Jurassic World, Part 2: Is the Game Better Than the Movie? and I-Rex VS Mewtwo.

“…here we are, hunter-gatherers wandering among the wreckage of our own making, and evolved to play with evolution.” - George Gessert, “Why I Breed Plants.”

So, I mentioned last section that I’ve been playing Jurassic World: the Game. I love this game to death, and actually think it’s better than the movie. 

I know, I know: I speak madness, this is Sparta, GET REKT. Hear me out. 

One of the things I really hated about the movie was how forced a lot of the things felt. For a few examples: “FAMILY IS THE BEST THING EVER EVEN THOUGH I’M AT A DIVORCE HEARING,” “Remember that one time we made out? Yeah, we’re a couple, now,” “WE’RE KIDS LET’S BE REBELLIOUS AND STUPID!” (more on this later), “weaponize all the things” (more on this later, too), and, most importantly, “TAKE THAT, YOU GENETIC FREAK! Whaddya mean, ‘I’m just as spliced?!’” 

That last one is not only the main point of this article, but also one of the main points of Jurassic Park as a whole: how far can science go before its wax wings melt? 

This is where the game really stands out. Aside from more character development and more dinosaurs overall, I have to mention how the designs really made the whole point about wax wings better than the movie. It did that mostly by having more dinosaurs, allowing us to interact with said dinosaurs, and doing slightly different things with them. 

For example, in the movie, we see raptor training. Vic Hoskins, a person working with both InGen and the military, mentions weaponizing the raptors, suggesting them as mine-sniffing dogs with talons among other things. Hoskins also suggests selectively breeding raptors for loyal strains. In the end, the training/conditioning wins out, but here’s the kicker: there is nothing wrong with selective breeding, especially for loyalty/docility. What’s wrong, really, is the military’s intent for such a thing. 

You do realize he was selectively-bred, right? 

Get this: the domestication of the dog predates the invention of the wheel. Dogs have been confirmed man’s best friend since 15,000 BCE; the wheel was invented around 3,500 BCE. It has been proven, multiple times, that not only are dogs and wolves the same species, but that all you have to do to make a wolf into a dog is select the brood for tameness. In foxes, this took only four generations; in wolves, with how similar their social structure is to that of humans, it may have taken even fewer than that. For the record, feral dogs have reverted almost entirely into wolves, yes. They’re called dingoes. 

Imagine doing that with raptors. Wouldn’t that be AWESOME? Since this type of breeding also creates new patterns (specifically piebaldism - irregular white patches on a creature’s coat), we could have a variety of raptors tailored to the demands of anybody with the time and money for a pet raptor! Want one with a nifty stripe like Blue? You got it. An all-white one? Doable. Orange? Sure, why not! 

And y’know what? The game actually encourages this. 

Image from the JW Wikia, but I have one, too. 

JW the Game has an arena function. In order to get stronger dinos, you have to fuse two of them together. The results lead to cleaner patterns and brighter colors, similar to the selectively-bred Okeetee corn snakes (they are not a heritable morph - they are “cleaned” wild-colored corn snakes). The tradeoff is camouflage for a pattern that rakes in the dough. All you have to do is mate/evolve your dinosaurs. It’s no worse than trying to select for, say, deeper purple in albino reticulated pythons, along with a good temperament. Always go for temperament. 

“But that’s unnatural!” 

No, no it isn’t. Allow me to elaborate on why it is perfectly fine using “fuck” in every sentence with several different meanings. 

Nature does not fucking care what humans do to its creatures. As long as things are fucking and their offspring continue to fuck, the species survives. Mother Nature is a fucking bitch; as long as you fuck and your offspring can fuck, you win. It doesn’t matter if a fucking wolf does it with a fucking dog- humans are the ones who care. As far as the wolfdog is concerned, it is still Canis fucking lupus, and can still fuck either of its parents while producing offspring that can fuck. That is how animals fucking win. That is all that fucking matters to nature: fucking. 

What is unnatural is that male dinosaurs aren’t fucking acknowledged. We don’t even know if there’s a fucking stud, who, by the way, must be doing a lot of fucking if he exists. If anything, preventing the dinosaurs from fucking naturally like that is more unnatural than selectively breeding them. At least with selective breeding, there is fucking going on. 

I’m done with the F-bombs, now. Hopefully, they make the point. Your move, Catcher in the Rye. 

