Insects Have Emotions & Feeling

In fact, there's mounting evidence that insects can experience a remarkable range of feelings. They can be literally buzzing with delight at pleasant surprises, or sink into depression when bad things happen that are out of their control. They can be optimistic, cynical, or frightened, and respond to pain just like any mammal would. And though no one has yet identified a nostalgic mosquito, mortified ant, or sardonic cockroach, the apparent complexity of their feelings is growing every year. 

When Scott Waddell, professor of neurobiology at the University of Oxford, first started working on emotions in fruit flies, he had a favourite running joke – "…that, you know, I wasn't intending on studying ambition", he says.

Fast-forward to today, and the concept of go-getting insects is not so outrageous as it once was. Waddell points out that some research has found that fruit flies do pay attention to what their peers are doing, and are able to learn from them. 

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They're strikingly similar to other animals, and yet vividly different. Insects have many of the same organs as humans – with hearts, brains, intestines and ovaries or testicles – but lack lungs and stomachs. And instead of being hooked up to a network of blood vessels, the contents of their bodies float in a kind of soup, which delivers food and carries away waste. The whole lot is then encased in a hard shell, the exoskeleton, which is made of chitin, the same material fungi use to build their bodies.

The architecture of their brains follows a similar pattern. Insects don't have the exact same brain regions as vertebrates, but they do have areas that perform similar functions. For example, most learning and memory in insects relies on "mushroom bodies" – domed brain regions which have been compared to the cortex, the folded outer layer that's largely responsible for human intelligence, including thought and consciousness. 

(Tantalisingly, even insect larvae have mushroom bodies, and some of the neurons within them remain for their whole lives – so it's been suggested that adult insects that went through this stage might be able to remember some things that happened before they metamorphosed.)

There's mounting evidence that our parallel neural setups power a number of shared cognitive abilities, too. Bees can count up to four. Cockroaches have rich social lives, and form tribes that stick together and communicate. Ants can even pioneer new tools – they can select suitable objects from their environment and apply them to a task they're trying to complete, like using sponges to carry honey back to their nest.

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In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin argues that – just like every other characteristic – the ways humans express their feelings would hardly have appeared out of nowhere in our own species. Instead, our facial expressions, actions and noises are likely to have evolved via a gradual process over millennia. Crucially, this means that there's probably some continuity among animals, in terms of the ways that we display our emotional state to others.

For example, Darwin noted that animals often make loud noises when they're excited. Among the loud chattering of storks and the threatening rattling of some snakes, he cites the "stridulations", or loud vibrations, of many insects, which they make when they're sexually aroused. Darwin also observed that bees change their hums when they're cross. This all suggests that you don't need to have a voice box to express how you're feeling.

Take the golden tortoise beetle, which looks like a miniature tortoise that's been dipped in molten gold. It's not actually covered in the element, but instead achieves its glamorous look by reflecting light off fluid-filled grooves embedded in its shell. However, pick one of these living jewels up – or stress it out in any way – and it will transform before your eyes, flushing ruby-red until it resembles a large iridescent ladybird.

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The discovery of insect emotions also poses a slightly awkward dilemma for researchers – especially those who have devoted their careers to uncovering them.

Fruit flies are the archetypal research animal, studied so intensively that researchers know more about them than almost any other. At the time of writing, there are around 762,000 scientific papers that mention its Latin name, "Drosophila melanogaster", on Google scholar. Equally, studies into bees are growing in popularity, for the insights they can provide into everything from epigenetics – the study of how the environment can influence the way our genes are expressed – to learning and memory. Both have endured more than their fair share of experimentation.

"I like to watch bees and I've studied behaviour for a lot of my career, so I empathise quite a lot with them already," says Wright, who has been a vegetarian for decades. However, the numbers used in research are tiny compared to those sacrificed elsewhere, so she feels that it’s easier to justify. "It's this sort of disregard of life in general that we have [that Wright finds more problematic] – you know, people just wantonly take life and destroy it and manipulate it … from humans to mammals, insects to plants."

