refractal

Searching for the bottom

A delightful little interview with the author of “Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth”. Even though I do not get the sense that Talbor, the author, is himself an explorer of caves, there is a bit or two for the imagination to alight upon for a moment.

Most people think caves are dead holes, but they are alive in many ways. For one, they breathe. There are pressure changes at the surface, and as the pressure increases it forces air down into the cave, so it’s inhaling, as it were. When the surface pressure decreases, that cave starts to exhale. They have clocked the exhalations at Lechugilla cave in New Mexico at over sixty miles per hour. So they can really roar.

If you should like to take further subterranean gambols, perhaps with a sober and captivating dash of political economy, The Road to Wiggan Pier may hold some interest:

When you have finally got there—and getting there is a task in itself: I will explain that in a moment—you crawl through the last line of pit props and see opposite you a shiny black wall three or four feet high. This is the coal face. Overhead is the smooth ceiling made by the rock from which the coal has been cut; underneath is the rock again, so that the gallery you are in is only as high as the ledge of coal itself, probably not much more than a yard. The first impression of all, overmastering everything else for a while, is the frightful, deafening din from the conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot see very far, because the fog of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can see on either side of you the line of half-naked kneeling men, one to every four or five yards, driving their shovels under the fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left shoulders. They are feeding it on to the conveyor belt, a moving rubber, belt a couple of feet wide which runs a yard or two behind them. Down this belt a glittering river of coal races constantly. In a big mine it is carrying away several tons of coal every minute. It bears it off to some place in the main roads where it is shot into tubs holding half a ton, and thence dragged to the cages and hoisted to the outer air.

My other tounge is a Cymothoa exigua

Radiolab this week treats the ever fascinating topic of parasites. In the hour long podcast, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich diffuse into the wondrous world of zombie cockroaches and cordyceps ladden ants (really this one is a must see!). Cordyceps is particularly surreal because, of its hundreds of varieties, each has evolved to commandeer the neural functions of a different species in order to hop another link of the biosphere.

See also:

Brainwashed by a neuroparasite

Discover Magazine Gallery – Zombie animals and the parasites that control them

Cymothoa exigua is a parasitic crustacean of the family Cymothoidae. It tends to be 3 to 4 cm long. This parasite attaches itself at the base of the spotted rose snapper’s (Lutjanus guttatus) tongue, entering the fish’s mouth through its gills. It then proceeds to extract blood through the claws on its front three pairs of legs.

As the parasite grows, less and less blood reaches the tongue, and eventually the organ atrophies from lack of blood. The parasite then replaces the fish’s tongue by attaching its own body to the muscles of the tongue stub. The fish is able to use the parasite just like a normal tongue. It appears that the parasite does not cause any other damage to the host fish. Once C. exigua replaces the tongue, some feed on the host’s blood and many others feed on fish mucus. They do not eat scraps of the fish’s food.This is the only known case of a parasite functionally replacing a host organ.

There are many species of Cymothoa, but only C. exigua is known to consume and replace its host’s tongue.

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