The problem: even selective breeding, an art as old as humankind, has very bad connotations, nowadays. PETA has made sure that selective breeding is linked with puppy mills, cross-eyed white tigers, and generally illegal activities. This is not to say that such things don’t happen at all with inbreeding, or that puppy mills are A-OK, but it is still an art almost as old as humanity itself, and will not go away. Generally speaking, humans move forward with their inventions, not backwards. This applies to breeding, too; for example, Siamese cats have had the exact same issues with crossed eyes as white tigers in the past (it’s the same type of albinism, even), but selective breeding, including outcrosses, overcame that hurdle. We’re generally pretty good at picking out traits we like and accentuating them without causing too much damage - i.e. making it so that the organisms can’t fuck. 

Refer back to the quote we opened with: we have evolved to play with evolution. Selective breeding is selecting for traits we like, rather than being stronger or faster. Considering that humans can be treated as their own extinction event, perhaps it’s about time we looked at selective breeding as its own, bizarre adaptation: a genetic response to a new environment. In this case, that new environment is us. 

So, again, let’s loop back to something I said in the beginning: part of the point of Jurassic Park is a sort of “wax wings of Icarus - don’t fly too close to the sun/play God” analogue. While we could argue that Indominus rex makes the point pretty clear by herself, might the game actually make it better? 

A liger, bred for its skills in AWESOME. 

Hybrids, in general, are a sort of breaking point for humans as far as science is concerned. You can mate a lion and a tiger, for example, making a liger, but the liger is going to have a few problems. For one, they suffer a lot of the same issues as large dog breeds; because the growth inhibition gene in lionesses is not at all present in ligers, they grow huge, to the point where their hearts literally cannot support them. Female ligers can indeed reproduce, but males are almost certainly sterile. Sterility happens rather frequently in hybrids, and remember our golden rule: Fuck. Once you can’t reproduce well, Nature herself flips you off as a species. This isn’t even touching sci-fi splicing; sometimes, crossing two things is enough to make Nature go “yeah, NO.” (Also, to preemptively cut off any anti-gay stuff? This has to happen to an entire species, and nature always has a few individuals that won't pass on their genes.) 

Before I go into how JW: the Game shows this better than the movie, I’d like to talk about Mewtwo. 

Scan from Bulbapedia. Should've just used mine. 

For those of you who do not know who or what Mewtwo is, you’re either really old or are not from this planet. I will nonetheless explain. 

Mewtwo is a Pokemon created from a single bit of DNA from Mew, said to be the progenitor of all Pokemon-kind, and Arceus knows what else. In its PokeDex entries, it is said to have been created by a scientist “after years of horrific gene splicing and DNA-engineering experiments.” Things like having the “most savage heart among Pokemon” and thinking only of combat also come up repeatedly. And yet…

…there are a few reasons that people are not piss-shit terrified of Mewtwo. No, if anything, Mewtwo is regarded as the only 100% badass Pokemon - even by people who are not fans of Pokemon. A lot of this has to do with how Mewtwo was softened as a character for the first Pokemon movie; watch the Japanese movie and/or the dubbed “Birth of Mewtwo,” and see exactly how anthropomorphized and softened the “most savage heart” became. 

Mewtwo was designed, from an artistic standpoint, to be a freak; like, seriously, that neck tube looks wrong. So was Indominus rex. Both are intelligent, cold-hearted, ruthless in battle, and meant to look like bastardizations of nature. They nonetheless are marketable badasses. 

Is it any wonder that this thing got the most merch? 

(Also, you aren’t marketing the hell out of something being a blend of T-Rex and raptor…why? “Part T-Rex. Part raptor. ALL AWESOME.” Also also, no, albinos are not scary; if anything, white and melanistic animals make things even more of an attraction! (See also: white tigers, black “panthers,” and NOLA’s white alligator.) Now fire your entire marketing department and anyone who kept THOSE TWO GENES a secret. The rest…people won’t care after that, trust me.) 

What the movie didn’t tell us was that there were more fused dinosaurs besides Indominus. Some of them, like the Stegoceratops, also got toys, despite not being in the movie. Others, though… 

This is Koolasaurus, the only fused amphibian in the game, but I'm pretty sure Pepe the frog has more reasons to live. 

I’m gonna throw it out there that the JW game doesn’t do enough with pterosaurs (or amphibians, for that matter). No long-tailed pterosaurs until the Dimorphodon update really stunted the potential for a giant, beaky wyvern-splicer. The fused monster (yes, only one fused pterosaur) for them simply looks like…nothing compared to the phoenixian Lv. 40’s until it fully evolves. All splicers start out with this pink-grey mush color to them, while the selectively-bred parent species look like something out of Avatar. It’s a kinda-dinosaur molded out of clay versus a living work of modern art. 

