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Biology

Another Thought Experiment.

When I wrote about my worries regarding the novel Corona virus in early (!) January 2020, I got some push-back. Did I have to be catastrophizing all the time? Couldn’t I provide a bit more levity or at least some art? 1.9 million U.S. deaths later, much as I’d like not to, I am back in Cassandra mode.

I’ll provide art (a poem below), all right, and photographs that I took at beautiful Point Lobos, CA last November, but today’s focus are issues related to the bird flu. Don’t yell at me. I am as sick, literally, as the next person, under the barrage of bad news. And today’s musings are as bleak as they come. But we must think things through to reach some kind of preparedness. That much we’ve learned from the last epidemic.

Let’s try a thought experiment, given that the Republicans’ slashing of NIH/NSF grants by more than half curtails actual scientific experimentation. (Here is a detailed, excellent review of the new rules.) Assume you learn the most important facts and statistics about the new H5N1 virus. Why assume? Well, since last week, many official publications of information about infectious diseases have disappeared from government websites. Data that briefly appeared on a C.D.C. website were gone a short time later, irretrievable despite scientists begging for a full report. For example, according to the NYT, “Cats that became infected with bird flu might have spread the virus to humans in the same household and vice versa, according to data that briefly appeared online in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but then abruptly vanished. The data appear to have been mistakenly posted but includes crucial information about the risks of bird flu to people and pets.”

So what facts do we actually know? The disease originated in Asia, almost 30 years ago. It spread among poultry farms, caused some 400 deaths in humans across these years, but rarely spread human-to-human. The virus started to explode exponentially since 2020, when it did not simply jump from poultry farms to wild bird populations, but when the latter started to disperse it along migration routes, spreading from flock to flock. It arrived on our shores in 2021, with 148 million poultry alone ordered to be euthanized since 2022. More than 5 million egg-laying chickens died in the first 16 days of 2025. (Ref.)

From North America it jumped to South America where it traveled 6000 km in just 6 months. It caused mass mortality, not just in birds, but in infected mammals as well, with elephant seals, sea lions, porpoises, dolphins and otters all affected. Almost 50% of the Peruvian pelican population succumbed. The ecological consequences are still up for grabs but likely devastating up and down the food chain.

Deceased elephant seal pups line the beach at Punta Delgada in Chabut, Argentina, along with a bird carcass. Cause of death: bird flu. Ralph Venstreets/University of California, Davis

Now cows are infected with the virus. As of last week almost 1000 herds across 16 states in the U.S. tested positive. In fact, cows in Nevada exhibited a new variant of the virus which has scientists alarmed for its potential to trigger a pandemic in humans. The genotype, known as D1.1, contains a genetic mutation that may help the virus more easily copy itself in mammals—including humans. This D1.1 version of the virus is the same variant that killed a man in Louisiana and left a Canadian teen hospitalized in critical condition. (Ref.) The real worry: with each genetic mutation, so easily accomplished since this virus mixes with other flu viruses quite rapidly, we might see increased severity of the disease and increased probability for human-to-human infection.

Back to our thought experiment. You now know that the virus is around us, mutating, and you start seeing people felled by it (by current expectations, it has a mortality rate between 40 and 50%. Compare that to Corona Disease mortality rate: about 1%. Imagine the hospital overload, increasing otherwise preventable deaths outside of bird flu mortality as well.) Let’s assume that scientists do find a vaccine (we have to be optimistic until the last minute!), just like they did for Covid, and it proves to be safe and effective in tests done outside of the U.S., since stateside we no longer support much contagious disease research. And now factor in the fact that you have an anti-vaxxer health tzar voted into office by a Republican Senate, instructing the FDA not to approve the vaccine. (You can still write to your Senator about Kennedy’s confirmation… their websites have a contact me link.) Fantasy? Read the proposed law debated on Friday in Montana (House Bill 371) that would ban the use of mRNA vaccines – you know the ones used to treat tuberculosis, malaria, zika, the rapidly mutating influenza viruses, hepatitis b, HPV, Covid 19 and in treatment of pancreatic, lung, prostate, and brain cancer.

What would you do?

Rich folks traveling abroad to inoculate themselves and their families? Would foreigners even be served if there are limited quantities available? What about poor folks?

Stock up on masks? There are already 16 states with masking prohibitions in effect, with more legislation in the works. And always think of the babies and toddlers that can’t be masked…

What will we do?

I can’t help but wonder about questions raised a decade ago by America’s smartest Cassandra, Sarah Kendzior, who has previously predicted everything we have seen unfolding since January 20th, 2025. in great detail.

***

Omnicide

And when our children ask,
Why did  you do nothing as the world
was dying?   what will we tell them?

Will we say, We didn’t know how
sick it was, or admit that We gathered
our rosebuds while we could,

Old  Time was still a-flying—?
It’s now the end of  everything,
our children will say, go crawl

into your arks and sail off  destitute into
your doom, and leave us only
your shadows. And our children

will light candles across seven continents
empty now of  lions, kangaroos, ravens,
squirrels, javelinas, pelicans—

devoid of praying mantises, koalas, ants,
cobras, snails, Doberman pinschers, pigs,
vultures, lizards, and alley cats.

Our children will hide in caves with blind
cockroaches, together feeding on the algae
glowing in neon greens and blues

across dolomite and limestone walls.
They’ll leave no pictographs behind,
no sprayed handprints, no artful gods.

Such silence now, they’ll say, this  you’ve
bequeathed us, this human indifference.
And we’ll beg them, Survive.

BY MAURYA SIMON

Music today is from France, with entirely home-made and recycled instruments, a funky melange that should cheer us up. Always music.

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And Now from the Interesting Person Department…

Last week I was looking something up at the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. It is a treasure trove for scientists, artists, and really anyone interested in natural history, with hundreds of thousands of manuscripts available to peruse for free. It is a worldwide consortium, seated at the Smithsonian in D.C., with universities and national libraries collaborating to make their collections accessible to all.

