g***e
发帖数: 577 | 1 Comment: The fact that he'd be less physically intimidated by 100 whinnying,
duck-sized horses hardly matters.
Body:
President Obama's handlers failed to alert their boss to the most clever
question he was asked on Reddit in August: "Would you rather fight 100 duck-
sized horses or one horse-sized duck?" Staffers with more Reddit savvy could
've prepped an answer. Last autumn, New York Times columnist Nicholas
Kristof had a quick response. "Definitely one horse-sized duck," he typed. "
Then I'd distract it with some cracked corn and, as it gobbled it up, I'd
jump on its back and take it for a flight."
How evocative! Imagine the globetrotting opinion-maker soaring o'er the
clouds, perched side-saddle. He surveys the earth below and gives his signal
. The mallard swoops suddenly down on a Third World capital, his brutal
wings pummeling the stunned sex-traffickers until their would be victims
flee to safety. An irresistible vision! So much so that I can forgive
Kristof, an opinion journalist with a bent for reportage, for failing to
factcheck his flight of fancy.
He is hardly alone. Since the Reddit forum, the mainstream media has merely
opined about the better choice. Are there no reporters left?
The White House is as awash in speculation:
In the days following, staffers debated the answer. Most immediately chose
the 100 duck-sized horses -- they would be easy to stomp on and were,
generally, a reflection of the usual day-to-day conflicts in life. A danger
to the shins, but possibly manageable. "Ducks are not exactly teeny-tiny --
so 100 duck-sized horses (as opposed to duckling-sized horses), while
smaller than a miniature pony, are still probably clocking in somewhere
around ten pounds each," one Obama official argued. "That's a lot to kick/
throw/battle."
Who would choose to fight a duck the size of a horse? The beak. The wingspan
. The ability to defend and attack in the air, on land, and in the water.
Has conventional wisdom replaced research?
I'd have been tempted to join my colleagues in the press and the people we
cover in mere opinion-mongering. But I've been powerfully shaped by a
question I conceived earlier in my career: If a shark and a tiger were to
fight, how many inches of water would it take for the shark to win?
The item I produced on the subject would've been impossible without shark
expert Ralph S. Collier, who graciously answered the question put to him by
email. The experience taught me a valuable journalistic lesson: If you send
animal researchers outlandish hypothetical questions that touch on their
area of expertise, they'll respond generously, especially if inter-species
combat is involved*.
John M. Eadie chairs the Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation
Biology at the University of California, Davis, where his areas of expertise
include avian ecology and waterfowl.
What does he think about Nick Kristof's soaring rhetoric and White House
worries about being attacked on air, land, and sea?
"It could not fly," he insists, illustrating his argument by assuming a
horse-sized duck weighing 1,000 pounds.
"At 1,000 pounds, the wing-loading (ratio of body weight to wing area) would
be immense. The wing-loading of a mallard duck is less than 0.02 lbs/square
inch (2.5 pounds over a wing area around 150 square inches). So, scaling up
400 fold (and it is not necessarily linear, but I will assume so for
simplicity here), would require a wing area of 60,000 square inches = 416
square feet = 10 ft wide by 40 feet long," he explains. "The wings would
have to be immense. Not likely (and indeed this is what limits the size of
flying birds, in the absence of jet engines!). So, we don't have to worry
about the terror duck attacking from the air. It would be a land lubber." **
The Obama Administration eventually started to ask better questions. "It's
just one opponent -- you can focus all your energy, attention, and strength
on outsmarting it," the unnamed official told BuzzFeed. "Maybe it tires
easily. Hard to know." In fact, it would tire easily:
With such a huge body, the problem of surface area to body volume comes into
play. The terror-ducktyl would have a problem losing heat. Hence, a
possible tactic would be to get it running around chasing me and it might
overheat, stroke out, and die. Birds have higher body temperatures than
mammals in any case (often very close to the 40 degrees Celsius upper lethal
limit) so it might not take too much to push the duck over the metabolic
cliff. Merits consideration.
