Caecilian

The caecilian is the yummiest mummy you will ever meet, she’s rather attractive, has a great pair of lungs on her, and she likes a good root…

… sorry just pouring out a Scotch… where were we… ah yes she likes a good root around underground… spending much of her time deep in soil.

Though caecilians look like a liquorice whip had a rather racy night with an earthworm they are in fact amphibians, yes quite… like frogs and salamanders. You’d be forgiven in thinking that you haven’t seen this filly around either as they are rather elusive, as we mentioned they spend the best part of their life underground. Not surprisingly they are rather short-sighted and can only just make out the difference between light and dark.

The caecilians grow up to one and a half metres long and all but one species have a pair of lungs… one lung is bigger than the other so it fits better in that lithe yummy mummy body… indeed the snakes have similar odd shaped lungs. The single caecilian species that doesn’t have lungs is rather a small chap, he doesn’t need lungs as he can get enough oxygen deep enough into his weeny system through his amphibious skin.

Oooh right… yes marvellous… this is the perfect time to discuss an honorary member of The Proceedings; J.B.S Haldane. Professor Haldane is perhaps most famous for his principle, put simply; body size defines what body bits an animal needs. Take for example air-breathing systems; tiny insects can take in oxygen in through their skin from their surrounds, but large mammals have had to develop incredibly complex lung and circulatory systems to get oxygen to their nether regions. So as Haldane’s principle predicts; a big caecilian has had to evolve lungs and a little one has in fact done away with them.

J.B.S. Haldane: Legend

While we’re on the subject the second thing that J.B.S. Haldane was known for is being a bounder… he really was a smasher and is dearly missed by us all. Once asked what he felt God must be like he quipped he must have ”An inordinate fondness for beetles” referring to the fact that about 25% of all known living things on the planet are beetles. Later, in a series of rather dangerous experiments on himself, he perforated an eardrum and afterwards stated quite matter of factly “the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question… which is a social accomplishment.” Marvellous fellow!

Right where were we… aaah yes the rather wonderful caecilia… aaah on to nuptials… we usually get around to this sooner or later. The caecilians are the only amphibian that have a penis-like organ… apart from a rather happy looking frog that lives in fast flowing streams. After all the rumpy pumpy the caecilians give birth to live young, and this is where the yummy mummy part comes in… as the wee ones like nothing less than eating their mother. Yes these little wrigglers begin in the womb, chomping away at the womb lining, some species even continue to eat their mother after they are born… tearing chunks from her skin and greedily gobbling them down… as we were saying the caecilian… a really really yummy mummy.

Sifaka

Meet one of the most dapper chaps on the planet, granted he doesn’t get his shirts from Jermyn St… nor does he know that a fine Harris tweed is of course unsurpassed as poor weather attire… but he does know a thing or two about grooming… say good day to the Sifaka.

We could learn something from this clean-cut primate… one can feel drunk on power from the crispness of the crease of a pair of trousers, actually to be fair mostly from this gin, but at least some giddiness from sartorial elegance.

Sifakas are a type of lemur, a smashing bunch of animals from Madagascar, yes like the Aye Aye. Madagascar said toodlepip to Africa ninety million years ago, while dinosaurs were still skedaddling around the planet. The lemurs separated from the rest of the primates (you, me, chimpanzees, creationists etc) about 55 million years ago. They diversified and filled all the ecological niches that the lovely tropical paradise of Madagascar had to offer them… until man turned up and thought them quite tasty.

Their name is onomatopoeic, that is to say their name is the name of the noise they make; like a cuckoo, a splosh, a quack or indeed a zip. The sifaka, who despite being a dapper primate hasn’t cottoned on to onomatopoeic universal fasteners, lives on the western side of the island and makes a noise that sounds like ‘Shee-fak’, and so the tribes their call them sifaka. On the eastern side the sifaka make a noise much like a sneeze, and so the tribes their have given them a name that sounds much like a sneeze, of course this is mightily confusing for both the local tribes and the sifaka when it comes to cold season.

