h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Even Jane Goodall was shocked to find that rabbits are not as vegetarian as legend would have it.

In the wild, they usually eat carrion and often hunt insects and small rodents.

The Central Coast Giant Hare, colloquially referred to as a 'jackalope', on account of its size being in a range with that of the local pygmy mule deer, is a predator by preference.

That one actually likes to run down prey.

On "Watership Down", the animated film version, seriously messed up, maybe, but honest and even inspirational.

I vividly remember from the book 'Bighead in the tunnel', Bigheads' heroic defense of the warren against invading hares, like 'Horatius at the bridge'.

...meanwhile, on post 38, the 'hairy frogfish', I think I would have called it 'plumed' instead of hairy.

Note the side filaments coming off its shag?

Also it might have been better called a 'newtfish' than a 'frogfish', since the newts are in the bird-like group and the frogs are in the mammal like group.

...of significant relevance, on the evolution of the bird-like and mammal-like vertebrates, the differentiation actually began with the lobe finned fish, bottom feeders that actually used their lobed fins to walk on the bottom.

Poetry in motion with some of the modern examples, strolling along on the sea floor...

At any rate, they'd differentiated into the bird-like and mammal-like lines before emerging, separately, onto the land.

Oh yeah, on the California ground squirrel, they're actually found as far east as Oklahoma.

In California, I have seen them living in trees, in the forested northern Central Valley, where there are many trees and few grass lands.

In the dune grass prairie of the Central Coast area, where they have their greatest population, and semi-arid southern California, there are expansive grass lands and few trees, so they burrow.

I'm still trying to get my mind around the giant electric bullfrog. If such a thing were found in somebody's brook, I bet a S.W.A.T. team would be sent to deal with it. If they got eaten, who knows what they send against it next?

.50 cal or higher if it breaks into the open.

(Small) depth charges if it submerges.

Don't presume just because its dead that it can't still deliver a deadly electric shock.

An animal like that, taken as example of fauna designed for a more challenging wilderness, would have to be rigorously controlled.

Probably someone will get around to it during the age of the asteroidal space colonies, if not sooner.

But why would they want to try it in the first place? Given its size and appetite, it would be expensive to feed. Given its electrical properties, cleaning its surroundings would be difficult and dangerous. Perhaps it might have some medical or therapeutic uses, but absent these, it could only live in a zoo. People might well be willing to pay money to see it.

Adventure.

Just finished the re-read on H. G. Wells, "The War Of The Worlds".

He postulates a germ free Martian environment where either micro-organisms never evolved, an evolutionary impossibility, or the Martians had eradicated all their micro-organisms (a practical impossibility) at a time so ancient in their history they'd completely forgotten the hazard.

The last is possible, I suppose, if the Martians had originated elsewhere and established their Martian community as a germ free colony on a germ free substrate.




Next reading up, "First Men In The Moon".

I've not read the book before and am only barely started on it.

In the film version, germs come up again as the Lunar civilization dies out on account of having caught Dr. Cavors' cold, but terrestrial civilization again is fortuitously spared an epidemiological catastrophe.

I'm looking forward to seeing the original H.G. Wells treatment.




The first H.G. wells story I ever read was a much condensed comic book version of "In The Year Of The Comet" which struck as a story founded on impossible premises.

I haven't read the H.G. Wells original on that one yet either and am looking forward to it.

Fairly early on in First Men In The Moon
there is an explosion at the house where
the experimental anti-gravity alloy is being
created. Well's description of such an explosion,
being on the order of hundreds of times greater
than anything known in the day, is eerily prescient
of an atomic blast which was then unknown and still
40 years off. The flash of light, the heat wave, the
blast and fire... felt 20 miles away.

Also worth noting if one is aware of the diving-bell/
bathescape shape of the vehicle is the 'undersea'
quality of the environment he describes on the
lunar surface.

The second part of the book was written just as the
first radio experiments were being carried out and he
is quick to speculate on how this new technology will
impact communication.

~jwf~

"He postulates a germ free Martian environment where either micro-organisms never evolved, an evolutionary impossibility, or the Martians had eradicated all their micro-organisms (a practical impossibility) at a time so ancient in their history they'd completely forgotten the hazard" [ITIWBS]

It might be simpler than that. Maybe the germs on Earth were totally new to them, and they hadn't developed resistance to them. The inhabitants of what we now call North and South America were largely helpless against the smallpox that the conquistadors brought from Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. Modern science has established that their range of immune system capabilities was much narrower than that of the Europeans.

