Bio Art Inspiration - the Batura Frog

Just a little inspiration and intrigue for those interested in genes and cloning:
http://io9.com/5850292/the-bizarre-toad-thats-part-clone-part-lover-and-all-hybrid

And another plug from me for io9.com -- Current topics include the Bubonic plaque's similarity to modern bacteria, design's enhancement of the egg, and make-out robots. This is a fun site to inspire those interested in the fusion of art and science. It's written to appeal to the armchair scientist so don't expect too much depth in these articles; they're a jumping-off point.

Pondering Pigeons

I started writing about the pigeon article we read with the intention of having a point, but then it turned into a story from my youth (posted below). So I wanted to add one more post with a few thoughts on pigeons and the urban environment.

I write this as I sit in an airport, watching people scurry to and from their own homing pigeons – large metal birds - and this has made me think about environment and home. I’m thinking – in particular – about pigeons as metaphor for human adaptability and movement.

The article by Boris Palameta says of the pigeon that it’s as if “evolution has prepared them especially for human intervention.” As humans have reconfigured nature into urban centers, pigeons have thrived due to an abundance of food in the city, have thrived due to the warmth of the city, and have survived due to their development of a keen sense of direction and landmark. As the city has been built to convenience the needs of the human, it has also given the pigeon a lifestyle of convenience.

And the problems with pigeon overpopulation mirror human problems both directly and metaphorically. The spread of disease associated with overpopulation is not dissimilar to the passage of illness between humans in high-density areas. Also, the problem of pigeon overeating has parallels to health problems and early deaths in humans who, in these times, are overeating convenience foods that threaten their health. Palameta writes that the urban pigeon is smart enough to seek the path of least resistance to food (i.e. going to a person who feeds the pigeon on a regular basis for meals). Humans, opting out of home-cooked meals in favor of fast foods, are harming themselves in much the same way. Humans seek a path of least resistance that may cause long-term harm.

What interests me most, though, is the idea of the pigeon (the passenger pigeon in particular) as a metaphor for humans in terms of home and environment. As I sit in the airport, I am linking “species” of humans to their airline gates. For instance, at the gate for Duluth, Minnesota, I see flannel-attired old men and women in Green Bay Packer sweatshirts. For the most part, this flock is blue collar and wears a layer of warmth directly referring to the cold, northern climate it originates from. At the gate for NY-JFK, I see some business-attired men, some young hipster-looking adults, and a thin, beautiful woman wearing a wisp of a dress that reeks of money. I see money at this gate but I also see diversity (monetary and cultural). This group is not made up entirely of native New Yorkers; like pigeons, they have carved New York out as a home. As pigeon-people, they nest in the city but they “home” to their roots – to Kansas or India or Utica or where ever they originally migrated from. And…like the pigeons of the city who have been well-fed on account of their attractiveness, I can see the New Yorkers who may have been well-fed financially in part due to their fine feathers…

And all of these people in the airport – like pigeons – have survived NOT by following the light out of the tunnel, but by memorizing the intricacies of their environments: the clothing, the culture, the food, the social scene…

I have many more thoughts on this, but they aren’t particularly organized. And I’m writing under a time constraint. In closing, I’m thinking about how we (as humans) can benefit by comparing our human selves to animals rather than to anthropomorphize the animal. The animal can be the starting point in the thought experiment, not the human. Let’s see how we are like pigeons or rats or monkeys rather than fitting them into our human-based understanding of the world.

Pigeon Problems - A Musing That Got Out-of-hand

I was introduced to the passenger pigeon as a child – not personally but through a gritty classroom filmstrip probably meant to relieve the teacher more than it was meant to educate her young students. I’m not sure what the plot of the film was, but I recall a stranded man struggling to overcome his wilderness entrapment. At some point, a homing pigeon entered the picture and the man was saved via the pigeon’s delivery of a message to civilization.

And with that, my daydreams of a pet passenger pigeon commenced. I imagined I would send the bird out of my bedroom window – message tied to its leg – with the explicit instructions to find and deliver a message to Michael Jackson (how the pigeon would actually find MJ was its own problem). As my imaginings went, my pigeon would return to me with a note from Michael Jackson and thus THE correspondence would begin -- the correspondence that would put me at the top of the fan mail and lead to my own discovery as the next big singing sensation. These were the days before email or cell phones or GPS existed, so this was clearly a brilliant plan. The only hitch was that I needed to locate a passenger pigeon and convince it that my house in Northern Wisconsin was its home base.

There were a few problems with pigeon acquisition, though. First of all, my parents brushed off all of my questions about pigeon breeders. We did not live in a place of pigeons; we lived near a lakefront swarming with the most boorish of birds: seagulls. No. My parents would not entertain my pigeon obsession. Judging from my preceding Alec Guiness obsession - which my parents wouldn’t even throw an Obi-Wan Kenobi figurine at – I’d have to go this alone.

Then there was the problem of the local pet store – The Aqua Hut. The Aqua Hut was located in my town’s dying shopping mall and was the only place other than the roller rink that provided a kid under the age of 11 any entertainment. The Aqua Hut owners knew all of us town kids. After school, they’d find us pressed up against the aquariums, taunting fish and iguanas with our tap-tap-taps. If they found one of us particularly doe-eyed over a guinea pig or hamster, the owners campaigned for us to campaign our parents for a pet. They were the interest group fueling the pint-sized politicians. Our presence and affinity for the furried and feathered worked to their advantage; fingerprints on the glass aquariums were a small price to pay for potential business.

One day – hands placed coolly in my corduroy pants pockets - I asked the store owner when she thought the next shipment of passenger pigeons would arrive (granted they wouldn’t simply fly to the store’s location with leg-bound adoption papers). The owner looked at me and cocked her head a little. The feather dangling from her earring caressed her face. “This way,” she labored through a saloon-style door near the store counter and led me to a far-away corner populated with chirping and whistles. Here, I saw preening white birds and fussy little gray birds in bright wire cages. But there were no bona fide pigeons. “Here you go,” the store owner pointed toward the spastic avians. I looked at her questioningly. “Why don’t you bring your mom by, and we’ll talk,” she responded while gesturing toward a small yellow bird. I dug my hands deeper into my pockets and shrugged.

I was not going to find a passenger pigeon and the limits of my imagination stopped me short of pondering the possibility of training a canary. Lifetime obsession #2 halted just a few weeks after it began. There were surely other routes to fame for an isolated Midwestern girl and a new set of television reruns about a pre-fabricated rock band got my brain churning. Soon I had posters of The Monkees adorning my wall and a promise from my father that we could attend a Monkee reunion concert in Minneapolis. As I transitioned into great lifetime obsession #3, I abandoned the idea of pigeon-as-conduit and wistfully began daydreaming about backstage break-ins.