Rain, rain, rain and ripples du Charles

AKA

Winter has finally come in full force.  Rumours of a storm Caribbean side, affecting matters moistly.  Wow it's been raining!  Slugs and leaches take that as invitations to come hang out on our wet porch.  Death of a dehydrated invertebrate via human applied salt.

Yesterday, Kaia (aka dog-dog) and I (aka Ernesto) walk up to the institute in the rain.  We are superheros, so a bit of water doesn't phase us.  I don my inter-galactic impermeability force field (aka, umbrella), while Kaia wears her hydrophobic superhero cape (aka her dog rain coat).

About half way up the road, we spot a familiar birding guide, sitting inside his nice 1970s Toyota Land Cruiser: blue.  He's accompanied by two Spaniards hoping to see some birds.  His eye brows raise in a subtle expression of intrigue.

"Y el otro?"  (aka: "and the other one?" referring, no doubt, to Sir Charles).

Explanation.

More subtlety of expression in his face, indicating sadness, disappointment, awwww.

Detour:

Primates evolved out of a group of small nocturnal mammals.  The same stock of mammals that kept to the dark during the 150 million year or so reign of the dinosaurs.   At around 65 million years ago (mya), the dinosaurs went extint, most likely the result of a meteorite that struck near Mexico and Arizona (aka, formerly Mexico).  This triggered an adaptive radiation of a bunch of orders of mammals, primates included.

The last 65,000,000 years are known as the Cenozoic era.  At the beginning of it, we see the first primate-like mammals: the plesiadapiforms.  The first true primates (opposable thumbs, stereoscopic eye vision, post-orbital bars, etc), however, appear around 50mya. mostly in North America and Europe (at that point, the two continents had just begun to drift apart from each other).

"Aka Ernesto: get to the point"

These first primates were still nocturnal.  It's not until around 35mya that primates become diurnal animals (as a notable exception, Tarsiers, a small primate found in Asia, are still nocturnal).  The implications of a shift from night to day-time activity for sociality were huge.   We used our already very good vision to begin to read social landscapes along with the fruit and insects in the trees.  Hypotheses concerning the selective pressures that have shaped primate intelligence (aka, machiavellian inteligence) suggest that the ability to "read" social landscapes--hierarchies and such--fueled the type of intelligence that today characterizes primates.

*You are what you eat, you feel what you see*

One thing I like to do with people I just meet--particularly nice people, people that you can tell are "working" to make social interaction function smoothly--is to play with gestures.  We greet, engage in small talk, and as this happens, I rest my forearm over my head, sort-of stretching my back muscles.  Chances are, the other person in this dyad will do the same.  The same goes for facial expressions.  Scrunch your nose and another nose will scrunch.

Back to the birder.  Honed by millions of years of selective pressures that have molded mammals with stereoscopic vision, and keen social intelligence, it was apparent to me that he was saddened by the departure of Charles.  Rain-produced puddles, and ripples, the memory of a dog.

We are now nearing the end of this post.  Get this: this birder, like a good eco-minded primate, was concerned with Charlie's hunting.  One day, our other big-dog friend, 80lbs of Beto, charged up to this birder and a large group of North Americans, doggily saying hi, scaring the shit out some women.  So, you would think big hunting dogs would annoy the shit out of him, nuisances to his profession as they are.

Wrong.   Feelings and culture aren't rational (someone tell the World Bank).  Primate brains and facial expressions: clues to sentiments concerning canines and puddles in the rain.