Reinvention: NESCBWI16

This past weekend was NESCBWI's 2016 conference. A lot of wonderful things happened there, including getting to meet writers I've only ever connected with over the web, and getting to reunite with old critique partners who have moved out of state (and other writerly friends who I rarely get to see in real life!). However, what struck me most was the theme:

Reinvention.

I am in the process of personal reinvention. Last year I got a new job and my first ever book deal. I have been going through a rapid change in my life, and I can tell a new person is growing out of it. A super cool person. *puts on sunglasses*

However, it is important to note that metamorphosis isn't easy. From the outside perspective, the caterpillar goes into the chrysalis and comes out as a butterfly. In reality, it's much messier.

Science time.

Just give me a minute, guys.

When the caterpillar enters its chrysalis (which it first has to build itself, for the record), its enzymes begin to literally digest its tissues. After that, several sets of cells begin to multiply, much like what happens to an embryo, and new body parts grow. This forms the butterfly that we all know and love.

These special cells that grow into butterfly parts are actually there all along, but they can't begin to change and grow until that caterpillar turns its own body into sloppy goo. Let that sink in. Apply it to your life. Cringe a little at the imagery. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Anyway, to top it off, when the butterfly does emerge, it's in no condition to fly away. I was just in my museum's butterfly garden a few days ago, and got to witness a butterfly break free of its chrysalis. That thing was exhausted. It was still all wet, its wings were all crumpled, and it very obviously took all of its energy just to move to one side of its chrysalis where it could rest.

I stared at it, shaking my head and thinking: Dude. I identify so hard right now. 

Reinvention is powerful, but it has a price. The end result is worth it, but getting there can be a struggle.

I took a walk today around my local pond. All the spring imagery was really hammering home the reinvention theme all over the place, but one image in particular stood out to me:

This family of ducks. It's a dreary day of drizzle and 50 degree weather, with no sun in sight. When I approached these ducklings, they were scattered all over. Upon seeing me, Mom and Dad began regrouping them in a tired flurry. They have their work cut out for them, keeping track of all eight. I could tell they had already had a "day". One of the ducklings was a good dozen feet away when I walked up, and I could hear the exasperation in Mom's quacking.

New life is beautiful. New transformations are beautiful. But gosh darnit, those things take a lot of work. Too often, we only see or think about the happy results. Cute ducklings, following their mother in a neat line. A butterfly soaring to its next flower. Debut novels on shelves, new presentations wowing audiences...

Ahem.

Reinvention. It's great, important, sometimes even necessary...but it is a BEAST to accomplish.

My advice, and the advice echoed by tons of speakers this weekend?

Do it anyway.

Springtime

Boston is climbing out of a difficult winter, and spring is barely daring to peak out from the remaining piles of snow. Yes, we can see grass in spots, but next to the bare patches are slowly melting snow drifts, many still measuring in feet rather than inches. And any public outdoor space—think local soccer fields or parks—were used as dumping grounds for plows this year, so who knows when they’ll be clear. They still look like miniature mountain ranges right now!

The point of this is that we’re all on a desperate lookout for signs of spring. So with that in mind, I thought I’d talk a little bit about what makes spring spring.


1. We get access to more sunlight.

Image by Colivine

Earth moves to a point in its orbit where the Northern Hemisphere (or Southern Hemisphere, if you’re reading this post from below the equator) is tilted towards the sun, rather than away. This gives us longer days and more concentrated sunlight. We aren’t any closer to the sun than we were before, we’re just angled more advantageously.


2. The ground warms up.

While we tend to measure air temperature to judge if it feels warm enough to go out in a lighter jacket, spring is really about what’s happening below our feet. The thawing ground allows for a multitude of things to happen.

• Faster snow melt. (Ask yourself, is a chunk of ice going to melt faster on a surface warmer or colder than 32 degrees Fahrenheit?)
• Water begins to filter through the soil once more, and naturally mixes the nutrients from dead autumn leaves into the ground.
• The frost line below the ground rises until it’s gone completely, cluing in life below that it’s safe to come out!

