How to Find a Turd in the Woods Todd Palmer and Rob Pringle
There are a couple of ways to think about a monkey turd. You can look at it as a packet of undigested monkey food, which has passed through a monkey gut and collected a bunch of bacteria in the process. Alternatively, you can look at it, to borrow the phrasing of San Francisco State scientist Jennifer Jacobs and colleagues, as "an ephemeral resource in high demand by many organisms."
One beast's trash is another beast's treasure, and a poo pile in the woods provides food for flies, fungi, and other nutrient seekers. Dung beetles are perhaps the archetypal example of these ecologically important decomposers. Sacred to the ancient Egyptians, these critters eat, nest, or even live in dung pats, sometimes rolling outsized dung balls great distances.
The fundamental challenge facing dung beetles is, unsurprisingly, finding dung. This can be challenging in complex habitats where feces-producing mammals are scarce, such as tropical rain forests. Time is of the essence--arrive late and you might find that another poo pirate has stolen the prize. Success in the shit-eating business requires efficiency in locating the stuff.
Most forest dung beetles scan the understory for droppings, aided by a keen sense of something akin to smell. But a recent paper by Jacobs et al. in the journal Neotropical Entomology describes an entirely different and far more straightforward strategy, the logic of which is as follows. A turd is like a cigarette butt: if it's on the ground, that's only because some asshole dropped it there. If you want to be the first to find it, then just hang out next to the nearest asshole.
Jacobs et al. report this behavior in the dung beetle Canthon aff. quadriguttatus, which they observed "sitting and waiting" around the anal and genital regions of the brown titi and bald-faced saki monkeys. When the monkeys take a dump, the beetles drop to the forest floor and begin rolling the conveniently sized poo pellets away. This ass-riding behavior, called phoresy, has been described in other dung beetles, but the Jacobs paper notes a new case and provides the first visual evidence in the form of stunning full-color photographs.
At this point, you might be feeling as appalled as the young woman sitting next to us on the airplane as we type this, who keeps glancing sideways at our computer screen, then up at the flight attendants, then back at the computer screen, and who seems ready to reach for the air-sickness bag any second. So try to see this from the beetle's perspective. You have six tiny feet, a set of wings, and a penchant for poo. Suddenly, you're no longer a puny bug clinging to the hair on a monkey's butt waiting for it to crap. No sir. Now you're a chocoholic hobo riding the Fudge Train to Fudgetown. Or one of those creepy self-righteous munchkins from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, living alongside a fudge river as wide and brown as the mighty Mississippi.
Other fudge-related metaphors might also be appropriate; we invite you to post them in the comments section.
In any event, this is a winning paper. Sure, it's cool evidence for an evolutionarily adaptive strategy to the classic ecological problem of finding food, but it's also more than that. It's an elegantly written research communication in an era when elegance in formal scientific writing seems to have gone the way of the dodo. In places, it's almost poetic: "From a distance, the beetles attached to the monkeys appeared as jewels or shiny water droplets." Emily Dickinson would be proud (we're not sure what Emily Post would think).
Elsewhere, we hear of a research assistant who "reported that a fecal pellet from a bald-faced saki monkey, with dung beetles attached, fell directly into his shirt pocket as he was observing monkeys in the canopy overhead." Fieldwork doesn't get any better than that, y'all.
As always, new findings raise new questions. Reconstructing the evolutionary history of the beetles, for example, would help us estimate when this behavior evolved, and how many separate times it has arisen in different beetle groups. Someone should get on that. But for now, check out the paper, enjoy the photos, and maybe take a minute to savor the fact that you're not a brown titi monkey. Or a dung beetle.
How are we doing today? How we doin'? Great, great. You're looking good. Love the shirt. Let me guess: Christmas present? Knew it. Great. Hey man, whenever you get a sec—and it's no biggie—I was hoping you could just pop on over to my office real quick so I can fire you.
Nothing to worry about. Trust me. Just a short little one-on-one session about you being fired. We'll have a bit of unnecessary and degrading small talk and then I'll clunkily segue into terminating your position here. I'll follow up by apologizing like I care and that'll be that. The whole thing will take a second out of your day. Promise.
