Results for “puffin” 69 found
What does the puffin tell us about the Atlantic?
The widths of the Pacific continued unaltered for millions of years. Temperatures scarcely dropped there in the Ice Ages. Generation after generation of Pacific birds were able to evolve in an almost completely stable world. Birds which somehow or other had arrived on remote islands branched into different species. In the Atlantic, there was hardly time to do that between the Ice Ages…in the Atlantic endemics — species confined to particular places — only rarely evolved.
What you see when the puffins arrive in the spring is a product of this history. The Atlantic, for the past 2.74 million years has been a place of coming and going, unsettled at the deepest of levels, a system always ready to flip from relatively beneficent to deeply unaccommodating. Life does not have the time here to develop the mass of differentiated variety it has within the security of the Pacific.
…The result is that now in the North Atlantic there is relatively little local variation. Species have evolved to cope with the variability and have wide ranges across the latitudes. The Pacific is a mosaic of local land-based varieties; the Atlantic the exclusive realm of the ocean travellers, birds which have distance embedded in their way of being.
That is from the new and excellent The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers, by Adam Nicholson. Whether it is covering the sex lives of guillemots or how gannets abuse their children, this book is first-rate.
The puffin chapter closes with this:
Next time you sit among the puffins on a summer evening, looking at their elegance and anxiety, that is what to hold in mind: not clowns but beauties, Ice Age survivors, scholar-gypsies of the Atlantic, their minds on an everlasting swing between island and sea, burrow and voyage, parent and child, the oscillating nomad masters of an unpacific ocean.
By the way, that is a UK Amazon link above, so they had to ship my copy across the Atlantic.
Puffins
I've had a few reader requests to blog puffins. My interest in puffins dates from a visit to Iceland in the early 1990s, where I went on a lovely mini-quest to track down a colony. Here is a YouTube of puffins. Here is a longer and more scenic video of puffins in Iceland. Here is the sound of puffins, UK puffins at least.
"The fresh heart of a Puffin is eaten raw as a traditional Icelandic delicacy."
But that is not for me. I am interested in puffins for a few reasons: a) they appear unlikely, b) they often seem to be anticipating something, and c) nature has produced them.
Here is a collection of poems about puffins. None seems good. Here is a Russian video about Puffincat. It is recommended. Here are postage stamps featuring puffins.
On this site if you scroll down you will see pictures of albino puffins, among other delights.
Here are twenty-six questions about puffins, along with answers; e.g.,
The greatest natural predator
of the puffin is the Great Black-backed Gull. This gull can catch
adult puffins in mid-air.
Currently puffins are not at serious risk of extinction.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Puffins are excellent swimmers.
2. How good are top Chinese LLMs?
3. Multicellularity older than we had thought?
4. “Online, she goes by the name Ballerina Farm, and millions of people watch her almost daily videos depicting her life in the countryside 30 miles from Salt Lake City.” (NYT, interesting throughout).
Saturday assorted links
1. Did proxenia grants help ancient Greece grow?
2. Bob Lawson tribute to Jim Gwartney.
3. Puffin walking on the cliff in Iceland, other good photos too.
4. “Alphafold found thousands of possible psychedelics.”
5. Daniel Gross on AGI trades?
6. Girardian Papuans, circa 1963 (short video).
7. Nabeel on how to use Twitter. And on Substack.
Thursday assorted links
1. “Let’s start with strawberries. I have a trio of questions on strawberries. Is it feminine to eat strawberries? Why do we eat strawberries with cream? And do you think the British consider strawberries a very British fruit and maybe the most British fruit we have?” Here is the rest of the podcast, with transcript.
2. FT interview with Claudia Sahm.
3. University of Austin now accepting undergraduate applications, with some fellowships too.
4. Dan Klein on the history of the word “liberalism.”
5. New Iceland puffin documentary (New Yorker).
Saturday assorted links
2. Hezbollah’s arsenal of weapons.
3. Israeli billionaire quits Harvard board.
4. What might be in those scrolls.
5. Louise Gluck, RIP. She was one of our best poets, even if not the equal of Shakespeare.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Can we talk to whales? (New Yorker)
2. Roland Fryer podcast with Russ Roberts.
3. Why has per capita Medicare spending slowed down? (NYT) And the changing economics of higher education (NYT).
4. How much are male-female partners alike?
5. Flying puffin.
Monday assorted links
1. Rasheed Griffith interviews Anton Howes on the Caribbean, Japanese toilets, and much more.
2. Puffin photo.
3. The economic life of cells?
5. Good profile of BAP. In my view, the so-called “New Right” needs to learn to live with feminization, one way or another. I think of BAP as “Cope” for those people who will not or cannot do so.
