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Items to fit into your overhead compartment |
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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
I covered our eight-legged friends in an entry recently: "What a Tangled Web"  . This is a different spider-written article from SciAm: Do People Really Swallow 8 Spiders a Year While They Sleep? Should we worry about arachnids crawling into our mouths while we’re in dreamland? Sure, go ahead. Worry about that. It's not like there's enough other stuff to worry about. Rod Crawford has heard plenty of firsthand accounts of spider-swilling slumberers. “Once or twice a year, someone tells me they once recovered a spider leg in their mouth,” says Crawford, the arachnid curator at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle. Yes, this is the same Rod Crawford (actually a spider in a trenchcoat and hat) who got quoted in the previous entry. Luckily for all of us, the “fact” that people swallow eight spiders in their sleep yearly isn’t true. Not even close. Yeah, it's more like eighty. Okay, yes, I'm kidding. But if you think it's "luckily for all of us," just think how much luckier it is for the spiders. Three or four spider species live in most North American homes, and they all tend to be found either tending their webs or hunting in nonhuman-infested areas. I'd say it's more like thirty or forty. Okay, I'm kidding again. During their forays, they usually don’t intentionally crawl into a bed because it offers no prey (unless it has bed bugs, in which case that person has bigger problems). Problems that can be solved by introducing spiders. Plus, many people would likely be awakened by the sensation of a spider crawling over their faces and into their mouths. Sure, whatever helps you sleep at night. Spider experts concede that a sleeping person could plausibly swallow a spider, but “it would be a strictly random event.” Given that we swallow a lot less while sleeping, and we sleep only about 1/3 of the time, I think it's far more likely to swallow one while awake. If this article doesn't put your nocturnal arachnophobia to rest, consider this: other arthropods don't have the same fear of us that spiders do. It's far more likely that you've swallowed a cockroach. |
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