Opening day is usually chaotic, nothing new there. We're implementing a new scheduling system designed by a company that has "years of exerpeince" and, well, it shows. Still, once the kids are in the room, once attendance is taken and the procedures reviewed, good things happen.
I simultaneously dropped a paper clip and my set of keys (like most floats my key ring rivals that of a warden). The kids predict what they think will happen, then note what actually does.
The knot of keys and the paper clip hit the ground at the same time. Really. Try it.
Five minutes later I asked a student which hit the ground first.
The paper clip.
"Why do you think that?"
Cuz that's what you said.
Pretty sure I didn't, but I don't argue the point.
"Which one did you see hit the ground first?"
They both hit at the same time.
In school, you succeed for producing the "correct" answer, which doesn't always coincide with the right one. If the child heard me say the paper clip hit first, that's his answer, even if he observed otherwise.
It's a tough habit to break. In the long run, he might even be better off picking the authoritative "correct" answer even when he can see otherwise.
Why does teaching science matter then?
With science, a child has a framework to challenge dogma. It's not enough to say challenge authority; you need to give the children tools. It's easy to create cranks with tinfoil hats, much harder to create critical thinkers.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Sunday, May 4, 2008
I'm an idiot...
I'm in the middle of cleaning up and moving stuff around.
Yes, some posts are duplicated.
Yes, most were originally on Everything2.
Yes, some posts are duplicated.
Yes, most were originally on Everything2.
puddles (June, 2004)
Children gravitate to puddles.
Children see things before they are taught they do not exist. With enough education, they learn to avoid puddles. They no longer waste time staring at the edge of a pond.
My daughter, now old enough to have children of her own, still whiles away time at the edge of water. Yesterday we wasted some time on a warm June evening staring into a 15 gallon bucket of pond water, kept by the garden for watering plants. She did this partly to keep me company, but mostly because she wanted to. On the days I am sure I screwed up as a parent, I need to remember this.
If you stare at the night sky long enough, details emerge. A hundred stars turns into a thousand. If you hold a handful of pond water, you might not see anything at first. Look a little harder. Look for movement. It's there.
I shelled peas today, something I love to do. I split the impossibly green pod, then run my thumb inside, freeing the peas. Some bounce away onto the ground, looking to snuggle into the earth. I leave them be.
Shelling peas is supposed to be tedious--it's one reason Americans wanted to get off the farm, I suppose.
Children see things before they are taught they do not exist. With enough education, they learn to avoid puddles. They no longer waste time staring at the edge of a pond.
My daughter, now old enough to have children of her own, still whiles away time at the edge of water. Yesterday we wasted some time on a warm June evening staring into a 15 gallon bucket of pond water, kept by the garden for watering plants. She did this partly to keep me company, but mostly because she wanted to. On the days I am sure I screwed up as a parent, I need to remember this.
If you stare at the night sky long enough, details emerge. A hundred stars turns into a thousand. If you hold a handful of pond water, you might not see anything at first. Look a little harder. Look for movement. It's there.
I shelled peas today, something I love to do. I split the impossibly green pod, then run my thumb inside, freeing the peas. Some bounce away onto the ground, looking to snuggle into the earth. I leave them be.
Shelling peas is supposed to be tedious--it's one reason Americans wanted to get off the farm, I suppose.
But just stop for a minute and think about what it means to live in a land where 95% of the people can be freed from, the drudgery of preparing their own food.
James E. Bostic, Jr*
Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Rural Development
I enjoy shelling peas. My father, not much older than me, cannot shell peas anymore. Not sure he ever enjoyed it when he could, but he would today. He still enjoys eating them, though he turns blue now and again when eating things pea-sized. June is pea season. It is my father's last pea season.
Desire is a funny thing.
The family microscope is a teaching scope--Kerry and I can look at another world together. When one wanders away from one's usual world, it's good to have company.
We stared into the same world together.
