Why Evolution is True Feed

I remind you once again to send in your photographs as there’s always a need. Thanks!

Today we have some pictures taken by James Blilie and his son Jamie. The captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here is a set of photos from our local area.  We live in far southern Washington state in Klickitat County.  These photos are from Klickitat and Skamania Counties.

A mostly full moon photographed on February 8, 2025:

Two views of Mount Adams from the front porch on our new (2024) home.  Both are taken at sunset.  One is a black and white closeup.  The other also shows our local gang of Black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus).  Mount Adams is about 20 miles directly north of our house:

The next shot shows left to right:  Mount Adams, Mount Rainier, and the Goat Rocks Wilderness from the top of a local ridge.  I took this on March 1, 2025:  It was 60°F (16°C) and sunny, unusual for the first of March!  The view is well worth the work on this hike:

The next bunch of photos were taken at the Wind River Arboretum in Skamania County, definitely on the wet (west) side of the Cascade Range.

A cross-section of the purportedly largest Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) found in Washington state and the placard that accompanies it.  The section was taken at 60-feet (18m) above the ground and the tree was determined to be 393-feet (120m) tall:

[JAC: I can’t help pointing out the superfluous apostrophe in the park sign below.]

Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata):  Foliage and a (small) example tree:

Two shots by our son Jamie of Bird’s Nest Fungus (Nidulariaceae spp.):

Last year’s Bracken Fern (Pteridium aquilinum), also taken by Jamie:

Views of Sword Ferns (Polystichum munitum), also taken by Jamie:

Equipment:

Mine:

Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera (micro-4/3, crop factor = 2.0)
LUMIX G X Vario, 12-35MM, f/2.8 ASPH lens
LUMIX 35-100mm  f/2.8 G Vario lens
LUMIX G Vario 7-14mm  f/4.0 ASPH lens
LUMIX G Vario 100-300mm F/4.0-5.6 MEGA O.I.S. lens

Jamie’s:

Nikon D5600 (crop factor = 1.5)
Nikkor AF-P DX 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 G VR lens
Sigma 150-600mm f/5.0-6.3 DG OS HSM lens

A reporter from ABC News interviewed me yesterday about the Dire Wolf, and her piece appears on their website today (see below). I had to find it myself because, as is usual, when I ask reporters to send me the link to a story for which I was interviewed, they all say “yes”, but only about 10% ever do.  Frankly, I think it’s kind of selfish to exploit scientists for their expertise and not even send them a lousy link.

Well, I digress, but this is in line with the kind of science journalism that has often accompanied the Dire Wolf story. Fortunately, the ABC article is pretty good.

First I’ll add a few comments.  My own view is that Colossal has behaved in a sleazy and overly secretive way with respect to their “de-extinction” and “we-are-big-conservationists” claims.  Some of the secrecy seems unwarranted. For example, they told the New Yorker reporter who wrote about the “Dire Wolf” what genes they had edited, but did not permit him to publish their identity.  Since the faux Dire Wolves are now romping around a secret pasture monitored by drones, there’s no chance that anybody else is going to do what Colossal did, so no need to hide the genes.

The paper about the “woolly mouse” is on bioRχiv, but is still not accepted for publication. (The accompanying note says “This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review.”)

And Colossal Bioscience is getting considerable flak from the better science journalists, and is getting peevish about it. They issued a press release yesterday that was defensive, clearly a response to the pushback they’re getting and heavily concerned with species definitions, trying to argue that the dire wolf is a “new species” even though it’s just a gray wolf with 20 DNA letters changed.  Here’s short excerpt of the two-page release:

We invested over a year collaborating with academic colleagues to improve the dire wolf paleogenome and decode the dire wolf’s evolutionary history. Our scientific manuscript has been submitted for peer review and posted to the preprint server–please go check it out.

I cannot find the preprint of the Dire Wolf paper anywhere on the web. If you can find it, let us all know. It would of course list the genes that had been changed.

You can read the ABC article by clicking below; it’s free. The article includes a ten-minute video of the project showing the “Dire Wolves” (I have to admit that they’re cute).  Note that Colossal decline to let the reporter see the faux Dire Wolves “up close,” though they showed her the videos.  And Colossal co-founder Ben Lamm asserts that they are on target to produce woolly mammoths by 2028! I’m ready to bet a thousand dollars that that won’t happen—especially if you define “de-exincted woolly mammoth” as being something with at least 50 gene edits that’s ready to release on the tundra.

Three quotes from Beth Shapiro, the chief scientific officer of Colossal Biosciences, from the video in the article:

“. . . that animal looks like a dire wolf, it will behave like a dire wolf, and it is a dire wolf.”

“When I saw them born, and they were white, I was like: ‘we’ve done it–those are dire wolves.'”

“I think that the best definition of a species is if it looks like that species, if it is acting like that species, if it is filling the role of that species, then you’ve done it.”

They are heavily invested in the claim that this really IS a dire wolf.  The press release makes that clear, as they’re trying to revise species definitions so that the Dire Wolf qualifies as a new species. From Colossal’s press release:

So many experts out there are demanding that species are defined solely by their DNA. That’s some version of “insane”. Even evolutionary biologists can’t agree on species definitions. Mammoth species? Defined by teeth ridges. Ancient bison? Horn shapes. And so arbitrarily that someone accidentally mixing up length and width measurements had zero impact on species classification. Brown bears and polar bears, humans and Neanderthals, wolves and coyotes are all different species unless you apply the most commonly taught species concept, which would classify them as the same species because they can interbreed and produce healthy, fertile offspring.

Getting dragged into arguments about species definitions is a distraction from the real achievement. This is the most significant advancement in gene-editing in history. Even our harshest critics admit it. As one of our founders stated, “this is the moon landing of synthetic biology.”

. . .We get it. We totally understand that some scientists are not comfortable calling these dire wolves because they feel like the wolves are not sufficiently genetically similar to a particular extinct individual to merit that name. That’s ok with us.  This is not a fight that we care about. We’re calling them dire wolves, and if you prefer something else (how about “Colossal’s dire wolves”?) that works too. And maybe also take a breath and think about what the birth of these technologies means to the future of our planet instead of nitpicking terminology.

This is a fight they don’t care about? I think they should care, at least a bit. They are calling these tweaked canids members of a new species, the “Dire Wolf”.  I prefer “gray wolves with fifteen DNA letters from dire wolves” or, better, “genetic variants of the gray wolf.” The whole hype around this animal is that it is a new species that existed in the past, not simply a minor variant of the gray wolf that is nowhere near being genetically similar to the extinct gray wolf.

Quotes from the ABC piece, including what I said:

Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences, the company behind the revived dire wolf and based in Dallas, said it is “a scientific breakthrough for global conservation efforts” and is even trying to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth by 2028.

However, bioethicists and ecologists say they are skeptical that the animals created are actually dire wolves and said there are ethical concerns including where the animals would be kept and if they could ever survive in the wild.

“All claims of de-extinction are the invocation of a metaphor, and what they have produced and what they will at some point produce, may be technologically impressive, but they are not and never can be the actual previously extinct creatures,” Samuel Gorovitz, professor of philosophy at Syracuse University and a leader in the development of the medical ethics field, told ABC News.

“Only adult dire wolves can raise a dire wolf and there aren’t any. … One thing that we know for sure, that they are not, is dire wolves.”

. . . Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke professor of conservation ecology at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, called the news of the resurrected dire wolf a “colossal fabrication” and referred to the species created as a “designer dog.”

“This is just a big dog with a few genes inserted from a once extinct wolf,” Pimm told ABC News. “Incidentally, a dire wolf is not really closely related to a regular wolf.”

He went on, “It’s about as different to a regular wolf as we are from chimpanzees and if you inserted a chimpanzee gene into a human, I think that will be a horribly unethical thing to do.”

One of my beefs is that none of Colossal’s projects involve changing the behavior of the “de-extincted” organism, even though behavior is absolutely critical not only in bringing back a species as it really was, but allowing it to survive in nature.  Remember, wolves and mammoths are social animals, programmed to learn many things from their parents. And they have genetically coded behavioral repertoires whose genetic basis we do not understand. For example, maybe lichens tasted good to a Woolly Mammoth but wouldn’t to a replica tweaked by Colossal. Such a difference, if it existed, would likely be genetic.

A few more criticisms from the ABC piece:

However, today’s environment does not resemble the environment in which historic dire wolves lived and releasing them into the wild could harm the ecosystem.

“It has to live somewhere, and it isn’t clear what the environment was that the dire wolf lived in, or what it ate, or sort of its behavior, and so you kind of face a possibility you won’t know where to keep this animal that you made healthy,” Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told ABC News.

He added that the behavior of dire wolves was likely shaped by the packs they roamed in or packs that they may have competed against. However, those groups also don’t exist anymore.

“If you bring back something that’s been dead 10,000 or 40,000 or 100,000 years, you need to bring back its environment, not just the animal,” Caplan continued. “Otherwise, you potentially are going to have issues.”

Jerry Coyne, professor emeritus in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, said there is no way to release the “de-extincted” dire wolves back into the wild because they wouldn’t know how to survive.

Coyne told ABC News that if the revived dire wolves are let loose into the wild “without the social group that they’re evolved to be in” it would be hard to expect them to “behave properly” around other animals because they’ve never been exposed to other species.

“So that’s also unethical, because those animals are kind of separate. They’re not going to have the right thing to eat, it’s not going to know what to eat, how to eat, probably got the wrong digestive system. … So that’s one of the ethical considerations.”

Colossal Laboratories did not reply to ABC News’ request for comment on these concerns.

Of course they wouldn’t!

