(no subject)

[dr_pretentious]

paganpilgrim is, as far as I know, the only marine biologist on my friends list, but just in case anybody else has a useful opinion, here are the questions I mainly mean to ask her:

Okay, so supposing a guy from Atlantis washed up, injured, on Sandy Hook. Injured, like, with abrasions and maybe some cuts. Presumably, little creatures would have taken up residence in his cuts, right? But what kinds of little creatures? In Patrick O'Brian's novels, the characters talk all the time about bodies being feasted on by crabs, so would it be crabs? Planktonic ones, like the ones you showed us? Or something else?

If you were going to add gills to the human body, where would you put them? Hollywood loves to put gills on the neck, but that seems kind of suspect to me, from a practical standpoint. As the body modification artist in the story says, "If a man wants gills, it's nobody's business to say him nay." Still, they ought to go in the right place.

Do you mind if I borrow the idea of your house to be the setting for the supernatural farce I'm writing? Well, actually, it's too late. My characters have already moved into the idea of your house, except the floor plan's different. Presumptuous imaginary people that they are, they're already making soup in the idea of your kitchen and ordering pizza on the idea of your phone. Well, now that I get a better look at it, maybe it's the idea of somebody else's phone, but it's still in the idea of your house, since the characters needed to live right on the shore. What the world needs now is more supernatural farces in the New Jerseyan mode.

They won't get underfoot, I promise. Jane slams doors a lot, and Sophie's a slob, but they mean well.

How long after getting a body piercing does it take before swimming in salt water doesn't sting?

Comments

[lindalee.livejournal.com]

I think that where gills "used to be" is a known thing. No, I don't happen to know it, but someone must.

And aren't there gill-like slits that appear while a fetus is developing, which can, on very rare occasions, persist until birth, requiring corrective surgery? The location of those must be known, too.

Good luck.

[crepuscular.livejournal.com]

there's a pretty detailed description of *where* they go at http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/r/re/recapitulation_theory.htm

but you still need to have some anatomy textbook pictures on hand to figure it out.

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-33712?tocId=33712 also looks promising, but it's a subscription site.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

Injured, like, with abrasions and maybe some cuts. Presumably, little creatures would have taken up residence in his cuts, right?
how big are these cuts sposed to be? cuts-and-scratches size? if so, there won't be much in them; possibly bacteria. maybe larger unicellular critters, but i think the immune system would mop them up pretty quickly. maybe diatoms and other beasties in glass houses would live; i'm not sure how well the immune system can throw stones at them. :)

crabs scavenge, so i don't think they'll infest wounds, unless the guy is much closer to dead than you seem to want.

If you were going to add gills to the human body, where would you put them?
how much can i reroute the plumbing? chest and upper back should work ok with some changes to the circulatory system. (humans briefly have gills during fetal development, but i'm not sure if/where they reach the outside, or even have all the bits to work.)

um, is guy sposed to breath air, too?

hm. i wonder if we'd need larger mouths and throats to move enuf water over gills. that is, if you want them like fish have. for external ones like salamanders have, i think they'd have to be pretty big. i also wonder if mammals would have problems staying warm with gills, since running all that nice cold water over structures with lots of blood flowing thru them is gonna dissipate a lot of heat. hm, maybe with fancy heat-exchanging capillaries...

foo! i think our (adult) hemoglobin wouldn't work so well for oxygen exchange with water, so this guy might need something else. maybe something closer to fetal hemoglobin gamma. maybe i'll look up how fish blood differs from ours when i go blind from reading patents.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Substantial lacerations, if not life-threatening on their own.

Yeah, he breathes air.

Don't make yourself crazy with the research, unless that's entertaining to you. After all, this is a supernatural farce, not an attempt at hard sf. For one thing, the call for submissions that prompted the idea for the story requires an intervention of the supernatural into ordinary life-- even if it's the ordinary life of odd characters. Too much emphasis on functional oxygen exchange would probably give the story the wrong feel.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

it's entertaining intellectual exercise, and a fine distraction from tracking down a bug in somebody else's software. :)

breathing both air and water would be ... hard. but with a spec asking for the supernatural, i guess i'd be tempted to punt on the science altogether and embrace his being from atlantis: the city sank, and deep magic allows more-or-less normal humans there to breath water Just Because. give him the traditional blue skin and big eyes so we know he's from the deeps. :)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Nix the blue skin and big eyes. I thought he might speak Greek, though, if I were to embrace any of the big cliches.