The critter peeked from under a duckweed leaf, saw an even tinier critter, and munched. It moved, well, gleefully.
I am, of course, anthropomorphizing....but gleeful is the right word. We can reduce it to the transfer of energy from one critter to another, but the subsequent burst of energy gave me a burst of energy--glee is contagious.
Turns out the critter was an ostracod. I never saw an ostracod before. I never thought about them when I used pond water to feed the garden. I knew that pond water made great fertilizer. I just never wondered why. "Glee" (or energy) gets transformed into plant growth. Which means ostracods die.
Ostracods have sex. Ostracods eat. Ostracods have baby ostracods.
Boy ostracods attract girl ostracods by using flashing lights. Boy ostracods use "a special long leg" to pass sperm into girl ostracods. I bet a boy ostracod enjoys his "special long leg."3
Watering my plants just got harder.
In the 17th century, Antony van Leeuwenhoek made microscopes. Invented them, really. He saw things no one saw before.
I then most always saw, with great wonder, that in the said matter there were many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving. The biggest sort... had a very strong and swift motion, and shot through the water (or spittle) like a pike does through the water. The second sort...oft-times spun round like a top...and these were far more in number.
Antony van Leeuwenhoek, in report to the Royal Society**
I cannot imagine the wonder coursing through Leeuwenhoek's veins, but I know what I felt as I sat with my eldest on the stoop, seeing critters we never imagined. We did not know they were ostracods yet. We did not know much about them at all. We knew this much, though--they got excited when they found something good to eat. We could see them munch on something else, then could see the "something else" in their bellies. Voyeurs, we were.
This is the world we live in. You have innumerable critters in your gut, in your nose, on your skin. You are surrounded by a cloud of bacteria. Every step you take destroys uncountable lives, but creates ground ripe for uncountable more.
We think we are special, and perhaps we are.
Yearning. Lust. Desire. I seek light, warmth, food, and love. So do animalcules. In January this would depress me. In June, with the infinite light of early summer, it makes sense.
_____________________________________________
*From The Unsettling of America, in "The Body and the Earth," Wendell Berry, p. 96.
**Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/leeuwenhoek.html
bee
Occasionally I will stumble upon an exhausted bee, dying on a flower. Too tired to move, but still alive enough to thrust its tongue into the nectar. I leave those bees well enough alone. Should I be gasping my last breaths with my tongue buried in my life's lust, I trust the bees will return the favor.
Tonight I found a bee clinging to a cluster of oregano flowerlets. Her head hung awkwardly over the cluster, missing the pollen and nectar of the flowers under her feet. I only saw it because I went to pick an oregano leaf.
The bee's middle leg occasionally moved, as though reaching for an itch. The wings trembled. It was dusk, the bee was, I thought, dying, or maybe, I said aloud to my wife, it was just resting.
I explained to Leslie, who has heard me explain too many ridiculous theories in our 26 years together (she listens intently, as though I might make some sense, and I speak intently, knowing she will listen, no matter how silly I am being--we love each other, after all), that perhaps the bee was only resting.
She challenged me, fairly. "How do you know it's only resting?"
Well, I saw a bumble resting on a marigold just last week, and in the morning, it was gone.
"Did you look on the ground," she asked, and I admitted that I had not, preferring to believe that my comatose bumble had been resurrected. And at that moment, I suspected that my bumble had merely fallen off the marigold, dead.
Still, the idea of a bee dying on a cluster of flowerlets with her head hanging awkwardly off to the side bothered me enough to push another cluster of flowers towards her head. My wife watched. As I mentioned, she loves me, and she knew why I wanted to bury that bee's head in a flower, as crazy as the idea was. Because she knew my motive, she remained silent--not a skeptical silence, more a let's see where this goes silence, a silence of faith.
The bee buried its head into my offered flower. I figured that was it--she'll die there, and in the morning, when I see her carcass still on the flower, her head buried in nectar, I'll be glad to know I made her last moments a little better. Why not?
