Ming’s Wisdom

It’s always been a mystery to me why some of us get sick easily when riding in cars, boats, or roller coasters, while the rest enjoy those stomach-churning motions without any ill symptoms. A couple months ago I finally figured it out.

I was watching a Discovery documentary on the evolution of ancient sea creatures from several hundred million years ago, and the realization hit me during the narration of how certain animals in the ocean have their closest living relatives being a species that lives on land. They key fact I learned was that the sensitivity of the inner ear (which helps animals balance), is gradually changed as a species moves into the ocean or onto land. Species that live on land require a sensitive inner ear for good balance and always keeping their head up. An example of when this comes into use is when you roll off your bike, and you are able to keep your head up to avoid injury of hitting it on the ground. However, for a species that lives in the ocean, this is not needed as much, but an inner ear that is too sensitive could overload due to the 3-dimensional freedom involved in living underwater.

The next piece of the puzzle is solved by the principle of evolution. Those animals that have a more sensitive inner ear will be less likely to hurt their head during a fall on land. Those animals that have a less sensitive inner ear will be more likely to have more agile movements in water without getting nauseated. In the history of the earth, some species have undergone a move from land to water or water to land, and over the next few million years their inner ears have evolved to increase or decrease in sensitivity to adjust to their new environment.

By this logic, humans, as land animals, should on average have fairly sensitive inner ears, at least in comparison to ocean creatures, and all get car sickness. But why then do some people get nauseated in cars and some don’t? The answer to this question lies in what if the earth floods and we as a species move to the ocean over the next several million years. Nature has provided us with natural variation (due to sexual reproduction), so that a whole range of sensitivity occurs in different people’s inner ears. In case we stay on land, those with sensitive inner ears will carry on the species, and in case we are pushed to the ocean, the ones with less sensitive inner ears could survive. This gives us as a species the ability to survive in a changing environment (and potentially one day become like the dolphins, whales, and sea lions, if that’s the direction we need to go to survive). So now you know why you have car sickness, and your buddy doesn’t. The two of you join forces together to carry on the survival of our species.

This is an focused study of a recent event that reveals multiple failure points in our society and institutions. This case specifically studies recent activities in Humboldt squid movement and the commotion that followed.

The Humboldt squid is a large squid commonly found in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, around 200 to 700 meters in below the surface. In recent years their habitual territory has apparently expanded north to California through Alaska, from their original location off the coast of South America. This fact, paired with anecdotal evidence from aboard fishing boats about their aggressive behavior, quickly spiraled into sensational stories of alien-like creatures of the deep with massive tentacles invading the lives of humans everywhere. Before reading on, watch this excerpt from PBS on the subject: http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/the-fierce-humboldt-squid.

Go back and watch the linked video if you haven’t yet. Some of the following will pull information from that clip. I will break down the rest of the article into the different aspects of our society that have fundamentally gone wrong to make these recent events possible.

First of all, there’s been a failure of both the general public and the scientific community to sit quietly and observe all that the world has to offer. There have been dozens of documentaries (airing frequently in recent years) produced by widely-respected television channels such as Discovery and PBS that claim the squid are instinctively aggressive and cannibalistic, to the point of eating anything they come across. Almost all of these documentaries draw off observations from squid-fishing boats, where the squid are found in a fight-or-die stressful situation with many of its neighbors being hooked to their death by people. Observing squid while your boat-mate is actively participating in slaughtering the squid’s partners would not lead to the same results as observing them in their natural habitat.

Worst part is, this is coming from professors from leading research universities. In the video, a Stanford professor says, “This squid, only thinks about two things, one is eating and one is reproducing. Even though they have big brains, I don’t think they spend a lot of time philosophizing”, and assumes that during times when he cannot observe the squid, that they are probably feeding. This would not be an unexpected comment from a non-scientist, but for a professor who has been studying marine biology for 30 years, a summarization of an agile and highly developed animal species to have only two types of thought processes paints a grim picture of the state of education in our society, especially considering that this professor probably teaches a lot of soon-to-be misinformed students. In addition, he studies the squid behavior hitched on a fishing boat, from a vantage point at the water’s surface, while dozens of lures with sharp hooks attract squid to their death while other squid watch. It also brings up the question, what exactly, are the qualifications that an individual must have, in order to become a Stanford professor?

