Natural History

How Much Energy Will the World Need?

Are we heading toward an all-renewable energy future, spearheaded by wind and solar? Or are those energy sources wholly inadequate for the task? Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Cloud Revolution, compares the energy dream to the energy reality. Watch this video (five minutes, 29 seconds):

Got Toads? Here Is What You Might Want To Know

In the Sonoran Desert, the summer monsoon rains bring out the toads. Some are psychedelic and toxic. See my story in the Arizona Daily Independent (link)

Sonoran-desert-toad

MONKEYPOX – Was it engineered?

This article is from the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness newsletter (Source)

The new media disease crisis to follow COVID-19 is monkeypox, or whatever it will be called after its supposedly racist name is changed. The World Health Organization (WHO) is considering whether to call it a “public health emergency of international concern,” which could lead to “temporary” international measures to stem the spread.

The name is really a misnomer. The disease was discovered in 1958 in research monkeys, but its natural hosts are likely rodents and other small mammals. It was first diagnosed in humans in 1970 in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), causing fever, headaches, and lymph node swelling followed by an eruption of pus-filled blisters. The skin lesions can resemble those of shingles, chickenpox, or syphilis. The rash tends to start on the face and has the unusual feature that blisters can form on the palms (https://tinyurl.com/2p8t24ph).

Most people recover within 2–4 weeks, and outbreaks usually fizzle out on their own. The biggest known outbreak in the U.S. occurred in 2003, when 47 people were infected by pet prairie dogs that had picked up the virus from rodents imported from Ghana (Jon Cohen, Science 5/2/022, https://tinyurl.com/33pjenrk).

This outbreak is different because of the simultaneous appearance of around 2,500 cases by late June, in 20 countries on four continents, of a disease that has previously been mostly confined to Africa. Could a rave or two with international attendance explain it? Or does the simultaneous occurrence of widespread cases, and apparent increased human-to-human transmission, suggest it was spread deliberately and may have been engineered, asks Dr. Meryl Nass (tinyurl.com/yc2rp2rm).

The outbreak seems to be tightly associated with two large European dance party events (“raves”), a “Madrid sauna” and a “Gay Pride” event in the Canary Islands on May 5–15, which drew some 80,000 people. Recalling the early history of AIDS, someone who was seeking to introduce a pathogen into a highly mobile international population might see this as an ideal opportunity, writes Robert Malone, M.D. (https://tinyurl.com/pjsby78p).

Monkeypox is not generally considered to be a sexually transmitted infection, but it is transmitted by close contact and victims have so far been mostly gay or bisexual men. The way to stop the spread would be for people to stop having sex with men who have sex with men, for about two-to-three weeks. Public health officials had no trouble telling people not to go outside, not to visit their family, not to go to church, etc. for two weeks stretching into years to stop COVID-19. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) apparently believes that a few weeks of abstinence is too much to ask. On its website, it suggests some ways to be a little safer if you must go to a rave, party, club, festival, or gay bathhouse (https://tinyurl.com/y3a8r89b).

An amazing coincidence is that the Canary Island rave occurred on the same date as a hypothetical bioterror attack modeled in an Event 201-style wargame exercise about release of an engineered monkeypox virus, “a pathogen engineered in a laboratory with inadequate biosafety and biosecurity provisions and weak oversight.” This tabletop exercise was conducted in March 2021 by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) (tinyurl.com/5b4zfcra). The modeling predicted 3.2 billion cases and 271 million deaths by Dec 1, 2023. As Dr. Malone points out, the predictive accuracy of the simplistic public health models such as that used to support this scenario have repeatedly proven to be abysmal, as in the initial catastrophic predictions for COVID-19.

In another “bizarre coincidence,” writes Cohen (op. cit.), Bavarian Nordic held a meeting in May with David Heymann of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and nine other public health leaders from around the world, planned 6 months earlier, to discuss the need for more countries to stockpile its vaccine, given the increase in monkeypox cases over the past few years. This vaccine (JYNNEOS) uses a nonreplicating form of vaccinia, and has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use against both smallpox and its cousin monkeypox.