3. Life wakes up.

We all know about animals who hibernate for the winter, and the return of birds from migration is a classic sign of spring as well. But spring is also about the plants and insects (who have been rendered essentially catatonic for months) finally resurfacing and going on with their way of life. They’re the powerhouses of spring. Buds form on trees, flowers bloom, and every around you, billions of creepy crawlies emerge from the earth and the water, busting back out to the surface like tiny, six-legged zombies. Or, in many cases, the grubby larval forms laid in eggs from last year.

Thanks to them, the entire circle of life revs up once more. They are the basis for everything. All hail springtime, the Great Bug Awakening! (And the Great Amphibian Awakening, which I will likely post about soon. For now, take a look below at a Great Reptile Awakening.)



 
4. Babies on the way.

Once life is awake again, it goes on with…well, making more life. It’s important to take advantage of the warm season when possible, so a great number of plants and animals capitalize on springtime to reproduce. The result: spring, hands down, is the cutest season we have. But it also is a dangerous time for many creatures, especially because of human activity.

Image by Guido Strotheide

So try to remember—as you go to bask in the sunlight of spring, all around you your entire extended family is distracted by (adorable) babies who need their attention! Be careful when driving. Watch out during yardwork. Keep cats and dogs controlled and indoors when possible.

And if you find a baby animal that you’re worried has been abandoned, please do some research before taking it away from wherever it’s nestled. It may actually be just where it’s meant to be, and mom may be coming back for it later. This site has good information about whether or not a baby animal is in trouble, and if it is, what you can do about it.

Sitting here, looking out my window at all the snow still on the ground, it’s hard to believe that the above processes are actually heading our way. But I hear it may hit 50 degrees today, so perhaps I’ll open up a couple windows and keep my fingers crossed.

And hey, look at that...I forgot that slide was back there! I wonder what other treasures the Boston Meltdown of 2015 will reveal...

Happy Spring, everybody!

T. rex: Hunter or Scavenger?

This is a question I get asked a lot. The public seems enamored with this notion that T. rex didn't actually hunt. It's bizarre. They're all so very disappointed by the idea, and yet obsessed with it, almost as if they're actively looking for a reason to pout about scientists making T. rex ultra lame. "Gee, way to go and let us down again, science. Party poopers. Pluto killers."

Please.

Allow me to clear some things up. The hunter/scavenger debate is not a major point of controversy in paleontology. Not by a long shot. It was just a suggestion brought up by Jack Horner back in the early 90s, and no one in the paleontological community has flipped out over it (and if no one's flipped out over it, then it's not a big deal, because paleontologists enjoy flipping out over things).

"Okay, okay. So which is it already?!"

The answer to the question of if T. rex hunted or scavenged is basically...they did both. Just like any modern carnivore.

There's been some hubbub recently about a cool fossil find where a hadrosaur vertebrae has a T. rex tooth embedded and healed over, which implies the T. rex bit this dinosaur when it was still alive and had time to heal. Therefore, likely evidence of predatory behavior on the part of the T. rex. It's being touted as the "nail in the coffin" on the scavenging theory, which just kind of makes me roll my eyes. This is a neat find, to be sure, but doesn't do much other than to affirm what other evidence has already implied: T. rex could both hunt and scavenge.

Many modern carnivores hunt while also supplementing their diet to varying degrees with scavenged meat. That's really how most predators go about their lives. Does it make them less fearsome? Not really. They can still kill things.

So as far as my reaction to this particular piece of pop culture dinosaur news, I'm nodding along with basic interest, but not flabbergasted (as many people have expected me to be). Sorry if I've burst anyone's bubble. I wasn't even going to cover this story on my blog, but I've had enough people ask me about it that I felt like I probably should address the issue, and address why I wasn't more super-psyched about it.

Remember, just because a predator is eating something already dead doesn't mean it couldn't kill you.

Easter Platypus?

With Easter tomorrow, there are images of bunnies and eggs pretty much everywhere you look right now. And while many of these images are adorable beyond words...they make zero sense scientifically.

As a fan of adorableness and a fan of science, this has me torn. So I thought, for Easter, why not do a blog post with adorable pictures AND actual science? Best of both worlds!