What was supposed to be a relatively quick search for quasi-abstract images I wanted to learn from for a new project, turned out be a day of my life when I chanced on the biography of a most impressive naturalist that I simply HAD to read. Here is how I fell into the rabbit hole:

I had come to look at the Naturalist’s Miscellany (1789) by George Shaw, which has images of natural objects drawn from life, with Latin and English text explaining what people knew about them then. (Today’s images that are not mushrooms, are from this book.) Many of the engravings found here are spectacular. (In fact, on really bad days, going to this site and just looking at pictures instead of doomscrolling has been my rescue more than once.) After downloading what I thought were the most interesting prints, I decided to browse a bit for mushrooms, since the last blog had all these photographs I had taken of fungi. This is what popped up.

I had come upon a treatise called Brasilische Pilzblumen, (Brazilian Mushroomflowers) written in 1895 by a mycologist named Alfred Möller for a book Botanical Notes from the Tropics. He spent almost three years in Brazil, visiting his uncle who had emigrated from Germany decades earlier. Möller’s contribution to science was a detailed exploration of leaf cutter ants and their symbiotic relationship with certain fungi, which they literally farm, while living inside of them. The fungal agriculture involves planting, cultivating, and harvesting Basidiomycota for food by the ants. (Attina).

He took the photographs in 1890!

They add nutrients from fresh plant material, remove dead tissue and shelter them from predators, while consuming parts of the fungi as food, exclusively, and using fibers from the fungi to reinforce their nests. Ants contribute to protecting the plant against herbivores, fungal pathogens and competing plants. As the fungi thrive, so do the ants. Before we remain too much in awe of this mutualism, however, let’s note that the defoliating leaf cutter ants inflict widespread forest and agricultural damage in tropical regions due to their abundance. Nowadays, countries use satellite imagery and drones to detect their presence in tropical forests to fight decimated their numbers before they irreparably harm the trees.

Möller, it turns out, eventually got around to writing the biography of this uncle he visited, Fritz Müller (1822 – 1897), and this is where it gets fascinating. Well, for me, anyhow, since this was someone radically true to his beliefs no matter the cost, interested in everything under the sun, and never giving up, no matter how burdened by unimaginable losses. (The full text of the biography (1905) in German can be read here. An American retelling based on the biography is available here.)

Here is the short version. Johann Friedrich Theodor Müller is born into a rectory in Germany, one of many siblings, who develops a talent for science and mathematics and goes to university to become a pharmacist, eventually studying medicine. By the time he is done with his studies, he has joined the revolutionary youths of those years around 1848, and has become a fervent atheist, cutting him off from his religious parents and most of his siblings, as well as a woman he intended to marry. Atheism prevents him from swearing an oath to receive his university diploma, making employment difficult, so he decides to travel to Brazil where a German colony is built near Santa Catarina. He lives with the daughter of a poor farmhand and their first child dies at age three. The second child is one of two (out of 12 infants) who survive the ocean crossing to Brazil threatened by rampant malnutrition and diseases. Another thirteen children die of the measles on this trip as well.

In Brazil, the young family builds a hut in the jungle, loses almost everything to floods, to poisonous snakes, to attacks by pumas and indigenous tribes who the Germans have colonially displaced, with disease taking the lives of several of his 10 children. His most beloved daughter later commits suicide during a visit in Germany as a young adult. Müller relentlessly provides for his family with physical labor, income as a doctor with no access to necessary medicines, and eventual teaching gigs that are at the mercy of the Jesuits and the Brazilian government that is reported to have shafted him multiple times.

All the while he observes, records, analyzes and describes everything under the sun – mollusks and seashells, orchids, butterflies, you name it. He publishes, he corresponds, he reads the scientific literature when his means allow him to order the journals, and he draws exquisite images of what he finds in nature. Soon he gets a reputation in Europe, receives honorary doctorates, and begins a life long correspondence with Darwin, who calls him the “prince of observers” using many of Müller’s suggestions and reports to bolster his arguments about evolutionary processes. In fact, Darwin feels so indebted to him that he offers a substantial sum of money when once again natural disaster has destroyed much of Müller’s household and small library, which the latter politely refuses. He does accept, however, the scientific community’s gift of sending journal and literature for free after the disastrous flood.

In 1878 he publishes his observations on the evolutionary advantage of certain colorations in butterflies: mimicry as a defense mechanism against predators. “Müllerian mimicry is a natural phenomenon in which two or more well-defended species, often foul-tasting and sharing common predators, have come to mimic each other’s honest warning signals, to their mutual benefit.” Not only did he observe the functional advantages of coloration, but he developed one of the first ever mathematical models of frequency-dependent selection in biology. (Ref.) Darwinists ran with it.

So why do I go on about this, other than being happy to share something fascinating? I think it is a good reminder that openness to new ideas can produce amazing results. Ok, we probably all agree on that. But Müller also modeled resistance: his passion for something, the natural world in his case, and his engaging with the puzzle of evolution, enabled him to survive the worst hardships and personal losses someone can face. His correspondence reveals over and over again how the drive to understand the world we live in superseded the grief over what this world had in store for him.

It helps me to get a grip on those bad days where I feel overwhelmed. Pick and engage the things that interest you most, and for a while there will be no room for worry. Or rage. Or fear. Even if it is just a temporary relief, it might produce something that goes beyond just the personal realm, even for the many of us who are not the kind of genius he clearly was. Read an obscure biography! Feel better in no time.

***

After writing this yesterday, this morning I received an essay by Brian Klaas from my subscription list. It picks up on the topic of resilience, resonating with one’s environment (and even ant colonies,) late in the piece, which is generally about the dangers of optimization in contemporary cultures. The perfect long read , spelling out the dynamics of adaptation and the inherent risks. I would have liked though, if the author had discussed how it cannot be the duty of individuals caught in organizations that profit off optimization, to change from the bottom up – it would harm their livelihoods and functioning within the work place. It has to come from the top down, or as a synchronized movement by many like-minded people. But the essay provides a LOT of food for thought for young people trying to balance life and careers.