But oh, no. You look at the other two crosses of what should be badass dinosaurs, and things start looking so much worse. 

I'll give you the crack, okay? By the way, I don't own any of these caps because I'm not cool enough. 

I am, of course, talking about the Spinoraptor and Carnoraptor. One of these barely has feathers and has huge, pink, bulging eyes with tiny pupils, like some sort of dinosaur drug addict. The other has the cool horns of a Carnotaurus…stunted into little demonic nubs, along with wrinkly skin like on a shrunken head and black, beady eyes. If Indominus was not enough of an indication that insane splicing was not the answer, oh my gods, look at her creepy as hell siblings. 

Indominus kinda beat us over the head with “this is WRONG” while looking completely badass - just like Mewtwo. Her possessed siblings do so in a much more subtle and chilling manner. That is art. 

Now that's more like it! 

Granted, the evolved hybrids look a lot cooler. The gray mush of Tropeogopterus becomes just as bold as any other pterosaur, and even if Carnoraptor and Koolasaurus look just as freaky as before, it’s an improvement over the color gray. Evolve anything but Indominus, and it looks decent (red stripes and spikes...yawn). So, what else does the game do that the movie doesn’t? 

Pretty much just generic kids in the movie. Not so in the game. 

At this point, I’m going to bring up the two kids. Zach, the older brother, is a techie; he reminds me a lot of my (younger) nephew in that he’s concerned about things regarding technology, and is the type of kid who freaks when a place has no cell phone reception (which I think he got from his mom, but I digress). Gray, the younger kid, is into things like science and math, and is just giddy to see dinosaurs and be out in nature. Although these sides of these characters were probably in the movie on some level, I think one exchange really hammers in the key difference between the two: 

Zach: This is awful! There’s no cell phone reception! 

Gray: I know, isn’t it great? 

That bit, right there, cements these two as characters. (It also proves that the people who made Gray’s character really don’t know anything about how modern kids act, but more on that later.)  It’s not verbatim, but the exchange really stuck out. Zach’s character is consistently tech-oriented, while Gray is an absolute geek about the natural world. The movie focuses on the sibling relationship between these two, which, while realistic, feels cheap and forced in places (“Y U NO BOND WITH CLAIRE?!”). They could’ve had something more interesting and insightful if they had given the two more traits (or emphasized extant traits) beyond “they’re brothers; the younger kid likes dinosaurs, older brother is borderline stupid and generally a rebellious teenager.” 

I would like to note that the Wikia says absolutely nothing about Zach’s character and a lot about Gray’s character. I’ll get into why this matters in a bit. 

While it wasn’t necessarily crystalline in the movie, in the game, these kids are really, really symbolic in a way that doesn’t beat you over the head…as much as the movie did in spots with different characters. Look at that dialogue I pasted up there, and the purpose of these two siblings suddenly becomes clear: Zach is obsessed with technology and would probably die without his phone, while Gray is a junior paleontologist. These two are extreme representations of nature VS technology, with Gray being nature boy and Zach being glued to his phone. Even their names hint at this if you squint. 

Now, mind, they are still characters. They are also still older and younger siblings. For example, the Wikia describes Gray as a little bit hyper, and getting on Zach’s nerves from time to time. Zach nonetheless tries to keep a reign on his little brother, even if he has a rebellious side himself. 

Um, question: why not switch these two? I don’t really object to the younger sibling being aligned with nature and the elder being concerned with his iPhone, but symbolism aside, which is more realistic? Drawing from my own relatives, I know the opposite from experience: the older brother is more concerned with math and science and is a Boy Scout, and the younger one wants his tablet PC, his dad’s phone, or really, any screen to stare at and tap on. Kids these days are growing up with devices that their older siblings never encountered; it would make a lot of sense for a kid in that day and age to be tired of dinosaurs, which have been “normal” for much of his life, while the older sibling is more concerned with not only the names, but the processes that created them to begin with, as well as the older Jurassic Park. It would also make more sense for the younger sibling to be more hyperactive not just because he's a little kid, but because he’s grown up in a world that encourages technological ADD (which I have STRONGLY experienced with a friend’s little brother). 

Now, here’s why they didn’t do that: Gray is not only symbolic of nature, but also of the Jurassic Park fanbase. Really into dinosaurs? Check. Kinda knows when things are about to go wrong, sort of like an animal sense? Check. Knows stuff about the old park? Oho, checkaroonie. Again, though - wouldn’t this make more sense on the older brother? 

The world as most humans know it. 