And on top of that the whole commotion reveals a huge lack of responsibility, both for the environment and for accurate portrayal of facts in the media. These documentaries simply state that we are facing a huge problem of squid invading the territory of fisheries and are causing fishery economic numbers to go down. They do cite climate change as a cause for the mass migration, but most people’s solution is to hunt and eat more squid, instead of fixing the root problem of what we’ve done to this earth to cause that climate change. This is all aired on our most trusted channels for learning on television, Discovery channel and PBS. The clip linked to in this article is from PBS, from a northern California public broadcasting channel that claims it “provides consistently high quality public media that informs, educates, entertains and engages… reflect the value we place on human dignity, lifelong learning and the power of ideas, and on the importance of community service and civic participation”. Yet their summary of the show which aired last year, says “Packs of fierce Humboldt Squid attack nearly everything they see, from fish to scuba divers”, having no proven case of Humboldt predation on humans. All the while, northern California is actually considered one of the most educated areas in the country, yet no one decided to dig deeper into the story. Discovery channel is no better, airing repeated series of shows such as “Squid Attack” without giving viewers full background information so that the viewer at least has the opportunity to ponder the possibility that the squid are not vicious creatures invading “our” territory. Again, they have access to some of the best minds in the world, yet most shows on the Humboldt squid have been accounts of their cannibalistic behavior, and no one decided to question it.

The human reaction to the whole series of squid migrations also brings up a question of how much compassion do we really have for our fellow species. Our views (as a society) on many of the issues we face are of “us” versus “them”. The squid are not one of “us”, and therefore they can be thought of as creatures without emotion, without logical thinking, without communal bond. In fact Humboldt squid have the biggest nerve fiber of any creature on earth (this includes humans) and a large, complex brain structure. They live in communities of up to a thousand, and hunt cooperatively to gather small fish and krill. Yet when scientists saw one particular behavior, they reacted with one common explanation. In the particular circumstance when squid were being pulled out of the water with hooks by fishermen, other squid immediately came up to the hooked squid, and grabbed them with their tentacles. Scientists concluded that they must be extremely aggressive creatures and are seizing the opportunity to eat their friends while they are weak. As an intelligent creature that lives and hunts cooperatively in large communities, in a situation where food is not scarce, eating each other would not seem to be the logical action to take when a predator is near, making this somewhat of an odd explanation to offer. Other scientists cite that they have found pieces of Humboldt squid in others’ stomachs, though this still does not prove that they are habitual cannibals, as even the nicest of humans has resorted to cannibalism when faced with scarce food/life or death situations as in extreme after-plane crash survival cases. I have yet to see any scientist offer up evidence in attempt to prove that the observed behavior under fishing boats is indeed an act of opportunistic eating instead of trying to pull a friend back from a vicious human predator. Almost everyone listens to the scientists (after all, they are the scientists), and happily offer to hunt down the squid and eat them. This same type of thinking of “them” as all cold-blooded creatures incapable of intelligence and bonding, has created many of the problems we have faced as a society. Stereotypes and racism both stem from an intrinsic distrust of “them” with an arbitrary boundary drawn not based on individual personality but on skin color or other attribute. Religions intolerant of the style of thinking of “them” have caused division among people, and even wars. In fact it was a view that “they” are not as intelligent, that “they” have no emotions, that justified slavery for hundreds of years.

The world has improved over the years and some have become more tolerant of others, but there’s a lot more to improve on, and the small incident of our perception of Humboldt squid are only a peek into how people’s collective minds can lack a compassion for the others that share our earth. Overall, even a piece of news that hasn’t gotten much attention on CNN or the world news, can show us so much about the current state of affairs. If you’ve read to this point, you’re probably a very intelligent and educated person who cares a lot about the world, and you might never have realized that even in this day certain segments of the world (*ahem* well known universities) are probably not quite as compassionate and environmentally responsible as you thought, that education and media truthfulness are still in a sad state, and even the most respected “experts” cannot always be trusted.

Squid brains: 1, Human intelligence: 0.