While most lemurs like to belt all over the place on all fours, the sifakas thought it much more refined to be a bit more… well upright… and are incredibly well adapted to bounding through the trees, in fact some hoof along at up to twenty odd miles an hour amidst the twigs and branches. Of course being mostly upright, and hoofing it through trees takes some skill. The sifaka manage this feat by leaping out from the trees, spinning 180degrees, and landing back face-first on the next tree up to 10 metres away. Being so well adapted to hoofing through branches means that they are rather ill adapted to crossing land, though they do their best… unfortunately doing their best looks like a cowboy, fresh from crossing the entire western plains heading towards a bar after a nut-kicking competition.

But why is he so dapper I hear you cry?

Well it turns out that he has a number of remarkable implements at his disposal to keep himself presentable. He has a toothcomb, highly adapted teeth that comb through his thick fur, to keep himself clean. What’s more he has a toilet claw which is used for… what it’s not for… aaaah! for gads sake… does that mean… I’m so sorry for wasting everyone’s time… I thought it was used for… ah never mind.

Right Whale

Everyone knows the story of the right whale, the whale the whalers thought was the right whale because… well it was the “right” whale to catch… well I’ll tell you something about this right whale chap… he’s just not right.

He’s certainly an odd looking fellow for starters, his huge mouth starts way above his eye… a gaping maw chock full of baleen to strip the water of tasty shrimp and the like. On that bonce are big bugger off callosities, sometimes appearing white because of the huge lice that congregate on them… though as Mrs Merrick said to her little boy ‘it’s not what is on the outside that counts’ and what shoves this fellow clicking and squeaking into the Proceedings of the Ever so Strange… is what is on the inside.

When you are dealing with whales it’s not exactly a huge leap of the imagination to realise that you are going to be dealing with some big body bits. Though there is one body bit in particular of the right whale that is really rather outsized. You see these chaps have enormous gonads… knackers… family jewels… call them what you will… one thing you can call them is bloody enormous… each one is five hundred kilos… together they weigh the same as a saloon car… though you wouldn’t want to clamber inside one for a family Sunday I’d warrant.

The right whale needs them too as the female right whale is… well something of a strumpet. When it comes to mating season the female right whale will… erm take on multiple partners at the same time. They are tremendously sensuous creatures and it’s said that the pressure of a human finger can give them a knee-trembler… if they hadn’t evolved their knees away. The right whales meet for these watery orgies and the males gather round to nuzzle and stroke the female for hours, then the males will enter her with their eight foot schlongs… it’s true that… how do we put this… she’ll allow them ‘in’ more than one at a time… after which the right whale all agree that they’ve had a merry old time and bimble off in to the big wet to find another orgy to attend.

All salacious gossip, and it’s just one of the reasons that female right whales don’t live in small villages and attend church… but there is also the tricksy laws of evolution here afoot… sexual selection. Postulated by Charlie Darwin… yes you are quite right… it’s the reason that males fight like rutting stags and show off like pompous peacocks. But combat and ornamentation are only two aspects of sexual selection… there are other shadowy goings on… one is sperm competition. Yes one way in which this never-ending tussle for more offspring is to continue the fight on to a microscopic level. As you’d expect nature has come up with a range of strategies to deal with this… the male dunnock bird pecks out his predecessors sperm before mounting the female… whereas dragonfly have evolved a penis that for all intents and purposes looks like a bottle cleaner to scrub out his predecessor’s love goo. Even humans have sperm competition and men will produce more of a type of ‘blocker’ sperm, like a defending footballer, if he suspects his missus is having it away with the milkman. The right whale has a much more simple method… to produce lots of sperm… from enormous testes… put quite simply he’s buying lots and lots of tickets in a lottery. I warned you that these chaps just aren’t right.

There are three species of these not-so-right whales who inhabit the Arctic and Antarctic, their populations spilt by a cold planet warming some millions of years ago. There is a forth… though not currently put in the right whale group… the much larger bowhead whale, a huge leviathan, it uses its great big bonce to smash through thick ice to draw a breath… as I mentioned it’s not usually placed in the right whale group but modern genetic studies have found there is more variation between the three species of right whale than there are betwixt them and the bowhead.