You'll be in and out and unemployed in no time.
Keep working on whatever it is you're working on. I don't want to interrupt. Just want to terminate your source of income. That's all. Go ahead, take your time and finish whatever you need to do now, because afterward you won't be allowed back in here. And we'd really love it if we could get as much work as possible out of you before you go. Okay? So when you've got a free minute, just drop by my office to get fired.
Oh, no need to bring a pen and paper. Love the enthusiasm but, really, relax. It's just gonna be a quick little meeting about you not working here anymore. Honestly, corporate is making me have these with everyone. They want to get you up-to-date on how the company's moving forward and how you won't be moving with it. Again, nothing big.
Just a "Hi, how are ya, you're fired" kind of deal. Totally painless.
Door's open whenever you're ready to peek your head in and lose your job. I'll get you in and out real quick, grab your security card, confiscate your work computer, and terminate your employee profile. I'm putting it at three minutes, tops. Then you can spend your afternoon on more important things, like saying goodbye to your coworkers who will complain to you about how it's so unfair that you got fired, but won't ever say anything to me about it. And within a week we'll all pretend like you never existed.
Sound good? Good.
Don't be nervous, man. I'll make sure you're out of here way, way before you have a chance to get mad at me. I just gotta bend your ear for a quick sec about the company's fiscal policy no longer correlating with you having a job. Whenever you're ready. I'll be waiting for you.
Actually, if you'd prefer, I could go ahead and let you go right here if you want to get a head start on packing your stuff up. Got to keep moving, right? Speaking of which, it's a nice day. Maybe we can walk it out, grab some Starbucks, I could fire you, and you could keep right on walking. Better yet, I could puss out and have Gina do it. Whatever works for you.
Oh, and if you've got an extra sec, could you grab Greg and bring him in on this? I'm thinking maybe we just double-team this thing real fast, and then everyone's free to be jobless for the rest of the day. That'd be great for me, actually, because I have to run soon. Got a little powwow with the guys upstairs. They just want to talk to me real quick when I'm done down here.
MYTH #4 -- 61 RELEASED DETAINEES HAVE RETURNED TO THE BATTLEFIELD: One conservative talking point that has been especially effective at making its way into traditional media reporting is that 61 "of the people that were incarcerated at Guantanamo and then released have returned to the battlefield, have engaged in further terrorist activities," as CNN's Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr said yesterday. The Associated Press has made a similar claim [ http://www.kansascity.com/449/story/995868.html ]. But in fact, as Media Matters has reported, "according to the Pentagon, the 61-detainee figure includes 43 former prisoners who are suspected of, but have not been confirmed as [ http://mediamatters.org/items/200901220014 ], having 'return[ed] to the fight.'" Bergen has also noted that "returning to the fight" could simply mean writing a negative op-ed [ http://mediamatters.org/countyfair/200901240004 ]. Mark Denbeaux, Director of the Seton Hall Law School Center for Policy and Research, has been tracking the Bush administration's claims. He told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, "Their numbers have changed from 20 to 12 to seven to more than five to two to a couple to a few -- 25, 29, 12 to 24. Every time, the number has been different [ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28752222/ ]. In fact, every time they give a number, they don't identify a date, a place, a time, a name or an incident to support their claim."
Peter Bergen, a national security expert and CNN analyst, notes that of the 18 people the Pentagon says are confirmed to have engaged in terrorism, only a handful of names have been released.
If one accepts that all 18 on the "confirmed" list have returned to the battlefield, that would be 4 percent of the detainees who have been released, Bergen said.
Bergen also noted Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics data that show the recidivism rate for U.S. state prisoners who have been released is more than 65 percent. Those same numbers show that about half of the released prisoners are returned to prison.
Bergen said that some of the prisoners at Guantanamo may not have been terrorists at all but were singled out by vengeful villagers who told U.S. authorities they were al Qaeda.
"We know that a lot of people who were in Guantanamo don't qualify as being the 'worst of the worst,'" he said, quoting former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's assessment.
Bergen said some of those "suspected" to have returned to terrorism are so categorized because they publicly made anti-American statements, "something that's not surprising if you've been locked up in a U.S. prison camp for several years."
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