[Hat tip to Brian Switek.]

Now go check it out or the Daleks will win!I have been shamefully neglectful of my participation of the Carnival of Evolution but all the previous installments can be found here. If you missed any of these you’ll definitely want to go check them out as well!

Don’t ask me…

First a mollusk:

I discovered this rather large (approx. 10cm) slug making its way across my front walk. Not sure about my ID but I’d say it was possibly a Limacus flavus, which would make this an introduced ALIEN SLUG! [Scream!]

Secondly a couple different arthropods, one terrestrial and the other aquatic:

This dangerous little bugger was hitchhiking in a load of horse manure that my mother was unloading from the back of her pickup truck. A centipede, probably a Scolopendra polymorpha. After I told my mother that I wasn’t interested in adopting it she ended up feeding it to her chickens, which was probably a little spicier than their usual fare.

OK, there is a bit of a set up to our next crawly, or rather swimy critter. I was on my way to work one morning and while driving by a vacant lot around the corner from my house, I noticed three adults standing around a large puddle in middle of the lot that was left over from some recent rain. My brain noted that this was an unusual thing to see, so I slowed down a bit and saw that a couple of them were holding small fishnets, of the sort that an aquarist might keep handy. Quickly running through the possibilities of what three adults with fishnets standing around a small ephemeral body of water in a generally arid environment might be up to and my brain instantly hit upon what seemed to be the only logical conclusion…BIOLOGISTS!

Unfortunately I was already a little late for work and couldn’t stop and talk to them, however I immediately vowed to myself that I would visit the puddle ASAP to see what might have drawn a trio of probable biologists to this vacant lot. So on my way home from work I stopped at the lot and checked out the puddle.

At first I didn’t see anything but once my eyes adjusted to what I was looking at I noted some small (maybe 2cm) things swimming fairly vigorously around the puddle. At first I thought that they might be fish, perhaps Gambusia which are often stocked in our local waterways to control mosquitoes. This wasn’t totally crazy as there is a catchment basin immediately adjacent to the lot and I thought that, while it was unlikely, it might be possible for some Gambusia to have somehow made it into this puddle.  However given that this was a very ephemeral body of water and that Gambusia would be considered “junk fish” by an ichthyologist I quickly dismissed this idea.

Looking a bit closer at the tiny swimming creatures I realized what their true nature was and why thy might be of interest to biologists became much less of a mystery. They were fairy shrimp, possibly of the Family Streptocephalidae, some members of which are very endangered. In this case possibly Streptocephalus woottoni A.K.A. the “Riverside fairy shrimp“, though this puddle was a little shallow (under 30mm) for the normal bodies of water that S. woottoni are supposed to inhabit.

Anyway, after seeing that they were indeed fairy shrimp I rushed home and got one of my critter keepers (a small plastic aquarium) and fashioned a small, pitiful, net out of a coat-hanger and one of my wife’s old nylon stockings. Pitiful as my jury-rigged net was, it allowed me to catch a few of the shrimp.

Fear not for the shrimp though, after I photographed them (which isn’t an easy thing!) I returned them to their puddle which remained habitable for three or four days longer.

Last but not least a couple different chordates, in this case both mammals:

While driving through a local rural area (Reche Canyon) my wife and I spotted a herd of feral burros (Equus africanus asinus) that we had heard (get it?) lived in the area. I wasn’t able to get too close to them and only had my cell phone camera so these are not the best pictures. However if you look carefully at the second picture below you’ll get a glimpse of some “hot donkey action” going down (brown chicken, brown cow!).

Apparently there is something of a mystery involving these burros lately. It seems that several of the newborns have gone missing and it becoming a concern for the locals who watch over them.

Finally a rough pair of middle aged male apes (H. sapiens). Yours truly with Dr. Sean B. Carroll Professor of Molecular Biology, Genetics, and Medical Genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison at U.C. Riverside on 2-11-2013. Dr. Carroll had just given a very entertaining talk: Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species about the adventures and scientific contributions of Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin and Henry Walter Bates in honor of Darwin Day 2013 (Photo and my shirt by Lani Britain, a.k.a. Mom).

OK, so this wasn’t a scathing dissection of creationist silliness, but it was something…

My sincere condolences to his friends and family.

I first ‘met’ Dr. Gish in 1994 at UCLA where he was to debate Dr. Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society. My friend Don Frack and I knew roughly where on campus the debate was to be held but didn’t have an exact route on how to get there in mind. So at one point we took a short cut through a building and when we got to far end, which we figured should be near our destination, we opened the door and literally came face to face with Dr. Gish himself (who as I recall was looking for the restroom). Don laughingly told me that I looked like I had seen a ghost.

Yours truly with Dr. Gish at the Southern California Center for Christian Studies 1998 Summer Conference (August) (Photo by Don Frack)

I have a few other minor stories I could tell about Dr. Gish and a mountain of criticisms I could relate about his work, but this is not the time.

Again, by condolences to his family.

For those unfamiliar the video for the original “Party Rock Anthem” by LMFAO can be found here.

Kathy and I are moved into our new (rented) home but still surrounded by boxes, some of which still contain much of my library. Hopefully it won’t be too long before I can get my stuff organized so I can start thinking about blogging again…

May yer seas be calm, yer rum flow freely and yer booty be bountiful!

[Aye, still among the living I be and meaning to sail back into blogging waters as soon as fair winds allow...]

One of my earliest memories is from the day after my fourth birthday in July of 1969. It is just flashes of my parents being very excited about something and images of a large rocket on a TV, it was, of course, the launch of Apollo 11 which carried the first humans to land on the Moon.

Yesterday we have lost the Commander of Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong (1930–2012), however as long as long as our species endures something of him should endure with us, the memory of the first person to set foot on another world.

Goodbye Commander and thank you for risking it all to take that giant leap for mankind.

[A bittersweet coincidence of sorts. I didn't hear of Armstrong's death until early Sunday morning because my wife and I were watching a marathon of old Star Trek shows (Enterprise/Voyager/DS9).]

[Hat tip to Michael Barton.]