Thursday, May 29, 2014

New Zealand May 2014



The Shire today. Due to economic mismanagement it has gone the way of Detroit, plus sheep. From weburbanist.com.
Yo, check it: I went to New Zealand. The original version of this post foolishly omitted my original source for deciding the kind of stuff I'd like to see, that being the blog o' Sam, Escape from the Bay. You really should check it out, except currently he's over in that stupid country across the Ditch no doubt getting gnawed on by all manner of serpents and salties. But hey. That's his problem.

Pictures below. If you want to see them, I am forcing you to page down or read through my editorializing.

What I really liked about NZ:

- Routeburn Track. I can't imagine how this will not remain one of the top trail runs of my life.

- Unique climate and ecosystem. Imagine if one day in Portland Oregon, people awoke to find that their flora had been replaced by Hawaii's, somehow adapted to cool temperatures. What's not to like about that?

- They are not shy about saying NO FIRES AT ALL in their parks, even in that wet climate. I wanted to high five all of New Zealand when I saw my first one of these signs. Why we can't bring ourselves to do the same in our dwindling, much drier SoCal national forests is really an indictment of American conservationism.

- Food: the salmon is OUT OF THIS WORLD and deserves to be better known. There are also lots of fish that I've never had or in many cases heard of (blue cod, warehou, hoki, kawahai). I had the best abalone (paua) I've ever had in my life, for NZ$3.50 a go. Why New Zealand isn't more of a seafood country is a mystery to me. If Japan has competition, it's from this place. The milk is in fact noticeably fresher (it better be because the biggest company by revenue in NZ is the national milk cooperative, and dairy is NZ's #1 export). St. Pierre's Sushi is tasty, creative, and a great value too. (Hawaii has spam sushi? Well the hell with that, St. Pierre's has chicken sushi!) Also you can buy canned tuna with flavors in NZ (lemon pepper, thai, etc.) This is an absolutely brilliant idea. Someone get on this back here in the U.S. Also kiwis take their bacon seriously, telling you which part of the animal it's from. There's not just "bacon" there. The pinot gris is the best outside Italy (sorry Okanagan and Columbia Valleys). The sauv blanc I could take or leave but I'm not a fan to begin with.

- No scary critters: no snakes to step on while running. Or mountain lions to get you (a friend in Poway ran across a still-bleeding kill one morning a few weeks ago!). Or bears to get you. Or nasty plants that make you itch.

- Lots of interesting endemic critters: The first mammal in New Zealand was the first Maori to step out of a waka onto shore, less than 1,000 years ago. That's amazing, and the flora and fauna reflect this. Consequently, the birds have taken over many of the mammalian niches (kiwi are nocturnal ground-foragers with whisker-like feathers, for example) but this also means that they're terribly vulnerable to introduced mammalian predators.

- Super-interesting endemic plants: Extending this theme, the Alpine flora on Tongariro is absolutely alien to my northern hemisphere eyes, adapted as it all must be from South Pacific tropical ecosystems.

- Tourism as conservation: their tourism industry really focuses on the outdoors, and their conservation department is in charge of it. If you want to make sustainability, you know, sustainable, you should be looking for immediate reward, especially monetary! So whoever was behind this strategy was pretty clever. Normally outdoorsy types aren't good tourists because we don't spend much money, but if you do the Great Walks in season, you'll be spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars between trail pass, hut reservation, and transportation. For some people that's worth it. If you go in the off-season like I did, you might be a little cold and wet, but you'll have the place to yourself for cheap or free. Despite the rain I managed to get badly dehydrated, and told myself that the lack of native mammalian fauna meant a lack of giardia, and drank out of a stream up at the pass; my reasoning must be sound because there was no resulting GI distress. (A down-side to doing the track in the off-season is that the water is off in the huts, which to this thirsty bear was like that Bradbury story about Venus where the sun-dome was leaking.)

