the reach of the frustrated killer whales circling below. When the seal starts to slip off, the humpback gently pushes it back onto its chest with a flipper. The seal eventually escapes onto another ice floe. The orcas, denied their meal, swim off.

The marine ecologist who watched this happen in 2009 was, on his own subsequent account, so bewildered that it took him years to work out what he’d actually seen. And what he ended up finding, once he started asking other researchers whether they’d witnessed anything similar, was that it wasn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern. And it involves species the humpbacks have no obvious reason to help.

What the researchers actually documented

According to a 2017 review paper by Dr Robert Pitman of NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, with Volker Deecke, Christine Gabriele and eleven other co-authors from research institutions around the world, published in Marine Mammal Science under the title “Humpback whales interfering when mammal-eating killer whales attack other species: Mobbing behavior and interspecific altruism?”, the team compiled 115 documented interactions between humpback whales and killer whales over a sixty-two-year period from 1951 to 2012. The interactions came from researchers, whale-watch operators and wildlife photographers across multiple ocean basins.

The numbers, once you sit with them, don’t quite behave the way you’d expect. In 57 per cent of the interactions, the humpbacks were the ones who started it. They swam towards the killer whales, not away. Ninety-five per cent of the orcas involved were mammal-eating forms rather than fish-eating ones, meaning the humpbacks were reliably distinguishing between the two ecological populations and only intervening when the killer whales were hunting warm-blooded prey. And in the interactions where humpbacks approached killer whales that were actively attacking something, 87 per cent involved a kill or a hunt in progress.

The bit that made the paper genuinely surprising is what happened next. When the humpbacks arrived at the scene of an attack, only 11 per cent of the time was the prey another humpback. The other 89 per cent of the time, the killer whales were hunting something else entirely. A seal. A sea lion. A porpoise. A grey whale calf. A minke whale. A sunfish. Across the full data set, humpbacks were documented interfering with orca attacks on ten different species, including six kinds of pinniped, three other cetacean species, and one bony fish.

The interventions weren’t casual. Humpbacks travelled up to two kilometres to reach an ongoing attack. They approached bellowing and trumpeting. They positioned themselves between the killer whales and the prey. They tail-slashed. They struck orcas with their flippers, which on a fourteen-metre humpback are capable of doing real damage. They stayed for hours in some cases, refusing to leave until the killer whales gave up. In one incident in Monterey Bay in May 2012, described in reporting by National Geographic on the specific case, at least fourteen humpbacks converged on a group of killer whales that had killed a grey whale calf, and spent hours preventing the orcas from feeding on the carcass. One humpback stationed itself directly next to the dead calf, head pointed at it, tail slashing every time a killer whale approached.

None of this makes obvious sense.

by Kiran Journals, Space Daily | Read more:
Image: via

“The Making of JAWS” (1975)
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[ed. Floss and visit your dentist regularly.]

Doublet x Beta Post Tuna Head Bag, AW26

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How Dachshunds Took Over the Dog World

The barking starts before customers even reach the door.

Then comes the rapid tippy-tap of paws as dozens of dachshunds race across the floor, noses first, eager to sniff new arrivals and dole out sloppy kisses. Charlotte, Cherleen, Kingston, Khaleesi and the rest of the pack are the main attraction at Bornz Too, a cafe in a Bangkok suburb where customers pay 300 baht ($9) to spend an hour and a half with more than 30 sausage dogs. “Coffee is secondary here,” says owner Phatthira Koosrivong.

The dachshund breeder and importer opened the cafe in June after being inundated with requests from people wanting to meet and play with the breed before buying one. Customers crouch on the floor to rub bellies, pose for photos and laugh as dachshunds climb into their laps. By the time they leave, they know Charlotte from Cherleen and Kingston from Khaleesi.

When Phatthira started importing dachshunds about five years ago, she sold 10 to 20 puppies a year. Today, she places close to 100. “We don’t have to do any hard selling,” she says.