Again, I think there is a destructive and perhaps unwitting collusion between Colossal and much of the press. Now the ABC piece by Mary Kakatos is fine, and gives the proper caveats and room for critics, but a lot of pieces don’t (see the New Yorker piece, for instance).  But the press isn’t going to get clicks by saying that “this is not a real Dire Wolf,” so they amp up the gee-whiz factor and dial down the critics. And, as you see above, Colossal is perfectly happy with the rah-rah press coverage. The real losers in all this are the public, who miss the chance to learn something about genetics and conservation.

And, by the way, Colossal should stop spreading the view that de-extinction is one way to keep us from worrying about endangered species, implying that we can always bring them back again with cloning, Crispr and surrogate mothers!

UPDATE: Beth Shapiro defends the criticisms leveled against the Dire Wolf project. Many of her points was in the press release. Click to hear (h/t Matthew Cobb). She is quite defensive.

An analysis of this statement followed by a thread. I can’t embed the Bluesky post, but click on it to go to the thread:

Today Mark Sturtevant has returned with pictures of diverse critters, including insects, amphibians, and gastropods. Mark’s IDs, links, and narrative are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are more pictures of various critters in my area, which is in eastern Michigan.

The first picture is a young treefrog, and it is about as big as your thumbnail. This will be one of two sister species in the area, either Cope’s Gray Treefrog, Dryophytes chrysoscelis, or the Gray Treefrog, D. versicolor. They are commonly green in green surroundings. If it is the latter species, then it is tetraploid and that is why it is a separate species from the former. Polyploidy is one way to quickly form a new species, and this is a classic example.

Next up are a couple of our local snails, the Brown-lipped snails, Cepaea nemoralis. I was not sure what to do with them, and so I did this. These snails were introduced from Europe, and are now widespread in the U.S.

The next several pictures are manual focus stacks that were staged on the ‘ol dining room table. First up is a young Flower Crab Spider. That name applies to many species of crab spiders that often lurk on flowers to capture prey. Based on its eye arrangement and prominent hairs, I am pretty sure this one is Mecaphasa sp.

The jumping spiders that follow are species that I’ve shown here many times. The first is a Dimorphic Jumping Spider, Maevia inclemens. This one was very fidgety and it needed something to eat to help settle down. The lights in the eyes of the first picture came from an LED modeling light to help me to focus. I liked the look and so I did not remove the highlighting in post-processing. In the second picture you can see reflections of my fingertips in the large frontal eyes.

Another common spider is the Bold Jumping Spider, Phidippus audax. This youngster was very easy to work with.

The weird creature shown in the next picture is one of our Harvestmen, I think Phalangium opilio. I don’t see this species very often even though it’s distributed all around me. I like them because males have really long pedipalps and horned chelicerae. In some populations, the chelicerae horns are much longer than what is seen here.

Next is a moth that flew inside the house one evening. I think it’s a new species for me – the Lunate Zale Moth, Zale lunata.

And finally, I spotted this large caterpillar one day when out with the cameras. This is a mature Polyphemus Moth larva, Antheraea polyphemus, and it will become maybe the 2nd or 3rd largest moth in the U.S. For the portrait picture, I was trying to get it to look all haughty and Offended, as caterpillars like this often look very offended when being handled. But instead, this one looked like it was Eevil and plotting something, Mwa ha ha haa.

Today UC Davis ecologist Susan Harrison returns with some bird photos and, at the end, a couple of reptiles and mammals. Susan’s captions and notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

Ibises, Meadowlarks, and Others

It’s early April and the skies are still often cloudy, snow is lingering on the distant mountaintops, and the wildflowers are getting underway.   Birds are singing, chasing, nest-seeking, and flashing their breeding colors.  These photos are from two of northern California’s wildlife refuges at this invigorating, promising time of year.

White-Faced Ibis (Plegadis chihi) at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, with a westward view to  Snow Mountain, the Coast Ranges’ tallest peak at 7,057’:

White-faced Ibises have gone from uncommon to quite abundant around here in the past 25 years, possibly because flooded rice fields are being managed to support wetland wildlife.   To appreciate these Ibises’ iridescent beauty, it helps to get close to them on a sunny day, as I attempted to do at the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area.

White-faced Ibises:

Western Meadowlarks (Sturnella neglecta) are abundant in open fields, dominating the soundscape with their complex resonant songs.  One artfully arranged himself in a bed of Goldfields (Lasthenia californica), while another showed off his tonsils.

Western Meadowlarks:

Marsh Wrens (Cistothorus palustris) are also loudly melodious in their namesake habitat:

Belted Kingfishers (Megaceryle alcyon) are quite hard to approach with a camera, but this one was perched next to a bird-viewing platform that obscured his view of me:

Nuttall’s Woodpeckers (Dryobates nuttalli) and other woodpeckers are in the same order as Kingfishers, and there is a bit of a family resemblance:

Black-necked Stilts (Himantopus mexicanus) are common in the refuges’ shallowly flooded fields:

Clark’s Grebes (Aechmophorus clarkii) are on the verge of doing their spectacular springtime mating dances:

Western Pond Turtles (Actinemys marmorata) like to sunbathe together, and on first glance, these ones looked like turtles all the way down:

P.S.  Last night when I’d just gotten this post ready to send, we found two Gray Foxes (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) curled up on the patio furniture, in a picture of canid domestic bliss!

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “well2”, is a reboot, and came with this note: “A resurrection today from 2007. Poor Twelfth Imam! Let’s hope he’s got plenty of reading material.

Yep, there has been a long wait. As Wikipedia says of Muhammad al-Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam:

Muhammad al-Mahdi (Arabic: محمد بن الحسن المهدي, romanized: Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Mahdī) is believed by the Twelver Shia to be the last of the Twelve Imams and the eschatological Mahdi, who will emerge in the end of time to establish peace and justice and redeem Islam.

Hasan al-Askari, the eleventh Imam, died in 260 AH (873–874), possibly poisoned by the Abbasids. Immediately after his death, his main representative, Uthman ibn Sa’id al-Asadi, claimed that the eleventh Imam had an infant son named Muhammad, who was kept hidden from the public out of fear of Abbasid persecution. Uthman also claimed to represent Muhammad, who had entered a state of occultation. Other local representatives of al-Askari largely supported these assertions, while the Shia community fragmented into several sects over al-Askari’s succession. All these sects, however, are said to have disappeared after a few decades except the Twelvers, who accept the son of al-Askari as the twelfth and final Imam in occultation.

“Occulatation” is like religious hibernation, and according to Wikipedia the Twelvers constitute “about 90% of all Shi’a Muslims”, or number between 140 million and 180 million people. And, like Christians, they’ve waited a long time for their Messiah to appear. And they’ll wait forever.

Reader J Monaghan from Australia sends us some urban birds from his area. It must be nice to live in Oz and see these around your house! Monaghan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. 

Urban Birds

These photos were taken in my garden and neighbouring streets in the Lake Macquarie area of New South Wales, one of Australia’s largest coastal salt water lakes. As we live in a “bird corridor” with many native and introduced different birds, we have had to learn to co-exist.

Australian magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen). During their August to October breeding season they become  protective of their nests and young, swooping on and sometimes injuring unwary passers by. Cyclists resort to sticking plastic ties and pipe cleaners in their helmets to protect from direct injury:

Female Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) are an introduced bird. Several families live near a creek at the bottom of my street and we all slow down and drive slowly past them as they take their time waddling off:

Mallards are not particularly shy and are happy to visit. If we walk and talk slowly, they will hang around for quite a while:

Australian Wood Duck (Chenonetta jubata) are common in our area, particularly around creeks and parks, as have adapted well to the urban environment:

Eastern Rosella (Platycercus eximius). The only two photos I have of these birds, as not only do they rarely come out into the open but they are skittish and fly away at the sight of my creeping cats:

Eastern Rosella. My second photo, just before it took flight:

Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae, also known as the laughing kookaburra). A frequent visitor to my friend’s pottery workshop, where it checks out her latest creations. Their raucous call can be sleep shattering at 6am:

Little Corellas (Cacatua sanguinea). Increasingly common in urban areas and often seen feeding on lawns, shrubs and playing fields. They are very social and can be boisterous and playful with each other. These two stayed still long enough for me to photograph them:

Masked Lapwing (Vanellus miles novaehollandiae). May swoop during breeding season but rare actual contact (unlike the magpie!). They nest in small depressions in the ground, and sometimes beside roads or in the roofs of buildings. We have to take care not to disturb their nests, which may require mowing around them or relocating them if they are in a particularly unsafe place:

Masked Lapwing couple on guard duty:

Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita). These birds are highly intelligent and comical, using loud, raucous calls and screeches to call out to each other. They drown out converstion when a flock flies over, so best to just wait until they fly off again:

The Sulphur-crested Cockatoo on the right spotted me trying to photograph it, raising its crest in reaction to my threat:

 Australian white ibis (Threskiornis molucca). Though they have many names (Tip turkey, Dumpster chook, Rubbish raptor), they are most commonly known as Bin Chickens, due to their ability to survive in cities by scavenging our leftovers, as their wetlands have been increasingly lost.

Australian White Ibis. Wary enough of humans that I couldn’t get close enough to take a better photo of them but brave enough to take over the local dog park:

Readers and correspondents are asking me what i think about the just-revealed “de-extinction” of the dire wolf by Colossal Biosciences, and the firm’s attempt to bring back the woolly mammoth, too.  I don’t want to write much about this now because I’ve put up a few posts about the mammoth before, and Matthew has expressed similar sentiments in his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age.  Further, I am writing my take for another venue, so I will just say this about the genetics of the de-extinction efforts so far:

My general sentiments are these: attempts to bring back extinct species as outlined so far are not only scientifically misguided, but are journalistically mis-reported by the press.  That is, the press is, by and large, distorting what has been done scientifically, pretending that an animal with only a few cosmetic gene edits is actually identical to an extinct species. Further, Colossal seems happy enough to let this misconception be widely reported (to be fair, there are some decent articles about the science of de-extinction, and I’ll link to a few below).