But while using insects for research is still largely uncontroversial, the discovery that they may think and feel raises a number of sticky conundrums for other fields.

There's already a historical precedent for banning pesticides to protect certain insects – such as the EU-wide embargo on nicotinoids for the sake of bees. Could there be scope for moving away from others? And though insects are increasingly promoted as a noble and environmentally friendly alternative to meat from vertebrates, is this actually an ethical win? After all, you'd have to kill 975,225 grasshoppers to get the same volume of meat as you would from a single cow.

Perhaps one reason we don't tend to think of insects as emotional is that it would be overwhelming.

- More Here

Grew Up Poor. How Am I Supposed to Raise My Middle-Class Kids?

Gratitude comes by constantly learning history to understand how lucky and privileged most western kids are now (by sheer luck and nothing else).

And most times, it doesn't require history but to look at other longitudes and latitudes at the present time. Gratitude shouldn't be mental but should be acted upon - for starters stop wasting food. 

Esau McCaulley has a touching piece on the same (NYT): 

I am who I am because I had to struggle and suffer. I came from the mud, and even now I remember how the dirt tastes. When my mother told me that my grandfather grew up as a tenant farmer, I could drive past cotton fields in Alabama and imagine what his life was like. The land was bursting with memory. My children and I have returned to the South and to the very neighborhood where I grew up. I once drove my two oldest kids to the home I used to live in. But the land, the dirt and the concrete don’t speak to them the way they do to me. The ghosts do not haunt them.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of treating poverty as some kind of learning experience. Black and brown people need to have paths to success that don’t involve overcoming a legacy of racism and structural injustice. We need more ordinary roads to flourishing.

And yet, I cannot help believing that my children have lost something: the determination born of suffering. I wish that I could give them that feeling. That suffering was the context within which my mother taught me about the value of education. It formed the background of my pastors’ sermons in the Black churches of my youth. The only God that I have ever known was one who cared about my Black body and my Black soul. That suffering was a unifying factor in all my deepest friendships. Those bonds are special because of what we survived.

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The life I live is the complicated legacy of a survivor. I want to instill in my children the sense of Black possibility and responsibility that arises in the hearts of those who escaped the fire. It’s the fierce urgency born of a gratitude to God that we survived, coupled with the knowledge that it shouldn’t be that hard. It is a message that I needed when my belly was empty. I hope that my children listen now that their bellies are full.

At my family’s Thanksgiving, we all go around the table and name something we are grateful for. I am thankful for my wife and children. I am thankful for the life that they live. But I am also thankful for the things I suffered that made me who I am and for the ways that such suffering does not let you go. It ties you to all the other hurting people of the world. It gives your success a vocation and a purpose: to create more happy families gathering for family meals.

What I've Been Reading

If you find yourself sliding into alcoholism, compassionate friends may try to intervene, to help you steer in the direction of a healthier life but speed (busy) addiction tends to be socially celebrated. Your friends are more likely to praise you for being "driven". 

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.

I have been reading Oliver's Guardian pieces for close to two decades and he is one of those rare decent human beings. 

Time is short. Focus only on things that matters most and ignore rest since we will never have time for all of it. Period. 

That is the summary of this book and also, summary of my life with Max (and still continuous). I am ruthless in who, where, and how of sharing my limited time. I knew from the beginning that my time with Max was limited and I wanted to spend every microsecond possible with him - after all Max and I had way lesser than four thousand weeks (less than 700 weeks to be precise). 

Oliver is a gifted writer plus this book is also his personal story with time. Please read but more importantly embrace and act on the message.

We don’t get or have time at all, that instead we are time. We’ll never get the upper hand in our relationship with the moments of our lives because we are nothing but those moments. To “master” them first entails getting outside of them, splitting off from them. But where would we go?

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is the river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is the tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is the fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. 

There’s no scrambling up to the safety of the riverbank when the river is you. And so insecurity and vulnerability are the default state - because in each of the moments that you inescapably are, anything could happen, from an urgent email that scuppers your plans for the morning to a bereavement that shakes your world to its foundations. 