Conveniently, JYNNEOS was approved in 2019, when there had been only about 50 human cases of monkeypox diagnosed in the U.S. over a period of 60 years. It could not be tested for efficacy against either disease; so, FDA relied on neutralizing antibody titers.

Another interesting coincidence is that Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) was funding research to study treatments for monkeypox beginning in September 2020, well before the outbreak (https://tinyurl.com/245uzdfc).

The U.S. government has reportedly stockpiled enough smallpox vaccine for the entire population in the event of a biowarfare attack, and has recently ordered $113 million worth of vaccine from Bavarian Nordic, with an option to buy $180 million more for a total of 13 million doses (https://tinyurl.com/4x6s4hp5). Should you rush out to get a shot as soon as possible?

Myocarditis/pericarditis is a well-known side effect of smallpox vaccination. FDA acknowledges a rate of 5.7 per 1,000 (1 in 175) in persons given the ACAM2000 vaccine, the other US-licensed smallpox vaccine. The incidence might be higher with JYNNEOS; two studies showed elevated troponin (cardiac enzyme) levels in 11–18% of recipients (https://tinyurl.com/3hkz74kc). Moreover, use of replicating smallpox vaccines can cause disseminated vaccinia infections in immunocompromised persons (tinyurl.com/ydvuu24v). Some worry that COVID-19 vaccines can cause immunocompromise.

Could the virus be engineered? The first full genome showed that the strain most closely resembles viruses carried by travelers from Nigeria to Singapore, Israel, and the UK in 2018 and 2019. However, as Dr. Malone writes, the outbreak virus differs from the 2018 and 2019 viruses by a mean of 50 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which is far more than one would expect considering the estimated substitution rate for Orthopoxviruses. (DNA viruses evolve slowly.) Monkeypox virus is the subject of gain-of-function research in many labs, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Although the pox viruses are unrelated to the varicella-zoster virus, the monkeypox rash can be confused with shingles. The CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has processed more than 18,000 reports of herpes/shingles outbreaks in association with COVID-19 vaccines (https://tinyurl.com/yvr62th9).

Monkeypox might be just the latest cause for fear porn, but it raises more questions than answers at present.

Remember the Italian saying: Niente e lasciato al caso (nothing happens by chance).

The smell of desert rain may be good for your health

The following contains excerpts from a press release by Mikayla Mace Kelley, University of Arizona Communications.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for rain in the desert. Instead, breathe easy knowing that the desert fragrances after a storm help keep you healthy and happy, according to new University of Arizona research.

Desert dwellers know it well: the smell of rain and the feeling of euphoria that comes when a storm washes over the parched earth. That feeling, and the health benefits that come with it, may be the result of oils and other chemicals released by desert plants after a good soaking, new University of Arizona research suggests.

“The Sonoran Desert flora is one of the richest in the world in plants that emit fragrant volatile oils, and many of those fragrances confer stress-reducing health benefits to humans, wildlife and the plants themselves,” said Gary Nabhan, a research social scientist at the UArizona Southwest Center and the Kellogg Endowed Chair in Southwestern Borderlands Food and Water Security.

The Southwest monsoon season typically runs from June 15 to Sept. 30. About half of the region’s average annual rainfall occurs over the course of those three-and-a-half months.

Nabhan and his collaborators – Eric Daugherty, a former intern at the Southwest Center, and Tammi Hartung, a co-owner of Desert Canyon Farm in Canyon City, Colorado – identified 115 volatile organic compounds in 60 species of plants in the Sonoran Desert that are released immediately before, during and after rain. Of these, 15 have been shown in past studies to offer tangible health benefits.