Now, I'm sure everyone has some familiarity with why rabbits and eggs are used as Easter symbols. Springtime, fertility, yadda yadda yadda...I'm not going to rehash the quirks of Christian holidays and symbolism here. Instead, let's talk about the biology of these fuzzy, floppy-eared lagomorphs, and the dinosaur eggs we love to artificially dye and shove in pictures with them!

Now, rabbits do actually have eggs. Just like we do. But their eggs, like ours, aren't exactly large and don't have shells that we can dye fancy colors. They're kept internally, waiting for the male equivalent to come along.

What we usually think of as an egg is actually an unfertilized chicken egg, laid by a hen in a controlled environment. Or maybe you're more of a naturalist, and the first thing that comes to mind is a nest full of blue robin eggs. Regardless, I'm guessing when you hear the word "egg", you think of a bird egg. And that's fine! Bird eggs are eggs, after all. However, sometimes it can be fun to remember that eggs come in many shapes and sizes.

Fish and amphibians lay eggs that are squishy, like jelly, to allow water to seep in and out. Reptiles have a shell on their eggs. It's usually soft, but it serves its purpose--it allows for nutrients and water to be held inside the egg without getting out, and keeps the egg from needing to be laid in water. Dinosaurs have hard shell eggs, which allows for greater protection (especially when you consider the sheer size of some of the dinosaurs that would've been sitting on their nest!). Birds, which are dinosaurs themselves, have this type of egg as well. And it is this type of egg we associate with Easter.

Rabbits, on the other hand, are lagomorphs--a special type of mammal that generally is herbivorous and has four ever-growing incisors. They're well nestled in the family tree of placental mammals, making their eggs completely internal, as mentioned before. Definitely not what we think of when with think of the Easter Bunny and its basket of eggs. However, there are mammals that do actually lay eggs! Namely, the platypus and the echidna.

So what about the eggs of those odd mammals? Well, unfortunately for Easter egg hunt enthusiasts, platypus and echidna eggs most closely resemble soft-shelled reptile eggs rather than hard-shelled dinosaur eggs we generally stick with our rabbits for Easter pictures. Not exactly things we could dye and hide safely.

So what does this all mean?

It means that our Easter symbolism is a little wonky. The eggs we use with our rabbits are actually from an entirely different group of animals. If you wanted to get more accurate, you could use actual rabbit eggs, but they would be impossible to find on an Easter egg hunt, since they'd be microscopic. If you didn't care that it was specifically a rabbit ringing in the holiday, and just wanted a fluffy creature with large enough eggs to see, you could use an echidna or a platypus as the symbol instead. However, their eggs aren't hard-shelled and wouldn't dye as easy. Not to mention those animals live in Australia, where the seasons are opposite ours and therefore this "Spring" ritual would be entirely in the wrong time of year.

Moral of the story: Easter symbolism doesn't make a lot of scientific sense, and there's no easy way to make it more logical. But shh! I won't tell if you enjoy your adorable bunny pictures and have a Happy Easter anyway!

Alien Animals

With science discovering new exoplanets nearly every day now, proving that our solar system is not all that special (and most definitely not alone), it's a super fun time to write sci-fi!

Finally, there is science to back up the idea of planets around other stars, planets within a habitable range of stars (the "Goldilocks Zone": not too hot, not too cold), and even methods for detecting the composition of the atmospheres of these planets (...water vapor? Oxygen? We're lookin' for YOU!). At this point in time, it's pretty much assumed that aliens must be out there.

Awesome!

...but wait. Before you grab that pen and start creating your alien planet, now may be a good time to step back and learn something about evolution.

I think most of us grasp the basic concepts of evolution: species change over time, and it usually has something to do with out-competing each other and/or fitting into their environment. But if you're going to sit down and construct an entire alien world, you need more than the basics.

Example: James Cameron's Avatar attempted to create an alien world with fully fleshed out ecosystems. I say "attempted" because, in my opinion, they failed.

Setting aside whatever positive or negative feelings I have about the story itself, the glaring issues with the created creatures made it hard for me to concentrate on the movie. The sad thing was, I could see that a great deal of thought had gone into the invention of these animals. Clearly, though, not many thoughts from functional morphologists.

