A Visitor From The Grapevines

Last Wednesday (20 August) we got to admire this moth all day long when Pica discovered it resting on a t-shirt hanging on the laundry line out back. This is an achemon sphinx moth (Eumorpha achemon) in the family Sphingidae. Their caterpillars feed on wild and cultivated grapes. Its presence makes sense because we have grapevines along the fencing on two sides of our yard, though we have never observed a caterpillar in the vines. The moth left the t-shirt some time over the night.

Guinea Pigs At The Chalkboard

Pica working on her comic about the guinea pig Mr. Ginger reminded me of a story about the great twentieth-century geneticist and evolutionary biologist, Sewall Wright. This is recounted in Jim Endersby’s book A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology which covers a lot more than just guinea pigs: rather it is a history of biology told from the point of view of the subject organisms (there are chapters on fruit flies, corn, and many other species in addition to guinea pigs).

A couple of interesting facts about guinea pigs before I get to the Sewall Wright story.

• When guinea pigs were imported from the New World the English took quite a fancy to them. Queen Elizabeth I even had one as a pet.
• They were important study animals in the discovery of vitamin C and its role in the prevention of scurvy. Like humans but unlike rats and mice, guinea pigs do not synthesize their own vitamin C, so they are good subjects for this topic.
• The eminent twentieth-century British biologist JBS Haldane studied guinea pigs for a while because his sister took up keeping guinea pigs after she developed an allergy to horses. (They were an upper-class family.) Their lawn didn’t have croquet hoops or tennis nets, rather there were about 300 guinea pigs running loose behind the fencing. The genetics experiments came to a tragic end in the penultimate generation when a friend’s fox terrier jumped the front gate and frightened all the guinea pigs to death. (Incidentally, Haldane was a British communist who like many of his compatriots including George Orwell went over to Spain to fight the Fascists).

Together with JBS Haldane and R.A. Fisher, Sewall Wright (1889-1988) was one of the three key figures in developing the mathematical theory of evolution in the first half of the twentieth century. I first heard of him in my undergrad courses around 1982 and 1983 on population genetics and evolutionary biology. Wright was still alive at that point. I more recently ran across him while reading Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie’s popularization of the theory of causal inference, The Book of Why. Wright in 1921 developed the mathematical technique of path analysis, which is an important precursor to causal inference theory.

Wright fell into working with guinea pigs because he was offered a position as a graduate student to be a caretaker of a research colony of the animals, and he kept working with them for most of his career. The following story about Wright is apocryphal, and according to his biographer William Provine the story isn’t true, but is fun to relate nonetheless. As background, although Wright was incredibly conscientious and generous with his time, he was not a very good lecturer. This is quoted from an interview with a student of Wright’s, the paleontologist Robert Sloan:

I didn’t see this, but my friend and partner, Ernie Lundelius, who was one of the groomsmen in my wedding, describes a case where Wright brought in a guinea pig. He was displaying the guinea pig and showing some of the variations in coat color. This particular guinea pig was somewhat more fractious than usual and was scurrying around on the desk and was not about to be quiet. When Wright worked at the blackboard, traditionally he tucked an eraser in his left armpit. And to keep the guinea pig quiet, he tucked the guinea pig in his left armpit. And when he was through and ready to erase some space so that he could put the next equation down, he reached for the eraser and grabbed the guinea pig and started to erase the blackboard with a squeaking guinea pig. Of course, this was one of the tales that went around among all the students of evolution. Whether they had been there or not, I doubt it ever got into print. It deserves to be there, as part of at least the bibliography of Sewall Wright.

Almost a Real Guinea Pig

I’ve now completed a very incomplete first draft of the script for my Mister Ginger comic. There will need to be quite a bit of work on the script and also on the drawings… but to help with the latter, I ordered a plushie, pictured at left, and set about doing some sketches.

Drawing live guinea pigs is obviously better, but a) I don’t have one, b) if I did, the cats would kill it, c) if I go to the pet store, the animals are almost at ground level which makes it hard to get anything other than a bird’s eye view. So this plushie, while not perfect, at least allows me the luxury of placing at eye level and even higher, this way and that, 3/4 view and from behind. I am still drawing on reference photos but this will allow me to stage the drawings in my comic better.