Turns out the vestigial gills show up on what turns into the throat, and the top gill slit becomes the ear. Found a wacky anecdotal bit about a woman who, while pregnant, developed a spongy growth in her throat. Doctors at first feared cancer, but it turned out to be one of her vestigial gill slits inexplicably trying to go functional. After pregnancy, it went away. Dubious, yeah, but quite heartening for the story's sake. Sophie's odd taste in men gets to be just as problematic as I'd thought it would.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

ah, the joys of human development!

i was pretty sure such gills as we have would end up on somewhere between
the jaw and the collarbone, but i wasn't sure where. if you wanna give him gills on his neck to make sympathetic magic go, feel free. i couldn't see any way to make them functional with our bodies plumbed as they are.

hm. various folks keep desperately searching for evidence that atlantis has something to do with thera going pop. they wanna sink a city on the coasts of crete or cyprus, or one on a tiny island between either one and thera. well, why not? have him speak whatever proto-greek goes with linear b. :)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Oh, and you'll be amused to know that a google search on vestigial gills human infants gets more creationist crank sites than science.

[jeneralist.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I just did a similar search in trying to answer your question, fonud a lot of "even developmentally, humans never have 'gills', it's just a misnomer to support the lie of evolution...."

Where do they really wind up? Eustachian tubes is one of the places -- those little tubes between your ears and your throat that you need to 'pop' on an airplane.

Random ideas: I've heard it said that the hammer/anvil/stirrup system of bones gives us about the same level of amplification that would come from just being in water otherwise. Aside from the problems of breathing in and out of water, producing and hearing sound in and out of water could be interesting, too.

Gills would need to be HUGE to really support a mammal in water. Oxygen is much more concentrated in air than in sea water; to get the same amount of O2 out of sea water to support a human, you'd need just an AMAZINGLY large surface. (Is there a unit of area roughly equivalent to the "metric boatload"?) Dolphins and whales have been in the water for a durn long time, and never re-invented the gill.

So your Atlanteans might have blowholes instead....

But if it's gills you want, you might consider making them retractable somehow that either fit into the chest, or, if you really want to be gross, you can use the omentum. That's this membrane that hangs down in the abdomen, absolutely covered in blood vessels -- one way to do dialysis is to exchange toxins across this membrane ("peritoneal dialysis" instead of "hemodialysis"). Why not use it to exchange oxygen instead? It would mean their bellies would open up, somehow....

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I thought about blowholes, but the visual didn't feel right.

How ridiculous would it be to have not-very-well-functioning gills that worked well enough to be a sort of backup respiratory method, something that would work for a short period of time? Fortunately, the story doesn't require the gills to work very well. Actually, the story's still pretty larval right now, so it may not, in the end, require gills at all. It does seem to require a house with a picture window once had a stunning view of the ocean, but that now has an underwhelming view of a seawall, and it requires an opening scene on Gunnison Beach. It requires sushi, tax forms, and a tattoo artist. Also, a utilikilt. We'll see about the gills.

Your suggestions about sound are intriguing. I'll have to let that percolate. Our visitor should have some songs from home. I wonder how different from ours they ought to sound.

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I could see blow holes, either. If the guys from Atlantis, which is supposed to be completely submerged, then where would they surface to get the air? Going this route, I'd actually do most of the anatomical restructuting internally and give the guy lungs that take up most of the chest cavity to store lots of air, or even an internal air sac or something. I would think that the really freaky aspects would be nictating eye covers (or whatever they are called) so he can keep his eyes open under water and all body hair being very fine and short.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I like those nictitating membranes! I'll have to let that percolate, see if it settles into the character.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

well, i'm often amused by the loyal opposition, cause pointing and laughing is cheaper and easier to get away with than sniping from tall buildings. maybe i should follow this idea to a logical(?) conclusion and hire professionals to mock them.

