Lately I’ve been thinking that were I a Disney Princess, I would probably be Pocahontas… hence the “Colors of the Wind,” lyric I’m using as the title here…
Reading about history on the internet is surely no substitute for a formal education but let me say this: I don’t think I would have the freedom in any classroom to debate connections between electric knifefish evolution in the freshwater lakes of the supercontinent Gondwana and migration along the highway of algae that brought humans from Asia around the Pacific Rim to the Americas long before any ice-free corridor opened between the North American glaciers.
I love how everything has a name… ancient Earth oceans like Iapetus and Panthalassa indicate that when we discover more about the history of liquid water on Mars, the discovering scientists are going to have to dig deep into their reserves of creativity for new names. We all know how creative scientists and engineers are… NOT! That is why here on the internet, I would like to offer up a name, a simple name, that scientists may, if they are so inclined, use for the first discovered ocean on Mars… “Bosco.” They may or may not take me up on this.
Electric knifefish probably were the last fish to swim in the oceans of Mars before the solar wind stripped away the atmosphere. The reason I state this so simply is not because of any scientific evidence: to the contrary, life has never been found outside of Earth, electric knifefish have never been found outside of South America, etcetera. However, because of Mars’ molten core cooling into a solid and therefore the shutdown of its magnetic field, I believe the last life on Mars, the fish in the Martian ocean of Bosco, must have generated their own electric field. Perhaps in the great oceans on the Jovian moon Titan there are also electric knifefish.
Even though no electric knifefish were able to flip-flop across open land to the Western lakes of the supercontinent Gondwana before it split into South America and Africa, they did and still can all generate their own personal electric fields. Something tells me we are going to find these things on other planets in extraterrestrial oceans like Bosco. Of course all that depends on a set of factors such as if life ever existed off Earth, the salinity of these oceans, the evolution of extraterrestrial fishes, etc. etc. The lesson here is that no schooling is needed to be perfectly informed about these things, and to expound on them accordingly.
A National Geographic program told me (in high definition) that America has always been a melting pot and a salad bowl of cultures since the first migrants followed the highway of kelp around the Pacific rim (the same boaters that overtook Australia?) fifty thousand years ago, just as smart as us, and made it to the West Coast at approximately the same time that Western Europeans trekked across the Atlantic on the glacial edge bringing with them the Clovis point and populating the southern East Coast, just as smart as us. Yes, it appears the land-bridge story was a bad one. I remember being in fifth grade thinking, “This whole land-bridge thing’s a little fishy.”
America has always been this way!
At least since three million years ago when the volcanic Isthmus of Panama rose up and bridged the two continents allowing for interchange of flora and fauna such as rodents and yes, electric knifefish. (Yes!) After Panama it was like the animals were picking teams for a game of dodgeball… South America sent up its armadillos, opossum, vampire bats, porcupine, dire wolves, hummingbirds and chupacabras… North America sent down its deer, rattlesnakes, cottontail rabbits, hog-nosed skunks, squirrels, big cats and short-faced bears. I bet it was cute!
Many mega-fauna species died off, however, around the time that gigantic waves of human beings flooded in, leading some scientists to believe that we were the catalysts of death and destruction. Rubbish, I say, for we people are the kindest and gentlest beings yet put forth by the evolution of life. For the record, tonight for dinner my aunt and I dined at a seaside clam shack and I had a foot-long chili-dog and a 1/4 LB cheeseburger and she had the fried scallops platter.
Maybe the evolution of our species is best respresented by a human tribe stalled on the land-bridge, and our future survival is dependent on an ice-free passage opening in the glaciers of our selfish desire. Perhaps the internet is like an algae superhighway and I am amongst those first in the grass rafts rowing away from the land where I was born. Or perhaps…
Bearnaut,
You are a wild blizzard. I suspect what you really need to further your self-motivated quest to determine the ways of the electric fish is more people to ask “What the hell are you talking about?”, which would give you reason to catch your breath and elaborate into whole books about the fishes, slowly. They would reach a wide audience of grass rafts breaking away from their from their own birthplaces.
“from their” is sweet baby cow’s stutter. can’t help it, born like that!