Memories of 21, 42, 63 ... the 84th meandering

Glad you and yours are safe, Stradee. Clicked. The following article drew an "uh oh" response from me.

Environmentalists Slow to Adjust in Climate Debate
Opponents Seize Initiative as Senate Bill Nears

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 31, 2009

ATHENS, Ohio -- The oil lobby was sponsoring rallies with free lunches, free concerts and speeches warning that a climate-change bill could ravage the U.S. economy.

Professional "campaigners" hired by the coal industry were giving away T-shirts praising coal-fired power.

But when environmentalists showed up in this college town -- closer than ever to congressional passage of a climate-change bill, in the middle of the green movement's biggest political test in a generation -- they provided . . . a sedate panel discussion.

And they gave away stickers.

Next month, the Senate is expected to take up legislation that would cap greenhouse-gas emissions. That fight began in blazing earnest last week, with a blitz of TV ads and public events in the Midwest and Mountain West.

It seems that environmentalists are struggling in a fight they have spent years setting up. They are making slow progress adapting a movement built for other goals -- building alarm over climate change, encouraging people to "green" their lives -- into a political hammer, pushing a complex proposal the last mile through a skeptical Senate.

Even now, these groups differ on whether to scare the public with predictions of heat waves or woo it with promises of green jobs. And they are facing an opposition with tycoon money and a gift for political stagecraft.

"Progressives and clean-energy types . . . made a mistake and slacked off" after the House of Representatives passed its version of a climate-change bill in June, said Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who blogs on climate issues. "And the other side really kept making its case."

The bill the House passed would require U.S. emissions to drop 17 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels. Its centerpiece is a "cap and trade" system, in which polluters would be required to amass, for every ton of their emissions, credits that could be bought or sold.

Environmentalists say it is crucial for the Senate to act now: In December, a conference in Copenhagen is supposed to create an international climate-change treaty. They fear that if the United States arrives without any plans to cut its emissions, other countries will feel emboldened to do less.

To get the Senate to do something similar, environmentalists are buying TV ads, running phone banks and holding public events. Much of the effort is coordinated from a "war room" shared with labor and veterans groups in Washington's Chinatown.

"People have been naysaying all year long," said Josh Dorner of the Sierra Club. But, he said, "We got a bill through the House, and you know . . . all signs point to yes" in the Senate.

In Elkhart, Ind., the Energy Citizens, funded in part by the American Petroleum Institute, were cheering.

"The whole question of man-made climate change is really, really iffy," said limited-government activist Kelly Havens, speaking to a cheering, sign-waving crowd of about 200 at the recreational vehicle hall of fame. "I mean, what was man doing when Indiana's glaciers were melting? We weren't even here!"

The event had all the trappings of a political campaign stop: ready-made signs, a video featuring country music star Trace Adkins. All expressed worry that a climate-change bill would make high-polluting energy cost more.

Oil and natural gas groups have always had deeper pockets. In the first six months of 2009, the Center for Responsive Politics found they spent $82.1 million lobbying Washington on various issues, including climate policy. In the same time, environmental and health groups concerned with climate change spent about $6.6 million on lobbying and clean-energy firms $12.1 million, according to two other analyst groups, the Center for Public Integrity and New Energy Finance.

But last week, the impact of industry money really started to show in this debate.

The National Association of Manufacturers said it was spending millions on TV ads in 13 states, calling climate-change legislation "anti-jobs, anti-energy."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce began its road show with an event in South Dakota. The chamber has demanded a new "Scopes Monkey Trial," saying the Environmental Protection Agency needs to show it is certain about climate change. The EPA has said no.

"Reality is now being transmitted into the political system," said Bill Kovacs, of the chamber of commerce.

Environmental groups dispute the "reality" part. They have called the Energy Citizens and other industry-sponsored organizations "astroturf" -- fake grass roots, professional activists and paid employees masquerading as concerned citizens.

At the Elkhart rally, many attendees said they had come on their own, worried about what higher gas prices might do to a place that depends on recreational vehicle manufacturing and farm equipment. One man said he couldn't be astroturf: He was unemployed.

