Wasting Time on YouTube

(Picture from here.)

Okay. It's the pandemic. It's been a godawful long time. I just saw one of my best friends, in person, for the first time in seven months. If you can call it that. We were both masked. We stood six feet apart and made grotesque long distance hugging motions at one another. 

Who am I kidding? It was the best moment I'd had for months with someone who wasn't living inside my house. Of course, it was the only good moment I'd had for months with someone who wasn't living inside my house.

That said, there are some really good diversions on youtube. 

(Yes. I've been watching a lot of it. For one thing, the news sections pops up effectively in headlines so I can be depressed without the horrid experience of actually watching the news. Small mercies.)

So: these have been good at getting me through the night.

In no apparent order...

Realistic Fishing

We got into fishing in a big way this year. It's outside. It's doing something. We can spend some time together outside doing something. It's fairly easy to maintain social distance. 

I mean it would be great if I actually caught fish. Wendy and Ben did. Turns out fried fish fresh from the lake is pretty good. 

RF fishes a lot and has a lot of videos. He shows you what he does. He shows you when it works and when it doesn't. There's a lot of "doesn't" in his show. He usually catches a fish eventually but you get to watch him cast six or eight or forty times before that happens. This is endearing to me since I cast a lot and don't catch many fish. 

It's also true RF isn't proud. If he can't catch bass, he'll catch bluegill. Pretty much anyone can catch a bluegill. Bluegill range from not very big to extremely small. But RF likes them all. 

In all his videos I only saw him keep a few fish.

On the con side, he really has some very good spots down there in Tennessee. Wendy and I are looking at a bunch of shad feeding. RF tosses a hook into the swarm and hooks one and then uses it for bait. 

We stop at the shad feeding point. We never see that. 

Scishow

Scishow is great for 8 or 10 or 20 minute discussions about interesting scientific things. This can be the evolution of sharks or the nature of the Big Bang Theory. (The scientific theory. Not the show.) The hosts don't dumb it down but they don't bludgeon you with math either. 

There are several hosts but one (whose name escapes me) looks a whole lot like Peter Dinklage if PD were six feet tall. Being lectured to about science by Peter Dinklage is far from the worst thing in the world.

That said, the only thing that would make Scishow better is if it really were hosted by Peter Dinklage. 

I would love that. 

Joe Scott

Joe Scott has two basic video blogs. One about science ("Answers with Joe") and one about his emotional state. ("TMI") Both are fun.

Answers with Joe is Joe Scott trying to figure out science and technology and explaining what he's found out to the viewer. This can be a lot of fun since he is not a scientist but does have a real drive to get it right. He's also the first to admit when he runs off the edge of his understanding.

TMI on the other hand is Joe trying to make sense of his life and this current world situation. It's very personal and, frankly, I don't listen to it as much as I listen Answers. There are some real nuggets here, though. For example, he did one TMI where he wondered if social media is a possible Great Filter. 

(The Great Filter is one of the hypotheses on why we're not hearing lots of conversation from out there. The idea is that there is some kind of event, probably self-generated, that prevents a species from getting off planet and getting out there riling things up.)

Hijinks ensued.

Outdoors55

As both of my readers know, I've been experimenting with making knives. I have Outdoors55 to thank for this. I mentioned him earlier, though not by name. (See here.) It was his video that made things understandable enough to me so that I could try it. 

Outdoors55 has a particular point of view on everything he does. It's extremely practical. For example, the video I watched about making a knife said, basically, make a knife from a file because the file is already heat treated. In another video, he built a tiny forge out of four bricks and a couple of torches. It's a very serviceable  forge for tempering a knofe and it costs about six bucks. 

A lot of very good advice that I'm probably not smart enough to take.

Overly Sarcastic Productions

I cannot say enough good things about this site. OSP has two hosts: Red and Blue. Red talks about fiction tropes and mythology. Blue talks about history. They make extremely interesting, extremely funny videos about what interests them. 

There are also some serious ones, too. Red's Trope Talks are interesting and not particularly funny-- except that Red is funny just by herself.

I've seen them all. 

She has the best take on Journey to the West I've ever seen. Also, her take on Lovecraft should be seen by everybody.

exurb1a

I found this one very recently and I have to say I'm in love. These are, really, flash fiction or short stories with fairly minimal illustration. 

The video We're the Last Humans Left begins:

Or species probably began about two hundred thousand years ago and judging by the fucking state of us I think we can all agree it was a terrible idea.

Which gives you an idea how his nihilist side works. But that's not the only good thing about his material.

Letter to Marble 3 begins:

To our excellent friends of Marble 3. Congratulions on decoding this message from the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. You must be getting very clever. Don't ask us why it's written in your languages. Give us some credit. We're gone now. But we left this message behind for when you're ready to hear it.

It's a lovely, hopeful, and not terribly sentimental letter to us to keep trying to be better. 

