Dr. Hypercube has an essay up linking zoo architecture, raising poison dart frogs, and how to design an effective (fishing) fly. (The last references my late friend Datus Proper, who died with his waders on while fishing Hyalite Creek).
What these pursuits have in common is they all make an effort to communicate something intelligible to an animal. On the frogs:
"Dendrobatids and naturalistic vivaria go together like, I dunno, lobster and butter. You don’t need a planted tank to be successful with darts - lots of leaf litter, some film cannisters or a petri dish - depending on the species’ egg deposition preference - and a mister bottle will usually do the trick. It’s almost the reverse case - you can put PDFs in a planted tank and rather than destroying the plants and trashing the joint, they will settle in and, if you’ve done your world building well, thrive. To circle back to Geoff’s communication point again - I guess I’m trying to communicate with the frogs in an unnecessarily complicated way, with the complexity being for my - the observer’s - benefit."
Read it all of course.
1 comment:
Steve, I think I mentioned before that I always have really liked Proper's travel book on Portugal, "The Last Old Place".
What a way to go out, though!
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