Her booming business reflects a broader surge in the short-legged breed’s popularity. From Bangkok to London to New York, demand has climbed as social media and celebrity owners amplify the breed’s appeal, while changes in how people live, work and build families reshape what they want in a pet. In 2025 dachshunds overtook poodles to become the American Kennel Club’s fifth-most-popular breed, after a decade-long climb from 13th place. In the UK, they were the Royal Kennel Club’s third-most-registered breed last year when all sizes and coat variations are tallied, behind only Labrador retrievers and cocker spaniels, with registrations doubling from a decade earlier.

Few dogs are better suited to the moment. Dachshunds are compact enough for urban life, distinctive enough for Instagram or TikTok and packed with personality. The breed comes in standard, miniature and rabbit sizes and three coat types — smooth-, long- and wire-haired — as well as dozens of color and pattern combinations. [...]

As cities grow denser, apartments shrink and homeownership drifts further out of reach for many young adults, the dachshund is becoming an ideal pet — small, adaptable and perfectly suited to urban living. Kisnica sees the same pattern in Bangkok that she did in Spain. “It’s definitely the breed that’s become very, very popular, especially among millennials without children,” she says. “They’re easy to have in an apartment or in a city.”

During a recent trip to Italy, I found myself photographing dachshunds almost as often as the scenery. They padded down cobblestone streets and appeared everywhere, from adverts in shop windows to tote bags, including one that reimagined Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam with a dachshund in Adam’s place.

Dachshunds were first bred in Germany about 500 years ago to hunt badgers underground and flush out foxes and rabbits. Their elongated bodies slipped easily through tunnels, while their oversize paws were built for digging and their loud bark helped hunters locate them below ground. The stubborn streak that delights and frustrates modern owners reflects the independence and bravery they needed to confront fierce prey.

Hunters prized them for their loyalty, and many owners say that instinct survives today. They form strong bonds with their families, often burrowing under blankets, curling up in laps and shadowing their owners from room to room. [...]

New York Yankees captain Aaron Judge regularly features his dachshunds, Gus and Penny, on social media. Formula One driver Charles Leclerc’s dachshund, Leo, appeared in his wedding photos, while tennis players Anna Kalinskaya and Alexander Zverev have brought their pooches to Roland Garros. Actor Luke Evans, who stars as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the Broadway revival of The Rocky Horror Show, nicknamed his dachshund Lala “Frank-N-Wiener.”

The celebrity connection long predates social media. David Hockney and Andy Warhol owned dachshunds, as did John Wayne and Elizabeth Taylor.

by Randy Thanthong-Knight, Bloomberg | Read more:

Image: Waltraud Grubitzsch/Getty Images; Andy and Archie; Jack Mitchell/Getty Images
[ed. I've grown up with dachshunds most of my life and they're the best dogs, hands down. We have a Dachshund Festival in our town each year. Here are a few pics: Wiener-Palooza.]

The Deep Sea

The Deep Sea
by Neal Agarwal

[ed. Fun and informative (scroll down to different depths to see the various creatures that have been recorded there). For example, I had no idea thick-billed murres could dive that deep.]

Why So Quiet?

In May 2024, when then-Congresswoman Mary Peltola introduced a Bycatch Reduction and Mitigation Act and Bottom Trawl Clarity Act, the bills drew immediate backlash.

Peltola, a Democrat, received a letter signed by 53 trawl interests and nationwide fishery stakeholders urging her to withdraw the proposed legislation saying, “These new federal mandates and timelines are utterly unworkable.”

Fast forward to 2026.

In her current campaign to unseat 12-year incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, Peltola introduced a similar “Fighting for Alaska Fisheries” platform to no reaction from the trawl sector. Sullivan quickly followed by proposing a Bycatch Reduction Act, a revamped version of a 2022 Alaska Salmon Research Task Force bill that produced a report recommending more research. Again, no trawler reaction.

What’s the difference?

This time around, Peltola’s push is a campaign policy platform, not a proposed congressional bill. While Sullivan’s Act fits that description, the trawl sector apparently views him as its strategic shield against Peltola. If they aggressively attack his bill, they could politically weaken their strongest ally in Washington.

