Reactions to story from The New York Times

• 

  The Walrus, minus the carpenter

  http://thegreenogre.blogspot.com/2008/08/walrus-minus-carpen...
  78 days ago in The Green Ogre · Authority: 6

  Here's an endearing portrait of that wonderful, little known and oft-misunderstood fatso of the Arctic pack ice known as the Walrus. Natalie Angier in NYT: In the public pantheon of marine mammaldom, dolphins are adored, whales revered, and seal pups make old Bond girls swoon. But walruses remain perversely, lumpishly obscure, known mostly for their sing-song linkage with a carpenter, an eggman and goo goo goo joob. To which Dr. Schusterman and his colleagues might well respond with a blast of a Bronx kazoo. Odobenus rosmarus is a magnificent creature, they say, behaviorally, anatomically, acoustically and taxonomically in a category all its own. More The Green Ogre - All things Eco, not necessarily Umberto
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  Walrus: Born to Sing

  http://tusktusk.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/walrus-born-to-sing...
  195 days ago in Classic Rock: The Walrus · No authority yet

  The New York Times had an article about walruses on May 20 that didn’t mention Bellingham’s classic rock band per se, but …  The article describes the walrus’ singing ability, saying that a walrus … is an acoustic genius, its body an all-in-one band. Males woo females with lengthy compositions that have been compared in the complexity of their structure and phrasing to the songs of nightingales and humpback whales, but that use a greater number of body parts. Walruses sing with their fleshy and muscular lips, tongues, muzzles and noses. They sing by striking their flippers against their chests to hit their pharyngeal pouches, balloon-like extensions of the trachea that are unique to Odobenus and that also serve as flotation devices. In full breeding tilt, the bulls sound like a circus, a construction site, a Road Runner cartoon. They whistle, beep, rasp, strum, bark and knock. They make bell tones, jackhammer drills, train-track clatters and the rubber-band boing! of Wile E. Coyote getting bonked on the head. They mix and match their boings, bells and knocks, they speed up and slow down, they vocalize underwater, in the air, at the bubbly border between. They sing nonstop for days at a time, and their songs can be heard up to 10 miles away. They listen to one another, take tips from one another and change their tune as time and taste require.
• 

  TEETH

  http://pianoparty.blogspot.com/2008/05/teeth.html
  196 days ago in Player Piano Party · Authority: 18

  I was having a bit of a work-induced tantrum this morning when B emailed me a link to this, which pretty much solved all my problems. It's like, you don't even need to read the article because the picture is so badass. That is my kind of article. Walrus pictures and the stupendously beard-y new Bonnie Prince Billy record = instant bliss.Also, FYI: This Thursday (5/22) I'll be reading from my 33 1/3 book on Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" at Word in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Matthew Stearns (Sonic Youth's "Daydream Nation") and Michael Fournier (The Minutemen's "Double Nickels on the Dime") will also be reading, and Jenny Eliscu, from Rolling Stone, will be moderating a post-show discussion.The event starts at 7:30. Word is at 126 Franklin Ave. (G to Greenpoint Ave).Also, incidentally, if any of you are tooting around during the day, I'm participating in a panel discussion ("Visualizing Popular Music") at NYU at 2PM, as part of the Cultural Studies Association's annual conference. Come by! Wear yr best elbow-patch'd corduroy blazer!
• 

  Who Is the Walrus?

  http://www.worldzootoday.com/2008/07/06/who-is-the-walrus-2/
  149 days ago in World Zoo Today · Authority: 6

