Guano Mining

Bird shit stinks. I’ve had the exquisite pleasure of encountering a lot of poop in my life and nothing smells worse than bird shit. My neighbor – a racist and a thief – had a chicken coop that we had to watch while he was away. It was small, dark – little more than a man-made cave with more than a dozen stinking, angry chickens crammed inside, brooding over their own excrement. If you could take ten years of mistreatment and pain and turn it solid, it would smell like that chicken coop.

So it’s surprising to learn that the desire for bird excrement has actually fueled an incredible international industry. Guano mining is a cheap source of extremely useful chemicals known as nitrates and phosphates. Nitrates go into fertilizer and gunpowder. Phosphates are used in industrial chemicals, medicines, and foods. Coca-cola has phosphoric acid in it. Guess where that phosphorus might have come from?

These chemicals have been an object of desire for ages. The ancient Inca used it to enhance their crops. In 1856 the U.S. Congress passed an act specifically for guano excavation that let anyone claim any unoccupied guano islands for themselves – as long as they sold the guano exclusively to America.

This need for guano came to a head on a small island in the South Pacific called Nauru. Nauru is one of the most remote nations on Earth. It’s nearest neighbor is more than 300 km (186 mi) away. It clocks in with a measly 9,000 residents – only the Vatican has fewer people within it’s borders. Nauru was as close as you could be to an island paradise – far away from everyone else, lush beaches, dense forest, warm, balmy breezes wafting across the island.

That is, until the late 19th century, when a chance geological encounter revealed that nearly the entire island was made of guano-rich rock deposits. Within five years a dedicated mining company had started literally digging the island out from underneath it’s inhabitants. I’ll leave most of the details where I originally found them – an amazing story on This American Life, which you can find here and which I highly recommend. Today, Nauru is nearly mined out and a textbook case of environmental disaster. Corruption has nearly bankrupt the entire nation and the forests are gone. All that’s left are these inhabitable limestone spires that erupt from the broken ground.

All for bird shit.

Other Sources: Uniya.org

 

Video: Discovering the Moa

Check out these old videos I found at TeeVeeNZ’s youtube channel. Really neat stuff.

 

Monster Insects Defeated by Birds

Before vertebrates moved out of the ocean, insects ruled the land and air. Rhyniognatha, the earliest known insect, arrived on land nearly 400 million years ago, roughly 40 million years before the first tetrapods arrived. Monster creatures like Meganeura, one of the so-called griffinflies (the larger cousin to dragonflies), ruled the air with two foot long wingspans. And even after amphibians, reptiles, and dinosaurs spread and diversified the insects stayed just as massive and just as dominant.

But today, insects are tiny. Even the largest ones (such as the atlas moth and the goliath beetle) are barely larger than a person’s hand. The disappearance of the mega-insects has been an evolutionary puzzle for years. The prevailing theory is that it all has to do with oxygen. During the Permian period oxygen levels were about 50% higher than they are today. This abundance of respiratory energy could have fueled super-sized metabolisms and allowed the insects to grow larger than they could today. And this theory seems good. The size of insect fossils seems to track right along oxygen levels. When the atmosphere was rich, they were big; when the atmosphere was oxygen-poor, the insects shrank. But this trend suddenly stops about 140 million years ago. Without warning, the size of insects shrank dramatically, even though oxygen levels were starting to rise. Why?

The answer is that the giant bugs had finally met their match. Pterosaurs had been to clumsy to be a real threat, but this era saw the rise of a new aerial creature, the bird. These ponderous mega-insects made a ready and easy food source. The smaller, more maneuverable bugs could still outrun or out-fly the proto-birds, but the larger ones succumbed to predatory pressure and began to disappear. Slowly, larger size lost its advantages and became nothing more than a liability.

Sources: ScienceDaily, Discovery.com

 

Burn Notice: Why Chilis Taste Hot

I love schadenfreude, that special feeling of watching someone else’s misfortune. Ninety percent of the internet runs off it. Youtube is full of videos of luckless skaters and instant karma. A good amount of chili pepper videos exist too (to my eternal entertainment). Like this one:

Love it. But if you think about it, it does bring up an interesting natural question. Why are chili peppers so hot?

When talking about evolution it’s useful to think of answers as either hows’ or why’s, a.k.a. proximate or ultimate. How a chili gets that hot, the proximate cause, is simple. The flesh surrounding the seeds is packed full of a chemical called capsaicin. Capsaicin is an odorless, fatty compound and, once in your body, binds to the same cellular receptors that detect heat. That’s why it tastes so hot, your cells literally think they’re in danger of burning up.

But the ultimate cause, the why, is pretty interesting too. Why is the fruit so full of capsaicin? Chilis are a fruit after all, and fruits exist to be eaten, but most animals would shy away from something to distasteful. Why would evolution put so much energy into creating something that defeats its own purpose? Well it, turns out that not all animals shy away from the capsaicin. Birds in particular have different heat receptors than we mammals do, meaning they can’t taste the heat.