Instead of a detailed rant covering each and every one of the flaws I noticed, I'll focus on the biggest one. And no, it's not the tail-mind-meld thing, which I just have to chalk up to movie magic so I don't hurt my brain. No, my personal biggest issue is the number of limbs Pandoran animals have:

Six, for the most part.

Frankly, that's alright with me. It makes me curious as to their skeletal structure, but it doesn't raise any improbability flags. At least, not until we examine where the exceptions are:

The Na'vi only have four limbs. 

Four.

The movie attempts a cutesy way of explaining this. Fairly early on in the movie, this guy shows up:

Some sort of primate-like critter, hanging out in the trees. Instead of six distinct limbs, this guy has two hind limbs, and its two pairs of front limbs appear to be fused.

I see what you did there, Avatar. Giving a nod to our own evolution: humans are primates, and the Na'vi must be from whatever family this guy is from. So this guy has fused forelimbs as sort of a evolutionary step towards only four limbs.

Too bad this is just plain silly.

Tree-dwelling animals would not fuse limbs together. Tree-dwelling animals evolve to hold on well to branches, and the more limbs for that, the better. Reducing the number of limbs is absolutely backwards from what happens in reality. Six limbs would be an amazing advantage in the trees. Heck, just look at spider monkeys. They use their tail as a fifth "limb" because extra limbs are just that awesome in trees.

Unless those lemur-like fusing limb aliens evolved from a creature who had been a ground-dweller, it just makes no sense for selection to favor fused limbs in the trees. The Na'vi themselves, as a primarily tree-dwelling species, should've retained six limbs as well. But they didn't.

The Na'vi must have left the trees sometime in their evolutionary past for the limb proportions they have in the movie (human-like limb proportions) to make any sense. They obviously switched over to bipedalism as an adaptation to living on the ground rather than up trees, and lost their extra set of limbs because...

Okay, I still can't explain why they'd completely lose their extra set of limbs. I mean...EXTRA PAIR OF HANDS. SO USEFUL. WHY DID THAT DISAPPEAR?

Ahem. Anyway. Continuing with my confusion, while the tree-dwelling animals are, for who knows why, reducing their flexibility and number of limbs, it appears the ground-dwelling animals hold onto their extra limbs.

Excuse me while I go flail about in frustration.

Animals that specialize in running along the ground are known as cursorial animals, and evolutionarily-speaking, cursorial animals evolve to reduce how much their limbs come in contact with the ground (think horses as an example: they reduced even the number of toes that touch the ground down to one toe per leg). Therefore, if any animal on Pandora should fuse limbs...it would be these ground-dwelling ones. But in every instance of a ground-dwelling critter on Pandora, it of course has six limbs.

So maybe none of them are actually cursorial? They don't run?

Except for all those scenes with stampeding animals in the movie. Oh dear.

Frankly, the Na'vi are the only potential ground-dwelling animal for whom it would make sense to keep all six limbs, since they only use two limbs to touch the ground anyway. But they're the only ones who lost a set!

Perhaps now you begin to understand my issue with this movie. This is just one example of where the body structure of Pandoran animals fails to make sense. As mentioned, I won't go into all the other instances here. It would take far too long.


Takeaway lesson:

If you're going to create an alien world, do yourself a favor and read up on evolution, and in particular, functional morphology. Functional morphology is the study of how the structure of a body part relates to its function. It answers the question, "Why does that thing look like that?".

If you want cool things that may not make sense on your alien animals, read up on sexual selection as well. Animals can certainly have things on them that don't serve much of a purpose for their own survival, as long as it somehow relates to the survival of their genetics (getting the opportunity to pass their genes on through mating). This gives the chance for a lot of creativity on your end as an author.

Whatever you do, though, don't fall into the trap that advanced species must resemble us. The Na'vi could've had extra hands! So cool! But as biased human creators, they were designed instead to match our own bodies. Perhaps to make it easier on the human characters who had to take on the alien forms. Perhaps to make it easier on animators. Or, most likely, because we associate our own form with higher intelligence.

Just some food for thought as we begin to imagine what could be alive on all these new planets science keeps finding. Aliens are awesome in stories, but they're even cooler when they're biologically plausible.