Discovered: First Lungless Frog

Peter Herbolzheimer Rhythm Combination & Brass: Frog Dance
Wide Open (MPS, 1973)

For the full article: Live Science l Playahata

The enigmatic amphibian, dubbed Barbourula kalimantanensis, apparently gets all the oxygen it needs through its skin.

Scientists first saw one of these frogs 30 years ago, but due to their rarity, just one other specimen had been collected since then and neither had been dissected.

"No one thought to open them up — there was no real reason to believe that they could be lungless," said researcher David Bickford, an evolutionary biologist at the National University of Singapore. "Because these specimens were so rare, they had never been dissected. If you have just one specimen in your museum, you don't want to rip it open!"

Other organ weirdness

It appears that the rest of the internal organs in these frogs have shifted position to take up the space once filled by the lungs. "So we had the stomach, spleen and the liver up in the area where lungs are normally found," Bickford said. "Interestingly, we also discovered some abnormal cartilage around the area where the lungs should have been that we are still investigating."

The loss of lungs helped the frogs severely flatten their bodies. This in turn increased the surface area of their skin, which helps them absorb oxygen.

The researchers conjecture the loss of lungs might be an adaptation to the cold, fast rivers the frogs live in. Such waters naturally have high oxygen content. Also, the frogs would rather sink than float and get carried away in the water, so getting rid of lungs, which behave as flotation devices, would prove helpful.

Amphibians are also cold-blooded, "so their inherent energy requirements are very small — roughly 10 percent that of a similar sized mammal," Bickford said. "If you don't need as much oxygen anyhow, it might be easier to change, to lose lungs as the primary respiration organ."

The Day The Looney Tunes Died

From left to right: Mickey Mouse, Hewey, Dewey and Louie Wile E. Coyote ("genius") and Daffy Duck

What's Up Doc?: Lee Hyungkoo And The Origin Of The Species
By Howard Rutkowski


The Punch Line

A black room frames the installation, which is dramatically spot-lit. A presentation of two skeletons, not unlike what one might see in a museum of natural history; a predator chasing its prey. Then the dawning – it’s Wile E. Coyote and The Roadrunner! Reduced to a science exhibit! Brilliant, clever and very, very funny.

Once the laughter subsides, something very interesting begins to emerge. The work is not merely clever or amusing in the way that Cattelan’s taxidermy animals are. There’s a whole new bit of forensic activity at work and the viewer is drawn into an exploration of the process behind this reductio ad absurdum. First of all, cartoon characters are not real; they are two-dimensional exaggerations of human behaviour. Yet, over time, they have entered the pantheon of global popular culture and are more recognisable than the real personalities that shape our world (Just consider the multi-national empire that is Disney). Our own predisposition to anthropomorphise furry (and feathered) creatures allows us to endow them with personalities that reflect our own and to place them in situations that mirror the trials and tribulations of our daily lives. So, if these cartoon figures can represent us in a simplified, yet extreme form, it follows that this form can be deconstructed and analysed.

Lee Hyungkoo’s approach eschews the pop psychological approach to deconstruction. What he is doing is actually physical deconstruction – more pop palaeontology – and it is detailed, thorough and completely worked through.


‘Familiar Tree’

This was Lee’s original idea for the title of the exhibition. As a play on ‘family tree,’ he was looking to describe the evolution of his creations and to evoke the empathy we all have with these animated characters. This new body of work began with Homo Animatus of 2002–2004. This was an homunculus – Latin for ‘little man’ – a cartoon exaggeration of human form (think of Elmer Fudd as a skeleton). The original homunculus was a creature with magic powers that medieval alchemists claimed to have created. Considering that Lee’s studio looks more like a laboratory than a typical artist’s atelier, the connection is even more easily drawn. Plus cartoon characters do possess incredible strength, resilience and resourcefulness: how many times has the Coyote fell off a cliff, only to rebound fully-intact in the next frame?

Homo Animatus was an extension of a series of earlier pieces where the artist physically sought to alter – to reduce to cartoon simplicity – his own anatomy. Using plastic forms, enlarging and reducing lenses, Lee created a variety of body costumes that altered both one’s appearance and one’s vision of the real world at the same time. Homo Animatus is, for Lee, the ‘Origin of the Species;’ in a peculiar and devolutionary way, of course, and in keeping with how animated creatures serve as stand-ins for their human counterparts. Canis Latrans Animatus (Wile E. Coyote) and Geococcyx Animatus (Roadrunner) followed and are now joined by Lepus Animatus (Bugs Bunny), Felis Catus Animatus (Tom), Mus Animatus (Jerry), Anas Animatus (Donald Duck) and his three nephews, Animatus H, D and L (Huey, Dewey and Louie).