Maybe, maybe not. It’s a sad fact of American culture that adults usually aren’t into nature. The mature world of man is not a world of wild animals  - it’s a world of metal and people on their phones on a constant basis. In the adult mind, humans have exceeded nature already, and don’t really see it as a threat. People who really like animals tend to be more in-tune with their inner child, so I can see why the writers did what they did with these characters. 

In short: while I don’t entirely agree with the positions of younger and elder siblings, I respect the creators’ choices. It just could have been more powerful if this had been fleshed out, and maybe switched. I do mean “fleshed out” and not “beaten into our skulls,” the latter of which ironically makes things less effective. 

In the end, the two siblings have to settle their differences and work things out in order to avoid being eaten by Mewtwosaurus. The humans eventually sic the natural (but still very spliced) dinosaurs on the freak they have created, and win out by playing off of both conditioning and natural behavior. In other words, a compromise between tech and nature was reached. We've evolved to play with evolution, but that doesn't mean we control it entirely, nor does it mean that we won't make icky-looking mistakes. 

While the movie does make the point of wax wings on its own, it feels like the game does it better. It doesn’t beat you over the head, lets you interact more with the dinosaurs than humans we are supposed to like (even then, Blue the raptor is the best character in the movie), and actually teaches you, the player, more things than the movie ever did without you realizing it. Nostalgia Critic was completely right in that the movie should maybe have been more about cool dinosaurs doing cool dinosaur things than about forced stereotypes, whether girls can ever have it all or not, and not-at-all subtle callbacks to the first movie (Jaws was very cleverly inserted, though). It’s still worth seeing, so go ahead and give it a watch - and then go play the game on your tablet or phone. If nothing else, it’s a fitting complement to a decent flick. 

Who Let The Dogs Out?: Wolfdogs.

So, maybe after pugs, you're thinking that we humans have gone too far. Hell, it feels like society has forgotten that dogs are, in fact, carnivores. Maybe we should take a step back and introduce some wolf into the dog.

 Oh, wait. That's a thing.

When a dog happen to meet at the right time of month, they make a wolfdog. There is no "one size fits all" description for a wolfdog - every one of them will be different. It's just like with mixed breed dogs. In fact, wolf dogs are almost the exact same thing as mixed-breed dogs, with all the unpredictability and hybrid vigor therein.

First off, a reminder: The scientific definition of "species" is based on "can this thing get it on with this thing?" It has absolutely nothing to do with the human perceptions concerning dogs and wolves. To science, if something can mate and produce 100% fertile offspring with something else, those two things are the same species. There may be behavioral difference between wolves and dogs, but that doesn't stop them from doing it like they do on the Discovery Channel...successfully.

STILL look adorable.

As the silver fox study shows, most of the traits that we treasure so much in domestic dogs come from breeding just for docility. That includes floppy ears, wagging tails, and general obedience. The wolf is not bred at all - rather, it undoes a few stitches of whatever breeding went into the dog. Even with all the variability wolfdogs have, the tendency is toward timidity, not aggression. That does not mean you should keep one without doing your homework.

Let's look at some testimonials from people with wolfdog experience:

 "I have a friend that has three. Not judging, just fact.

He got a puppy last year to go with his two older dolves..

His puppy chewed up his cabinets. Like, not a little bit that you could cover up with some trim. THE SIDES.

His puppy RIPPED UP HIS HARDWOOD FLOORING in his kitchen, which was her area while he was at work or whatever. He lets his dogs out at regular intervals, and other than his preoccupation with wolf/dog hybrids, he's a great pet owner.

His puppy has not one but TWO genetic defects, too (something about intestinal adhesions and her kidneys aren't in the right spots)."


"high (wolf) contents are often very difficult to handle and actually tend to fare BETTER as mostly outside dogs. they need a lot more everything all around. get a real high content hybrid and its an average 14 or 15 year commitment riddled with high insurance, expensive fencing, oftentime an animal who HAS to be fed raw, little to no travel(traveling with a wolfdog is practically impossible), the threat of your dogs being seized, and a lot of concerns that go above and beyond just owning a dog." 


And finally, someone found this helpful little sheet on determining whether a wolfdog is right for you or not. This was honestly the least biased thing I could find about wolfdogs. I'm not necessarily advocating wolfdogs, but the behavior there seemed chillingly different to anything I have ever found when asking about reptiles. Call it a vibe; I could tell some people there just hated wolfdogs. I don't, but you should know what you're getting into.

Although some breeds, such as the Czech Wolfdog, deliberately have wolf infused into them, bad things happen when wild wolves cross with stray dogs. The resulting hybrids might have no fear of humans - y'know, one of the things that had to be bred out of the domestic dog. You have domestic dogs to thank for pure black wolves, by the way.