  NYT > Endangered and Extinct Species By NATALIE ANGIER I was about to meet a walrus for the first time in my life, and I felt fabulous. After all, Ronald J. Schusterman of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has studied them for years, had assured me over the phone that to meet a walrus was to fall in love with walruses — the mammals were that smart, friendly and playful. “They’re pussycats!” he said. Just as we were entering the walrus house at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, Calif., however, Dr. Schusterman tossed out a bit of advice. “The first thing the walruses will do when they come over is start pushing at you, pressing their heads right into your stomach,” he said. “Don’t let them get away with that. No matter how hard they push, you have to stand your ground.” I stopped short, confused. “If you don’t stand your ground, you’ll be knocked over or backed against a wall in no time,” Dr. Schusterman said. But but … I sputtered. How was I supposed to stand my ground against an animal the size of a Honda Civic? This sounded less like “friendly and playful” than “aggressive and possibly dangerous.” “Just push back on the snout with the palm of your hand and blow in its face,” Dr. Schusterman instructed. “A walrus really likes to be blown in the face.” But suddenly there I was in the pen, time expanding as I watched Sivuqaq, a 2,200-pound adult male, roll toward me like a gelatinous, mustachioed boulder and head straight for my solar plexus. Somehow, either out of professional pride or rigid terror, I managed to stay standing and stuck out my palm; when Sivuqaq nuzzled against it, all my fears fell away. I stroked his splendid vibrissae, the stiff, sensitive whiskers that a walrus uses to search for bivalves through the seabed’s dark murk, and that feel like slender tubes of bamboo. Then I blew in his face, and he half-closed his eyes, and I huffed and puffed harder and he leaned into my breath, all the while bleating and grunting and snorting for more. In the public pantheon of marine mammaldom, dolphins are adored, whales revered, and seal pups make old Bond girls swoon. But walruses remain perversely, lumpishly obscure, known mostly for their sing-song linkage with a carpenter, an eggman and goo goo goo joob. To which Dr. Schusterman and his colleagues might well respond with a blast of a Bronx kazoo. Odobenus rosmarus is a magnificent creature, they say, behaviorally, anatomically, acoustically and taxonomically in a category all its own. The walrus belongs to the pinniped suborder, the group of blubbery, fin-footed carnivores that includes seals and sea lions. But whereas there are 19 species in the family of so-called true seals, and 14 in the family of fur seals and sea lions, the walrus is the only living representative of the family Odobenidae, those that walk with their teeth. And though the walrus is an Arctic species and thus much harder to study in the wild than the elephant seals and sea lions that flop onto the beaches of Northern California, scientists are gathering evidence that Odobenus is the most cognitively and socially sophisticated of all pinnipeds. “I’ve worked with marine mammals for a long time, and with many different species of pinniped, but I’ve never experienced anything like walruses,” said Colleen Reichmuth of the Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “They are fantastic.” Yet she and her colleagues despair for the walrus’s future. Like the polar bear, which last week was granted protection under the Endangered Species Act, the walrus depends on the seasonal rhythms of the polar ice cap for every phase of its life, which means it is particularly vulnerable to the warming of the earth’s climate and the retreat of the ice. The walrus might well be a match for any famously eggheaded animal of any nonhuman order: for Flipper, for Willy, for Alex the gray parrot, for Kanzi the bonobo chimpanzee. As researchers have lately determined, the walrus shares with other big-brained species an unusually extended childhood. Walrus calves remain with their mothers for several years, compared with several weeks or months for the young of other pinnipeds, and that sustained dependency “could very well provide an opportunity for learning,” said Dr. Reichmuth, particularly about walrus civics. Evidence suggests that the bonds between walruses are exceptionally strong: the animals share food, come to one another’s aid when under attack and nurse one another’s young, a particularly noteworthy behavior given the cost in energy of synthesizing a pinniped’s calorically rich, fatty milk. “Walruses are very gregarious, and they like to be near other walruses,” said Chad Jay, who heads the walrus research program for the United States Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center in Anchorage. “They like hanging out together, touching each other, socializing. Even when it’s hot and they have plenty of space, they prefer to clamber on top of each other and huddle together.” Walruses want so much to be with other walruses that if there are no other walruses around, they will make do with the next available large object. Lee Cooper of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science recounted his 2004 expedition aboard a research vessel in the Bering Strait, when the crew came upon a number of calves that had somehow gotten separated from their mothers, and, oh, how excited the calves were to spot the ship and its staff, and how desperately they sought to climb aboard. “They see this big red and white ship, they must assume it’s a big iceberg and the people moving around on it are something like walruses,” Dr. Cooper said. Unfortunately, the ship was far from shore and lacked the means to serve as a rescue