- New Zealand law: The fact that there is no real "constitution" as such and the Treaty of Waitangi is thought of as the founding document is interesting, if you think that countries' founding documents are really just ways of forming identities and don't actually constrain their behavior that much. Gun laws are smart (you get screened by police interview as a gun owner in general, rather than for specific classes of licenses.) Drinking laws are smart (you can't buy alcohol if you're under 18, period. You can consume and possess it though.) Despite NZ's approach to need a reason to outlaw a new psychoactive substance, rather than proactively banning everything and requiring approval, there hasn't been a rash of overdoses on home-brew psychedelics.

- Non-ironic penguin-crossing signs on the roads. I retain an affection for "hidden queue" as well.


Neutral but possibly interesting observations and questions:

The kumara (the Maori name for sweet potato, hence the New Zealand English word for it) has its genetic origins in South America - it wasn't brought to NZ by Europeans - and (here's the kicker) the word for sweet potato in the Inca language (Quechua) is "kumara" (that link is from the journal Nature!). This is the strongest evidence I've ever seen for prehistoric Polynesian-South American contact.

- Forgive my puerility, but I greatly enjoyed the naming of New Zealand places, which includes: a town called Athol. Also, Kaka Creek, Random Creek, and Dicks Creek, all with signs along the road, advertising their presence to the delight of 6 year-olds everywhere. Also, a fish called pipi. While I'm being ludicrous, I should mention thatI ate a kiwi in New Zealand (the fruit, stupid), much as I had French fries and France and Belgian waffles in Belgium. I looked for beef Wellington in Wellington but could not find it. [Later note: I have since had it and my life has not changed dramatically.]

- There is a monorail between Queenstown and Te Anau under consideration. Assuming there are cars available in Te Anau, this would be good for both places in terms of making Milford and Routeburn Tracks more accessible.

- English second person plural vernacular: previously I thought youse was only found in the American Northeast, but I heard it in the wild from New Zealanders in Wellington. "Just the two of youse?"

- Wellington does in fact look a lot like San Francisco in certain places. I was skeptical of this claim until I happened to look up from the harbor, uphill toward Parliament, where you might as well be looking up at UCSF on the side of Mt. Sutro. The hillside streets in that neighborhood complete the picture.





- New Zealand's model of aboriginal integration: I have to say that sometimes, the Maori translations on government signs and the inclusion of Maori legend side by side on a display with the actual geologic history. Also, the formal handing back and forth of territory between the NZ gov't and various iwi (tribal governments) seems a little forced. And the pronouns give it away: in conversations and historical displays, Maoris (even in modern times) are referred to in the third person. This is not a criticism because this seems to reflect the genuine way of thinking of the majority of NZers (who are white). There has also never been a Maori PM, and currently there are only a small number of Maori MPs, less than 10 out of 120. I saw Maori people around, but mostly in official capacities, who I didn't have occasion to talk much with other than ask directions. I did see one guy on the ferry with full facial tattoos. Certainly I encountered a number of white NZers who were unaffected by these cultural bridge-building efforts and were not afraid to offer their negative views of their Maori countrymen. Of course it would be quite forward of a Yank to be criticizing someone else's treatment of indigenous people, but the observation here is just that NZ's government has obviously long been making a very strong and explicit effort, without much resultant mingling visible "on the ground" as it were. Compare this to Mexico, in which today almost everyone is of mixed native and Spanish descent, but don't talk about it. Russell Crowe mentions his Maori ancestor, but if you were to suggest to many Mexicans that they're part Aztec, the conversation might become uncomfortable. In NZ's defense, Mexico has had a three century head start on their integration project.

I thought about asking the facial tattoo guy what he thought of Mike Tyson's, but I thought better of it.

- Speaking of Mexico: there's a Mexican food boom going on in NZ. I was busy eating all the fish I could so I can't evaluate it.

