Monthly Archives: August 2014

Armed to the Teeth: Bites from Forgotten Sharks

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As the 31-day stretch of August rapidly rushes to completion, and the balmiest days of summer fade into the imminent, cool veil of fall, 2014 also discards one of its temporal landmarks associated with these heat-stricken days. If you think I am referencing something remotely anapestic and evoking chest-fluttering nostalgia of long-forgotten, canicular childhood summers, then think again. Because I am, of course, talking about Shark Week.

Yes, that now-legendary bit of the Discovery Channel’s summer programming line-up, a selachimorph-centered festival that is closing in on three decades running, has now passed us by, ending but two weeks ago. Years ago, Shark Week initially appeared to be driven with the mission statement of Discovery in mind, one rooted in the dissemination of fundamentally educational, science-based material in an entertaining manner. This incarnation of Shark Week was the one I was fortunate enough to grow up with, and this week was a boon to my insatiably science-curious child brain, one that my neurons practically salivated over in Pavlovian form right around the time the last traces of abandoned, burnt out firecrackers left July’s dirt. The gift of science education excellence was instrumental in the development of my eventual fascination (and career trajectory) with biology, and I credit the old-school Discovery Channel’s programming with much of the inspiration and intrigue about the natural world that gilded my early days.

At the age of four, my shark ID skills were solid. However, my artistic skills were still…er….buffering.

So, given the intimate intellectual relationship I have with Shark Week and Discovery, watching what both entities have become in recent years feels like a steel-toed kick to the kidneys. There are a laundry list of offenses, and all of them hit on a single formula; the sacrifice of ethics and scientific accuracy in favor of mythology and adrenal-gland massaging codswallop; a grand invasion of heart-pumping, flash and sparkle nonsense programming based on approximately zero micrograms of actual science, all as an ill-conceived motion to inflate ratings. Some examples of Shark Week contrived falsehoods? Well, there’s this lovely bit of mass hysteria-inducing, publicity-hungry deceit initiated by cries of “oh no! Lake sharks! *wink wink*.” Also, there’s that time Discovery trotted out this steaming, embarrassingly unscientific pile of horseshit. Oh, there’s also that other time they made an entire special up. Or how about how the network can only seem to convince scientists to do Shark Week specials with them if they straight-up con them into doing so?

Others (linked above) have done a splendid job of calling out the network’s recent, fraudulent Shark Week habits, so this post isn’t going to be yet another dart in that already well-pockmarked board, but what I want to address is loosely tied to Shark Week’s newfound adoration of Megalodon (well, specifically an adoration of tricking viewers into believing the very extinct shark is still patrolling the deep…now for two years in a row).

“Megalodon”, or to be more accurate Carcharocles megalodon (or Carcharodon megalodon, it depends on what paleontologist you ask) is a popular beast, and thus is an obvious choice for many an examination by television networks (in mockumentaries or not). The extinct shark species is popular for damn good reason, too. C. megalodon was an animal of such outlandish proportions that it doesn’t seem like it could ever have existed, and yet it did, for more than 26 million years, dying out right around the time our ancestral line first harnessed that hot, orange, light-producing stuff that eats up wood (followed swiftly by the invention of S’mores and crappy ghost stories). This was a shark that, according to the most conservative estimates, exceeded 45 feet in length, and had a pair of cartilaginous bear trap-esque chompers big enough to gulp down a Ford Fiesta without even scratching the paint on its immense, triangular teeth.

And oh yes, those teeth. Those frisbee-sized blades that festooned its jaws in a ragged chain of despair. Those famous teeth, for which the animal is named (megalodon basically means “giant fucking tooth”), combined with a body bigger than a goddamn school bus, have enraptured the imaginations of young and old alike, and contemplation about what it would be like to encounter such a surreal, monstrous animal in the flesh is unavoidable.

But, here’s the deal with ol’ Megs…outside of its status as by far the largest shark that ever lived, and definitely one of the biggest predators to ever exist (getting edged out by the sperm whales alive today)…as far as we can tell, there’s nothing insanely unique about its biology. Granted, one of the most fascinating things about C. megalodon is that we don’t know that much about it. Even the size of the thing is sort of up in the air, seeing as how the scientific community has only fragmentary remains (teeth and a handful of vertebrae; the cartilaginous skeletons of sharks don’t fossilize as readily as bony skeletons, so this dearth of recorded remains is not that unusual) from which to base their calculations; estimations range from the 40s of feet in length to more than 60 feet…which in my book is the difference between “we’re going to need a bigger boat” huge and “I’m going to need a new pair of pants” huge.