vessel, Dr. Cooper said, and the staff had no choice but to leave the young walruses behind. Calves might also need time to learn how to play — music, that is. It turns out that Odobenus is an acoustic genius, its body an all-in-one band. Males woo females with lengthy compositions that have been compared in the complexity of their structure and phrasing to the songs of nightingales and humpback whales, but that use a greater number of body parts. Walruses sing with their fleshy and muscular lips, tongues, muzzles and noses. They sing by striking their flippers against their chests to hit their pharyngeal pouches, balloon-like extensions of the trachea that are unique to Odobenus and that also serve as flotation devices. In full breeding tilt, the bulls sound like a circus, a construction site, a Road Runner cartoon. They whistle, beep, rasp, strum, bark and knock. They make bell tones, jackhammer drills, train-track clatters and the rubber-band boing! of Wile E. Coyote getting bonked on the head. They mix and match their boings, bells and knocks, they speed up and slow down, they vocalize underwater, in the air, at the bubbly border between. They sing nonstop for days at a time, and their songs can be heard up to 10 miles away. They listen to one another, take tips from one another and change their tune as time and taste require. Nobody yet knows what a female listens for while she hears one or more suitors singing, but listen she apparently does, for she eventually dives from her icy perch and into the water to mate with a well-tempered male, and evidence suggests she will shun anyone who can’t carry a tune. And though females in the wild do not sing as the males do, they have the anatomical chops to make music and will happily perform the entire walrus Billboard chart if given the right incentive — like the promise of food or affection from Leah Coombs, one of the masterly trainers at Six Flags. Reporting in the December issue of the journal Animal Cognition, Dr. Schusterman and Dr. Reichmuth described their efforts to explore the extent of the walrus’s vocal talents, its capacity to invent acoustical sequences when given the cue. Experienced trainers worked with two 12-year-old walruses, Sivuqaq the male and a female named Siku (both names are Inuit), reinforcing the mammals’ behaviors by dispensing or withholding food rewards and demanding that the walruses strive ever harder to generate innovative sounds and sound combinations. The breadth of the walruses’ creativity exceeded all expectations, not only during training sessions but also during downtime. Dr. Reichmuth said one walrus figured out how to use a rubber toy in the pool as an instrument by pressing it against a window and blasting air through it until it sounded like a bugle. Soon two other walruses in the pool had learned to do the same thing. “To use a tool to produce an innovative sound, and to learn about that behavior socially,” Dr. Reichmuth said, “now that is impressive.” As impressive as such musical talents may be, and as indispensable as they are to a male walrus’s reproductive prospects, the elaborate infrastructure behind them probably evolved for alimentary rather than artistic reasons. Pinnipeds are thought to be descendants of bear-like terrestrial ancestors that, around 30 million years ago, turned amphibious to better exploit marine prey. Walruses focused on a particular segment of the seafood market: bivalves like oysters and clams and other invertebrates that live in the benthic zone, the muddy floor below the shallow waters of the continental shelf. They eat huge numbers of bivalves, maybe 7,000 a day. They creep along the seabed, their whiskery vibrissae probing the surface to feel for the telltale tubes of buried mollusks. They dislodge their prey with a scoop of their flippers, or by sucking in water and blasting it back out in targeted jets. They are able to locate, excavate and extract the meat from an oyster in some six seconds, said Nette Levermann of the University of Copenhagen, “and all this without the help of hands and in total darkness.” They have such incredible muscular control over their entire snout area, Dr. Reichmuth said, “that if you drop a little piece of fish on the whiskers away from the mouth, they can walk it along the whiskers, across the muzzle and into the mouth.” That precision feeding equipment eventually was recruited to do double duty singing walrus love songs and enabling walrus schmoozes. The walrus’s menu plan helps explain its Arctic range and its ice-based life. Benthic feeders fare best where waters are cold, said Jacqueline M. Grebmeier of the marine biogeochemistry and ecology group at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In cold waters, organic matter like algae tends to fall straight to the bottom to nourish the clams and worms below, rather than getting grazed off the top as it does in more tropical seas. The more trickle-down bounty for bivalves, the more bivalves for walruses. Ice sheets above these happy hunting grounds in turn offer the walruses a handy platform on which to rest and rear young. The ice also serves as transportation, for as it retreats and advances with the seasons, the walruses above are conveniently delivered to fresh benthic fields. A walrus is beautifully suited for life on the rink. Its three-inch-thick hide of blubber and skin keeps it warm, while with its elongated pair of canine teeth, its hallmark tusks, the walrus can heave itself from water and onto slippery ice. Through the machinery of eating, then, Odobenus rises: talking the talk, and walking the walk. Go to Source http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/science/20walrus.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss World Zoo Today ShareThis
• 

