The Bat - the slumdog harlot of mammals

Ozzy Ozbourne fucked Typhoid Mary and now we all have to stay inside.  It may not be a story old as time but it’s time this story was told.  You heard it here first: patient zero of the COVID19 outbreak has been overlooked and it all began on January 20, 1982 at Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines (pronounced Di-ez-Moy-in-ez).  Before we jump ahead to a Days Moones, Iowa 1982 let’s talk about a terrifying and super neat mammal: the bat.

First some words of wisdom from Bane, fictional supervillain and adversary to Batman: “Calm down doctor, now is not the time for fear.  That comes later.”  With that in mind, buy the ticket, take a seat, accept the neatness, freak out and get over it, it's pretty neat.

Bats are slumdog harlots and don’t give a fuck.  By slumdog I mean that bats live in huge colonies in dark, humid, shit filled caves. By harlot I mean sexual deviants with no regard for personal, public or pubic health.  And by bat, I mean bat.. In addition, bats can live up to 20 years, some up to 40, which gives them a lot of time to get their freak on (shout out to Missy Elliott).  This shitstorm of guano and indiscriminate geriatric bat orgies are ideal conditions for passing viruses to one another.  Oh also, they fly, live on all continents except Antarctica and make up 25% of all mammals.  So there’s a lot of them and they are everywhere.  Shit.  But also, super neat.

First, let’s dive into all the viruses that bats have been known to harbor and a little about a few for a nice bedtime story:  Ebola virus, Marburg virus, Swine Acute Diarrhea Syndrome (not kosher), paramyxoviruses, influenza virus, Araraquara orthohantavirus (really bad one), bunyaviruses (including severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) virus and Heartland virus), rotavirus, norovirus, reoviruses, rabies virus (87% acquired human rabies cases in US due to bats since 1980), and last but not least coronaviruses.

Now how can Batman/Batwoman spend their lives riding the village bat-cycle unprotected and inside a dark porta-potty without any consequences.  Well, you may not be surprised to learn that the answer is friggin neat.

Bats have a butt ton of DNA floating around in the cytoplasm of their cells.  You may be at home thinking, DNA is good, the more the better, right? Just like bourbon whiskey, guacamole and neat animal facts.  No jerkass, you clod.  In general, whiskey, guacamole and neat facts belong mostly in the nucleus and mitochondria and not the cytoplasm.  Cytoplasmic DNA can be generated by viral infections OR as a byproduct of oxidative metabolism and stress caused by the high demands of flight (side note: bats are the only mammal that can fly).

Normally, the response causes inflammation and activation of other immune mediators to remove the DNA fragments.  Studies have shown that evolution, yes evolution, fuck you Jerry Falwell Jr/Sr, has weakened the immune response to high cytoplasmic loads of DNA, namely in the form of signalling proteins called interferons, so bats don’t get sick as easily when they get exposed to nasty shit. That's pretty neat.

In conclusion, Ozzy Ozbourne bit the head off a bat that was infected with COVID-19 in Da Moughens, Iowa in 1982.  Then in late 2019 Ozzy traveled to Wuhan Province, China for a gig (unverified but highly likely), ate another bat (unrelated but likely), shared the bat with his Chinese tour manager, Typhoid Mary (unproved but he did), Ozzy fucked Mary (unsure but he would), TM got sick with a respiratory illness defined largely by fever, sore throat, pneumonia and respiratory compromise (unconfirmed but...poor girl), and then Mary got between 2 and 2.5 people sick at a wet market.  And now we all have to stay inside.

Octopus - The Creature with Eight Pouses

The octopus.  Any educated person would expect to find eight vaginas, naturally, upon coming face to face with this mythical beast in the sweet coastal waters of western Mexico.   Boy was I mistaken.  Either this was a male octopus or the Greek’s were to busy philosopherizering on unimportant things like life and the universe and did not forsee the confusion that would ensue when they combined the terms meaning “eight” (okto) and “footed” (pous). 

Even if female octopuses only have one gonopore (science word for an octopus’s vertical smile) they are really really g-dang neat.  In this edition of Neat Animal of the Week we focus on the nervous system of the octopus which will guaranteed give you a neatness stroke.  We’ll leave the fact that octomuffs can stand tall on their arms, squeeze through a hole little bigger than one of its eyes and become a streamlined rocket or fold itself to fit into a jar behind and focus on neurons and shit like that.  

First, in order to gain perspective on the mind of this fetish filled eight footed freak, it’s prudent to point out that the most recent common ancestor between humans and the octopus is nearly three-times as old as the most ancient dinosaur and was most likely a worm-like creature with eye spots and a foreskin that lived nearly 750 million years ago (it would be another 749,998,000 years until the first mohel). Octobearded clams have nearly half a billion neurons close to the order of dogs (vs humans with 100 billion) and significantly more than plus the largest brain to body mass ratio of any vertebrate. Yet, as Donald Trump’s hands and penis would tell you: size isn’t everything! Despite the distance between humans and octovajayjays they have developed sophisticated behaviors including complex problem solving, task-dependent conditional discrimination, and observational learning more commonly found in mammals.  Octobeavers also have been found to have forms of short- and long-term memory, versions of sleep, and the capacities to recognize individual people and explore objects through play.

