More on Use of Great Apes in Advertising

In 2006, I posted my letter to CareerBuilder.com after seeing their Superbowl TV commercial.

I sent a similar letter to Castrol Motor Oil for their Superbowl commercial this year.

Now, an article entitled “Ape Advocate Cries Foul Over Super Bowl Simians” in the Huffington Post provides some solid background on the issue.

The Greatest Gift of All

Okay, so you want :

1. to get something fun for a kid/the kids/the family.
2. to really impress your spouse/significant other/love interest
3. to get yourself something that makes you feel like you know about something special

My suggestion:

• Give the gift of Monstrous, Huge, Unbelievably Big Bubbles with the Bubble Thing.

The pictures show my mother making a big bubble, and the actual bubble she made.

I first used “the Bubble Thing” many years ago while in college. I just got one for myself after all these years and re-discovered the simple, wonderful joys that it brings. And not just to me, my wonderful, beautiful girlfriend Heidi loves to watch.

The monster bubbles that you make with the Bubble Thing wobble in the wind and swirl with magnificent iridescent colors. Many sink to the ground and pop, but some find enough lift to fly skyward. (Heidi forms personal relationships with each one I make, talking to them, rooting for them, telling them not to hit this tree branch, or those wires, or the wall of a building.)

It’ll cost you about $12 (not including some Dawn dish soap).

In Praise of Scuba Mau

During our week long stay in Cozumel, we used the services of a small, local dive shop called Scuba Mau. Owned by a couple named Mauricio (”Mau”) and Opal, Scuba Mau is a relatively new establishment right near the Villablanca hotel, just south of town. We loved them and should we ever return to Cozumel, we would definitely use them again. Exclusively.

My buddy John found Scuba Mau through Internet reviews. People raved about them consistently, so we went to them first. Here’s what we liked about them.

Small, Fast Boats
Opal and Mau are divers, and love the dive scene. As such, they know that smaller groups on faster boats make for better dives. They aim to use a six-pack dive boat rather than a bigger, slower dive boat. This gives them a greater range of sites to choose from, and makes each dive an uncrowded, intimate event.
Scuba Mau recently got their own boat, but they were not using it yet because they are still raising enough cash (~$18K USD) to get permits.

You Decide Where to Dive
If you do your research before getting to Cozumel, you can learn about the various dive sites and creatures you might see around that part of Cozumel. This is really nice with Scuba Mau, since they usually don’t pre-plan their dive sites. Each morning, as we loaded the boat, the dive master would ask whether we wanted to go to a specific site or see anything in particular. Because the groups are so small, and the other divers rarely had a destination in mind, we were able to request what we wanted each morning we were there.

No Guessing on Dive Plans
I’ve been on too many dives with inadequate communication about the dive. Each of the four dive masters that we had with Scuba Mau was articulate and thorough about the dive briefing. (You can tell that Mau and Opal expect this of their dive masters.) And because you’re always in a smaller group, you can easily get clarifications, ask questions or make requests as you need.

Great Istructors
While John and I dove, I put my girlfriend Heidi in school. Since Mau was busy, they brought in a local dive instructor named Mario. (He’s not exclusively affiliated with Scuba Mau, but I got the impression that they call him in fairly often.) Mario was an outstanding instructor for Heidi. His relaxed and friendly attitude, and endless patience, gave her exactly the kind of learning environment she needed. Even on the first day in which she became a bit seasick from the choppy water, Mario’s calm understanding made it easy for Heidi. Best of all, because of the small boat, John and I were able to join for Heidi’s first two open water dives, with no one else on the boat but the captain.

Relaxed and Friendly
The last (and first) word on any dive shop should always be about their attitude toward safety and toward people. Scuba Mau’s team are all very relaxed and friendly, and both inside the small shop and out on its small, street-front lawn everything is nice and casual. You never feel like you’re in the way for hanging out. In fact, they all really seem to enjoy the company of people with an explorer’s worldly mindset. Put short, they’re just not at all uptight.
Does that imply that they’re not careful? Not at all. Their equipment is all in servicible condition. The staff loads the boat efficiently, with all the necessary precautions and back-up equipment. Every member of the Scuba Mau team is always concerned about not only your safety, but also your comfort.

More Information
Scuba Mau’s website will provide you the latest contact information.

Return from Cozumel

Heidi and me at 60' below

Heidi and I had a wonderful time together enjoying the tropical air, watching her learn to dive, falling in love in new ways, diving with John Lancaster, dining and playing card games with John and Liz, and generally doing an unlax and rewind.