[paganpilgrim.livejournal.com]

he he...
Im giggling and listening to bob marley... some one is ordering pizz and another is coming back from the beach with isopods attached to his gills... he he...

just kidding im all alone

when Ive dreamed ive had gills they were begind my ears... deep gills that are not terribly fillimentis... more like shark gills. i have no idea, but in some movies they range beteen behind the ears to the neck.. but i concur with ear tubes being pretty fleshy location to access our lungs...

except that I have been thinking that if we were aqualung then when swimming we might gulp water, let it fill our lungs and filter out the bottom... but we would need a muscle or a lever to hold the sac for air... hmmmm...

critters that infest open sores and can even burrow are in the crustacean family, though not crabs exactly. Crabs are scavengers but many crabs also hunt and attack their prey. Most everything is an opportunivore and few would argue with crabs... but sea lice are an amphipod i believe and isopods of which there are many would also be likely to attach to a floating/swimming body with either open wounds or soft (scale/slime free) flesh that can be easily burrowed. The critters that attach to mantas backs and many slower whales are like this too... its concieveable that a flesheating polychaete like a glicerid blood worm or a clam worm would eat human flesh though even lacerated fish are rarely affected by marine annelid worms... then there are ribbon worms, platyhelmenthes, flukes and whatnot when flesh is dead or dying these along with zillions of bacteria and maybe even a fish or two might pick at it...
Diatoms and phytoplankton would not be infesting to eat the flesh as they are photosythetic...

Id go with some nasty isopods and sea lice...

I think that ansered some or maybe none of your questions....

come to the beach... dress as a pirate
drink rum and sing sea shanties...

next weekend... maybe sonday

[jeneralist.livejournal.com]

I'm reading this thread again, with my darling reading over my shoulder, and we are struck by the thought: We have some amazing friends.

Aforementioned darling offers his Utilikilt and volunteers the name of a tattoo-artist friend. I can supply sushi and, alas, an abundance of tax forms.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we do, don't we?

This is the most amusing comment thread my little blog has ever had. And this after I'd nearly decided to send these questions to Meagan in a personal email. That would've been a fun little coffee run, but now we have a party. Yay, us.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I would love to come sing chanteys on the beach. This weekend and next weekend, I'm committed to out-of-state travel, but maybe the weekend after. I even know where to get a pirate hat now, so I'll be all set.

Sea lice sound perfectly disgusting, which is to say, disgusting to the perfect degree. I'll have to look up isopods to get a mental picture of them. None of the characters are marine biologists, so they probably wouldn't be able to name what they see, but I'd better get it right when I describe it.

Fond as I am of polychaetes, after your years of interpretive dance to demonstrate the key differences among marine worms, I'm not sure the character in question is close enough to dead to be beset by them.

So, while we're on the topic of making a plausible Atlantean refugee...okay, catching my breath from laughing at that opening...is kelp the sea vegetable he should be entangled in when he's found?

Glad to have amused you!

[paganpilgrim.livejournal.com]

Ahhh Kelp... Ill have to share my apical maristem images with you... I love kelp...

so here is the dealio on kelp... the giant sea kelp that most people visualize is a temperate water algae...

I think Sargassum weed is more likely to tangle an antlantian floater...

Saragassum is fun... its yellow and very interesting and often coated with critters too....

Kelp not just temperate but cold like eire, california is most famos and its not too cold in that water...
but its not found in the areas of the atlantic that I imagine an atlantian refugee would frequent....

maybe I can find images of sargassum

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Sargassum sounds very promising!

If a polychaete did adhere to you and try to eat your flesh, how would you get it off? I mean, once you were done running around screaming "There's a flesh-eating worm eating my flesh!"

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I found this informative introduction to isopods (http://tolweb.org/tree?group=Isopoda&contgroup=Peracarida). Very creepy. I think if I saw any of the beasties on those picture crawling in large numbers a person, I'd know something was seriously wrong.

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

For one thing, the call for submissions that prompted the idea for the story requires an intervention of the supernatural into ordinary life

Interesting concept. What is it for?

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

Brain storming here, with no research done.