Still, we live in a wonderful universe, and few things end as we predict. I was now in a peculiar position. The bee held her head in the clump of flowers I held; the bee's body, however, was still on the original bunch of flowerlets. Even in my most magnanimous moments, I do not envision holding a plant for an hour or two for dying insects. I am not a hospice for infirmed winged critters.
I gently tried to pry the flowers apart. The bee's body followed the bee's head, and I let go. She now rested comfortably with her head buried in an oregano flower. I have buried my own nose in oregano flowers. There are worse places to die.
Maybe it was the calories in the oregano nectar. Maybe it was the shimmying of the flowers. Maybe bees do in fact just rest at times (shhhh, don't tell the bee mythologists). She pulled her head out of the flower, then flew to a neighboring oregano plant, one where a human was less likely to interfere with her rest.
Tonight I found a bee clinging to a cluster of oregano flowerlets. Her head hung awkwardly over the cluster, missing the pollen and nectar of the flowers under her feet. I only saw it because I went to pick an oregano leaf.
The bee's middle leg occasionally moved, as though reaching for an itch. The wings trembled. It was dusk, the bee was, I thought, dying, or maybe, I said aloud to my wife, it was just resting.
I explained to Leslie, who has heard me explain too many ridiculous theories in our 26 years together (she listens intently, as though I might make some sense, and I speak intently, knowing she will listen, no matter how silly I am being--we love each other, after all), that perhaps the bee was only resting.
She challenged me, fairly. "How do you know it's only resting?"
Well, I saw a bumble resting on a marigold just last week, and in the morning, it was gone.
"Did you look on the ground," she asked, and I admitted that I had not, preferring to believe that my comatose bumble had been resurrected. And at that moment, I suspected that my bumble had merely fallen off the marigold, dead.
Still, the idea of a bee dying on a cluster of flowerlets with her head hanging awkwardly off to the side bothered me enough to push another cluster of flowers towards her head. My wife watched. As I mentioned, she loves me, and she knew why I wanted to bury that bee's head in a flower, as crazy as the idea was. Because she knew my motive, she remained silent--not a skeptical silence, more a let's see where this goes silence, a silence of faith.
The bee buried its head into my offered flower. I figured that was it--she'll die there, and in the morning, when I see her carcass still on the flower, her head buried in nectar, I'll be glad to know I made her last moments a little better. Why not?
Still, we live in a wonderful universe, and few things end as we predict. I was now in a peculiar position. The bee held her head in the clump of flowers I held; the bee's body, however, was still on the original bunch of flowerlets. Even in my most magnanimous moments, I do not envision holding a plant for an hour or two for dying insects. I am not a hospice for infirmed winged critters.
I gently tried to pry the flowers apart. The bee's body followed the bee's head, and I let go. She now rested comfortably with her head buried in an oregano flower. I have buried my own nose in oregano flowers. There are worse places to die.
Maybe it was the calories in the oregano nectar. Maybe it was the shimmying of the flowers. Maybe bees do in fact just rest at times (shhhh, don't tell the bee mythologists). She pulled her head out of the flower, then flew to a neighboring oregano plant, one where a human was less likely to interfere with her rest.
Seven weeks before my mother died, she danced. We had gathered at the Crab House in Cape May, where our family swarms annually. The Crab House is like so many other places down by the shore--plain brown paper table cloths, crab mallets, beer, and music.
Breast cancer had poked my mother's brain with nests of useless cells. Her bones ached. Her liver was swollen from metastases. When no one was looking, she moved like a marionette. Publicly, however, she moved slowly, gracefully.
In June of 1996, we danced. We knew she was dying. She knew she was dying. Others at the restaurant had no way of knowing, and they joined in our maniacal twirling, singing, laughter. The others could not know she was dying, her energy so high, but we knew, and danced all that much harder. We knew she would not be back next year, we knew she was suffering, but the joy that night was real. We were celebrating life--not just hers, not just ours. Our joy was contagious, and the joint was hopping.