Also indubitably neat is the distribution of those neurons in their bodies. While most vertebrate’s neurons are concentrated in the brain, the majority of the neurons in octofannies are in their arms.  Their arms have the ability to sense touch and taste and even an arm that has been hacked off by a psycho ex-girlfriend can still perform independent functions such as reaching and grasping. Holy great balls of I’m so scared right now.  When an octocoochie reaches to grab something 2 waves of muscle activation occur: inward from the tip and one outward from the base.  Also, the neurons in each arm have loops (recurrent connections) which may give the arm a simple decentralized form of short term memory.  If you didn’t already have a neatness induced transient ischemic attack (Ni-TIA) then listen to this neat fact: researchers believe that opsins (proteins that make up photoreceptor cells) in the skin can sense different wavelengths of light and help octohoohas camouflage themselves.  The neatness is all-becoming.  

The Fangblenny - The Drug Dealer of the Indo-Pacific Ocean Heroin Highway

Anthony Romilio/University of Queensland

There's a crisis that's devastating rich and poor communities alike all over 'Merica. Opioid abuse, addiction, and widespread death and universal sadness as a result. And now the crisis has reached our oceans. Let me introduce you to the fangblenny (Plagiotremus rhinorhynchos), the pusherman street pharmacist of the Indo-Pacific heroin highway.  The fangblenny may look harmless at only 2-4 inches long with bright cheerful coloring and schoolboy demeanor but this sea-faring candyman has venom glands that contain a shanghai sally/china white/mexican mud/black pearl hormone, enkephalin. Enkephalins, function by targeting the brain's opioid receptor sites and work similarly to synthetic opioid painkillers like fentanyl or oxycodone. 

A CT rendering of a fangblenny
Richard Smith/OceanRealmImages.com

Fangblennys use their fangs as a defense mechanism causing their predator to become disoriented and hypotensive (low blood pressure).  It's been documented that these fish will bite their attacker from the inside causing slack jaw and allowing them to exit like a boss.  Side note, it's still unclear whether it's the enkephalin or another peptide, neuropeptide Y, that's responsible for the disorientation.  Neuopeptide Y, found in cone snail venum, is known to cause severe drops in blood pressure.  

My personal mind research wonders whether fish that feed on the fangblenny purposely don't harm them so they can swallow them and get their h-bomb black tar fix.  Since 60% of the time I am right 100% of the time, I am making a recommendation to the United States Department of Fish and Wildlife to create an initiative to combat and treat fish opioid abuse.  This is vitally important because help for opiate addiction is about more than just treating fish opiate withdrawals, it is about enacting lasting change in our oceans and sending the right message to the baby fishies out there. 

They may look harmless, but this fangblenny will get you highhhhhhhh
http://www.ryanphotographic.com/blenniidae.htm

National-International Giraffe Cardiovascular Neatness Month

Giraffes

After a long hiatus, NAOTW is back and it couldn't be better timing because January is National-International Giraffe Cardiovascular Neatness Month.  How neat is that!  Giraffe's (pronounced "gi"-like gyroscope and "raffe" like Raffi of Baby Beluga fame) have one of the neatest cardiovascular systems in the animal kingdom!

Raffi

Let's start with the neck. It long, it's strong, and it's down to get it's friction on. Giraffes long necks, which have as many cervical vertebrae as humans and other mammals (7) but are just longer (10-11 inches), are useful for a butt-ton of things such as:

*reaching wicked high branches to feed on acacia leaves and seedpods (which are highly nutritious but also are toxic to other animals..yuckers)

*fighting with other giraffe's by using their head-neck combo as a medieval flail weapon (longer necks increase the torque they can exert on their "genemies"--Giraffe-enemies if you will.  VIDEO HERE

*AND long giraffe necks provide ample real estate for "gickies"---or giraffe hickies---and other related activities of ungulate foreplay. 
 