Off hand, if I remember how gils work, fish intake water through the mouth and have it pass over the gills as it leaves. Which is one reason why the neck is an obvious place for them, since it is right by the throat. But another possibility might be on the side of the chest, under the arms. Water is taken in through the mouth and then passes through some sort of tubing to be let out on the side of the chest in the same general vacinity of the lungs. However, one would think it would need some reworking of other parts of the anatomy. For instance, if taken in through the mouth, the spinal column would need to be reconfigured to allow the person to effectively look "up," i.e., in the direction they swim, with more easy than for a normal human. Or the whole taking it in through the ear canal, which would change the way the person hears.

I suppose the gills could be on the cheeks, which would be the shortest way to get water past them, but might make eating hard

[wombats.livejournal.com]

I'll pipe in as well. Gills would be very hard. You may put them were you like but the surface area for the mammal, as mentioned, would be huge. Unless the sea he lived in was warm, keeping warm would be hard. Even a warm water can cause hypothermia - supposedly, exhausted/unconscious would give 3-12 hrs in 70-80 deg water, without gills to steal heat. Couple that with the low O2 tension, as mentioned, and mammals just don't get gills. Hemoglobin is a fine choice for the blood - so red blood beats out the copper ones, hands down. It's the choice of fish, everywhere! Critters with blue blood (copper) tend to tire quickly - molluscs, squid, octopi, for example.

Gill example: I vaguely recall an old John Brunner story wherein some of the protags had high tech gills that were something like 25 m^2 across and could only support slow movements - no swim sprints or the like. Since this was a hard SF story, he probably had some numbers from somewhere.

Parasites: how long has this species had to interact w/the sea? At this point, none of the various fish parasites one can acquire eating saltwater sashimi can actually give you a persistent parasite - they are just not adapted to us. Bacterial infections, tough as well. The ocean is so packed with bacteria phage that they have a hard reproducing in the open water. Don't know about fungi. In general, parasitic infections are usually rather host specific. Then again, whatever got the water guy to live in Atlantis may have brought along his own versions of nasty beasties.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

The Brunner bit sounds promising, and it's not something I'd have had floating around in my brain, so I'm glad you piped up. Not-overwhelmingly-fabulous gills with hard limitations would be just fine.

Given that none of the other characters are Atlanteans or biologists, I need to stick to parasites visible to the naked eye, stuff that's obviously Not Supposed To Be There, so I can convey to the reader that some Very Bad Things have happened to the visitor, without violating Jane's point of view. Sea lice are the current front runners, but the competition is still open to late-entering opportunivores.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

obvious and disturbing? how 'bout lampreys?

[writersweekend.livejournal.com]

Did you know I was once a body-piercer?

ahem.

So, I'd say it stings when you swim in salt water for about two to three days after a piercing. Some people like that sensation, so they play with their piercings to keep them from healing, or put peroxide on them to keep them from healing (it was once believed that peroxide would heal the piercing faster, but that is not true). The real hard-core folk would use rubbing alcohol to keep things from healing, or an ointment of cinnamon extract...you get the idea. The salt water would actually facilitate the healing, if you let it dry fairly soon after exposure...

[skyefyr.livejournal.com]

Oh, I wish I had known you a few years back! I had a piercing that wouldn't heal and I dilligently washed it with peroxide multiple times a day and could never understand why it was getting worse. (Fortunately, this time around I went to a better shop and was told to keep away from it, and it seems to be doing much better.)

So in may case, since it never really healed, it stung in salt water the whole time I had the piercing (which was like 4 years--what can I say, I'm stubborn and REALLY wanted that piercing). Not sure if that's any help at all or not.

My thought for gills would be covering the chest, pretty much the same area that the ribs would be. That seems the most logical to me.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Very helpful! Thank you.

And, um, cinnamon extract? Wow. That's hardcore, all right.

[shakti-lemaris.livejournal.com]

I asked my sister to draw a depiction of an Undine for me based on some description with regards to what I'm writing. What she came up with was a humanoid form with gills that ran along the sides, at, and approximately below the ribcage. Don't know if it's anatomically possible but it sure looked cool.