My mother taught her children to bury our heads in nectar the rare days we could find it. That nectar even at all exists boggles the mind. That it exists for us and for the bees, a miracle.
colony collapse disorder
(This was written last fall--the bees are coming back again.)
Walking to school in the dark of winter allows for thinking, but when it's truly dark, my thoughts seem wordless.
The past week or two, a hint of steel blue light has softened the eastern horizon, and now words bubble up as I walk. I try to hold on, but the words make little sense once the sun rises. What follows may only make sense in the earliest dawn light in February.
The bees have been dying again, but the mites are not to blame. Scientists call it Colony Collapse Disorder, which sounds like something curable with a serotonin uptake inhibitor. The almond industry may be threatened, but I'm more worried about the bees than the almonds.
The bee colonies look fine from the outside, with bees wandering in and out the hive, but when the hives are opened, most of the bees are gone. Not dead. Gone.
The assumption is that the bees die outside the colony--any other explanation gets one into tinfoil hat territory.
Bees are far more sophisticated critters than most hominids realize, and while a spike in almond prices might have a financial impact here (my love adores almond butter), I am troubled by this for more basic reasons.
I think my sister's death may be partly to blame. She was killed by a Christian missionary's errant driving, a gentleman who has assured me that he will "ask God of the Universe to bring you solace and sympathy." Earlier he let me know he's been asking God to give me the faith to keep trusting God's plan. I might put more weight in his words had his God of the Universe asked the missionary to stop immediately after his actions tore my sister apart, but no matter.
So now I put my faith in an apple orchard in Tipton, Michigan--the bees keep buzzing, the apples keep coming, and this past summer saw a resurgence of honeybees around here. Mary Beth's breath helped feed the trees.
Walking to school in the dark of winter allows for thinking, but when it's truly dark, my thoughts seem wordless.
The past week or two, a hint of steel blue light has softened the eastern horizon, and now words bubble up as I walk. I try to hold on, but the words make little sense once the sun rises. What follows may only make sense in the earliest dawn light in February.
The bees have been dying again, but the mites are not to blame. Scientists call it Colony Collapse Disorder, which sounds like something curable with a serotonin uptake inhibitor. The almond industry may be threatened, but I'm more worried about the bees than the almonds.
The bee colonies look fine from the outside, with bees wandering in and out the hive, but when the hives are opened, most of the bees are gone. Not dead. Gone.
The assumption is that the bees die outside the colony--any other explanation gets one into tinfoil hat territory.
Bees are far more sophisticated critters than most hominids realize, and while a spike in almond prices might have a financial impact here (my love adores almond butter), I am troubled by this for more basic reasons.
I think my sister's death may be partly to blame. She was killed by a Christian missionary's errant driving, a gentleman who has assured me that he will "ask God of the Universe to bring you solace and sympathy." Earlier he let me know he's been asking God to give me the faith to keep trusting God's plan. I might put more weight in his words had his God of the Universe asked the missionary to stop immediately after his actions tore my sister apart, but no matter.
So now I put my faith in an apple orchard in Tipton, Michigan--the bees keep buzzing, the apples keep coming, and this past summer saw a resurgence of honeybees around here. Mary Beth's breath helped feed the trees.
This was written last fall...the bees are coming back again.)
Last time I touched my sister was when her blood oozed onto my hands as I rummaged through what remained of her car. After crawling through the wreckage, my hands were smeared with red blood, a miracle of sorts, as she had been dead for some time by then. I went to a diner with her lover, ate without washing my hands, an Act of Communion of sorts. I think folks who worship the God of the Universe have a similar ceremony.
According to entomologists, the Colony Collapse Disorder probably started a couple of years ago. I think it started November 2004.
And I think all the bees are flying to Tipton.
ebb tide
Children learn the smell of decay from their grandparents. Grandma naps with her mouth open.
"Grandma smells...."
"Shhh...."