For those of you curious, Balto, the most popular wolfdog ever, might not have been a wolfdog. He was most likely a purebred Siberian Huskie. Rumor has it, however, that Iditarod racers are contemplating breeding wolf into their stock to give their dogs more endurance, speed, etc. That's what wolves are slowly becoming: Dogs on steroids.

Bio-Art: Edunias.

Ah, Eduardo Kac. Whenever I miss the chance to see a bio-related movie, I know I can always count on you to monkey with nature in ways that make us question the definitions of things like "art"and "hubris." For those of you new to this column, Kac's specialty is bio-engineered art. The thoughts behind this art are usually pretty cool.

One of Kac's more recent pieces is the Edunia- or, if you prefer, Natural History of the Enigma. Each flower has a sample of Kac's DNA in its veins via a single protein. The idea behind these flowers was to create a man-plant hybrid that did not exist in nature. Way to go Moreau on us.

The Edunia contains Eduardo Kac's flesh and blood...in a way. It actually has a genetic marker in it from Kac's DNA that makes the fluids in the plant's veins turn red. The idea was that the pink petals of the flower and the red of the veins would be analogous to Kac's own flesh and blood. Creepy? Yes. Art? Your mileage may vary.







Wait a second. This sounds familiar. Wasn't there a monster that was part plant, part-human? We're sure Japan has several, but the one that comes to mind is Biollante - a rose created out of plant DNA, Godzilla gene scraps, and the life essence of a botanist's dead daughter. If Kac's stuff gets anywhere beyond a basic gene marker, we're screwed.

The fun does not stop at crazy hybrid flowers, no siree! Kac also made six seed packs, each designed to look pretty and house mutant plant seeds of doom. There were six packets made for the Weis,man Art Museum (Minneapolis, MN)  in 2009. They are not available to the public insofar as I know, but the mere thought of the Edunia breeding is enough to scare me after Biollante. Do not want man-plants.

Creature Feature: Return of the Burmese Pythons- Morphs + Hybrids.

One entry does not do Burmese pythons justice. Call me obsessed, but they really are cool snakes. I'm going to miss the dent in their population.

Specifically, the Burm ban prevents me from getting my all-time favorite snake: A Borneo Bateater.



The Borneo Bateater is a hybrid between a reticulated python (P. reticulatus) and a Burm (P. m. bivittatus). It was probably not found in the wild, and, if it was, it certainly did not consume bats.  Please; it's the hybrid of two large snakes. Bats would be a poor diet for it.

The Burmese python was one of the snakes that really got the reptile trade started. There was something really special about the first albino Burmese that came over approximately 20 years ago (anyone got a date on this? I used  to know it). It was the white tiger of the snake world, if you will. They were bred so often that, for whatever reason, albino Burmese have a higher fertility rate than their normally-colored counterparts.



Since then, the Burmese python has been bred with no less than ten different color and pattern morphs. These have been mixed and cross to the point where, not only can one have an albino Burm, one can have an albino granite, albino green, albino labyrinth...you get it. They all look really nice. The leucistic once thought legendary also proved heritable, so expect to see more hypo crosses, soon. Codominant traits are fun because they show up in the first generation! The people in the business are currently working on dwarf Burms, too, so size will not be such a big issue after a while.

I'll host it myself later...but that is a BEAUTIFUL eye.

Back to the Bateater. This hybrid has to be the most identity-challenged serpent on the face of the planet. Not only is it a hybrid, but it has the pattern and facial markings of a wildcat. Weirder still is that it is capable of breeding back to either parent, creating "jungle Burms" (3/4ths Burm) and "jungle retics" (3/4ths retic). Both of them look substantially different from the original species. Goes to show you what a little bit of experimentation can do.

Burmese pythons can cross into a lot of things, in fact. There are cateaters, which are the ultimate horror story python: African rock x Burmese, leading to a huge and possibly aggressive animal.  Burmese pythons have also been able to mate with ball pythons, leading to this:

Freaky. Trippy. Can I get it in lavender? :D

As for my actually getting a Batater? Too expensive right now. I'd love to have one, but I'm a responsible owner. Current means will not allow the author of this blog to possess a giant snake. Yet.

Bio-Art: The Young Family.

Blurring the boundaries between humans and other animals is one of my favorite things in the world. If, however, such a practice became common, it would not be the cute and fuzzy utopia that the furries would probably like. Mixing human and animal nonetheless remains a very popular theme in art and culture, as it has for thousands of years. Only recently, however, has that combination been so close we could almost look in its eyes.




