Farewell, Lonesome George...the Last of His Kind

 It was a sad day; he was the last of his kind:

Famed Galapagos tortoise to be embalmed, displayed
 Associated Press – Tue, Jun 26, 2012

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — The beloved Galapagos Islands giant tortoise known as Lonesome George will remain a tourist attraction even in death.

Ecuador's environment minister says the reptile that became a symbol of disappearing species will be embalmed and placed on display on Santa Cruz island.

Minister Marcela Aguinaga told reporters Tuesday that an autopsy determined that Lonesome George died of old age. He was believed to be about 100 years old. He was found dead Sunday.

Lonesome George was the last of the Pinta Island giant tortoise subspecies, and he failed to leave offspring despite the best efforts of conservationists.

He was discovered in 1972 discovery on Pinta Island and became an ambassador of sorts for the archipelago off Ecuador's coast whose unique flora and fauna helped inspire Charles Darwin's ideas on evolution.

Lonesome George was a Pinta Island tortoise, a subspecies of Galápagos giant tortoise (Chelonoidis nigra):

The Pinta Island tortoise^[2] (Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii^[1][3]), also known as the Pinta giant tortoise,^[1] Abingdon Island tortoise,^[4] or Abingdon Island giant tortoise,^[1] was a subspecies of Galápagos tortoise native to Ecuador's Pinta Island.^[5]
The subspecies was described by Albert Günther in 1877 after specimens arrived in London. By the end of the 19th century, most of the Pinta Island tortoises had been wiped out due to hunting.^[6] By the mid-20th century, it was assumed that the species was extinct^{[citation needed]} until a single male was discovered on the island in 1971. Efforts were made to mate the male, named Lonesome George, with other subspecies, but no viable eggs were produced. Lonesome George died on June 24, 2012. The subspecies is believed to have become extinct; however, there has been at least one first-generation hybrid individual found outside Pinta Island.^{[note 1]}

 Maybe there's hope yet.

Giant Tortoises (tortoisi? tortoiseses?) are amazing animals, who live much longer than humans do, have more variations than we usually think:

The Galápagos tortoise or Galápagos giant tortoise (Chelonoidis nigra) is the largest living species of tortoise and 10th-heaviest living reptile, reaching weights of over 400 kg (880 lb) and lengths of over 1.8 meters (5.9 ft). With life spans in the wild of over 100 years, it is one of the longest-lived vertebrates. A captive individual lived at least 170 years.
The tortoise is native to seven of the Galápagos Islands, a volcanic archipelago about 1,000 km (620 mi) west of the Ecuadorian mainland. Spanish explorers, who discovered the islands in the 16th century, named them after the Spanish galápago, meaning tortoise.
Shell size and shape vary between populations. On islands with humid highlands, the tortoises are larger, with domed shells and short necks - on islands with dry lowlands, the tortoises are smaller, with "saddleback" shells and long necks. Charles Darwin's observations of these differences on the second voyage of the Beagle in 1835, contributed to the development of his theory of evolution.

In an attempt to save some DNA lineage of his subspecies, zookeepers had Lonesome George living is sin with two female tortoises.  They had good times, unfortunately no tortoise-lets resulted:

Over the decades, all attempts at mating Lonesome George had been unsuccessful, possibly due to the lack of females of his own subspecies. This prompted researchers at the Darwin Station to offer a $10,000 reward for a suitable mate.^[14]
Until January 2011, George was penned with two females of the subspecies Chelonoidis nigra becki (from the Wolf Volcano region of Isabela Island), in the hope that his genotype would be retained in any resulting progeny. This subspecies was then thought to be genetically closest to George's; however, any potential offspring would have been intergrades, not purebreds of the Pinta subspecies.^[20]
In July 2008, George mated with one of his female companions. Thirteen eggs were collected and placed in incubators.^[21] On 11 November 2008, the Charles Darwin Foundation reported 80% of the eggs showed weight loss characteristic of being inviable.^[21][22] By December 2008, the remaining eggs had failed to hatch and x-rays showed they were inviable.^[23]
On July 23, 2009, exactly one year after announcing George had mated, the Galápagos National Park announced one of George's female companions had laid a second clutch of five eggs.^[24] The park authority expressed its hope for the second clutch of eggs, which it said were in perfect condition.^[25] The eggs were moved to an incubator, but on 16 December, it was announced the incubation period had ended and the eggs were inviable (as was a third batch of six eggs laid by the other female).^[26]
In November 1999, scientists reported Lonesome George was "very closely related to tortoises" from Española Island (C. n. hoodensis) and San Cristóbal Island (C. n. chathamensis).^[27] On 20 January 2011, two individual C. n. hoodensis female partners were imported to the Charles Darwin Research Station, where George lived.^[28]
A reward of $10,000 was offered by the Ecuadorean government for the discovery of a suitable female to help save the subspecies.^[29]