There are fundamental differences between the two bills.

Peltola’s approach leans toward statutory restrictions that would force the government to draw hard lines on where trawling is allowed — the goal is to stop “multi-species collapse.” It would make changes to language loopholes in the outdated Magnuson-Stevens Act, such as “minimizing bycatch to the extent practicable.” Her proposal would remove “to the extent practicable” as it is widely regarded as the phrase that allows trawlers to declare under the law that they “are doing the best they can” to reduce bycatch. It has been included in management decisions for decades as a way for the trawl sector to avoid more stringent bycatch rules. Peltola’s approach calls for restructuring the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to dilute trawler influence, and adding seats for subsistence and small-boat fishermen. It calls for investment in Alaska seafood processing innovation, fish by-product utilization and seaweed and shellfish mariculture.

Sullivan’s bill offers industrialized trawlers a heavily subsidized pathway to compliance rather than an eviction notice. It requires stricter operational rules like mandatory salmon excluders — devices built into trawl nets that can allow salmon to escape — and tougher seafloor contact accountability. It focuses heavily on using advanced data, real-time technology and gear innovations to mitigate bycatch and ecosystem impacts without adding regulatory burdens. Crucially, it includes massive federal carrots: funding for a flume tank, electronic monitoring upgrades and streamlined Exempted Fishing Permits that allow vessels to conduct experimental fishing activities that would otherwise be prohibited.

Instead of resorting to angry rebuttals, the trawl sector has outsourced its messaging to new advocacy fronts like The Truth Alaska, Sustaining Alaska’s Future and the Alaska Pollock Fishery Alliance. One originates in Texas; the others are fronted by former state directors for Republican Congressional delegates Sen. Sullivan and Rep. Nick Begich III.

This strategy lets the trawl sector counter anti-trawl sentiment without making it look like they are fighting a sitting US Senator. They reframe the debate as “supporting science and Alaska jobs,” allowing Sullivan to position himself as the reasonable middle ground.

During his tenure, Sullivan has been one of Big Trawl’s top recipients of campaign contributions. He obfuscates the fact that those cash cows all are homeported in Seattle or Oregon.

In recent social media ads, for example, he calls for reining in chum salmon bycatch by “holding foreign fleets accountable,” knowing full well that foreign fleets have been banned from Alaska waters out to 200 miles since the mid-1970s.

by Laine Welch, Alaska Beacon |  Read more:

Image: David Csepp/National Marine Fisheries Service
[ed. Politics in a nutshell (and GOP politicians) - and the natural environment continues to get screwed. I don't think Republican politicians hate the environment per se, but if the choice is between protection and unfettered development, no contest. See also: Roadless Rule to be Rescinded (affecting 45 million wild acres) here and here, and Big Bend National Park (Texas) under threat (here and here).]

***

"Donald Trump once bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose his supporters’ faith. In the Big Bend region, the Trump administration has been figuratively shooting Texans in the face while the state’s leaders do virtually nothing. In recent weeks, bulldozers began ripping up Texas’s last, best wilderness—the one place that still honors the state’s mythology of wide-open spaces and endless frontier. Even with the federal boot heel (for now) off the neck of Big Bend National Park, it’s preparing to press down on the rest of the vast region with a mix of thirty-foot border walls, vehicle barriers, and new patrol roads. Hundreds of private landowners between El Paso and Del Rio may soon face eminent domain, their land seized by the feds for a project that few in the region think will do anything to secure a part of the border that sees vanishingly few illegal crossings.

In the face of all this, a spirited, bipartisan coalition of Big Bend enthusiasts—from crunchy river rats to MAGA border sheriffs—have been fighting back. Early in the summer, they managed to get the Trump administration to scrap plans for a thirty-foot wall in the park. This week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner Rodney Scott agreed to pause construction there while he visits the region. Governor Greg Abbott, after months of silence on the matter, has attempted to take credit for the pause."