The main problem, as I said, is the pretense that changing a living species by editing just a handful of genes (20 max so far) to get something that looks like the extinct “dire wolf” is not the same thing as re-creating a dire wolf.  That species undoubtedly had hundreds or thousands of genetic differences from the gray wolf, including genes affecting metabolism and behavior—genes that we do not know.  Further, control regions of genes, which are outside protein-coding regions, undoubtedly are involved in differences between extinct species and their relatives. But we don’t know where these regions are and so cannot use them for genetic editing.

All of this means that, in my view, de-extincting species is a cosmetic rather than a serious genetic project, designed to produce gee-whiz animals to entertain rich people and to wow children.  Such animals, especially the highly touted de-extincted mammoth, which mammoth expert Tori Herridge calls “an elephant in a fur coat”, would certainly not survive in their original habitat.  Further, proponents’ claims that de-extinction would be a fantastic conservation effort , and could even mitigate global warming. are totally unsupported speculations.

There are two such efforts that have received all the press: the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth and of the dire wolf; the latter effort has produced some pups, but they are not dire wolves. We will never see woolly mammoths, though Colossal promises that they’ll be stomping about in three years!

Mammoth (see my website posts above) There are many reasons why this project is a non-starter.  The evidence that it is feasible rests solely on the production of “woolly mice,” which are mice that have had 8 edits in only 7 genes (remember, mice are easier to work with than elephants!).  Only two of the genes that were changed were edited in a way to conform to known mammoth genes. The rest are simply using mouse mutants known to affect hair texture, color, and waviness in lab mice.  Thus we have a woolly mouse—not anything close to a woolly elephant. Yes, it’s cool to make multiple changes in multiple genes at once, but this is not a new technology. The novelty will be to edit an elephant egg cell in a way that the edited cell can be implanted in an Asian elephant and develop into a woolly mammoth. If you really want something popping out of an Asian elephant that is close to a woolly mammoth, you will never get it. In fact, the whole project seems impossible to me. And the conservation results touted by Colossal–that the re-exincted mammoths, released on the tundra, will keep carbon in the permafrost and not in the atmosphere–are purely speculative.

Dire wolf:  Scientists edited a gray wolf stem cell, changing 20 genes. Fifteen of the edited genes were designed from from the sequenced dire-wolf genome (again, sequencing an extinct organism is a feat, but not one developed by Colossal), while five others were taken from known genes that change dogs or wolves (the articles aren’t clear on which genes were used, as Colossal is keeping that secret).  The edited cell, as an egg, was placed into a “large dog” to be the surrogate mom, and then extracted via caesarian section (did the dogs survive this procedure?) They get a whitish wolf with some dog or gray-wolf genes, not dire wolf genes. All of the changes are said to affect things like fur color, body size, and tooth and jaw configuration–traits that differentiated the dire wolf from the gray wolf.  As I noted, we wind up with a gray wolf (and remember, domestic dogs are descended from gray wolves, and can even be considered gray wolves, as they mate with each other and can produce fertile hybrids); we get a gray wolf with a couple of changed traits to make it look like what we think the dire wolf looked like. (We are not sure, for example, that the dire wolf had white fur.)

Neither the mammoth nor the dire wolf results are published in a peer-reviewed journals, though the woolly mouse experiment has been languishing on bioRΧiv for a while but hasn’t been published.

Here are some links, most but not all of them pointing out problems with de-extinction projects:

Colossal’s explanation of  the mammoth project. (Note that they also want to de-extinct the dodo and the thylacine, or marsupial wolf.)

Colossal’s account on the dire wolf result.

Nature paper by Ewen Calloway on why the woolly mouse isn’t a credible step towards a woolly mammoth.

Nature paper by Tori Herridge explaining why she turned down a position as advisor to Colossal on the mammoth

Article in Ars Technica by Nitin Sekar, WWF authority on conserving the Asian elephant, explaining why “Mammoth de-extinction is bad conservation.”

Guardian paper by Adam Rutherford explaining why trying to de-extinct the Woolly Mammoth is not only unethical, but impossible.

NYT article by Carl Zimmer on the dire wolf, a good summary and not nearly as critical as his Bluesky post below.

New Yorker article by D. T. Max on the dire wolf, somewhat windy and credulous (archived here).

Article in the MIT Technology Review by Antonio Regalado: “Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire?”

Tweets and posts:

Tori Herridge’s posts on both Twitter and Bluesky are an informative and hilarious critique of the woolly mouse/mammoth projects. Get started with this one if you’d like (it’s a thread):

[though as an aside, honestly Colossal missed a trick not going for the Fgfr1/2 double mutant — I mean, have you seen a more mammothy-mouse?!]*MAMMOUSE KLAXON*www.nature.com/articles/s41…

— Tori Herridge (@toriherridge.bsky.social) 2025-03-05T00:20:55.808Z

Journalist Asher Elbein and a commenter on the misleading Dire Wolf.

Here Carl Zimmer points out that Colossal’s dire wolf is not a dire wolf. This is a bit more frank than his NYT article!

It's not a dire wolf. It's a gray wolf clone with 20 dire-wolf gene edits, and with some dire wolf traits. And here's my story! Gift link: http://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/s…

— Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer.com) 2025-04-07T16:38:15.772Z

Adam Rutherford (read his Guardian article on mammoths above) is particularly critical of the Dire Wolf project. I love the first tweet asserting that journalists who don’t do due diligence are making people stupider. That’s true, and it also makes people misunderstand (and possibly eventually mistrust) science:

Public service announcement. They are not Dire Wolves. They have 20 single letter changes in their entire genomes. I’ve done shits with more mutations. Every time journalists write up a Colossus press release, They are making people stupider. Client journalism by a ridiculous company.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T20:02:25.283Z

GODDAMIT. IT’S NOT A RESURRECTED DIRE WOLF. 20 edits in 19,000 genes. IT’S NOT GOING TO AID CONSERVATION. EVERY WRITE UP THAT SWALLOWS AND REGURGITATES THIS GUFFERY WOLFSHIT IS DOING PR FOR A FUNDING ROUND.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T12:05:49.778Z

Caveat emptor!

Oh, and for fun, here’s the Secretary of the Interior tweeting about how we shouldn’t worry so much about endangered species and pay more attention to “de-extincting” species.  But of course “de-extincting” isn’t going to do squat to keep existing species from waning. Burgum is off the rails here, entranced by the dire gray wolf.

Today we have a lovely batch of tidepool organisms taken by UC Davis math professor Abby Thompson, who is also a Hero of Intellectual Freedom.  Abby’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

More tidepool pictures from Dillon Beach, CA.   The best tidepooling season is just getting underway.  There are some big tides at the end of April, and they’ll recur through July, with the low tides at ghastly hours of the morning.    These pictures from March were from less painful times of day.   There are a few species I’ve posted before, but they had some especially photogenic representatives this month.

Several of these animals are really (really) tiny, and some are both tiny and fast, so some of the pictures aren’t perfect, but I think they’re interesting creatures.

Phidiana hiltoni (nudibranch).   Posted before, but this one was a beauty:

Genus Ophiopholis (brittle star). Distinguishing species in this genus requires better pictures than this one.  This tiny- about an inch tip to tip- brittle star was on the underside of a rock.    These move fast and gracefully.    They’re in the same phylum as big ochre stars, the sea urchins (see the next two pictures) and sea cucumbers:

Strongylocentrotus purpuratus (purple sea urchin). I know, it’s green, but the juveniles start green and then turn purple.    The next picture shows its mouth on the underside:

Sea urchin mouth:

Family Sabellidae (feather duster worm). Another very tiny creature, visible to the naked eye as just a slight pink fuzz.   This marine worm lives in a tube of its own creation,  and retracts into the tube in a flash if disturbed.  The dark dots at the base of the “feathers” are eyes:

Caesia fossata (eggs from this snail).

Margarites pupillus (tentative ID) I liked the bit of opalescence on the shell:

Coryphella trilineata (nudibranch). Another one I’ve posted before, posing for the camera:

Genus Gnathopleustes (amphipod). Yet another tiny guy.    I’ve found just a few of these, a speck of bright color in the seaweed:

Mopalia acuta (chiton).   The Mopalia species can be hard to distinguish from photos, so this ID should be taken with a grain of salt.    Chitons usually cling to a rock like a limpet, but they can curl into a ball like a roly-poly to protect their vulnerable body if they get dislodged:

Camera info:  Mostly Olympus TG-7, in microscope mode, pictures taken from above the water.

Yesterday I spent quite a few hours at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, part of a free field trip sponsored by the Biological Sciences Divison (or so I think). It’s the third largest Holocaust Museum in the world, probably after Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, which I visited, and (perhaps) the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which I haven’t. This one is very large, and is full of interesting photos, articles, relics, and other memorabilia.

I guess it has so much stuff because Skokie, where the Museum resides, was mostly a Jewish suburb, and there were many Holocaust survivors who contributed items, as well as many Jews who donated money for this very large building.

We had a guided tour, though I had a tendency to wander off by myself to look at stuff.  If you’re in Skokie and have an interest in these things, I recommend it highly. First, a few photos (I didn’t remember to take photos until later in the tour), which aren’t great because they were taken with my camera.