One reason for the Europeans' broader resistance was that, unlike the indigenous Americans, the European experience had included close proximity to domesticated animals. They caught diseases from the animals [I can't remember which animal had given them smallpox], and the ones who could muster a strong enough immune system were the ones who lived to produce offspring.

For what it's worth, some of the indigenous Americans [about 10% on average] *were* able to survive the smallpox plague. Montezuma's descendants have done pretty well. His line of succession continues to this day...

The point on H.G. Wells postulating a germ free environment for his Martians is that otherwise, next, pandemics of Martian disease would have swept the Earth.




Meanwhile, on the colonial era pandemics, they actually began with the black death (bubonic plague), originating in central Asia, sweeping Europe and China, producing mortality rates varying from ~75% to ~25% depending on how successful local quarantine measure were.

In Europe, Milan had the lowest mortality rate, at 23%.

Among other things, besides nearly complete embargo of outside commerce, if a case of the plague was diagnosed there, Milan simply bricked up the doors and windows of the dwelling place of the victim with the residents of the place inside and had the mass for the dead performed for them.

The statistics for death rates for the plague in Europe are very Mendelian, with the next 2 or 3 subsequent outbreaks typically taking about a quarter of the population.




On the native Americans and Polynesians, their susceptibility to the old world zoo of infectious and contagious diseases was a consequence of only about 12,000 years of evolutionary isolation, leaving them with little capacity for resistance to things like TB and the childhood diseases.

(Smallpox was classed with the childhood diseases as late as the 19th century. Nearly everyone caught it sometime during their childhood years. Most who caught it died.)

The native Americans did contribute a few diseases of their own to the world zoo, things like syphilis, unknown in the old world and Polynesia till the colonial era, impetigo, which apparently originated in what's now the American eastern seaboard, valley fever, which originates in California, in the San Joaquin Valley.

Smallpox, on a basis of gene-mapping studies, apparently originated as an Egyptian mouse-pox that jumped the species barrier.

Cow pox, which is a much less serious disease than small pox, confers immunity to small pox and provided the first safe immunization for small pox.

(The earliest official public vaccination program that I know of was a small pox vaccination program sponsored by the Massachusetts colony during the American Revolutionary War. Since The Royal Governor, Governor Amherst, had been evicted by the revolution and was known to have been spreading small pox among the native Americans by means of buying up clothing and bedding from small pox wards in the hospitals and selling it unwashed to the native Americans, it was feared he might do the same to the rebellious colonials.)




On other colonial era quarantine measures, like the closure of far east ports in China, Korea and Japan to foreign voyagers, these were only sensible and reasonable efforts to protect their populations from disease.

The point that Spanish and Mexican colonial era California had similarly tough tough quarantine laws, comparable to those of the far east, may have made them unpopular with the European and Yankee traders, but that, taken with the point that the Spanish and subsequent Mexican colonial authorities had very strict standards with respect to health and moral character of prospective colonists for California, delayed the pandemics in California till the California gold rush.

Then, over the decade of the 1850s, the mortality rate was 90%, with smaller outbreaks coming up over the next 3 or 4 generations.




The apparent number 1 killer of the native Americans in Mexico during the age of the conquistadores was a hemorrhagic fever, related to ebola, which is now extinct, along with everyone in the world susceptible to it, with a mortality rate of 100%.

The Spanish were immune.




Meanwhile, if only ~12,000 years of evolutionary isolation produced a rate of susceptibility among the native Americans to the old world diseases generating 90% mortality, one has to suppose that with a xenobiological pathogen originating elsewhere than planet Earth, to which the Terrestrial biome has no history of evolutionary exposure at all, there is no reason to suppose any higher organism of Earth has even a capacity for immune response.

In other words, mortality rate may be 100% at any level above that of the bacteria.

With respect to space exploration and development enthusiasts who duck the issue, or ignore it, I consider that discrediting.

I see your point about the Martians not bringing disease pathogens with them in "War of the Worlds."

Just finished reading "The First Men In The Moon".

Little there of relevance to this thread.

Currently embarked on "Food Of The Gods", where I expect to find a bit more of relevance.

I believe you'll also discover one of the first
appearances of a motor car in Literature.

~jwf~