The event ended with a video in which person after person repeated, "I'm an energy citizen." Some of those filmed for the video were actors, a petroleum institute spokeswoman said.

In Athens, the environmentalists were as raucous as a zoning commission.

"We're sitting in a room right now that is overly air-conditioned," one woman said when the panel took questions. "My concern is that we have . . . thousands of inefficient buildings."

This was the Athens stop of the "Made in America Jobs Tour," a series of events put on by environmental and labor groups. It was, in some ways, the green side's answer to events like the "Energy Citizen" rallies -- but the two hardly seemed to belong to the same debate.

In a classroom at Ohio University, nobody shouted, nobody sang, nobody waved a sign. They talked about solar energy, home energy audits, utility regulation. Somebody else talked about the air conditioning. The House climate-change bill was barely mentioned.

The group behind this event said its rallies will be much bigger this week, including one in Detroit on Monday and another in Gary, Ind., on Tuesday attended by EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson.

It's hard to know now if anybody is winning. In a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 52 percent of Americans supported the cap-and-trade approach used in the House climate bill.

In the Midwestern heart of the current ad blitz, the office of Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has been getting calls from people inspired by environmental groups' TV ads. But in the office of Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), a staff member said letters were running 100 for and 7,000 against climate legislation.

Even the optimists in the environmental movement talk about the next few months as a cliffhanger, rather than a sure thing.

"I often refer to it as 'The Moment.' It's the moment we've all been waiting and working for, for a very long time," said Maggie L. Fox, CEO of the Alliance for Climate Protection, an activist group founded by former vice president Al Gore. "Yes, it's a test for the environmental movement. But it's a test for our civilization."

Sue, that's big business talking trash to keep their dollars rolling in. Same thing is happening with the President's Health package. Business, backed completely by the Repub's are yelling that all will fall apart if they have gov competition. Well, they are right - they would HAVE to compete.

Iz!! Glad you had a nice trip and are back home and safe.

Stradee, I've been watching the Nat'l news and am glad you aren't in the line of fire - literally.

ehBeth, I'm still clicking like it's a Race for the Rainforest............

THis is a very nice animated (but more like art) piece on the end of summer.

http://scher.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/summer-retreat/?th&emc=th

September 1, 2009
Editorial
Great Lakes Rescue

Barack Obama, of Illinois, is the first president since Michigan’s Gerald Ford to come from a heartland state that depends heavily on the Great Lakes for its economic well-being. Hopes have thus been raised that the Great Lakes will at last get the help they need.

The Clean Water Act of 1972 did much to stop direct discharges from industries and municipal sewage systems. But the lakes still suffer " from lingering industrial pollution, toxics like mercury, deteriorating wetlands and, more recently, invasive species that have devastated the fishing industry and fouled shorelines.

In response, the Environmental Protection Agency will soon roll out recovery programs known collectively as the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. In June, the House gave the program the entire $475 million the White House wanted. The Senate should do likewise.

This is a small down payment on a project that could ultimately cost $20 billion. But it is an important start that will be administered by one agency, the E.P.A., in an effort to avoid the scattershot funding that undermined earlier restoration efforts.

Many of the tasks that lie ahead are easily identified, and some are “shovel-ready,” awaiting only an infusion of federal energy and money. But nobody has found the answer to what has become the lakes’ biggest and most complex enemy " the invasive species.

The worst is the quagga mussel, a fingernail-sized shellfish that made its way to the lakes on an ocean freighter. First documented in Lake Erie in 1989, these tiny creatures now carpet the lake floor and filter out the tiny organisms at the bottom of the food chain with such efficiency that there is little left for bigger fish. Species vital to local economies " like salmon and whitefish " are disappearing. Recreational fishing in Lake Huron has nearly collapsed. Lake Michigan could be next.

The hope is that a truce of sorts can someday be reached between native species and the exotics. But that will not happen unless new invasions stop " which will require sterilizing the ballast of overseas freighters or, possibly, closing the lakes to foreign shipping.

That would be a radical step, but not irrational. It seems increasingly clear that the economic damage from exotic species outweighs the benefits of allowing polluting ocean ships into the Great Lakes.

Nice film work, thanks sue.

5 targets of Great Lakes cleanup...