Finally as I mentioned the whalers of yore were said to have given the right whale its name after the fact that it didn’t sink, though the truth is a tad more multifaceted than that. Early whalers were based on the land, lookouts would keep a constant vigil, and when whales were spotted they would give the signal for the other whalers to row out to spear the poor sods. The right whale is also a slow swimmer, so it’s not surprising the right whale was considered right by those having to row out and catch one. Finally these ‘right’ whales are indeed more likely to float than other whales once you’ve stuck a harpoon in the poor sod, at the absolute most only 30% would sink.

While it’s easy to point a finger at these whalers that decimated the right whale populations, it’s these ‘right’ characteristics that means it is still being killed today… they are constantly struck by propellers and crashed into by boats… which means that some species of these rather marvellous creatures are down in their hundreds… Sad news indeed and while it’s debatable whether this whale is right or not… we at The Proceedings can certainly tell you when something isn’t right.

Golden Rumped Elephant Shrew

Meet the golden rumped elephant shrew, owner of one of the most magnificent bottoms in the animal kingdom, world champion skedaddler and he’s not even a shrew… in fact he’s more elephant than shrew.

Magnificent!

Despite looking just like a shrew this fellow, like the rest of the elephant shrews and indeed the tree shrews, is not related… they don’t even get a card from the shrews at Christmas… yes quite it is that fellow convergent evolution we keep on going on about. It seems likely that the elephant shrews are closely related to the elephants, armadillos and hyrax but even that is debated.

Of course the elephant shrews have been so-called not because of modern genetic cladistic analyses to postulate phylogenetic trees… but because they’ve got a bally big trunk on their face. It uses this great big nose to root around in the leaf litter looking for tasties; grasshoppers, beetles and the like. It’s a bit of a bother when it does actually manage to eat something, to eat a worm it has to hold it with its foot, chew it on the side of its face… big nose remember… and then flick bits of worm into his mouth. No you are right he is dreadful company to take out for supper… though he is quite delightful company in all other respects.

no dear it's very flattering

Though it’s not his lineage or his manners that make this chap a real corker in The Proceedings of the Ever so Strange… it’s that he has evolved more ways of getting away from persuants than the French.

First off, if the predator is far enough away, he legs it… and at quite a speed… up to 25kmh, incredibly fast for such a wee chap.

If the golden rumped tree shrew is unfortunate enough to be too close to the predator he does something rather unusual. Instead of keeping his head down and trying to hide, he does quite the opposite, in fact he goes absolutely stark raving bonkers. He causes a right hullabaloo, slapping the leaf litter to make a racket… the idea is to send a message to the predator… goading it not to waste time attacking him… which apparently works some of the time. An unusual method of predator avoidance this may be, but it has been demonstrated a number of times and it’s about a show of fitness. Skylarks when being chased by a bird of prey will often sing, the message to the predator is ‘not only can I outrun you but I can do it with a little ditty’ and remarkably it has been shown that Merlin and the like give up the chase much quicker when the Skylark is singing. I can’t resist one more example of this demonstration of fitness; a type of Anolis lizard when he spots a snake will start doing push ups… the message is simple… not only can I see you but I’m in tip top condition and ready for a ruck.

In the event this demonstration of fitness doesn’t work… it’s wonder bottom to the rescue, the elephant shrew’s golden rump attracts attention, and as he scurries off through the undergrowth… the cad that’s trying to eat him will more often than not strike at his bedazzling rear… his rump is rather tough and so helps to stave off any blows. What’s more this elephant shrew’s bottom is so beguiling it means that the predator will go for it rather than its head, thus he’s much more likely to live.

His final tactic to stop from being eaten is to maintain a number of nests so that predators can never associate their nests with food.

A real roister doister I’m sure you’ll agree!