Lobsters & Crabs Are Sentient Beings - UK Government

Octopuses, crabs and lobsters are capable of experiencing pain or suffering, according to a review commissioned by the UK government, which has added the creatures to a list of sentient beings to be given protection under new animal welfare laws.

The report by experts at the London School of Economics looked at 300 scientific studies to evaluate evidence of sentience, and they concluded that cephalopods (such as octopuses, squid and cuttlefish) and decapods (such as crabs, lobsters and crayfish) should be treated as sentient beings.

Vertebrates, animals with a backbone, are already classified as sentient in new animal welfare legislation currently under debate in the United Kingdom.

"The Animal Welfare Sentience Bill provides a crucial assurance that animal wellbeing is rightly considered when developing new laws. The science is now clear that decapods and cephalopods can feel pain and therefore it is only right they are covered by this vital piece of legislation," said Animal Welfare Minister Lord Zac Goldsmith in a statement.

The Bill, which isn't yet law, will establish an Animal Sentience Committee, which will issue reports on how well government decisions have taken into account the welfare of sentient animals. It is part of a wider government Action Plan for Animal Welfare.

The report said lobsters and crabs shouldn't be boiled alive and included best practices for the transport, stunning and slaughter of decapods and cephalopods.

- More Here

Thank you. I hope, this is progress and opens up the eyes of other countries. Remember, UK has an animal welfare minister where as in US, there is nothing of sorts and everything is rolled up into some agriculture "department". 

Thank you for working on reducing the sufferings of our fellow sentient beings. 

Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity

"Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature,” wrote Bonhoeffer in his treatise. And the nature of stupidity has its roots deep in the subconscious. It is driven by the fundamental mechanics of the human experience. As ancient philosophers noted, humans are social animals. It is this very sociability that is at the base of stupidity.

“We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.”

Stupidity is a group phenomenon. An individual can act stupidly, but that has no effect on the greater whole. However, when a group acts stupidly, that greatly impacts the individual, compounding the entire effect. In many ways, something with initially positive ramifications, ended up stabbing humanity in the back.

- More Here

The Magnificent Bribe

Nearly 50 years ago, long before smartphones and social media, the social critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the way that complex technological systems offer a share in their benefits in exchange for compliance. He called it a “bribe.” With this label, Mumford sought to acknowledge the genuine plentitude that technological systems make available to many people, while emphasizing that this is not an offer of a gift but of a deal. Surrender to the power of complex technological systems — allow them to oversee, track, quantify, guide, manipulate, grade, nudge, and surveil you — and the system will offer you back an appealing share in its spoils. What is good for the growth of the technological system is presented as also being good for the individual, and as proof of this, here is something new and shiny. Sure, that shiny new thing is keeping tabs on you (and feeding all of that information back to the larger technological system), but it also lets you do things you genuinely could not do before. For a bribe to be accepted it needs to promise something truly enticing, and Mumford, in his essay “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” acknowledged that “the bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe.” The danger, however, was that “once one opts for the system no further choice remains.” 

For Mumford, the bribe was not primarily about getting people into the habit of buying new gadgets and machines. Rather it was about incorporating people into a world that complex technological systems were remaking in their own image. Anticipating resistance, the bribe meets people not with the boot heel, but with the gift subscription.

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Yet Mumford was not merely being sarcastic in describing the bribe as “generous” and “magnificent.” Any attempt to wrestle with the metastasizing power of the “megamachine” required recognizing that much of what it offered truly did appear impressive and beneficial. Writing in 1970, Mumford rattled off a list of some of the bribes of his time, a list that included refrigerators, private motor cars, planes, telephones, television sets, electrically driven washing machines, and the computer. Mumford emphasized that these new products should not “be arbitrarily disparaged or neglected, still less rejected out of hand.” After all, Mumford was not a reclusive ascetic hermit — he rode in cars, flew on planes, and talked with friends on the telephone. In denouncing the bribe, Mumford was not simply blasting this or that particular machine. He was questioning the ways that particular machines were used to incorporate people into a much larger technical system. What at first could seem like a “generous bargain” had a tendency to eventually feel like more of a raw deal, and once the initial excitement around a new gadget had vanished, a person all-too-often found that the new machine had not in fact solved “every human problem.”