Music from Brazil. If you want a full album by Pauletti, I recommend (on Spotify) Ritual das Cordas.

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Getting rid of the Junk.

I did not publish a blog on Monday because I spent my entire Sunday on the phone and on text messages, processing the momentous shift in our political landscape, instead of writing about how our brain works – the initial plan. My friends’ comments ranged from “Just resign yourself to a Republican win, the world is going up in flames everywhere, so try to enjoy your last year(s) to “Why are you so pessimistic about the chances of a new candidate to infuse life into a shriveling campaign?” and everything in-between.

I had been squarely in the “It’s safer if Biden stays” contingent, and was emotionally rattled with his withdrawal. My fear had been (and to some extent still is) that abandoning the boat this late in the game would lead to an onslaught of ever more open racist and misogynistic attacks which, in turn, model for those in everyday life to go after people in vulnerable populations, and that we lose the ever important mid-western Independents. I had also worried that there would be no circling of wagons around Harris and thus a danger of losing the Black and women’s vote, fears now allayed.

I had once again forgotten Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano‘s insistence: “Let’s save pessimism for better times.” Was shaken enough, though, that I felt physically ill on Monday. So much at stake, so little margin for error, so many unpredictable variables. Even my go-to soporific Venn-diagram didn’t work.

I feel better today, given the barrage of positive reports on youth engagement, and statistics showing that the millions of $$ sent by small donors were 60% from first time donors (!). 39% of poll respondents said that they are now more likely to vote (and 49% equally as before.) Vote.org saw over 38.000 new voters sign up in the 48 hours since Harris’ announcement.

It will be an uphill battle, nonetheless, but I am willing to concede we have a chance. Particularly if we are able to filter out the junk that is already descending in waves on social media and talk shows, etc. Here is a truly informative piece of research from the Wilson Center that makes it clear how women politician are denigrated and what one can do to identify and confront the accusations. Malign Creativity: How Gender, Sex, and Lies are Weaponized Against Women Online is a valuable read at this very moment.

And speaking of filtering out the junk, let us at last turn to the brain and its mind boggling ways of accomplishing just that, not just metaphorically. (I’ll summarize what I learned here.)

Scientists have figured out the process that allows the brain to push its waste, a byproduct of our 170 billion cells doing their work, from deep within to the surface, where it gets picked up by the bloodstream in a nifty interface, which brings it to kidneys and liver for removal. Slow electrical waves set that process in motion while we’re fast asleep, pushing the debris within some fluid to the brain surface where the bad stuff gets sorted and flushed away.

Understanding this process has been of great interest to researchers concerned with Alzheimer disease. A lot of the debris that needs to get disposed of is amyloid, a substance known to form plaques in the brain associated with that form of dementia. There are reasons to believe that a malfunctioning waste removal system could be at the root of the disease. Thus, understanding how stuff gets removed might be a valuable step towards figuring out where things go wrong with this glymphatic system and how to fix it.

We know that our bodies get rid of problematic substances with the help of the lymphatic system, where tubes transport the waste to the bloodstream. Th brain, however, lacks these tubes. Here is what scientists discovered:

“By measuring the wave, we are also measuring the flow of interstitial fluid, the liquid found in the spaces around cells. It turned out that the waves were acting as a signal, synchronizing the activity of neurons and transforming them into tiny pumps that push fluid toward the brain’s surface.”…. Tests showed that the waves increased the flow of clean cerebrospinal fluid into the brain and the flow of dirty fluid out of the brain. They also showed that the fluid was carrying amyloid, the substance that builds up in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.” (Ref.)

Let sleep find us and the dance of electrical waves begin! Maybe a junk-free brain has more time to remember the important stuff:

Here is to joyful candidates, and power regained. Here is to having a brain fit enough to learn about youth culture, brats, coconut trees and other memes associated with our new nominee. We’ll go there some other time. For now, we understand our assignment.

Today, 7/24, is a virtual meeting organized by Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ) at 4pm Pacific time (7 EDT) for White women to learn how to show up for the moment. You can sign up for the zoom call here or follow on FB livestream if they reach capacity.

Music today was sent to me by my dear friend Leila – and it’s perfect.

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Purging the Passions

Walk with me. A slow, short amble through a park modeled after old English country estates. Weather in tune, soft rains alternating with violent deluges, making me clutch the camera under my raincoat, seeking shelter under old fir trees, since the paths are too slippery to run back to the car. Or what goes for running these days.

Signs of early spring everywhere, snowdrops dotted with rain,

scilla peaking out among them,

aconite trying to pretend sun(s) still exist.

Camelias bringing some red to the palette

Crocci abundant, some hiding from the rain.

A fragrant edgeworthia paper-bush attracts the very first bee.

Center of my attention, though, were the hellebores, pummeled by the rain, bitten by earlier frost, struggling this year to develop their full glory. I had just learned some fascinating new facts about them (you might remember that I write about them almost every spring, so partial to them.) More importantly, these facts connect to something that modern science is beginning to explore: the relationship between our guts (literally, stomach and intestines) and that of our mental health. (I am going to summarize sources from here and here, and also a recent essay in the Atlantic discussing our preoccupation with gut health.)

Hellebores were linked to madness already in Greek mythology, not as a cause but as a cure, quieting the unruly, “hysteric” young daughters of a king. We find evidence for medicinal use in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as well as earlier writers, and the practice of using it to “heal” hysteria, epilepsy, mania and depression, lasted for centuries, documented across Europe, from early Romans to 18th century England. Paracelsus sang its praises. Wondrous cures were reported over and over again.

The plant contains helleborine and its derivatives are cardio-toxic glukosides, similar to digitalis. Ingestion even of only the seeds can prove to be fatal. The toxic compound protoanemonin, once swallowed by humans, causes “vomiting, inflammation of the mouth and throat, [and] abdominal pain and diarrhea that can be followed by severe ulcerations of the mouth and damage to the digestive and urinary systems.” The one saving grace might be that it induces vomiting so fast that not enough of the substance remains to kill you.