Which is pretty much all there is, isn't it?

Warlord of Noodles

Also called Betsy Lee.

This is a very strange site. There are a lot of different pieces to it. There are two main story lines: No Evil and Swingers Side Show Dance Club. The dance club story line is, sad to say, now defunct. It's worth watching but it ends abruptly.

No Evil is an entirely different kettle of fish. 

Imagine meso-american mythology being told with the point of view of Appalachia. 

No Evil is convoluted and mysterious. Several parts or flat out obscure-- you know that what is happening has a reason behind it but the reason is not forthcoming. It may never be forthcoming. 

I'm fine with that. No Evil has interesting characters and a good plot. Some of the singing is heartbreakingly beautiful. (I'm looking at you episode 10.) It blends music and folk lore seamlessly. 

Some singing, I think, is by the production team. Some comes from old recording. 

The sense of it reminds me of the Grand Old Opry and other like music I heard when I was a child fifty or sixty years ago. 

And that's it. 

These are interesting sites. Things I like might not be things that you like but give them a whirl.

North American Megafauna

(Smilodon image from here.)

This is what used to be called Columbus Day. It is now called Indigenous Peoples Day. 

People came to the "New World" at least 15,000 years ago. There is some evidence that they may have made it here as much as 20,000 years ago. Regardless, the ecology here was very different from where they had left. I am referring to the megafauna that were here for quite some time and seemingly disappeared about 11,000 years ago.

These were the animals living here when the Native Americans arrived.

When Columbus sailed into the Caribbean there were thriving populations of human beings already here. Some of the largest cities in the world were in the "New World"-- cities supported by agriculture without the aid of cattle or horses. Smarter people in that they had to be ingenious in different ways without domesticated large animals.

One wonders how North America might have turned out if humans had realized they could domesticate the horses and camels that were already here, long before they "old world" humans figured it out. SF writers: go for it.

The animals usually spoken of in this context are, besides the horses and camels, were mammoths, mastodons, smilodons, giant sloths, glyptodons (an armadillo on steroids), short faced bears, an American cheetah, a giant beaver, and the dire wolf. Many were much larger than equivalents at the same time in the "Old World." Of course, humans had fifty thousand years to take care of them. 

My two favorites are smilodons and mastodons. 

Smilodons were the saber toothed cats you saw in Ice Age. They ranged from medium cats coming in at 55-100 kg (Smilodon gracilis) up to 280 kg (S. fatalis). To give some comparison, modern lions top out at about 225kg. (BTW: there was a North American lion, Panthera atrox, that weighed as much as 420kg.) 

These were extremely successful predators until they weren't. They hunted things like bison or camels-- one wonders if they left the really large herbivores to the American lion. No one knows if they hunted in packs or singly. But they arose 2.5 million years ago and came to an abrupt end along with all the others.

While smilodons were in the cat family, they were unrelated to tigers. They were no more a saber toothed tiger than a similarly named Tasmanian tiger. It would be interesting to know which was the apex predator: P. atrox of Smilodon. Most of the literature I read suggested Smilodon was an apex predator. However, it's hard for me to believe that when P. atrox is on the scene and twice as big. As far as I can tell, atrox had not abandoned its predator ways. Of course, without a precise knowledge of animal ranges, it's hard to tell. Smilodons might have been apex predators in locations not frequented by P. atrox.

Lions and Smilodons appear to have different strategies for killing. Smilodons sacrificed bite force for precision with their sabers. Where lions and their relatives developed significant jaw bones and muscles. This is one possible way they co-existed: different prey selection. However, one study suggested the dire wolf, Smilodon and atrox hunted the same prey, suggesting all three were in competition. I find this interesting. Unless there were a huge diversity and quantity of prey available to them, this could not have been permanent. 

Let's move on to mastodons, the mammoth's less popular, scrappy little brother.

Mammoths get all the press with their curvy tusks and long hair. They're taller so they get all the attention.

Mastodons are smaller, flatter and have long, flat tusks. Mastodons ate rough fair: woody small trees and bushes. Mammoths were grazers and liked grass. Mastodons were everywhere, all over North America, Russia down into China and down into Viet Nam. Mammoths had a comparatively narrow range: a band in North America, northern Russia and China. Mammoths ranged further north than mastodons. Mastodons ranged much further south.

(Although, I think this opinion might be revised. There was a tremendous mammoth site found in mid-Mexico recently. Or maybe they just managed to get far enough south to reach the end of their range. Also, I'm including the range of all the mastodon species here, including some where the genus attribution is still under discussion.)

While mastodons have been depicted as hairy as their mammoth cousins, there's no evidence for this. Some studies have suggested they were more like elephants-- which might account for their relatively southern range. They looked more like elephants than mammoths but were only distantly related to either one. 

