* C E L E B R I T Y *
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Sunday, May 31, 2026
Saturday, May 30, 2026
Arctic
C A R I B O U
Santa's reindeer.
Sleighs powered by caribou is the way to go,
if you live above the Arctic Circle. Caribou live through
-140 degree nights. Horses die. And where's the food?
You might get hay if you're Donner or Blitzen but
everyone else scrapes about to get by. You live
in a vast, snow and ice covered tundra. There
are no tree leaves to nibble on while browsing.
At times there is nothing more to eat than lichen,
growing like moss on the hard face of rock.
It's buried deep in ice and snow. Use your
hoof to break through. Take what you can get
and keep moving. Birthing the next generation
is the one event requiring the migration to stop.
Females are particular about where they raise
their calves. The location chosen needs to have
the right food available while also posing the
least danger from predators. Herds will trek
hundreds of miles to find what they want, or
settle for close enough if time runs out.
A R C T I C F O X
Salmon automatically makes this a special occasion.
Much of the time the food pickings are skimpy, at best.
You'll settle for seaweed, if you can find it.
Here's a tip. It pays to follow a polar bear out onto
the ice flow. Risky, yes, but the seal remains left after
a polar bear has had his fill, is a fitting carnivore
happy ending.
The Arctic Fox is nomadic. It ranges over hundreds
of miles in search of food. They hunt, even on dark
winter nights, when the sun takes months for it
to finally rise again, and daylight returns.
There is no hibernation in the Arctic zone.
No Time Out. No Free Parking.
There is no surplus fat here for the taking.
The Arctic just isn't that generous.
M U S K O X
This is an ancient mammal that lived among
the woolly mammoth and saber-toothed tiger.
They survived the Ice Age and are with us today.
Layers of hair protect them from extreme cold.
The exotic innermost layer provides eight times
the warmth of sheep's wool while also being softer
than cashmere. What a magnificent beast...
and now he's providing us with Sweaters by Yeti.
A R C T I C W O L F
The carcass of this musk ox has more than enough
meat to satisfy this canine. A wolf can take in as much
as 22 pounds of flesh in one sitting, stocking up for the
possibility of sometimes going weeks before the
next meal.
Wolves stick together, roaming their territory in packs
of up to seven. When it comes time to breed, only
the alpha male and alpha female are allowed to mate.
Consummation is the exclusive privilege of the Prom's
king and queen. It makes for dreadfully successful pups.
P O L A R B E A R
Seal is the best! ...packed with nutrients and plenty
of high energy blubber. There is enough bad cholesterol
here to drop a human in their tracks, seized with congestive
heart failure. The polar bear has biological work arounds
so this result doesn't apply to them. Their survival
depends on a diet filled with fat-rich blubber.
Here's something else about the picture above.
Water is everywhere but nothing there to drink.
You die of thirst if you rely on fresh water here.
The polar bear doesn't drink. It creates water
for itself when it metabolizes the seal's fat.
In a sense, the blubber is like a refreshing
glass of water.
S N O W Y O W L
The thick insulation covering this bird makes it
the heaviest owl on the continent. Its body is no
bigger than other owls but it flies about blanketed
from head to toe with double the down.
Lugging this extra weight about is the price paid
for survival in below zero cold.
Most owls work at night. They are nocturnal.
Snowy owls are diurnal. You work both day and night.
There is no avoiding it. In summer the sun
never sets while during winter the sun
takes months before it rises again.
In any event, the owl does what is needed
to stay alive. Food is often scarce.
Except for the lemmings, small rodents like mice.
Amazing breeders. A gift that keeps on giving.
A typical Snowy Owl could pack away 1,600
lemmings a year, and still have room for dessert.
Many years ago a Disney documentary claimed
lemmings periodically committed mass suicide
and showed a film clip of thousands of lemmings
running off a cliff, falling onto the wave-battered
rocks below. The scene was apparently staged,
but the myth of the lemming urge for suicide
lives on as biological fake news.