Because their necks are so g-darn long their hearts must generate enough arterial blood pressure, nearly 300mmhg, to overcome the gravitational and hydrostatic pressure exerted on the heart by the height of the column of blood in neck arteries. So you're probably thinking:

"The left ventricular and interventricular walls in the heart are probably really enlarged in order to produce such a systemic blood pressure." And you would be wrong. I mean right.  Very fucking right.  NERD ALERT



Giraffe heart - the left ventricle walls (above) are nearly 8cm thick 



You're probably also thinking, why don't giraffes get super duper dizzy when they bend their necks down to drink.  It's because that neck, underneath all those gickies, has a complex pressure regulation system called the rete mirabile that prevents excess blood flow to the brain when the giraffe drinks or dips it's head low to do lines of "gocaine" or giraffe cocaine. "Wait a minute, Max," a reasonably headed person might say, "giraffes? cocaine? gocaine? no way Gose." Well, giraffes have one of the shortest sleep requirements of any mammal, between 20 minutes and two hours in a 24 hour period.  Now I say, give me a more plausible explanation for their short sleep requirement other than excessive gocaine use.

Then, since giraffes have the blood pressure of an obese person from Kansas who does nothing but work hard on her foopa game, smoke 2 packs of heaters a day, gurgle ground beef, and hold Chipotle burritos as a security blankets, you'd expect them to stroke out and the pressure exerted on the lower vessels to push fluid though the capillary walls like this lady:



Visual representation of giraffe blood pressure in a human from Kansas

Giraffes, though, have a tight sheath of thick skin over their lower limbs which maintains high extravascular pressure just like a Iceman's G-suit in Top Gun.

Hope you learned a lot about giraffes!  How neat are they!

The Frigatebird: The Klepto-Cloud Surfing Guido Seabird With a Big Sac





A male frigatebird in flight. Courtesy: Harvey Barrison/Flickr

It's unfortunate that there's so much neatness surrounding the frigatebird because in reality they're assholes; mostly the guido dudes. Let's dig deep into this asshole and discover what it's constructed with first, and then we'll overpower it with an enema of neatness.

 

Frigatebirds are the Jersey Shore douchebags of the tropical seabird family. In order to court a mate these GTL seabirds inflate their red gular throat pouches, vibrate their outstretched wings, produce a drumming sound by vibrating their bills together, and sometimes give a whistling call. They're literally bird guidos who show up to the club, bust their chests out, shimmy, and holla at ya girl. Then, after a female has chosen a mate and they copulate, Paulie D gathers some sticks for a nest and the female constructs it and it's cemented with guano. Both Paulie D and his lady take turns incubating the egg for 41-55 days and take turns feeding the chick for around 3 months. Then after about 3 months Paulie D gets fed up with the responsibilities of raising a kid and leaves his lady to find another birdie to shake his sac at without even paying child support.

A great frigatebird chick wearing a Gucci fur coat that was probably stolen.

Finally, not only does Paulie D frigatebird fly the coop when parenting starts getting real, he also gets his food from through theft (to be fair, the females also engage in larceny). Frigatebirds are known as pelagic kleptoparasites. Pelagic meaning they feed in the open ocean as opposed to around costal areas. And kleptoparsites since they gain a large portion of their diet by harassing other birds and steal their catches. Guess it shows that all frigatebirds are essentially products of broken homes and lack that stable parenting environment with both a mom and dad present.

A female great frigatebird



Now to the neatness. First, frigatebird feathers aren't waterproof so they can't land in the water...sooooo in order to stay aloft for an extended period of time, they intentionally fly into clouds. They hitch rides on the warm air updrafts from the sea surface to the top of a cloud. Recent research documented that some of the birds stayed aloft for nearly 2 months without landing. One bird flew nearly 40 miles without a wing flap. They also have been know to reach altitudes of over 12,000ft above the sea surface, nearly freezing conditions, and unheard of for a tropical bird and probably the highest relative to the surface of any bird. WHOA! Neatness overload. One thing that helps the birds achieve this is that their wingspan can reach up to 7.5ft and they have the largest wing area to body weight ratio of any bird. The size of one's ratio is important for anyone, but REALLY important for these peculating FUBU-wearing throat puffers.

 

Researchers also discovered that winds that form the updrafts in the atmosphere that the frigatebirds ride also disrupt waves at the sea surface. When the waves are disrupted, deeper water tends to rise carrying with it small microscopic plants like phytoplankton that attract small fish. Then bigger fish eat the smaller fish which creates a feeding frenzy that the frigate birds take advantage of to grub out. So not only is Paulie D a degenerate klepto dad, but he also catches free rides on the atmospheric rollercoaster of air currents, getting on and off when he needs a fish sandwich. Tubular! How neat is that?




Frigatebird Range

Oh I come from a land from a far away place...

They have bushy untamed eyebrows, two rows of long eyelashes and long fit legs. They sport a fat backside and large, tough lips.  They have incredible control over their nostrils and fashion a huge moose knuckle. No folks, the neat animal of the week isn't a transvestite BJ hooker who's top half resembles a cocaine invaded Eugene Levy and bottoms like Kim Kardashian wearing nothing but spandex bike shorts exposing her giant smuggled yo-yo.  IT'S A CAMEL!!!