And it would be easy to outsmart. "Ducks are dumb. There is a record of some
research in which half of a duck's brain was removed surgically ... with no
discernible change in its behavior," Eadie explained, though he didn't see
that aspect of its biology as an unalloyed advantage. "The flip side, is
that in battle, I could literally destroy half the terror-duck's brain and
it would have no impact on the battle. Nothing worse than a dumb opponent
who doesn't know how to quit."
So did he expect the fight against the oversized duck to be easier?
After all, as nature writer Sy Montgomery, author of Birdology, pithily
pointed out in a separate email, "There once WERE horse-sized ducks: they
were known as Mihirungs, giant flightless birds who stood up to three meters
high and weighed up to half a metric ton. They lived in Australia during
the late Tertiary and early Pleistocene. But where are they now? They must
have a weakness."
Perhaps so.
But despite its weaknesses, "I fear the duck," Eadie confessed.
Lest you worry that he's just a thoughtlessly embracing the conventional
wisdom, as shaped by Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 horror movie The Birds and the
chilling scholarly article "Aggressive Behavior and Interspecific Killing by
Flying Steamer-Ducks in Argentina," with its talk of "aggression toward a
wide variety of species not closely related taxonomically, or similar in
appearance or food habits," don't fret: His arguments for the horse-sized
duck's strengths are compelling.
As he put it:
(1) Birds (ducks) have a far more efficient respiratory system than mammals
(one way flow through the lungs and they capture almost all of the oxygen
passing through the lungs compared to half that in the lungs of mammals).
The duck could easily outlast me.
(2) The wings of a 1,000-pound duck would be threatening armaments. Bird
bones are hollow, but incredibly strong, especially the humerus (main wing
bone). I have been beaten (literally) when banding Canada Geese and their
wings can deliver a wallop that leaves bruises on even the most hardened of
field biologists. The Giant Canada Goose (Branta canadensis maxima) is the
largest goose in the world and can get up to 20 pounds -- our terror duck
would be 50 times the size! One wing thump would be a deathblow.
(3) Birds, when flying, bear their entire body weight on their wings. And,
when migrating, they do this for 24-36 hours at a time. So, they are
suspending their entire body weight by their "arms" held straight-out from
their side. It is equivalent to a human gymnast holding the iron cross
position for 24 hours. And lifting their body up and down repeatedly. You
want to fight something that can do that?
(4) Even our ex-governor in California would envy the chest muscles of a
bird. Their wings are powered by huge breast muscles (the pectorals major
and pectorals minor) that lift and lower the wing and the bird's weight.
These muscles comprise up to 30 percent of the birds body weight. So, our
terror duck has 300 pound 'pecs. Nope, not wanting to face that.
(5) Waterfowl are omnivores, horses are herbivores. The duck could eat me,
the horses would not.
(6) Birds have gizzards, known for their crushing ability. A shrike can
digest a mouse in a few hours. Turkeys can crunch 24 walnuts in the shell in
less than 4 hours and grind surgical lancets to grit in less than 16 hours.
Aside from what the terror-duck's gizzard would do to me if it ate me, it
could easily chomp down and grind to dust any weapon I might have.
(7) The bill of a duck is adapted for picking and sieving. It has ridges
called lamella - regular teeth like edges on its mandibles. Nothing to
really worry about for a regular-sized duck. But scaled up 400 fold (2.5
pounds to 1000), those 0.02 inch long lamella would be 8 inch long crusher
blades with 50-70 of these arranged along the edge. Hmmm. Not wanting to
faces that, thanks.
(8) Waterfowl are among the oldest existing group of birds. And we know
quite well, now, that birds are actually dinosaurs (I kid you not). Their
ancestry --- theropod (maniraptoran) dinosaurs. They are relatives, and most
closely aligned, with the group that includes tyrannosaurs and
velociraptors. They have serious attitude and it comes with the family
history.
Eadie is almost dismissive of the duck-sized horses.