Commercial development, invasive species and dams have contributed to the loss of more than two-thirds of Great Lakes wetlands, sometimes called the "kidneys" of the system because they clean out pollutants from water as well as provide shelter for wildlife.

Environmentalists hope to eventually restore 500,000 acres of wetlands.


http://www.detnews.com/article/20090831/LIFESTYLE14/908310319/1409/5-targets-of-Great-Lakes-cleanup


Dan, thank God!




http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

Thanks sue, You reminded me of the Texas Tumble weed, famous in the old western movies. It's not native to the USA, was brought over from the old country many many years ago to tie down the soil from being blown away by the wind. So, what did we get? Tumbling Tumble Weeds.

Same thing with the 'ice plants' along the CA coastline. Just took over.

Now that would be a discovery! The original Amber Room most likely is a few tons of puzzle pieces...

Clicked.

Stashing this number here til I figger out what it's all about Alfie.

2,597

New format at rain forest website. Neat. Hello to all, and to all a good night.

And kudzu in the southeast, Danon.

Clicked, and found some interesting reads for everyone's pleasure. Danon will be interested in the one about north Texas.

September 2, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Where the Wild Things Were
By STEFAN MERRILL BLOCK

THE May when I was 14, the coyotes bayed wildly every night. Their cry was a mournful sound, and for good reason: North Texas real estate developers had suddenly colonized the coyotes’ land; suburban sprawl was unfurling across the plains on which they had once chased rabbits among fields of wheat. Instead of their creek-bed den of bramble and bush, there was a zoned triangle of immaculate green sod, named for the displaced: Coyote Creek Park. Still, for a time, the eponymous animals would often startle us from sleep as they howled in angry consensus, like anarchists rallying in their slums to overthrow their oppressors.

A neighbor, fed up and sleep deprived, appeared one night at our front door with a lantern and a shotgun, asking my dad to hold the light while he fired. My dad " an urban Jew of Eastern European descent " knew a thing or two about displacement and assured the man that the coyotes, starved of their resources and their freedoms, would soon leave on their own. June proved my dad right; the howling finally ceased. The city, confident that the residents and Shih Tzus of Glenhollow Estates had nothing to fear, built a concrete walking path that wound along the creek.

The coyotes’ sanctuary had also been my own, their den just three turns up the creek from the fort I had constructed in the wall of a small ravine. My fort! There, I invented a silly language, stockpiled ersatz weapons, drafted a constitution, laid booby traps and rigged an intricate system of climbing ropes, all arranged around a spot I called the Inner Sanctum, a hidden space behind a boulder. And because I was homeschooled, I had tremendous freedom over what I studied and, more important, where I studied it. Nearly every day, for years, I spent hours reading and writing within the Sanctum.

Often, I secretly put my books aside and spent a stolen hour or two trekking through the fields or exploring abandoned farmhouses for rusted treasure. By the time I was 14, however, the old farmhouses had been razed to make way for a new subdivision. I had begun to check the crevices of my body for the hairy traces of manhood. My parents and I had decided that when the summer ended, it would be time for me to go to public school. After years spent either in my solitary spot near the creek or in the sole company of a middle-aged woman who interpreted my every word as evidence of my perfection, I feared that I would fit in at a normal school among normal schoolchildren about as well as those coyotes fit in the newly domesticated landscape.

In the Inner Sanctum, late one June evening, I was busy writing about the apocalypse, a topic I found perversely comforting " after all, in a nuclear-winter wonderland, I could stop worrying about going back to school " when my eye caught some motion amid the vast plain of two-by-fours and pink-foam insulation beyond the creek. A coyote! What was he still doing slinking around, when his pack had long since fled for the grasslands far beyond suburbia’s reach?

By the time the coyote had loped to the far bank of the creek and sat down, I had named him. Mohican. I ran the two blocks home to grab some of my terrier’s biscuits, and when I hurried back, Mohican was still sitting there. Careful to keep my distance, I hopscotched across a few jutting stones to his side of the creek. I called him by the name I had just given him, dangled a biscuit and he stood, pawed the earth before him, as if testing its firmness, then turned shyly away. I tossed the biscuit into the space between us. Mohican slunk closer, accepted the treat, then disappeared into the construction site.