And death becomes scary.
A tottering gentleman walks near the edge, his shoes no longer sinking as they once did.
The bay pulls back. Low tide. A glimpse of mud flats reminds him of a thigh, of her. A quick flush, embarrassed by unshared thoughts.
On the jetty a few oysters and mussels gape like old folks sleeping. The sicksweet scent of death blends with the exuberant breath of critters who feast on the shore's edge, gorging on life before the tide returns.
The Delaware Bay etches the gray February skies. A single tern hovers a foot over a careless spearing, dives, then seemingly walks on water a moment as it swallows the writhing flash of silver, no longer alive, not yet dead.
He lifts a whelk shell, and sniffs. His nose knows before he does, and the still rotting corpse is tossed back to the water.
A grey shadow scuttles towards the whelk flesh.
The beach has shifted, he has grayed. He stands on the spot--almost sure. She showed him the sea monsters that grinned back at them when they arced underwater to stare at the August sun.
He trudges home.
The tide returns.
How do you know the fish are enjoying themselves?
I grew up close enough to the Jersey shore to have spent many hours submerged up to my nose in the Atlantic Ocean. If you tilt your head back underwater, you can see your reflection in the underside of the sea; a silvery, shimmery Neptune child gazes back.
I mostly bobbed up and down, nose sometimes in the water, sometimes out, pretending I was a salt-water crocodile. With eyes so close to the surface, the seaweed and broken reeds floating by loomed like large islands. When I turned away from the shore gazing eastward, I was the largest creature in the universe, not quite human anymore.
In New Jersey, what most of the world calls silversides or smelt, we call spearing. Menidia notata. They are mostly transluscent, no bigger than a pinky. Each side has a silver band that looks like smooth tin foil. They have straight jawlines that make them look rather glum close-up, but since we mostly saw them when threading them on a hook as bait, looking glum seemed appropriate.
Spearing travel in huge schools, almost invisible except for the occasional flash as the sun catches the silver. The surface sometimes erupted with them when a predator came underneath the school, but otherwise spearing had no particular reason to jump.
Or so the books will tell you.
One August afternoon, when I was 11 or 12ish, and I was busy conquering the seaworld, a piece of a phragmites reed drifted by. A tiny fish jumped over it. Odd.
I drifted closer to the reed, my eyes inches away. One fish, then another, their bands of tin flashing in the sun. I spotted the school just below the surface. I figured a few got too close to the reed, and jumped over it out of need. I continued to watch.
The fish jumping over the reed appeared to turn back. The school was mulling about in no particular direction. The fish were lining up to jump over the reed.
For the empiricists:
The individual subjects were observed approaching the reed at about 1 to 2 inches below the surface, then leaping about 1/2 inch before the reed, clearing it by no more than a 1/2 inch, then appeared to turn after reentering back into the water. The fish consistently approached the reed from the same side.
For the rest of you:
How do you know the fishes are enjoying themselves? They jump for no apparent reason over a randomly floating object on a lovely day when (for the moment) no predators were interested in them, when the water was not cloudy with the milt of spawn, and when they forgot a crocodile sea god was watching).
I observed this more than once, or so I remembered. I am old enough now confuse imagination and memory. The tao tale above says as much as needs to be said contemplating joy in fish, and the tale reminded me of my jumping spearing.
Then the tao met Google.
Had anybody ever reported seeing fish jump over reeds for no apparent reason (or at least for any reason apparent to humans, who have an unsatiable need for "reasons"). If you throw "fish" and "jumping" and "twig" together, you get a few hits. One of the hits is for an entry in Fish-Sci.
Fish-Sci is a listserv, a "scientific forum on fish and fisheries." On it fish biologists carry out long, serious conversations about, well, fish. You will find discussions on "otoliths in dolphinfish", "iron content in adult eel", and "fish biomass estimates for oligotrophic systems," all within the past 6 months.