The two Nuremberg “Race Laws”, passed in 1935, not only defined as who counted as a Jew or an Aryan, but also forbade “intermingling” of Jews and non-Jews. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor” stipulated this:

The second Nuremberg Law, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, banned marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. It also criminalized sexual relations between them. These relationships were labeled as “race defilement” (Rassenschande).

The law also forbade Jews to employ female German maids under the age of 45, assuming that Jewish men would force such maids into committing race defilement. Thousands of people were convicted or simply disappeared into concentration camps for race defilement.

Here’s a photo of two people who violated that law, and it struck me as particularly noxious.  The woman is holding a sign that reads (my translation; note that it rhymes in German) “I am the biggest pig in this place and only associate with Jews.”  The guy’s sign reads, “As a Jewish boy, I always take only German girls with me to my room.”  The guy’s sign rhymes as well.  I have no idea what happened to these people, but the Jewish man was almost certainly taken to the camps, and that almost certainly led to death.

Nazi armbands (real ones).  Many of the inhabitants of Skokie were (and some still are) survivors of the Holocaust, and donated things like this to the Museum. The pin in the middle is, as you can see from the placard, a Hitler Youth Membership pin.

Below is a (genuine) postcard celebrating the “Anschluß“, when Germany annexed Austria on March 11-13 of 1938, claiming that the country was ethnically German.  Later in the year, the UK, France, and Italy agreed that it was okay as well for Hitler to annex the part of Czechoslovakia also containing “ethnic” Germans, an area called the Sudetenland. This “Munich Agreement,” did not involve any Czechoslovakian participation. Hitler promised to leave the rest of the country alone and that he had no more territorial ambitions (he was lying, of course). Britain’s PM, Neville Chamberlain, returned to England with great approbation, declaring that he’d achieved “Peace for our time.”  He was dead wrong, of course, and his loss of face when Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 led to Chamberlain’s ouster in 1940 (he died the same year).

I digress: this card is about the Anschluß, and reads: “13 March, 1938.  One people, one country, one leader.”

Below is a very fancy hand-done document, labeled “Declaration of the State of Israel created by Arthur Szyk, 1948.  On loan from Cipora Fox Katz.” It’s lovely, and Szyk, a Polish-American artist, has his own Wikipedia page, which says this:

Arthur Szyk was granted American citizenship on May 22, 1948, but he reportedly experienced the happiest day in his life eight days earlier: on May 14, the day of the announcement of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Arthur Szyk commemorated that event by creating the richly decorated illumination of the Hebrew text of the declaration.

And, sure enough, here it is. Click photo to enlarge it and see its beauty:

I stopped by the gift shop on my way out, and among the many interesting thing was this “Bag of Plagues”: toys for kids commemorating the plagues visited on Egypt because Pharaoh wouldn’t let the Jews go:

Finally, one of the best parts of the Museum is a hologram of a Holocaust survivor, one of several created by the Shoah Foundation. When the survivors were alive, they spoke for about a week to the interviewers, and their answers were recorded. Their accounts were combined with modern technology and AI to enable the audience to ask questions of the hologram, and there is so much data recorded for each person that the holograms can answer almost any question (see the video at bottom for more details). Here’s a short recording I did of one survivor named Eva.  Eva lived in Amsterdam as a child, where she was friends with Anne Frank. After the war, when Eva had lost her father and brother and Anne Frank her own sister and mother, Eva’s mother married Anne Frank’s father, Otto.

Here’s she’s answering an audience question about what her typical day at Auschwitz was like:

Here’s Leslie Stahl interviewing holograms of  Holocaust survivors who had died before the interview. Yes, they are interviews with people who weren’t alive! This is an absolutely fantastic way to keep not just the accounts alive, but also the survivors themselves.

 

Today is Sunday, which means that we have a batch of butterfly photos from John Avise.  John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Butterflies in North America, Part 17 

This week continues my many-part series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  We’re getting near the end of the alphabet, so this is the penultimate post of my photographic tour of our continent’s Lepidopterans.

Tiny Checkerspot (Dymasia dymas):

Tropical Checkered Skipper (Burnsius oileus), male upperwing:

Tropical Checkered Skipper, female upperwing:

Umber Skipper (Poanes melane), upperwing:

Umber Skipper, underwing:

Viceroy (Basilarchis archippus):

Viceroy, underwing:

Wandering Skipper (Panoquina errans), upperwing:

Wandering Skipper, underwing:

West Coast Lady (Vanessa annabella):

West Coast Lady, underwing:

West Coast Lady, larva;

Did you spot the orange cat amongst the oranges from this morning’s post?  I’ve circled it in red below. I thought this was fairly easy but not dead easy.

You may have already read about this new cat coat color, undoubtedly found as a single mutation in a single individual. Popular Mechanics describes the color, called “salmiak”, or “salty licorice” in the article below. “Salmiak licorice” is flavored with ammonium chloride (!), and, according to Wikipedia, is “a common confection found in the Nordic countries, Benelux, and northern Germany ” I tried it once in Sweden, but wasn’t a fan.

Presumably this coat was named because it resembles a variety of this confection that is coated with salt, like these:

Marcin Floryan, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

To read about the color and see photos, click the headline below to go to an article in Popular Mechanics, which is also archived here, and also go to the article at My Cat DNA. Photos are below, too.

From Popular Mechanics:

You’ve probably heard of spooky black cats, chaotic orange cats, and distinguished-looking tuxedo cats. If you’re really into cats, you might have even lesser-known color variants like seal point and ticked tabby. But there’s officially a new cat color in town— salmiak, or ‘salty liquorice.’ You can see one here.

The pretty black, white, and grey shade—named for a popular snack food in Finland, where this coat color has been making itself known—is thanks to a fur strand that starts off black near the root, but grows whiter and whiter out towards the tip. The coat was first spotted in 2007, and in 2019, it was brought to the attention of a group of cat experts lead by feline geneticist Heidi Anderson. Since then, the group has been trying to figure out exactly what causes this shade to express itself, and recently, they finally figured it out. A paper on the discovery has been published in the journal Animal Genetics.

Here’s a two-minute video of this fur pattern:

And from My Cat DNA, which runs down the genetics (this is a single genetic mutation, a “knockout” mutation that inactivates a gene because there’s a big deletion of the DNA outside that gene).

The salmiak colour pattern was found to be recessively inherited, meaning it requires one copy of the salmiak variant from both parents in order for the trait to be visible. Although white spotting patterns can lead to hearing impairment in cats as well as dogs, researchers did not note any signs of deafness. However, they recommended BAER (brainstem auditory evoked response) testing in the future to rule out this possibility. The allele appears to be quite rare, with only 5 cats found to be positive for the pattern, and another 3 carriers for it, out of 183 Finnish domestic cats screened. The variant has not yet been found in other domestic cat populations.

Two additional domestic cats were also genotyped, one domestic cat from Romania and one from the UK, which manifested a similar type of white patterning referred to as “karpati,” of yet-unknown molecular cause. This pattern has been used as the basis of the creation of a new breed, called the “Transylvanian.” The term karpati is related to “Carpathian,” the region where local cats were noted to have this pattern. Researchers confirmed that the salmiak allele was absent in both of the karpati-coloured cats. Both karpati and salmiak may be described as being similar to roan colouring in other domestic species.

Here’s the paper in Animal Genetics. Click to read (note that they use the word “flavor” in the title, which is not an accident):

. . . and a picture from the paper (caption also from paper);  Some of these do resemble salted licorice, especially (a) and (f):

FIGURE 1.  Salmiak coloring in cats. Prominent features of the coloring are: “tuxedo” (a.k.a. bicolor) white spotting in the absence of white spotting alleles (Ws, g), and additional gradation of the pigment within hairs of primary color toward no pigmentation at the tips in the body, legs and tail. Additionally, there is primary colored spotting in the white areas of the front legs and chest, more intense coloring in the scapular region, and a very pale tip of the tail. (a) Salmiak solid black cat (aa/wsalwsal), (b) salmiak solid blue cat (diluted black, aa/dd/wsalwsal), (c) salmiak brown mackerel tabby (wsalwsal) (right) and his normal-colored brother heterozygous for salmiak (wsalw), (d) salmiak phenotype on a long-haired solid black cat (not genotyped), (e) salmiak solid black cat (aa/wsalwsal) and (f) salmiak phenotype on a tortoiseshell cat (not genotyped). Cat a was sequenced, and cats b, c and e were genotyped for salmiak. Photo credits: (a) Ari Kankainen and (b–e) courtesy of the cat owners.

The authors sequenced entire cat genomes, and found that the salmiak pattern is associated with a huge deletion (95 kb, or 95,000 bases) outside the KIT gene, a gene responsible for the distribution of white patterning in cats.  This region of the DNA is presumably not translated into a protein, but somehow controls the expression of KIT, knocking it out. And that’s what produces the color.   “Regulatory” regions of genes are often very distant from protein-coding genes themselves, making it hard to find out how a gene’s expression is controlled.

The top line is a map of the cat chromosome containing the KIT gene (chromosome B1), the second line is a normal “wild type” cat with an intact KIT and control region, and the third line is the genotype of a cat with the salmiak allele, showing the bit deletion that moves the KIT gene closer to the KDR gene.

This probably produces the salmiak color (we can’t be 100% sure). The authors of the paper say this:

Other structural variants downstream of the KIT gene have been previously associated with coat color phenotypes in cattle, goats and horses (Brooks et al., 2007; Henkel et al., 2019; Küttel et al., 2019). In two Pakistani goat breeds, of which one is completely white and another one is white with colored patches, there is a copy number variation starting ~63 kb downstream of KIT and spanning a ~100 kb region that has a disrupted variant in a genomic region most similar to the salmiak variant (Henkel et al., 2019). In summary, comparative data from other species and genotype segregation analysis support the newly discovered KIT region deletion as potentially being a cause of salmiak coat color in cats.