- Overvalued home prices? While I was there, an economic body (can't remember which) released a report that NZ's homes were the most overvalued of any OECD country. I have difficulty with this. Homes in Picton, South Island with private beaches were listed for US$400,000. Really nice places in Auckland were listed for $500k. Maybe I've lived in California for too long but those seem like good deals to me.

- Like a single American metro area: Listening to national news in NZ is like listening to the Philly nightly news, with fewer shootings. "Home invasion in Auckland...2 dead in car accident in Christchurch..." which is not surprising considering the number of people in greater Philadelphia and New Zealand is the same.

- Food again: For all their sheep, you don't see as much lamb on the menu as you'd expect. It was as good as any other lamb I've had. I also had many kinds of pies, including my first venison pie. I'm convinced that English-style meat pies could use rat sphincter and it would taste the same in all that gravy (and still just fine) but I was glad to be helping reduce invasive species.

- And food yet again: When I got warehou, I asked the fish and chips proprietor what it was like. "It's fish" was his unhelpful yet uninformative response. Other than saying it was kind of buttery and lumpy, I don't know that I could describe it either. And I've noticed this before: ever been speaking another language and not known the word for a certain fish, and not known how to ask for it? "Fork" you could figure out. "Philosopher" you could figure out. But "halibut"? No dice. This is intriguing, because this is another example of how language fails when trying to describe taste (or smell.) [Later note: smell does not get processed through the thalamus like other senses. The sense organ itself is also rather inelegant and just consists of many separate channels for possible smells.]

- Rugby culture: It's easy to get annoyed with the focus on sports in the U.S., but the focus in New Zealand is so one-dimensional on rugby that it's hard to believe. I saw one rugby guy's face on about a thousand different ads (no I don't remember his name and I'm not looking it up). When people weren't talking about rugby, it was about the cricket scandal.

- Is there a reason that shepherding is so prevalent? Other than the obvious, the Scottish extraction of many of NZ's citizens (which suggests that occupation may be about cultural inertia more than what is necessarily optimal for the land.) I had to stop for several sheep drives along the highway, which always put a smile on my face, but damn those guys work hard (and I never cease to be amazed by the intelligence of sheep dogs and how effectively the shepherds communicate with them.) But damn. It really looks like those guys work hard.


What I didn't like (NZ readers, I'm giving an honest opinion, and would seriously enjoy hearing what you honestly didn't like about any experiences in America):

- Wellington on a weekend night. During the morning and afternoon, it was the sleepy/quirky national capital the guidebooks suggested. After nightfall it turned into worse than the most annoying college town you've ever been in, with the streets taken over with hooting drunks rushing in and out of traffic and blocking sidewalks. Sorry New Zealand, but this was just not impressive. (And for those who love Wellington or the rest of Enzed who love to hate Auckland: sure, people in Auckland clearly enjoy a pint at night, but somehow, in so doing they don't regress en masse to adolescence.)

- Many things were more expensive, not surprisingly for an island nation, but still. Beer was outrageous (US$8-9/bottle not uncommon in grocery stores), and I didn't really find any high quality and/or original microbrews. Gas about US$7.50/gallon. $4 for a 2.25 liter bottle of soda. No good. A 3 oz. bottle of bug spray was $25, no good if you're planning on going to Milford Sound.

- Abel Tasman park is very poorly signed. As a result I had to give the whole thing a miss because by the time I found it I was out of time.

- I know people warned me not to trust the weather forecasts, but I mean come on. You could plan your day by expecting the opposite of what the forecast said.

- Pavlova's charms escaped me, and I'm a dessert fanatic. Seriously, the cake is just a crumbly dry marshmallow. Just give me the fruit.