Think about it. Pepper seeds are pretty flimsy and soft. A big old mammal, like a cow, that grinds its food to a pulp would totally destroy the precious seeds. But birds tend to eat things whole. The seeds can pass through their digestive tract unhurt. A pepper’s fire is its tool. Its evolved over generations to become a specialized delicacy, made to tempt friendly birds and scare away mammals.

Non-YouTube mammals, atleast.

Sources: Tewksbury and Nabhan (2001), americanscientist.org, YouTube

 

The Birdman Cult

When Europeans arrived at Easter Island the moai were there to greet them. Nearly nine hundred of the multi-ton statues stood facing inward towards the island. The moai were carved from the living rock of the island and transported to their various locations, a feat on the scale of moving the Stonehenge blocks. It is thought that these represented the physical embodiment of ancestor spirits, a combination altar, icon, and occasional home.

But if these were religious icons, something terrible happened to their belief system. Instead of moai worship the Europeans were greeted by the ominously named Birdman Cult, Tangata Matu. At some point in their recent past the moai quarries were abruptly abandoned, unfinished moai left permanently half-formed out of the rock. Concurrently some unknown disaster had caused their island population to crash from nearly 15,000 down to only 3,000.

Although no record exists to prove it, what likely happened to these people was environmental degredation on a major scale. Easter Island today is a land of high cliffs, bare rocks, and thin soil, but when Polynesian settlers first arrived fifteen-hundred years ago, the island would have resembled Hawaii, a verdantly forested island. Over the next thousand years the inhabitants exhausted the forests, chopping down trees for fuel, building, and transport for the immense moai. The people thrived, led by the ariki, high chief and leader of the old moai religion.

But when the forests vanished, so did the fertility of the island. Suddenly deprived of food and building materials, the population crashed. A warrior uprising took place, overthrowing the ariki and replacing his ancestral religion with a new one born out of the warrior’s half-animal patron, makemake, and the only remaining source of food, migratory sea birds.

This leads to the central ritual of the cult. Every year, as the migratory birds, in this case sooty terns, arrived again on the island a select group of people would be named as candidates. These candidates would, in turn, choose young men called hopu to compete for them. Everyone would gather at Orongo, a nearby volcanic crater and gaze out over the water to a nearby islet. The first hopu to go to the islet and grab an egg without dying to drops, drowning, or shark attacks would win.

The winning candidate would be declared as the physical embodiment of makemake and given tribute and special honors. In return they had to go through a transformation, painting their skin, shaving their hair, growing nails into talons, and living in isolation. This was the Birdman, and the island was his cult.

And then the Europeans came and nearly everyone died from smallpox.

Sources: The History of the World in 100 Objects, bradshawfoundation.org, mysteriousplaces.com, The Birdman Cult, Wiki: Tangata Maku

 

The Volcano’s Child

Here is where the jungle reaches the mountain. This is Indonesia, where the conflux of biology and geology reaches its height. Sulawesi is only one of a thousand islands in the Indonesian archipelago, most easily recognizable by its unique shape, like a horseshoe on a string. Or, considering the entire archipelago is volcanically active, perhaps smoke rising from a mound is more fitting.

One inhabitant of Sulawesi in particular has formed a unique attachment to the geologic energies here. It appears unassuming to the eye. One would not be blamed for mistaking the maleo (Macrocephalon maleo) for just another jungle bird. Something small and chicken-like, scratching for food on the jungle floor. The maleo is part of the megapode family and is recognizable by its large feet, crested head, and salmon underbelly. Maleos are endemic to Sulawesi and have an interesting array of calls, but otherwise appear similar to most every other megapode here.

It is when we consider the maleo’s method of reproduction when the bird becomes more interesting. Megapodes don’t build nests. Instead they bury their eggs in huge mounds, and the maleo is no exception. Usually the mound is made of compost and rotting debris. The idea usually that the decomposition would produce enough heat to incubate the eggs instead of the parents (although the male sometimes stays around to monitor the temperature and guard the nest). The maleo, however, only uses dirt and sand instead. It gets its heat elsewhere.

Specifically, volcanoes. The birds form colonies in sandy areas and dig down to where the earth is heated naturally. You can watch a video of them in action below.

The maleo is an excellent example of what can happen to endemic animals. The limited range allows for relatively local events or conditions to wreck vast changes to the species. A larger gene pool would have probably negated these effects, but here on these isolated islands, extraordinary things can still be found.

Sources: Random History, ICUNRedlist.org, BBC, Wikipedia

 

The Great Auk’s Last Days

Even before the eighteenth century, the great auk was not doing especially well. The large flightless seabird (the only one in the North Atlantic) had been hunted on a significant scale since atleast the eighth century and had been taken as opportunistic meals by people well before the stone age. Like the dodo, grounded and unused to humans, the birds were easy prey. One sailing ship reported that they were able to use planks to simply herd hundreds of birds on board and into waiting stomachs. The scale of this hunting was so large that by 1600 no nesting colonies remained in mainland Europe. Instead hunters had to travel to Iceland, Greenland, or Newfoundland to find prey.