The next morning, Mohican returned, and I was prepared, my pockets heavy with dog biscuits. Throughout that day, and the next, and the next, Mohican came back, and slowly I advanced a few contemplative steps closer to him, as if the two of us were engaged in some drawn-out interspecies game of chess. Eventually he came within an arm’s length, and even let me extend my hand to his nose so that he could sniff me.

One morning, I returned to my fort to find Mohican patiently waiting for me. I paused, held forth a biscuit and called for him to come. Not only did he come to me, he stood on his hind legs and embraced me, leaving muddy paw marks on my T-shirt. Coyotes, I knew, were private, wild things. Even to glimpse one felt lucky. To hug a coyote was too wonderful to keep to myself, and so I brought my mom down to my fort to stand at a distance and watch. “It is amazing,” my mom agreed. “But I don’t think he could be a full coyote. No way a real coyote would act like that.” Let my mom have her own opinions; to me, Mohican was pure, feral coyote.

As if I had a houseguest I felt obliged to entertain, I devised activities for the two of us, trying to teach Mohican some tricks. But all Mohican wanted to do was stand on his hind legs, press his paws to me and waltz. For me, there was no imminent school year; for him, no imminent subdivision. For two weeks, we danced.

One day, though, Mohican didn’t show up. I waited until dark, then waited again the next day, and the following week. But it was now only days until school would begin; my mother made me abandon my vigil to traverse the city’s back-to-school sales. As the shopping bags accumulated in our minivan, as I tried not to think about my immediate future, I gazed out the car window, searching, in vain, for Mohican.

When I finally pushed open the front doors to Shepton High School, I immediately understood that my untamed days were over. Before, time had been my own, to think about whatever interested me; here, time was partitioned by school bells, and all I could think about were the inscrutable, fearsome faces of all those other children.

By the end of that week, my art class had rechristened me Ol’ Frizz Head, I had failed three quizzes and a sneering girl in my gym class had punched me in the liver for acting like a know-it-all. I had already glimpsed my true curriculum for that first high-school semester: a laborious, close study of my own personal failings. Puberty began, then advanced cataclysmically. I ceded control of the Inner Sanctum to a barbarous horde of 10-year-olds. With so many other things to worry about, I stopped looking for Mohican.

Months later, I cooled the warm ache of my blooming acne on the foggy glass of the passenger-side window as my mom pulled the car up to a red light on our way to school. Suddenly, simply, there he was. Mohican? It looked like him, but he was wearing a collar and leash, 10 pounds heavier, placidly walking alongside an efficient-looking woman with a man’s haircut.

Had Mohican really been willing to abandon his feral glories " the snap and hiss of running wild through wheat, the flush of rabbit blood in his teeth " for Purina and air-conditioning? Did Mohican understand that it was either civilize or die? Or had I let myself believe that Mohican was a wild thing, when he had been only a stray dog all along? Just before the light turned green, Mohican turned to me, and our eyes met.

Could he have recognized me, through the fog of the window, myself as transformed as he? I can’t know, but at that moment, some ancient impulse seemed to seize Mohican, and his legs suddenly surged forward. His leash, however, was bound to the woman’s wrist, and she managed to hold on. She yelled at Mohican, and he sat and bowed to her apologetically.

I was saddened, even a little ashamed, to witness Mohican’s surrender. Once the creek, and our days, had been ours, to stalk whatever we craved. But now Mohican was a pet on a leash, and I was a pimply teenager in a minivan. Or maybe this was only a ruse: maybe Mohican had gained the woman’s trust so that, at some later time, he could take advantage of it. Just when that woman would come to think of him as a dog, the coyote would suddenly break free.

September 1, 2009, 10:13 pm
Hunting Wolves, and Men

They started hunting gray wolves in the high reaches of the Rocky Mountains on Tuesday, the first time in years that people have been allowed to shoot for sport this genetic cousin of man’s best friend.

For those who hate wolves and long for the era when they were wiped off the map, and for those who welcomed back this call of the wild, the last few days have revealed some dark feelings in the changing West " and some strength of character as well.