- I emphatically DO appreciate the road signage and reflectors and maintenance in NZ. If it weren't for the devoted posting of upcoming curves, everyone would be going off a cliff, and I think NZ civil engineers should teach everyone else how to do this. That said, driving super-curvy 2 lane roads in the (nearly constant) rain from Picton to Queenstown (or Queenstown to Greymouth) at night in one go was not pleasant, and I was not unhappy when I handed back the rental car keys at the Picton ferry terminal. (Yes, it was my fault for planning such ridiculous one-shot drives, but I still didn't like it. All hail the flat part of Route 1 in southern North Island)

- A bridge where the opposite direction lanes merged into a single lane (like most bridges in NZ) along with a freaking rail line - on which bridge people were killed the very next day after I crossed it (in Greymouth).


Outstanding questions/speculations:

- Running along Queen Charlotte Track, at several points I was almost overcome by a bitter, almost acetone-like smell that seemed mingled with the forest. Is this some animal or plant? I've searched online and found nothing.

- There are large, large stretches of NZ being taken over by Douglas firs, one of the few North American plants to invade the rest of the world (it's invasive even in Europe). It has taken over the lower half of the mountains around Queenstown just in the last 30 years, and if there isn't a massive campaign to eradicate it starting now, then I don't know why NZers expect there to be anything but Douglas fir left in South Island in the next half century.



- It's weird that the tuataras are the biggest (and only large) reptile in New Zealand, but until very recently geologically the place was heavily glaciated, and these guys have a much lower body temperature on average than more "modern" reptiles. That said, I think if some jerk brought a bunch of rattlesnakes from the east coast of the U.S., they would do just fine in New Zealand's climate.

- New Zealand has a higher percentage of sexed plants than any other land mass. One can't help but wonder if this is a result of having been such a bird-dominated place for so long (lots of cross-fertilization).

- Many plants in New Zealand, especially creeping vines, have exactly symmetrical pairs of leaves. This pattern jumped out a lot. Heavily speculating: plants don't mind as much when birds eat them, because they don't have teeth and hence are more likely to spread seeds as opposed to destroying them, versus mammals. (This is the evolutionary strategy behind why capsaicin-bearing plants burn the mucus membranes of mammals, but not birds, as you can see here.) Sometimes nature evolves tricks to keep animals from detecting patterns that they can then exploit. Maybe this pressure is decreased in an environment with only birds and no mammals, so there is no reason not to just let your leaves grow in exactly even pairs.

- Ever see The Future is Wild series, speculating about evolution on Earth hundreds of millions of years hence? (It's pretty cool.) I thought of pre-Maori New Zealand as a sort of post-mammalian Earth. While I'm being both geeky and speculative - to those folks who think that aliens visiting us would be just dandy, just look at what flora and fauna from right here on this same planet have done unintentionally to New Zealand. (40% of endemic bird species lost.)


All THAT said, here are pictures and narrative. If you want you can open a map to refer to these places.

Mt. Taranaki during the flight from Auckland to Wellington.

Looking up at Parliament from the harbor. See? San Francisco's long-lost twin.

Parliament. 120 members. I wonder if there's a relationship between legislature size and efficacy.

Looking down at the airport. At LAX from wheels-up to passing over water you generally have about 20 seconds. At Wellington it's 5. (I like to count.)

From the Wellington-Picton ferry.

From the ferry to Picton again.

Queen Charlotte Track on South Island, with fern trees. Other users were mostly mountain bikers that day. Still, like all trails in NZ, mostly empty.

Then I stupidly drove, starting at 5pm, in one shot from Picton to Queenstown, which took about 11 hours. Sorry Christchurch, I gave you a miss, but I was in NZ for nature! Plus side of this terrible drive: Mt. Cook is amazing in the moonlight, and I got to participate in the time-honored NZ tradition of eliminating invasive mammals. By that I mean, my rental car was like a rabbit lawn mower that night. The first one I felt bad about. The rest just made me angry by impeding my momentum for a millisecond.

Lake Wakatipu and Queenstown below, South Island.

Skyline luge! Like hot cycles for grown-ups. Or the offspring of slalom and bumper cars. Amazingly fun.