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This article from the Washington Post, by Sam Sanders, tells you how to play with your moggy. Click on the headline below or find the article archived here.

A summary (quotes are indented):

Pick the right toys.

For toys, Ellis says, “the texture and shape are what truly matter.”

Does the toy feel furry like a mouse? Does it have feathers like a bird? These are good signs that your cat will enjoy the toy. Cats slice with their teeth instead of chewing, so hard, durable toys used for dogs typically don’t work for cats. Cats also prefer toys that are smaller in size, similar to the size of the prey they hunt.

Move your cat’s toy in a pattern that mimics their prey. 

. . . To mimic a bird, glide a wand toy in large sweeping movements or figure eights mirroring natural flight patterns. Create “S-shaped” wiggles on the floor with a wand to mimic a worm or snake. Tuck a toy under your rug like a hiding mouse.

Let your cat win.

As you move their toy in prey-like motions, periodically let your cat “win” by capturing the toy, and don’t immediately rip it away. This allows them to finish the predator cycle. Let them celebrate their successful hunt with additional kicks, bats and bites before reengaging for additional playtime.

DO NOT USE LASER DOTS. I have always thought that this frustrates the cat and is more for the amusement of the staff than of the cat. Two more tips (there are additional ones in the piece):

Create multisensory experiences through sound.

Adding sound brings dimension to a cat play session. “Cats can hear in an ultrasonic range,” says Delgado. “Their close-up vision is very fuzzy, with a focal point of only a few meters away, so they use their hearing to know if prey is nearby.”

Create noises that mimic what cats would hear in the wild, like a high-frequency chirp or squeak. The rustling sound of paper, tissue paper or cardboard while playing with a toy can mimic the sound of rustling through leaves. Try hiding treats in the paper pile, creating an immersive food puzzle.

Try turning the lights down low. 

Cats need play throughout the day, but engaging in a play session during low-light conditions is another opportunity to provide a novel and enriching play session. “Cats are crepuscular, meaning they are most active at dawn and dusk,” says Delgado. As dawn and dusk change throughout the seasons, your cat’s play habits will change, too. Take this as an opportunity to give your cat a high-intensity play session as the sun is setting to help them (and you!) get a restful night of sleep.

Read the rest at the archive and then start playing with your cat PROPERLY!

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Finally, from the AP news (click on the headline), you can read about bodega cats: those cats in NYC that inhabit small, often Hispanic-owned stores. If you’ve been to NYC, you may know that many bodegas have resident cats. But I didn’t know it was illegal.

An excerpt:

New York City’s “bodega cats” are beloved fixtures in the Big Apple — but they’re on the wrong side of the law.

The convenience store cats that live at many of the city’s bodegas and delis look innocent enough, spending their days lounging in sun-soaked storefronts or slinking between shelves of snack foods as they collect friendly pets from customers.

Officially, though, state law bars most animals from stores that sell food, with bodega owners potentially facing fines if their tabby is caught curling up near the tins of tuna and toilet paper.

The pets’ precarious legal position recently came into the spotlight again when a petition circulated online that advocated for the city to shield bodega cat owners from fines, racking up more than 10,000 signatures.

But inspecting bodegas is a state responsibility. The New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets said in a statement that its goal is to ensure compliance with food safety laws and regulations, though it noted that inspectors aim to offer “educational resources and corrective action timelines and options” before looking at fines.

Many fans argue that the cats actually help keep the stores clean by deterring other ubiquitous New York City creatures, like rodents and cockroaches.

Indeed.  Bodega-cat inspectors are EVIL! And bodega cats help in many ways:

However, some shopkeepers say the felines’ most important job is bringing in customers.

At one bodega in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a fluffy gray and white cat named Mimi has become even more of a star attraction after a customer posted a video of her to TikTok that was viewed over 9 million times

Sydney Miller, the customer who shared the video, said the experience has helped her build a lasting rapport with Mimi’s caretaker, Asam Mohammad, a Yemeni immigrant who has only been in the U.S. for a few years.

“Ultimately, the cats are a symbol of community building and the special, unique type of connection that happens in a city like New York,” said Miller, a poet and digital content producer.

Here’s Mimi!

@girl.brain

Replying to @Cleotrapa a little update on mimi the bodega cat #cat #bodega

♬ original sound – sydney

You can sign the petition here (it’s over 11,000 signatures now). I signed it!

And here’s a short video about bodega cats and the push to protect them from Cat Pecksniffs:

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Lagniappe: Two of them today. First, a rescued cougar. Listen to its noises!

. . . . and a cat becomes a sundial.

h/t: Barry, Debra

We’re running a bit low on photos, so if you have good ones, send them in.

Today’s batch comes from our most regular regular, Dr. Mark Sturtevant, but with an unusual theme. Mark’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

And now for something completely different. Over the past few years, I have been exploring a type of photography called light painting. This term can refer to different kinds of artistic photography, but the one I practice involves taking multiple long exposures of a still-life scene illuminated only by a flashlight. The images are then imported into a photo editing program and blended together using digital paintbrushes. This technique can produce a single image with dramatic lighting effects that would be impossible to achieve in a single shot. While the process requires patience and basic familiarity with image editing software, I believe only minimal artistic skills are necessary. Anyone can do this!

In this small set of pictures, I showcase some of my light painting still-life projects. Since they incorporate natural and scientific objects, they may align with Readers’ Wildlife Photos in a broad sense.

The first images illustrate the initial steps of the light painting process. It begins by arranging a still-life scene in front of a camera on a tripod. I always take a few bright-field shots like this first picture. While a preliminary image like this may appear quite ordinary, and the surroundings can be cluttered, this step is useful in order to figure out the composition. The shells in this picture are part of my large collection of marine and freshwater specimens.

Next, the camera is set for a long exposure (typically 15-20 seconds). After turning off the room lights, I work in total darkness while “painting” over a portion of the scene with a small flashlight. After the shutter closes, I repeat the process with another long exposure, illuminating a different part of the scene. It’s essential to avoid moving the camera between exposures, and it is essential to keep the flashlight moving in order to create soft shadows. Here are two examples of such images, taken straight out of the camera.

This sequence is repeated several more times. In this case, I took approximately two dozen pictures, though I likely didn’t use all of them in the final picture.

The next step involves loading the images into a photo editing program and selectively blending them together. While many photographers use Photoshop for this, I prefer GIMP, which is a free alternative to Photoshop. I do nearly all of my photo editing in GIMP. The images are stacked as layers, one on top of the other, so that each picture is perfectly aligned. This alignment is why it’s crucial to keep everything stationary during the photography process.

A layer mask filter is applied to the top layer, and this allows me to use a digital paintbrush to selectively make parts of the top image transparent to reveal the corresponding areas of the image beneath it. This technique is non-destructive, meaning the pixels in the top image remain intact and can easily be restored if needed.

Once I’m satisfied with how the first two images are blended, I merge them into a single picture layer. I repeat this process for each subsequent layer until the final composition is complete.

And with that, here is the finished image of the seashells.

Next, I’d like to share a few more light painting projects. This is a human skull that I’ve had most of my life and it is called “Uncle Herbert.” Based on the shape of the eye sockets and other details, I consider Uncle Herbert was a male, though I could be mistaken. This was my very first light painting, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy the process was!

In this final scene, Uncle Herbert is used again alongside objects related to “Human Biology,” which is what I call this picture. The old microscope belonged to my father, and the human vertebra in the foreground is a well-worn teaching specimen I purchased long ago.

For anyone interested in trying out this kind of photography, here is a tutorial about using a flashlight. (Click on “Watch on YouTube”).

And here is a tutorial on using layer masks in Gimp. Photoshop would be very much the same, and I expect there are other photo editing programs.

Finally, one can find a couple more of my light painting photos here, including a very complicated one that almost broke me.

 

Yes, Gary the orange cat is there with the oranges. Can you spot him?

Click picture to enlarge but DO NOT say in the comments where you found him. Let others have fun finding him.

There will be a reveal at noon Chicago time. (h/t Stacy on Facebook)

On my way to Regenstein Library today to pick up a book, I saw this sign, and beside it was a table with a woman and a cooler, presumably holding these products:

I showed it to several people, all of whom were grossed out, even when I told them that they most likely drank that milk when they were infants. I was sort of grossed out too, I admit, though I was not breast-fed as a baby.

Finally, I told one friend that to get the chocolate HuMilk some women must have to eat a lot of Hershey Bars. I thought I was being funny, but that just grossed her out even more. (Note that it is organic and free-range, so it presumably does not come from prisoners.)

Finally, the 2% variety (the cow milk  I make my lattes with) is nearly as cheap as cow milk. Given the source, I found that amazing. That should have been the tip-off to me that something was fishy here.

But it ain’t real. I found a video featuring one of the  supposed founders, who says the milk comes from consenting surrogate mothers.  It turns out, as you might guess from the ad, this is not genuine human milk but oat milk. It is a ploy to get people to go vegan, and it sure got my attention! But I am not going vegan.

But should adults drink human milk at all? No, not according to this editorial in the JRSM:

The latest supplement – touted as completely natural, free-from and a ‘super food’ – human breast milk has emerged as a recent craze among adults. While breast milk has long been promoted as optimal for infant nutrition, among CrossFit, BodyBuilding, Palaeo and other fitness communities, fetishists, chronic disease sufferers and even foodies, breast milk is in demand. In the UK, breast milk ice cream is for sale. In the USA, a lollypop company sells a breast milk-flavoured sweet. Primarily, though, the milk is sold in its raw state, ready to drink.