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Even as yesterday’s bribes become today’s commonalities, a steady flow of new bribes is made available to preserve our loyalty. There are smartphones with bigger screens and better cameras, virtual reality headsets, NFTs, smart glasses, self-driving cars, personal robots, a promised land of infinite apps, artificial intelligence, and the list goes on — new bribes for the new moment. As soon as it becomes incontrovertible that the last crop of technologies promising to solve “every human problem” has created many new problems, we are offered a new crop of technologies promised to really solve “every human problem,” including all of the ones created by the previous crop of technologies. Once you start looking for them, you can see technological bribes everywhere. And once you stop mulling over the potential benefits on offer, you can begin to see the risks and harms lurking just behind the shiny façade.  

Despite the ominous tones in which he often wrote, Mumford did not believe that we were doomed to become automatons. He retained a stubborn hope throughout his life that the sleepers could awaken, and that all hands could save the sinking ship. While writing extensively about technology, time and again he emphasized that what needed to be confronted was not so much the machines themselves as the ideology that builds up around them and turns them into objects of fealty and worship. As he pithily put it in Art and Technics, “If you fall in love with a machine there is something wrong with your love-life. If you worship a machine there is something wrong with your religion.” 

It is not a good thing to be accepting bribes, but it’s even worse to think of those bribes as just friendly gifts. 

- The Magnificent Bribe: Half a century ago, Lewis Mumford developed a concept that explains why we trade autonomy for convenience by Zachary Loeb

The Dawn of Everything - New History of Humanity

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

I preordered this book few months ago and it arrived early this week. 

And I started reading it today...

I want to scream at the top of my lungs. This is a once in life time book. It's so sad that David Graeber passed away two months ago. Thank you, thank you, thank you Graeber and Wengrow for spending 10 years of your lives researching and writing this book. 

This is a rare gem; it overturns everything we were "taught" and "learned" about human history. 

And why this is important? Because, it opens up possibilities that we haven't even imagined. 

Please stop booking tickets for "space tourism" and stop respecting morons who are chasing empty spaces in space. 

Instead, spend few dollars and read this book. We can use an extra mind to bring insights on how we can make marginal improvements to the quality of life of all sentient beings on this planet. 

This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast. There is not a single chapter that does not (playfully) disrupt well seated intellectual beliefs. It is deep, effortlessly iconoclastic, factually rigorous, and pleasurable to read.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Cognitive Tradeoff Theory - Tetsuro Matsuzawa

We then decided to make a direct comparison between the working memory of humans, adult chimpanzees, and young chimpanzees. The masking task was modified slightly for the purposes of this comparison. Sana Inoue, now an associate professor of Ritsumeikan University, and a postdoctoral student at that time, introduced the limited-hold task, in which the numerals were presented to the chimpanzees for only a brief duration.37 Suppose that there are five numerals—2, 3, 5, 8, and 9—displayed on the touch screen. After 650 milliseconds (ms), 430 ms, or 210 ms, all the numerals are automatically replaced by white squares. The goal is to touch the white squares in the ascending order of the now-masked numerals.

Ai’s performance in the limited-hold task was comparable to that of university students facing the same test for the first time. The performances of three young chimpanzees were much better than those of humans. We also tested the impact of overtraining among human subjects, allowing them to repeat the memory test many times over. Although their performances improved with practice, no human has ever been able to match Ayumu’s speed and accuracy in touching the nine numerals in the masking task.

One day, a chance event occurred that illustrated the retention of working memory in chimpanzees. While Ayumu was undertaking the limited-hold task for five numerals, a sudden noise occurred outside. Ayumu’s attention switched to the distraction and he lost concentration. After ten seconds, he turned his attention back to the touch screen, by which time the five numerals had already been replaced with white squares. The lapse in concentration made no difference. Ayumu was still able to touch the squares in the right order. This incident clearly shows that the chimpanzee can memorize the numerals at a glance, and that their working memory persists for at least ten seconds.

