The All-New Bunrab

I did warn y'all that my attempt to read more nonfiction and a lower percentage of murder mysteries was going to probably mean a lot of pop science. Well, here's some of that:

Fish That Fake Orgasms, and other zoological curiosities by Matt Walker - whole bunch of biology trivia, in little factiod snippets. Not completely accurate, either; he consistently refers to the domestic horse as equus callabus instead of equus caballus, and apparently no proofreader or copy editor caught it.

Father Knows Less, or, Can I Cook My Sister? by Wendell Jamieson. One man's attempt to find answers to all the weird questions his five year old son asks. He also collects odd questions from other people's children, and even some of the ones he asked his father when he was around 5. After collecting all these questions, he then goes to various experts to find answers - the director of the Division of Pain Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, for example, to answer the question, "What would hurt more: getting run over by a car or getting stung by a jellyfish?" and to the official historian of the FBI in Washington DC, to answer , "Why is it called 'kidnapping' if you can steal away adults, too?"

A Guinea Pig's History of Biology by Jim Endersby. Endersby is English, and so this history is slightly Anglocentric, but nonetheless good. Basically, it's the story of how the mating of a USDA colony of guinea pigs with a bunch of wild Russian fruit flies led to modern molecular biology. No, really, it's sort of an era-by-era look at biology by looking at what plants and animals were being studied, when. We start with the quagga, which went extinct in 1883, in a chapter titled "Equus quagga and Lord Morton's mare" and go on through a plant in Darwin's greenhouse, homo sapiens as Francis Galton's research animal, Mendel's work on the pale hawkweed; Hugo de Vries and some flower; then, "Drosophila melanogaster: Bananas, bottles and Bolsheviks" which ties back to Galton. Finally, we get to chapter 7, "Cavia porcellus: mathematical guinea pigs." We get a history of the domestication of the cavy, and of the naming of it, and then of Abraham Lincoln's establishment of the USDA in 1862, and within only a few decades, the USDA had a large colony of guinea pigs at its experimental farm in Maryland - which I happen to know where that was; we drive past the current Dept. of Agriculture site along Rt. 29 regularly, and every time I see its enormous front lawn now, I envision piggies browsing there. Sewall Wright, who had started working on guinea pigs accidentally as a grad student at Harvard, kept in touch with JBS Haldane from about 1915 on. Haldane and his sister had had a huge bunch of guinea pigs as children:

...his sister Naomi (who would later become a celebrated novelist under her married name, Naomi Mitchison) developed an allergy to the horses she had loved and took up keeping guinea pigs instead. She loved the animals and knew many of them by name; she could impersonate their squeaks and grunts so well that they would answer her. When her elder brother came home from Eton for the school holidays and discovered her new pets, he 'suggested that we should try out what was then called Mendelism on them.' She agreed, deciding that 'Mendelism seemed quite within my intellectual grasp,' and so her pet population began to expand. ... One of JBS's friends remembered that in 1908 the lawn of the Haldanes' house was entirely free from the usual upper-class clutter of croquet hoops and tennis nets; instead, behind wire fencing, were 300 guinea pigs.

Anyway, Haldane's work interested Wright, and Wright went to work for the USDA. And therein lies the tale. By the way, did you know that guinea pigs helped win twenty-three Nobel prizes?

The book does continue after that, to the bacteriophage virus, corn, a plant called mouse-ear cress (at least in England), the zebrafish - still in use in a lot of heart research! - and finally OncoMouse (r), the first patented, transgenic animal.

Great but serious reading, not written for humor like the first two or like Where's My Jetpack? from a previous post (that one was actually written almost entirely for the sake of being sarcastic).

Boots passed away this evening, around midnight. He was a little over 4 years old. Long-haired guinea pigs tend not to live as long as short-haired ones, and Boots was a Silkie - a Himalayan Silkie at that. He was gorgeous. Dumb, but cute enough to get away with having no brains. Himalayans have chocolate "points" like Siamese cats, except of course for the tail, and otherwise pure white fur (rather than the cream/tan that Siamese cats have). Silkies have hair that doesn't quite grow as long as Peruvians, and it doesn't grow forward over their eyes; instead, it grows back in a sort of sweep, with a clear part down the middle. Guinea pigs tend to get old very suddenly - no long old age; they're middle-aged until one day suddenly they start sleeping more (although they're still active when awake), eating less, and losing weight fast, and it's usually only a few days to, at most, a few weeks, before they pass. (I had one guinea pig who got arthritis, and lived for a couple more years after that anyway, but other than arthritis, he didn't exhibit any signs of old age until the end. I miss Rover.) Anyway, Boots followed that pattern - he just slowed down and only ate a little bit at Sunday evening's snack, and then slowed down more.

We'll miss him; he was shy, but once he got picked up, he was fun to pet. He didn't wheek as loudly as Persephone does, but he always made sure that he didn't get ignored when the treats were being handed out. He was one of those piggies who can lose a treat just by dropping it, but he always eventually found them again. He was, in short, a very piggly piggle.

Sleep well, Boots.