It's the unfortunate fate being the last of your kind: zoologists managing your sex life, and in the end, the final indignity of being embalmed and mounted in a museum.  But he lived a good long life before the end:

On June 24, 2012, at 8:00 am local time, Director of the Galápagos National Park Edwin Naula announced that Lonesome George had been found dead^[30][31][32] by his caretaker of 40 years, Fausto Llerena.^[33] Naula suspects that the cause of death was heart failure consistent with the end of the natural life cycle of a tortoise. A necropsy is planned to determine an official cause of death.^[34] He was believed to be more than 100 years old.^[35]

 Farewell Lonesome George...you were quite literally one of a kind.


Tortoise hatchling...ridiculously cute:

A tour guide for the Galapagos National Park holds on his hands a Galapagos tortoise egg and hatchling

 Silly ape riding tortoise:

Walter Rothschild on Rotumah, a Galapagos tortoise that he found living in the grounds of an Australian lunatic asylum

Lonesome George, August 2007:

Lonesome George, December 2006:

Funeral party:

In this photo released by the Galapagos National Park Direction, DPNG, the body of the famed Galapagos giant tortoise Lonesome George is removed on stretcher from a corral at the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, Sunday, June 24, 2012. The Galapagos National Park says in a statement that the tortoise estimated to be about 100 years old died Sunday. Various mates had been provided for Lonesome George over the years in unsuccessful attempts to keep his subspecies alive. (AP Photo/Galapagos National Park Direction)

The Hurricane Hunters

Hunting hurricanes in a plane.  More risky than hunting eclipses; slightly less risky than  hunting tornadoes.  Or maybe it's a tossup.  Daring?  Fool hardy?  An excuse to do cool dangerous flying under the excuse of scientific research?   Don't worry; I won't give the game away.  ;-)


This Yahoo News slideshow gives a preview of the Weather Channel's upcoming series, The Hurricane Hunters:

Hurricane Hunters' debuts on The Weather Channel

Published: Monday, June 11, 2012, 3:55 AM

By Dave Walker, The Times-Picayune

Pardon Christian D'Andrea if he must suppress a smile when he’s on a commercial airliner experiencing turbulence. As creator, director and executive producer of the new Weather Channel series “Hurricane Hunters,” he’s flown through much worse. The new documentary series, which debuts with back-to-back episodes at 8 p.m. Monday (June 11), flies into and out of hurricanes with the Biloxi, Miss.-based 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron.

 There’s a gigantic ‘Wow’ factor to it that hits you right between the eyes,” D’Andrea said during a recent phone interview. “It’s 2012. We’re a very sophisticated civilization, technologically speaking. We have satellites beaming information 24 hours a day. And yet in 2012 we have to send human beings in airplanes into the eyes of hurricanes, one of the most dangerous places imaginable. Not above the hurricane but actually through it and into the eye itself.
“When you're boarding that plane for the first time to go into your first hurricane and you know where that plane is about to go, it's a bizarre feeling. But I will say one thing. You're not afraid when you're on the plane, because the crew, the guys and gals who fly those planes, are so professional. They’re so cool, it's infectious. And you become as calm as you can be given what you’re about to go do.”

Sounds like the trip of a lifetime.

A hurricane is a tropical cyclone in the  in the Atlantic and North East Pacific, or so Wikipedia claims.  Supposedly every other tropical cyclone is a typhoon, though a list of Atlantic and Pacific storms indicate no real consistency.  