Courtesy wikipedia images

There are 2 kinds of camels in the mundo: Bactrian, or Central/East Asian camels which have 2 humps and dromedaries, which are Arabian camels with one hump which we will primarily focus on as the NAOTW. 

The Black Eyed Peas (a hiphop/pop group for those who lived under a pile of sand in the 2000s) provided a very profound question regarding camels in their smash hit "My Humps":

Whatcha gonna do with all that junk
All that junk inside your trunk

So what do camels DO with all that neat junk inside that trunk hump?  Well, it's actually not water in that hump but fat, sometimes more than 80lbs of it that they can metabolize into energy when they are in the middle of desert really far away from the nearest Arby's.  Since their insulation is concentrated in one location in their hump trunk and not distributed around their whole body they hardly sweat and can travel up to 100 miles in the desert. 

Courtesy Britannica

Camels could also be compared to ecstasy obsessed teenagers as they very efficient water drinkers. Yet, camels can drink 30 gallons of water in 13 minutes and they don't die of an electrolyte imbalance and brain swelling.  That's a lot of water, how neat is that!  

Courtesy Google Images

Arabian camels have adapted a number of characteristics that help them survive in the desert: they can close their nostrils so sand doesn't get in their business or they don't get high on cocaine when they hang out with Charlie Sheen. They have really bushy eyebrows, 2 rows of eyelashes and a 3rd clear eyelid all to shied them from the sun and sand.  

Finally, some words about the swollen hatchet wound, the vertical smile or the folded pancake better known as the camel toe. 

Courtesy Google Images

Camels walk on their toes much like a Caitlin Jenner in high heels but instead of a heel, Camels have a ball of fat that forms a soft pad on the bottom of its foot. The pad supports them much like a snowshoe and allows them to walk easily on the sand.  

Finally, some neatness that has recently been discovered about the camel is that camels actually originated in the high arctic forests of North America during the Eocene period around 45 million years ago and dispersed to Asia and west from there via the Bering Isthmus. Camels are AMERICAN!!!  Scientists believe their humps were adapted to get them through cold arctic winters and their broad feet to walk through the snow. Yet this camel was thought to be around 9 feet tall and weigh around a ton.  And instead of smoking 1 cigarette like Joe Camel they smoked at least a dozen at a time.  

Leatherback Turtle

Although the tubular turtles Crush and Squirt in the righteous film Finding Nemo were actually Pacific green turtles, this week's Neat Animal of the Week is in the same superfamily Chelonioidea and is equally as radical and arguably neater in neature.  The leatherback turtle is the "blue whale" of turtles; they are the largest turtle on earth AND one of the largest living reptiles. They'll grow up to 7 feet long and reach nearly 2000 pounds. But ask any man with small hands and they'll tell you: size isn't everything. Lady Leatherbacks will tell you differently. The leatherbacks are lucky that they not only have the size thing going for them, they also have a whole lot of neatness on their side. 

Image: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries

Leatherbacks can dive to depths of 4,200 feet, which is deeper than any other turtle, AND they can stay down for up to 85 minutes. Who knew Franklin the turtle wasn't such a pussy after all.  (Disclaimer: Franklin wasn't actually a leatherback turtle, but more likely a box turtle, which are totally pansy turtles.  It just rolled off the tongue so well.)

Leatherbacks are pelagic, meaning they spend most of their lives in the open ocean. After mating at sea, females come ashore to nest. At night they dig a hole in the sand, lay down around 100 eggs and then leave a large ruffled area to make it difficult for babysnatching terrorist predators to find the nest. They do this several times during nesting season at around 8-12 day intervals. I know what you're saying, "Max, these turtles come ashore and basically download a brownload of eggs in a hole once a week, what's so neat about that?"

I was able to sponsor some baby leatherbacks and release them into the ocean in Guatemala in 2010. The day was filled with fruit, rum and many tears. 

Well you jabroni jerkass, these leatherback mamas travel on average 3,700 miles to the exact beach they were born to bury their offspring after not having been there since they were a wee hatching. Western Pacific leatherbacks engage in a brain melting migration, swimming from nesting beaches in the western Pacific (primarily Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands area) to noshing grounds in the eastern North Pacific (almost 7,000 miles). Holy Jebidiah peach cobbler that is so gee dang neat. See map below. 

Image: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries

Unfortunately because of factors such as eggs taken by humans and other predators, falling victim to fishing lines and nets, or ingesting plastic mistaken for jellyfish, only 1/1000 leatherback hatchlings reach adulthood.  Very not-neat. 

Finally, as to the name. They are called leatherbacks not only because they were super into the show Sons of Anarchy and are honorary members of some West Coast biker gangs but also because they are the only sea turtle that doesn't have a bony shell.  Their top layer is actually 1.5 inch thick leathery, oil-saturated connective tissue overlaying loosely interlocking dermal bones.  

Keep on preserving the neatness in the universe and have a great week.