I also one day went up to the pass on Ben Lomond, which should be better-known given it's right above Queenstown, and has a fan-fricking-tastic view of the backside of the of the west coast range. Here I should add that I didn't hear very much German in New Zealand, but guess where I did hear German? Coming down from the pass on Ben Lomond, and heading up to the pass on Routeburn. This unfortunately supports Dorothy's racist theory of hiking first professed in Colorado (i.e. that we Germans are a mountain and forest people who instinctively seek out this environment).


Above, the start of the Routeburn Shelter side of Routeburn track. Classic South Island beech forest. I didn't take my camera along for the actual run because it was pouring the whole time, but others' pictures will do this place more justice anyway. I made it from Routeburn Shelter just about up to the pass, but the rain and wind picked up and a salmon could have made it to the pass just as easily. I ran out of water and drank from a waterfall with no ill effect.



Above: balmy Polynesia, or blustery Pacific Northwest? The cabbage trees along these glacial lakes confuse things. One thing that amazed me was high low the alpine zone came down, and how rapid the transitions were. This lake is 44 degrees south and maybe 1,000' elevation.


On the way to Milford Sound. It's a long damn way from Queenstown to there. (And the other end of Routeburn. 32km to walk, 300 km to drive.)

Milford Sound

Milford Sound with waterfall mist from the side. I was almost sick of waterfalls by this point

DAMN them fern tree ferns is big

The famously intelligent keas seemed uninterested in my keys (perhaps fortunately). This spot near the tunnel above Milford Sound is infamous for keas. Sometimes they land and try to strip the liner off your windshield wipers.

Glacial valley just the other side of the tunnel. The rivers were all swollen with four days of heavy rain. Between how achingly cold the water was after just one crossing and the fact that there were more, I decided to turn around. It turns out a hiker died that day trying to ford a creek.

Beech trees, and in fact much of Fiordland, belong in Sung landscape paintings.

Sung landscape painting. See what I mean?

Driving to the west coast and glaciers past Lake Wanaka, autumn. Some areas really reminded me of Pennsylvania (with slightly craggier hills).

Lake Wanaka, with the footprints of two watersports. As I was heading west from Otago to the fiords some amazing wind came up from nowhere and I was almost unsurprised to see these.

I should say here that the drive from Queenstown to Greymouth was also an unpleasant one, but I decided I didn't need to do multi-day hikes and I would just do awesome in and out trail runs each day. Lucky for me - because some really awful weather hit South Island day after I left, closing roads and knocking out power. I would've been stuck down there for a while had I not left when I did.

Sheep drive. As they were coming toward me this is what I imagined.

Fox glacier.

Fox glacier, looking down the glacial valley toward the Tasman Sea. This was all still filled with ice in 1751.


Fox glacier. People getting into a boat to (I guess) take the glacier river down to the sea.

Franz Josef Glacier. These are some of the few glaciers in the world that penetrate temperate forests. With the rainfall on the west coast it's not surprising.

Waterfall at Franz Josef Glacier at dusk...that is to say, an evil waterfall. This might be my favorite picture from the trip.

Pancake Rocks on the West Coast, north of Greymouth. Natural formation. We don't yet understand how they formed.

My last day on South Island I wanted to run in Abel Tasman, and see Ernest Rutherford's birthplace. (You know? Rutherford, the guy who discovered radioactive decay?) But because the weather turned so bad, the roads were so difficult, and the signage for Abel Tasman so subpar, I had to miss both of them so as not to miss the ferry back to North Island. To be honest I was kind of done with South Island by this point.

Once back on North Island, I made straight for Turangi (a fishing village at the south end of Lake Taupo) intending to take on the Tongariro Crossing next day. (Thanks for the tip, random wildlife photographer in Milford Sound.) I should clarify, it was less Tongariro Crossing, and more Tongariro run up to Red Crater (I think because there was zero visibility) clinging to rocks in the extremely unpleasant wind and sleet and then run back down.


