Yesterday was an eventful day for coronavirus preparedness in the U.S. Officials declared national, state and local emergencies, events were canceled everywhere, and public venues including schools closed through at least the end of March. U.S. testing capacity is woefully behind but there’s hope now that a coronavirus relief bill is moving quickly through the Capitol.
Meanwhile, anxious people are panic hoarding. By mid-week there was a sudden rush on toilet paper and bottled water as if preparing for a hurricane.
The Germans have an apt word for this: Hamsterkauf = “hamster” hoards in its cheeks (hamstern) + “buy” (kaufen). The hoarding hamster above is totally stuffing his cheeks despite the overabundance of dandelion leaves.
I haven’t been to the grocery store for a few days so I asked my friends what hamsterkauf looks like in Pittsburgh.
On Thursday 12 March at 5:30p John English reported, “Stopped at the Greenfield Giant Eagle for food. Toilet paper shelves are wiped clean. Paper towels were also flying off the shelves. Bottled water was limited to 4 cases per person. (I guess people never heard of water filters.)”
On Thursday 12 March at 7pm, Terry Wiezorek photographed the frozen food section at the North Hills Trader Joe’s.
“People be crazy”, 12 March 2020, 7p (photo by Terry Wiezorek)
On Friday 13 March at 2:30p, Sue Bodziach saw this in the Cranberry Walmart toilet paper aisle.
(photo by Sue Wargo Bodziach)
And on Friday 13 March at 4p, Shannon Platt found little to buy in the toilet paper aisle at Target on McKnight Road.
For a week the blog has been All Peregrines All The Time. It’s time now for something completely different.
When I wrote about the Marabou stork (below) in A Face That’s Hard To Love, Nan asked, “Why would something so ugly be associated with delivering babies?”
Well, the ugly Marabou stork is not the baby-delivery bird.
There are 20 members in the stork family, only one of which is famous in the baby fable. Can you guess which one it is from this list of five? Leave a comment with your answer.
1. Wood stork (Mycteria americana) is found year round in South America, Central America and Florida.
5. Jabiru (Jabiru mycteria) is native to Central and South America. Sometimes it visits Texas. (Yoga fans, notice that this stork is doing the Tree Pose.)
Sandgrouse (Pteroclidae) are seed-eating birds native to Africa and Asia that are famous for carrying water in their specialized belly feathers. The male sandgrouse flies as much as 18 miles from his nest to a watering hole where he soaks his belly in water. He then flies back to the nest where his young squeeze his belly feathers to get a drink.
The sandgrouse is nothing like a flamingo or grebe but he’s descended from the same extinct ancestor that spawned flamingos, grebes, sandgrouse, mesites and doves. The pink circle around the number 95 in the phylogenomic supertree shows where the birds diversified. (“95” is that ancestor.)
As human population soars and fish populations plummet illegal fishing has ramped up in the world’s oceans. With 50% of the world’s fish population now gone, countries protect fish within their 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) but dishonest fishing vessels sneak in to capture endangered species and overfish what’s left.
Catching the perpetrators, or even knowing they’re out there, has been quite difficult despite the ability to track them by satellite. That’s because dishonest vessels turn off their Automatic Identification System (AIS) satellite transponders so they can’t be seen. The boats travel safely without AIS; they use radar to avoid collisions and find fish.
In 2017 Henri Weimerskirch and colleagues at Centre of Biological Studies Chizé launched an innovative study to uncover the extent of illegal fishing. They equipped wandering albatrosses (Diomedea exulans) with radar detectors that transmit location data to satellites. The research team then matches albatross radar sightings to AIS satellite sightings. If there’s a radar ping but no AIS, the boat is operating illegally.
The research team expanded the study in 2019 by fitting 169 albatrosses from Crozet and two other islands with radar detectors (map below). From December 2018 to June 2019 the albatrosses encountered 353 ships, 37% of which had turned off their AIS.
After a 6-month study with the large seabirds, the researchers estimate that more than one-third of vessels in the southern Indian Ocean are sailing undercover, confirming concerns about illegal or unreported fishing.
Armed with this new data, enforcement can now focus on the hotspots of illegal activity. Ideally it will lead to more arrests like the one pictured below in the North Pacific in 2008.
Scientists began using DNA sequencing to see who’s related to whom. They learned that ducks and geese are older than loons, loons are related to penguins, falcons are related to parrots (not hawks), and grosbeaks are newer than sparrows.
The phylogenomic supertree below, current to July 2019, shows the new relationships in a clockwise spiral from the center. The first bird, closest to the dinosaurs, is the common ostrich (Struthio camelus), photo at top.
As of February 2020 there are 10,928 species on the worldwide taxonomic checklist of birds. Regional checklists show a subset of birds, limited by geographical or political boundaries, so the first and last birds vary by checklist:
Additional DNA sequencing will change the lists over and over again.