A Republican candidate for governor of Idaho, Rex Rammell, was at a political barbecue last week when somebody brought up the tags used by wolf hunters, and then made a reference to killing the president of the United States.

“Obama tags?” Rammell replied, to laughter, according to an account in The Times-News of Twin Falls. “We’d buy some of those.”

In the Idaho of the past, jokes about shooting a president could sometimes be dismissed without consequence. Indeed, the comment was buried in an initial news story about the gathering, and Rammell sloughed it off later, saying on his Web site that “Obama hunting tags was just a joke! Everyone knows Idaho has no jurisdiction to issue tags in Washington, D.C.”

Ha-ha. What a knee-slapper, these assassination jokes. And besides, he couldn’t hunt down Obama with out-of-state tags. Get it?

This episode was not unlike a town hall meeting last month in the northern California district of Wally Herger, a Republican congressman. When people show up at an event that is supposed to be about health care, and get their applause by proclaiming themselves to be “a proud, right-wing terrorist,” as one man did in front of an approving Herger, you know they could care less about defined insurance benefits.

As with wolves, the fear has many faces, and the true source of it is seldom clear.

But what followed in Idaho was rare in a year of endangered civility. The Idaho Republican establishment came down hard on Rammell, condemning the comments of a fringe candidate who channels voices that have found a wide airing in the YouTube age.

Of course, the reaction could be driven by self-interest. For years, Idaho officials have been trying to convince businesses that their state is not a hotbed of hate-filled rubes, gun-toting racists and assorted nut jobs getting their information from Glenn Beck. Tech companies that thrive in the New West metro area of Boise and the outdoor paradise of the north say the state’s reputation has severely hurt efforts to recruit ethnic minorities.

But this is a changed state in a quick-stirring part of the country " not necessarily less Republican, but certainly less tolerant of the kind of hate speech that used to flow with warm beer on late nights at the wacko corral. Obama, the candidate, drew about 14,000 people in his appearance in Boise last year " putting it among the largest political gatherings in state history. He got just under 47 percent of the vote in Ada County, the state’s most populous.

The wolf hunt has brought out feelings that have less to do with Canis lupus than with something more deep-seated. Gray wolves were exterminated long ago in most Western states, a campaign of blood lust, terror and bounty kills. In some counties it was against the law not to put wolf poison on the fence post. Their return by federal wildlife officials has been such a success that two states, Montana and Idaho, have authorized hunting to keep the numbers in check.

Whether the reintroduced wolf packs " which feast on elk, deer and occasional domestic livestock " can still flourish even with the hunt is an issue now before the courts. But this call to arms against an animal that has been historically misunderstood by most anyone whose name is not St. Francis of Assisi is in part a fear of letting the wild back into Western lands.

Rammell himself is a prime exhibit of a nature-phobe. Until 2007, he made his living in elk ranching, which he calls “a novel agricultural enterprise.” Imagine this majestic creature at dawn in a high mountain meadow, in all its glory. Now imagine it inside a fenced-off plot while someone tries to domesticate it into stupidity. That’s elk ranching.

As for wolves, Rammell wants them all dead, dead, dead. “I believe wolves need to be eliminated,” he says on his Web site. Does it matter to him that they roamed every Western state long before Rex Rammell starting tossing one-liners to red-faced Republicans blowing on their soup at the diner?

Probably not. But judging by the success of tourism built around wolf sightings, the four-legged hunter is back in the West to stay. Still, it would help all concerned if what we talk about when talking about wolves was just that.

September 2, 2009
Editorial
Wolf Season Begins

The first legal wolf hunt in decades in the continental United States began at dawn in Idaho on Tuesday. Legal wolf hunting will begin in Montana on Sept. 15. All told, some 295 wolves are likely to be killed in these two states in the next two months. Idaho has set a quota of 220, Montana 75.

These hunts are misguided and, at best, premature. Until April, wolves in these two states and Wyoming had enjoyed the protection of the Endangered Species Act. But the Interior Department decided that the wolf population across the northern Rocky Mountains had recovered to the point that limited hunts could be allowed in Idaho and Montana, which in the department’s view had developed management plans that would ensure the animal’s long-term survival.

