Hmm...interesting website (as usual, it has little if anything to do with Firefly, but never mind) about the Hawaiian animals.
Poor Albatrosses...a friend of mine once tried to start a debate over who would win in a fight between a Mongoose and an Albatross...doesn't seem quite so hilarious now. Why would anyone introduce Mongooses? (not Mongeese) Was there a snake problem, or did two guys have a contest to see who could bring in the most random animal?
One more question: Why is it that ninjas are always funny/cool? -t just randomly mentioned ninjas, and I laughed. Why?
Did the Polynesians not have rats?
I wonder if, on the terraformed worlds of the Firefly 'verse, there are Earth creatures that no one would have wanted to bring, but got there anyway, like rats, or cockroaches.
I'm sad that I missed the thread change.
Polynesians brought rats, too.
and I forgot a Hawaiian bat as the other native mammal.
Yeah, this is the creepy part. It's not caused by anything that is alive. It's caused by a new kind of protein that corrupts the other proteins. Like that new kind of water in the Vonnegut story that freezes at room temperature, and also transfoms ordinary water into its own form on contact, so if you touch your tongue to it you freeze solid.
Prions or something, right Rick? My cousin's m-i-l died of probable vCJD (I don't think they allowed an autopsy, which is the only way to prove it--by looking at the brain) a few years ago, and I googled a lot, at the time. They didn't know what hit her at first. They thought she had a stroke, and then nothing fit the expected prognosis. It was heartbreaking, because they knew she was dying and in so many ways was already gone.
Tthere's more than one mammal native to Hawaii? I'll never be able to remember two. Oh well.
I might be able to remember that Hawaiian bats exist, though, 'cuz that's just cool.
This USGS paper pretty much covers all the bases on Hawaii's critters.
It's 'mongooses' because the -goose part of the word is from an entirely different root word than goose/geese.
I've learned a startling number of new things in these first few posts.
And, while the you may be tired of hearing it by now, I really LOVE the subscribe/unsubscribe function. It's beautiful.
Bats are native? Okay, weird. Because dood, that's a long way to fly when you're a bat.
Birds I get. Bats, not so much.
