Sharks and Salad

Just a bit of a mixed post of oddments today. Firstly I tucked into the first harvest out of the new vegetable patch last night. Things have not gone as well as hoped in some cases and better than expected so far in others. This is a mix of purple pak choi thinnings and a 7-strain rocket mix.

It was delicious but pehaps that was due in certain parts to a level of self satisfaction! Those of you following the all new twitter feed may have noticed me use a #providingforthevillage tag. That's a little in joke in the family that the fishing and gardening are actually useful because, if some sort of apocalypse (or ash cloud) comes for us, I'll still be able to provide for my village. Its a bit of fun but it kinda has a serious edge now we've seen how much we depend upon air supply these days. If anyone else is tweeting and harvesting their own food please use it - it would be awesome if providing for the village went viral in both the twittersphere and real life.

In other news of an unrelated nature Brian of Laelaps and a number of other bloggers have referenced this awesome study that shows thresher sharks (Alopias sp.) do in fact use those tails as whips to stun prey.

As one of the few people in the blogosphere who's been privileged enough to see threshers on multiple occasions (hence the appalling photo above) I can say I'm not surprised. There is a fluidity to that tail in the flesh that video and still photography can't quite do justice. and you can really imagine it working that way. Having said that, it is a truly remarkable effort to document this, threshers are remarkably difficult to even see in the wild and seeing them in a feeding sitation is unprecedented. My hat is off to the researchers. I'd love to see footage of how they use it on squid in normal rather than experimental conditions......