'Biological Datacenters' Could Make Animal Testing Obsolete

There’s a big flaw in the way that drug companies develop and test medicines today: What works in a mouse often doesn’t work in a human.

For decades, the industry has relied on animal testing. But in a laboratory south of San Francisco, a startup called Vivodyne is scaling up a different approach. Inside wardrobe-size mini labs, robots grow human tissue and run thousands of AI-designed experiments that could better predict how well a new drug will work—and whether it will be safe.

Right now, around 90% of clinical trials fail despite the fact that a drug has already successfully gone through animal testing. “You have these clinical trials where there’s hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, and decades of people’s careers just spent hoping this thing works,” says Andrei Georgescu, Vivodyne’s CEO. “And then it fails because of some ambiguity that you could not have checked.”

The company’s system, which now includes a dozen robotic labs called “hives,” can run controlled trials on more than 3 million human tissues each year. That’s twice the capacity of all the clinical trials in the U.S. combined.

The process starts with cells from humans, often taken from a blood draw. In its labs, the cells grow on “biological chips” and self-assemble into living structures with blood vessels and immune cells that reproduce some of the functions of the original organ, whether that’s a liver or a kidney. (The tissues don’t look like full-size organs, but like large biopsies, with hundreds of thousands of cells.)

The automated system can deliver drugs to the tissues, dose with cell therapies, knock out genes, and run complex tests and analysis. AI can design experiments and then use the results to continually design new experiments and improve.

“We can dose with tens and tens of thousands of therapeutic compounds to understand what they would do in that particular tissue type within a person, and we can repeat this across many types of tissue,” Georgescu says. “We can look at diseased tissue and see if it becomes healthy. We can look at healthy tissue and see if there are side effects from these drugs.” At a more fundamental level, it’s possible to begin to understand the human body in a way that wasn’t possible before, because experiments in humans have inherently been limited.

Other startups also use human tissues for testing, but Vivodyne’s platform can be up to 1,000 times larger, making it possible to capture more of the complexity of human biology. In addition, the company can run a massive number of experiments in parallel and feed the data back into AI to repeatedly design new experiments. [...]

A clinical trial might test one drug in thousands of people. Vivodyne can test thousands of different drugs across human tissues at once. And while people in a drug trial only have occasional visits to a clinic to track results, the system can continually test how human tissue responds.

by Adele Peters, Fast Company |  Read more:

Image: Vivodyne

Sheep that Bleat

My dog Toby and I were just back from our early morning walk and I was in the living room when I heard a single bleat of a sheep. It was 8:30. The sheep bleated again.

How to describe the sound? Demanding, worried, and hesitant. Half, “Well, what?” and half, “Oh dear, oh help!” Half low moan, half high and wavering supplication. It’s a sound, like birdsong, that I’d have to replay endlessly to describe even half-right. And yet I recognized it immediately as different from the bleating of the small herd my neighbor’s nephew Jesús keeps in the fields across the lane from my house. This mournful bleat proclaimed, I am alone.

I looked out the window and saw the animal, emerging from the shadows where the lane dead-ended at the gated entrance to a field. It hesitated, then, almost deerlike, it advanced. What was it doing here, and where had it come from? Behind it I could see the fence at the entrance. It appeared intact. Beyond were the green fields where the sheep grazed among the partially built houses of an abandoned project on the ridge above the river. The bank owns the land now, but my neighbor’s family has the use of the fields. No other sheep were in view.

My son had heard the sheep, too, and we both stepped out into the lane. The sheep retreated into the corner against the fence. We didn’t have the nephew’s number, so we called my neighbor instead. He was in Holland, visiting his son for a few days, but he assured us he’d call his nephew right away. For good measure, he also gave us the number.