One study of mastodon mitochondrial genomes suggests significant dispersion along with the glacial shifts. Different groups would migrate into new areas as the glaciers retreated and then get pushed into new locales as the glaciers returned. This pushed different groups together, isolated one group from another and mixed things up. All of this appears to be shown in the variation in mitochondrial DNA.

People have a tendency to come across a given place and presume that it's always looked like that. The state we initially encounter is what we think of as the natural state. Subsequent changes are compared against this natural state. When the Europeans came to Atlantic coast and found these huge forests, they thought that state was primal and without human intervention. Given that human beings had been there at least thirteen thousand years by that point, nothing could be further from the truth. Of course,  the vast majority of Native Americans had been obliterated by European diseases and couldn't argue the point. (I strongly recommend reading 1491.) 

The ecology of North America had been isolated from human beings for millions of years. The megafauna I mentioned above was integrated into that ecology. And disappeared virtually overnight. 

Mastodons , like most of its elephantine relatives, were drivers of that ecology. (Another such driver was the beaver. I suggest reading Eager, an ecological analysis of the role of the beaver. But I'm not going to discuss that right now.) They, along with mammoths, had played that role for over two million years when glaciers came and went. Then, they were gone. Smilodons, gone. Giant sloths, gone. But the ecology they drove didn't disappear with them. It just stumbled along with great holes punched in it.

Herbivores-- especially giant herbivores-- exert a strong downward control on vegetation. (See here.) They limit the spread of trees and buses by eating them-- only a subset survive to become large. They can increase grasslands by knocking down or eating grass competitors. Elephants have been known to dig out waterholes when they extract minerals. The elephants go on their way but the waterholes remain. The vegetation responds. Some take advantage of the animals by using them for seed dispersal or pollination. Or just by using the enormous amounts of dung-- a mammoth might eat 300kg of food a day. That high quality fertilizer had to go somewhere. 

Apex predators have a similar influence on the size of their prey. Predation is expensive. A predator can't end up expending more energy getting food than the energy that food will supply. So, large predators imply large prey. Not always-- baleen whales can be considered predators for the herring and krill they consume. But usually, on land, a large predator tends to hunt single relatively large prey animals rather than consuming many, many small animals. Again, not always-- this is a tendency, not a law. There has been some evidence that in the north country of Canada of wolves consuming large amounts of rodents. But those same wolves are also hunting deer and elk. 

When predators get big, some of their prey get bigger to escape them. Very large predators escape them altogether and at that point the predators descend on their sick and young, leaving much of the population intact. Since, then, the predators go after smaller herbivores, they are, in effect, reducing the competition to large herbivores. Smilodon went after horses and camels-- mid-range, grass consuming herbivores. This left the field open to mammoths.

An interesting side effect of increase in size is this large increase in biomass. The consequence of that is ecological control. By "control" I do not mean the mastodons are sitting around figuring out their next move, I mean the population is interacting with the ecology towards a new equilibrium.

This study shows that dispersal of phosphorous (an essential mineral for life) was radically different in the megafauna age compared to now" "...we estimate that the extinctionof the Amazonian megafauna decreased the lateral flux ofthe limiting nutrient phosphorus by more than 98%, withsimilar, though less extreme, decreases in all continentsoutside of Africa." This resulted in a long term decrease in phosphorus all through the Amazon that is still ongoing.

The ecological implications of the megafauna extinction to parasites, micro-predators, medium predators and mega-predators are interesting. (See here.) The giant vampire bat (Desmodus draculae and D. stocki) were not able to switch prey and went extinct. Smilodons, the dire wolf and  P. atrox went extinct-- which meant medium prey such as bison and elk had less predation until smaller predators stepped up. 

The question always comes up: why did the megafauna go extinct?

One study suggests the shift towards megafauna was a response to ecological instability. This instability came to an end around 11k years ago and the result was that there came a selection against large megafauna in North America. Recently, as these systems equilibrated, the world evolved into "stripes"-- areas  that had a reliable temperature and rainfall. These areas supported a different selection criteria for animal size. They suggest the extinction didn't happen suddenly but over the last 100k years as the ice age ceased and the climate stabilized. Thus, the "stripe" that allowed megafauna became sections of India and Africa and the temperate megafauna downsized to bison and cattle sized animals. 

Humans might have played a role. The "overkill hypothesis" suggests the Clovis hunters with their superior technology were able to bring these large animals down. It's certainly true that mammoths and mastodons were hunted by human beings. While their great size proved an impediment to the larger predators, it did not seem to deter people. That said, it's unlikely that there were enough people in North America to directly hunt these animals to extinction.

However, it's also true that all of the megafauna species were under some stress. One idea was that humans hunted enough of the larger animals to shift the ecology and that shift served the final blow. 

My own feeling is that humans pretty much devastate the landscape wherever they go. I suspect this is what they did to Neanderthals. Not so much kill them but leave the land barren enough to push them over the edge. There were no Neanderthals in North America, so we made do with the megafauna.