About the clearest view of anything I got on Tongariro.
When I talked to the ranger at the I-site station in Turangi, she told me "Antarctic storm coming in...hurricane force wind gusts...zero visibility...this is a dumb idea." (She actually said "dumb idea".) To which I said, "Great! Let's go!" The video below should give you the idea, but essentially, blindfold yourself with cotton, stand in front of an industrial-strength fan with someone throwing in ice-chips and cold water, and that was basically what it was like. I think I got to the high point (Red Crater) but all I could see was the rocks around my feet, much like the images from the Venera Probe. The wind was so bad I had to hold onto rocks to keep from getting blown down, my legs stung from the ice, and I couldn't hear myself shout. I was actually going deaf from my hoodie beating against my ears. Plus, it's active - in 2012 it erupted enough to destroy one of the huts, and without warning too, and it was so windy that if it erupted while I was there, I wouldn't know it until I was briefly grateful for the warmth of a pyroclastic cloud overtaking me. So after making the high point I came back down. These were used for Mt. Doom in Lord of the Rings but a more apt name is Mt. Annoying Wind. The trailhead was merely a taste of what was to come.



Similar to what I saw on Tongariro, but with much better visibility. For all I could see I might as well have been on Venus. Granted it was cooler on Tongariro, but the atmosphere stripping your skin off factor was about the same.

Te Kooti's last stronghold, Te Porere. His followers were killed fighting the British here in 1868 but he escaped (again). (The last fighting between U.S. troops and indigenous people was late 1860s-early 1870s as well; coincidence?) As with many other Maori sites like the much older One Tree Hill overlooking Auckland, defensive earthworks remain.

Craters of the Moon Volcanic Area near Taupo (not to be confused with America's own Craters of the Moon in Idaho).



I also saw Huka Falls, near where the Waikato River starts draining out of the the large volcanic Lake Taupo. I also went for a run around Taupo starting from Kinloch and then went to kerosene creek, a naturally hot creek, for a soak on my way to grab dinner in Rotorua.


And then driving back to Wellington from Turangi, I was treated to a snow squall on the Desert Highway Strech of Highway 1 (see above). For someone who lives in SoCal, the Desert Highway isn't all that deserty or weird, but I imagine to a New Zealander, a large flat area with no trees would be quite eerie.




Then I went to Auckland, where I had some Polynesian food (taro, plaintain and pork...I have to admit I can see why it's not sweeping the world), had a pint or two, went up One Tree Hill, and hung out in the Central Business District eating and drinking. I had an 18 hour layover so I just waited until the sidewalks rolled up and then went to the airport in the middle of the night. I liked Auckland but was surprised at how early most things closed, given that this is NZ's big city.


Looking down at the CBD of Auckland from Ponsonby.

I did a lot in a week and a half. If I were there longer, and in a different season, what would I have also done? I would actually do Tongariro again just so I could actually see it. I wouldn't bother with skydiving/bungee jumping/jet boating just because I'm old and I've done all that stuff already at home. I might try climbing Cook, Tanaraki and Ruepehu as well. A weekend traverse of the Queen Charlotte Trail getting dropped off by sailboat from Wellington might be fun. And of course, I didn't get to see a kauri forest. (Oddly enough there's a redwood forest outside Rotorua, which also has great trails! But much like with Mexican food, I didn't go to NZ for that.) The closest kauri forest is about 2.5 hours each way from Auckland, and it would have been the middle of the night anyway by the time I got there. So instead I resolved to find some in the US and A, and what do you know, there's a kauri right here in San Diego, in Balboa Park growing next to the Mingei Museum. So I saw it the day after I came back.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Your Vibrams Don't Work, Now You Can Get a Refund

Vibram has settled a class-action suit and will now put money in a trust for people who want a refund. They will also stop making claims that their shoes are good for you.

