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It's late March, and things are warming up here. After seeing very few invertebrates during the winter months, Trish and I were on a hike a few days ago, and she spotted what may be the largest centipede we have found in Missouri. It was about 3 inches (7.6 cm) long and seemed to be on the prowl, roaming around looking for prey (FIRST PHOTO). FYI—centipedes and millipedes are very different. Each group makes up its own Class, which means they are as different from each other as a human is from a fish, or from a snake. Centipedes, with one pair of legs per body segment, are fast-moving predators. Millipedes, with two pairs of legs per body segment, are slow-moving grazers. If a millipede is like a gentle brontosaur, a centipede is a vicious T-rex. Near the head (the business end) of a centipede is a modified pair of legs (called forcipules) that act as fangs, injecting venom that quickly paralyzes prey. In fact, a "giant centipede" (those in the genus Scolopendra) that weighs only 3g can immobilize a 45g mouse in less than 30 seconds. Most smaller centipedes, of course, eat small invertebrates, but "giant centipedes" can prey on lizards, snakes, rodents, birds, and even bats. The centipede we found on our hike (the first photo) is not considered a "giant centipede." However, for many years, Trish and I have regularly hiked the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas, where we often find the tiger centipede (Scolopendra polymorpha). This beast grows to SEVEN inches (18cm) long. The SECOND PHOTO is a tiger centipede we found in 2011. I have to tell you a brief story. Back when we were both biology teachers, we captured the largest tiger centipede we could find so that we could show it to our students. We put it in a plastic butter tub, and when we got home, we decided to transfer the creature to a larger container. This did not go well. The centipede made a wild lunge at the stick I was using to coax it from one container to the next. This startled me, and I dropped the butter tub. The centipede took off across the living room floor and disappeared down a crack next to the stairs. It was under the floorboards of the house—the house where we lived, slept, and routinely walked around without shoes. We never saw the centipede again, but we found it somewhat more difficult to relax for several weeks after the centipede incident. By the way, the tiger centipede is not particularly dangerous to humans, but a bite would be extremely painful. Other species of giant centipedes can be more dangerous. One of the largest of the giant centipedes, the Amazonian giant centipede, grows to 12 inches (30cm) long. Okay, one more morsel of information to satisfy your burning curiosity. Giant centipedes are not considered as food for humans in many cultures. But in some countries, including China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia, they are sometimes eaten grilled or deep-fat fried and are usually served on skewers, like you see in this the THIRD PHOTO. Oh... and one more thing: the giant centipede was actually my inspiration for the venomcrook, a nasty living weapon wielded by an alien creature in Bridgers 3: The Voice of Reason. Trust me... you don't want to get hit with a venomcrook. FOURTH PHOTO.     Photo Credits: - Missouri centipede and tiger centipede from Kansas - Stan C. Smith - Centipede snacks - DepositPhotos - Bridgers 3 cover - created for me by Jake at JCalebDesign
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The first time Trish and I visited Queensland, Australia, we were on a long hike around a huge park in Cairns, and I looked up to see dozens of huge birds flying into the park. These things had broad wings than spanned well over a meter. Then I realized they weren’t birds at all—they were bats. To be more specific, they were flying foxes (FIRST PHOTO). Needless to say, I was jumping up and down in my excitement. Anyway, hundreds of them flew into a city park and roosted in the trees for the night. I was so enthralled with these creatures that I have included rather monstrous versions of huge bats in two of my novels, Profusion and Hostile Emergence. Those creatures are kind of scary, but real flying foxes are remarkably… well, cute. Flying foxes are in the group of bats called fruit bats (mostly in the genus, Pteropus). Take a look at the face of just about any flying fox and you'll understand how they got their name. They have very fox-like faces. There are about 60 species of flying foxes, and they are widely spread throughout the subtropics of Asia, Australia, East Africa, and many islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. One thing that distinguishes flying foxes from other bats is that they eat fruit, pollen, nectar, or flowers. This means they have to live in areas that have flowers and fruit to eat year-round (tropical). Also, these bats do not have echolocation (sonar) to help them catch insects. Instead, they have very well-develop eyesight and smell. Like many other bats, they hang upside down (SECOND PHOTO). Of course, flying foxes are the largest bats in the world. Some have a wingspan of five feet (1.5 meter)! Some flying fox species are rare, partly because they are simply not very prolific. In