Search Results

This chapter describes the physical setting, biogeography, El Niño cycle and climate change effects of the coral reefs of Panama. A focus on the unique role of low diversity but complex ecological interactions, as well the importance of corals in supporting a diverse and often cryptic part of the food web is presented. Spatial and temporal variation is described as well as the potential role of human resource use and climate change on the ecosystem.

This chapter explains the success of companies such as Provident Financial and Cattles (both members of the FTSE 250 by the 1990s). Their agents serviced the growing sub-prime sector and commercialized backstreet feminized affectual relationships between borrowers and lenders. The extent to which their success was dependent on the decline of pawnbroking and mail order agency (and the limitations of the government's Social Fund) is explained. The motivations and limited options of moneylenders' customers are explored as are accusations of ‘predatory lending’ and exploitation. Moneylenders fought PR battles to exclude themselves from the label ‘loan shark’, as images of criminal moneylenders increasingly replaced ones of ‘Shylocks’. The chapter examines the role of violent loan sharks, explaining their small but significant market. Particularly important was the fact that government resisted calls for interest rate caps because it feared legal lenders would abandon their riskiest borrowers, leaving them vulnerable to loan sharks.

In recent years, with better education and a more transparent approach to public engagement, our knowledge and understanding of the shark have improved such that coastal visitors and locals alike are more likely to see the presence of sharks as not only an indicator of ecosystem health, but also as an economic opportunity. Human responses like those that occurred in 1916, or even in the 1960s, have changed drastically. Rather than rely on ignorance and the distorted “man-eater” myth and cinematic tropes of shark violence, people are beginning to recognize that the predatory nature of sharks is natural and that sharks have greater rights to the ocean than tourists do. The appeal of shark ecotourism suggests that even though sharks are feral and can be scary, our unfamiliarity with them makes our curiosity trump that fear. This amazing shift in attitude has made the move away from hunting sharks with dynamite, guns, and longlines to hunting sharks with cameras a logical one. By rebranding the shark and seeing it as natural capital, their presence in the world’s oceans can be understood as another asset we must tend to.

This chapter is an evocation of the fishing village of Boca San Michel, near Willemstad and tells the story of the death of Max Zimmerman, one of its fishermen and neighbour to the author including a description of a death procession and being laid to rest with to the strains of a muffled tambú drum playing.

This chapter examines historical films produced in Hollywood about the life and death of American president Abraham Lincoln made during the period from 1930 to 1941. During this period, Lincoln's presence sanctified whatever theme or subject the historian chose and he generously supported whatever period film a studio happened to create. Lincoln lent authenticity to insignificant scripts, healed any divisive tale of the Civil War and he was a prestigious touch added to secure that elusive critical and box-office appeal. Examples of these films include D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln, Darryl Zanuck and Nunnally Johnson's The Prisoner of Shark Island, and John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln.

Symbols like the service flag furthered community morale in the United States during World War I and evolved to engender memorial organizations like Gold Star Mothers. Music supported both, with three components of the industry—Tin Pan Alley, Kitchen Table publishing, and Song Sharks—differing in key respects: the participation of women composers and lyricists, the focus on mothers and loss, and the mix of ballads, waltz songs, and marches. As the war evolved, so did the responses, with the closing months and aftermath focusing increasingly on soldiers’ fatalities and the expression of grief and mourning. Postwar changes in style and dissemination marked the end of such collective expressions.

Fossils potentially provide direct evidence on how changes in growth strategies may have affected diversification patterns in geologic time. New strategies may have allowed some species to exploit new ecological opportunities or contributed to their demise. This chapter discusses the following topics: ocean acidification in the past and today; major patterns of larval evolution in the oceans; climate change and mammalian developmental evolution; Jurassic sharks; survival and diversification in the early mammalian lineage; and islands as experiments in life history evolution.

By the early spring of 1962, all of western Washington was abuzz with Seattle’s upcoming world’s fair—the first to be held in the United States since 1940. On April 21, with the push of a button in the Oval Office, President John F. Kennedy released a swarm of balloons 2,300 miles away in Seattle. Seconds later, warplanes from the naval air station on nearby Whidbey Island roared over the city, thrilling the throngs of eager fairgoers. Over the next six months, nearly ten million people passed through the turnstiles, among them Elvis Presley, to film his forgettable It Happened at the World’s Fair (1963). Officially titled the Century 21 Exposition, the fair boasted exhibits from twenty-seven countries and a range of attractions. But with futuristic highlights such as the Monorail and Space Needle, it aimed above all to celebrate Seattle’s new modern identity. It seemed the perfect theme for the time and place. Just two months earlier, John Glenn had become the first American to orbit the earth, and the Cold War space race was in full swing. The Boeing Company, with its headquarters and three manufacturing plants in and around the city, was a leader in cutting-edge commercial and military aviation. If the 1962 world’s fair didn’t launch Seattle into the twenty-first century, it certainly signaled the city’s move away from its nineteenth-century extractive economy. But these changes came at a cost. Seattle’s maritime industries had been declining since World War II, even as Boeing jobs and freeway construction hastened flight to the suburbs. By the early 1960s, city leaders were pushing for urban renewal. The Seattle Times led the way, publishing a special feature in October 1961 that called for a “downtown for people.” To be sure, the Century 21 Exposition provided a short-term boost, drawing visitors to the fair site at the base of Queen Anne Hill and creating the new tourist hub of Seattle Center. But two months later, an event drew visitors to the waterfront itself.