Granting that they'd be fast and capable of fighting in a herd, he points
out that "horses are edgy and easily spooked. Move toward one, especially
quickly and unexpectedly, and they run away (if you have never tried to
saddle even a tame horse, try it). And if they were scaled down to the size
of a duck, even their most potent weapon (kicking with their hooves or
biting) would not be lethal and would likely deliver little more than
bruised or nibbled shins." Of courses, the horses could more easily run away
, but it turns out they'd also be easier to best in a war of attrition:
At their high metabolic rate, and the increased surface area to volume ratio
, the dorses would be challenged to keep up a fast or active lifestyle and
find enough food, especially if they remained herbivorous. Horses spend a
large part of their time eating even at their current size, given the long
processing time required for digesting vegetation. At the size of a duck (
with much more surface area to volume, such that they would rapidly lose
metabolic heat), they would need much more food relative to their body mass.
They would eat all day. So it would be easy to sneak up on them. Or starve
them to death. Or woo them over with apples and sugar cubes. And if it got
down and dirty, given the relatively frail ribs and femurs of modern horses
(work horses excepted), I suspect that many of the dorses cold be dispatched
with a swift kick.
Finally, just as there were giant birds that went extinct, Eadie points out,
"there were indeed small horses (Eohippus, about the size of a small dog).
They went extinct. That says something."
****
So wait just a minute, you might be thinking. If Eadie and a majority of
people who've pondered this question say that the 100 duck-sized horses
would be the easier biological opponent, why am I so sure that President
Obama would fight the horse-sized duck?
Come now.
Prudence and biological consequences are low on the list of factors that
dictate which wars of choice get waged, as so many maimed veterans of the
Iraq War can attest. Political reality matters more.
Eadie understands as much. After engaging his graduate students in
conversation, he came to realize that it would be politically disastrous for
Obama to fight the duck-sized horses. Think about it. In America, the duck
lobby is composed of duck hunters. The horse lobby is made up of horse
lovers who succeeded in stopping Californians from buying horse meat. The
young women voters essential to the Democratic coalition are far more
sympathetic to veritable ponies than a giant, rape-obsessed mallard.
Shooting the duck would be perfectly legal under existing law, or would at
worst result in a citation for hunting without a license.
But killing the duck-sized horses?
"If Obama killed just one of the hundred 'dorses', he would be subject to
legal action and huge fines under existing federal law (e.g. The Wild Free-
Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, the animal welfare act and, based on
a recent case, even the National Environmental Policy Act)," Eadie points
out. "There is no sport horsery! The legal implications would have him tied
up in court, bankrupt or in prison faster than you can say Secretariat."
It's easy to anticipate the coalition that would form against him. Still
upset about being dinged for putting Seamus on the roof and urged by his
Rafalca-loving wife to intercede, Mitt Romney would lead the charge to draw
up impeachment papers. Congressional Republicans would surely be amenable to
cooperating.
Even barring that scenario, the politics are clear: You fight the giant duck
. So what about the execution?
That's actually the clincher.
A moment's reflection is enough to understand that Obama would "fight" his
inter-species foe the same way he "fights" militants. It would probably be
hard to pummel a horse-sized duck to death or to slay it with a sword, but
the commander-in-chief's weapon of choice is a Predator drone equipped with
a Hellfire missile, operated under secret legal authority. Behind their
computer screens in the Nevada desert, would it be easier for the drone
pilots to kill the horse-sized duck, or the whole herd of duck-sized horses?
The little equines would scatter, despite the preparatory steps even now
being taken to prepare them for the duress of war:
keep calm cantor.png
In fact, it isn't clear that the American people would buy the notion of
little horses being legitimate targets in the War on Terror. But the giant
duck? Sure, its presence on American soil might complicate things. Even
neoconservatives are made uneasy by the prospect of drones in American
airspace. But that's where the real genius of choosing the horse-sized duck
is revealed.
You've heard of avian flu? Yeah: bioweapon. Obama could plausibly claim that
there are more WMDs in that monster duck than were ever found in Iraq, and
he's surrounded himself with people who voted for that war in 2002. The
whole Washington establishment and much of the nation would rally behind
Obama against the duck. Go back to the beginning of this story and you'll
see that even an unprompted Eadie, a dispassionate man of science,
reflexively started referring to the foe as "a terror-duck." Given America's
post-9/11 deference to POTUS in matters of terrorism, Obama would obviously
choose "the terror duck" as his enemy. Its ducklings would be lucky to
survive. |