Tongue Eating Louse

The tongue-eating louse is the only example of a parasite that lives by crawling into another animal and after dispatching with a body part lives as a rather awkward replacement. It does so with relatively little harm to the poor bloody fish, though it is said the poor bloody fish rarely gets a smooch these days.

say aaaaah

He’s an unwanted guest, like some insufferable bugger from college who comes around and stays far too bloody long, at least he would be if that guest came in ate your chaise longue and quickly proceeded to decimate your wine cellar and didn’t leave until the day they died. The tongue-eating louse is quite possibly the most repugnant thing on the planet, worse than the Major’s wife and even a sniper wouldn’t take her out.

just a quick kiss... no no don't mind him

This louse is quite simply a monster, albeit a little one. The crustacean crawls into the gills of a fish, scrambles up to the mouth and stabs its claws either side of the fishes tongue. Despite its name it doesn’t actually eat the tongue, the organ atrophies as the parasite slurps the blood taking with it all the oxygen and nutrients and what not. There the louse sits for the rest of its life, why the blazes they never evolved to eat the tasty morsels the poor bloody fish is eating is anyone’s guess. One also wonders how they find this living-in-a-fishy mouth lifestyle satisfying.

... well on tuesdays i do Spanish classes... and on Thursdays I do salsa

So do we at The Proceedings wish we’d never mentioned the horrible buggers? Quite the opposite we think they are really rather grand! An incredible example of a pinnacle of evolution…. you see parasites rather obviously live off another animal to the hosts detriment. It’s a rather lazy, but devilishly clever survival technique that has arisen again and again independently throughout the course of evolution. It’s safe to say almost every single animal of any size has at least one. The really really clever, or more to the point the really well-evolved parasites, tap the hosts resources all the while leaving the host to live quite normally and hence as long as possible…. so that the parasite can tap more and more resources, and make more and more horrible little offspring. And we at The Proceedings can think of no other parasite that does it quite so well.

Indeed the closest we could think of is our own offspring, living off the nutrients of the blood of its mother, before popping out being a bit of a pain until you can eventually pack them off to a cripplingly expensive boarding school at the age of four. Which is at least some good news for the parents as they get back to smooching, a smooch that contains millions of micro-organisms, some of which are parasites.

Vampire Finch

Many moons ago a ship set sail around the world, it wasn’t to know it yet but it was going to change the course of history. It didn’t know this not least due to it being a boat it had a rather poorly developed sense of self. This boat was even less capable of clairvoyancy, a skill unproven in even the most sentient beings… it’s fair to say it really didn’t have the foggiest idea. Still it was so, the places it would visit, and the animals of those places would light the tinder for the greatest idea mankind has ever had… one such creature was the Vampire Finch.

Of course it just wouldn’t do for the ship’s Captain to speak to the scoundrels and hoi polloi of the crew and so it was standard practice at the time to bring a gentleman to drink sherry with them and to generally stop them from going stark raving bonkers. One rather affable fellow seemed perfect, all except for his nose thought Captain Fitzroy. The Captain was a keen phrenologist and being a scholarly and erudite chap he knew that there was no way that this fellow would make the gruelling journey around the globe with a nose that was shaped like that. Thankfully he took him anyway, what’s more he even gave him a book for the journey, a journal on how rocks metamorphose over large periods of time.

Fitzroy

A couple of weeks in their conversation turned to slavery, the Captain a conservative and pious man thought it a splendid idea, whereas the young Charles Darwin quite rightly thought it an abomination, after that they didn’t get along quite as well. Thankfully this gave the young naturalist a bit of time to think. Incidentally Charles wasn’t the actual naturalist of the Beagle, that honour fell to Robert McCormick, who eventually quit after constantly being usurped by the affable country gent.

what's wrong with my nose?

When the Beagle hit South America young Charley was quite taken by the rhea. This large flightless bird was undoubtedly smashing, but why on earth would God feel the need to create it having already made the ostrich.

Upon reaching some volcanic islands miles out to sea from the Ecuadorian coast he met some really rather marvellous species. Enormous tortoises, hawks, aquatic lizards, blue footed boobies, an array of finches and some mockingbirds. Travelling onwards to Tahiti Darwin began to catalogue his finds from the Galapagos. It was the mockingbird that first grabbed his attention, they were all from the same species, yet from each island they displayed slight, yet noticeable differences. Back in Blighty it was the finches that would really get his cogs whirring.

