Seahorses in the Thames

Eighteen months after the discovery by Zoological Society of London it has been announced that a colony of seahorses has been discovered in the Thames estuary. The discovery has been hailed as clear indicator of the increasing purity of the river’s water.

Alison Shaw, the Zoological Society of London’s marine and freshwater conservation manager, said: “These amazing creatures have been found in the Thames over the past 18 months during our wildlife monitoring work. It demonstrates that the Thames is becoming a sustainable habitat for a diversity of aquatic life.”

The short-snouted seahorses (see above for a picture of one bred in captivity in an Angelsey aquarium) in the Thames are commonly found around Africa and the Mediterranean but also sometimes near the southern coasts of Britain. Their usual habitat is shallow coastal waters rich in weeds and plant life, although they can be found as deep as 100ft. “They’re rarely found in Great Britain at all,” said Richard Harrington from the Marine Conservation Society. “If they are, then it is usually in the Channel Islands or near Dorset.”

Last year, however, juvenile seahorses of both the short-snouted and long-snouted species were found in the marina at Brighton, East Sussex. This was the first evidence to suggest the fish were actually breeding in British waters.

The Thames discovery illustrates the partial success of attempts to reduce pollution in a river once considered one of the dirtiest in Europe (Fifty years ago the river was declared biologically dead).

The clean-up has already resulted in the return of salmon, which were extinct in the Thames from 1833 until 1974 but are now breeding in Berkshire. Their regeneration has been aided by releases of juvenile fish. In 2006 a dead otter was found not far from Tower Bridge. Other sightings have confirmed that the mammal species could be staging a comeback.

Conservationists hope wildlife numbers will continue increasing but the Thames still suffers from periodic surges of pollution, especially after rainstorms, which tend to flush sewage from drains into the river. By 2019 the government plans to have built a 20-mile, £2 billion tunnel to collect such sewage and transport it to a treatment plant in east London.

The lower reaches of the river are often visited by porpoises and dolphins; in 2006 a northern bottlenose whale was watched by crowds of people as it swam upriver as far as Chelsea. It died while being rescued.

Some experts suspect that the decrease in pollutants is only one of the factors behind the appearance of se horses in the Thames. “There has also been a small but definite rise in the temperature of the North Sea and English Channel,” Harrington said, “and this may well be the cause of all the new and exciting species we are seeing.”

The last Turkish WWI veteran dies

Yakup Satar, the last Turkishy WWI veteran died last Wednesday at the age of 110. He fought at the Second Battle of Kut in the Mesopotamian campaign.

Satar was born in Crimea in 1898 into a Tartar family. His father, Zeki Bey, had been one of the Tartar chieftains who had fought for independence from the Russian Empire. In 1915 he enlisted in the Army of the Ottoman Empire. After basic training in Constantinople he was selected as part of a special 200-strong force trained in the techniques of gas warfare. He was captured in Mesopotamia in February 1917, as Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Maude’s British and Indian army drove the Ottoman Empire’s forces back up the Tigris from Basra towards Baghdad.

Released from captivity after the end of the First World War, Satar joined the forces of the Turkish National Movement under Mustafa Kemal in Anatolia which fought against the terms of the Allied partitioning of the Ottoman Empire. From 1919 to 1922 he fought in the Turkish War of Independence and the Greco-Turkish War which culminated in the declaration of the Turkish Republic in October 1923.

Satar settled in Anatolia at Eskisehir, 100 miles west of Ankara, where he married and had six children.

Satar’s death means that there are now just 12 WWI veteran alive. Franz Kunstler is now the only surviving Central Powers veteran.

Photo Hunt - Glass

The subject for this week's entry for Photo Hunt is glass. For once I don't have to stretch the theme! So here goes...

Waterford Crystal bottle

Stained glass window, St Andrew's Greensted (the old wooden church that was the subject of a photo hunt entry a little while ago)

Oscar

This is Oscar a stray the not-wife took in in 1989. He was around 3 or 4 at the time. He came with us when we bought our house in 1992 and he died, aged 16 or 17, in 2002. This photo was taken some time in early 2002. This week's entry for Friday Ark and Carnival of the Cats.

The youngest planet?

A team of astronomers has detected an embryonic planet detected around the star HL Tau. What makes this discovery interesting is that it could be less than 2,000 years old. Research leader Dr Jane Greaves said the planet's growth may have been kick started when another young star passed the system 1,600 years ago.

The scientists studied a disc of gas and rocky particles around HL Tau, which is 520 light-years away and thought to be less than 100,000 years old. The disc is unusually massive and bright, making it an excellent place to search for signs of planets in the process of formation. Dr Greaves, from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, said the discovery of a forming planet around such a young star was a major surprise. "It wasn't really what we were looking for. And we were amazed when we found it," she told BBC News. The next youngest planet confirmed is 10 million years old."

Dr Ken Rice, from the Institute of Astronomy in Edinburgh, said the discovery shed new light on theories of planet formation. According to one model, planets form from the bottom up. Under this scenario, particles of rocky material collide and "stick" to one another, forming a bigger and bigger object. But he thinks the proto-planet in HL Tau formed relatively quickly when a region of the disc collapsed to form a self-contained structure. This could occur because of gravitational instability in the disc itself.