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In 2013, I proposed the cognitive tradeoff theory of language and memory. Our most recent common ancestor with chimpanzees may have possessed an extraordinary chimpanzee-like working memory, but over the course of human evolution, I suggested, we have lost this capability and acquired language in return. Suppose that a creature passes in front of you in the forest. It has a brown back, black legs, and a white spot on its forehead. Chimpanzees are highly adept at quickly detecting and memorizing these features. Humans lack this capability, but we have evolved other ways to label what we have witnessed, such as mimicking the body posture and shape of the creature, mimicking the sounds it made, or vocally labeling it as, say, an antelope.

- Primate Memory, Tetsuro Matsuzawa

Cliodynamics - History As A Science

To Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the appearance of three peaks of political instability at roughly 50-year intervals is not a coincidence. For the past 15 years, Turchin has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator–prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human history. He has analysed historical records on economic activity, demographic trends and outbursts of violence in the United States, and has come to the conclusion that a new wave of internal strife is already on its way. The peak should occur in about 2020, he says, and will probably be at least as high as the one in around 1970. “I hope it won’t be as bad as 1870,” he adds.

Turchin’s approach which he calls cliodynamics after Clio, the ancient Greek muse of history is part of a groundswell of efforts to apply scientific methods to history by identifying and modelling the broad social forces that Turchin and his colleagues say shape all human societies. It is an attempt to show that “history is not 'just one damn thing after another' ”, says Turchin, paraphrasing a saying often attributed to the late British historian Arnold Toynbee.

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What is new about cliodynamics isn’t the search for patterns, Turchin explains. Historians have done valuable work correlating phenomena such as political instability with political, economic and demographic variables. What is different is the scale Turchin and his colleagues are systematically collecting historical data that span centuries or even millennia — and the mathematical analysis of how the variables interact.

In their analysis of long-term social trends, advocates of cliodynamics focus on four main variables: population numbers, social structure, state strength and political instability. Each variable is measured in several ways. Social structure, for example, relies on factors such as health inequality measured using proxies including quantitative data on life expectancies — and wealth inequality, measured by the ratio of the largest fortune to the median wage. Choosing appropriate proxies can be a challenge, because relevant data are often hard to find. No proxy is perfect, the researchers concede. But they try to minimize the problem by choosing at least two proxies for each variable.

Then, drawing on all the sources they can find historical databases, newspaper archives, ethnographic studies Turchin and his colleagues plot these proxies over time and look for trends, hoping to identify historical patterns and markers of future events. For example, it seems that indicators of corruption increase and political cooperation unravels when a period of instability or violence is imminent. Such analysis also allows the researchers to track the order in which the changes occur, so that they can tease out useful correlations that might lead to cause–effect explanations.

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Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, a computer social scientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, welcomes cliodynamics as a natural complement to his own field: doing simulations using ‘agent-based’ computer models. Cioffi-Revilla and his team are developing one such model to capture the effects of modern-day climate change on the Rift Valley region in East Africa, a populous area that is in the grip of a drought. The model starts with a series of digital agents representing households and allows them to interact, following rules such as seasonal migration patterns and ethnic alliances. The researchers have already seen labour specialization and vulnerability to drought emerge spontaneously, and they hope eventually to be able to predict flows of refugees and identify potential conflict hotspots. Cioffi-Revilla says that cliodynamics could strengthen the model by providing the agents with rules extracted from historical data.

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But Goldstone cautions that cliodynamics is useful only for looking at broad trends. “For some aspects of history, a scientific or cliodynamic approach is suitable, natural and fruitful,” he says. For example, “when we map the frequency versus magnitude of an event — deaths in various battles in a war, casualties in natural disasters, years to rebuild a state we find that there is a consistent pattern of higher frequencies at low magnitudes, and lower frequencies at high magnitudes, that follows a precise mathematical formula.” But when it comes to predicting unique events such as the Industrial Revolution, or the biography of a specific individual such as Benjamin Franklin, he says, the conventional historian’s approach of assembling a narrative based on evidence is still best.