Darwin’s finches as they became known are of course one of the most incredible examples of how an array of animals can come from one. Years before the Beagle’s arrival a single finch had made the islands its home. From this single finch they had adapted and evolved to fill all the different opportunities that the islands have.

going anywhere nice this year sir?

The vampire finch is of course one of the more extreme examples, a subspecies of the sharp beaked ground finch it evolved on two of the smaller Galapagos Islands; Darwin and Wolf. These arid islands lacked freshwater and so the finch began to seek out moisture rich foods, it drank the nectar of the cacti it nibbles at, and rather ghoulishly it pecks at the backs of the blue footed boobie population. Strangely the blue footed boobies don’t seem to mind, it’s thought that they think it normal for small birds to come and peck them for parasites. It could of course be that they are insufferable imbeciles, the early Spanish explorers named them boobies after the Spanish for clown: Bobo.

a vampire? pecking you? well show him you're cross... Ok... STOP PECKING ME YOU LITTLE BA...!

So it was born that Charles Darwin, after twelve years deliberating in his house in the garden of England finally published the Origin of the Species, and what’s more come up with the theory of evolution the single greatest idea mankind ever had. What became of Captain Fitzroy? A devout man, though exactly where all that ‘love thy neighbour’ business fitted in with his belief in slavery is anyone’s bloody guess. Fitzroy was deeply perturbed by the cataclysmic blow dealt to his religion by Darwin’s incredible idea. An idea that could only have been dreamt up if Darwin had been ferried around some odd corners of the globe, after reading a book on how rocks change over vast periods of time. Captain Fitzroy got up one morning and took his life.

Tenrec

Hurrah! We at The Proceedings doff our caps to this intriguing chap who is quite simply like no other… for starters he’s got no balls! No, he’s not French… he’s from Madagascar… what’s that you say… a former French colonial outpost… aah starting to make sense… apart from the bit where the French actually managed to conquer somewhere of course.

Grrrrrr....

He is really rather smashing isn’t he. Yes quite… he does look like a rather dapper hedgehog… and yes… you are forgiven for thinking that he’s some relative of a snail-eating creature with no road sense… no I told you not the blasted French… he’s not related to hedgehogs. His closest relatives are in fact the golden moles, elephants and hyraxes which causes a real kerfuffle when it comes to booking a venue for family get togethers.

This tenrec chap is quite amazing, there are 30 species of them dotted around Madagascar and South Africa. They inhabit a number of different ecological niches; some favour bobbing around in rivers, others scrabbling around in bushes, some are up trees and others are underground. Remarkably they’ve grown to look quite a lot like some rather more familiar species… some are the spitting image of hedgehogs…

eeek

others are well adapted to water and look like otters…

well hello

others bound around bearing a remarkable resemblance tree shrews…

hello

…and the lowland streaked tenrec appears to have evolved to look like a German transvestite.

Guten tag handsome

Time to talk balls, more so than usual, you see these chaps lack them. They have testes of course, but they are one of the few mammals that keep them inside their body. Testicles as you know produce sperm and hormones, for mating and producing “maleness” in the body… a number of factors including facial hair, libido and propensity for pipe smoking. As the testes don’t work very well in the hot temperatures inside the body, most animals have balls that hang out of the body. A few animals, such as the whales and dolphins, keep them inside their body and have adapted elaborate systems to keep them cool. The tenrecs however just have a cool body temperature.

There is another odd body feature about these chaps in that they have a single opening for all their weeing, pooing and hanky panky. Their bum and other bits are one and the same… one hole for all functions known as a cloaca… more commonly seen in birds, reptiles and amphibians.

So there it is quite remarkable isn’t it… no not that… that the French managed to conquer somewhere.

Jumping Spiders

The jumping spiders are a rather charming bunch, one of the most numerous types of arachnid with about 5,000 species spanning the globe, though pour yourself a sherry and read on dear friend as they are far from common, and aren’t a bit like your run-of-the-mill eight-legged fiend.

don't look sad little one...