To take a dive vacation while unemployed is a strange experience. It feels reckless and irresponsible, even if I had paid for most of the trip while I was still employed. I certainly prefer not needing to be quite such a spendthrift.

Pictures from our dive are now online on facebook.

On the Cloning of Mammoths

From: Science Daily, “A Plan For Reintroducing Megafauna To North America”

I first came across the idea of Pleistocene Rewilding in an issue of Scientific American. It grabbed my fascination. The basic idea–the subtleties, nuances and beauty of which I completely gloss in this stunted summary–is that because North American megafauna from the Pleistocene ice age were erased from this continent by human activity, humans have caused a vast and deep ecosystemic impact.

The loss of these animals is revealed by the holes they left behind. Relict species such as the pronghorn demonstrate this. Pronghorn can run 55 m.p.h., despite having no extant predator that comes anywhere close in speed. They must have co-evolved with very fast predator. Interestingly, fossil evidence reveals that there were North American cheetahs that lived alongside pronghorn during the Pleistocene.

So to finish my stunted summary, there are advocates for establishing a vast animal park in the western U.S., re-wilded with surrogate species for the missing Pleistocene megafauna. Bactrian camels, African cheetahs, and so on. Such a massive endeavor could help preserve endangered species from around the world, while restoring some potentially ecologically vital behavior of missing megafauna. (Most notably, wherever elephants exist, the landscape is substantially affected by their behavioral presence. What is the long term impact from the disappearance of the mastodon and Columbian mammoth?)

If this is the first time you have come across the idea of Pleistocene Rewilding, please research it more, as I have given it unfortunately short shrift. There are many counterarguments that I don’t consider in my summary, though I am well versed in the impracticaities, risks, and rationales for not pursuing such a massive undertaking. But that’s not why I started writing this. I started writing because of the problem with elephants.

As I understand it, neither African nor Asian elephants would make suitable surrogate species for Columbian mammoth. The western North American climate is quite different–harsher winters most notably–from that of the extant elephants. It would seem that there’s not a modern surrogate to be had. However, one line of thinking proposes that this is not a limitation to restoring elephants to North America. We might be able to restore mammoths through cloning. I decided to research a bit.

Here’s the idea summarized nicely by Page Paleontological Center:

The Idea — French explorer Bernard Buigues and Larry Agenbroad, Northern Arizona University hope that Jarkov Wooly Mammoth sitting inside a 23-ton block of ice will contain flesh sample with some perfectly preserved DNA. That and some proven cloning technology could resurrect a long-gone species.

What Buigues and his team would do is something similar to the process that created the famous sheep Dolly: extracting the nucleus of one adult mammoth cell and inserting it into an empty egg cell.  The embryo would then be implanted in the uterus of an Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, a surrogate mother that would gestate it as its own but without transferring to the baby any of the elephant’s genes.

For the past 20,380 years, this 10-foot-tall mammal weighing more than 2 tons has remained buried under 4½ feet of permafrost in the steppes of northern Russia. When the frozen mammoth was pulled out last year, expedition leaders suggested the possible presence of soft tissue would make it possible to clone the extinct animal.  There is a lot we can do with even bad DNA.

We believe we have a 100 percent chance of finding parts of the mammoth, which died at 47 years old, still intact,” Buigues said.  Its head and trunk were closest to the surface, exposed to climate changes, and they have deteriorated, but not the rest of the body. Its woolly skin is in good condition and we think its internal organs and possibly even its stomach contents are as well.

There should be little problem in getting DNA if the animal is well preserved.

So that sounds really hopeful. But the same page goes on to state:

The Reality – Finding intact parts, however, does not necessarily mean finding clonable DNA.  Breathing life into the extinct woolly mammoth is likely to be a possibly impossible operation.   During life, the damage to fragile DNA is repaired naturally. After death, the genetic code quickly breaks down. Siting in ice for 20,000 years, the water damage, the ultraviolet radiation and the chemical decay will likely shatter your DNA to bits.

Robert DeSalle, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, calls this the “Humpty Dumpty” problem. These genetic fragments would likely be 10,000 to 100,000 times smaller than the DNA pieces the researchers in the human genome project are working with.  Except for a simple flu virus, No organisms have been manipulated this way.

For cloning to work, you need the entire genome be completely intact.  Even though an animal might be frozen for centuries, bacteria and fungi begin colonizing its tissues from the moment of death and consuming it until all is buried by snow.

Hmmm…that sounds rather condemning.