I wonder who will be first and last in 2050.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons, phylogenomic supertree from MDPI; click on the captions to see the originals)
p.s. (*) DNA sequencing gave the yellow-shouldered grosbeak a new genus — Parkerthraustis — named for the late Theodore A. “Ted” Parker III, a superb field ornithologist who died in a plane crash in Ecuador in 1993, age 40.
Tonight at around 6:39pm two defunct satellites that are still in orbit have a 1% (or less) chance of colliding 900km (560 miles) above Pittsburgh. They’ll be traveling toward each other at 32,880 mph!
If they don’t collide, everyone who has anything to do with satellites will breathe a sigh of relief because there will be that much less out-of-control space junk for their own satellites to hit.
If they do collide they won’t hurt us. At best we’ll see a few shooting stars as the bits burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. But we probably won’t see anything because Pittsburgh’s cloud cover will be 40% at that point. Check out the Clear Dark Sky chart for the forecast (screenshot below).
Here’s the original collision prediction from LeoLabs, an outfit in California that tracks space junk and potential collisions.
2/ On Jan 29 at 23:39:35 UTC, these two objects will pass close by one another at a relative velocity of 14.7 km/s (900km directly above Pittsburgh, PA). Our latest metrics on the event show a predicted miss distance of between 15-30 meters. pic.twitter.com/Hlb1KeQ50U
4/ Events like this highlight the need for responsible, timely deorbiting of satellites for space sustainability moving forward. We will continue to monitor this event through the coming days and provide updates as available.
When you’re in the neighborhood, this street is a fluid dynamic place. Learn more in this vintage article as we go Walking Down Vortex Street. (click the link)
(photos NASA and Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals. video by Megan Lewis on YouTube)
American oystercatcher in flight, New Jersey (photo by Tony Bruno)
Sunday, 12 January 2020
Tomorrow the New Jersey legislature will consider a bill that will either protect or destroy 15 acres of state park land where a neighboring golf course wants to build 3 golf holes. The showdown between those who love public parks and nature versus extremely rich developers is well described in the New York Times: Golf Club for the 1 Percent Wants to Seize a Migratory Bird Habitat.
I don’t know how the fight will play out in human terms but I’m sure of one thing. In the end the sea will win.
Caven Point Natural Area is a sandy peninsula on the Hudson River in Jersey City, NJ, a migratory bird stopover and nesting site so sensitive that the area is closed April through September to leave the birds in peace. American oystercatchers, shown above, are some of the cool birds you can see there.
Though it’s part of Liberty State Park, Caven Point Natural Area (yellow circle) is not contiguous to it.
Liberty National Golf Club is one of the most exclusive golf courses in the US with an initiation fee of nearly half a million dollars. The course has breathtaking views of the Manhattan skyline which you may have seen on television last August when Liberty National hosted the PGA TOUR’s FedEx Cup Playoffs from August 6–11, 2019. This photo, uploaded by Redi-Rock International in 2015, gives you an idea of the view.
To us humans, Nature is the backdrop to the protests, letter writing, legislation and legal battles, but Nature will be the foreground in the years ahead. Climate change and sea level rise will engulf Caven Point and part of the existing golf course. It is already happening.
This map of the Caven Point area from NOAA’s Sea Level Rise Viewer shows red where the highest high tides inundate the land today. This doesn’t include the 5-foot wall of water that washed over the area during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
If the ocean rises 3 feet, as predicted for this century, Caven Point will become an island, ponds on the existing golf course will overflow (green) and the end of Liberty National’s parking lot near the clubhouse will be underwater every day (green).
“Nobody’s debating that sea-level rise is happening. It’s back to how much, how fast,” Helen Amanda Fricker, a glaciologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told me. Even the most optimistic scientists have recently increased their low-end estimates, she said.
(photo of American oystercatcher by Tony Bruno. Caven Point walkway by Bill Benson on Flickr, Liberty National Golf Course by Redi-Rock International on Flickr, maps from New Jersey State Parks and NOAA Sea Level Viewer; click on the captions to see the originals)
For thousands of years people have known that certain sand dunes make a low humming sound, the musical note of G, E or F. It occurs when the sand is moving but you can force the sound if you slide downhill. Why does it hum?
A decade ago scientists at CalTech studied two humming sand dunes in California to answer that question. They found that for the sand to sing, the grains have to be all the same size, the dune must have a slope greater than 30 degrees and be over 120 feet tall, and the sand must be dried under the desert’s summer sun. It was very hot work.
The humming sound occurs naturally when the sand moves but that doesn’t happen on a predictable schedule so the CalTech team forced the sound. Dr. Melany Hunt explained,
Usually we would trigger it by having a number of people slide down the dune in unison. We always called it ‘Science by the seat of our pants.’