At present, a number of Internet sites and forums cater to those wishing to buy or sell breast milk.1 These sites allow women who are expressing milk to advertise both with text and images, communicating details such as cost per ounce and a description of milk’s source. Buyers can also advertise, detailing needs and volume requirements in order to find an appropriate donor or seller. Unlike licenced milk banks, which are directed at infant feeding needs, these forums allow adult buyers to seek sellers, and sellers to advertise that they will ‘sell to men’ or adult buyers. Individuals can then follow up on these advertisements, contacting each other either to meet or to conduct transactions via distance selling, with the milk being shipped, usually by courier, after being frozen and/or packed in dry ice.

Milk is often sold at a premium for adult buyers, with sellers charging as much as four times the price for non-infant feeding sales, a premium that has received high-profile media coverage.2 But why are adult consumers paying a premium for human milk? Online forums are replete with posts boasting about the immune, recovery, nutritional and muscle building benefits of human milk. For those seeking a competitive edge, this milk is supposed to deliver significant returns. A ‘clean’ super food, it is purported to lead to ‘gains’ in the gym, to help with erectile dysfunction, to be more digestible and to contain positive immune building properties.

Such purported benefits do not stand up clinically, however. Nutritionally, there is less protein in breast milk than other milks like cow’s milk.3 Chemical and environmental contaminants are known to make their way into breast milk, just like the food chain more broadly.4,5 No scientific study has evidenced that direct adult consumption of human milk for medicinal properties offers anything more than a placebo effect, and rather where breast milk offers clinical and nutritional researchers much promise is at a component or stem cell level.6,7 The benefits of breast milk are being found in the lab, not in drinking a bottle ordered online from an expressing mum.

Indeed, raw human milk purchased online or in an unpasteurised state poses many risks. It exposes consumers to food-borne illnesses like any other raw milk. Research into breast milk bought online identified the presence of detectable bacteria in 93% of samples, with Gram-negative bacteria in 74% of samples.8 Such levels of bacteria can be attributed to the failure to sanitise properly when expressing milk, the failure to sterilise equipment properly, improper or prolonged storage of milk and improper transportation of milk.

Won’t get fooled again!

Here’s a short ZeFrank video on the apparent waning of fireflies, which are luminescent species of beetles in the family Lampyridae. Wikipedia notes as well that fireflies seem to be disappearing worldwide, and there are many reasons why this should be so:

Firefly populations are thought to be declining worldwide. While monitoring data for many regions are scarce, a growing number of anecdotal reports, coupled with several published studies from Europe and Asia, suggest that fireflies are endangered. Recent IUCN Red List assessments for North American fireflies have identified species with heightened extinction risk in the US, with 18 taxa categorized as threatened with extinction.

Fireflies face threats including habitat loss and degradation, light pollution, pesticide use, poor water quality, invasive species, over-collection, and climate change. Firefly tourism, a quickly growing sector of the travel and tourism industry, has also been identified as a potential threat to fireflies and their habitats when not managed appropriately. Like many other organisms, fireflies are directly affected by land-use change (e.g., loss of habitat area and connectivity), which is identified as the main driver of biodiversity changes in terrestrial ecosystems. Pesticides, including insecticides and herbicides, have also been indicated as a likely cause of firefly decline. These chemicals can not only harm fireflies directly but also potentially reduce prey populations and degrade habitat. Light pollution is an especially concerning threat to fireflies. Since the majority of firefly species use bioluminescent courtship signals, they are also sensitive to environmental levels of light and consequently to light pollution.A growing number of studies investigating the effects of artificial light at night on fireflies has shown that light pollution can disrupt fireflies’ courtship signals and even interfere with larval dispersal. Researchers agree that protecting and enhancing firefly habitat is necessary to conserve their populations. Recommendations include reducing or limiting artificial light at night, restoring habitats where threatened species occur, and eliminating unnecessary pesticide use, among many others.

The video describes various ways of monitoring their abundance as well as reprising the causes of decline describe above. When I was a kid, fireflies were abundant during the summer, and we would catch them and put them in jars to make lanterns (we’d let them go afterwards).  Now I can’t remember when I last saw one of these amazing insects. It’s very sad.

I could go on about how they emit light, and the amazing species that flash synchronously, but I’ll leave that ZeFrank in a future video. But if you want to donate, just go to this page of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation and cough up a few bucks.

 

h/t Matthew Cobb

It’s been years since I read any Ayn Rand, and her philosophy never fetched me. However, a reader called my attention to the article below on a Rand-ian site that dilates on the “KerFFRFLE”: what I call the fracas about the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s censorship of my critique of their fellow Kat Grant’s piece, “What is a woman?”. I won’t reprise all that; you can see the summary in the collection of posts here.

The  new article, which you can access by clicking on the screenshot below, comes from the New Ideal site, whose motto is “Reason/Individualism/Capitalism”. And it seems a site thoroughly devoted to osculating the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Its own summary:

At New Ideal, we explore pressing cultural issues from the perspective of Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism.

Here you will not find the categories that define today’s intellectual world. We are neither of the right nor the left, but we reject “the center.” We are atheists, but we are for reason, not merely against religion. We champion science, but also free will. We are staunch individualists, but also moralists—embracing a new kind of morality, in which selfishness is a virtue and none of us is bound to be our brother’s keeper. We don’t just oppose “big government,” we eagerly support the right kind of government—one limited to protecting individual rights.

Right off the bat I find a bug: “We champion science, but also free will.”  I disagree heartily with that, for libertarian free will is incompatible with what we know of science. But let’s move on.

Short take of the piece: the author, Ben Bayer, (a Fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute) agreed with my critique of the FFRF’s self-definition of sex, a critique that ultimately led to the FFRF’s censorship and my resignation from the organization, along with Steve Pinker and Richard Dawkins.  But Bayer also argues that scientists should be “proud” rather than “humble,” an approach that the person who sent me the article said was “very Ayn Randian.”  I presume some readers will tell me what that means, but it seems to comport with New Ideal’s dictum that selfishness is a virtue. I presume, then, that Bayer equates “pride” with “selfishness” and “humility” with “being a weenie.”

But read below:

As I said, Bayer sides with Pinker, Dawkins, and me on the sex binary, but does take issue with some of the statistics I cited (the stats were supposedly the reason the FFRF found my piece “harmful”).  An excerpt from Bayer:

While Coyne’s arguments about the biological sex binary sound plausible to me, as a non-biologist I’m not fully qualified to evaluate the debate. But I find little to no assistance from his critics. After deciding to unpublish Coyne’s piece, the FFRF offered no specific criticism apart from the claim that the piece did not align with the organization’s values.4 Subsequent defenders of the FFRF’s decision for the most part ignored Coyne’s arguments for the sex binary.5 (One tried to challenge the binary by sharing an article that admits that sex is a biological binary but which attacks its utility for failing to explain everything about the behavior of sexed individuals — a straw man if ever there was one.6)

Instead of offering an argument to show why Coyne is wrong on a matter of his expertise, his critics instead focused on his remarks at the end of the piece addressing Grant’s claim that “Transgender people are no more likely to be sexual predators than other individuals.” They’ve made sensible criticisms of Coyne’s use of statistics in claiming that trans women are more likely to be sex predators.7 (Notably, the study he cites draws on a very small sample size and probably classifies non-predatory behavior like consensual prostitution as a “sex offense.”) So far as I can tell, neither Coyne nor his defenders have responded to these criticisms. They should.

So I’ll respond first to the “statistics” argument. The site I used, and the only one to have any decent statistics, is from Fair Play for Women, and I summarized the data in my vanished FFRF piece this way:

Under the biological concept of sex, then, it is impossible for humans to change sex — to be truly “transsexual” — for mammals cannot change their means of producing gametes. A more appropriate term is “transgender,” or, for transwomen, “men who identify as women.”

But even here Grant misleads the reader. They argue, for example, that “Transgender people are no more likely to be sexual predators than other individuals.” Yet the facts support the opposite of this claim, at least for transgender women. A cross-comparison of statistics from the U.K. Ministry of Justice and the U.K. Census shows that while almost 20 percent of male prisoners and a maximum of 3 percent of female prisoners have committed sex offenses, at least 41 percent of trans-identifying prisoners were convicted of these crimes. Transgender [-identifying prisoners], then, appear to be twice as likely as natal males and at least 14 times as likely as natal females to be sex offenders. While these data are imperfect because they’re based only on those who are caught, or on some who declare their female gender only after conviction, they suggest that transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women and somewhat more predatory than biological men. There are suggestions of similar trends in Scotland, New Zealand, and Australia.

Note that I am emphasizing transgender women here, that is, biological men who identify as women. And my main conclusion is this: transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women.  That is to be expected simply because transgender women are men who retain some of the biological propensities of men as well as their strength, and thus are expected to commit sex offenses more often than do natal women. In this sense, at least, you can’t say “trans women are women”, for the data show the expected biological differences that result in imprisonment,

Yes, the statistics are based on a small sample size, and there are problems with them–problems that I noted. But I will say two things.

First, Kat Grant gives NO data, saying only that “Transgender people are no more likely to be sexual predators than other individuals. . . “.  Well, that’s not true, at least for transgender women compared to natal women, which was my point. Note that I was not saying that trans people are, in general, more likely to be sexual predators than cis people. My point was about trans women versus natal women. And that leads to my second point:

I predict that when more data are collected in the future, this pattern vis-à-vis women will hold up. While trans men (biological women) may not be sexual predators more often than are natal women, I will bet that, based on behavioral differences between the sexes, trans women will be more violent—and more guilty of sex crimes—than are natal women.

