Welcome to today’s bucket of eels. I’m Rose. Let’s pull out some eels, shall we?
Today’s eel: Every edition of this newsletter is named after an eel. Today's eel is the California moray (Gymnothorax mordax). We've done a moray before (the Giant moray, or Gymnothorax javanicus) and in that newsletter I noted that "You might think that moray eels are one species, but in fact moray is the family (Muraenidae) and there are 200 different species of moray eels out there." I'm picking the California moray today because I'm currently taking a class on the biogeography of the Bay Area and so I'm thinking a lot about the reasons certain species live where they live.
The California moray, for example, lives up to its name. You can only find them between Santa Barbara, and Baja California. In fact, they're one of the very few morays that don't live in the tropics. And there's a theory that in fact, the California morays that live in the Northern expanse of their range, don't actually reproduce because the water is too cold for their gonads to operate properly. The theory goes that the individuals that live off of the Catalina Islands, only do so because they floated there as larvae during an El Niño Southern Oscillation event, carried by something called the Davidson current. Which is kind of wild when you think about it! A current impacted by a periodic variation in winds dragged these larvae up to a place they literally cannot reproduce, and they just live there and hang out because how would they know anything else?
What's even cooler is the way they tested this theory! It's hard to find experimental evidence for a lot of these kinds of biogeographical hypotheses. But in this case, they were able to gather up individuals from the Catalina area and look at something called their "otoliths" which is a small thing (see note below) in the ear to figure out how old the eels were. "Of the 33 individuals collected, 30 settled at Catalina Island during El Niño years." They also noted that "The oldest individual in the data-set was 22 years old, placing G. mordax as one of the longer-lived predatory fishes in the system."
Side note: Otoliths are very weird. They are not actually bones. They're rocks. Inside an animals head! They're found in all fish (yes eels are fish) other than sharks, rays and lampreys. These little rocks are not attached to the skull at all, they just float around beneath the brain in the inner ear canal. The size and shape of otoliths from various species is so distinctive, that they can be used to identify the remains of fish inside another animal's stomach or droppings. Look at these things!
The way you use an otolith to date a fish is by cutting it in half and counting the rings. I promise you I am not making this up. Fish have little rocks floating in their heads that you can read like tree rings to tell how old they are.
Recent Excitement
As you may know, if you follow my work, I ended my show Flash Forward last year. That also meant closing up my Patreon page, which for many years was my primary source of income. These days, supporting my work means joining the Time Traveler Club, a membership program that helps me do all kinds of work: novels, non-fiction book proposals, short stories, sculpture, freelance reporting, and more. The program recently passed 100 members, and I'd love for you to be one too!
🌀 🌀 🌀 JOIN HERE 🌀 🌀 🌀
By becoming a member you're not only supporting my work, but you also get all kinds of exclusive stuff from me. In the last few months that has included:
Long newsletter essays about things like how to think about generative AI, and how to handle professional rejection.
Shorter newsletters where I talk about what I'm reading, what I think is cool, what art I'm inspired by, and other tidbits.
Bonus podcast featuring full interviews from past episodes of Flash Forward. We recently featured Dr. Ruha Benjamin, and Dean Spade. Upcoming episodes include Sabrina Imbler and Tuck Woodstock.
Members only book club discussions, often with the authors of the book! We recently met with Ed Yong to discuss his book An Immense World.
Updates on my projects before anybody else, and exclusive behind the scenes intel on what I'm working on.
Process logs where I break down how I'm creating certain pieces of art. Recently that has included a sculpture made out of plaster thumbs that is now an ant farm.
Exclusive PDFs and links to things like a timeline of every Flash Forward episode ever, members only music from past episodes, a set of writing prompts and more.
Exclusive access to fiction and poetry.
To hopefully entice you on that last bullet point, I've recently made the first chapter of a young adult novel I was working on a few years ago public for anybody to read. I'll be posting chapters each month, and perhaps this will inspire me to actually finish the darn thing. Future chapters will be exclusively accessible to members, but if you want a sneak peek here you go.
Again, if you want to become a member and support the work I do, head this way.
What Have I Been Doing?
It's somehow mid-April, which means we're approximately 28% of the way through the year. So what have I been doing since we last spoke? Great question. In my last newsletter I talked about how I wanted to try and figure out a more sustainable, joy filled life. A magical farm of wonders, I called it. I've spent the last few months trying to recalibrate my time, figure out what I want to be doing next, what is sparking joy, what is not. What grows on this magical farm, and what doesn't need to be here. So here's what I've been doing:
Taking a bunch of classes at the local community college, including a sculpture class, a raptor identification class, and a class on Bay Area biogeography.
Powerlifting, working towards my goal of squatting 200lbs.
Working with the Freelance Solidarity Project on organizing better workplace conditions for freelancers, specifically in audio.
Writing a non-fiction book proposal, that I just sent a rough draft of to my agent. (Eek!)
Helping pilot a re-launch Advice for and from the Future with new hosts.
Updating the Wirecutter menstrual cup guide, which should come out soonish and will now include a whole section about discs.
Working on an episode of a sports podcast.
Trying to pitch a documentary series that I've been invested in for years and have never managed to find a home for.
Writing my WIRED column (my most recent one being about listicles full of inaccurate future predictions, and what their value really is).
Writing short stories.
Getting tattooed a lot.
And, just to belabor the point as much as possible, you'd know about all that stuff in great detail if you were a member of the Time Traveler Club!
Brain Snippets
Here are some things that have caught my eye recently.
Elen Garner, on happiness: "I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist."
When The Pandemic Came, The Zoos Shut, And The Animals Began to Act Differently</a />
A newsletter (or a cohost, I don't know if that counts as a newsletter?) about notable trees.
An interesting paper (from last year) about whether the ESPN Body issue is actually "empowering" as people like to claim or not.
It used to be pretty hard to get yourself across a whole ocean. Now, birds are catching rides on ships.
A really fun paper about how typography can help make trail signs more understandable and memorable.
Okay, that's all for this newsletter! Here are some more otoliths from a species called Merluccius merluccius aka the European hake.
And just for scale, not all otoliths are tiny! Here's one from a fish called a Jullien’s golden carp, aka Probarbus jullieni.</em />
✨ Onward and upward friends! ✨