The ironic result is that the gray wolf now enjoys more protection in Wyoming " a state where it is still listed as endangered, thanks to an unacceptably weak management plan " than it does elsewhere in the West.

Environmental groups have made two persuasive counterarguments, which they will continue to press in court, hopeful for an injunction to stop the hunts. One is that Idaho’s and Montana’s plans are also inadequate. The other is that the wolf population across the northern Rockies has not in fact reached sustainable levels " it is now just under 1,600 " and that wolves should be left alone until there are at least 2,000.

After wolves were reintroduced to the Rockies in the mid-1990s " in central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park " they did more than just hunt and breed and prosper. The impact they had on their ecosystem was extraordinary, and beneficial. You might almost argue that their prosperity was and is an expression of an ecological hunger for a top predator.

To us, the wolf hunt in Idaho and Montana seems indecent. Hunters want to kill wolves because wolves kill elk " and the human hunters want the elk. A second reason is a love of killing things. A third is an implacable, and unjustified, hostility to the wolf. It is well past time to let gray wolves find their own balance in the Rockies.

I hope you will all back up and read them - one of them is extraordinary.

Still waiting to hear from the courts re: injunction to stop the hunts.

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

September 1, 2009, 9:08 pm
The Fantasy Genome Project

Here’s a game for a rainy afternoon. If you could pick any organism to have its whole genome sequenced " what would it be?

I played this recently, and it made me ponder. For it raises another, more fundamental question: what does a genome actually tell us?

A genome is an inventory of an organism’s DNA. Genes are made of DNA, so looking at a whole genome tells us all of an organism’s genes. Or it will one day.

At the moment, our ability to interpret whole genomes is patchy: it’s like trying to read a foreign language with an incomplete dictionary and grammar. We don’t yet know what most genes do, or how they interact with each other.

Moreover, a lot of the DNA in a genome does not encode genes, it does . . . something else. What that something else is remains, by and large, to be discovered. Some of it might do nothing at all. (One of the big surprises of the human genome project was how few genes we have. Obviously " or so everyone thought " an animal as magnificent and complex as ourselves must have a lot of genes. Most of the early estimates came in around 100,000 genes; the real number is more like 24,000. This is about the same as a sea urchin " around 23,000 genes " and rather fewer than rice, which boasts around 50,000. More than 95 percent of the human genome does not contain genes.)

But just because we don’t yet understand all the information that genomes contain doesn’t mean they aren’t useful. Consider, for example, the single-celled being Cryptosporidium parvum. This is an intestinal parasite of humans and other animals; it belongs to a group known as the apicomplexans, which includes a number of nasties such as Plasmodium, the bugs that cause malaria. The whole genome sequence of Cryptosporidium revealed that it is missing several of the genes that had been identified as potential drug targets in some of its apicomplexan relatives. Attacking Cryptosporidium will thus require a different strategy.

There are many uses for genomes beyond discovering which genes an organism has and which it lacks. Indeed, one of the most powerful uses of a genome is to compare its general structure with those of other genomes. By doing this, we can spot patterns in how genomes evolve, and we can start to answer fundamental questions in evolution.

Let me give you a couple of examples. By now, we have whole genome sequences for a plethora of parasites. These range from the aforementioned apicomplexans to disease-causing bacteria to fungi to nematode worms that parasitize plants. Interestingly, many of these organisms have small, stream-lined genomes: they have lost many of the genes possessed by their free-living relations. The plant-parasitic nematode Meloidogyne hapla is a case in point: it has about 5,500 fewer genes than the free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Similarly, parasitic bacteria tend to have smaller genomes than free-living bacteria. Why does this happen? Because parasites can piggy-back on their hosts for many tasks, such as getting nutrients. They lose the genes because they don’t need them anymore.

Another use for genomes: we can ask fundamental questions about where new genes come from. For example, do they appear when sections of the genome are duplicated? Or do new genes arrive from other species altogether, a phenomenon known as horizontal gene transfer? The answer varies from one species to the next. Brewer’s yeast has seen large-scale duplications. The nematode worm Meloidogyne hapla appears to have acquired a few genes from bacteria and from plants. Diatoms " these are a type of algae " have large numbers of bacterial genes in their genomes. Indeed, according to one recent estimate, 5 percent of diatom genes have been acquired from bacteria. That’s enormous " and entirely different from the pattern seen so far in animals.