The inquiry started innocently--Randy E. Edwards, Ph.D. and principal scientist for the Center for Coastal Geology needed to present a poster to International Symposium on Sturgeon in Oskosh, WI back in 2001. His question was simple: why do Gulf sturgeon jump? In his thoughtful letter, he listed numerous known reasons why fish jump.
A number of hypotheses have been brought forward to explain jumping behavior and include: parasite shedding, startle reflex, behavioral communication (to alert other individuals of their presence), to help shed eggs during spawning, nuptial behavior, and air gulping or swim bladder adjustment. .... Gulf sturgeon jumping is not temporally random, but instead is concentrated in the early morning and late afternoon. Why mullet jump (often in the same habitats as sturgeon) is not known.
The resulting discussion takes on a dance worthy of Albert the Alligator and company in Pogo. Fish apparently jump, at times, for no discernible reason.
Ivor Growns, a scientist with the Australian government, dodged the issue with an anecdote:
On a lighter note, I have heard of a member of the public sending a letter to their local parlimentarian asking why fish jumped. The minister asked for an explaination [sic] from the Fisheries department. The staff member sent back a reply saying "Because they are happy".
Another scientist, Glenn Crossin, a salmon specialist for Centre for Applied Conservation Biology in Vancouver, Canada, notes that sockeye salmon expend tremendous amounts of energy getting to their spawning grounds, yet when they get there, spend two weeks jumping and wasting energy.
Energetically one might think that this would be a risky behavior. Salmon typically expend most of thier [sic] fixed somatic energy reserves (mostly lipid) just reaching the spawning ground. Thus to expend limited energy unnecessarily, particularly when their one and only spawning opportunity lays ahead, seems risky.
When he asked his 9 year old nephew what he thought, the child answered "maybe they are just so happy to have made it there."
Ha-ha, kids are cute, let's get back to science.
Dr. Rodney Rountree is a scientist. He has a Ph.D., he teaches at the University of Massachusetts, he knows fish. He finally said what the others were skirting:
Fish likely jump for a lot of reasons, but I've often observed fishes jumping for no obvious reason (i.e., no predators or feeding behavior). I've often felt that the often cited purpose of jumping as an effort to dislodge external parasites (e.g., ocean sunfish) seemed inadequate. I even admit to thinking that some fish are just playing after on many different occasions watching Atlantic silversides (Menidia menidia) jumping over floating twigs over and over again. It sure seemed like a game.... The jumping fish never made contact with the twig, which might be expected if they were trying to rub off a parasite or scratch an itch.
Spearing like to play. Or at least it's a reasonable hypothesis.
I wonder what else I taught myself to forget.
Sources:
FISH-SCI archives, June, 2001, http://segate.sunet.se/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0106&L=fish-sci
Personal observations and a ragged memory
I mostly bobbed up and down, nose sometimes in the water, sometimes out, pretending I was a salt-water crocodile. With eyes so close to the surface, the seaweed and broken reeds floating by loomed like large islands. When I turned away from the shore gazing eastward, I was the largest creature in the universe, not quite human anymore.
In New Jersey, what most of the world calls silversides or smelt, we call spearing. Menidia notata. They are mostly transluscent, no bigger than a pinky. Each side has a silver band that looks like smooth tin foil. They have straight jawlines that make them look rather glum close-up, but since we mostly saw them when threading them on a hook as bait, looking glum seemed appropriate.
Spearing travel in huge schools, almost invisible except for the occasional flash as the sun catches the silver. The surface sometimes erupted with them when a predator came underneath the school, but otherwise spearing had no particular reason to jump.
Or so the books will tell you.
One August afternoon, when I was 11 or 12ish, and I was busy conquering the seaworld, a piece of a phragmites reed drifted by. A tiny fish jumped over it. Odd.
I drifted closer to the reed, my eyes inches away. One fish, then another, their bands of tin flashing in the sun. I spotted the school just below the surface. I figured a few got too close to the reed, and jumped over it out of need. I continued to watch.