“The fragrant volatile organic compounds from desert plants may in many ways contribute to improving sleep patterns, stabilizing emotional hormones, enhancing digestion, heightening mental clarity and reducing depression or anxiety,” Nabhan said. “Their accumulation in the atmosphere immediately above desert vegetation is what causes the smell of rain that many people report. It also reduces exposure to damaging solar radiation in ways that protect the desert plants themselves, the wildlife that use them as food and shelter, and the humans who dwell among them.” (link to full report)

Rattlesnake combat dance to see who gets the gal

The males of some species of rattlesnakes engage in a combat ritual to see who will mate with an available female snake. Several years ago I saw two western diamondback rattlesnakes engaged in this ritual at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Everyone gathered around to watch. As a docent then, I warned them to be careful because the female may be close by, and she was.

The video below shows such a dance.

According to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum:

“Prior to copulation in the spring, male diamondbacks (as well as males of at least some other rattlesnake species) perform well-documented, ritualized, combat dances. When two males encounter each other they raise their bodies off the ground as much as one-third of their lengths. Belly-to-belly, they begin an intense wrestling contest. Occasionally one snake or the other falls to the ground, only to rise up to continue the contest anew. This wrestling match may continue for thirty minutes or more. At some point, one snake finally gives up and crawls away, often with the victor in hot pursuit. Victors have even been observed climbing into shrubs several feet off the ground, apparently to make sure the loser does not try to return to the females. There are occasions when a third male is present. He does not join the duo at battle, but instead copulates with the females while the other two males are battling. Biologists have termed this the sneaky male strategy. The inseminated female will give birth to as many as 23, 9- to 14-inch-long young in the late summer. Young diamondbacks feed on rodents, and adults also eat rabbits and ground-dwelling birds.”

Watch the video:

https://youtu.be/gAN7Drf7Nns

Prickly Pear Cacti – Many Varieties, Many Uses

Prickly pear cacti (genus Opuntia) range from southern Canada to southern South America, in habitats ranging from arid desert to tropical semiarid woodlands and high mountains. There are about 18 species in the Sonoran Desert region, some of which form hybrids. Native peoples recognize many more varieties. I have five (maybe six) varieties of prickly pear in my yard. The most common in the Tucson area is the Engelmann prickly pear. The first photo above shows the ripe fruit. The second shows the flowers which start out reddish and get yellow as they mature. All cactus fruit is edible.

According to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum (ASDM), cacti of genus Opuntia, which includes chollas, are distinguished from other cacti by four characteristics. “First, the stems grow in distinctly jointed segments. The elongation of joints is permanently terminated by the onset of the dry season; subsequent growth of the plant occurs by the initiation of new joints by branching from the areoles. (Other cacti have indeterminate growth. A saguaro stem, for example, grows ever longer each growing season until the plant dies or the stem tip is damaged.) Second, whether or not they have regular spines, Opuntioid areoles bear glochids (usually small to minute, barbed spines that are very sharp and brittle, and very easily detached). Third, rudimentary leaves are present on new joints. Fourth, the seeds have a pale covering called an aril; most other cacti have shiny black seeds.”

Prickly pears are Western Hemisphere plants, but they are now found all over the world. “Sailors brought them back from the New World in the sixteenth century and they are found in Italy, India, Ceylon, South Africa and Australia. In all but Italy, the hope was to raise cochineal insects, but the insects died and the cactus escaped to become part of the landscape.” – ASDM

Cochineal insects, a source of red dye, grow, sometimes profusely, on prickly pear pads under white fuzzy webs, especially in August. See link below.

Spineless varieties of prickly pear were also tried as food for cattle. In South Africa, I saw many plantations on farms for that purpose.

Use as food:

Both the pads and fruit are eaten by pack rats, jackrabbits, javelina, insects, and humans. Note: the pads contain oxalic acid which can make humans sick. However, new spring pads contain much less oxalic acid so these pads were used for human consumption. Preparation may include boiling to leach out the acid. Many native American tribes used the pads as their green vegetable. The flesh is mucilaginous (like okra) and was used to thicken soups.