And it's beside the point if you get caught in one.  Tropical cyclones actually sound like the Borg of Tornados, a collection of cyclone like thunderstorms rotating in one massive cyclone, and you--and your property-- will be assimilated:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone

A tropical cyclone is a storm system characterized by a low-pressure center and numerous thunderstorms that produce strong winds and heavy rain. Tropical cyclones strengthen when water evaporated from the ocean is released as the saturated air rises, resulting in condensation of water vapor contained in the moist air. They are fueled by a different heat mechanism than other cyclonic windstorms such as nor'easters, European windstorms, and polar lows. The characteristic that separates tropical cyclones from other cyclonic systems is that at any height in the atmosphere, the center of a tropical cyclone will be warmer than its surroundings; a phenomenon called "warm core" storm systems.
The term "tropical" refers both to the geographical origin of these systems, which usually form in tropical regions of the globe, and to their formation in maritime tropical air masses. The term "cyclone" refers to such storms' cyclonic nature, with counterclockwise wind flow in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise wind flow in the Southern Hemisphere. The opposite direction of the wind flow is a result of the Coriolis force. Depending on its location and strength, a tropical cyclone is referred to by names such as hurricane (/ˈhʌrɨkeɪn/, /ˈhʌrɨkən/), typhoon, tropical storm, cyclonic storm, tropical depression, and simply cyclone.

It's doubtful anyone will be having this conversation as the house flies by:

Himself:  Ah  fuck, it's a bleeding typhoon!
Herself: Actually, dear, technically it's a hurricane...there goes the cat...
Cat:  Mrreeeeeeoooooow!

But you never know.

The damage these storms can leave is no joke; attempts to disperse them via Better Living through Chemistry---some reasonable, other less so-- have all failed:

Artificial dissipation

In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States government attempted to weaken hurricanes through Project Stormfury by seeding selected storms with silver iodide. It was thought that the seeding would cause supercooled water in the outer rainbands to freeze, causing the inner eyewall to collapse and thus reducing the winds.^[71] The winds of Hurricane Debbie—a hurricane seeded in Project Stormfury—dropped as much as 31%, but Debbie regained its strength after each of two seeding forays.^[72] In an earlier episode in 1947, disaster struck when a hurricane east of Jacksonville, Florida promptly changed its course after being seeded, and smashed into Savannah, Georgia.^[73] Because there was so much uncertainty about the behavior of these storms, the federal government would not approve seeding operations unless the hurricane had a less than 10% chance of making landfall within 48 hours, greatly reducing the number of possible test storms. The project was dropped after it was discovered that eyewall replacement cycles occur naturally in strong hurricanes, casting doubt on the result of the earlier attempts. Today, it is known that silver iodide seeding is not likely to have an effect because the amount of supercooled water in the rainbands of a tropical cyclone is too low.^[74]
Other approaches have been suggested over time, including cooling the water under a tropical cyclone by towing icebergs into the tropical oceans.^[75] Other ideas range from covering the ocean in a substance that inhibits evaporation,^[76] dropping large quantities of ice into the eye at very early stages of development (so that the latent heat is absorbed by the ice, instead of being converted to kinetic energy that would feed the positive feedback loop),^[75] or blasting the cyclone apart with nuclear weapons.^[18] Project Cirrus even involved throwing dry ice on a cyclone.^[77] These approaches all suffer from one flaw above many others: tropical cyclones are simply too large and short-lived for any of the weakening techniques to be practical.^[78]

 Maybe the Hurricane Hunter research will reveal more than the obvious;  the best way to weather a hurricane is to not be caught in one.

Unless you're hunting one in a plane.  I wonder, do they charter tours?  Where do I sign up?


And because Yahoo news is notorious for disappearing down the memory hole, these images have been swiped for posterity. Enjoy.

Monster Jellyfish and Immortals

The first thing I think of re jellies are those poor sad creatures that abruptly intrude on your beach stroll when you step on their hunks and leap back with a loud EWWW!  everyone can hear for miles.  They look.  They know what happened.  They go back to tanning.

But these jellyfish carcases are barely a hand wide.  You'd never accidentally step on the body of stygiomedusa gigantea:

www.discoverynews.com For the first time ever, stygiomedusa gigantea, a gigantic jellyfish was caught on video by scientists in the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists say finding this massive species can provide better insight into habitat, behavior, and ecology of this mysterious creature.

Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stygiomedusa_gigantea

Stygiomedusa gigantea is a species of giant deep sea jellyfish in the Ulmaridae family.
With only 114 sightings in the last 110 years it is a jellyfish that is rarely seen, but believed to be widespread throughout the world. It is thought to be one of the largest invertebrate predators in the deep sea ecosystem. The jellyfish has an umbrella-shaped bell that can be up to a metre wide, and has four arms that extend up to six metres in length. These "paddle-like" arms lack stinging tentacles, and scientists are unsure of their exact function. It has been suggested that they might be used to envelop and trap prey.
On May 19, 2009 scientists filmed a giant Stygiomedusa in its natural deep sea habitat for the first time. Direct observations of these creatures from submersibles are very rare. It has been previously videoed by scientists off the Pacific coast of the US and by ROVs off Japan. However, this is the first time the giant jelly has been recorded in the Gulf of Mexico.^[1]

Video footage may be rare, but there are photos:

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

from Ventnor Blog

 Fortunately for divers, this jelly is a simple creature.  It "hunts" by way of running into food, ei any large object, attaches itself and waits for nutrition to happen.  If not, it detaches and moves on.  A bit like speed dating.

Another monster jelly is the Lion's Mane, capable of growing as long as a blue whale:

 The lion's mane jellyfish (Cyanea capillata) is the largest known species of jellyfish. Its range is confined to cold, boreal waters of the Arctic, northern Atlantic, and northern Pacific Oceans, seldom found farther south than 42°N latitude. Similar jellyfish, which may be the same species, are known to inhabit seas near Australia and New Zealand. The largest recorded specimen found, washed up on the shore of Massachusetts Bay in 1870, had a bell (body) with a diameter of 7 feet 6 inches (2.29 m) and tentacles 120 feet (37 m) long.^[1] Lion's mane jellyfish have been frequently observed below 42°N latitude for some time—specifically in the larger bays of the east coast of the United States.

 These do sting, but they're not fatal to a healthy adult.  Look, but don't touch!

Nemopilema nomurai , which looks a bit like a swimming mushroom, vies with Lion's Mane in size:

 It's also an inadvertent sea hazard :

 Giant jellyfish sink Japanese trawler

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November 1, 2009

CHIBA, Japan — A 10-ton fishing boat has been sunk by gigantic jellyfish off eastern Japan.

The trawler, the Diasan Shinsho-maru, capsized off Chiba`as its three-man crew was trying to haul in a net containing dozens of huge Nomura's jellyfish.

Each of the jellyfish can weigh up to 200 kg and waters around Japan have been inundated with the creatures this year. Experts believe weather and water conditions in the breeding grounds, off the coast of China, have been ideal for the jellyfish in recent months.

The crew of the fishing boat was thrown into the sea when the vessel capsized, but the three men were rescued by another trawler, according to the Mainichi newspaper. The local Coast Guard office reported that the weather was clear and the sea was calm at the time of the accident.

They might sink your ship, but otherwise are indifferent to humans:

It's literally another world down there.

And then there are the Immortals, Turritopsis nutricula:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula

 Turritopsis nutricula, the immortal jellyfish, is a hydrozoan whose medusa, or jellyfish, form can revert to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature. It is the only known case of a metazoan capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary stage.^[2][3] It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation. Cell transdifferentiation is when the jellyfish "alters the differentiated state of the cell and transforms it into a new cell". In this process the medusa of the immortal jellyfish is transformed into the polyps of a new polyp colony. First, the umbrella reverts itself and then the tentacles and mesoglea get resorbed. The reverted medusa then attaches itself to the substrate by the end that had been at the opposite end of the umbrella and starts giving rise to new polyps to form the new colony. Theoretically, this process can go on indefinitely, effectively rendering the jellyfish biologically immortal,^[3][4] although in nature, most Turritopsis, like other medusae, are likely to succumb to predation or disease in the plankton stage, without reverting to the polyp form.^[5] No single specimen has been observed for any extended period, so it is not currently possible to estimate the age of an individual, and so even if this species has the potential for immortality, there is no laboratory evidence of many generations surviving from any individual.

I don't know what they're waiting for.  If I can't have flying cars, I'll settle for immortality.