It’s confirmed by a quote from a researcher,

“While we can now retrieve the entire genome of the woolly mammoth, that does not mean we can put together the genome into organized chromosomes in a nuclear membrane with all the functional apparatus needed for life,” said Ross MacPhee, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History who worked on the project. “We can’t even do that with modern DNA.”

But wait…there’s more. In the same article, comes this:

Other researchers have expressed a desire to revive the mammoth by injecting frozen sperm DNA — if they can find some — into elephants. Over several generations, they’d create a creature that’s 88 percent mammoth.

So, cloning outright is impractical, but creating a mostly-mammoth hybrid may be possible. (National Geographic provides more depth on this.)

How far then does this digress from species preservation and ecosystem restoration to outright experimentation? Once we created such an estimated species, if we were then to discover its behaviors were not suitable, should we pursue selective breeding to align the new creature better to the ecosystem? If not, what are the ethical questions we must ask about eliminating a new species (or subspecies, hybrid, whatever) that we have so recently invented?

Personally, I’m for the idea of creating the 88% creature, but I think that my position may be informed more by that odd human tendency toward technological megalomania than by the initial ecological altruism that turned me on to the Pleistocene Rewilding concept in the first place. (And if sentence length can be used as an indicator of moral uncertainty, then certainly that last one presents a psychological field day.)

(I hope you weren’t expecting me to have a more solid conclusion…)

Hummingbird Dogfights on my Back Porch

Two of my great pleasures in life are playing the didgeridoo on my back porch swing–a dual-hammock-chair  loveseaty thing–and the numerous hummingbirds that come to the feeder that hangs nearby.

Four species of hummingbird are regular visitors. Speedy Black-Chinned hummers zoom in, flashing bright purple in the twilight. Delicate Calliopes perch and look about nervously as they steal rapid sips. On occasion, a Rufous hummer will pay a visit. And with trilling wingbeats, the Broad-taileds come in.

The last of these, the Broad-tailed hummers, are aggressors among all the others. On seeing any other bird arrive, one male among them comes whirring in from the huge serviceberry bush to confront and give chase to any interlopers.

The Broad-tailed hummers perform aerial combat stunts. When a male challenges the resident who dominates the feeder, they face off for a split second in mid-air, hovering with their tails fanning at each other. Then the resident lunges in. Wingtips buzz against each other for a moment until one relents and is pursued by the other.

When this happens, several others come to the feeder from all directions, enjoying a few moments of peace. They feed. Minor squabbles occur, and they jockey for positions. Soon the dominant Broad-tailed returns and, one by one, clears out each of the trespassers.

Shark Dives and Post-Vacation Detoxified Bliss

I miss the post-vacation detoxified bliss already. Seems that one day back at the office has already downgraded the bliss to a “not quite stressed yet” status.

But, I dove with sharks, and that is a good thing.

In the photo, I’m in the middle. My buddy John Lancaster is on the right.

Posting video shortly.

Video now linked. (200MB, ~13:00
, Mp4 .Mov)

Garifuna

My first encounter with the Garifuna people was in 1992 when I stayed in Livingston, Guatemala for a couple nights. My Israeli travel companion Yaron and I hired a small lancha down Rio Dulce, past the warm springs and to Guatemala’s Caribbean coast. Terns glided above, occassionally rolling into a dive and nonchalantly splatting onto the water’s surface. Livingston has Guatemala’s population of people of African descent: the Garifuna.

In two days, I will be in Honduras, on Roatan island. There live Garifuna people there, too. I am eager.

A Backyard Pair o’ Ducks

By mountain torrents swung the birdfeeder, eschewing its contents onto the snow.

Through thaws and freezes the seed feed sank into the snow.

By springs warming, it emerged again, a granary pile from receding snow.

To it they come, and Rachel and I watch. One brown female. One curl-tailed male. Two mallards who waddle up from the stream, across my dormant lawn, to dine together in the mid-morning sun.

T: What’s another name for a crate full of duckings?

R: A box of quackers?

Coyote on Swaner

When I came to Park City, Utah as a prospective home buyer in 2002, I remember looking out from the real estate agent’s car as she explained that the area just southwest of Interstate 80 was a nature preserve. I spotted a coyote loping across the flat expanse, his gray-brown silhoutted against the white snow.

Today, driving the same road in the opposite direction, I saw across the expanse a distant canine figure making its way southward. I saw Sandhill Cranes in a different area of the Swaner Nature Preserve a few days ago. They nest on the ground, braving hungry predators.

I drive to work.