Intriguingly, another young star in the same region called XZ Tau may have made a close pass of HL Tau about 1,600 years ago. Although not required for planet formation, it is possible that this flyby perturbed the disc, making it unstable. This would be a very recent event in astronomical terms. "It's possible it gave a 'yank' to one side of the disc around HL Tau, making it unstable, and that this was a 'trigger' for the planet to form," Dr Greaves explained. "If the planet formed in the last 1,600 years, that would be incredibly recent."

Beating (err whipping) depression and addiction

An old story I know, but it’s quite an unconventional way to tackle depression! According to Pravda in 2005 scientists from Novosibirsk made a sensational report at an international conference devoted to new methods of treatment and rehabilitation in narcology called “Methods of painful impact to treat addictive behaviour.” According to the report addiction, depression, and psychosomatic diseases occur when an individual loses his or her interest in life. This is caused by decreased endorphin production. If a depressed individual receives physical punishment it will stir up endorphin receptors, activate the “production of happiness” and eventually remove depressive feelings.

Russian scientists recommend the following course of the whipping therapy: 30 sessions of 60 whips on the buttocks in every procedure. A group of drug addicts volunteered to test the new method of treatment: the results can be described as good and excellent. Doctor of Biological Sciences, Sergei Speransky, is one of the authors of the whipping therapy. The professor apparently used the self-flagellation method to cure his own depression; he also recovered from two heart attacks with the help of physical tortures too.

”The whipping therapy becomes much more efficient when a patient receives the punishment from a person of the opposite sex. The effect is astounding: the patient starts seeing only bright colours in the surrounding world, the heartache disappears, although it will take a certain time for the buttocks to heal, of course,” he said.

The whipping therapy is not new: Soviet specialists used a special method of torturing therapy at mental hospitals (so not just in the gulags?) . They made injections of brimstone and peach oil mixture to inspire mentally unbalanced patience with a will to live. A patient would suffer from horrible pain in the body after such an injection, but he or she would change their attitude to life for the better afterwards. ”People might probably think of me as a masochist,” Dr. Speransky said. “But I can assure you that I am not a classic masochist at all,” he added.

Hmmm: Prozac or a good thrashing.....I somehow think most would opt for the former rather than the latter. I suppose Leopold von Sacher Masoch might have looked forward to being a bit low though!

Nina Conti and Monk

Silly but amusing

Now we are two

Here startes year three of the Poor Mouth's life. When I started I didn't know how long I would last before I got tired and gave up - I didn't expect to make it to two years!

I am grateful to everyone who continues to visit, everyone who has linked to the Poor Mouth and to everyone who has left comments over the last two years. Without you the Poor Mouth is nothing.

WW - Inside a bunker

A few miles away from where I live, is a small and unassuming building which hides a big secret: it's the entrance to a Cold War era nuclear bunker.. Until the early 1990s it woukld have been a regional seat of Government if the UK had faced a nuclear attack. Several hundred officials would have been housed here, their function to administer part of a shattered country.

The bunker is now open to the public asnd advertised with signs saying "This way to the Secret Bunker". This week's entry for the Tuesday and Wednesday edition of Wordless Wednesday.

Some Ern Malley for April Fool's Day

With any luck there will be a good crop of April Fool stories in today's press. Whether they are of the calibre of the BBC's famous spaghetti harvest documentary or the Guardian's San Serriffe spoof remains to be seen.

Although not an April Fool Day joke Ern Malley was a superb literary hoax. Malley was a fictitious poet created by two Australians, James McAuley and Harold Stewart. They created a spoof biography and wrote a series of modernist poems in a single day then submitted them to an avant garde Australian publication called Angry Penguins. Editor Max Harris was taken in and published a whole edition devoted to Malley's work in June 1945. Here are two examples of Malley's "output":

Culture as Exhibit

“Swamps, marshes, borrow-pits and other
Areas of stagnant water serve
As breeding-grounds ...” Now
Have I found you, my Anopheles!
(There is a meaning for the circumspect)
Come, we will dance sedate quadrilles,
A pallid polka or a yelping shimmy
Over these sunken sodden breeding-grounds!
We will be wraiths and wreaths of tissue-paper
To clog the Town Council in their plans.
Culture forsooth! Albert, get my gun.

I have been noted in the reading-rooms
As a borer of calf-bound volumes
Full of scandals at the Court. (Milord
Had his hand upon that snowy globe
Milady Lucy’s sinister breast . . .) Attendants
Have peered me over while I chewed
Back-numbers of Florentine gazettes
(Knowst not, my Lucia, that he
Who has caparisoned a nun dies
With his twankydillo at the ready? . . .)
But in all of this I got no culture till
I read a little pamphlet on my thighs
Entitled: “Friction as a Social Process.”
What?
Look, my Anopheles,
See how the floor of Heav’n is thick
Inlaid with patines of etcetera . . .
Sting them, sting them, my Anopheles.

Palinode

There are ribald interventions
Like spurious seals upon
A Chinese landscape-roll
Or tangents to the rainbow.
We have known these declensions,
Have winked when Hyperion
Was transmuted to a troll.
We dubbed it a sideshow.

Now we find, too late
That these distractions were clues
To a transposed version
Of our too rigid state.
It is an ancient forgotten ruse
And a natural diversion.
Wiser now, but dissident,

I snap off your wrist
Like a stalk that entangles
And make my adieu.
Remember, in any event,
I was a haphazard amorist
Caught on the unlikely angles
Of an awkward arrangement. Weren’t you?

Harris later made the best of his humiliation by publishing a literary journal called Ern Malley's Journal.

Click here to visit a website devoted to the Ern Malley affair