I haven’t enumerated all the uses for genomes " there are many more. But rather than listing them, I want to turn back to my original question, and dream of all the organisms we could sequence.

Needless to say, I want to pick a species that hasn’t already been done. So no humans, dogs, cows, chickens, chimpanzees. Brewer’s yeast is out; so are fruit flies and honey bees. And let’s say no bacteria, because hundreds have been done already.

(I haven’t been able to find a complete list of everything that has been done so far, though there is a list of many of the biggies here. In general, most of the organisms that have been done are “worthy”: they cause or carry diseases " e.g., Plasmodium, mosquitoes " or they are important in the laboratory, like mice, roundworms and fruit flies, or in farming " rice, corn. A few were selected because they shed light on patterns of genome evolution, e.g., pufferfish, which have famously small genomes, or because of their relationship to us " chimpanzees, duck-billed platypus.)

Oh, there are so many millions to choose from! Part of me wants to be greedy, and sequence the lot: world genome project, here we come.

But if I had to choose just one?

I’d choose the African coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae.
Alberto Fernandez Fernandez. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this image under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later. Preserved specimen of Latimeria chalumnae in the Natural History Museum, Vienna, Austria.

These fish (pronounced see-la-canth) are the relicts of a once mighty group. The earliest coelacanth fossils date back to the Devonian, around 360 million years ago, and their heyday was in the Triassic, around 230 million years ago. More than 120 species are known from the fossil record, some of which were giants, reaching three meters (almost 10 feet) in length. Some coelacanths lived in freshwater; others were marine; and many of them were abundant. But around 70 million years ago, they vanished " no fossil coelacanths have been found in younger rocks " and were presumed to be extinct.

Until 1938, when a living coelacanth was " to universal astonishment " caught in South African waters. Since then coelacanths have been found living in deep waters off the Comoros Islands (these are a set of islands in the Indian Ocean; they lie between Mozambique and Madagascar), and off Manado Tua, a volcanic island belonging to Indonesia. Living proof, if any were needed, that the fossil record is woefully incomplete. (The Indonesian coelacanth is a different species from the African one; it’s called Latimeria menadoensis.)

Coelacanths are interesting for a couple of reasons. First, their closest relatives are lungfish " and us. When I say “us,” I don’t mean humans here, but tetrapods " amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Indeed, coelacanths and lungfish are more closely related to us than they are to salmon or tuna: the animal that was our common ancestor diverged from the ray-finned fishes hundreds of millions of years ago. (Most fish you’ve ever heard of, except sharks, are ray-finned fish.) This means that by comparing the coelacanth genome with tetrapod genomes, we can discover genetic features that make tetrapods unique. Sequences that we have and they lack, for example, may shed light on how our ancestors evolved to live on land.

The second reason that coelacanths are interesting is that they are what Darwin termed a “living fossil.” That is, today’s coelacanths are clearly recognizable from their fossils, which means that, over the past 70 million years, their skeletons haven’t changed much in form.

In and of itself, this need not mean that their evolution has been unusually slow. Many parts of an animal can evolve while leaving no fossil trace. For example, genes important in the immune system, or skin color, or in the wavelengths of light that the eye detects, can evolve without affecting the structure of the skeleton. However, preliminary genetic evidence suggests that coelacanths are, indeed, evolving more slowly than the rest of us. A study of their genome might help us to understand why. It should also give us a window into the past: slow evolution means that their genes are a kind of historical document, a record of what genes looked like long ago.

So that’s what I’d choose.

And you?

I think I'd choose naval fuzz to determine which fuzz will make the best sweater to keep warm in winter.

Hi all, good clicking.........

My goodness sue - that's a lotta reading...........Thanks for the N TX story, it was cute.

Hello danon5. Where are the other four?

Bald eagles nest. Oh so magnificent.



Took my little nephew up north to visit them,...and their babies.

Second day in a row with a click. Rolling.