The Young Family, a sculpture by Patricia Piccinini, pushes the Uncanny Valley so hard that it has been featured on those "real or fake" pop-up ads alongside the bully whippet. It features a transgenic creature - or, rather, a family of transgenic creatures. (The artist herself mentions pigs; I for one see more dog in them.) Piccinini claims to have an ambivalent stance regarding technology. The Young Family was made to spark discussion. No time to start that like the present.

First of all, allow me to praise the artist for her choice on adding canine traits (mostly the ears) to her hybrids. Dogs are the creatures that illicit the most sympathy from humans. We already dress dogs up in people clothes and buy them birthday cakes. Had she chosen a pig, frog, or rodent (which are more common model organisms than dogs), the sculpture probably would not have had the same effect. Props.

Regardless of the animal used, the sculpture touches upon a very real issue: Science will create hybrids like the dog-family above. This is not an "if." Science will create fertile human-animal hybrids because it can. We've already engineered bacteria to make insulin and mice to have human immune systems.It is only a matter of time before we make all-out parahumans.

If human-animal hybrids became a reality, organ transplants would become a lot easier. There could be many a medical advance made by harvesting bodily fluids, organs, and so forth from not-quite-human chimeras and hybrids. There is no way science will not do this. People who have relatives with diseases that can only be cured by human tissue replacement will do whatever they can to get that person cured.

Parahumans like The Young Family open a whole new can of worms. Modern culture has placed a special label on humanity. Once the human species starts getting blurred, what will legislation do to the hybrids in labs? A lot of people would say that it depends on if the resulting hybrids are self-aware or not, but no matter where you stand, this will evolve into a slippery slope. If we can give human-dog hybrids human rights, soon, people will insist that mice with human immune systems are human enough for rights.

Oh, by the way,  the U.S. in particular has a bad rap for not giving humans basic rights. Gay marriage comes to mind. This blog alone should be proof that I am not sub-human. Whether I should be on par with a dog-human hybrid or not is up to you.

As the artist herself put it, "These are not simple issues with easy answers: It is one thing to talk about an idea and another to be confronted by the emotional reality of a creature, and yet another to be in need of what that creature might provide." Seriously, discuss below.

Patented Humans?

To make up for my general sloth this week, I found a rather interesting article concerning the patenting of life. Long story very short, somebody wanted to patent (i.e. claim exclusive rights to) a human-animal hybrid. If this patent had slid, he would have been able to produce said hybrids for his own profit, and would be the only one legally allowed to do so for the next 20 years. Ouch to everyone else.

In the end, the scientist applying for the patent lost the case. The court ruled that the hybrid was "too human to be patentable." However, winning an exclusive patent was not his goal. Instead, his goal was to create a precedent for future human hybrids, which would become inevitable as science progressed.

We already have human chimeras. The government has already allowed a patent on a mouse with a human immune system for medicinal research. "Humanized" animals like this are usually given the OK, but what about non-human things with human brains? How far can we go until something becomes so human that it becomes unpatentable? Hell, human parents might start patenting their kids, just in case they start becoming valuable. They're technically made by people and under the sun.

The article in question brings up some really good points. Science has no ethic; it can and will make human hybrids. If we can patent anything made by man under the sun, including life forms, who's to say that humans will not be patented next? Hell, conspiracy theories are loaded with humans being barcoded. That's actually a very real possibility, what with RFID chips becoming more and more common. Real furries are also slowly becoming more and more plausible. With new advances in science come new meanings of being human.

Just sayin'.

Creature Feature: Africanized Bees.

There are a lot of mixed feelings about honey bees. On one hand, they make delicious honey and help plants have sex; on the other, their stings can hurt and trigger insane allergic reactions. On the the third (wait, where did a third hand come from?), they were bred into aggressive super-bees out for blood.



That is an Africanized bee. No, the Cherrios bee did not put on a bunch of gaudy jewelery and start rapping. See that little stick the bee has? It is going to kill you with that.

It all started when one Brazilian beekeeper tried to make his European honeybees (Apis mellifera ligustica) more viable. To do this, he purchased 26 Tanzanian bee queens (A.m. scutellata). He proceeded to breed them in an attempt to make a new bee that was stronger...faster...and more adaptable to the rain forest climate! (Actually, I have seen mixed things about this; some sources say that the hybridization was intentional at first, others say it occurred after the bees escaped.)