We are lucky, on Earth. We are lucky because we—as complex and self-aware organisms—are here. We are sustained, given air to breathe, and water, and food, by a very ancient planet: a planet past its midpoint, a planet that is nearer death than birth. Our species is a latecomer. It took some three billion years to bridge the gap from a single-celled organism (originating in this planet’s youth) to a multicellular one, and then a little over half a billion more to arrive at the diversity of species on Earth today, including Homo sapiens . In all this time, the chain of life has remained unbroken. The Earth has been consistently habitable, with an atmosphere, and land, and oceans. Since life began, our planet has never been truly deep-frozen, nor have the oceans boiled away. The Earth is the Goldilocks planet. One recalls, here, the children’s story, where the young heroine of that name walks into the house of the three bears, and in their absence tries out successively their bowls of porridge, their chairs, and their beds. Each time the first and second choices are too hot or cold, large or small, hard or soft—and the third choice is just right . The Earth has been, so far and all in all, just right for life: not just right at any one time, but continuously so for three billion years. There have, though, been some close calls: times of mass extinction. But, life has always clung on to bloom once more. That makes the Earth’s history more remarkable than any children’s story. Other planets have not been so lucky. Mars seems to have been a planet with an appreciable atmosphere, and—at least intermittently—running water over its surface, and may even have begun to incubate life. But the atmosphere was stripped away by the solar wind. Its early lakes and rivers became acid, charged with sulphates. Then, most of the water evaporated and was carried off into space; what little was left became locked away as permafrost and in thin ice-caps. Mars does have weather, including spectacular, planet-wide dust-storms.

The breaking of the German teleprinter cipher that led to the construction of the Colossus computer was the culmination of a series of triumphs for British codebreakers. British interception of other countries’ radio communications had begun in earnest during the First World War. The War Office ‘censored’ diplomatic communications passing through the hands of the international telegraph companies, setting up a codebreaking operation to decipher the secret messages. The British Army intercepted German military wireless communications with a great deal of success. E. W. B. Gill, one of the army officers involved in decoding the messages, recalled that ‘the orderly Teutonic mind was especially suited for devising schemes which any child could unravel’. One of the most notable successes for the British cryptanalysts came in December 1916 when the commander of the German Middle-East signals operation sent a drunken message to all his operators wishing them a Merry Christmas. With little other activity taking place over the Christmas period, the same isolated and clearly identical message was sent out in six different codes, only one of which, until this point, the British had managed to break. The army codebreaking operation became known as MI1b and was commanded by Major Malcolm Hay, a noted historian and eminent academic. It enjoyed a somewhat fractious relationship with its junior counterpart in the Admiralty, formally the Naval Intelligence Department 25 (NID25) but much better known as Room 40, after the office in the Old Admiralty Buildings in Whitehall that it occupied. The navy codebreaking organisation had an even more successful war than MI1b, recruiting a number of the future employees of Britain’s Second World War codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park, including Dillwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox, Frank Birch, Nigel de Grey, and Alastair Denniston, who by the end of the war was head of Room 40. Among the many successes of the Royal Navy codebreakers was the breaking of the Zimmermann telegram, which showed that Germany had asked Mexico to join an alliance against the United States, offering Mexico’s ‘lost territory’ in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in return, and brought the United States into the war.

The Ulysses expedition killed 2,037 whales and processed approximately 79,000 barrels of oil in Shark Bay, Australia, during the first equatorial season of its career. The Ulysses processed her whales and manufactured the whale oil within the territorial limits of Australia and within the port limits of Carnarvon, Western Australia. At this time the people in authority on this expedition were apparently not terribly interested in adhering to the requirements of United States whaling regulations. Observations indicate that there was a growing animosity on land toward whaling ships of foreign registry operating off the Australian coast. The Australians were deriving very little financial return from the two expeditions. This is understandable since the whaling ships were making thousands of dollars daily off the Australian coast. The Ulysses bought tons of provisions and tons of water while off the coast of Australia.

Virtually all the whales obtained in Shark Bay were delivered to the factory ship on the same day as they had been killed; toward the end of the season some carcasses were delivered after midnight, but such instances were comparatively few and far between and no exceptions were made on the records. The expedition's killer boats were allowed to take only an allotted number of whales daily, the number being determined by the factory shop manager. This system prevailed for most of the season. The Australian records was examined every morning by the American inspector. Strictly speaking, the Ulysses had little to do with the actual formulation of Form WI-1 as an official record for the United States government. In Antarctica, the company's disregard for maintaining this form in an accurate manner was even more pronounced. The method of recording the data is in need of some explanation, which this chapter attempts to give.