Guinea Pig Studies

I’m working on a new comic, one that features a guinea pig that had some big adventures during the Russian advance on Kyiv in February 2022. (Since this is based on a true story, I’d like to make the guinea pig at least somewhat recognizable!) We owned a couple of guinea pigs as kids but that was a long time ago plus neither was the smooth-haired variety like Mister Ginger, so I’ve been doing some online image research (anatomy, though there is precious little available about musculature) and different poses, including some video I took at a PetSmart in Brunswick, Maine on Monday.

Getting the guinea pig to look “right” as a somewhat drawn-from-life animal is essential before I can turn this into the plucky heroic character of my story, and today was a bit of a test to see how far I’ve come. The ears are completely eluding me: you don’t want them upright (too much like a capybara), you don’t want them small (too much like a rat), you don’t want them big (too much like a chinchilla) and in fact in many photos of guinea pigs you hardly see them at all. It’s definitely back to the drawing board tomorrow, but I thought I’d share some progress sketches… There is a new PetSmart in town that might have some live guinea pigs, which would be a great place to start.

Sheep on the Quad

At UC Davis a landscape architecture professor, Haven Kiers, has an ongoing project to bring sheep to the heart of campus in springtime to mow the lawns and to educate people about the benefits of this form of landscape management.. This project is called the UC Davis Sheepmowers, and has been underway since 2021.

These past three days the sheep have been in an enclosure on the main campus quad. They are always well-received by the student and campus community. I went on a walk this morning to do a few sheep sketches, as seen at left.

Return -- Canidly

Apologies for the long absence. I have many half-written-in-my-head blog posts strewn over the past month that never made it onscreen. Rather than trying to gather them up, I’m going to jump in again.

I spent time with one of my vet friends on Friday evening. I like vets: they see the world in an entirely different way. For instance: any black-and-tan dog (Rottweiler, Doberman-type) is at huge risk of parvovirus; lumps on boxers should be removed immediately because they often turn malignant, and sighthounds (greyhounds, Afghans, wolfhounds, the big guys) have the reputation of looking for ways to die.

Mixed breeds obviously are the answer, but poor Molly from next door is terrified of gunshot and broke through the fence twice this morning (it’s dove season). She’s a pit bull mixed with a larger breed — boxer? — and is amazingly sweet. Just neurotic. I’m guessing this is not genetic, she was probably shot at before the landlord picked her up at the shelter.

The foxes at the Wildlife Health Center have moved on, possibly because of the parasite loads in their former dens. (Lots of my coworkers have been suffering from flea bites.)

Dog days of summer are over, and I’m trying to figure out how best to preserve the feral tomatoes…

A Day At The Fair

We went to the California State Fair today because Pica was helping Robin Lynde of Meridian Jacobs sheep farm with her stall in the livestock hall. Pica spent much of her time drum carding wool at the booth, an activity which a lot of people were curious about, and I was free to wander all about the fair. After doing an initial pass through the exhibit halls, I started sketching, beginning at the western end of the fair, where all the rides are (at left) and ending back in the livestock hall (see below at right).

Drawing Day At The Zoo

Today is the worldwide Drawing Day 2010: we participated by going sketching at the Sacramento Zoo. Pica drew mostly birds; I drew a mix of birds and ungulates. At left is a sketch I made of an Amazon parrot, at right are a couple of giraffes. I need to submit my giraffe drawings to the one million giraffes project — the creator of this project has as of today collected 839,661 drawings of giraffes and has only 208 days left to reach his goal of one million giraffe drawings!

New Morning Nook

Charlie this morning pulled over the basket containing the newspaper recycling and after tentatively poking his nose in he settled inside it for his morning doze.

In other critter news, I saw my first Swainson’s hawks of the year this afternoon, two birds flying into the black walnut trees on the opposite side of the road.

River Otters In The Arb

We’re expecting three weeks or so of solid rain so we decided to go for a walk this morning out to the UC Davis Arboretum before the deluge hit. We saw a few new birds for the year (green heron, orange-crowned warbler…) but the big excitement was seeing a couple of river otters in the Arboretum waterway! Pica had heard that they were around several weeks ago but received no subsequent news about them. The waterway is a closed body of water so the mystery is how did they disperse into it — probably taking a sneaky path from Putah Creek following any number of culverts. We saw the otters working their way along the north side of the waterway: they were mostly underwater but we could spot their wake and air bubbles. The best view was after they had ducked into one of the storm culverts on the side of the waterway. One of them poked their head forward, and we had a clear view of his muzzle and whiskers! There is plenty of carp for them to eat, so we hope they stick around.