fact, the large flying fox (yes, that’s its name) usually has only one pup (I love that they're called pups), and that's after a gestation period of 180 days! And then it takes 3-4 months for the pup to be weaned, and it won't be sexually mature for about two years. And… flying foxes mate while they are hanging upside down. This seems awkward. And I guess I could add that the males often have a penis that is one-fourth the length of his entire body. So, are you starting to see the logistical problems involved here? Flying foxes hang out (literally) in trees in massive groups called camps. Sometimes these camps can have several hundred thousand bats. But this isn't nearly as many as they used to have before their numbers were depleted. In the 1930s, there were camps that were four miles wide and had 30 million flying foxes. (PHOTO THREE).    Photo credits: Flying fox #1 - DepositPhotos Flying Fox #2 - hanging - DepositPhotos Flying foxes #3 - group - DepositPhotos I just finished writing a time travel story, titled The Sorcerer, and so this stuff is on my mind. Let's talk about two problems with logic regarding time travel. First, let's dismiss the idea of time travel to the FUTURE. We can already travel to the future. For example, every time you are unconscious, you awake in the future having experienced no passage of time. Also, if you get in a spaceship and travel really fast (like half the speed of light), or if you go near a black hole where there is extraordinarily intense gravity, we know that time passes more slowly for you than for people on Earth. Depending on your speed or the intensity of the gravity, you could leave Earth for what seems like only one year to you, but when you return home, hundreds of years have passed on Earth. This method isn't practical, but it is a proven, observable fact resulting from Einstein's theory of relativity. Even more interesting conundrums come in when we think about traveling to the PAST. Of course, we have no practical concept of ever being able to travel to the past. Probably won't ever happen. However, in the spirit of die-hard sci-fi fans, let's say it IS possible. There are two issues that most time travel stories struggle with. Issue #1: if jumping back in time is possible, a new timeline has to be created at the moment any person or object arrives in the past. By "new timeline," I mean a new universe. Yes, jumping back in time requires the existence of infinite parallel universes (and there are at least five plausible scientific theories that suggest the existence of multiple universes, including the concept of “daughter universes” suggested by the theory of quantum mechanics). Why does a new timeline (universe) have to be created upon the arrival of any person or object from the future? Because that arrival changes the events that are happening in the past. Let's say I have a time machine, and I send an iPhone (or a rock, or a hamster, or a person) back in time 100 years. The moment that iPhone appears, it triggers a sequence of events that are different from the other sequence of events that happened in those 100 years. But that original 100-year series of events has already happened. It's impossible to undo something that has already happened (the disappearing photograph in "Back to the Future" is silly for this reason). So, the appearance of the object in the past has to create a new timeline (a new universe). Anything can happen in the new timeline. Even if no one ever finds the iPhone in the past, random events will make it so that different events happen in the next 100 years in that timeline. This is also why, if you could jump to the past, you could never get back to your own place in your original timeline... because the moment you arrive in the past, you are in a new universe. Even if you live another 100 years, you will not end up in the same place you started from. Jumping to the past is basically a one-way trip. Issue #2:Jumping back in time (or forward, for that matter) is really space travel. Almost all time travel stories ignore this obvious fact. The Earth is moving... really fast. Even if we only consider the Earth's rotation, you are moving at 465 meters per second (1,037 miles per hour) at the equator (a bit slower if you are not at the equator). But remember, the Earth is also orbiting the sun, the solar system is spinning with the entire Milky Way galaxy, and the galaxy is hurtling through space as the entire universe expands. If we only consider our solar system moving in a huge orbit around the center of the galaxy, you are moving at 230 kilometers per second (514,000 miles per hour). Seriously. So, if I have a time machine and I instantly jump back in time one second, I will appear at least 230 kilometers from where I started, probably somewhere deep in the Earth's crust (ouch) or somewhere beyond the Earth's atmosphere (ouch again). If I jump back in time 100 years, I'll appear 450.6 billion miles from where I started. See the problem here? A time machine has to be capable of transporting you across vast expanses of space and placing you at your destination with mind-boggling precision. Pretty cool stuff, huh?  Image credit: Clock in the stars - Midjourney |
Stan's Cogitations
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