This chapter focuses on the large animals found in the sea. It describes their evolutionary history and patterns of behavior such as feeding, breeding, and migration. Cetaceans as a group (whales and dolphins) are the largest and the fastest swimming animals in the sea. Both toothed whales and those lacking teeth have enormously large representatives, but the largest are baleen whales. The largest of the toothed cetaceans is the sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus), while the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is the largest among the baleen whales. The baleen whales, together with the giant sperm whale, are called great whales. Other vertebrate groups also have large animals: pinnipeds have elephant seals and the walrus; sharks and their kin include whale sharks; the great white, and manta rays; and bony fishes have swordfish and sturgeon. Among the mollusks, the giant squid is the largest.

This chapter showcases Howard Skempton’s miniature, The Maldive Shark. It is dedicated to his friend, the composer and singer Brian Dennis (1941–98). The captivating text ruminates on the relationship between the shark and the smaller fish that encircle it, as it makes its ponderous progress. The poem’s imagery is often lurid (‘sawpit of mouth’, ‘charnel of maw’) and is laden with alliteration (‘white triple tiers of glittering gates’), giving the singer the opportunity to relish the sounds as they roll off the tongue. Despite all this verbal detail, a seamless overall legato has to be preserved, with notes given their full value. The piece lies comfortably within the baritone’s natural compass, and the vocal dynamic is mezzo piano throughout, so a good degree of tonal control will prove advantageous.

A storyteller arrives, one hundred million years from now, to tell the tale of the human species. It is an interval that will add a couple of per cent to the age of the Earth and a little under one per cent to the age of the Universe. Geologically, it is the near future. Cosmologically, we are almost there. There will be an Earth, that which we now call our own. On it there will be, very probably but not quite certainly, oceans of liquid water, an oxygen-rich atmosphere, and an abundance of complex, multicellular life. The Earth is abnormal, and that will draw any interstellar travellers in. The spaceship’s sensors—a simple spectroscope will suffice here—will immediately register the highly reactive surface chemistry that is out of any sort of normal equilibrium. An oxygen-rich atmosphere is not normal. Even from a distance of many millions of miles, this will be a planet that is obviously alive. Closer up, the living skin on the planet, regulator of that planetary surface chemistry, can begin to be glimpsed, as the green wavelengths that mingle with the blue of the oceans of liquid water and the brown of the rock surfaces. Our future visitors would not yet be aware of chlorophyll, but that unexpected signal shining through in the light spectrum would certainly arouse their curiosity. Rock, oceans . . . and green stuff. The geography of the Earth, to our own human and contemporary eyes, would look oddly familiar, but distorted: as though remodelled by Salvador Dali. Familiar landmasses will be displaced. But where to? Unfortunately, we cannot predict where the Earth’s continents will be in one hundred million years’ time. Will the Atlantic Ocean continue to widen, and the Pacific Ocean shrink? Will the East African Rift expand into an ocean? Will the continents aggregate into super-continents, as has happened in the past? Long-term tectonic forecasts, like long-range weather forecasts, are subject to such uncertainties that detailed prediction becomes useless; there are simply too many possible alternative futures. Our planet’s physiography will simply be different, one hundred million years from now, though with elements we would find partly familiar, rearranged as though by the hand of some gigantic and playful child.

This chapter examines the early vertebrates. The major group to which vertebrates are assigned—phylum Chordata—includes two small groups (the tunicates and the cephalochordates) and one large group: the vertebrates (or Craniata). Most chordates are bilaterally symmetrical, with complete, relatively complex digestive tracts. There are nine major groups of vertebrates, five of them “fishes” and four of them tetrapods. Although chordates constitute only some three percent of all living species, they are widely distributed, marvelously adapted, numerically abundant, and strikingly successful. All share a few distinguishing characteristics for at least part of their development: a single hollow nerve cord, which is differentiated in vertebrates into the brain and spinal cord; a notochord, a flexible rodlike axis, running underneath and supporting the nerve cord; pharyngeal gill slits; a tail extending beyond the anus; and segmentation, reflected in the muscles and the vertebral column.

This chapter analyzes how aspiring migrants navigate the world of document fixers, loan sharks, travel agents, lawyers, and state bureaucrats—including consular staff and U.S. immigration officials—in preparation for international migration. It presents accounts of the institutions, technologies, social and cultural forms, and relationships that shape and constrain migrants' efforts. Migrants of provincial and lower-class backgrounds often extend themselves through objects, technologies, and embodied skills to realize their migration projects; they do so with guidance from tramitadores (document fixers) and other service providers in Peru's growing migration industry. The chapter also discusses the complex politics of race and class that underline the historically unequal access to mobility in Peru, and in turn intersects with U.S. racialization of Latin American migrants that begins with their first encounters with U.S. consular staff in Lima.

This chapter discusses the anatomy of the brains of the cartilaginous fishes and their learning capabilities. Sharks, rays, and chimaeras can learn as quickly as birds and mammals, and have brains of a comparable size and elaboration.