On Meeting Georges Cuvier, Version 2.0
I love sidewalk chats and presentations for impromptu on-the-ground teaching. They’re especially effective when you have a live animal in your hands. Over the years I’ve been lucky to hold and present many different species, particularly reptiles, including the lovely and colorful Mali Uromastyx.
The other day, while holding a Mali, I had quite the conversation with an eight year old who must’ve been the reincarnation of Georges Cuvier.
Cuvier: “What kind of lizard is that?”
Me: “It’s a Mali Uromastyx, they’re from sub-Saharan Africa.”
Cuvier: “He kind of reminds me of an anklyosaurus.”
Me: “Ankylosaurus, hmm. Those are the ones with the big lob tails and the spikes, right?”
Cuvier: “Well yeeeeah. So does your lizard have osteoderms too?”
Me: “Um.. osteoderms. Do you mean modified scales? Like scutes?”
Cuvier (with a look of disdain): “Only non-scientists call them scutes.”
Eight years old, ladies and gentlemen.
I just finished up a post the other day discussing my love of jargon and here we have an eight year old who calls me on the floor with “osteoderm” and I flub it. Good grief!
Entangled Statues in Vancouver
Plastic Pollution Coalition has a brilliant guerilla-style grassroots campaign unfolding in Vancouver at the moment. Plastic Manners is also providing coverage and reactions from the public on the giant plastic six-pack ring found entangled across several of the marine-themed statues that grace the city. I find the campaign brilliant and inspiring. It’s hard to deny the message they’re sending when the problem is big and in-your-face.
Mission Blue: Jeremy Jackson’s Reefs
Jeremy Jackson covers some of the most pressing issues in marine habitat conservation – not just coral reefs – and I especially like his thoughts on biological pollution. This is definitely one TED talk worth listening too all the way to the very end, where he offers up some food for thought on our personal responsibility and contribution to the challenges facing habitats in our modern world.
I don’t entirely agree that its “selfishness” that drives our failings when it comes to the natural world. Selfish behavior seems to imply that we are aware of the impacts of what we are doing, but continue it despite that knowledge. Jackson said it himself: there are feedback loops inherent in many aquatic systems that we are just now beginning to understand and could not have predicted to exist. “Selfish” implies that we did depleted resources and altered ecosystems purposefully.
I simply can’t accept that idea. Perhaps its my inner Treehugger speaking, or the eternal optimist in me finding a voice, but I cannot believe that the generations before me sat down with a violent notion in their head that it was us against the planet and that we would drive down what Sylvia Earle calls the “world bank” of natural resources with a gleam in our eye and a thirst for blood in our hearts.
Perhaps its a choice to look at it this way, but I continue to believe that it is ignorance that drives our failures with ecosystem health. Ignorance all too often bred out of fear or mythology. I believe that it is a lack of a basic fundamental natural literacy that leads to destructive behavior. As an environmental educator, that belief is probably necessary to my core values. And it might be that it is a self delusion… but it is nonetheless a belief I have to hold if I am to continue to teach people with the hopes that what they learn can change the way they view their world and lead their lives.
392 Butts On the Beach
It’s a well known fact that cigarette butts are some of the most common litter items found in the United States in any area. They especially contaminate some of the heavily used access points along the Lagoon. While I usually pick up a few dozen at each cleanup, I decided today to focus only on the butts and the filters that get left behind.
After an hour of bending down and crouching in the sand to pick up the tiny little fragments, I gave up, having only cleaned a hundred feet of beach line. And my take today? Hardly a pound – if that really, my scale isnt sensitive enough for such small weights – amounting to 392 butts and filters.
It all does make me wonder one thing of course: when/if the oil spill arrives on the Atlantic beaches of Florida and gets sucked into my lagoon.. would discarded cigarette filters be a good way to soak up the mess? Hmm.
“It’s Like He’s Trying to Speak to Me, I Know It!”
I have a problem. A jargon problem. As in, I love jargon. Cephalic scoops. Pineal glands. Zygomatic arches. Harpacticoid copepods. Ziphiidae. Eutrophication. Nitrogenous waste. Circadian rhythms. Photosynthetically active radiation levels. Catadromous and anadromous fishes!
And on, and on, and on.
I often forget that if I’m going to use a scientific term when teaching that I need to define it. Its one of the biggest critiques I receive from other instructors and its the sort of valuable feedback I definitely need.
Afterall, I dont want to send people for the sort of mental tail spin that the video above does to me. Crazy engineers and their ding alarms and modial interaction of magnetoreluctance and capacitive directance.
PS: Do you know where your nofer trunnions are?