The fish jumping over the reed appeared to turn back. The school was mulling about in no particular direction. The fish were lining up to jump over the reed.
For the empiricists:
The individual subjects were observed approaching the reed at about 1 to 2 inches below the surface, then leaping about 1/2 inch before the reed, clearing it by no more than a 1/2 inch, then appeared to turn after reentering back into the water. The fish consistently approached the reed from the same side.
For the rest of you:
How do you know the fishes are enjoying themselves? They jump for no apparent reason over a randomly floating object on a lovely day when (for the moment) no predators were interested in them, when the water was not cloudy with the milt of spawn, and when they forgot a crocodile sea god was watching).
I observed this more than once, or so I remembered. I am old enough now confuse imagination and memory. The tao tale above says as much as needs to be said contemplating joy in fish, and the tale reminded me of my jumping spearing.
Then the tao met Google.
Had anybody ever reported seeing fish jump over reeds for no apparent reason (or at least for any reason apparent to humans, who have an unsatiable need for "reasons"). If you throw "fish" and "jumping" and "twig" together, you get a few hits. One of the hits is for an entry in Fish-Sci.
Fish-Sci is a listserv, a "scientific forum on fish and fisheries." On it fish biologists carry out long, serious conversations about, well, fish. You will find discussions on "otoliths in dolphinfish", "iron content in adult eel", and "fish biomass estimates for oligotrophic systems," all within the past 6 months.
The inquiry started innocently--Randy E. Edwards, Ph.D. and principal scientist for the Center for Coastal Geology needed to present a poster to International Symposium on Sturgeon in Oskosh, WI back in 2001. His question was simple: why do Gulf sturgeon jump? In his thoughtful letter, he listed numerous known reasons why fish jump.
A number of hypotheses have been brought forward to explain jumping behavior and include: parasite shedding, startle reflex, behavioral communication (to alert other individuals of their presence), to help shed eggs during spawning, nuptial behavior, and air gulping or swim bladder adjustment. .... Gulf sturgeon jumping is not temporally random, but instead is concentrated in the early morning and late afternoon. Why mullet jump (often in the same habitats as sturgeon) is not known.
The resulting discussion takes on a dance worthy of Albert the Alligator and company in Pogo. Fish apparently jump, at times, for no discernible reason.
Ivor Growns, a scientist with the Australian government, dodged the issue with an anecdote:
On a lighter note, I have heard of a member of the public sending a letter to their local parlimentarian asking why fish jumped. The minister asked for an explaination [sic] from the Fisheries department. The staff member sent back a reply saying "Because they are happy".
Another scientist, Glenn Crossin, a salmon specialist for Centre for Applied Conservation Biology in Vancouver, Canada, notes that sockeye salmon expend tremendous amounts of energy getting to their spawning grounds, yet when they get there, spend two weeks jumping and wasting energy.
Energetically one might think that this would be a risky behavior. Salmon typically expend most of thier [sic] fixed somatic energy reserves (mostly lipid) just reaching the spawning ground. Thus to expend limited energy unnecessarily, particularly when their one and only spawning opportunity lays ahead, seems risky.
When he asked his 9 year old nephew what he thought, the child answered "maybe they are just so happy to have made it there."
Ha-ha, kids are cute, let's get back to science.
Dr. Rodney Rountree is a scientist. He has a Ph.D., he teaches at the University of Massachusetts, he knows fish. He finally said what the others were skirting:
Fish likely jump for a lot of reasons, but I've often observed fishes jumping for no obvious reason (i.e., no predators or feeding behavior). I've often felt that the often cited purpose of jumping as an effort to dislodge external parasites (e.g., ocean sunfish) seemed inadequate. I even admit to thinking that some fish are just playing after on many different occasions watching Atlantic silversides (Menidia menidia) jumping over floating twigs over and over again. It sure seemed like a game.... The jumping fish never made contact with the twig, which might be expected if they were trying to rub off a parasite or scratch an itch.