The roots were pulverized and put in a concoction that led to violent purging with excrements taking on a black color, interpreted to be the evil humors that left your body, the later now ready to heal, mind included. If dosage was mistaken, it led to death. The line between panacea and poison, miracle dram and murderous draught, was a thin one. But the psychological assumptions of emotions being lodged in the belly, and needing to be driven out, if maladaptive, were anything but thin: the perceived violence of Hellebore’s laxative action were seen as the necessary equivalent of the violence and perceived grossness of mental illness, to be forcefully exiled.

In the 17th century, doctors started to discuss the problems with something so potentially lethal, advocating for its use only in the most stubborn cases, and purging with less dangerous substances, like Senna, instead. The symbol of Hellebore was however also taken up by religious crusaders, talking about the need for sinners and “spiritually diseased” people to take the hellebore cure, thus intertwining moral with medical issues, with deranged emotions being at the core of both. Cleansing was necessary both to maintain health, but also to achieve pure spiritual interiors, free from demonic possession.

“Viewed in this light, a prescription of hellebore becomes about much more than just the removal of corrupted physical matter. The black substance voided from the bowels was the embodiment of the evil cast out, with the site of spiritual transformation being neither the soul nor the mind but the gut. Taking hellebore presented many of the same dangers as the condition it purported to cure: loss of control, internal corruption, and the very real possibility of death. By forcibly confronting sufferers with their own embodiment, it offered a temporary reprieve from the existential anguish of madness and melancholy. In doing so, it confirmed what many godly individuals already believed: that their bodies were vile and filthy vessels and that their best hope for deliverance lay in abasement before God.”

If we leave G-d and evil out of the discussion (although certain parts of our political establishment seem to bend over backwards to get them back in again…) what do we know scientifically about the gut-brain connection?

Gut and brain communicate through a number of pathways. There is the Vagus nerve, that sends info to the brain with neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine as messengers. Over 90 percent of the body’s serotonin—the neurochemical targeted by the class of commonly prescribed antidepressant medications that includes Prozac, Zoloft, and Lexapro—resides in the small intestine, facilitating multidirectional communication between the digestive tract and the central nervous system. If our gut’s fragile microbial balance is upended, it sends a message to the immune system, which may trigger gastrointestinal inflammation.

There is also an association (not a determined causal relationship) between gastrointestinal disorders and some psychiatric conditions, including bipolar disorder and depression. People who live with schizophrenia have higher rates of GI inflammation than the population as a whole. People who struggle with IBS [irritable bowel syndrome] are often also diagnosed with anxiety disorders.

This explains why we have an emerging field of nutritional psychiatry that teaches patients about the appropriate foods that might reduce inflammation — namely grains and plants rich in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fiber and pre- and probiotics. No need to buy expensive probiotic supplements that have sprung up like mushrooms provided by an industry ready to cash in; yoghurt, kimchi and sauerkraut all do the job just fine. Hellebore smoothies, however, will likely not be recommended!

Music today offers a bit of madness – demons and all, Faust riding with Mephistopheles, having sold his soul….

Full Opera (Berlioz’ The Damnation of Faust) here, with Solti conducting.

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Of Wolves and Goats

Science today, not fairy tales. Although the Brothers’ Grimm The Wolf and the seven young Goats was a favorite of mine due to clever trickery and happy ending. Oh, do I like happy endings. Not always true for German fairy tales, or German anything, but I digress.

Goats first: European scientists have observed Alpine ibex, a species of mountain goat, across the last many years. They found that with increasingly hotter temperatures, the goats are shifting their diurnal habits to more nocturnal explorations, to avoid the heat.

Maybe the best move available to them, and one could celebrate their adaptability. But the shift involves numerous problems. If your visual system is set up to function in the day time, it is difficult to see at night. This matters for finding your footing in the craggy, mountainous landscapes where these mammals live, leading to slower movement and more potential accidents in this treacherous environment. More importantly, it is difficult to spot the vegetation that is your food source, signaled by color, washed out in the dark; less food leading to malnutrition is going to affect population density. Finding mates also becomes more difficult, again resulting in shrinking population numbers.

Pica and Marmots in action

Another complication is the exposure to nocturnal predators, wolves in particular, who the goats can avoid if grazing during the day. The impact of heat seems to be threatening enough at this point in time that goats are shifting their habits despite the looming dangers. One wonders what that will imply for the years to come.

Plenty of wild goats visible on a hike I took a decade ago in the North Cascades’ Mount Baker region. Goat Mountain is an 8.2 miles round trip with a steep elevation gain of 3.100 ft to a summit of 5.600 ft. We camped overnight (kids carried the gear, I was spoiled with carrying only a small backpack, water and camera) before hiking to the top, and then down to a glacial lake. It is the most beautiful hike through hemlock and pine forests, remnants of lava of the 1980 explosion of Mt. St. Helens, wildflower meadows and eventually phenomenal vistas of the surrounding mountains.

It was August, with snow banks on the summit and the lake still covered with remnants of ice. Reports from last year (2023) showed no snow and a completely ice-free lake already by the end of June.

Wolves were spotted in the Mount Baker wilderness area for the first time since the 1930s in 2014. I did not see any, ever, in the wild. But I have recently read about research with wolves that posits some fascinating questions.

Princeton University evolutionary biologists and toxicologists have tracked and examined wolves in and around the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) and compared them to wolf populations in neighboring wildlife areas. Chernobyl was the site of the catastrophic nuclear accident in 1986 in Ukraine, with one of its 4 reactors blowing, releasing huge amount of radioactivity into the atmosphere. Over 300.000 people had to be relocated, with countless health issues caused by radiation exposure emerging over the years. The area around the explosion is now an exclusion zone and the reactor itself encased in concrete sarcophagus, improved in 2016 to a structure supposed to contain the radioactive remnants for at least a century.

