Duck!

The New York Times book review podcast from a few weeks ago featured a book called Moby Duck. Or, to use its correct name: Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. 

I think we can all agree that the full title, which is too long for even Amazon.com to handle, is a bit of a mouthful.  The short version, on the other hand, is one of my favourite ever book titles. 

Author Donovan Hohn is quick to point out that "it wasn't just ducks."  There were green frogs, blue turtles and red beavers too.  The  toys were in transit between China, where they were manufactured, to the US to be sold when the container ship they were on ran into a storm.  The crate they were in fell overboard and broke open, essentially turning the North Pacific ocean into a giant bath tub.

Eleven years and 7000 nautical miles later, one of the ducks turned up, sitting on top of a pile of seaweed in Maine.  Word spread among the international beachcombing community, after Eben Punderson (inspired by some ocenographers who, several years earlier had tracked the drift patterns of a container-load of Nike sneakers* which had met a similar watery fate) placed a classified ad in a local paper looking for people who had found them.  Dozens of people replied, and ever since then the ducks, and the turtles, and the beavers and frogs have been showing up all over the place.

Hohn is a high school English teacher by trade and first heard of the ducks when one of his students wrote about them for a homework assignment; he was so captured by the story, and curious about the people interested in them, that he left behind his job and his pregant wife, and set off to join the search and find out more.  His book (reviewed here) sounds fascinating; there's this Harper's article as well, which gives a taster. 

(As an aside, and because Google insists on correcting search terms, I am now desperate to see Moby Dick: The Opera .)

*insert "S.O.S - save our soles" related joke here.

"Single gene creates snake-resistant mirror-image snails, and maybe some new species"

Definitely my new favourite science headline, courtesy of Discover magazine and coming via @David_Dobbs on Twitter.

You can click the link to view the whole article, but in summary:

1. Japanese Satsuma snails (yes, really, and I haven't even been saving up this story especially for Christmas) have shells which mostly spiral in a clockwise direction, and sit slightly on the snail's right hand side.  A small number of snails have anti-clockwise shells, which sit slightly to the left; a single gene determines which type of shell the snail will get.

2. Snails can only mate with other snails whose shells spiral in the same direction.  They're not being fussy, it's just physically impossible for them to do otherwise. (I am imagining all sorts of Romeo and Juliet type scenarios where poor, love-struck snail couples are tragically torn apart becuase the cruel, cruel hand of fate has bestowed the wrong kind of shell on one of them.)

3. Snail-eating snakes are designed to eat the snails whose shells spiral clockwise.  They stalk their prey from the left, giving them clear access to the side of the snail which is less protected by shell.  Then they use the backward pointing fangs of their bottom jaws to twist the snails out of their shells; there are more of these fangs on the right side of their jaws than on the left.

 4. All this means that if you're a  left-handed (anti-clockwise) snail, you'll be scraping the barrel when it comes to chooing a partner, but on the bright side you probably won't get eaten by a snake.  Not a bad trade-off in my book, but then as a left-hander I'm maybe a little biased.

The importance of family planning

I have no idea what I am listening to on Radio 4 right now; something science-ish. They are talking about a killer frog fungus, which has all but wiped out the golden frog of Costa Rica, which is, I am sure you know, an icon in the frog world.

Hang on, it's just finished.  It was called Saving Species, according to the presenter, who I would assume has no reason to lie about these things.

As it turns out the killer frog fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis if you are being polite, "Bd" to its friends) is quite a serious issue.  According to the half an hour or so of Google-based research I've just done, anyway.  The numbers vary wildly across the different articles I have looked at, but it seems that around about a third of all amphibian species are currently under threat of extinction. There are various theories about the reasons for this, but chytridiomycosis, the disease caused by Bd, is one of the major players.

It's highly infectious and has a 80% mortality rate.  No one quite knows where it came from, or why it's suddenly become so prevalent, or how to stop it, but a lot of scientists are working on answers to these questions.  One of them is Professor Poulter, who is worried about the declining population of corroboree frogs in Australia:

I would really feel quite satisfied if we could say, 10 years from now, that you have to be careful walking around [Australia's] Kosiuszko National Park or you might tread on a corroboree frog because they're all over the place," said Professor Poulter. "I would take real satisfaction from that".

 The earliest reported case of Bd was in 1938, in some clawed frogs in South Africa.   I learnt this from an article in Science Daily, but this is the part of the story which completely blew my mind (which was already reeling from the discovery that some frogs have claws):

Around this time there was a huge trade in clawed frogs when they were used in one of the earliest human pregnancy tests. The global exportation of the clawed frog is likely to have spread Bd around the world.

Frog based pregnancy testing.  Who knew?  Certainly not me.