And
yet, for all the curiosity surrounding these chimerical creatures,
which have been swimming eastern Australia’s rivers for tens of millions
of years, scientists have no idea how many duck-billed platypuses are
out there, how many there used to be, or how long they might continue to
be at all.
“Are there half as many as there were? A tenth of what there were?” asks Josh Griffiths, a wildlife ecologist with the Centre for Environmental Stress and Adaptation Research
in Victoria, Australia. “I mean, they could have increased for all we
know.” Even so, the International Union for Conservation of Nature
decided in 2016 to classify the species as
near threatened due to challenges such as habitat loss and degradation…
The Maya people (sometimes Mayans) are a group of Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. They inhabit southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. The overarching term “Maya” is a collective designation to include the peoples of the region that share some degree of cultural and linguistic heritage; however, the term embraces many distinct populations, societies, and ethnic groups that each have their own particular traditions, cultures, and historical identity.
The pre-Columbian Maya population was approximately eight million.[3] There were an estimated seven million Maya living in this area at the start of the 21st century.[1][2]Guatemala, southern Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula, Belize, El Salvador, and western Hondurashave managed to maintain numerous remnants of their ancient cultural heritage. Some are quite integrated into the majority hispanicizedMestizo cultures of the nations in which they reside, while others continue a more traditional, culturally distinct life, often speaking one of the Mayan languages as a primary language.
Maya blue is an ancient, long-lasting pigment with special significance to the Maya, associated with sacrifice and Maya deities, including the rain god Chaak.
Not only do I run into people who think insects and other arthropods don’t qualify as animals, I run into people who know that they’re “technically” animals but they’re of the “opinion” they shouldn’t be.
What are people actually judging by here, though? Intelligence? Because there are definitely vertebrates like us with barely more brainpower than a cockroach, and then there are invertebrates like octopuses, as genetically distant from us as a cockroach but intelligent enough to learn people’s faces and solve puzzles. Are they going by anatomy? That an arthropod is supposedly just “too different” physically to be lumped with us as animals?
Let me show those folks something:
Here’s the animal kingdom. The giant pale blue is all the arthropods, the insects and spiders and crabs and things.
The pale green sliver is the chordata, which contains just three groups. One of those three groups is the vertebrata, literally every single animal with a skeleton: humans, horses, eels, owls, snakes, frogs, all the things people apparently think are “real” animals.
One of the other three types of chordata, your closest possible cousins, are these things, the lancelets:
Just like you, they have a notochord, which during embryonic development becomes your spinal column.
The third kind of chordate, and actually even closer to you genetically than a lancelet, is a tunicate, and here’s an example of one kind of tunicate:
This is a colony of several thousand little bags with mouths and anuses and virtually no other organs. As larvae, they resemble tadpoles and also have a notochord like you once did in the womb, but then they absorb it as they mature. These are our nearest cousins on the planet.
Now unlike the mature tunicate, an insect is a creature with a clearly defined head, jaws, legs, feet, eyes, a complete brain, practically anthropomorphic compared to those bags of filter-feeding jelly, yet it’s the bags of filter feeding jelly that share an immediate ancestor with you. If “bugs” are too weird to be animals then what the hell are we?
Basically if you’re going to say an insect shouldn’t be considered an animal, you may as well say a cactus shouldn’t be considered a plant because it looks funny.
Had some idle time today and drew a bit for myself to clear my head. Made some progress with the Arithan striders during the train commutes and this should be fairly close to my “version 1.0″.
Looking forward to the weekend, there’ll be a Long Distance Calling, long-distance trains and the good ol’ Guru Guru with my good ol’ friend @shivallon - plenty of opportunity to shake the last weeks off.