If you look closely, the goats are little white dots to the left of the snow field and also in the island within.

It turns out that the CEZ wolves have flourished – their population is seven fold compared to those in neighboring regions, despite the chronic, low-dose, multigenerational exposure to ionizing radiation they have been exposed to for the last 4 decades. The researchers speculate that two factors play a role in this advantage: natural selection of cancer-resistant or cancer-resilient genes in the animals and not having to deal with the stressors of human activity, in particular hunting. The removal of human threat alone is considered a huge survival benefit.

Wolves are at the top of the food pyramid, which means all of the radioactivity accumulated by those lower in the food chain ends up in their diet. It could be the case that those who have cancer resistant or resilient genes have survived more frequently than those who don’t and have transferred these genes to their offspring, creating a selective gene pool. If they are resilient, they might get cancer at the same rate as other wolves, but survive longer with a stronger immune system response. If they are resistant, they won’t get cancer as much in the first place. The burning question is, of course, if looking at their blood cell composition reveals some clues to where immunity is lodged. The researchers also looked at the genomes of the exclusion zone wolves compared to other populations and found “that the fastest evolving [genome] regions within Chernobyl are in and around genes that we know have some role in cancer immune response or the antitumor immune response in mammals.”

The implication for human health are huge – oncological research might benefit from these findings if genetic information can be isolated and translated into the human genome. Of course, just when you think you are on to something massively important, it all grinds to a halt: the research was impacted first by the pandemic, and for the last two years by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, making it impossible to continue data collection. War’s ripple effects.

Music today is neither goat nor wolf, but named after the properties of another great beast: Elephantine. The album by Egyptian Jazz musician Maurice Louca and his many northern European colleagues (he spends his time between Berlin and Cairo) is intense and requires close listening. You’ll be rewarded by an amazing mix of musical cultures and styles. Not easy listening, though.

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Schwanengesang

· (Biological) Swansong ·

The silver Swan, who living had no Note,
when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
thus sang her first and last, and sang no more:
“Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes!
“More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.””

– Orlando Gibbons The Silver Swan Madrigals & Motets 1612

Walk with me. In the wetlands, before the intense cold, predicted for the days to come, is settling in. The air is damp, a grayish blue that intensifies all the yellows and oranges around, the bark of the willow bushes, the buds of the hazelnut trees. (And also makes it very difficult to photograph birds in flight as you will see below.)

A dreamy landscape, with occasional glimpses of the sun trying to break through the cloud cover

Herons and egrets drying off and combing for morsels, respectively.

Bald eagle on the look-out.

Some geese,

lots of duck action, ducks unknown to me,

some happily (?) planning for future ducklings…

The silence, only occasionally interrupted by their flapping wings, or splashing water, is shattered when a wedge of swans appears overhead in flight, calling loudly.

A sight to behold! These are Tundra swans (Cygnus columbianus sometimes called Whistling swans)), recognizable by their black beaks and slight yellow streak around their eye (I could only see that with the single one I caught close on camera, while swimming.) They are native to North America and we can see them in winter when they fly over Oregon, foraging here in our wetlands.

These swans are monogamous and mate for life (they can live for more than 20 years), breeding once a year in the tundras of Canada and the Alaskan arctic. Come autumn, they merge in groups of up to 100 birds to fly south. The journey covers 4000 miles, flown at an altitude as high as 26.000 feet and with speeds up to 60 mph! Their biology is all about making this flight possible: bones are hollow and there are fewer of them compared to mammals; their breathing systems is adjusted in multiple ways – (during flight birds need to breathe up to 10 times faster to enable sufficient oxygen to be delivered to the muscles. All of these details, btw, I found here.)

The lungs have far more tissue density so that more blood can flow through them for oxygen exchange. Their breath flows in one direction only, entering on one path, exiting on another, enabling lots of volume to flow through in a steady stream. Their windpipe, the trachea, is different from ours’ as well – as you can see in the picture, it has coiled loops at the end, rather than going straight into the lungs.

“Why is she blasting me with all these details?” you might wonder. “Do I really need to know tundra swan anatomy?” Well, you might want to if you are interested in the genesis of the phrase “Swansong,” a phrase commonly used to describe the last output of someone before their stage exit or death, often heard in the context of famous artists showering us with brilliant work at the end of their life. (In fact, music today is Schubert’s collection of songs titled Swansong, published posthumously.)

OK, maybe Swansong is not on the forefront of your thoughts either, but it really is an interesting bit of lore – or, as it turns out, a biological fact.

Throughout history, swans have held a special place in mankind’s imagination. Tons of confabulation revolves around them, from the Greek fables to Norse mythology to the European fairy tales of the 19th century. (Details can be found in this essay, which was also the source of today’s entry citation.) One of the lasting assumptions across cultures was the claim that swans are pretty much silent or mute throughout their life time, and only sing beautifully at the point of their death. Some smart cookies, like Pliny the Elder, were already critical of that observation in CE 77, but the belief would not die. Da Vinci noted it, as did Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Coleridge, to mention just a few.

Here is the deal: swans are not mute during their lifetime. But it is also true, that due to the nature of their coiled trachea, they emit a series of long, plaintive tones when their lungs collapse during death and the air gets pushed through the windpipe, probably the base observation that started the legend.

Now where the other piece of persistent lore originates – swans are maidens, who shed their feather coats at night to bathe in the lakes and can be trapped if you steal the plumage – remains a mystery not yet solved by naturalists…

For those less inclined towards biology and more interested in art: Here is a truly terrific collection of 44 art works centered on the myth of Leda and the Swan. The author did an amazing tour de force from Michelangelo to modern photography and everyone in between, with helpful description and discussion of each piece. Really worth a read!

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Possible Worlds.