* * * * *
© Tom Taylor
OVER EASY
Sunday, May 24, 2026
Saturday, May 23, 2026
Creatures
H A M M E R H E A D S H A R K
What advantage is there to extending your eyes
straight out and far away from your skull?
You can see everywhere at once except for
directly in front of your snout. Your one
blind spot is in the direction you are headed.
Your head acts like a rudder, enabling you to
pivot and twist at high speed to capture an
energy meal, like another shark or a ray.
Hammerhead's dive to extreme depths in
order to feast on a favorite, giant squid.
They hold their breath while hunting at
great depths because the icy waters passing
over their gills can dangerously lower the shark's
core body temperature.
R E D - E Y E D T R E E F R O G
What is it about a rain forest that attracts flamboyance?
This frog is easy pickings for a passing hawk or
nearby snake when displaying itself in full regalia.
However, by tucking its limbs under its green body
and masking its red eyes with a membrane, the frog
becomes invisible, lost in the surrounding jungle foliage.
Red-Eyes needing a mate complicates their survival.
Nature has provided a relatively few females with
an abundance of males to chose from. The date night
frenzy begins with a passing rainforest downpour.
Males everywhere hop about to dazzle the ladies.
Being chosen for mating doesn't end the competition.
Matters get ever more ugly as desperate rivals
attempt to pull the male off his bride's back,
even on their honeymoon night.
A L L I G A T O R
Dine with ancient reptiles that preceded the dinosaurs
by a hundred million years. Spend the day among
a thousand alligators lounging pondside in a beautiful
garden setting. What a wonderful destination for a
family picnic. Just twenty-five cents brings you the
Experience of a Lifetime!
The California Alligator Farm opened in 1907,
enduring until 1953. The farm supplemented
its income at the gate by renting alligators to
movie studios in the early days of Hollywood.
H O R S E
Gallop - the fastest of four gaits.
It has four beats to a cycle, one for each hoof
hitting the ground separately. Four thuds and
a silent moment when the horse's legs are
all lifted above the ground.
The Trot has a two clop gait, with two legs
striking the ground at once, then the other two
doing the same.
Cantors, the second fastest, have three clops
to their cycle. The mosey along gait is Walking.
One leg moves at a time. Each when it is
good and ready.
T R I C E R A T O P S
A three-horned dinosaur that makes its appearance
in the fossil record two million years before Earth's
catastrophic collision with an asteroid the size of
Mount Everest. The result is an immediate course
change for life on this planet. Nocturnal mammals,
small and timid, rapidly diversified to fill all the roles
once dominated by the now extinct reptiles.
Chance has given life a new path to follow.
F L Y C A T C H E R
You'll easily go through two sets of flight feathers a year.
Your first set comes just in time for the breeding season,
when you need to be at your sharpest. But as summer
closes out and the family has left the nest it is time to
replace rough, worn-out feathers with shiny and new.
Most birds lose their flight feathers one at a time
on each wing in a symmetrical pattern.
This process provides the least interference with
the bird going about its daily routine.
Waterfowl like geese and ducks, on the other hand,
lose their flight feathers all at once, leaving them
limited to paddling about the pond for the next
two to four weeks, waiting for their new feathers
to arrive.
* * * * *
© Tom Taylor
OVER EASY
Sunday, May 17, 2026
Saturday, May 16, 2026
Invertebrate
J E L L Y F I S H
Go back 250 million years to the Age of Dinosaurs
and you find jellyfish, not all that different from how
they appear to us today, quietly adrift. Now, go back
another 500 million years in time to discover the most
advanced and dominant animal its the day. The Earth
was mostly covered with oceans whose waters were
warmer than todays. There were many shallow seas,
thick with tropical jellyfish drifting all about.
They have no brain, no bone, no heart, no blood.
They are 98 percent jelly. Gelatinous material
capable of making decisions. They can respond
to visual threats with the speed of a mouse
running under the sofa. They manage
without a resident wizard holed up in the noggin.
