Here’s the story.

Monday was 14 days. I celebrated quietly, over a big steak.

Yesterday was 16 days. Being a card-carrying member of the .5% of the universe card, I said nothing.

Today, though, it’s 17 days with no symptoms, you know, other than that pesky daily 5AM anxiety wakeup call.

So my reasoning goes like this: if I’ve jinxed myself by mentioning the no symptoms thing, well, at the very least now I’ll have ensured my place in the annals of Anisakis history. Mmmm, annals.

Thanks everyone who particiapted in the Parasite Watch ’06. And cook your halibut right!

The pathology report came back. It’s Anisakis simplex, also known as herringworm. Really freaking easy to kill, if you COOK YOUR FOOD. Someone in the kitchen that night screwed up bigtime – according to the FDA, this is not a thing commonly found in restaurants.

The good news is, other than the worst tension headache I’ve ever had, I feel fine. My stomach is definitely upset, but unless it gets much more severe, I’ll chalk it up to stress.

The bad news is that it can take as long as two weeks for Anisakiasis (that is, the infection caused by ingestion of Anisakis) to manifest.

The other good news is, there have only been 50 cases reported in the US, pretty much ever.

But then the other bad news is it often gets totally misdiagnosed as a bunch of other awful things, so who knows how accurate any of this is. They can definitively diagnose Anisakiasis when, you know, you cough up some nematodes.

So. That’s that.

When you spend four hours in the emergency room with some worm-infested fish in a bag, everyone is your friend, and is also an amateur scientist. Everyone.

I won’t mention the name of the restaurant, because I would own its search results within two hours. It’s probably not appropriate to list here. If you really must know, ask me in person or email. I’ll be happy to tell you. It’s a nice restaurant.

The halibut was delicious. From Alaska, fresh, and apparently never frozen. Apparently never fully cooked, either. Between two lobes of flesh, about 2/3rds of the way through the filet, a wiggly pink ~1″ worm was quite comfortably nestled. Actually, later in the ER, one of my eagle-eyed junior scientist neighbors noticed that there were two, happily wriggling around the remaining piece of uneaten fish.

What a freaking night. We drove straight to the hospital, where we watched two hours of South Park, and they carried my worm off in a little dated and numbered cool-whip specimen container. So now I’ve got a date with the LA County department of public health, as well as a follow-up with my friendly neighborhood infectious disease specialist. Stunning.

The good news is, normally the symptoms for this manifest within a couple of hours. It’s all treatable, and if I actually did manage to ingest a friend of the fully living, third-larval stage parasitic nematode that I got to bring home from the restaurant, well, at least it’s tremendously rare to experience severe symptoms.

Overwhelming anxiety and a phobia of anything related to Google Image Search Results for “Pseudoterranova decipiens” do not apparently count as symptoms.

There’s humor in this. The scene I made in the restaurant was pretty good. And oh, later, at the ER? The part where the psycho looking homeless guy comes in, carrying a paper, sits down two seats away from me, and within 30 seconds, slams the paper as hard as he can, right down on the baggie containing my worm? Comedic gold.

“Uh, hey…”

“Oh, was that yours?”

I guess you had to be there.

No one gives dolphins enough credit. My theory? They’re evolving, right underneath our noses. Getting ready to pop out of these filthy oceans and open up a mighty can of whipass on all of humankind. Samuel L. Jackson style.

“So long, and thanks for all the fish, bitches!”

thank you thank you.

i’m still waiting for the chart of global warming as function of krispy kreme donuts consumed by al gore. used to like that guy, a lot, but these days, i’d file him under ‘road to hell is paved with good intentions’.

sparing you the big rant on this one, for today at least, if we’re going to really understand the biology of our planet, we must first stop acting like environmental imperialists. our ecosystem has been here much longer than we have, it’s seen greater threats than chevron.

humankind has always loved to overexaggerate its stunning strength and dominance over, well, everything. but perhaps the most inconvenient truth of all is this: progress will not ever happen until we stop infantilizing the environment, and begin acting as its appointed stewards.

When it comes to studying ancient birds, it’s often necessary to make a few assumptions and hope that future evidence will support your theories. Sometimes taking that leap can jumpstart what is “known” and help people see what is actually there. It’s awfully easy to overlook important, obvious, and often totally banal evidence that’s lying in the dirt when you’re required to, well, stand on the shoulders of so many giants.

Birds have been around for longer than we can really even fathom, and sometimes it takes a creative leap to look around the existing wisdom and suggest something new. The back and forth chatter between the Arboreal and Thecodontal theorists have probably done more to harm progress in this field than anything; when you’re busy defending a theory in a hot and public argument, you’re hardly open and receptive to new evidence.

I particularly enjoyed this suggestion of the importance of hindlimbs in flight evolution, from a PhD student at the University of Calgary. It’s creative and a bit daring, and it’s getting press, too. Good work.

That said, and while I have yet to read the full paper, the thesis still doesn’t ring quite right to me. Anything has aerodynamic properties, if you throw enough wind at it. And there’s a kind of economy of form common to all living things; volume: surface area ratios must exist within certain tolerances, and the presence of skin over muscle and tissue tends to follow a pretty specific set of curves. And I’d love to hear more scientists discussing that economy of form; observing it where it is alive in the ancient species of today. You cannot watch a flightless cormorant without the realization that you are looking through an open window, one that opens on hundreds of thousands of years into the past.

It’s easy to toss rocks at the longstanding work of many devoted and educated scholars, and I certainly don’t want to do that. But I do believe the viability of existing theories would be greatly enhanced through closer observation of extant, living and breathing birds.

The abstract is here.

July 21, 2005, was way, way up there.

A trip deep into a secret world, nesting grounds, alternately lush and desolate landscape dotted with dessicated corpses, yet somehow teeming with life too.

Scaled things, feathered things, things with flippers, things with no backbones, things with fins. Frigatebirds stealing food from blue-footed booby chicks. Herons fishing. Brown noddies stealing food from pelicans. Tropicbirds wheeling overhead.

North Seymour Island, and South Plaza. My last day on Las Islas Encantadas, the Galapagos Islands.

Everybody finding a mate, building a nest, or feeding their young. Skyline of Daphne major and Daphne minor. Exquisite. At least 15 of my all-time best and favorite photographs are from that day.

Life, death, rebirth. Millions of years worth of it. Everything they tell you about nature, all the stuff Darwin wrote about. So much more than you could ever hope to understand, but you can see it. All of it, in just one day. Just a day there changes you forever – we got to spend an entire week.

No matter what else I accomplish, or experience, that day in July will remain one of the Best Days of My Life. It was the kind of day that blows the scale. The kind of day that helps molds you into the kind of person that you’d always hoped you would one day be lucky enough to be.

Those indeed are real bird parts, lovingly flattened and pasted down into books.