‘Familiar Tree’ remains an appropriate description for this body of work. These are the ‘skeletons’ of characters/personalities that are as close to us and as instantly recognisable as our own inner frames.


The Process

Stories of any kind usually require a build-up before offering the denouement. The joke involves a narrative before providing the punch line. Lee Hyungkoo works backwards. Merely seeing the work gives no clues to the complexity of its creation. Visually, the work can strike a chord and delight, amuse or bewilder, but examining its origins and development frames it properly.

Lee’s studio is a laboratory and could not be further removed from a scruffy artist’s garret. With a white-coated, masked team of technicians working in ‘clean rooms,’ the space is unlike any other. Bones of real animals sit on shelves alongside those of the works in progress. Clay constructions of skulls of imaginary characters provide a reference to those reconstructions of our fossilised ancestors. The walls are adorned with drawings of the anatomies of both real animals and their animated renditions. The tools and working methods are more akin to the procedures seen on the Nature Channel than the usual brush and paint-pot strewn environments one usually associates with the creation of contemporary works of art.

The adoption of Latin names to describe the individual creations underscores the faux-scientific approach, utilising the classifications associated with ‘kingdom, phylum, genus, species’ that categorise every living thing on the planet. Fans of the Roadrunner cartoons will recall that schoolboy Latin was often used to describe the characters, e.g. ‘Coyotus imbicilus.’


The Sources

The work itself, while sublime, delightful and amusing, requires an in-depth understanding of how all of this came to be in order to be fully appreciated. Observing the creation of this various works does provide the modus operandi behind Lee’s work, but where does the origin of the Origin of the Species lie?

Lee has cited Rodin and Giacometti as sculptural artists to whom he has responded within the development of his own work. Rodin was a breakthrough artist who sought to imbue the natural human form – warts and all – with a heroic sense of space, rejecting along the way the idealisation of the body that was previously the hallmark of Western sculpture. Rodin changed the way one could look at the human figure much in the same way that Lee’s optical helmets and body-distorting devices create alternative physical realities.

Giacometti’s own work passed through a number of critical stages – representational, cubist and surrealist – until he reached his apogee in Post-War Europe and sought to render the human form in all its existential angst. Giacometti found the inner reality of man.

Lee has spoken about the ability of these two artists to create a new sense of sculptural space. ‘Space’ is a concept that all artists working in three-dimensions must come to terms with. With this new body of work Lee has gone from the virtual space defined by his Objectuals series and has made the virtual a reality.

Frogger

Peter Herbolzheimer Rhythm Combination & Brass: Frog Dance
From: Wide Open (MPS, 1973)

DARWIN, Australia (March 28) - A "monster" cane toad the size of a small dog has been captured by an environmental group dedicated to wiping out the toxic amphibian, which has killed countless animals since being introduced to Australia in the 1930s.

The volunteer-run organization, Frogwatch, picked up the 15-inch-long cane toad during a raid on a pond outside the northern city of Darwin late Monday.

With a body the size of a football and weighing nearly 2 pounds, the "monster toad" is among the largest specimens ever captured in Australia, according to Frogwatch coordinator Graeme Sawyer.

"It's huge, to put it mildly," he said. "The biggest toads are usually females but this one was a rampant male ... I would hate to meet his big sister."

Cane toads were imported from South America during the 1930s in a failed attempt to control beetles on Australia's northern sugar cane plantations. The poisonous toads have proven fatal to Australia's delicate ecosystems, killing millions of native animals from snakes to the small crocodiles that eat them.

As part of its so-called "Toad Buster" project, Frogwatch conducts regular raids on local water holes, blinding the toads with bright lights then scooping them up by the dozen.

"We kill them with carbon dioxide gas, stockpile them in a big freezer and then put them through a liquid fertilizer process" that renders the toads nontoxic, Sawyer said.

"It turns out to be sensational fertilizer," he added.

Up until 1935, Australia did not have any toad species of it's own. We had tree frogs and burrowing ground frogs - even microhylid frogs which do not have a tadpole - but none of the world's hundreds of toad species evolved here. However, not wanting to be left out, Australia acquired some - 102 toads, in fact.

These toads were supposedly being used successfully in the Carribbean islands and in Hawaii to combat the cane beetle, a pest of sugar cane crops. After rave reviews from overseas, Hawaii shipped a box of toads to Gordonvale, just south of Cairns. These were held in captivity for awhile, their numbers were increased by breeding, and then they were released into the sugar cane fields of the tropic north. It was later discovered that the toads (scientific name Bufo marinus) can't jump very high so they did not eat the cane beetles which stayed up on the upper stalks of the cane plants. At the time of year when the beetle's larvae were emerging from the ground, no toads were about. So the cane toad, as it came to be known, had no impact on the cane beetles at all and farmers had to go back to the use of chemicals to kill the beetle.