Last week I came across a short interview with some notable writers all focused on the climate crisis. Rebecca Solnit, Thelma Young Lutunatabua, James Miller and Jay Griffiths were asked multiple questions concerning their own relationship to the crisis, their levels of engagement, their hopes and fears. When asked about the efficacy of the written word for a fight against the climate crisis, their responses ranged from hope and enthusiasm to doubt. One answer lingered with me: “I embrace all forms of storytelling, and I think all are necessary in this struggle. We have to tap into people’s imaginations and show them that another world is possible.”

That is of course one of the many functions of art, showing possible worlds, next to creating beauty, communicating ideas, raising consciousness, being the canary in the coal mine. I want to focus today on how photography can serve as a window into a different, private world that allows us to see people who are perhaps different from ourselves and yet utterly familiar in their mundane settings, poses, and demeanors. With that it creates the possibility of empathy if not bonding, in a way that writing about the subject never would (at least not immediately), words relying on facts and persuasion, rather than the direct emotional involvement created by the narrative of imagery.

The photographs, a century apart, depict queer folk, and I want to stress that today’s musings are not about the issue of transgender origins, medical procedures for transitioning, or transphobia, although all warrant close examination in an era that has made the topic into a tribal rallying cry for exclusion and worse. The intensity of the debate echos other preoccupations with the “order” of things, the retention of existing hierarchies or the need for simple binary truths in this world, an either/or thinking that avoids engagement with choice and uncertainties. (And of course a backlash against the enormous progress made in the area of sexual orientation, including the right to marry a same-sex partner.)

That said, here are the biological facts. Biological categories do exist – have some objective reality in the sense that if, for example, your genetics have an xy pattern, it is enormously likely that you have an anatomy associated with males and a biochemistry associated with males, and if you are biologically xx, the same applies for women. But that reality sits alongside of the undeniable fact that there is a substantial number of people who don’t fit this pattern. Biologically some have traits that are strongly associated with male and female. And in still other cases they have biological traits that are neither typically male nor typically female, and so for example their genetic pattern is entirely different, having xo or xxy chromosomes. One more step: if this is undeniably true at the level of biology, it would be astonishing if it wasn’t reflected in people’s psychology, with one example of many, some people feeling they were born into the wrong body, and often having these feelings from a very young age.

But again, what I am after today, is how photography, in the depiction of something or someone who is different, can create a sense of familiarity nonetheless, and can convey a shared humanity. It does so by offering a narrative that invites the viewer into daily routine, anything other than the exotic fantasies contained in the stereotypes held by those feeling disgusted, alienated or threatened by queerness.

The first selection is the work of two Scandinavian women photographers, Marie Høeg (1866 – 1949) and Bolette Berg (1872 -1944), who met in Finland and lived in Norway, as business partners and as a couple. They were suffragettes and quite engaged in feminist politics on the local level, while making a living by conventional photography, studio portraits and the like. Høeg founded the Horten Branch of the National Association for Women’s Suffrage, the Horten Women’s Council and the Horten Tuberculosis Association. Berg worked more behind the camera. The photographs were part of some 400 glass plates found in a barn of their farm decades after they had died. Marked “private,” they contained images that played with gender roles, cross dressing, mimicking behavior reserved for men (arctic explorers in fur coats,) showing the androgynous protagonist as well as a number of their friends joyously defying gender norms.

The work has a home at Norway’s national photography museum, the Preus Museum in Horten. It is currently shown at the ongoing Festival of Photography and Visual Arts, PHotoEspaña, in Madrid until September. 

As you can see, the couple poses like a traditional heterosexual couple at home, going out in the boat (or sitting for a photographer in these studio props that were known to anyone at the time,) interacting with their pet, and having fun at drinking, smoking and playing cards with friends (behavior reserved for men at the time) independent of gender.

A few of the photographs show a male friend not averse to cross-dressing.

Fast forward to 120 years later, and a different part of the world. Camila Falcão has been photographing Brazilian trans women (women born into male bodies), encouraging them to pose as they wish, in their own environments. (All photographs are from her website.) Brazil’s 2019 law that considers transphobia a crime has done nothing to lower the murder rate of Brazilian queer people: it is the highest in the world, for the 13th consecutive year, with a 30% rate of 4000 killings in that span of time.

The title of Falcão’s series, “Abaixa que é tiro” refers to the reactions of the portrayed and their friends, who started commenting  ‘Abaixa que é tiro!’, celebrating being shown to the world. “The expression is used widely among the Brazilian LGBT community to address that something really awesome/fabulous is about to hit you. More in general, however, it could be said that “Abaixa que é tiro” signals a paradoxical relationship between fear and empowerment.” (Ref.)

Again, notice how an attachment to pets immediately confers familiarity.

Women are tired, women break arms, women have friends.

Women are barely out of childhood,

could be on a winning gymnastics team,

a first grade teacher,

or the smart, uncompromising sister who sets you right.

Work like this can help to deconstruct stereotypes, although it will be a long road until increased visibility leads to a decrease in violence against this population. The photography world is noticing. We have now venerable institutions calling for work to show what unites us in times of division, like, for example, the British Journal of Photography, having judged exhibitions of Portraits of Humanity. Every single image that manages to shift our consciousness and beliefs is worth it, even if not all of us can have Falcão’s talent, access or courage as an ally to a demonized minority.

Music today is sung in Portuguese by Joao de Sousa, but created by a Polish collective, Bastarda, that has the most amazing modern Jewish music in their repertoire. Check them out. I have been listening to Fado non stop for weeks.

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Of Bees, Drones and Clams.

Walk with me. This time there’ll be the bonus of learning some choice German curse words, if you listen closely enough. Muttered under my breath when I realized after a 40 minute drive to the wetlands that I had brought the camera but forgotten the memory card. My iPhone had to suffice, so you’ll get some December landscape impressions, but no close up of the birds I had come to see: the first mergansers of the season.