Spearing like to play. Or at least it's a reasonable hypothesis.
I wonder what else I taught myself to forget.
Sources:
FISH-SCI archives, June, 2001, http://segate.sunet.se/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0106&L=fish-sci
Personal observations and a ragged memory
Light a candle.
May apple orchard blossoms fed by the energy of sunlight caught by the tree's leaves beckon to honey bees. Apple trees are sexual beings. Offering nectar, their sticky stigmas wait under the warm spring sun for the brush of pollen.
The bees collect nectar, and make honey. In the second week of a bee's life, she eats lots of honey, which she converts to wax through special glands under her belly; her belly exudes wax scales, which other bees then harvest for the hive.
The bees chew the wax and shape it to form the honeycomb; they use hexagonal tubes to store the honey, getting the most volume for the least amount of wax. Ask a mathematician to come up with a more efficient shape.
In the olden days, kids chewed on honeycombs. 'Course, in the olden days, most kids were breastfed, too. Now it's Enfamil and Bazooka Joe.
Light a candle.
Forests of plankton caught sunlight millions and millions of years ago. The plankton sank and was buried. Under increasing pressure and temperature, the bonds of life transform into hydrocarbons we burn today.
A few miles from here, petroleum is cracked in refineries--gasoline, oils, and paraffin all come from the same rich crude. Travel through the northern corridor of the New Jersey Turnpike and you can see the cracking towers lighting the sky, flames licking over a puzzle of giant pipelines and huge tanks.
Most candles today are made from paraffin.
Just about every school child knows that plants capture sunlight and carbon dioxide to form "stuff": our food, our heat, our homes, our air all depend on photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide and water fueled by the energy of the sun form carbohydrates and release oxygen.
Chlorophyll gets all the glory--it captures the energy of photons, lassoing excited electrons like roping calves as they bounce from chlorophyll molecule to chlorophyll molecule, finally calmed down enough to be converted into chemical energy.
Still, after all is said and done, the light reaction leaves us with just ATP and NADPH--enough to keep you going if you're a bacterium, but nothing you'd serve at Christmas dinner.
Credit Melvin Calvin for figuring out the cycle of reactions that fix carbon dioxide to organic compounds during photosynthesis. It's how an acorn can turn into a massive tree without "using up" soil.
The critical step is grabbing hold of a carbon dioxide molecule (relatively rare in our air, despite its starring role in global warming) and plying it into existing organic compounds, creating high energy hydrocarbon bonds that make the existence of humans possible.
At the heart of the process is an ancient enzyme rubisco. Some enzymes can catalyze millions of reactions per second.
Not rubisco--it churns out new molecules at the parkinsonian rate of 3 reactions per second.
Most enzymes are amazingly picky; each enzyme reacts only with very specific molecules.
Not rubisco--it gets confused. Oh, it mostly gets things right, grabbing a carbon dioxide molecule to fix to a carbon chain, but now and again it grabs oxygen instead. Oh, well.
It's an old, old enzyme.
It's an inefficient enzyme.
It's an unevolved enzyme.
It's also the most abundant protein on this planet.
Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the physical world
It is easy to teach science badly, or what passes as science anyway.
With textbooks morphing into monoliths, immutable facts are drilled into the cranium. While a few pages of the text may allude to classic experiments, they are presented like ancient battles in a history book--the experiments matter for their contribution to the scientific database, not for the opportunities in thinking they present the student. As the database increases, we are obliged to increase the diameter of the craniotomies drilled into our students' skulls.
I stumbled onto a wonderful site, What is Science? while googling, natch, "What is science?"--it looks like a simple question. Seems a science teacher ought to have a handle on the word "science."
I wandered around the site while pretending to do lesson plans, and found a lovely essay that argues that the essence of science is storytelling. The article is co-authored by Barry Bickmore (geochemistry) and David Grandy (philosophy), faculty members at BYU.
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