Then, by pure accident (or fate, take your pick), the Tanzanian hybrid bees were released. They mated with European honeybee populations. This was more like crossing a dog and a wolf than, say, two different types of python, so nature could definitely do it.

The fluke worked out fine for a while. The bees did adapt better to Brazil's tropical climate than just plain European bees. They are currently the preferred bee in South and Central America, despite a few unfortunate side effects of hybridization. The hybrid bees did very well.

Too well.


Wait a sec, if the Amazon already has bees, why bother with these? 

The bees took over much of South and Central America before slowly moving their way towards North America. As of 2003, they have slipped their way into North America as well. Geez, we knew these bees were created as a result of science gone horribly wrong, but I doubt the breeder had world conquest on his mind.


MWAHAHA!

One of the side effects of crossing African bees into the European sort made them aggressive (or, rather, defensively-aggressive). Although the African blood made them happier in such a hot, humid climate, they were also more easily agitated. They have the nickname "killer bees" for a reason.

These bees are just...jerks. If anything -any animal, even a human- walks by these things, they are going to get stung. The bees are extremely sensitive to noises of any sort, including the ones that come from vehicles. They are even douchebags to other bees, often killing European queens and effectively taking over the hive.


OH, you meant the bees. Right. We are still not amused.

When irritated, the Africanized bees swarm. They do not have more potent venom than the average honeybee; they just attack en masse, even if you have avoided the hive. The bees are also persistent, following targets for up to a quarter of a mile and stinging incessantly for the whole trip. People have died from massive bee attacks, but they are far more dangerous to the apiculturists that provide honey.

There is no visual warning that these bees are psychotic killing machines. They look pretty darn similar to your every day honeybees. (Only an expert can tell them apart, so if you're a certified entomologist, good for you.) It is only when you suddenly notice a giant cloud of bees coming at you that you realize your mistake.


This could be a hive of normal bees and you would not be able to tell. 

The best advice is still to let the bees be, but if you see them suddenly picking up shotguns, run like hell.

A Museum of Natural Art?

Today, I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. They did not have some of the truly special stuff that made me 'wow' the first time around, like a gigantic light chamber and a hall of iridescent mirrors. They had some neat tricks with mirrors with an interesting thesis behind them, but most of the things made me tilt my head in WTF. Looking at the crap that people turn into art made me wonder:

Why the hell isn't there a museum for natural art?

To clarify: I am not only talking about all that is beautiful in nature, but also all that was created from life itself. That means morphs, hybrids, things with two heads, and so on. Collies, sphynxes, bubble-eye goldfish, scaleless rattlesnakes and Chinese Cresteds all deserve their own pedestals. Breeds can go extinct, too. Credit must be given where credit is due.

Don't think it would work? Check out how many zoos are pimping white tigers - as I have said before, white tigers are just about the least natural animals there are (after dogs and cats). Freaks mean big money, which is why Siegfried and Roy can get away with pimping their white cats in Vegas.


Remember them?

Despite everything I have said about white tigers, I do admit that they are on their way to becoming a solid breed. If people can breed crossed eyes out of Siamese cats, they can probably do the same with white tigers. Call this a double standard if you like, but I am cool with white tigers being part of an actual show. They should not be representatives of real, wild tigers any more than German Shepherds should speak for wolves.

Zoos should not make ligers, white tigers, black panthers, and so forth just to attract customers. As I said before, ligers do not happen in nature, and white tigers are about as inbred as European royalty - they are far from pristine natural specimens. Going to a zoo just because it has a white tiger is a scam; you are not helping the problems associated with the morph, and more and more regular tigers will suffer for the attention given to their inbred cousins.

That is not promoting conservation. That is conservation mixed with a veritable freakshow. It misrepresents and skews what people really want to save. Do you want to save an animal that could never survive in its natural habitat?


Speaking of black and white attention whores...

This does not mean that all white tigers should be eradicated - just keep them out of conservation arguments. They are the rough equivalent of using advertisements in a scholarly paper; that is, they are clutter that should not be used when trying to make a serious point. Ditto with ligers. Black wildcats can slide, but they too suffer from inbreeding (and several misconceptions). By the way, support Lady Gaga!



I swear she's a rare specimen from Pandora.

Let's give the freaks a place to stay. Zoos should not have them. Get a bunch of taxidermists and exotic pet owners together and make it happen. There are also plenty of glowing microbes and stones to pick from, so we could really go nuts.

Creature Feature: Pizzlies.

If you thought that breeding two species of big cat yesterday was dangerous, how about trying it with bears? Better yet, in the case of pizzlies, nature has already done it for you; no drugs required for this idea!