  What Walruses Can Teach About Learning

  http://silenceandvoice.com/archives/2008/06/27/what-walruses...
  158 days ago in Silence and Voice · Authority: 23

  The New York Times had a recent article entitled Who Is the Walrus? that I have been thinking about and processing for the past few weeks. The more I reflect on it, the more I realize how assumptions quietly sneak back into preparation and delivery of teaching and learning with adults. Now, I have worked in and around adult and organizational learning for most of my professional life, and every now and then something comes along to wake me up again to various assumptions and the like that I hold about learners. I know about andragogy, hegemony, postmodern paradigmatic structures, critical theory, and the like. I have studied all of these things and they have helped to transform my worldviews on teaching and learning. Nevertheless, it is easy to fall back into the pre-learned status quo and teach as we learned. Enter, the walrus. The article on walruses raised my thinking quit a bit, and I can’t help but think there is a lot here for us to learn about teaching and learning. So, what can walruses teach us? Here are three thoughts: Big scary things aren’t always as they seem. Yes, walruses can way over 2000 pounds and can approach very quickly, but as the author learned they are not as intimidating as they appear. In fact, he learned they like to play, are highly social, and are so intelligent that scientists use the term “creative” when discussing walruses. They don’t quite charge–they come over to play and love to have their faces blown on. How easy it is to miss this because we can’t get past the size, tusks, and noise? How often do we do this with learners, perhaps because of their organizations, hair styles, or use of professional language? Throw in culture, history, and status (using whatever measure is at hand), and you get the picture? Some things that appear mean are really only happy. It is easy to draw conclusions about the tusks and how the walruses bang into one another as if they are fighting. In reality, the tusks help them get onto the ice and out of the water. Fight? Walruses are so social and so like the company of other walruses that they climb all over one another, and if no walruses are around, will even seek out other moving objects (such as, sadly, a ship). Do we at times misunderstand what our learners want or have to offer, especially those who are (for whatever variety of reasons) different from us? Can we misinterpret their questions, as well as their learning needs, distractions, and levels of commitment to education they had no role in creating? Noise to some can be considered singing to others. A male walrus can be heard from 10 miles away, and can sing in complex forms using all body parts for days at a time. This singing is for the female walrus who can, amazingly, seem to distinguish the love song through all the noise of all the other walruses. Not everybody likes opera or rap, but some people really get into one or the other (or even both). Things that may appear like a confused mess can really be complicated processing by learners (ever seen a Philip Glass opera?). Have we ever thought something was wrong or nonsensical because we don’t get it, though our learners fight to affirm their experiences (that we in turn can easily dismiss)? How often have we ever claimed (even internally) that we know our learner’s context better than they do, and then handily proceeded from there? I am still considering how much I learned with this article and the next few weeks of attentive reflective practice. While my perceptions and appreciation of this wonderful animal has shifted and grown, I so very want to bring this into my professional and academic work. Failing to do so will leave me unable to reach out to my learners in ways they need.  After all, learning is most valuable when we reach the learners where they are in and as themselves.  Technorati Tags: walrus,new york times,adult education,organizational learning
• 

  Who does public relations for the Walrus?

  http://www.ta-agency.com/socially-responsible-pr/2008/6/19/w...
  167 days ago in Off The Grid Blog - Clean Tech public relations · Authority: 1