There's a very non-zero chance that if you've run across this, you're a barefoot/minimalist type, so I'm writing this for you, knowing full well you'll be pissed off about this. Of course legal outcomes are not stone-cold scientific evidence, but they should at least inch your dial toward "B.S." and away from "true". (If you think that's an outrageous thing to say: what would you have said had the outcome here been the opposite? "Good, the legal system works"?) But there's just nothing like the evidence in favor of running barefoot that I've heard and read minimalist runners claim.

There IS evidence that Vibrams imitate the form running barefoot pretty well. But, unless that's better for you, who cares? Because there is NOT (much) evidence that running barefoot is any better for you. (Despite the many otherwise evidence-minded types in the tech and rationalist communities who were carried along by this trend, couched as it was in sciencey-sounding claims; that's the most interesting part of this.) I suspect most of our opinions on this, outside of the professional sports science and medicine communities and their respective peer-reviewed journals, are based on our own N=1 experiments. (I'm waiting for the first claims of conspiracy against science from minimalists. Don't be the first one!) Barefoot running is awkward and unpleasant for me personally. If it works for other people, great - although I've been told repeatedly by fanatics that barefoot running is clearly better for everyone, and based on my own N=1, I can disprove that. If it's not clear to you how a single case can be much more disconfirmatory to a theory than it can support a theory, your issue is with science in general, not just footwear.

Sunday, May 11, 2014

Moving to Sunnier Places Won't Make You Happy

I checked sunlight hours, average annual temperature, and seasonal temperature standard deviation (i.e. extremeness of seasons) against Gallup well-being data by metropolitan area, and state-level Gallup Healthways happiness data. The scatterplots were a mess (no point in even showing them here) and there was no relationship.

This struck me as very good news actually. Yes, maybe a change might have an effect (a particularly severe winter may depress you if you're not used to it; a week or two in the sunny Southwest might lift your spirits if you're stuck in a dim Pennsylvania winter). But of course there's the infamous hedonic treadmill effect, which is actually good news. Wherever you're living, it's likely the people and the work you're doing there that's determining your happiness, rather than something superfluous like how warm and sunny it is.

Friday, May 9, 2014

Red Diamond Rattler: Santa Fe Pond

(I already put this encounter on the rattlesnake map; always at top right on this blog.)

A sign in Lusardi Creek Preserve states that there are red diamond rattlers there, and then about 20 minutes after I saw it, I met one of these guys.


From venombyte.com


If you're familiar with the little pond in Rancho Santa Fe, it was in the basalt rocks on the northern side of the pond. As I ran by I heard a slapping sound, and as I looked over on the rock next to me, this fine fellow had just dropped itself down from a rock higher up, onto a rock maybe two feet to my right. I leaped into a sprint, then stopped and turned back. It had taken on a threat posture but wasn't rattling. It didn't have many beads on its tail so it was young. From a safe distance I tossed a few very small little sticks and pieces of bark onto it to get it to rattle but it wouldn't. As I've seen other rattlers do, when it realized all its posturing wasn't making me go away, it flattened itself and played dead, and I left the poor guy alone. A family had just arrived to play in the pond and I made sure to warn them where I saw it, then went about my running business.

I looked up the species to see how much trouble I would have been in if it bit me. Rattlers' venom chemistry is always interesting. I had once been very puzzled that most rattlesnakes have hemorrhagic venom (for your biomedical types, it's a hack of the arginine-glycine-aspartate motif in the IIb-IIIa system on platelets) but Mojave rattlers have neurotoxic venom. This didn't make sense. Evolution works by adapting structures that living things already have to new purposes, not by magically developing things that fit into the same abstract function of a structure. For example: flying squirrels have a membrane between their arms and legs. Birds have given up their entire arm and now use them as wings. It's not like suddenly squirrels will switch from having skin between arms and legs, to having their arms as wings, just because they want to continue improving their flying. By the same token, a snake can't wake up one morning and say, "You know, I like being able to kill things by biting them, but instead of just making them bleed to death internally, I'd really like to paralyze them or make them seize. So I'll just concentrate really hard - there we go - and start making neurotoxic venom instead." So how can a snake with hemorrhagic venom be related to one with neurotoxic venom? (I once emailed an Australian snake venom expert but he didn't write back. Maybe he was insulted at being consulted about wussy American snake venoms.)