These charming spiders don’t really fit in with their peers, of course this can only endear our band of bon vivants to our eight-legged chums… what with us being the scourge of the gentleman’s clubs of Soho… those clubs that would have us back anyway.

... that's better!

The jumpers are, put quite simply, not very spider like… instead of a terrifying lolloping blur of legs… beady little eyes… venomous gnashers… attributes that turn even the most ardent animal lover into a genocidal animapath… they are instead fluffy and doe-eyed and actually make you want to pick them up for a bit of a spidery snuggle.

This sadly would be quite impossible as they tend to be about 5mm long, though these wee spiders do try and make up for their unsnugglable tiny stature by behaving in a rather precious manner. If you presented your pinkie to another type of spider it would presumably either start skedaddling towards it drooling at its gaping maw… or simply scuttle back to Hades (or the back of the refrigeration unit, whichever is nearer). The jumping spider reacts quite differently, inquisitively wondering what the blazes the big pink sausage is… and go and have an investigate.

These spiders move not surprisingly in a jerky jumping manner. Amazingly they don’t move by muscles clunking their hard shelly body around, but in fact use hydraulic action. Like a mechanical digger they utilize fluid, blood in the case of our adorable arachnid, which they pump around their system. The fluid pushes to move limbs, rather than pulls like a muscle. This rather marvellous adaption allows them to jump really rather high, up to eighty times their own height, without having to rely on big bulky muscles like the grasshopper.

The jumping spiders also have incredible eyesight, it is ten times better than that of the dragonflies… patrons of by far the best peepers in the six-legged insect kingdom. The furry bounders use their remarkable vision to stalk their prey rather than putting up big and quite frankly frightful and unwelcoming webs everywhere. Though it did confuse learned types for some time as to exactly how something with such a tiny brain can use its eyes to hunt.

Predatory mammals such as cats and ourselves have evolved incredibly complex neural pathways to deal with the amount of information our eyes bring in. The information is sifted and sorted and we can make out what we need to make out, without going stark raving bonkers at the barrage of information we behold. The jumping spiders it turns out have evolved in a very different manner, they see a very small amount at a time. While they can see as clearly as a pigeon, they could only see a speck of something at a time, if they were presented with a pigeon they would not only be annoyed at your poor taste in presents but they quite simply wouldn’t be able to comprehend its magnitude… which is incidentally a philosophical argument as to why we cannot see Gods dilly dallying around the place, they are just too enormous for our tiny minds to compute… though whether pigeons are Gods to jumping spiders is anyone’s guess…

So that’s it, the rather delightful jumping spider. I’m sure you’ll agree that they aren’t a bit like those other ruffians, our fuzzy friend with big eyes rather than big fangs, inquisitive and bouncey rather than skulking and scampering. It has even been postulated by learned types that these charismatic inquisitive creatures shouldn’t really be called jumping spiders at all… and that perhaps a better moniker for these pouncing furballs would be ‘eight-legged cats’.

Namibian fog-basking beetle

On a foggy morning you can find old Onymacris unguicularis standing on his head on top of a sand dune with his bottom in the air… no he hasn’t been drinking all night, quite the opposite, in fact he’s absolutely parched.

Water, lovely stuff, wash with it, make tea with it… life started in it and it took quite some time for him to get out of it, I know how it feels, it’s awful getting out of the tub at times…

The wet stuff is flabbergasting in its omnipresent grandeur, lakes of incomprehensible dimensions, huge rivers coarse through the land slicing through granite mountains like an unimaginably slow paring knife. The oceans are so massive that we haven’t got the foggiest what lurks at the bottom of them. Water blankets the planet, our blue Earth, covering two thirds of it… in fact it never fails to surprise us down at the Proceedings that there is in fact absolutely bugger all of the stuff… don’t believe me? Take a look;

Told you… yes really, that’s it, that wee blue droplet is all the lakes, all the rivers, all the puddles, all the seas, all the ice and soda, even all the cup a soups… all that we have… thankfully we don’t treat it too badly… back in a mo’ just going for a… oh dear lordy what are we doing?