  We do. On June 19, I leave for Petrapavlosk in the Kamchatka peninsula in Siberia where I am promised "mountains raising their gleaming white heads into a cerulean blue sky, of hillsides covered in a profusion of wildflowers, of stretches of Siberian "raiga", of rivers fringed by reeds and woodlands, of forest of birch and conifer". Only accessible by land or by sea. Surrounded by 100 volcanoes,68 of which are active (comprising 10% of the total Earth's active volcanos----hence the Russian's have their Institute of Vulcanology here) this truly is a place for those seeking TNRIs (Totally New Retinal Images) as well as those of us who might just be a tad jealous of John Muir's wintering in Yosemite Valley. For this is a most volatile region of the Earth called The Ring of Fire--part of the high tectonic shifting along the Pacific Rim, it comprises part of the string of volcanoes that mark this rim of the Pacific Ocean. Unlike San Francisco quakes and Mt St Helens, these do not make the news: They are too frequent and obviously too remote. From PBS' Siberia's Ring of Fire: Forbidden Wilderness... A region of Kamchatka called the Valley of Death has been especially lethal to animals. Numerous vents in the Valley release a heavy, odorless, toxic gas. When the wind blows from a certain direction, the entire Valley is filled with this gas, suffocating any animals (and humans) present. During one recent year six bears, four foxes and three hares perished, along with dozens of crows and assorted rodents. All of the above may have you asking: Why am I going there? Then of course there is Gorely Lake - in above photo. No,that's not photoshopped. That's a lake of pure hydrochloric acid. This too may have you asking: Why am I going there? Loaded into zodiac boats with Russians (and hopefully a good supply of caviar and vodka on occasion, given the risks and consequences of being here) I cannot think of a place more remote and free from civilization and pr agency discontents. And a place to meet surely one of the 120,000 remaining walruses in this region (see map above). As impossible as it is to envision this from my desk here in Orlando, I do hope shortly to blow a puff of air into a walrus' face -- a gesture they apparently appreciate. And to hear them sing. This all seems quite wonderfully eccentric to me for a 2,200 lb "perverse lump" as a Times writer dubbed walruses. But sad to say, to those of us who track global warming data, I'm afraid the geologists in our group will be pointing out that the ice caps on the mountains, in previous years an everpresent fixture of the landscape, will not be so thick or everpresent. My greatest fear is that I'll actually see walruses fighting over the few scant ice floes they leave their young on when they hunt. After all, I've read in Imaging Notes that scientists have been studying the recent exposure of over one million square miles of open water, as measured through remote sensing satellite monitoring. As reported in the New York Times (Andrew Revkin, Oct., 2007), satellite and buoy data show that winds have been pushing think old ice out of the Arctic basin past Greenland, leaving behind only thinner ice that melts more rapidly under summer conditions. (Note being a PR person - I love satellite data as it is relatively difficult to "spin". It is not that the data cannot be visually biased to omit a scientist's bias, eg. setting the threshold value for pseudo-coloring to be high or low, so much as the peer group which guards this easily dispells such a bias.) The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center had previously projected a 2050 or 2070 ice-free summer ocean in the Arctic, and now have moved that projection forward to as early as 2030. Since it's 2008, well, I have my concerns. So I've come to see if the dots connect between what we witness in this remote place of ice and what is projected to come, far closer to this desk I sit at in Orlando. Sea-level rise simulations by Jared T. Williams Copyright (c) Daniel P. Schrag. Source: Fueling our Future, Harvard Magazine, May 2006 To read more why we are going to this strange remote place, check out this great NY Times piece on the walrus. And though we're a bit south of this, we're greatly inspired also by Imaging Notes, The Need for Mapping Polar Bear Habitat Collapse written by Timothy Foresman, President of the International Centre for Remote Sensing Education. Yours truly- speaking for the walrus and polar bear - the only PR I'll be doing for the next two weeks is Planet Reverence. lisa
• 

  Finally

  http://bainbridgefish.blogspot.com/2008/05/finally.html
  185 days ago in Friendly Fish Phronistery · No authority yet

  It is still May for a few more hours yet. Tomorrow is June, the month when the stress is supposed to all dissipate because all the reports will be in and done. It is not as clean as that, though, and everything is dragging on, so the stress continues, but it's not too bad. It helps that I finally have a non-horrible diagnosis for why I have been feeling tired, nauseated, dizzy, and tingly since before Christmas. It's not multiple sclerosis. It's not chronic fatigue syndrome. It's not a tumor. It's an inner ear disorder of unspecified everything. It might be problems actually in the vestibule. It might be damage to the vestibular-auditory nerve. It could have been caused by shoddy materials. Or my concussion 4 years ago (some gifts keep on giving). Or a virus. Or maybe it's something else. Anyway, I have been doing vestibular therapy, which consists of eye and neck exercises, and sitting up and lying down quickly. The problem is that I don't do them nearly as much as I am supposed to. The first eye exercise has really helped (or maybe it's a coincidence), so although I am still dizzy and kind of tingly, I haven't been as diligent as I should be with the exercises. And I haven't done any of them today. oops.Here is poem, written to my friend Carol:"Poor Toe"A battle between wall and toe.Wall won.I thought of you.That's all. Carol might understand it because she broke her toe months ago. Or she might not. Did you hear about how cute and lovable walruses are? They are the sweethearts of the pinniped world.

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