A pizzly (which SOUNDS like another word for bear urine, but whatever, scientific naming system) is a hybrid between a male polar bear (Ursus maritimus) and a female grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis). Pizzlies generally act more like polar bears than grizzlies, stamping like polar bears do ice and sleeping like throw rugs. They have at least some coloration from both species; generally speaking, they have light bodies with darker paws. It looks almost like a Siamese (or Himalayan) cat in bear form:


Meow?

Numerous hunters have found strange-looking bears in Alaska and Canada, but the pizzly was the first confirmed wild hybrid. DNA testing proved its mixed parentage in 2006. Had it been a pure grizzly, hunter Jim Martell would have been arrested. (For some reason, he had a license to kill the FAR more endangered polar bear, but that's another issue entirely.)

If only they would have stuck with "prizzly." "Grolar bear" indicates that the specimen had a grizzly father and polar bear mother, but "pizzly" is the real name for polar x grizzly (with the father's name coming first). "Nanulak," a portmanteau of Inuit words for the two bears, is a fine replacement. "Pizzly" deserves to be pissed on; science, HOW did you manage to make a hybrid of two of the most badass bears in the world sound so lame?

Creature Feature: Ligers.

No, these big cat crosses were not bred for their skills in magic as Napoleon Dynamite would suggest. The liger is a real creature with a lion (Panthera leo) father and tigress (Panthera tigris) mother. The opposite combination, a tiglon, rarely lives past birth. Both of these hybrids are fertile. The two species would never meet or mate in the wild, but in captivity, accidents happen.

Normally, lions and tigers are kept separately. Since ligers like Hercules have become huge (seriously!) draws, however, more zoos have deliberately crossed the two. If reptile breeders cross giant snakes for the hell of it, why not do the same for giant cats?


Pictured: SCIENCE. No booze involved.

A pairing between a lion and a tiger results in the biggest of the big cats known to mankind. Ligers can get up to 900 pounds and, when standing on their hind legs, reach up to 12 feet in height. This is, at least partially, because lionesses have a growth-inhibiting gene. No lioness in there means that the liger is one big kitty.



Don't try this at home. As the video says, big cats need a lot of food, and there are already a fair amount of homeless Panthera specimens. Let the big cats stay with people who are licensed to handle them. (No, I do not know how one gets 'started' with big cats...but it probably involves working at a zoo.)


You can, however, get a robotic liger with absolutely no prior training. Just like kids in Japan!

Creature Feature: Hybrid Cats.

A while back, I encountered a cat that cost over ten thousand USD called an Ashera (pictured above). It was listed on a news site as the "largest, rarest, most expensive domestic cat in the world." Small wonder; the Ashera could be leash trained, stretched over a meter from head to tail, ate more than the average cat, and had an amazingly exotic look (with a 'guarantee' that all kittens would look alike).



Almost immediately following the news post, breeders of cats called Savannahs were calling it an overpriced, overmarketed hybrid. This later turned out to be true - the Ashera was no different from an F1 Savannah, a hybrid that already existed. The owner of Lifestyle Pets, Simon Brodie, promptly changed his name and started a different company.

Did you think that cats, of all domesticated animals, had escaped hybridization? There are a fair few crosses with small wildcats, such as servals, Geoffrey's cats, and Asian Leopard Cats (ALCs). There seem to be many more deliberate crosses between wild and domestic felines than with wild and domestic canines, and each and every one of them has different requirements. These all have dramatic effects on a cat's appearance, temperament, and even eating habits. This brings us to the Bengal, one of the more popular exotic crosses.



This cat probably could have fit into Freak Week if it had not been a hybrid. Despite having a registry with over 60,000 members, Bengals and all other hybrids are outcasted from the Cat Fanciers' Association. Other associations may or may not accept Savannahs, Bengals, and other hybrids based on their blood. As I said in my article addressing the differences between breeds and species, hybrids are not breeds.

Despite the orange coloration, the Bengal hybrid-breed does not derive its name from the Bengal tiger. Instead, it comes from the far lesser known Asian Leopard Cat's scientific name, Prionailurus bengalensis. They act like little wildcats until the F4 generation, at which point they are tame enough to be considered standard pets.

Since the birth of the first Bengal litter, breeders have been crossing its wild look into many projects. This includes the infamous, and adorable, Toygers - tabby cats with a little bit of Bengal in them for a 'wild' look. This was supposedly done to encourage the conservation of real tigers in the wild, but until I see 10% of every Toyger kitten profit going to wildlife preservation, I'm not buying it.


This is actually kind a freaky...