Elephants kill rhinos

Check out this absolutely incredible story that I stumbled on last night: yes, elephants slaughtering rhinos!!

The story
"Aggressive young orphaned elephants are reported to have killed 36 rhinos, including rare black ones, in a game park in eastern South Africa..."
[Elephants kill endangered rhino, a brief account from the BBC News, Monday, 14 February, 2000]

"KwaZulu-Natal's valuable flagship species, the black and white rhino, are being violently killed by delinquent young elephants..."
[Delinquent elephants kill rhinos, a more detailed and interesting account by Jill Gowans, Environment and Travel Writer, The Sunday Tribune, Durban, South Africa]

The explanation
This has been "....ascribed to young bull elephants in musth. Musth is a state of heightened aggression associated with reproduction, and the young elephants are entering musth at around 18 years old, instead of at about 30. The normal pattern is for bulls to gradually enter musth, with the period lengthening with each event. The young bulls are entering full musth of up to 3 months at a time!" [says Rob Slotow of the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Park (HUP) Introduced Elephant Project]

The solution
"...The elephants of HUP were reintroduced from Kruger Park from the early 1980's, and included mainly young orphans from culling operations. There are thus no older bulls in the park. The solution is to create a structured heirarchy of bulls in the Park. The older bulls should suppress the musth behaviour of the younger bulls, and allow the younger bulls to become experienced in dealing with the consequences of musth..." [continues Dr. Slotow]

So what is musth and why would introducing older bulls supress it?
Here are links to some absolutely fascinating information about the sexual behavior dynamics of elephants and the strange phenomenon of musth [Note on etymology: in colloquial Hindi (which is what I know ;)) - to say that somebody is musth means that they are in a sated, happy drunken state. The dictionary says the etymology is: mast raving mad, intoxicated (in Urdu), also matta excited, intoxicated, mad (Sanskrit). But I haven't been able to find out when and how this term began to be used in a technical sense wrt elephants]

An overview: Musth and elephant Society, Rob Slotow and Gus van Dyk

More technical:

• Rasmussen, L.E.L, Why musth elephants use pheromones: Super insect mimickers smooth societal relationships, thus modulating reproduction, Biologist, 50 (4), 2003 [pdf]
  
• Rasmussen, L.E.L., Riddle, H.N. and Krishnamurthy, V., Chemical communication: Mellifluous matures to malodorous in musth, Nature, 415, 975 - 976 (28 February 2002)
  

Recent movies I've seen

Shaun of the dead(2004)
Highly entertaining and to it's credit, joins the ranks of only two other films (as far as I can remember) of those I've seen in the US where the movie ended with a round of applause in the theatre. The two others being Titanic (at a packed 300+ seater Chicago multiplex) and Farenheit 9/11 (on the opening night at the Coolidge Corner Theatre).

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Waco: The rules of engagement(1997)
I stumbled on this documentary yesterday by chance while channel surfing. It is an investigation of the "rules of engagement" used by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) at Waco and subsquently by the FBI which took control of the situation. In my little teacup, any documentary that succeeds in shocking/provoking me to think deeply about it's content gets multiple stars, whether or not I concur with the message. This documentary one scores very high!

Apart from the actual events that transpired at Waco, there is a larger issue that this documentary deliberately engages with. In an article written in 1999, David Gifford (one of the writers of the film and it's executive producer) noted that - "...the willingness to uncritically regurgitate official demagoguery manufactured to manipulate or inflame public opinion for political gain or careerism simply encourages the technique's repetition to justify and hide heinous official acts....Through study and practice, savvy police and political PR professionals know that facts are seldom allowed to prevent a profitable news scare --- particularly when the designated heavy is a person or group whose lifestyle or belief system is a repugnant cliche or stereotype to most."

In these modern troubled times, many would willingly nod their heads vigorously in agreement to this observation and as an example readily point to the White House conservatives and their ability to retain numerous zealous supporters despite the numerous factual inconsistences to do with the Iraq war. What Gifford is trying to point out is that this capability is symmetric -- it was the White House which also stoked people's biases with regard to the Waco incident. The Branch Davidians, were readily stereotyped and caricatured as being ultra-religious, gun-toting, polygamous, white-supremacist, child-molesting nuts which made a lot of the stuff that happened easily palatable and slip by unquestioned (even though many of these labels turned out to be highly questionable).

