Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Critter foo
Giuliani’s ferret problem
Yeah, I know he’s no longer a contender, but this still rices my kishkes.
How can you reconcile that much hate with this much adorableness?
For the life of me, I cannot understand this man’s problem with ferrets.
D.
Dreaming of pets
This happens to me regularly: I’ll dream of neglected pets. Call it unresolved guilt; I still wonder whether I could have or should have done more for the pets I’ve owned who have died on my watch. Snakes don’t handle big moves, nor do frogs. Lizards and frogs often have narrow climate requirements.
In these dreams, I’ll find cages with forgotten pets in a back room I don’t often check. Last night, I was trying to clean a cage in which I had added way too many species. There were poison dart frogs and anoles, a Chinese water dragon, a dumpy frog. While I was cleaning the cage, the lizards kept trying to make a break for it. The water dragon leapt out, I grabbed his back (taking care not to grab the notoriously detachable lizard tail) and some of the skin came off in my hands. In horror I examined my lizard, who was in obvious pain, trying to decide whether to suture the wound, dress it, or give it up and euthanize. I dressed it.
Toward the end of the dream, I noticed two snakes poking their heads out of the cage’s substrate: a red-tailed boa and an emerald tree boa (which we’ve never owned). Long forgotten pets who had somehow survived, possibly by munching on our other pets.
In real life we take care of our animals, of course, but in these dreams I am often guilty of unthinkable callousness: I have left cages without food or water for weeks or even months, only to discover that my pets have grown, reproduced, thrived without my help. No connection with reality, in other words. In the real world, some pets fail no matter how much effort I put out (like my two water turtles, purchased last year, who refused to eat anything I put before them).
We have always kept pets. The morality of keeping pets has always interested and troubled me. Once a pet is in the pet store, he’s already a captive. Am I doing a favor by buying him, knowing I stand a better chance to do right by him than the little kid with a passing whim? Or does my purchase merely provide positive reinforcement to an industry that continues to capture/breed and imprison wild animals?
The logical endpoint of that line of thought would leave me a vegan, of course. And that ain’t gonna happen unless I can figure out how to fix a vegetarian meal that doesn’t bore the hell out of me and everyone else in this household.
D.
Bull 1, Matador 0
The most interesting aspect of Huffington Post’s story on the near-pithing of bullfighter Julio Aparicio is not the graphic photo of a horn piercing Aparicio’s throat and popping from his mouth like . . . wow, there’s no apt simile for a bull’s horn popping out of someone’s mouth. Go figure. I guess only bull horns pop out of people’s mouths like that. Anyway, the interesting part is the commentary. Not one person defended the sport. Not one. Has Hemingway’s spirit left this society entirely? Or perhaps Hemingway’s aficionados don’t read HuffPo.
A cross-section of the responses:
Revenge, about time.
The doctors are telling him to take his recovery slow, maybe by killing some small dogs first then working his way up to bulls.
He got what he deserved. What’s good for the bull is good for the bullfighter.
Karma truly is a bitch.
Isn’t there some other more constructive way to prove one’s manhood?
Yeah, if the Matador actually “Mounted” the Bull. Now THAT would be MANLY!!!!
The second most interesting thing about this article: Google’s choice of ads.
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Happy Monday!
D.
Patricia
I’ve shown you the frog tank. It’s sufficiently “grown in” that we are ready to repopulate it with frogs. Sorry, no miniature hippos. Miniaturehippos.com was fresh out.
But I’m close to purchasing four Dendrobates tinctorius “Patricia”:
and I’ve already bought some Dendrobates leucomelas:
which ought to arrive some time next week.
Soon our household will yet again play host to the pitter patter of little feet. Really little feet.
D.
Too tired to think
Not sure why. I’m not on call this week . . . should be sleeping like a baby.
The talk went well. I was hoping a “Here, let me share some wisdom-gained-from-experience with you” talk would be appreciated, and it was.
Here. This one’s for the writers/authors in my audience.
This intrigued me:
But what I really wanted to do was steal this from Noxcat.
D.
The frog tank
It ain’t all work and cooking and grocery shopping. And video gaming. Now that I don’t spend hours and hours writing, what do you expect me to do with my free time?
I’ve been working on the frog tank.
Here’s the left side:
and here’s the right side:
Discriminating readers will note a distinct lack of frogs in the frog tank. This is true. I’ve become so obsessed with letting the thing grow in that I’ve neglected buying new frogs. (Sadly, our last azureus died in Santa Rosa, thanks to the heat.) As much as I like Dendrobates azureus, I’m thinking of going back to Dendrobates leucomelas. What do you think? (Noisy buggers!)