My son and I kept an eye on the sheep. I knew that my neighbor’s sister and nephew lived five minutes away. I expected them any moment. The sheep made a couple of tentative starts into the lane but retreated each time to its corner. The third time, instead of turning back when it came up against us in the lane, it stood its ground. Then it took courage, gathered itself, and made a mad dash around us—to the freedom of the open lane, nothing to stop it or impede its progress. It looked like a young male—I could see its testicles. I followed and saw it turn off the lane onto the grassy slope behind the sports center. If it continued in that direction, it would hit city streets. I moved back, hoping it would not press on. The grass on the slope was very green. Maybe the sheep would linger to nibble.

Back at the house, I wondered what was taking the owner so long. I went inside, but a few minutes later, from the corner of my eye, I saw a sheep in the lane, just like the earlier one, drumming up its courage to get past my son, still outside. Wait! I shook my head. It felt like déjà vu.

“Same one?” I asked, stepping back outside, and my son said yes, same one—back in its dead end, only to try to escape again. And still no nephew. My son sent a WhatsApp message.

The sheep made a last attempt. My son and I, prepared this time, jumped in front of it, waving our arms. At the last moment, the sheep veered, turned, and charged back to its corner. It made a funny little leap into the air, twice, to come down on all four feet in a show of petulance. Then it lay down on a patch of grass by the gate. Shortly afterward, a car pulled up.

Instead of the story ending, however, it took a turn. Rather than the nephew, it was his mother, with his girlfriend driving. The women explained that they got a call from my neighbor, explaining that the nephew hadn’t picked up. The mother and girlfriend couldn’t get in touch with him, either—the man was at work. So they’d come.

I pointed out the sheep, lying quietly in the shade of the wall. The sister wore a worried expression. The girlfriend seemed amused. How do we catch it, I asked? Oh, we won’t, the sister said. Another nephew in the family, cousin to Jesús, was coming. He would catch it.

So while we waited for the cousin, we watched the sheep. It was on its feet again. Was it favoring the front left leg, injured perhaps while wriggling free through a fence? Would it put up a fight? While we talked, a call came: Jesús, finally alerted by my son’s message. His mother passed the phone to the girlfriend. The cousin appeared, climbed out of his car, engine running and door wide open. He was looking past us as he advanced toward the sheep, backed up against the gate. Almost immediately, even before he’d had time to size up the situation, he turned to us. “That’s not Jesús’s,” he declared. The girlfriend passed the phone to the cousin, and in a minute he passed it back to her. She passed the phone to Jesús’s mother, as if rewinding a skein that had come unwound. A few words to Jesús, and the mother hung up.

“Well, whose sheep could it be, then?” I wondered aloud.

Nobody knew. Call the police, the cousin said, and left. The two women got in their car to drive off, too. As they turned the car around, I stepped up to the window. “Did you call?” I asked.

“No, no—we don’t have the number.” And they too drove off. I stared after them. Well, why wouldn’t they leave? The sheep wasn’t theirs.

It wasn’t mine, either, though.

To me, it looked like a sheep had been dropped among us, and we should all make a contribution to getting it where it belonged. My 45 minutes counted as my effort. What was theirs?

To them, the situation might look different—as if I’d started it all by worrying about a sheep when it wasn’t my business to worry about it, disrupting the morning of any number of people by involving them, too. And now I was trying to hand off the Old Maid card. They weren’t taking it.

by Clelland Coe, American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: John Fowler/Flickr

Salmon Sushi: Not a Japanese Tradition

Somewhere in Tokyo in the mid-1980s, a Norwegian marketing strategist stood in front of a room of Japanese seafood executives, served them raw salmon, and watched the room politely fall apart. The colour was wrong, they told him. Its smell, they said, had a river-like quality. Someone objected to the shape of the fish’s head.

I think about that meeting every time I sit at a conveyor belt and watch the orange slabs go past. Salmon nigiri has the settled look of something that was always there, parked next to the tuna and looking as venerable as a prawn tempura. It has been on Japanese menus for about thirty years.

What Japan actually ate before

Japanese cooks have used salmon for centuries. They grilled it, salted it, flaked it into rice balls and packed it into lunchboxes. Nippon.com describes grilled salmon and salmon flakes as fixtures of home cooking, with a hard line drawn between that cooked fare and anything sliced raw. The domestic workhorse was chum salmon: lean, firm, nobody’s idea of sashimi.

