May 17th

May 17th
So it’s another class spent inside, here’s what we learned.
From looking at our earliest cave paintings we have been able to determine that lions had little ears, and that 6000 years ago they didn’t have manes. We know that they were depicting male lions and not just females because they were shown doing a courting ritual.
Natural History is still relevant because it can prevent some silly mistakes we have made in the past. For example, when shrimp were introduced as fish food they ended up wiping out the salmon and eagle populations. Since shrimp are nocturnal they only migrate up to the surface during the night. So the diurnal predators never found them. The shrimp also eat zooplankton so they ended up being competitors for food as well. A little Natural History research might have prevented this mistake from being made.
Natural History required investment in our collective knowledge. Without Natural History, we lack a baseline. We didn’t research the bounce back from the oil spill 30-40 years ago, so when it happen again a few years ago we didn’t have a strategy for what to do. We didn’t learn anything.
It is thanks to Natural History that we were able to figure out that cholera attaches to the cocoa-pod and can therefore be strained through a sari cloth.

Posted on June 5, 2012 06:57 AM by mhf5