The film-makers, who seem to have drawn the ire of many in the liberal establishment due to the film's sympathies for the perspective of the Branch Davidians, note that - "Because people tend to see the events at Waco through the prism of their politics and fundamental belief systems, many of the questions we receive reflect, not an intellectually honest interest in learning what really happened, but an effort to deny what really happened by demonizing the messenger. Most of these latter questions rely upon the argumentative appeal to authority falsity that because an authority figure, government officials or agents of the FBI, ATF, etc. claim or testify that something is true, it must be.".

To summarize: the bigger message of the film is to undercut what they believe is the government's attempt to manufacture consent using people's biases to hastily cover up the horrific mistakes made all along the chain of command in the handling of the situation at Waco.

Links to some articles about the movie that do some hard work to evaluate the presented evidence:

• Sifting Waco's Ashes by Alan A. Stone (Boston Review)
  This is a must-read because Stone also wrote an official report for the Justice Department and is a talking head in the documentary
  
• Still Burning: Was Waco a Massacre? Four Years Later, The Question Hasn't Been Extinguished, by Richard Leiby and Jim McGee (The Washington Post, April 18, 1997)
  The writers of this article interview different experts about one of the critical pieces of evidence -- the thermal camera footage from the reconnaissance plane that shows flashes possibly indicating gun-fire directed at the people holed up inside in the house
  
• "Waco": Breaking The Rules Of Disengagement by Stephen Hunter (The Washington Post, June 20, 1997)
  Probes some of the epistemic assumptions in the documentary
  

Latin says it best (and what you always wanted to know about Suetonius)

A Latin expression to adequately describe the response to my "jokes"

Acta est iocus, plaudite!
The joke is over, applaud!

This is a mangling of - Acta est fabula, plaudite! (The play is over, applaud!) - The phrase was often used at the end of Roman plays, to let the audience know that they had reached the end of the piece. Attributed to Vitae Caesarum, Divus Augustus by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus [my source]

So who was Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus? There are several conflicting accounts on the web, so here's one (seemingly authoritative) version from the Encyclopaedia Brittanica

born AD 69, probably Rome [Italy]
died after 122

Roman biographer and antiquarian whose writings include De viris illustribus ("Concerning Illustrious Men"), a collection of short biographies of celebrated Roman literary figures, and De vita Caesarum ("Lives of the Caesars"). The latter book, seasoned with bits of gossip and scandal relating to the lives of the first 11 emperors, secured him lasting fame.

Suetonius' family was of the knightly class, or equites. A friend and protégé of the government official and letter writer Pliny the Younger, he seems to have studied and then abandoned the law as a career. After Pliny's death Suetonius found another patron, Septicius Clarus, to whom he later dedicated De vita Caesarum. Upon the accession of Emperor Hadrian (117), he entered the imperial service, holding, probably simultaneously, the posts of controller of the Roman libraries, keeper of the archives, and adviser to the emperor on cultural matters. Probably around 121 he was promoted to secretary of the imperial correspondence, but in 122 or somewhat later he was dismissed for the neglect of court formality, after which he presumably devoted himself to literary pursuits.

Most of Suetonius' writings were antiquarian, dealing with such subjects as Greek pastimes, the history of Roman spectacles and shows, oaths and imprecations and their origins, terminology of clothing, well-known courtesans, physical defects, and the growth of the civil service. An encyclopaedia called Prata, a work like the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, was attributed to him and often quoted in late antiquity.

Suetonius' De viris illustribus is divided into short books on Roman poets, orators, historians, grammarians and rhetoricians, and perhaps philosophers. Very nearly all that is known about the lives of Rome's eminent authors stems ultimately from this work, which survives only in the whole of one section and in the preface and five lives from another section. The lives of Horace, Lucan, Terence, and Virgil, for example, are known from writers who derived their facts from Suetonius.

