Up on the reeftop...

We're not planning on going fully live until after the New Year, but it seems appropriate to post this tonight. It's about 7:00 PM CST on Christmas Eve and, according to NORAD, Santa has just made a stop at Tarrafal, Cape Verde in the Atlantic off of West Africa. Exciting stuff, and I'm sure kids these days are as wired as mine used to be. Of course, back in the day, we didn't have all the high tech support, just the local weatherman saying that Santa (actually, usually Rudolph - red nose, you know) had been spotted headed toward town and it was time to get your butt in bed if you wanted to get anything for Christmas.

But, for the grown-up biologists in the crowd who already have a pretty good idea what time Ole Saint Nick will be arriving, there's a similar watch going on right now. For the last couple of weeks, the Marine Turtle Research Group has been tracking two leatherback sea turtles, Dermochelys coriacea, who are also currently off the coast of West Africa. The leatherbacks, named Darwinia and Noelle, are traveling a circuitous route off the coast of Gabon.

Leatherbacks are the largest of the living sea turtles, reaching lengths in excess of nine feet and weighing nearly a ton. They're also the deepest-diving of the sea turtles, with documented dives to almost 4,000 feet.

If you get tired of tracking the jolly little guy with his eight tiny reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), then you might check out the big turtles.

So know the starfish...

The title of this blog is from John Steinbeck's The Log from the Sea of Cortez, the account of his 1940 collecting expedition to the Gulf of California with marine biologist Ed Ricketts. In his narrative, Steinbeck blends an account of the six-week voyage on board the Western Flyer with his musings on the life in the ocean, and life in general.

A favorite passage of mine (and, I believe, of many biologists) is the one in which Steinbeck recounts a discussion about the differences between "true biologists" and those that he refers to as "dry-balls", the ones who, for whatever reason, seem more concerned with sucking the fluid out of life than with understanding and appreciating its vitality.

"He must, so know the starfish and the student biologist who sits at the feet of living things, proliferate in all directions. Having certain tendencies, he must move along their lines to the limit of their potentialities. And we have known biologists who did proliferate in all directions: one or two have had a little trouble about it. Your true biologist will sing you a song as loud and off-key as will a blacksmith, for he knows that morals are too often diagnostic of prostatitis and stomach ulcers. Sometimes he may proliferate a little too much in all directions, but he is as easy to kill as any other organism, and meanwhile he is very good company, and at least he does not confuse a low hormone productivity with moral ethics."

There's a lot of truth there. I'd like to think I'm one of those true biologists. Maybe I'm flattering myself. Admittedly, I don't sing very much, but I'd like to. I've certainly done my share of proliferating. Had some trouble, too. But I think that to study life, you have to live. Right now, I fear the dry-balls are winning the day. This will be a dry-ball-free zone.

For the record, I'm a professor of biology, a field biologist, at a little university buried very deep in the very rural South. I've spent thirty years trying to pass on some of my love of life and living things to an army of students. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Regardless, this is for them.

Considered "Easy to Kill" as a title as well. But I thought that might be tempting fate.