Which brings us back to our friend the Namibian fog-basking beetle. The local bushmen refer to him as the ‘tok-tokkie’ beetle, as they attract a mate by tapping the ground with their bottoms to make a noise. Though it’s not for their fine line in rectal morse-code chat up lines that makes this chap so splendid. He’s developed a rather nifty way of getting a drink. As a sea fog rolls in of a morning the beetle presents himself to it. This is where things get clever, his carapace is made up of a series of peaks and troughs. The peaks are very attractive to water and the fog settles on them, the troughs however are waxy and hydrophobic and the water rolls off the trough and begins to form droplets. The water naturally runs down the inverted beetles body and into his mouth, smashing!

This gave the chaps down at the MoD an idea, they’ve made a series of fabrics using glass beads and waxy coatings to make huge and inexpensive fog catchers, so that the parched locals can get a glass of water. Of course getting a free drink at the best of times is obviously a good idea, but in Africa it could be a matter of life and death. While governments nowadays are happy to kick the hell out of some poor bloody country for the sake of oil… as the population crisis looms the next wars will be fought over a far more valuable fluid resource… actually I think I’ll have that drink after all.

King of Herrings

We only really know a smidgeon about this most marvellous looking beastie, the King of Herrings, a huge sword of sparkling silver resplendent with a crown… an oceanic majesty.

What we can tell you is the King of Herrings is the World’s longest fish, up to an incredible 12 metres long. It’s a type of Oarfish and more than one researcher has said that it gives off electric shocks when touched. A group of frogmen recently reported that it moves by undulating its enormous fin along its back, keeping its body quite straight. And that’s about it… it’s fair to say we know bugger all about this beauty.

So when it came to an evening talk on this King of Herrings we were rather stumped as to what to say down at The Proceedings. Many people, new ages types mainly, wag their finger at us men of science and point out that ‘we think we’ve got it all worked out’ well no we haven’t… it’s actually that we are rather fascinated about this wonderful and intriguing place we call home. This of course led us to chat about what we don’t know about, a subject that could fill the entire library of The Proceedings of the Ever so Strange thricefold.

We don’t know about the Universe, most of it appears to be missing for a start off, and the whole thing should be falling apart… but it isn’t. We haven’t got a clue if there is life out there… though according to the Drake equation there should be about 10,000 life forms in the Universe who have the ability to communicate… and therefore countless others. We certainly don’t know if something was trying to communicate with us when a thirty-seven-second long signal came from Sagittarius in 1977, the so called Wow! signal after the astronomer on watch couldn’t help but scribble his excitement by the side of the feedout.

We don’t even know about our planet… what the weather will do from day to day or when a volcano will erupt or the ground will shake. We haven’t got the foggiest how many organisms there are, at best guess we think there is somewhere in the order of between 2 and 100 million… pretty accurate I’m sure you’ll agree. We don’t know about what is at the bottom of the ocean or what made a huge noise there in the Summer of 1997… a noise that was heard by sensors 4,800 miles apart… a bloop almost certainly organic in origin… a noise that could only have been made by something much much bigger than any living thing ever known.

We don’t know what causes ice ages every 100,000 years, indeed we are actually in an ice age now, an ice age that despite only seeing an average fall in temperatures of about two degrees it was enough to turn the Earth into a snowball. We certainly don’t know what will happen as the temperature will rise by four degrees in this century… though I’d warrant it’s not bally good news.

We’ve no idea why we sleep or pick our nose, we don’t know why we have pubic hair and speaking of hair sprouting up in funny places we have absolutely no idea what the point in teenagers is… when all other apes seem to quite sensibly move smoothly into adulthood. We don’t know why humans kiss, it’s certainly not genetic, there are theories that it dates from ancient times when a mother would mush up food for the wee ones in her mouth… but who could ever know. We don’t even know why we love…

Though we at the Proceedings of the Ever so Strange would love to know about love and whopping great fish and weather and aliens… what’s more we look forward to finding out just a smidgeon about them…