Giant Manta

I find this picture unspeakably depressing, but it gives a good idea of the scale of the leviathon being held up by pulleys.

That is the sea devil, the giant manta- and in this case, an amazing creature that strayed a bit too near to human beings.

The giant manta is the largest species of the ray family. Mantas have been known to grow up to 25 feet from wing to wing, and weigh up to 5,000 lbs. (that’s over two tons for the weight conscious sorts out there) Even humbled to hanging flesh and strung up as it is in this picture, the giant manta has a certain undeniable presence; a dignity. Under water it is an eerily gorgeous inhabitant of the tropical seas.

The giant manta glides through the twilight waters, using it’s pectoral fins to ‘fly’ beneath the ocean. These fins are its only defense from predators, and they can deliver a stinging slap when they feel threatened. Unlike human beings however, no manta has ever accompanied a spanking with the words, “Whose your daddy?”

The horns on either side of the giant manta’s head, in combination with shark-like coloring and a broad mouth give the manta a rather piss-your-pants appearance, but in reality these creatures are some of the least hostile you’ll come across in warmer waters. They are filter feeders, meaning that they strain plankton, fish larva and other bitsy junk passively as they swim. The giant manta has the largest brain-to-body ratio of the sharks and rays, according to wikipedia, which is sometimes full of bullocks, but oh well.

Mantas tend to display curiosity toward divers, and these giants have been known to swim long distances beside human beings, accompanied of course by their little stalker friends the remoras. Remora fish are like hitchhikers that attach to mantas and let them do all the swim work. In return, the remoras tend to attract all the skin parasites to their own bodies. Remoras rarely swim far from their chosen manta, but do occasionally stray long enough to grab a bite. A remora without a manta is like an heiress without a designer perfume: Neither is likely to land a gig on the E Network.

Unlike its cousin the sting ray, giant mantas do not have stinging spines or barbs. Steve Irwin would still be alive and well today if it were a giant manta he’d startled rather than a sting ray. Mantas mate belly to belly, and typically bear 1-2 pups at a time. The babies are born rolled up like tubes, and they become active once they have unrolled their wings.

Mantas are considered to be a near threatened species. Their size makes them rarer than many breeds of smaller fish, so their numbers are monitored critically. The giant manta disappeared mysteriously from one of its common fishing grounds, the Sea of Cortez in 2002, and no mantas were sighted for a full two years until suddenly several sightings happened two years later. Remember though, that was also the year Eminem took over the world, so things were pretty fucked up.

In Mexico, legislation was passed to protect the giant manta in November of 2005. Undersea video of a manta devouring a live cocker spaniel puppy:

Okay, I lied. I wanted you to watch the video. You deserve that for being an evil old puppy hater, you sicko.

“Early superstitious fishermen called them Devilfish. Manta rays often feed at the surface on small zooplankton and krill funneling them into their mouths with specialized head fins—cephalic fins—unfurled below into twin scoops. Sometimes they accidentally swim into anchor ropes or into hard-hat diver’s air hoses. Since rays have no reverse gear, when caught they swim forward ever faster. Equally frightened fishermen or divers likened the fleeing rays to malignant beasts, with black wings sent from Hell to terrorize them. Fleeing mantas frequently lunge out of the water landing in a resounding slap—a maneuver that completes the Devilfish legend. The story goes that the rays would tow a skiff out to sea then crush the hapless crew by leaping on them.”

I can’t work like this….

Waking up things are blechy. My gray mass has turned to something even uglier, like greenish taupe. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have a Drano nightcap, but my throat thinks so. Dehydrated. Snarf blast. I hate it when I wake up noticably dumber and uglier than when I went to bed.

My brain worked just fine last night. If only I’d written my post then. Today, I go to Yahoo and they have this sucker faced Dinosaur as the top story.

Such is my absence of brain activity that I just stare at the thing for a minute or two, not comprehending. Finally a sluggish response of indignant skepticism. A sucker faced dinosaur? You know what? Paleontology is just being an attention whore now. People haven’t been focusing on the dinos for a month or two, not since the giant chicken-lizard, so now they’ve gone and gotten creative. Now they’re making shit up.

There’s no way they found a hoover-faced lizard in the Sahara. No way. They probably got some model-building geeks to dream this one up, and then brushed the plastic pieces with a bone-like patina. That’s my theory.

And they shouldn’t. Nope. It’s time for endangered species to have the spotlight for a minute. People only have so much attention span to give to ‘science-y’ things, and these suck-face reptilians are stealing the thunder.

It’s even an unbelievable size. They made it look too dinosaury. What do they think we are, stupid?

Well, it scares the crap out of me.

I saw this guy on the Colbert Rapport, and found it eerie enough to go check out his website. His name is Chris Jordan. He’s a photographer, an artist. I also think he’s a messenger of sorts, a truth teller.

It’s easy to forget about waste and mass-consumption, not least because the rate at which we are polluting the earth is incredibly uncomfortable to dwell upon. You see the neighborhood recycling efforts, you remember to turn off the lights and reuse your towell a few times, and it’s easy to fall into the assumption that the world is doing ‘A-ok’, as you’ve not heard otherwise aside from Al Gore’s little movie, and look at all the websites discrediting him? (discrediting-with a furor, with a passion, with a fervency that should betray how much modern business and industry is counting on the myth that the way people conduct their lives at present isn’t destroying the Earth)

The exhibit is called ‘Running the numbers; an American Self-Portrait’. The concept is somewhat artistic, but mostly mathematical. Simply, Chris Jordan has taken a few specific statistical quantities of things that are consumed, wasted or numbers that depict some aspect of American culture, and presented a concrete visual of the numbers in a way the brain might begin to grasp, as opposed to a mere abstract number. Here are a few examples, but check out his site if you get the chance. I promise it will make you uncomfortable. http://www.chrisjordan.com

^ depicts 170,000 disposable energizer batteries, equal to fifteen minutes of Energizer battery production.

partial zoom

detail at actual print size (resized smaller to fit blog)

This. ^This is what average sized people would look like next to 15 minutes of battery production if batteries were printed to actual size. The poster of 170,000 batteries would be 26×43 feet.

That’s fifteen minutes.

A depiction of one year of Energizer disposable battery production, (six billion batteries) would require a print 26 feet high by 146 miles wide.

^ Depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds. (click to enlarge) print size 60×72″

zooming in

a small piece of the puzzle