Herbert Gintis, a retired economist who is still actively researching the evolution of social complexity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, also doubts that cliodynamics can predict specific historical events. But he thinks that the patterns and causal connections that it reveals can teach policy-makers valuable lessons about pitfalls to avoid, and actions that might forestall trouble. He offers the analogy of aviation: “You certainly can’t predict when a plane is going to crash, but engineers recover the black box. They study it carefully, they find out why the plane crashed, and that’s why so many fewer planes crash today than used to.”

- Advocates of ‘cliodynamics’ say that they can use scientific methods to illuminate the past. But historians are not so sure.

Becoming Cousteau

Documentary on life of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. 

For over four decades, Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his explorations under the ocean became synonymous with a love of science and the natural world. As he learned to protect the environment, he brought the whole world with him, sounding alarms more than 50 years ago about the warming seas and our planet’s vulnerability. In BECOMING COUSTEAU, from National Geographic Documentary Films, two-time Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker LIZ GARBUS takes an inside look at Cousteau and his life, his iconic films and inventions, and the experiences that made him the 20th century’s most unique and renowned environmental voice — and the man who inspired generations to protect the Earth.

Thank you for everything you did and do sir! 

What I've Been Reading

Bertolt by Jacques Goldstyn. 

This is an illustrated children's book that portray's a beautiful friendship between a boy named Bertolt and an Oak tree. 

You can finish the book in couple of minutes but the melancholy will linger a life time. I wish there were more children books that portray such unique and precious relationships on earth. 

An entire generation of men who grew up reading Marvel comics are obsessed with empty space and "conquering emptiness" with flamboyant vehicles. At this point their brains are so over-fitted with this crap that they live and die without realizing immense beauty under their nose. These men have become role model for kids (and yeah, grown men too); such is the state of our civilization. 

We need to perpetually teach and remind kids the preciousness and rareness of everything in this blue planet. 

I grew up listening to this story of a Tamil king who gave his golden chariot so that a jasmine plant can use it as a support. History does remembers and salutes such beautiful acts and relationships. 

If I could do it all over again, and relive my vision in the twenty-first century, I would be a microbial ecologist. Ten billion bacteria live in a gram of ordinary soil, a mere pinch held between thumb and forefinger. They represent thousands of species, almost none of which are known to science. Into that world I would go with the aid of modern microscopy and molecular analysis. I would cut my way through clonal forests sprawled across grains of sand, travel in an imagined submarine through drops of water proportionately the size of lakes, and track predators and prey in order to discover new life ways and alien food webs.

- E. O. Wilson: Biophilia, The Diversity of Life, Naturalist

Consequences of Whaling & Now, Talking to Whales

As usual, Ed Young has an insightful piece on the consequences of 20th century Whaling: 

Baleen whales are elusive, often foraging well below the ocean’s surface. They are also elastic: When a blue whale lunges at krill, its mouth can swell to engulf a volume of water larger than its own body. For these reasons, scientists have struggled to work out how much these creatures eat. In the past, researchers either examined the stomachs of beached whales or extrapolated upward from much smaller animals, such as mice and dolphins. But new technologies developed over the past decade have provided better data. Drones can photograph feeding whales, allowing researchers to size up their ballooning mouths. Echo sounders can use sonar to gauge the size of krill swarms. And suction-cup-affixed tags that come with accelerometers, GPS, and cameras can track whales deep underwater—“I think of them as whale iPhones,” Savoca said.

Using these devices, he and his colleagues calculated that baleen whales eat three times more than researchers had previously thought. They fast for two-thirds of the year, subsisting on their huge stores of blubber. But on the 100 or so days when they do eat, they are incredibly efficient about it. Every feeding day, these animals can snarf down 5 to 30 percent of their already titanic body weight. A blue whale might gulp down 16 metric tons of krill.