Monday assorted links
Friday assorted links
Thursday assorted links
1. Corin Wagen reviews Talent.
2. Is there new positive news about Alzheimer’s?
3. Buttfish, for the chess player in your life.
4. Does climate change boost political instability?
Wednesday assorted links
Saturday assorted links
1. Do people see their political opponents as more stupid than evil?
2. Sam Enright on Charles Haughey.
3. “I argue that lawmakers representing more homogeneously white districts have greater electoral incentive to moderate their voting records, since the two parties compete more for support of white voters than for the support of minority voters.” Link here.
4. Petite Maman is an excellent movie. It is rare to see a film with a truly original premise.
5. Puffin photo.
Thursday assorted links
2. New youngest chess grandmaster in history is 12 years old and lives in New Jersey. Father is a software engineer, Indian background.
3. Today’s central bank digital currency status. And Timothy Taylor on CBDC.
5. Forthcoming book: We Have Never Been Woke, looks great, sign up to receive notification of pre-order!
6. Mishnah on the Cowen-Deutsch CWT.
7. ““You’re never going to beat a kid’s adrenaline rush off a riot. You’re not going to stop them,” says Michael Logan, an 18-year-old who works part-time at Townsend Outreach Centre, a youth centre off the loyalist stronghold of the Shankill Road.” (FT link)
My Conversation with Richard Prum
Prum is an ornithologist at Yale, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Richard joined Tyler to discuss the infidelity of Australian birds, the debate on the origins of avian flight, how the lack of a penis explains why birds are so beautiful, why albatrosses can afford to take so many years to develop before mating, the game theory of ornithology, how flowers advertise themselves like a can of Coke, how modern technology is revolutionizing bird watching, why he’s pro-bird feeders yet anti- outdoor cats, how scarcity predicts territoriality in birds, his favorite bird artist, how Oilbirds got their name, how falcons and cormorants hunt and fish with humans, whether birds exhibit a G factor, why birds have regional accents, whether puffins will perish, why he’s not excited about the idea of trying to bring back passenger pigeons, the “dumb question” that marks a talented perspective ornithologist, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Putting path dependence aside, if you were trying to give us the most fundamental explanation of why sexual dimorphism is different in birds compared to mammals, what would that be?
PRUM: Well, that’s actually a really big question. [laughs]
COWEN: Of course, but the most fundamental factor — what is it?
PRUM: The most fundamental factor is that most birds don’t have a penis.
COWEN: Talk me through the equilibrium there.
PRUM: [laughs] There’s a lot. That’s where we start: Most birds don’t have a penis, which means that one of the things that happens in avian evolution that’s distinct from mammals is that the kids require a lot of care. They’re growing up in the nest, they’re hatching out of an egg, but they’re very, very vulnerable until they can fly.
Birds have a very rapid period of rapid development. That means that they grow up and leave the nest, and you need two parents to do that efficiently in most diets or most kinds of ecologies. That means the dad’s got to be at the nest.
We usually thought that you have social monogamy, at least two birds helping raise the young, because the young are so needy and they have to grow up quickly. But there’s another possibility, which is that they could evolve to be so needy and grow up quickly because they managed to get males at the nest.
One of the things that happened in the phylogeny of birds — you’ve got ostriches and their relatives, and you’ve got chickens and ducks, and then you’ve got the rest of birds, and that’s a bunch. That’s the vast majority of them, and in that lineage leading to the rest of birds, the penis evolved away, and the question is why. My own theory is that female birds preferred mates that did not have a penis.
One of the ancillary benefits of that, one of the correlated benefits of that is that they were no longer subject to sexual coercion or sexual violence. They could be coerced behaviorally, but they couldn’t be forcibly fertilized. That means that they have freedom of choice, and what do they do with their freedom of choice? They choose beauty. One of the reasons why birds are so beautiful is that males don’t have a penis. They have to be subject to choice in order to effect reproduction, and also they have to invest if females require it.
COWEN: Now, sometimes albatrosses don’t breed until they’re 20 years old or even, on average, maybe it’s what — 10 years old. What are they doing in the meantime that’s so important?
PRUM: Well, that is a deep question.
Recommended, this was one of my favorite CWT episodes.