Less preoccupation with photography meant more time for contemplating the good news I had come across in various sources this week while thinking about the World Biodiversity Summit in Montreal. The UN’s COP 15 conference is trying to set worldwide new goals to halt and reverse nature’s diversity loss. A lot has been written in this context about the potentially catastrophic outlook for nature and humans alike, given climate change and human destruction of natural habitats. I thought I’ll pick something positive to demonstrate there’s stuff we can do. And certainly reason to stick with hope, our daily exercise, remember? (More positive examples can also be found down on the UN’s website.)

1. What I learned about bees:

European Honeybees have taken over much of the American landscapes at the expensive of native species (there used to be 1500 to 1700 native species in California alone.) Biotic homogenization, as ecologists call it, is happening across the world. Variety disappears and the same dominant species are found everywhere. This is a problem, among other things, because vulnerabilities to disease or temperature change might be tolerated differently by a more diverse population. If something threatens the honeybees and they happen to be the only pollinators around, we’re screwed. (I guess you learn some English curse words as well…) Invasive species like honeybees (now found everywhere in the world other than arctic regions) outcompete local species for food and share their own parasites they actively contribute to the demise of native pollinators.

It is also an economic question. Honeybee hives are trucked around the agricultural industry to pollinate crops ($15 billion of them!) that blossom at different times. The pollination industry itself scores about $250 million annually, with weekly rent costs for hives reaching stratospheric heights. All not so much needed if you had your native pollinators who live in your region and do the work for free. The solution: plant pollinator habitats, also know as “hedgerows!” There are now Bee-Better Certification programs that “lure investors away from extractive industries like fossil fuels and towards regenerative approaches to farming—practices that rebuild soil, store carbon, and support biodiversity—can be good for the planet while also healthy for the bottom line.”(Ref.) It will take a long time for these programs to work, but it is a start. Building corridors of mixed plants among the monocultures of blueberries or almonds or grapes might give native bee species a shot at survival.

2. And here come the drones:

Scientists have developed drones that spy nearly extinct plants in hard-to reach places like mountain sides and cliffs. Many local plants that have no defensive mechanisms like bitter taste, or thorns or the like against grazing by imported animals, now exist entirely in nooks and crannies that protect them up high, in Hawaii, for example. The drones can spot them and they have scissor equipped arms that allow them to snip small clippings of the plants. Biologist use those to propagate and thus enlarge the population of the endangered species.

3. What about clams?

Some parts of the scientific community have woken up to the fact that much indigenous wisdom can be used to protect species that are vulnerable to certain environmental conditions. Clams, for example, do not well when conditions become too acidic, a problem that is steadily growing with the increasing acidification of our oceans due to our burning of fossil fuels. Their shells become less resilient and that fragility opens clams up to predation and disease. Researchers have looked at Indigenous Sea-Gardening practices across the Pacific Northwest, where Native tribes cultivated clam beds for millennia. Caretakers crushed the shells of harvested clams and strew the fragments back into the sand. Apparently these crushed shells release carbonate into the water, neutralizing some of the acidity. Lab experiments are now done to concern and expand the possibilities of lowering pH levels this way.

The scientists are also looking at another Indigenous practices: regularly tilling of clam beds, which loosens the sediment and mixing in shell fragments. “This repeated digging could bring oxygen to burrowed clams, open more space in the sediments, and alter seawater chemistry.” (Ref.)

***

Much diversity where I walked, due to bird migration. Besides mergansers there were swans, tons of varieties of ducks unknown to me, hawks, herons and egrets. The rain paused just long enough to get a good hour of walking in, useless camera heavy in the backpack, soul light in my chest, geese above me. What privilege to be by their side, as described in today’s music.

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Hybridizing Thoughts

1. Stop here and now with the fall clean-up of your garden, should you be lucky to have one. Leaf blankets, flower stalks, withering vines all provide much needed survival help to pollinators and birds, many of whom have not had the easiest of times. (One exception: clean vegetable patches IF they had some serious pest issue. You don’t want to give those critters a chance to overwinter in place.) If you don’t trust me you can read more professional explanations here and here. “Wild” gardens provide many more food sources and places for shelter to the birds in winter. Drop the rake until February…

2. Besides the avian beneficiaries of inaction we humans benefit as well. Here is a neat study showing that the exposure to the sight and sound of birds improves our wellbeing. In case you need scientific evidence for that.

Bird and Their Songs Boost Our Mental Health, Study Finds

3. All this came to mind when listening to a podcast about birds. A special bird, in this case who turned out to be a hybrid between two different bird species, a truly rare event. Hybrids occasionally happen between close cousins (1 in 10 000,) but the two parents of the bird under consideration hadn’t shared a common ancestor in over 10 million years. The specimen was a mix between a rose-breasted grosbeak and a scarlet tanager (whose song he sang, while the looks were more like the grosbeak mom.)

The scientific assumption is that these “evolutionary experiments” confer a survival advantage to the hybrid, which in turn might shore up an avian lineage that is endangered. (Contrary to popular belief, hybrids can breed – if the hybrid mates with another hybrid, or with the same species as one of its parents.)

“It allows… independently evolved groups to share, that they’re, you know, sort of trading information back and forth on solving problems that the environment presents to them. So this might actually be important for adaptation to climate change, for example.”

4. Which brings us – you must have been waiting for it already if only as proof that my brain is back in action – to hybridization as a religious and political issue. As any number of nationalist Christian websites will tell you (and no, I am not linking to them) G-d does not want animal species to mix, or human bloodlines to merge in ways of racial intermarriage. This Divine command is found, they claim, in verse after verse in the bible – all conveniently and selectively cited – and originated as a punishment for transgression against Noah by one of his sons, the dark Ham, who in perpetuity is condemned to be inferior and whose descendants are to live in slavery. Japheth, the second son, is an idealized and blessed form of humanity superior to Ham in every conceivable way, representing Whiteness, and Shem is an archetype in between. In one foul swoop you have: an established hierarchy between White and Black, the former superior, prohibition of intermarriage, and a justification of slavery on divine authority. (In fairness many other Christian websites point out that this is false biblical interpretation.)

