In which the blogger attempts to pull herself together...Last Wednesday's post is long and will be out of sequence. Other posts? I'll focus on the new book reviews first because some people are waiting eagerly. Barring further cyberattacks, this Monday's butterfly study, Tuesday's Petfinder post, and Wednesday's book reviewer chat should be right on schedule.
Animals
Behold our Official Icon of Those Who Want More Babies Now:
Tent caterpillars, all ten to thirty species of them worldwide (there's debate about their classification too), have some features in common: They're furry, and (to some eyes) cute. They're very social; in fact they depend on regular grooming by siblings to survive their furry juvenile days. They spin threads of silk almost constantly, usually building multilayered shelters in which they spend their first four caterpillar phases, always building at least temporary carpets and sunroofs, and congregating in these "tents." They use the threads to communicate--silk produced just after chewing up fresh healthy leaves smells appetizing and makes a trail for other caterpillars to follow--as well as to make tents and lower themselves cautiously from high branches to lower branches or the ground. They move faster, and seem more perceptive and curious about the world than most caterpillars do. They're peaceable, inclined to act on the theory that whatever is touching them is a friend and return its caress, which is actually an effective strategy to stop (most) tachinid flies from parasitizing them as well as to form some sort of bond with siblings. As if those features didn't give them enough survival advantages, most species are also naturally adapted to eat toxic leaves.
(The ones shown here are Forest Tent Caterpillars, photographed by Carly Brooke, so full of cyanide their skins form blue spots. Though harmless to touch, they'd definitely make you sick if you ate them--so nature has conveniently provided humans with instincts that tell nearly all of us that we'd prefer not even to look at them while eating.)
So tent caterpillars have very few natural predators and their populations just grow and grow. About every ten years it seems as if they're about to take over the world. They strip their host trees bare and cover the trunks with silk as they prowl about looking for one last leaf to eat, then start laying silken trails across the ground as they look for a new tree. This migration causes many caterpillars to separate from their families before they're ready and eat poorer quality food, resulting in unusual behavior like resting on walls instead of tree branches...(See photos documenting the behavior at Carly Brooke's post:
...and in fungus infections, diseases, and death. The caterpillar plague years are distressing to watch even for species, like humans, that don't care much about the caterpillars and, if we do, want to see fewer of them. They keep the caterpillars from becoming serious pests, but at a horrific price.
Many humans find these individual caterpillars cute. You can actually pick them up and stroke them and, if you have a steady hand and gentle touch, they like being stroked. They are pets. (Though they don't have any instinct to stay near you; after enjoying being pets for ten or twenty minutes they'll wander away.) Nobody, however, finds a mass of overcrowded tent caterpillars cute. (Probably the heightened crawling, scratching, and squirming behavior in the clump is motivated by hungry caterpillars sniffing at siblings to see whether anybody has found food yet.) If you're not fond of caterpillars, the mass is disgusting. If you are, you can see the little animals' distress, which makes a ball of squirming tent caterpillars even harder to look at than it is if you see them as something to throw into the nearest trash fire.
This much has to be said for tent caterpillars: They do show an increase in violent behavior, within the limits of their species' abilities, in plague years. They're just not capable of being very violent. A tent caterpillar dying miserably from fungus infection may bite, but, as it can't bite through human skin, only the caterpillar's body language shows a difference between its biting behavior and its friendly grooming behavior. Anyway tent caterpillars don't progress into sexual aberrations, domestic violence, cannibalism, or war. They just lie down and die young.
If we rush to start having more babies, to keep a Social Security system working forever in the way it can only work when there are a lot more workers than retirees, or just to feed the toxic greed some people seem to feel for grandchildren, then we're no more intelligent than tent caterpillars. So let's use images of overpopulated tent caterpillars whenever and wherever we come to "more babies now" whines in cyberspace.
(If you're in a place where tent caterpillars are "swarming" in a plague season this year, please remind yourself and neighbors that the local population is in the process of CRASHING. It's just nature's way of reminding us not to have too many babies.)
History
No link because I did not like the bloke's condescending tone, but something on the Mirror does bring the legend of Mansa Musa, the Richest Man in the World, into historical perspective...
Mali was not a kingdom in the sense that England, France, or Poland were kingdoms. It was like, well, Western Africa. People lived very simply on the land, cultivated food, slept in simple shelters (not rondavels, they had simple houses for the whole extended family group), and didn't have a lot of things to spend money on. They did, however, have so much gold in the ground that the stuff frequently washed up in streams, as in California in the 1850s. So they didn't bother to mine gold but some of them had noticed that, if they held on to a few nuggets long enough, eventually they might find someone who would take their gold in trade for something useful.
So, Mansa Musa was the "king" of a small tribe of people who literally had gold they didn't know what to do with. He enthusiastically embraced Islam and donated gold to start schools, but he did not personally preside over those schools and, if they lasted through his lifetime, most of them closed when the gold was gone. Other tribal "kings" who saw the benefits in gold and trade made alliances with him; those also lasted about as long as he did. Toward the end of his life Mansa Musa did load up gold on as many of his loyal subjects and their animals as he could muster (actual numbers are hard to substantiate, but there really was quite a parade) and go to Mecca, taking all the gold they'd been hoarding and splashing it about like people who were glad to get rid of the shiny rocks that, although pretty in the light, were heavy to carry across the desert. And then they all went back to cultivating their gardens all day and sleeping in their shacks all night, even if they did adopt the ideas of wearing clothes and studying the Koran. "I'm an honest man! Work's all I know!" might have been their theme song.
This accounts for the sudden disappearance of Mansa Musa's "empire" after the dear old man was laid to rest. Still, the story is nothing to sneer at. If Musa was more of a patriarch than a monarch as we use those terms, he was still a great one. The story does teach us that wealth is relative.
Information That May Be Helpful
Someone Out There needed to know...
Posted by Pointman 12 Deplorable Garbage on the Mirror. Lens traces it to Carla Brown on Facebook.
Music
"Green Onions."
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