By the eighteenth century, there was widespread acknowledgement of the auk’s decline. Fewer and fewer were being found and many traditional nesting sites now sat abandoned. Many countries and communities started passing protection laws, but these laws were piecemeal at best. For instance, in 1794 Great Britain banned the hunting of auks for feathers, but still allowed game hunting. Some of the public called for stronger protections. However, others did not see the extinction as a tragedy.

“It is evident in the ‘battle of life’, such a bird as the Great Auk had but a poor chance. In a word, where competition for available provisions is so keen, where the ‘struggle for existence’ is so terrible, where only the ‘fittest’ survive, such a simpleton as the Great Auk must ere long be gobbled up. When the fat ‘innocent at hom’ actually walked into the mouths of its foes — great gawk that it was — its doom must be annihilation sooner or later. Such proved to be the case.”  – Reverend Moses Harvey, Newfoundland, 1874

However, no matter what the public opinion, numbers continued to shrink throughout the nineteenth century. As the birds became harder to find other fowl were substituted, decreasing the demand for meat and feathers. Ironically, the increasing rarity of the birds jacked up the demand and number killed for museum specimens. Instead of hunting for sport, the endangered birds were now taken to satisfy collectors.

By the 1820’s the only known auk colony was found on the island of Geirfuglasker, off the coast of Iceland. Sheer cliffs prevented humans from reaching the auk nests. However, in 1830, the island actually sank into the ocean, forcing the birds onto the more accessible Eldey Island. Museum collectors swarmed the island and, on July 3rd, 1844 three men, Jón Brandsson, Sigurður Ísleifsson, and Ketill Ketilsson found the last breeding pair ever seen by humans. Brandsson and Ísleifsson captured and killed the adults while Ketilsson smashed the nest with his boots. The bodies were sold to a Danish natural history buff named Carl Siemsen.

Sources: Who Killed the Great Auk? by Jeremy Gaskell, visindavefur.hi.is, icunredlist.org, Wikipedia

 

The Great Emu War

Australia! Where the only thing that can’t kill you is (some of) the sheep!

During the early years of the Great Depression, the Australian government promised extra subsidies to wheat farmers if they could increase their crop production. The government would fail to deliver on their promise, however, and as the year of 1932 rolled around tensions were growing increasingly high. A major drought in Western Australia exasperated the problem; even the wildlife was going nuts. Rabbits could be kept off farmland with wire fences, but emus, the flightless ratites of the Australian outback, were not so easily controllable. They were large, dangerous, and could easily tear down the rabbit proof fences to get to crops (which would also let the goddamn rabbits in too!).

The farmers sent a  delegation to meet with the MInister of Defense, Sir George Pearce. Pearce decided a little eradication was in order. The Minister would send a group of soldiers armed with machine guns to disperse the growing number of birds, which he seemed to believe would be great target practice for the troops. A cinematographer was even enlisted to record the event. It was hoped that their feathers could be used to make hats.

Well, it didn’t quite go as planned. The overall flock numbers were staggering, but the birds themselves grouped up in small flocks of a twenty to fifty. The first group the soldiers found were too far away and simply evaded the first round gunfire. A second volley hit, but only killed a few of the birds before they ran away. Eventually the troops switched to ambush tactics, but they were consistently thwarted by jammed guns, flighty birds, and poor weather. After a week only a handful of emu, perhaps as few as 50 were killed. The commander in charge of the mission commented: “If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world…They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks. They are like Zulus whom even dum-dum bullets could not stop.”

Local newspapers apparently didn't think highly of the "war"

A second attempt was mustered up, with slightly more success. Altogether about a thousand birds were killed, although by this time the whole situation had become a giant public debacle. The birds were still attacking crops, animal lovers were upset about the wide scale extermination, and the government felt, perhaps understandably, silly about the whole thing. In the later years the military would leave the hunting up to the farmers, instituting a bounty system instead. No more wars would be fought against the birds.

Sources: Emugigs.com, Warbuff, Oddee.com,  Wiki: Emu War,

 

How to eat an ortolan

There is a very small songbird that lives in the south of France. It is only about six inches long from head to tail and weighs in at about twenty grams, barely anything at all. It is very easy to simply dismiss it as a passing songbird, on its way from Africa to northerly Europe. But in fact, the ortolan bunting, Emberiza hortulana, has been said to represent “the soul of France” and the epitome of Southwestern French cuisine. However, this is also balanced by government protections, major fines, and a reputation as a particularly sinful dish.

Traditionally ortolans are captured wild, but not killed. Instead the bird is brought into a room and either blinded or exposed to extremely variable light levels in order to throw off its circadian rhythms and encourage the bird to eat more. The bird is then forcibly fattened until it weighs four or five times its natural weight. Finally, in an ultimate indignity, the obese birds would be drowned in alcohol, usually brandy, and roasted.

The diner was said to place a napkin over their head to not only capture the exquisite aromas but to also hide their face from God.

The birds are now protected by the French government after a sharp population decline around the 1960’s. The dish is also seen by many to be unnecessarily cruel and, while it is still legal to eat, selling ortolans can net you a hefty fine.

Sources: Unique Foods, Wikipedia, NPR