Walleye Fans See Danger in Duo by Scott LaFee - Eureka! on Creators.com

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Walleye Fans See Danger in Duo

Walleyes reside at the apex of the natural food chain in the Great Lakes and are a prized sports fish, critical to a $7 billion-a-year local fishery. But that lofty and much-admired perch (the spot, not the fish) is becoming increasingly precarious, thanks to a pair of lowly invaders: the round goby and the zebra mussel.

The threat to the walleyes is not direct, but rather an example of unanticipated problems that can occur when non-native species like the goby and mussel get loose in the Great Lakes, says fishery biologist David Jude at the University of Michigan. Walleyes prey upon round gobies, which in turn consume bottom-dwelling zebra mussels. The mussels are massive filter feeders, each fingernail-sized creature filtering up to a quart of water a day, absorbing any toxic substances present in the water.

And there's the rub: Portions of the Great Lakes are significantly contaminated by PCBs and other toxic chemicals discharged by industries into feeder-rivers. These toxins are absorbed by the mussels. Then the mussels are eaten by gobies and the gobies by walleyes, wherein the toxins accumulate at escalating levels.

Ultimately, the walleye become unsafe to eat, either by predatory birds or by mammals, the latter of which includes humans.

QUIRKS OF NATURE

Ask most people what the oldest living organism on Earth is and you're likely to hear answers involving plants like bristlecone pines, holly and huckleberry. And, in fact, there are specimens of each estimated to be thousands of years old. Hardly anyone, however, will mention the llareta plant (Azorella compacta), which is found in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

The llareta is a modest sort of organism. A relative of parsley, it looks like a big blob of moss, but it actually consists of thousands of flowering buds on long stems packed so tightly together that a person can stand on them without crushing the plant. Some examples of llareta are believed to be more than 3,000 years old.

Like many other long-lived organisms, llareta is found in an extreme environment and grows very, very slowly.

No one knows its lifespan. It appears to have only one significant threat: local humans, who use it for fuel and medicine.

ELECTRON INK

The Aargh page

osteele.com/words/aargh

Presumably no etymologist (someone who studies the origins of words) has ever written a scholarly dissertation upon the word "aargh," which is that famously guttural remark uttered by pirates and people being hit in the solar plexus. That learned void is thus filled by "The Aargh Page," a creation of Oliver Steele, a Boston-based software developer who has meticulously mapped the various incarnations of aargh, which as everyone knows can be spelled with unlimited numbers of a's, r's and h's.

It's not revealing too much here to note that "argh" is the most frequent spelling. But did you know that "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh" (15 a's and five r's) is almost 100 times more common than spellings with slightly more or less a's and r's?

VERBATIM

"Crash programs fail because they are based on theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby in a month."

— German-American rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (1912-1977)

BRAIN SWEAT

What is special about the following sequence of numbers: 8 5 4 9 1 7 6 10 3 2 0?

PRIME NUMBERS

19 — Number of the 25 highest mountains in the world that are located in the Himalayas

BRAIN SWEAT ANSWER

They're in alphabetical order: eight, five, four, nine, one, seven, six, ten, three, two, zero.

WHAT IS IT? ANSWER

A Petri dish containing rival colonies of bacteria. UCSD researcher Eshel Ben-Jacob and colleagues at Tel Aviv University and the University of Texas have discovered that at least some bacteria species will produce a lethal chemical that creates a sort of surrounding dead zone to halt incursions by other bacterial colonies. The idea is to preserve scarce resources for itself, and the practice is used even when the encroaching colony is closely related.

To find out more about Scott LaFee and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.