Animal Planet

[Xjmt]

From today's New York Times:

October 10, 2007
Television
‘The Desert Has Lost Its Favorite Rose’: Death Comes to the Whiskers Family
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
There are no simple, intuitive turns on the long road out of bereavement. We know this from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. We know this from Joan Didion. We know this from the fans of “Meerkat Manor,” for whom the past 10 days have made up a 240-hour period of magical thinking.

On Sept. 28 viewers witnessed Flower, matriarch of the Whiskers clan, one of the warring colonies of meerkats followed by this popular telenovela-style nature series on Animal Planet, die warding off a snake in the Kalahari desert. So seriously has the incident been taken in certain pockets of the culture that the wire service U.P.I. issued a report on Oct. 1 that began:

“Flower, one of the furry stars of the Animal Planet documentary series ‘Meerkat Manor,’ has died after being bitten by a cobra in South Africa.”

It proceeded in the earnest tone of an obituary, leaving you to wonder why a phrase like “Services to be held at Temple Emanuel next Friday” had been omitted.

Though the death had been foretold in advertisements, which announced an impending tragedy that would change things forever, few seemed prepared for the bloody eventuality of Flower’s end, her tiny head swollen from infection, the melancholy music that accompanied her never-to-be-resumed breaths. Flower had fallen protecting her cubs. Imagine Nancy Botwin taking a bullet for her sons Silas and Shane on “Weeds” as a rival drug lord invaded her patio, and you get the idea.

“Flower was a formidable leader and a noble mother,” the narrator Sean Astin quietly elegized. “The desert has lost its favorite rose.”

What the outpouring of sentiment that has followed says about the present character of American emotional life is disillusioning. Thousands have outlined the particularities of their sadness on Internet message boards, some claiming they haven’t cried so much since they lost a parent.

“I really do not think it matters how we say it,” one online poster wrote, philosophizing on the language of mourning. “It just matters that we do say it. The grieving process is a complex process. Many stages. I am now at the ‘I want to do something to make a difference stage.’”

(I wonder what this poster’s to-do list looked like the following day: “1. End Darwinian struggle in the animal kingdom. 2. Pick up eggs and shoe polish.”)

More than four million people have watched the third season of “Meerkat Manor,” making it Animal Planet’s current No. 1 series. And 12,000 visited the show’s Web site (animal.discovery.com) on Sept. 28 during a live chat with Mick Kaczorowski, the series executive producer, to discuss the implications of Flower’s death for meerkats in the Kalahari, on people in Cleveland and Pasadena, on the world.

The network continues to receive letters of condolence and tribute poems, and more than a dozen memorial videos have surfaced on YouTube, including a slide show of regal images of the imperious-looking Flower presented with a warbling rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

Grief often demands answers, and Flower’s followers have wanted to know why the “Meerkat Manor” film crew did not intervene to save her. Why, they’ve wondered, weren’t the observers packing vials of venom and anti-venom that might have mitigated the effects of a cobra bite? Why, in other words, couldn’t “Meerkat Manor” manipulate reality like every other reality show?

Perhaps it did play with the facts in some incomprehensible way, the conspiracy theorists suggest. Addressing his suspicions, one poster to Animal Planet’s Web site issued a point-for-point missive, remarkable for the exclusion of terms like “grassy knoll” and “second shooter”:

“1. How come MM only showed 2 seconds of Flower’s movements after being bitten, while for Lola and other meerkats, we were shown much more of what happened?

“2. Does MM have enough details to give to the audience at all?

“3. If they do, why and what they are ‘hiding’ from us?

“4. If they don’t, how come the underground cameras, collar tracing, and daily monitoring still produce not enough details?”

Before “Meerkat Manor” became such an active vehicle for public emoting, it was merely the most entertaining nature show on television, one that aimed to assert its relevance to the kind of social phenomena with which editorialists and the editors of Cosmopolitan remain obsessed. From meerkat life, you might extrapolate the burdens of the modern woman enduring what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild has called the second shift. Female meerkats definitely bring home the bacon and fry it up in the pan. They also play out a withering psychodrama of maternal ambivalence, offering their lives for their cubs but also evicting the ones who become too unwieldy.

Females in meerkat society choose their mates: In that way “Meerkat Manor” feels just like “Grey’s Anatomy.” It is an object lesson, too, in the dangers of male sexual complacency: you can never be sure when a bachelor, a roving male (Houdini in the series), is going to try to undo the stable balance of your partnership by propositioning your lady for a little sex in a ditch.

Flower may no longer be with us, but the ravenous infidelities of “Meerkat Manor” — the ones that make “Mad Men” seem fit for a screening at the Vatican — will live on.



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Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[brian]

[Henry J]

Symposium marks 30th anniversary of discovery of third domain of life

Thirty years ago this month, researchers at the University of Illinois published a discovery that challenged basic assumptions about the broadest classifications of life. [...]
Prior to this finding, generations of evolutionary biologists and microbiologists believed that the microbes now called archaea were simply another taxon among bacteria. [...]
Wolfe was one of only a handful of researchers studying methanogens in the mid-1970s.[...]
When he sequenced the ribosomal RNA of Wolfe’s methanogen, however, he found that it was strikingly different from that of eukarya and bacteria.

(Aren't these archaea guys a gas?)

[Henry J]

Random critter of the week:

Rotifera

Henry

[Henry J]

There's several threads on The Panda's Thumb blog about PBS Nova documentary on the Dover PA fiasco from two years ago.

Henry

[Henry J]

[Henry J]

Random critter for the month (this one's for the birds):

Grus grus (common crane)

[Henry J]

Birds that boogie

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080625/ ... 8.914.html

Online videos of 'dancing' cockatoos are not flukes but the first genuine evidence of animal dancing.

Philip Ball
SnowballDancing cockatoo Snowball stomps his feet to the beat. Watch him in action here, here and here .A. Patel

When Snowball, a sulphur-crested male cockatoo, was shown last year in a YouTube video apparently moving in time to pop music, he became an Internet sensation. But only now has his performance been subjected to scientific scrutiny. And the conclusion is that Snowball really can dance.

Henry

[Henry J]

Saw a black bear this evening, along one side of block where I live.

Several cars seemed to be loitering in the area.

Being on foot at the time, I decidedly did not loiter in the area.

Henry

[lswot]

Smart move!

[Henry J]

Yep, smarter than the average...

Well, maybe.

[lswot]

Yep, smarter than the average...

Well, maybe.

[Henry J]

Random critter for the month (even if it has been 8 months since the last one? )

Clamator glandarius
Great Spotted Cuckoo

Pretty bird.

[Henry J]

Random critter for the week:

Kalotermitidae
Drywood termites

Cute little guys, huh?

[Henry J]

Random critter for the random period of time:

Paraphaenogaster (group is extinct)

No pictures on that page, so here's the parent group page.

Henry