Numlock News: March 26, 2024 • Bananas, Orange-Tufted Spiderhunter, Malatang
By Walt Hickey
It’s A Banana, Michael, What Could It Cost?
Idiosyncratic supermarket Trader Joe’s has firmly held the price of a banana at 19 cents for 20 years, a stalwart hold in the face of inflation and price changes over the years. Well, that’s over now, as the grocery has said that it’s increasing the price of a banana from 19 cents up to 23 cents, a 21 percent price hike, as the grocer deals with higher costs for bananas that made the previous price unsustainable. I remember a time in this country where there was always money in a banana stand. I’m sad to say those times have passed.
Birdwatch
A massive controversy has emerged in the birdwatching forums, as a 70-year-old birder named Peter Kaestner has logged 10,000 different species of birds sighted on sites like eBird, which uses the Clements Checklist of Birds of the World, as well as iGoTerra, which uses the International Ornithological Community’s World Bird List taxonomies and which has an additional 189 birds. Kaestner hit the 10,000-bird milestone on iGoTerra, but a challenger emerged in the form of Jason Mann, who uploaded a backlog of 9,000 birds over the course of several months to Surfbirds, a now defunct site, and logged his 10,000th bird earlier in the day that Kaestner hit it. That sent the fluffy-backed tit-babblers over at BirdForum into a real exclamatory paradise whydah, if you know what I mean, and a thread on Mann reached a dizzying 400 comments after it was determined that Mann had reported finding species — such as the Manipur bush quail and the new Caldonian nightjar — that had not been seen since the 1930s. Mann conceded, and Kaestner is held to be the first to reach 10,000, securing the milestone by spotting an orange-tufted spiderhunter in the Philippines on February 9, 2024.
NCAA
The men’s March Madness tournament has seen its oldest batch of college players in years, with 296 players in their fifth or sixth seasons of playing college basketball playing in the tournament so far, the highest since such data first was collected in 2008. The North Carolina Tar Heels are averaging 22.2 years old as a team, which is nearly the average age of the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder, which come in at 22.6 years old. Through the round of 32, nine out of the 10 top scorers are seniors.
Laine Higgins and Robert O’Connell, The Wall Street Journal
Flaco
Flaco was the Eurasian eagle owl who escaped his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo following vandalism in early 2023, and lived in the park and its environs until his demise in February of this year. After a necropsy following his death from crashing into a building, veterinary pathologists found that city living was rough on Flaco, and New York is not a hospitable town to an avian predator. Namely, he’d been exposed to no fewer than four different rodenticides over the course of his hunting, and had a severe pigeon herpesvirus thanks to his diet of feral pigeons and rodents. Even without the collision — which veterinarians said may have been caused by the robust cocktail of rat poison and viral infection coursing through the bird — Flaco wasn’t in great shape.
Mary Dixon, Wildlife Conservation Society
Wood
The United States produces 18 million tons of scrap wood, of which 12 million tons ends up in landfills. One hope is to be able to use these scraps much in the way that wood scraps are reused in plywood, by potentially turning that wood into substrate that can be used to 3D-print material. The current state of the art is basically just mixing sawdust with a binder, but that composite, while resembling wood, lacks a lot of the properties that make wood rather useful to begin with. A new material described in a paper in Science Advances improves on the tech, starting with the lignin and cellulose that is found in natural wood and then eventually producing a material that, after being freeze-dried and heat-treated, resembled a natural hardwood.
Payal Dhar, Scientific American
Tianshui
Every so often, a city in China will go phenomenally viral owing to a local dish that becomes popular nationwide, leading to a massive glut of tourism and a moment that must be seized before the new trend comes up. Last April, the city was Zibo, which attracted throngs of visitors eager to chow down on the local barbecue skewers. This time around, it’s Tianshui, a city of 2.9 million in the northwest of China which has seen its local spin on malatang, a type of dry pot, become sensationally popular following the Lunar New Year. Hotel bookings are up 76 percent year over year as of last week, searches for it are up 616 percent, and the city — which is in one of the poorest areas in China — is trying to make the best of the fad while it lasts.
Porpoise
Researchers who found some 40,000 shallow pits in the sand 100 meters underwater were at first concerned that there was methane seeping through the sediment, which could have serious implications for the climate. Well, the good news is that they checked it out and it’s probably just harbor porpoises who are mucking around down there trying to eat some sand eels. What’s more, other such pits have been found elsewhere in the world, like around the Aran Islands and in the English Channel, and the 700,000 harbor porpoises of Earth may have been somewhat more industrious than originally understood.
By the way, I cite Hakai Magazine a lot, they’re a wonderful and unique non-profit newsroom, they’ve just launched a membership program and if you enjoy their work as much as I do you should give it a look, I have!
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Loved that bird-watching story. If you want to see an enjoyable movie, watch the movie "The Big Year", starring Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson, based on the wonderful book of the same name, by an author named Mark Obmascik (It's out of print, but it can be found if one looks hard enough). The premise of the book and the movie is that there are three men who are looking to set the North American record for most birds seen in a calendar year. It doesn't sound like much, but it's a great watch/read.
Wondering what the price of bananas will be after what just happened in Baltimore. Yikes