Anthropomorphic sub-species...

I know this is old news, but let me get this straight. Mickey Mouse is a mouse who has a pet dog, Pluto, and a best friend, Goofy, who is also a... dog? Pluto walks on all fours and wears a collar, but no gloves. Goofy, a biped, wears shabby street clothes and white gloves, and though goofy, seems to possess a certain rational capacity. I can't tell if this is a form of divine madness or ruthless cartoon apartheid. Curious to see how Disney's anthropomorphic puzzle evolves in the coming makeover.

Where are the whites of the eyes in other animals?

In most primates, the outer fibrous covering of the eyeball, or sclera, is pigmented and appears as a uniform or dark brown color. Brown coloration of the sclera provides little contrast with adjacent tissues, including the facial skin surrounding the eyeball and the pupils (brown pupils are the norm for all primates, save for humans and some lemurs), making it difficult to detect the position of the iris and thus the direction of gaze in nonhuman primates. Humans have a transparent conjunctiva and lack pigmentation in the sclera, giving us the distinctive feature of “whites of the eyes.”

The white sclera in humans contrasts markedly with the pigmented skin surrounding the eye, and with the pupil, facilitating the detection of the orientation of the iris and the direction of gaze. In addition, humans have more of the sclera exposed (relative to face and body size) than do other primates, making the pupil (and direction of gaze) all the more conspicuous (relative to orangutans, the amount of visible sclera is two to three times larger in humans).

Since humans are heavily dependent on cooperative social interactions, and frequently engage in joint attentional interactions with others (in which gaze following may play an important role in coordinating the attention of cooperating individuals), selection may have favored a loss of pigmentation in the sclera as a means of facilitating social communication, an idea known as the “cooperative eye hypothesis.”

Interestingly, visible whites of the eyes are a feature of many domesticated dogs.

- from The Museum of Comparative Anthropogeny (MOCA)

("What?" by John Siskin)

Cat wigs...

Believe me you... you, human, I have better things to do with my very important self than to worry myself with such trifling things as feline hairpieces, however... I would like to point out, for the record, that I very clearly stated at a (drunken) dinner in 2008 that cat wigs would be the solution to all of our problems. And now this. So, all I need is for everyone to agree that I was right, and then we can move on. OK? OK.

On moving bees (& them colonizing your psyche in return)...

And, here's a short movie of the move. Be forewarned, colorful language abounds as I get stung. Enjoy! PG

full bee story to come...

(Photos: Augusta Quirk, Sarah Bay Williams, Paul Gachot; Song: "Bees" by Caribou)

Birds on Guitars...

Hendrix reincarnated no doubt...

(by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot)

Total Bee Mayhem...

Please stand by...