Honestly, C. megalodon was cool and all, but it was basically just a Hulked-out version of any large lamniform shark (Lamniformes being the order of sharks to which great whites and makos belong). The animal is more or less like a great white had a run in with Rick Moranis and his growth ray, with maybe some very subtle differences in proportions…and a slightly different taste in prey…like taking on goddamned whales instead of comparatively diminutive sea lions. Yes, C. megalodon was something of a specialized whale killer…a shark exquisitely well-adapted to slaughtering and consuming the most massive animals of all time.

So sure, it’s teeth were heart-stoppingly big, and robust, and belonged in the titanic jaws of a beast of celebrity status….but they were just relatively standard lamniform teeth ratcheted up in size, with some limited modifications for slicing through several hundred cubic feet of whale flesh and bone at a time (increased thickness and bigger, deeper roots). For an animal so well-known for its mouth, it certainly didn’t have the most unique pearly whites among extinct sharks. The diversity of prehistoric sharks, and the diversity their feeding adaptations (which often are very divergent from today’s sharks), are woefully unappreciated, at least in comparison to C. megalodon, which is a remarkable shark due to its size and power…but I can think of a couple examples of long-extinct sharks that have far more interesting things going on at their eating ends.

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Macabre Moths: The Infernal Nocturnals

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My girlfriend is terrified of moths.

She hates them; purely, unabashedly, and completely. She despises their habit of gracelessly barreling out of the dark, smashing into anything and everything (including human faces) in a flurry of fluttering wings. She hates the way they persistently ram themselves into outdoor lights,  which oh-so conveniently tend to be right above her head just outside of the front door, cutting her off from the frustratingly close safety of her house. She loathes the angry drumming sound they make when they clumsily bat their wings against whatever wall or window they are crawling across. She shivers at the mention of their wings, which she describes as “dusty” (the powdery coating is actually made up of very tiny scales that cover the wing; butterflies have these as well). I’ve watched her spot a particularly massive, beastly, mothy bastard spread out sinisterly underneath a neighbor’s outside window sill, and immediately swing her path past it into a wide berth, eyes cautiously locked on the insect threat. She does not like them here or there. She does not like them anywhere. My girlfriend does not like the moth. She does not like them, David Lee Roth.

Because of her undeniably real, demonstrably intense dislike of moths, she was not exactly appreciative of the fact that the last week of July (July 19th through July 27th) was National Moth Week (or of the fact that I’m writing this blog post at all, frankly). For those of you that are unfamiliar, National Moth Week, started in 2011, is a global citizen science effort wherein groups of those inclined (called “moth-ers”, but I like to call them “moth-heads”) set out into the night equipped with lights, a white sheet, a bait mixture made of something like rotten fruit, molasses, or beer (preferably not the good shit; stick to domestic swill like Bud or Coors), and perhaps a camera for recording purposes…all of this to observe and categorize whatever moths they find attracted to their lights or bait, and to potentially contribute their findings to a multitude of databases. In this bit of crowdsourcing of data collection, we are able to know a bit more about the distribution of moth species (and for many species, where they turn up in the world is not well-known), and their general abundance over time, which is important to keep track of, considering that moths are good early indicators of decline in an ecosystem’s ecological health. Another major focus of National Moth Week is to bring awareness to moths, which are oftentimes regarded as boring, drab nuisances instead of the diverse, often colorful, interesting animals that they are. NMW also provides an opportunity to get groups of school age children together to not just learn about moths and the natural world that surrounds where they live, but to take part in a globally held citizen science project, hopefully inspiring some of them to take interest in the biological sciences in a more permanent sense.

Truthfully, moths are far more interesting than we give them credit for. They are diverse in form, size, coloration, and behavior. They are unfortunately pegged as dull creatures, which, at their best, are annoying, and at their worst, a pest that destroys clothes and crops. There’s a single thread runs through their popular characterization; one that paints moths as fundamentally benign, like a house fly, or a slug…something to put up with, and nothing to get too excited about; the “white bread” of the insect world. But, while it’s important to remember that moths are interesting by being incredibly important members of their ecological communities, as insatiable, leaf-obliterating larvae, as pollinators of flowering plants, or as nutrition for everything from birds to bats…there are a number of species that solidly destroy the notion that moths are innocuous at the acutely individual level. Some species are downright threatening, blatantly ignoring the memo about how moths are “supposed” to be the awkward, dirty, night shift butterflies of the world and nothing more disconcerting. These species, twisted, creepy, grotesque, and malicious even by arthropod standards, make it difficult for me or anyone else to dismiss my girlfriend’s mottephobia (the fear of moths) as being unfounded.

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