I hope that clarifies what I was trying to say. But of course we do need better statistics, for data on trans prisoners are hard to get.

However, the statistics were a small part of my argument, which was mainly about how self-identification is a lousy way to define sex (“a woman is whoever she says she is”, as Grant asserts), but also about how one defines sex has very little bearing on the rights of groups. As I said, “The first [point] is to insist that it is not ‘transphobic’ to accept the biological reality of binary sex and to reject concepts based on ideology.” Except in a very few cases, like where one goes to prison or in what sports group one competes, trans people should have all the rights and dignity as everyone else. It is simply dumb to accuse me of trying to “erase” them.

On to Bayer’s accusation that both atheists and those who share my views on biological sex affect an attitude of humility but really should be proud.  Bayer doesn’t define humility right off the bat, but eventually gives us a definition before showing us why we shouldn’t even emphasize “humility” as a scientific virtue:

. . .  “humility,” which in an ordinary definition means “a modest or low view of one’s own importance.” No one who appreciates the power of scientific reason to discover progressively more truth can see it as modest or lowly.

On this basis Bayer excoriates atheists and scientists for affecting an attitude of humility, when in reality we are evincing fierce pride. Thus we should simply drop the “humility” bit:

In recent years, atheists including Dawkins and Pinker have followed a trend in the broader rationalist community of paying homage to the value of intellectual or epistemic humility. Dawkins claims that science by its nature is “humble” insofar as it doesn’t pretend to know everything.  Just a few years back, the house journal of one of Dawkins’s allied organizations, Skeptical Inquirer, published a piece calling on the skeptical movement to embrace the value of humility as its “guiding credo,” as against a consistent “take-no-prisoners” approach that invites the charge of arrogance or elitism.

Yet when atheists fight back against transgender ideology, they are clearly not practicing anything like the now-fashionable intellectual humility. Not only are they asserting with strident certainty the biological reality of the sex binary, they’re doing so knowing that other very intelligent atheists disagree with them. They’re also intransigent about this biological reality even though they know a whole subpopulation of vulnerable people find their assertion not only offensive but threatening to their identities.

That’s not an exercise in humility, but in pride. It’s precisely this pride that Coyne’s critics are condemning; it’s precisely humility that they’re demanding.

Unfortunately, any atheists who otherwise advocate epistemic humility but take the strident approach against transgender ideology are, frankly, hypocrites. Fortunately, there’s a rational way to escape this contradiction and reclaim the moral high ground: they should give up the humility fad.

But when scientists say they are being “humble,” they do not mean “being modest or lowly”.  No, what we mean is that we should never assert that we have the absolute truth about the universe. All scientific “facts” and “knowledge” are tentative, subject to revision in light of new observation.  Now some observations (e.g., the Earth goes around the Sun and a molecule of regular water has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atoms) are about as certain as you can get, and I’d bet all my possessions on their objective truth. But certainty has been overturned so often in science that the proper attitude is to adhere to this well-known and eloquent passage written by Stephen Jay Gould in 1994 (my bolding)

Moreover, “fact” does not mean “absolute certainty.” The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

THAT attitude is what we mean by “humility”: the idea that one considers something “true’ when it’s supported by so much evidence that you’d be crazy to withhold assent. But even Gould would agree that we never have 100% certainty about anything.

I guess there’s an Ayn-Rand-ian reason for what Bayer does next, which is to argue that having pride in adhering to science and being rational helps us form a set of objective moral values:

The following proposal itself has to be weighed carefully against the balance of the evidence. Recognizing that the very practice of science involves commitment to these real virtues reveals not just a guideline for scientific practice, but the possibility of a rational code of morality. The rational commitment to truth is not just the source of our knowledge, it also helps to create the values that help us survive. Respecting the power of truth to give life means respecting the needs of the minds that pursue it, both one’s own needs and those of others. Though it goes far beyond the scope of this article, there’s an argument here that unlocks a code of moral virtues and values we need to live on earth.

Atheists need to do the work to defend a rational moral code now more than ever. It was a major scandal for the atheist movement that its long-celebrated heroine Ayaan Hirsi Ali converted to Christianity. In her statement explaining her conversion, she argued that the West needs guidance to fight off the triple threats of resurgent authoritarianism, Islamist militancy, and “woke” ideology. “Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?” She argued that only religion can offer such guidance. Someone needs to show anyone who sympathizes with her concern that the values of the Western Enlightenment can form the basis of a powerful moral code — and that religion, by contrast, is at the root of the irrational rivals of the West.

To do that, atheists need the courage of their convictions. The latest row over transgender ideology dramatizes this for all to see. When religious-style dogmatism infiltrates atheism itself, it’s a sign of religion’s pervasive influence on our culture, and thus of the need for the courage to challenge widespread conventional assumptions like the alleged virtue of humility.

But atheists have defended a “rational moral code”: the code of humanism.  Such codes have been set forth by atheists for centuries, including by people like Spinoza, Rawls, Kant, Singer, Mill and Grayling.  The specifics of how one derives morality differ (Rawls, for instance, offered a “veil of ignorance”, Kant offered deontology, and Singer and Mill were utilitarians). And I assert that, in the end, however you derive a moral code, in the end it is subjective, leading to a structure of society that you prefer but cannot justify as “the right structure.”

So what is the sweating Professor Bayer trying to say?  I guess I could review Ayn Rand’s philosophy, but I don’t have the stomach for it.

As everyone knows, I adhere to the gametic definition of sex, in which individuals are classified as male or female (or, as in hermaphroditic plants, both sexes in one individual) based on whether their bodies are set up to produce small, mobile gametes (the “males”) or large, immobile gametes (the “females”).  I’ve explained why I adhere to this definition, because it is not only universal in animals and vascular plants, but also because the difference between males and females in investment in gametes, which leads in general to females having a greater overall investment in reproduction, explains a lot of puzzles in evolution. One of them is why sexual selection creates males and females who are often so different in color, size, weaponry, and so on. Just remember: universality and utility.

Here’s a more formal definition given by Colin Wright write in his new post on his website, Reality’s Last Stand.

In biology, the definition of male and female has never been arbitrary or culturally relative. It is grounded in the concept of anisogamy: the existence of two distinct types of gametes—sperm and ova. This fundamental reproductive asymmetry defines the two sexes across all sexually reproducing anisogamous species. An individual that has the function to produce small, motile gametes (sperm) is male; one that has the function to produce large, immobile gametes (ova) is female. This is not a social construct or a philosophical preference—it is a basic principle of evolutionary biology, established long before today’s cultural debates.

Now of course this definition wasn’t pulled out of thin air: it is an a posteriori conclusion about how nature is set up. It is a truth that all animals and vascular plants have only two sexes, male and female, though in some species, as I said, individuals can be of both sexes. (And some individuals, like clownfish, can change their gametic sex.) But there is no third sex, no matter how hard the ideologues squeal about seahorses, clownfish, and hyenas. There is no third type of gamete in any species.  In fact, the opposition to the binary nature of sex by gender ideologues have led some of them to argue that the gametic definition of sex is a recent confection sneakily devised by “transphobic” biologists who want to shoehorn all people (and animals and plants, apparently) into two categories. Colin wrote the piece below to show that this claim is false. The gametic definition has been around for about 140 years.

Click on the screenshot below to read the piece (Colin’s bolding).

Now I make no claim that the gametic definition of sex is universal among evolutionary biologists, much less all biologists. I haven’t taken a poll! But the biologists I’ve encountered in my own field almost universally adhere to that definition. At any rate, Colin goes way back in the past to show a passel of biologists (I know many of the more recent ones) who adhere to and have presented the gametic definition of sex. As Colin says:

The historical and scientific record is clear: from the 19th century to the present day, biologists, medical professionals, philosophers of science, and evolutionary theorists have used gamete type as the defining criterion for sex. This document compiles citations from that record, providing a reference point for students, scientists, educators, and anyone interested in understanding what “male” and “female” mean in biological terms.

These citations span more than a century of scientific literature, showing that the gamete-based definition of sex is not a recent invention or a reactionary response, but a longstanding, fundamental biological principle. While sex roles and secondary sex characteristics can vary, the definition of the sexes does not: male and female are reproductive categories rooted in the type of gamete an individual has the function to produce.

This document is a work in progress. If you are aware of additional scholarly references—especially historical ones—that clearly depict the gametic definition of sex, please share them in the comments so I can continue to expand and improve this resource. I encourage readers to bookmark this page and return to it often as a reference in conversations, research, and advocacy.]]

I think I sent him the Futuyma reference (not below), but I can’t remember. At any rate, you can read them all yourself, but I’ll put up five of them spaced apart, starting with the first one in 1888. These are from Colin’s piece:

1888 – Charles Sedgwick Minot. “Sex,” in A Reference Handbook of the Medical Sciences Embracing the Entire Range of Scientific and Practical Medicine and Allied Science, Vol. 6, Alfred H. Buck (ed.) (New York: William Wood and Company), 436-438

As evolution continued hermaphroditism was replaced by a new differentiation, in consequence of which the individuals of a species were, some, capable of producing ova only; others of producing spermatozoa only. Individuals of the former kind we call females, of the latter males, and they are said to have sex.

1929 – Horatio Hackett Newman. Outlines of General Zoölogy (New York, The Macmillan Company), p. 448.