Surely, then, the mass slaughter of whales must have created a paradise for their prey? After industrial-era whalers killed off these giants, about 380 million metric tons of krill would have gone uneaten every year. In the 1970s, many scientists assumed that the former whaling grounds would become a krilltopia, but instead, later studies showed that krill numbers had plummeted by more than 80 percent.

The explanation for this paradox involves iron, a mineral that all living things need in small amounts. The north Atlantic Ocean gets iron from dust that blows over from the Sahara. But in the Southern Ocean, where ice cloaks the land, iron is scarcer. Much of it is locked inside the bodies of krill and other animals. Whales unlock that iron when they eat, and release it when they poop. The defecated iron then stimulates the growth of tiny phytoplankton, which in turn feed the krill, which in turn feed the whales, and so on.

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The new study, says Kelly Benoit-Bird, a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, in California, is an important reminder of how “exploited species are part of a complex web, with many effects cascading from our actions.” Killing a whale leaves a hole in the ocean that’s far bigger than the creature itself.

There are more whales now than there were even a few years ago—in early 2020, scientists rejoiced when they spotted 58 blue whales in sub-Antarctic waters where mere handfuls of the animals had been seen in years prior. But that number is still depressingly low. “You can’t bring back the whales until you bring back their food,” Savoca said. And he thinks he knows how to do that.

In a rare moment for humanity - for all the massacre of whales that humans unleashed in the 20th century (wonder why Moby Dick is a classic?), now some nobles souls are working on talking to whales: 

It started in 2017 when an international group of scientists spent a year together at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Radcliffe Fellowship, a program that promises “an opportunity to step away from usual routines.” One day, Shafi Goldwasser, a computer scientist and cryptography expert also from Israel, came by the office of David Gruber, a marine biologist at City University of New York. Goldwasser, who had just been named the new director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley, had heard a series of clicking sounds that reminded her of the noise a faulty electronic circuit makes—or of Morse code. That’s how sperm whales talk to each other, Gruber told her. “I said, ‘Maybe we should do a project where we are translating the whale sounds into something that we as humans can understand,’” Goldwasser recounts. “I really said it as an afterthought. I never thought he was going to take me seriously.”

But the fellowship was an opportunity to take far-out ideas seriously. At a dinner party, they presented the idea to Bronstein, who was following recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP), a branch of AI that deals with the automated analysis of written and spoken speech—so far, just human language. Bronstein was convinced that the codas, as the brief sperm whale utterances are called, have a structure that lends them to this kind of analysis. Fortunately, Gruber knew a biologist named Shane Gero who had been recording a lot of sperm whale codas in the waters around the Caribbean island of Dominica since 2005. Bronstein applied some machine-learning algorithms to the data. “They seemed to be working very well, at least with some relatively simple tasks,” he says. But this was no more than a proof of concept. For a deeper analysis, the algorithms needed more context and more data—millions of whale codas.

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The name of the CETI project evokes SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which has scanned the sky for radio signals of alien civilizations since the 1960s, so far without finding a single message. Since no sign of ET has been found, Bronstein is convinced we should try out our decoding skills on signals that we can detect here on Earth. Instead of pointing our antennas toward space, we can eavesdrop on a culture in the ocean that is at least as alien to us. “I think it is very arrogant to think that Homo sapiens is the only intelligent and sentient creature on Earth,” Bronstein says. “If we discover that there is an entire civilization basically under our nose—maybe it will result in some shift in the way that we treat our environment. And maybe it will result in more respect for the living world.”

Happy Birthday Neo!

Funny, sweet, hard headed, adamant, playful and cocktail of all the other damn emotions of this little two year old Neo is what I needed and will continue to need for me not to go into the abyss of missing Max. 

Max gave me everything and now I have everything I need (and more) except Max. Neo is a gift of life and an echo chamber from Max reminding me of the joy of conscious living. 

Thank you Neo for brining.this playful hurricane into this ocean of grief. 

You gave me what I needed the most and I hope, I am giving you what you need. 

Happy Birthday Neo!