Their scattered neural network diffuses responsibility
with no central authority to intervene on behalf
of the whole.
S E A S Q U I R T
What kind of biologically engineered life form preceded
the vertebrates? Crabs? Starfish? SpongeBob?
Nothing makes sense. The creature above is a tunicate,
a static filter feeder found in most any marine habitat
offering a hard surface for its anchorage. How likely
is it that this mindless, limbless, porcelain vase lookalike
would eventually lead to some dynamic, vertebrate form?
The adult sea squirt above is nothing like its
juvenile form. The larva hatching from a tunicate's
eggs looks like a tadpole from a frog pond.
A hollow nerve cord runs the animal's length,
from eyespots to powerful tail. The notochord,
a stiff but pliable precursor to the vertebra,
provides strength. This tadpole phase
lasts no more than 24 hours. The larva's mouth
cements itself to a rocklike surface once contact
is made. The animal reconfigures itself into its
unspectacular adult phase.
What is to prevent a tadpole larval type from
succeeding with this body plan? It's a winner -
sensing light, powerful tail, beginnings of a central
nervous system and vertebra. The basis for putting
on the brakes towards SpongeBob is the process called
neoteny - juvenile features replace adult characteristics
that prove less advantageous to the organism's survival.
The achievement of adult mobility delivers new
incentives for providing even greater improvements
to the animal's performance.
Winners survive.
S T A R F I S H
Starfish eat mussels and clams. Starfish have no teeth.
Their food has protective shells. The starfish has five
strong arms to pry the shell open, revealing a buffet
of tasty shellfish innards. Still the starfish has nothing
to break their food into small pieces and guide these
morsels into their mouth. Crabs, spiders and insects
all have small fingerlike structures around their mouth
to provide this service. That isn't feasible for starfish
because their mouth drags the ground, likely damaging
any delicate mouth fingers.
The starfish solution is to push their stomach
out through their mouth and douse the exposed
tissue with acid. The tissue is dissolved into a
nutrient rich broth that the waiting stomach sops up.
Nature has engineered a truly out of the box
award winning solution.
C R A B
You live your life heavily armored and you spend
much of your time squeezed into narrow rock crevices.
You are not king of your realm. You live to survive
another day in a nasty neighborhood. Crabs like you
come and go. They always wind up being someone's
dinner. A few breed youngsters before they go.
Some crabs among the next generation are running
around with your brand of genetics imbedded
in their being.
And isn't that what it is all about, biologically speaking?
The continuation of life. Protecting life's genetic formula.
Here is a purpose. Is it Nature's or is this merely
humanity's questioning for purpose?
Where is the bottom line?
What is this about?
Why?
S P I D E R
It is a tight fit but this animal appears to have
unexpected problem solving abilities.
How does abstract planning fit into such a tiny brain?
They've had over 300 million years to refine
their mental processes. Three hundred million
generations to attack the problem anew by
constantly tweaking their genetic code.
The incentive is to always improve.
Somewhere among the many competing species
innovation always finds a place that works.
O C T O P U S
How does an octopus keep track of eight arms?
It doesn't need to. Each arm has its own sense for
touch, taste and smell as well as its own mini-brain
to call the shots once it had made sense of things.
Up to a point. Sometimes the organism needs
to be focused as an animal of one.
There is a central authority capable of overriding
dissension when a singular response is required.
Place a tightly-screwed jar containing a tasty
crab in front of a hungry octopus.
Nice try. No problem. The octopus has
crab legs for brunch. Quick cognitive reasoning.
Certainly more than instinctual, stimulus-response.
It is not a grass-munching cud chewer. They have
free time but little curiosity. An octopus has both
the free time and curiosity to be clever.
Imagine intellect among the invertebrates.
Most underrated problem solver:
The answer is b. fruit flies
* * * * *
© Tom Taylor
OVER EASY
Sunday, May 10, 2026
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