WELCOME ABOARD THE TITANIC

I'm not sure which of Trump's never-ending stream of tweets, fiats, provocations, sadistic put-downs and flip-flopping decisions finally gave me that unmistakable sinking feeling. But I think it was the announcement in his National Security Speech of December 18, that he is cutting climate change out of America's national security strategy. This marks a major shift away from the Obama administration's security strategy, which recognized climate change as one of the major risks facing the nation and the world, and put international cooperation to minimize that threat high on the national security to-do list. As Trump said in his speech, “We are charting a new and very different course.”

 "Full speed ahead"--The RMS Titanic--the greatest ship of its day
Credit:  F.G.O. Stuart/Wikimedia Commons

It's been clear for a long time that climate-change denial has been the price of admission to the current Republican Party regardless of the real-world consequences. A saving grace, however, has been that the US Department of Defense and the intelligence agencies responsible for the security of the nation have generally resisted this politically convenient untruth and have made plans and deployed resources in response to such “risk or threat multipliers” as “livelihood devastation, state fragility, human displacement, and mass death,” not to mention extreme weather, coastal flooding, environmental degradation, threats to infrastructure, forced migration, and what James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence characterized as “unpredictable instability”caused by climate change.

Now, thanks to Trump, and as reflected in the accompanying 55-page document, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, by choice and design, climate change and its impacts are not to be found. Instead, there's a lot of focus on accelerated economic growth, bigger and better armaments, “fairer” trade and “energy dominance,” all of which, in the absence of a recognition of climate change and environmental degradation and destabilization, will only increase the threats and impacts we will be encountering.

This stance is all too reminiscent of the first (and last) voyage of the RMS Titanic, the greatest ship of its day, carrying the cream of international society as well as hundreds of ordinary people, and believed at the time to be unsinkable. Despite warnings from other ships about sea ice, Captain Edward Smith ordered the Titanic to steam full speed ahead through the north Atlantic night.

Everyone knows the result—nature in the form of an iceberg proved mightier than the great ship; the "unsinkable" vessel sank at 5:18 in the morning of April 15, 1912, and 1500 lives were lost, including that of Captain Smith himself. The Titanic, broken in two, is now slowly disintegrating 12,415 feet beneath the Atlantic.

The bow of the Titanic, in the depths of the North Atlantic
Credit: NOAA/ University of Rhode Island

Like the 2,224 souls aboard the Titanic on that ill-starred night, we are now shoveling on the coal and steaming full speed ahead across a treacherous sea with our captain and crew willfully blind to one of the gravest risks we face. That's making it a bit hard for me to just sit back and enjoy the glittering company, the fine food and drink, and theband's lovely music. I can't get the image of the dark, icy waters just ahead out of my mind.

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HOW CLEVER IS A CROW? -- New Caledonian crows carefully craft hooks

In Jean de La Fontaine's fable "Le Corbeau et le Renard" (The Crow and the Fox), it's Mr. Crow who plays the fool, tricked into dropping his morsel of cheese because of flattery from crafty Mr. Fox. However, if de La Fontaine had known about some eye-opening  recent research, he might have switched their roles. Crows, it seems, are nobody's fools.

It turns out that New Caledonian Crows not only use tools, as do many of their corvid cousins, but are the only animals other than humans who spontaneously make and use hooks. Although our ancestors started crafting stone tools more than 2.5 million years ago, it wasn't until about 25 thousand years ago that humans started to make hooks--initially for fishing. Recent research shows that human children younger than age 8 rarely come up with the idea of fashioning a hook to retrieve a reward.

 Goin' fishin'--a New Caledonian Crow uses a hook to snag insects

Credit: James St. Claire

Our closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, also use tools, including hook-shaped twigs, and adult orangutans will make hooks to fish for a reward. However, unlike the New Caledonian Crows, which use their claws and sharp beaks to carefully shape and trim twigs into deep hooks, chimpanzees don't modify the hook-shaped twigs they use. "We have recently discovered that chimpanzees routinely use naturally-hooked stems to fish for algae," says primate expert Christophe Boesch, "but they don't actively craft these hooks. The crows can reshape plant material with their pointed bills, which act like 'precision pliers', but this would be very difficult for chimpanzees with their large fingers."

 Chimpanzee using a twig to fish for termites

Credit: Valerie

The extra skill and effort the crows put into crafting their hooks pays off in how efficient they are at snagging bugs. "We suspected that tools with pronounced hooks are more efficient, and were able to confirm this in controlled experiments with wild-caught crows," says Christian Rutz, who led this research and has been studying New Caledonian crows for ten years. "The deeper the hook, the faster birds winkled bait from holes in wooden logs." The researchers found that the hooked tools allowed crows to catch their prey two to ten times faster.

A month or two ago I saw a plain old American crow fly up to the peak of a multi-story building, land, and then let something drop from its beak. It turned out not to be a morsel of cheese but a walnut, which rolled down the slanted roof, picked up speed as it fell, and cracked open when it hit the pavement. The crow flapped his way down and snacked on the now-available seed. At the time I thought that this Mr. Crow must have dropped his prize by accident. But now, after reading this research report, I'm willing to bet it was quite deliberate. Their brains may be small by our standards, but crows, it seems, make very good use of them.

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You can find a link to the research report in Current Biology here.

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