phobias

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As a post script to my last scripted post. Even though it was about spider sex—an amusing topic to ponder on a cold winter's evening—it may have given you the willies.

According to another essay by David Quammen from the same aforementioned collection of such, you may have arachnophobia. It seems that some people are born with an innate fear of spiders, while others may have a fear of snakes (ophidiophobia), while others are born with neither. But curiosiously, we humans are not born with a fear of both groups. It's either or neither but not both. It's genetic. You cannot help it.

So, if you are arachnophobic, and even the topic of spider copulation creeps you out, here's a bit of adult snake-logy that you might enjoy instead. Once again, it comes from Quammen:

"A male snake has two penises, which the experts call hemipenes, one for left-sided mating and one for right."

Talk about being ambidextrous.

-Quote from "The Boilerplate Rhino" by David Quammen

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missing spiders

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Spending a quiet evening at home in the middle of winter, reading my favorite writer of natural history—David Quammen, who manages to serve up curious observations with a garish of good humor—I'm reminded how much I miss spiders mostly because they are fun to watch and contemplate and imagine their eight-eyed, eight-legged world. Isn't it so Rikki?

Here's what Quammen writes about spider sex:

"Spiders do their mating with pedipalps, another form of modified leg, to which sperm is applied from a separate male orifice, like guacamole on a chip, before insertion. The male of the black widow spider bears on its pedipalp a fine, pointy structure called an embolus, the tip of which breaks off inside the female (bad enough in itself, but portending an even worse fate in store for the poor little dude)."

-Quote from "The Boilerplate Rhino" by David Quammen

Indeed. The Southern black widow, Latrodectus mactans, practices sexual cannibalism, defined as when a "female organism kills and consumes her mate before, during or after copulation." (Talk about a bad first date! For goodness sake, wouldn't eating your mate before copulation be counter productive?)

So the poor little black widow dude deserves our empathy. Forget his pointy, fine embolus, the female often (but not always) eats the much smaller male after they mate. I guess if you got to go, dying after sex is better than choking on a peanut butter sandwich.

Speaking of which, I think I'm out of milk. I'd better go to the store.

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knock out

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I have owned a copy of “The Song of the Dodo” for several years but at 625 pages, 178 chapters it seemed a bit daunting to dive into. There never seemed to be enough hours in the day. But after reading Quammen’s ”The Reluctant Mr. Darwin,” I felt it was time to give it a go. And go I did.

I think a good editor could have probably cut this tome down to 623 pages, which is my backhanded way of saying that "TSOTD" is a monumental book on natural history, well worth the time you need to invest into all 178 chapters. You'll never look at the natural world in the same way again.

Quammen does a skillful job of balancing scientific chapters with his worldly travels and adventures, taking us to exotic places around the globe with historical or environmental significance. But the real power in the book is his exploration into the development of ecology, basically beginning when the science found its chops, i.e. the data it had been collecting was actually put to use.

After finishing “The Song of the Dodo,” I feel that I have earned the equivalent of a PhD in island biogeography. (I wonder if I can use this on my résumé?) If I had read this book 25 years ago, I would have found my way to an ecology department at some university.

Early in the book the author describes the stack of photocopies of scientific papers “weighing eighteen pounds including the staples,” he has on his desk. By his own admission, he could have used the assemblage in the back of his truck to provide extra weight on icy roads in winter but instead, Quammen chose to read them and synthesize the information for us; presenting them in layman’s terms, explaining the jargon: minimum viable population, area-species relationships, equilibrium theory, inbreeding depression, et cetera. Lucky for us he did.

By the end of the book we have a real sense of just how endangered endangered species really are. The dodo was only one of the first to go.

Powerful book. David Quammen can write compelling science with a sense of humor.

In a five star world, this is a six star book.

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