Any individual, then, is sexual if it produces gametes—ova or spermatozoa, or their equivalents. Thus we would be justified in calling any individual that produces ova a female, and one that produces spermatozoa a male. One that produces both kinds of gametes is a male-female or, more technically, a HERMAPHRODITE. Thus we may say that the PRIMARY SEXUAL CHARACTERS of individuals are the ova or the spermatozoa, and that maleness or femaleness is determined by the possession of one or other of these two types of gametes.

A ringer: Simone de Beauvoir!

1949 – de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex, translated by H.M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books), 39

In the vast majority of species male and female individuals co-operate in reproduction. They are defined primarily as male and female by the gametes which they produce—sperms and eggs respectively.

2013 – Roughgarden, Joan. Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. University of California Press. [Note: Roughgarden is a trans-identifying male]

To a biologist, “male” means making small gametes and “female” means making large gametes. Period! By definition, the smaller of the two gametes is called a sperm, and the larger an egg. Beyond gamete size, biologists don’t recognize any other universal difference between male and female.

2021 – Bhargava, Aditi, et al. “Considering sex as a biological variable in basic and clinical studies: an endocrine society scientific statement.” Endocrine Reviews 42.3: 219-258.

The classical biological definition of the 2 sexes is that females have ovaries and make larger female gametes (eggs), whereas males have testes and make smaller male gametes (sperm); the 2 gametes fertilize to form the zygote, which has the potential to become a new individual. The advantage of this simple definition is first that it can be applied universally to any species of sexually reproducing organism. Second, it is a bedrock concept of evolution, because selection of traits may differ in the 2 sexes. Thirdly, the definition can be extended to the ovaries and testes, and in this way the categories—female and male—can be applied also to individuals who have gonads but do not make gametes.

So much for those chowderheads who say that, using the gametic definition, neither a pre-puberty human, a postmenopausal woman, or a sterile person can be male or female. If you see this argument, you know you’re dealing with someone who’s intellectually dishonest.

Again, this is not a vote to see how many biologists (or feminists!) would define biological sex. It is meant, as Colin said, to show that the gametic definition of sex has been around for well over a hundred years.

Several months ago I reported, based on articles from sources like New York Magazine, that Pamala Paul, heterodox New York Times columnist, was leaving the paper’s op-ed section, and the paper altogether. I was upset to hear that, for although she didn’t toe the paper’s “progressive” line, her columns were thoughtful and liberal.  Here’s the New York Magazine article (click headline to read):

The article was a bit ambiguous, as it implied that Paul’s ideas, which ran contrary to the NYT’s progressive op-ed aura, were the cause of her getting the pink slip. But the NYT also denied that. From the piece above:

Paul is admired by some of her colleagues for her willingness to buck liberal-left conventional wisdom. She has written a defense of J.K. Rowling and scrutinized the MeToo movement for overreach, while a recent column criticized the American Historical Society’s vote to condemn the ongoing “scholasticide” in Gaza. But others have said she does little more than produce rage bait, with what one Times staffer referred to as “intellectually lazy” positions. “It is a rarity inside the Times for someone to manage to make enemies on every desk they touch; Pamela is indeed a rarity,” one newsroom employee said. “She should have spent time making allies if she was going to be as divisive a figure as she was internally. But she didn’t put the time in there, or at least did not have the interest.”

I’m told, however, that Opinion’s decision to part ways with her is not because of her ideological positions. [Opinion editor Kathleen] Kingsbury said, “We don’t discuss personnel matters, but any insinuation I make staffing or editorial decisions based solely on political viewpoints is false.”

It’s really offensive to ask a heterodox columnist to suck up to her colleagues so they wouldn’t criticize her pieces. But that’s how the NYT rolls, and it’s the reason why Bari Weiss, among others, also left the paper. And note the weasel word “solely” in Kingsbury’s quote above.

For nine years (2013-2022), Paul was editor of the paper’s Book Review section, and then three years ago she moved to op-ed. I saw immediately that her columns were bucking the paper’s own ideology, and I believe I predicted (or at least worried) that she’d be fired for heterodoxy.  Nevertheless, I discussed her pieces often (she was liberal and thoughtful but not “progressive”), and, when I heard her head was on the chopping block, I compiled a list of the columns that were likely to have irritated the top op-ed editors. Here’s a bunch of screenshots:

Despite the announcements by other venues, up to now Paul hasn’t said a word about her leaving, and her columns still appeared in the paper—though less often. Today, though, she verified the rumors by writing her farewell column, which you can read by clicking the headline below or seeing it archived here.  And it’s clear from what she writes that she parted ways with the paper over her ideology and determination to tell the truth as she saw it. The NYT doesn’t like the truth if it doesn’t comport with “progressivism”.

A few quotes from Paul’s piece (indented). They lead me to believe that yes, she’s leaving because of what she wrote about and said.

This is my final column for The Times.

In the memo I wrote three years ago when applying for this job after 11 years at The Times Book Review, I vowed “to write to Times readers rather than to Twitter or to Slack.” I knew my positions, fundamentally liberal but often at odds with what had become illiberal progressive dogma, would ruffle feathers. But as I explained, “I want to write about that vast center/liberal space and to address what people really think and believe but are often too afraid to say.”

. . . I wasn’t looking to be loved or even liked. I had friends and family for that. I wanted to write what I believed to be the truth, based on facts and guided by fairness, but never driven by fear.

She lists some topics that, I’m guessing, the NYT probably wasn’t keen on:

But the reporting I’m most proud of is when I used my voice to stand up for people whose lives or work had come under attack, whether they were public figures or were dragged into the public eye because they’d dared to speak or act in ways that unjustly elicited professional or social condemnation: A popular novelist ostracized for alleged “cultural appropriation.” A physician assistant who was excoriated on social media for standing up to bullies. A Palestinian writer whose appearance at a prominent book fair was canceled. An early beneficiary of affirmative action who dared to explore its unintended consequences. Vulnerable gay teenagers who described being misled by a politicized medical establishment into dubious gender transition treatments. A public university president who was driven away by a campus besieged with political division. Social work students and faculty undermined by a school that had betrayed its own principles. A public health expert who risked opprobrium from his peers by calling out his profession on groupthink.

And it seems to me that much of her piece is simply a disguised lecture to the paper, letting them know that, as Jack Nicholson said, “You can’t handle the truth!”

Several years ago, The Times ran a campaign with the tagline “The truth is hard.” The way I’ve interpreted this is that the truth may be hard for some people to hear, but the truth should never be hard for journalists to tell. In our efforts to shed light on difficult subjects or to question conventional wisdom, we should never refrain from speaking what we believe to be the truth. Not because we think others can’t handle it and certainly not because we cannot handle it ourselves.

Readers are smarter and more thoughtful than the news media sometimes gives them credit for. They don’t need our protection. When journalists hold back, readers can sense they aren’t getting the full story. This sows doubt and skepticism at a time when readers desperately need news they can trust.

At the end, she thanks the readers for their feedback, both good and bad, and expresses hope that her pieces led people to examine their own views.  Here’s the sad last paragraph:

Though I am leaving The Times, I will not be leaving behind these principles in my work as a journalist. Readers depend on our telling the truth more than ever.

This is a brave woman, for she surely realized that her columns and their topics wouldn’t go down well with her editors. Nevertheless, she persisted. I wish her Ceiling-Cat-speed and hope she continues to publish her views at some other widely-read venue. Thanks, Ms. Paul, for your contributions.

Tara Tanaka has returned (this video was not shown for two years) with a lovely video of Roseate Spoonbills (Platalea ajaja) feeding, preening and dunking on her property. They remind me of my ducks!

Tara’s notes are indented below; her Vimeo page is here and her flickr page here.

A Vision in Pink

In the spring of 2023 we had at least 16 Roseate Spoonbills visit our swamp, some of them here for almost two months.  Two of the birds were adults in full breeding plumage, and the rest were juveniles likely fledged the summer before.  All of the birds in this video are juveniles.  In the traveling I’ve done I’ve never seen 16 Roseate Spoonbills at one time, and to have that many here in our cypress swamp for such a long time was quite a gift.

This video includes some of the highlights of their time here, with the opening and closing scenes shot from the living room (!)  They bathed, preened, dried, fed and spent a lot of time roosting.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a bird species that had so much time to just roost without having to hunt for food — they must be very efficient feeders.  One day there were very high winds and three of the spoonbills tried to hunker down in a large cypress where a wise old Wood Stork was easily riding out the winds.  The old stork chose a very large branch and faced into the wind, while the young spoonies struggled to keep their balance in the middle of much smaller branches. 

Last spring I kept hoping that some or all of these birds would return and nest, but I never saw even one spoonbill last year.  I keep looking out the window hoping that this will be their year to nest here.

As these are all juveniles, I put a photo of adults from Wikipedia below. It’s labeled: “Foraging roseate spoonbills at Merritt Island, Florida, United States.”  An excerpt from the article:

Little is known about the roseate spoonbill’s behavior outside of their foraging habits. This species feeds in shallow fresh or coastal waters by swinging its bill from side to side as it steadily walks through the water, often in groups. Moreover, the spoon-shaped bill allows it to sift easily through mud.

The bird feeds on crustaceans, bits of plant material, aquatic insects, mollusks, frogs, newts and very small fish (such as minnows) ignored by larger waders.[24][25][26] In Brazil, researchers found roseate spoonbill diets to consist of fish, insects, crustaceans, mollusks, and seeds, all foraged from limnetic/freshwater habitats.

Ke Wu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s their range: year-round is purple, and breeding range is blue. You can see that in the U.S. they are year-round only at the tip of Florida and along the Gulf Coast:

Cephas, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons