by Gregory McNamee
It’s a bitter commentary on our times. One hundred and eighty years ago, a young British naturalist stepped off a tall-masted ship and wandered into a semitropical forest in Chile, where he discovered a small frog notable for two traits: it carried its young in its mouth, and it imitated a leaf when confronted with a predator, blending into the forest floor.Rhinoderma darwinii, named after Charles Darwin, had a good run over the millions of years, but it has fallen victim, like many other amphibian species, to a mysterious fungal disease called chytridiomycosis. Reports Reuters, Darwin’s frog is no more, an example of what a Zoological Society of London biologist calls, ominously, “extinction by infection.”
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From Lilliputian to Leviathan: In 2008, a pod of whales 100 strong beached in a shallow lagoon in Madagascar. Only a handful survived. Now, five years later, scientists have an idea of what caused the strange behavior. Reports the International Whaling Commission, the remote-sensing sonar employed by energy companies seeking oil and other resources on the ocean floor interfered with the whales’ internal radar, sending them to their destruction. Reports the Washington Post, the energy company doing business closest to the scene has denied any involvement.
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Starfish are not fish. For that reason, marine biologists have for years been pressing the cause that they should be called sea stars. They are also sea canaries—if, that is, you’ll forgive yet another application of the old canary-in-a-coal-mine trope—or perhaps the oceanic rejoinder to the Darwinian frog. Reports the Washington Post, sea stars are dying in record numbers off both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America, attacked by a wasting plague of unknown origin. Most of the scientists involved in studying the situation, the story notes, have yet to attribute the disease to climate change and ocean acidification, but one look at the swirling masses of seaborne garbage and dystrophic tides suggests that the cause lies close to hand.
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This being a time of year for the giving of gifts, untold numbers of homes tomorrow will find themselves graced by new, wondrously round-rolling, even robotic vacuum cleaners, machines that are capable of movement that can seem counterintuitive at times. Those machines have nothing on the octopus, which is endowed with eight tentacles, just as its name suggests. Israeli scientists have determined, reports Scientific American, that these tentacles are capable of seemingly uncoordinated independent movement but can also be marshaled at the same time into moving the octopus in a straight line toward an object. This independent motion involves wormlike contractions that, as the report says, “suggest that the octopus brain sends out high-level, goal-oriented commands.” If only one goal were to figure out a way to clean up the world’s waters—well, that would be news we could use.