Saving the ‘god of ugly things’: NZ battles to restore its rodent-sized insects
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
I am homeless now, but still worried the fire wasnt enough to kill it.
I admire the battle to save these creatures...it's hard enough to get people on board that cute animals need to be saved. This has to be a real uphill battle.
Yeah, the brain starts working a bit better :)
Yes, that's when puberty hits and they really start caring more about what they think society tells them to consider good or bad, rather than about what their own intuition tells them. It's tied to the development of theory of mind.
Some people grow out of it later, and some are stuck with thinking the social norms they know are the same as absolute truths. They are just interpretive frames, of course.
Here[1] is for example a paper linking the work to theatre:
> In the specific domain of visual art, Michael Parsons has proposed a developmental framework of aesthetic epistemology that describes how we move through stages or “sets of ideas” when discussing artworks’ subject matter, artists’ expressions, the forms and styles of visual media, and our judgments about each of these concepts. Like epistemologists, he marks the boundary of each stage by cognitive shifts in: 1) our primary mode of inquiry (i.e., perception, interpretation, and evaluation), 2) our expectations about the purposes of art, 3) our primary sources of artistic knowledge, and, 4) our primary criteria for making evaluative claims. Numerous studies in the visual arts have supported his framework with various populations, yet to date no one has offered an analogous epistemological framework for the domain of theatre.
One criticism of Parsons' model is that it's hierarchical in a way that implicitly suggests that later stages are "better" than earlier stages (in typical Western fashion). Then again, it is tied to cognitive development and growing more mature so how could you not end up with a staged one-follows-the-development-of-the-other ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. For a more recent, more elaborate model that is inspired by Parsons' model, see[2].
[0] Michael J. Parsons, How We Understand Art: A Cognitive Developmental Account of Aesthetic Experience (New York: Cambridge U P, 1987).
[1] Jeanne Klein, Mapping aesthetic development and epistemological understanding, https://journals.ku.edu/jdtc/article/download/4376/4104
[2] http://ppcms.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/usermounts/lederh7/1993-...
NZ was a weird place where there was virtually no mamamals just mostly birds that didn't have many predators ( other than some giant eagles, where the best response was to stay as still as possible). As a result much of our wildlife have strong scents they use to find each other. Then the rodent mamamals came along and the stinky native species are easy to find, and thir defence is to stay as still as possible. So Carnage ensued.
One of our defences is a poison called 1080, which is a synthentic version of a nartually occuring poison ( Sodium fluoroacetate ). It has a unique property of being very toxic to mamamals and not very toxic to most NZ birds and insects, so ideal for NZs situation. The poison itself is pretty brutal on mamamals. But it has proven very effective. However, there is a kind of "antivax" backlash to the poison and a lot of misinformation which has slowed down the use of 1080. So we are living in a weird state of trying to protect what we can while a vast amount of native species are getting annhilated.
"The nation wants to eradicate all invasive mammal predators by 2050. Gene-editing technology could help — or it could trigger an ecological disaster of global proportions."
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/new-zeal...
I still find them pretty cool, but I don't think I'd chase another ever. Specially now that I know they shoot blood when scared.
My father's cats used to capture them by the dozens and bring them inside, usually they'd kill them, but if I could tra pthe weta I'd take it outside and put it near some bushes, so it could get away.
Fascinating little things.