So the fish was there. The appetite for raw fish was very obviously there. Those two facts never met.

The parasite question, answered properly

There was a real reason for the line, and fussiness was not it.

Wild Pacific salmon carry Anisakis simplex, a nematode larva that causes a thoroughly miserable illness called anisakiasis if you swallow it alive. Heat kills it. Deep freezing kills it. Slicing the fish fresh and eating it does not, which is why generations of Japanese cooks treated raw salmon as a hazard to be cooked out.

Farmed Atlantic salmon raised on heat-treated pellets is a different animal. The Norwegian Food Safety Authority exempts farmed salmon and rainbow trout from the freezing rule that otherwise applies to fish destined to be eaten raw, on the grounds that the fish eat nothing but dry feed containing no viable parasites and barely graze on wild organisms in the pen. That exemption tracks a 2010 European Food Safety Authority opinion and its 2024 re-evaluation.

A survey published in the Italian Journal of Food Safety put numbers on it: 270 slices of smoked farmed Atlantic salmon examined, zero anisakids found, against ten positives out of thirteen slices of wild sockeye. One paper on one processed product, not a settled literature, but it points the same way the regulators do.

Norway had too much fish

Norway started farming salmon commercially in the 1970s, then watched its own population drift towards chicken and red meat.

Freezers filled up.

The Norwegian Seafood Council, which has every commercial reason to tell this story well, dates the campaign to 1985, when a delegation led by former fisheries minister Thor Listau flew to Tokyo. Their figures: two tonnes of Norwegian salmon went to Japan in 1980, and twenty years later the annual number was above 45,000 tonnes.

Underneath all of it sat one piece of arithmetic. Fish sold for the grill competes on price with every other cheap protein, while fish accepted for sashimi could fetch up to ten times more, as Bjørn Eirik Olsen, who ran market research for the project, later told The Japan Times.

A name change, then a decade of nothing

“We couldn’t just say that our fish doesn’t have parasites,” Olsen said in that interview. Walking into a foreign industry and announcing that its national fish is wormy tends to close doors rather than open them.

So he went after the word instead. The Japanese for salmon is sake, and sake carried every association he was trying to escape: grilled, salted, cheap, the thing in the lunchbox. Olsen borrowed the English word and pushed the katakana sāmon, the term still stamped on essentially every sushi menu in the country. Same animal, different shelf.

Then came the advertising, all clean fjords and clear arctic water, and it achieved almost nothing for years. Olsen told NPR that pressure from home to abandon the sushi idea and dump the stock into the grill market was relentless.

The deal that broke it open

In 1992, Olsen offered the frozen food giant Nichirei 5,000 tonnes of salmon at close to giveaway prices, with one condition written into it: the fish could only be sold as sushi. Nichirei said yes.

That was the crack in the wall. Through the 1990s, Iron Chef and celebrity chefs including Yutaka Ishinabe put Norwegian salmon onto national television, and appetite did the rest. Olsen has said he knew the campaign had landed when he started noticing plastic salmon nigiri in restaurant window displays.

Where salmon sits now

Salmon has topped Japan’s biggest conveyor-belt sushi survey for fifteen consecutive years. In the 2026 round, run by Umios (the company known as Maruha Nichiro until March), 47.7 per cent of respondents named it as the topping they eat most often, more than eleven points clear of lean tuna in second place. The split runs along age lines: older diners tend to open with lean white fish and work up to tuna, while younger ones go straight for the orange.

by Daniel Moran, Space Daily |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Not many people know this but there are actually six species of Pacific salmon (not five), including the cherry salmon (Oncorhynchus masou) in Japan.]

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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.)

by Helen Lewis, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

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 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). 

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. 

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. [...]

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

The Vances added a chicken coop to the vice president’s residence. We had questions. (Washington Post/Seattle Times).

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.]

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.

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.]

Merganser Speed Trials

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.]

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