Fruit from any of the prickly pears can be eaten by humans. The fruit turns reddish-purple when ripe. (The ripe fruit is called “tuna”or “cactus fig”) Some preparation is required to remove the spines and glochids. Native Americans rolled the fruit in sand or other plant material. Cowboys used to put the fruit on a stick and burn off the glochids with a match or over a camp fire.

Generally people eat the flesh of the fruit and discard the seeds. The seeds are edible, but too many cause intestinal upsets. The seeds can be parched, dried, and ground into a flour. They don’t cause digestive upset that way. The juice of the fruit may be made into a syrup or jelly or used in pies and drinks.

Flower petals can be used to garnish salads.

Preparation techniques for both pads and fruit are shown here: http://www.wikihow.com/Eat-Prickly-Pear-Cactus and

http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/how_to_cut_and_prepare_prickly_pears/

Medicinal use:

According to WebMD: Prickly pear cactus is used to treat type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, obesity, alcohol hangover, colitis, diarrhea, and benign prostatic hypertrophy (BPH). It is also used to fight viral infections. Prickly pear cactus contains fiber and pectin, which can lower blood glucose by decreasing the absorption of sugar in the stomach and intestine. Some researchers think that it might also decrease cholesterol levels, and kill viruses in the body.

According to DesertUSA, “Researchers are using the prickly pear juice, produced by Arizona Cactus Ranch in Southern Arizona, for their studies, because it is pure. Pascua Yaqui Tribe in Tucson Arizona uses Arizona Cactus Ranch Prickly Pear Nectar in their Alternative Medicine Diabetic Preventive Program since 1997. Prickly pear extract has also been shown to reduce the severity and occurrence of hangovers if taken in advance of drinking. Nausea, dry mouth, appetite loss, and alcohol-related inflammation were all reduced in test subjects who ingested prickly pear extract 5 hours prior to drinking. You can make your own tests and see if it works for you, which is the only test that really counts.”

The juice from the pads was also used topically to treat cuts, bruises, and inflammation of the skin.

Other uses:

The juice from prickly pears has long been used to strengthen adobe mortar. It was so used in the restoration of the San Xavier Mission in Tucson.

As mentioned above, there are many species and hybrids, so exact identification may be difficult. ASDM notes: “Numerous species of cholla and some prickly pears hybridize with one another. Hybrid populations are fairly common. Some of these hybrids may reproduce sexually; others are sexually sterile but can reproduce vegetatively. There are several such ‘clonal microspecies’ in the Tucson area alone, some of which are restricted to a patch of just a few acres. Most of the descriptions of these species are published only in scientific monographs and have not yet appeared in general plant lists and keys. So if you are frustrated with being unable to identify a cholla or prickly pear from a field guide, be assured that you’re not alone. No field guide can cover all the possible hybrids and ‘microspecies.’”

Jaguars and more junk science

A new study, published by Cambridge University Press, “A systematic review of potential habitat suitability for the jaguar Panthera onca in central Arizona and New Mexico, USA,” claims that large areas of Arizona and New Mexico may be suitable habitat for wild jaguars.

From the study abstract:

“Here we present a systematic review of the modelling and assessment efforts over the last 25 years, with a focus on areas north of Interstate-10 in Arizona and New Mexico, outside the recovery unit considered by the USFWS. Despite differences in data inputs, methods, and analytical extent, the nine previous studies found support for potential suitable jaguar habitat in the central mountain ranges of Arizona and New Mexico. Applying slightly modified versions of the USFWS model and recalculating an Arizona-focused model over both states provided additional confirmation. Extending the area of consideration also substantially raised the carrying capacity of habitats in Arizona and New Mexico, from six to 90 or 151 adult jaguars, using the modified USFWS models. This review demonstrates the crucial ways in which choosing the extent of analysis influences the conclusions of a conservation plan. More importantly, it opens a new opportunity for jaguar conservation in North America that could help address threats from habitat losses, climate change and border infrastructure.” (Link to full paper)

The study has 17 authors, 14 of which (in my opinion) belong to radical environmental groups.