The answer is that like most things in nature, venoms are not pure suspensions of a single component. There are a whole bunch of compounds in snake venom and one or a few may get magnified if they're more effective at hurting certain prey in the right way. So most rattlers have a predominantly hemorrhagic venom, and some have a predominantly neurotoxic venom. This shouldn't be so shocking - some humans can produce two different varieties of the same protein (ever have a male friend who had dark hair but a red beard?) And it turns out even within species there are variants. From the Wiki article on red diamonds:

...Norris (2004) warned this species has a relatively large venom yield containing high levels of proteolytic enzymes, especially in the adults. A publication he mentions by Rael et al. (1986) showed it contains at least three proteolytic hemorrhagins that degrade fibrinogen and cause myonecrosis, but no Mojave toxin. On the other hand, three specimens from Mexico studied by Glen et al. (1983) did have Mojave toxin and lacked hemorrhagic activity.

Then again it may be that there are isomorphs that make identification by skin alone difficult (tiger snakes in Australia are one example), and that Glen paper from 1983 cited in the red diamond article from 1983 preceded PCR and easy DNA identification. That said, the one I saw did have the very prominent black and white banding on the tail. There's a more detailed discussion in the Mojave rattler article:

All rattlesnake venoms are complex cocktails of enzymes and other proteins that vary greatly in composition and effects, not only between species, but also between geographic populations within the same species. C. scutulatus is widely regarded as producing one of the most toxic snake venoms in the New World, based on LD50 studies in laboratory mice. Their potent venom is the result of a presynaptic neurotoxin composed of two distinct peptide subunits. The basic subunit (a phospholipase A2) is mildly toxic and apparently rather common in North American rattlesnake venoms. The less common acidic subunit is not toxic by itself, but in combination with the basic subunit, produces the potent neurotoxin called "Mojave toxin". Nearly identical neurotoxins have been discovered in five North American rattlesnake species besides C. scutulatus.[17] However, not all populations express both subunits. The venom of many Mojave rattlesnakes from south-central Arizona lacks the acidic subunit and has been designated "venom B," while Mojave rattlesnakes tested from all other areas express both subunits and have been designated "venom A" populations.


Why Did the Mountain Lion Pick This Woman?

What's disturbing about this is that it seems to have chosen her because of her size - mountain lions are attracted to pets and children for this reason - which means it must have taken its time casing the neighborhood before it came into her house.



Mountain lions will be confirmed in Pennsylvania by 2025. Anyone want to bet against me on this? (No takers so far.)

Cartels Hurt by Legalization; Now, Let's Starve Out Grow Operations in National Forests

Legalization is really starting to hurt marijuana cultivators south of the border. Exactly as everyone said it would based on basic economic principles (and people still refuse to believe for some reason). This is NICE. And by that I mean, TOTALLY NICE. For this very reason, a few years ago when California almost legalized, growers in NorCal panicked.

For us outdoors types, the big problem with continuing prohibition is that growers inside the United States seek out remote areas of national forests for their operations. Outdoors bloggers sometimes run into such operations. This is a major problem for conservation - it erodes the soil, introduces invasives, takes water, and increases the chance of forest fires.

So we can hurt drug cartels, decrease forest fires and preserve our open space by legalizing, which so far has apparently not caused civilization to collapse in Colorado. What are we waiting for again? (For a little Onion video humor on the topic go here.)

The Slot, Anza Borrego

All photos credit to the Motoo Y. the Egyptian. Listen, you don't like that name? Take it up with him. Because that's how he rolls.


Deep in the canyon




A grotesque monster encountered in the canyon,
which you will be pleased to know was promptly slain





Leaving the canyon