I wish I could tell you the names of all the plants you’re looking at, but I’ve forgotten many of them. The orchid is Phalaenopsis stuartiana. There’s a Dischidia pectinoides in there, a couple of different begonias, and an artillery plant. That tall potted plant is one of Karen’s chestnut trees. I’ve been jump-starting them in the tank, then moving them outdoors when they get too big. The lush green moss came from my back yard, believe it or not; who would have thought I’d have to move from the Northwest to Bakersfield to find moss that would grow in my frog tank? Although in fairness, I suspect the moss is doing well because I finally popped for full spectrum lights.
Part of me wants to say forget about the frogs. Get something different for a change. I’d go back to chameleons, but they poop like ungulates, and they require a steady drip of fresh water. Real hassle, that. I dunno, maybe something other than a poison dart frog? I wonder how mantises would do in my tank.
Right now, there’s a delightfully broad range of possibilities. Once I make the decision, the wave equation collapses and I have to live with my choice . . . choose a frog, and it’ll be a frog tank once again.
D.
Pride of the savannah
Last night, I dreamed I had become some sort of naturalist, a fieldworker in the African savannah, sent to a nature preserve to study lions in the wild. I was fresh off the boat and raring to go, and without any special instruction or preparation I began hiking my way across the preserve. Say what you will about me, I’m not shy.
Within a matter of minutes, I realized I had been spotted by a lion and lioness, who were heading over to greet eat me. I also realized I was dreaming, but I still didn’t relish the thought of experiencing this, even in dream land. So I hit the ground and pretended to play dead.
The two came loped over, sniffed me. And then the male mounted the female and they went at it.
One word for what followed: messy.
Interpretations, anyone?
D.
A B&W redux
I had been trying to think up a fun topic for tonight’s post when I remembered Kakabekia. Then I had the thought, “Kakabekia is such a neat story, I’ll bet I’ve done this before,” and crap, I was right! When I found my old post — one of the Thirteens — I had so much fun rereading it that I decided to post it as a redux. Hopefully y’all will have forgotten it as well as I had, all the better to re-enjoy it.
A note on the Kakabekia story: I learned about this organism in a biology class I took during med school. Early Evolution of Life, or some such. I remember I wrote a pretty cool term paper for that class, suggesting that within the genetic code of most life on earth (not all life forms share the same code, although all codes are quite similar) one could demonstrate evidence that the code itself is a product of selection. My teacher liked my term paper so much he suggested I write it up for publication, which I never did. This would have been, oh, 1988 or 1989? And guess what, on that Wikipedia page I just linked to, there’s a link to a paper published in 2003 making just that point.
I can’t tell you how many times this happened to me back in those days. I would have a great idea — perhaps something theoretical, like this genetic code bit, or perhaps something technical, like a way to fish for genes encoding promoter-binding proteins. Someone in authority would say, “Hey, good idea, get to work on it,” and I wouldn’t. There were always other things to do. My ideas were top notch, but my ambition, or perhaps my sense of perspective, insight into what was REALLY important, whatever . . . sucked.
Sorry. I didn’t mean to turn this into a kvetchfest. I was meant to be a doctor, right? Not a scientist. Or, if I was meant to be a scientist, it was only after skipping over all that dull gruntwork as a grad student or post-doc. Yup. Go straight to the finish, have my own R01 and scads of my own post-docs and grad students doing my bidding, turning my fine ideas into realities. Shame life doesn’t work that way.
Below the fold: thirteen cool microorganisms. (And, hey! It’s even Thursday!)
Just one question: where did I find time, in the old days, to write such detailed posts?
Truth, stranger than
Here’s a photo from a viral email my sis sent me:
Endangered pork
The email comes with the following explanation, as long as a number of other similar photos:
In a zoo in California , a mother tiger gave birth to a rare set of triplet tiger cubs.
Unfortunately, due to complications in the pregnancy, the cubs were born prematurely
and due to their tiny size, they died shortly after birth.The mother tiger after recovering from the delivery, suddenly started to decline in health,
although physically she was fine. The veterinarians felt that the loss of her litter had caused
the tigress to fall into a depression. The doctors decided that if the tigress could surrogate
another mother’s cubs, perhaps she would improve.
And so forth. As I usually do with viral emails, I checked Snopes.com for the real deal. The true story is quite a bit more disturbing. At the Sriracha Zoo in Thailand, zookeepers have set up a number of such odd displays, all for the entertainment of jaded animal . . . um . . . lovers? Tigers giving suck to piglets, pigs giving suck to tiger cubs, dogs and pigs and tigers living in harmony, you name it. All in good fun, perhaps, except this particular zoo has some a few loathsome skeletons in its closet. Read more at Snopes.
D.
New critters
Friends of ours from the old days, the pre-Jake years, know us as critter-keepers, lovers of snakes and lizards and frogs and anything else with cold blood. Our collection has waned in recent years because moving is bad for pets and we’ve been moving a lot.
But now we’re settled.
And today, I saw something I couldn’t resist.