Bufo marinus breed like flies, as the saying goes. Each pair of cane toads can lay 33,000 eggs per spawning (some published references estimate they produce as much as 60,000 eggs!).

Their 'toadpoles' develop faster than many Australian frogs so they can outcompete our frogs for food.

Toads and toadpoles seem to be resistant to some herbicides and eutrophic water which would normally kill frogs and tadpoles.

All stages of a toad's life are poisonous so they have no natural predators to keep their numbers in check (although studies suggests that toad juveniles are not toxic until they reach about 3cm in size but this presents a question: why would an animal lose its toxicity at the juvenile stage when it has it during larvae and adult stages?)

Toads not only eat the food normally available to Australian frogs, there is growing anecdotal evidence that they eat frogs as well, especially metamorphs.

Fish who eat toadpoles die. Animals who eat toad adults die. The museums have plenty of snakes preserved in jars which were killed by toad toxin so fast, the toad is still in their mouths unswallowed. Even small amounts of water, such as a pet's water dish, can be fouled by toadpoles and adults. When the pet comes along to drink from it's dish, it becomes sick. Local vets report that a couple dogs a month are brought in ill just from "mouthing" toads.

Some Queensland bird and rodent species have somehow learned how to eat cane toads without exposing themselves to the toxin. They kill the toad and turn it over onto its back. They pull away the soft belly skin and partake of the internal organs, leaving the skin and the deadly paratoid glands behind. This behaviour has only taken a mere 60 years to learn - very fast on the evolutionary scales. Those native rats which do feed on animal material (such as the White-tailed and the False Water) have learned to only eat the legs of the toad and not the body.

Captive cane toads will allegedly eat everything from dog food to mice and they keep growing until they reach 25cm in length and over 4 kilos. In recent years, it has been noticed that toads in the Cairns area are much smaller than they used to be (the "big mama" at right was found in Babinda - 30 minutes drive south of Cairns). A theory is that when toads first colonise a new territory, there is an abundant food supply. The toads gorge themselves and get quite large. As the numbers of toads increase from breeding, the food resource never reaches its pre-toad levels and therefore, the toads' size and their food supply acheive a "compromise". Certainly the largest toads still found in Cairns come from the suburbs which back onto bush and, therefore, have more plant life to feed more insects.

eLibrary

COROLLARY SCIENCE


I post threads of variant interest on the playahata hataboard. Yet the lion's-share are dedicated to the sciences. Below list an e-archive for current post.
NYTimes e-articles are only available for a week, thereafter they are only available online for purchase. Where applicable, I have threaded the e-articles to immortalize them without cost:

Study Uncovers Memory Aid: A Scent During Sleep
No Sleep Means No New Brain Cells
Moths Elude Spiders by Mimicking Them, Study Says
Why Is The Alphabet In Alphabetical Order?
Readers' Q & A With Wikipedia Founder
It Seems the Fertility Clock Ticks for Men, Too
'Doomsday' Vault Design Unveiled
Diabetes Repair 'Occurs In Womb'
Can Humanity Survive? Want To Bet On It?
World Scientists Near Consensus On Warming
*Boss Hog
How About A Bot For A Boss?
'Anti-Aids Gel' Trial Is Stopped
Flying Dinos Had Bi-plane Design
South Africa: Call For Deadly TB Isolation Move
Alzheimer's Vaccine 'In A Patch'
Strict Vegan Ethics, Frosted With Hedonism
Do You Believe In Magic?
The Voices in My Head Say ‘Buy It!’ Why Argue?
Cheap, Safe Drug Kills Most Cancers
The Only Unexpected Abnormal Sound
Japan Marine Park Captures Rare Shark On Film
The Warming of Greenland
'Altruistic' Brain Region Found
Defence Cell Genetics Unscrambled
Teenage Pregnancy Myth Dismissed
Skull Is First Fossil Proof of Human Migration Theory, Study
"Weirdest" Animals to Get Conservation Attention
Seaweed Anti-Obesity Tablet Hope
Magic Mirrors: Social Retailing™
Longevity Gene Keeps Mind Sharp
Body's Own 'Cannabis' Helps Pain
Repeat After Us: I Will Stop Eating Candy in 2007
The DNA So Dangerous It Does Not Exist
Robot Mother Helps South Koreans Prepare For Birth
You Are What You Eat: 2006 and the Politics of Food

*Heavily recommended reading