Note, these are not considerations of the American Antebellum South, when they were prominent. Or occurrences of the 1950s and 60s, like Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia citing the Bible in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or Reverend Jerry Falwell attributing the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision to Chief Justice Warren’s failure to know and follow God’s word, or Mississippi Senator Theodore G. Bilbo explaining that “miscegenation and amalgamation are sins of man in direct defiance with the will of God.” Ref.)

Race separation as a Divine decree and the dominion of Whiteness are making a comeback in ever louder public voices and votes here and now in 2022. Consider the issues of the constitutional right to intermarriage: some weeks ago, 157 House Republicans voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, which would enshrine marriage equality in federal law. Senator Mike Braun of Indiana explicitly stated that not banning interracial marriage was a mistake. Regulating racial boundaries has been a main topic for international right wing forces, as heard in Hungarian PM’s Victor Orban’s speeches against mixing races, which were loudly welcomed by right wing audiences in the U.S. As the conservative legal movement grows more emboldened, are there any protections that we can unquestioningly rely on?

5. I am writing this on the day this Supreme Court is hearing arguments about Affirmative Action at a Public University. You can figure out for yourself why that came to mind in my hybridizing thoughts.

Better go watch the birds on my leaf-strewn lawn.

Ham, Shem and Japheth’s story in music here.

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Unintended Consequences

My German readers currently have the opportunity to visit an exhibition called Macht! Licht! at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. The title is ambiguous – it could mean “Turn on the Light!” or “Power!Light!” The latter English translation is also ambiguous: power can refer to electricity per se, or to the uses of electric light in the context of surveillance, monitoring, torture or even destruction. (Ab)using power in the political sense.

You figure out how I took these photos of my shadow….

A description of the exhibitions contents:

Based on selected works from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, a fascinating spectrum of works of light art is presented in the darkened hall of the museum, the conceptual levels of reflection of which focus on the following (socio-)political areas: utopia/dystopia; ecology/biology; economics; violence/power; control/monitoring; advertising/manipulation; enlightenment/obfuscation; border/exclusion; public space etc.

I have obviously not seen the exhibition, but was made curious by one of the projects that is mentioned in the write-ups of the show. A collaborative team of artist Nana Petzet and biologist(s) explore the unintended consequences of artificial light used in cultural contexts – light shows during outside concerts, public nighttime events, festivals of light, etc.

Old Elbtunnel,Hamburg

Portland Airport

Parking Lot Boston, MA

The project, stretched across some years, was called Lichtfalle Hamburg (Light Trap – the link can be read in English.) It mimicked (in greatly reduced fashion with a single boat) the conditions of blue light that the City of Hamburg uses during Harbor festivals that illuminate the public landscape and night sky.

Photocredit: Helge Mundt

(“Cruise Days” they are called. It is one of those festivals, where 12,000 light sources – mostly blue fluorescent tubes – are strung in the port area and the HafenCity. Over a period of five weeks, with the aid of 40 km of cables and a team of 40 assistants, they were mounted onto buildings, quay sections, cranes, jetties, pontoons, launches, ferries, tugboats, docks, operational vehicles, trees, bridges etc.)

Photocredit: Hamburger Hafen Marketing

What would the light do to insect populations? The team counted and observed the behavior of about 16 orders of insects, moths among them but also large swarms of dayflies that usually hover above the river. Surprise, the results were of great concern. Insects are attracted to these light sources and fly around them to the point of such exhaustion that they don’t find their way home, basically dying in situ – something called the “vacuum cleaner effect. The land on surfaces and dry out, when exhausted, unable to reproduce before their death.

Hamburg Elbphilharmonie

This matters tremendously for pollination in times when we already see a huge reduction in numbers of insects due to destroyed habitats and shifts in temperatures that many species cannot adapt to. In other words, those lovely evenings celebrated with light, lifting our spirits, have truly bad consequences for agricultural environments

Old Elbtunnel, Hamburg – San Francisco Airport

Light pollution is often mentioned in terms of disrupting sleep patterns in humans and flight patterns for migratory birds, leading to huge losses there as well. We now have to add insect to the list. Here is a short intro to light pollution by National Geographic, Light Pollution 101. It discusses the problem of waste of energy as well.

Hamburg Elbphilharmonie – Hamburg Harbor Water Recycling Plant

Here in Portland, OR we have the annual Winter Light Festival that brings light art to the river for a short period of time, and the Willamette Light Brigade, who, in their words, harness the power of artful lighting to transform the cityscape by lighing bridges and advocating for the importance of night-time identity and place-making. There is WinterFest with light art in Central Oregon, and there are numerous night markets around the year that add extra lighting to city scapes that have already a high dose of light pollution through street lighting and shops windows etc.

Staircase in Ljubljana, Slovenia

For those interested what daily excessive use of light in a regular manner does to our environment, here is a relatively recent article in Nature that shows ho much research is going on in the environmental and ecological sciences. Truly interesting. And here are pictures of Portland’s light pollution and a link to the International Dark Sky Week 2022 (April 22 -30) that gives tips about how to reduce light pollution in our own households.

Photographs today are of instances where my eyes got caught by light patterns, inside as well as outside. Some of these are from Hamburg, where the Light Trap project took place.

Staircase in Paula Modersohn Becker Musem in Bremen – Stage scenery in Portland Armory

We have for the longest associated light with something positive. It offers protection, carves out social spaces, secures movement at night. Light art certainly has an enthusiastic following. It looks like we need to ask some serious questions about what the consequences are and was we are willing or should sacrifice in order to pay environmental protection more than lip service.

Advert in San Francisco – Art in Montreal – Lit Sign at RISD in Providence, Rhode Island

Here is a video that shows some of the work shown in Macht!Licht! and some other European light art. The language is German, but the images speak for themselves, Guantanomo reconstruction of a white torture chamber included.

Frei Hafen Hamburg

And here is Hamburg’s son, Brahms, played at the Elbphilharmonie – the building in some of the photos above. Pink lights and all….

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