De vita Caesarum, which treats Julius Caesar and the emperors up to Domitian, is largely responsible for that vivid picture of Roman society and its leaders, morally and politically decadent, that dominated historical thought until modified in modern times by the discovery of nonliterary evidence. The biographies are organized not chronologically but by topics: the emperor's family background, career before accession, public actions, private life, appearance, personality, and death. Though free with scandalous gossip, they are largely silent on the growth, administration, and defense of the empire. Suetonius is free from the bias of the senatorial class that distorts much Roman historical writing. His sketches of the habits and appearance of the emperors are invaluable, but, like Plutarch, he used "characteristic anecdote" without exhaustive inquiry into its authenticity.

De vita Caesarum is still exciting reading. Suetonius wrote with firmness and brevity. He loved the mot juste, and his use of vocabulary enhanced his pictorial vividness. Above all he was unrhetorical, unpretentious, and capable of molding complex events into lucid expression.

[Source: "Suetonius." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2004. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 21 Sept. 2004 ]

Also see Wikipedia's stub on a critical reference in the writings of Suetonius to Jesus

Film scripts online

I saw Singin' in the rain for the first time last night on TV. My favorite character was the squeaky voiced, dumb blonde character Lina Lamont (played by Jean Hagen).

The script for the movie is online at American Film Scripts Online (AFSO) (which also has 264 other scripts by 334 writers together with detailed, fielded information on the scenes, characters and people related to the scripts)

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For the nitpicker: A database of Movie mistakes

Movies I've seen recently

Ying xiong (Hero) (2002)
[Theatre viewing highly recommended]

The shape of things (2003)

The guru (2002)

The village (2004)

Great quote

"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."

John F. Kennedy on the 20th anniversary of the Voice of America (February 26, 1962), quoted from Floyd College, Rome, Georgia

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Context:"A nation afraid of its people", Cynthia Tucker, Universal Press Syndicate

Two new words

Incubus
(from the Oxford English Dictionary) A feigned evil spirit or demon (originating in personified representations of the nightmare) supposed to descend upon persons in their sleep, and especially to seek carnal intercourse with women. In the Middle Ages, their existence was recognized by the ecclesiastical and civil law.
[See the more detailed Wikipedia entry]

Succubus
(from the Oxford English Dictionary) A demon in female form supposed to have carnal intercourse with men in their sleep
[the Wikipedia entry]

Painted turtle

There's a small, lily-covered pond in the wetlands on my campus. This morning while walking by I saw a brightly colorful turtle sunbathing on a rock in the pond. After some Google-ing, I've identified it as being an Eastern Painted Turtle Chrysemys picta picta. [Photographs][Closeup]

FYI:
The painted turtle (Chrysemys picta) is the most widely distributed North American turtle, and the only one to range across the entire continent, occurring from southern Canada to northern Mexico and from the northwestern to the southeastern United States. They are small turtles with an adult carapace length of 4-10 inches (10-25 cm). The carapace is a smooth, flattened oval, and is green to black in color, with red markings in some sub-species. The plastron[*] is generally yellow, sometimes tinged with red, sometimes with a black to reddish-brown figure of varying size and shape. The skin of the painted turtle is black to olive with red and yellow stripes on the neck, legs and tail and yellow stripes on the head. Males have elongated foreclaws and long, thick tails. Females have shorter foreclaws, shorter and thinner tails, and tend to be larger.

The eastern painted turtle, C. p. picta (Schneider, 1783), ranges from southeast Canada through New England and down to Georgia and eastern Alabama. It is usually 5-7 inches (12.7-17.8 cm) long, and the record is 7.1 inches. This turtle is unique in that the vertebral and costal scutes run virtually parallel, so the light bordered seams are aligned across the carapace. On all other North American turtles, the seams alternate. The plastron is usually plain yellow. In the coastal portions of its range, it may be found in brackish tidal waters.

Sources:

1. Cohen, M., 1992, The Painted Turtle, Chrysemys picta, Tortuga Gazette 28(10): 1-3
   
2. Knipper, K., 2002, Chrysemys picta, Animal Diversity Web (accessed September 03, 2004)

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Fun fact: Terrapin is a term of Algonquin Indian origin applied to several edible North American turtles living in fresh or brackish water!

Mmmmmm....turtle

Photojournalist

I met a photojournalist Jim Korpi at a friend's wedding in New Hampshire this past weekend and he pointed me to his website, which is filled with his terrific photographs. Check it out!