Left to right clockwise - Richard Fitzpatrick, Dean Miller, Mike DeGruy and M. Sanjayan on board the Undersea Explorer holding down a whitetip reef shark as they prepare to take data and film the documentary Mysteries of the Shark Coast at Osprey Reef in the Coral Sea off the coast of Australia
Copyright (c) 2008 Wendee Holtcamp
I am not quite sure why I'm not blogging so much lately. The more time that goes by the more it seems overwhelming to begin to blog, so I better just do it. I've been insanely busy - but then again when am I not? I am struggling with the thought of my book needing to be completed by June 1. I got a whole lot done in the early months of this year and then sort of stalled due to other deadlines. I had that article on cyanobacteria due, and then Tuesday I gave a talk at my son's school called the Tree Huggers Revenge: Why People Need Trees. I am trying to put a copy of my Powerpoint from my tree/forest talk online but the PDF I made using Adobe Converter turned everything sideways. Harumph. Any ideas on how to turn a PPT file into a PDF without it turning weird like that?
Oh. My. God. I just laughed so hard at this essay about a dad and his young daughter's obsession with weiners on the blog Wind In Your Vagina by Black Hockey Jesus (don't ask, just read...). It will make you laugh!! Weiners.. The comments are especially hilarious too!! Such as, "She does have a point. It is considered polite to keep your weiner in your pants. Especially at a restaurant."
Speaking of weiners, I'm working on an article on shark virgin birth - aka parthenogenesis - and why sex evolved in the first place. There are costs and benefits, evolutionarily speaking, to sex as opposed to asexual reproduction. My article will discuss several recent cases of virgin birth in various species. The two that have been genetically confirmed are a hammerhead (bonnethead specifically) and blacktip shark but they've now found suspected and probable cases with white bamboo sharks and a whitetip reef shark - the same species I saw in Australia when I wrote the Discovery Channel Expedition Shark blog. That means that sharks that give live birth and that lay eggs can reproduce asexually. So why do they have sex? Why did sex evolve? That's the question of the hour...
One kind of cool thing that happened was one of the scientists that I interviewed for my article said that Mysteries of the Shark Coast was one of the best documentaries he'd ever seen (that's the documentary I was blogging about the filming of in the Expedition Shark blog), and thought it was cool I was there during part of the filming. This scientist is actually doing a similar project to what Fitzpatrick and colleagues are doing on Osprey Reef but on the Eastern Shore Board of the U.S. and he - and another shark scientist - invited me along with their research. Hell ya!!! Now I just have to find a magazine to give me the budget...