As stated in the abstract, the researchers did no on-the-ground research, but instead used models to “cherry-pick” previous publications. Reports of this study appeared in the Arizona Republic and in the March 19, 2021 print edition only of the Arizona Daily Star.

This study renews a very controversial topic. My take on the study is that the authors are campaigning for establishment of more critical habitat. Even if larger areas of Arizona and New Mexico could support Jaguar habitat, there is still no reason to formally establish “critical habitat” which would have many bad effects on property rights and natural resource production. The natural habitats in Mexico, Central America, South America are sufficient to provide for the species.

In my previous article on this subject Proposed Jaguar Habitat in Arizona and New Mexico Is Scientifically and Legally Indefensible, I provide a report from the Pima Natural Resource Conservation District (PNRCD): which “shows that the proposal by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) to designate Critical Habitat for the jaguar under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is scientifically indefensible because it is based on flawed data, and it violates laws such as the Data Quality Act.”

PNRCD requested that FWS withdraw its proposed rule “because habitat ‘essential’ to the conservation of the jaguar as a species does not exist in either Arizona or New Mexico under any scientifically credible definition of that term, because designation of critical habitat therein cannot possibly help save jaguars, and because the economic consequences of adding yet another layer of regulation and restriction on national security, resource production, water use, hunting and recreation during the worst recession on record since 1929 far outweigh any possibly discernible benefit to jaguars as a species that might be gained by designating critical habitat for them north of the Mexican border where they are but rarely transient…”

“For Critical Habitat to be established under ESA, the FWS must show that the area in question is essential to the jaguars conservation and survival as a species, not merely whether the area in question could host or has hosted individual, transient jaguars.”

The past, present, and future state of Tucson’s creeks and rivers

From the Arizona Geological Survey:

‘The past, present, and future state of Tucson’s creeks and rivers’, a #StoryMap by the Watershed Management Group (a 501 (c) non-profit). The presentation includes some excellent historic images, diagrams, and interactive maps showing flow conditions, past and present, in Tucson drainages. Most illustrations have explanatory text. Just scroll down through the article.

Take a look.

Bats of Western Abandoned Mines

From the Bureau of Land Management

See original here.

Below are parts of the infographic produced by the BLM. I had to divide it into pieces so that it is readable at this scale. You can click on the first graphic to make it easier to read.

Arizona Fossils

From the Arizona Geological Survey:

Susan Celestian of Phoenix’s Earth Science Museum cobbled together a nice pictorial on common fossils of Arizona to round out Earth Science Week 2020. You can view or download the 12-page report here.

What is a fossil? Fossils are the prehistoric physical remains (or traces) of organic life. By definition, prehistoric means older than 6000 years, although some people define the minimum age of 10,000 years, before a specimen is called a fossil.

It is hard to become a fossil. While billions of organisms have lived and died through geologic time, very few of them have been preserved in the fossil record.

By using fossils, we can develop a history of lifeforms & increase our understanding of biological evolution.
Fossils assist geologists in establishing a chronological order to geological events and strata. Fossils can be used to establish a relative age date1 for a rock unit. This is best employed by using index fossils (fossils with short and distinct spans of existence, and wide geographic distribution) and unique assemblages of fossils (rather than individual fossils).

This report contains a further explanation of fossils and shows many photographs.

One fossil not mentioned in the report is that of a dinosaur.

Dinosaurs roamed the land, including Arizona’s Sonorasaurus thompsoni, a new species of brachiosaurid dinosaur whose remains were first discovered in the Whetstone mountains by UofA graduate geology student Richard Thompson in 1994. Sonorasaurus is estimated to have been about 50 feet long and 27 feet tall, about one third of the size of other brachiosaurus. It may have been a juvenile or just a small dinosaur species. Sonorasaurus was an herbivore. Tooth gouges on its bones suggest it was killed and eaten by a larger dinosaur. A single blade-like tooth of a huge meat eater called Acrocanthosaurus was found near the bones and suggests that this was the predator that killed Sonorasaurus. You can see an exhibit dedicated to Sonorasaurus at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

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