A Melodrama For Three Parts

Here's a beautiful little critter that came by our hawkwatch yesterday:

This is a Merlin (Falco columbarius), another small falcon. Whereas Kestrels are all about elegance and grace, Merlin are all about power and speed. We sometimes say that Merlin shouldn't be a two-syllable word, because you don't have the time to say it!

Here's one dining on the wing -- they do this a lot as they migrate south.

What's he eating? Probably a close relative of this guy:

This is a Canada Darner (Aeshna canadensis) that also showed up on the hill yesterday. We don't see many of them, but we do see a lot of Common Green Darners, in the same family. (Although in a different genus -- they're formally known as Anax junius.) They appear to be a favorite snack for migrating Merlin.

Darners are also voracious predators of smaller insects, with darners specializing in flying prey.

This particular guy, though, fell afoul of yet another predator:

This beauty is a Banded Argiope (Argiope trifasciatus). She's a big spider, with a body close to an inch in length, and she's going to need every bit of her size and venom:

You may have heard people talk about the food chain. Some might even understand the concept. But the food chain is a wonderful example of what Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart call Lies to Children. (aka education) Nature is so much more complex than a simple chain -- here we have a notable predator (the darner) being eaten by two other predators (the Merlin and the spider), with nary a producer (i.e. plant) in sight -- any plant is at least two steps back in the system, and possibly more. If we had followed this darner through his entire life, we might well have found him eating a baby Argiope trying to reach a new home. Or we might have seen him eating a mosquito that had just fed on a female Merlin returning to her nest with another dragonfly for her hungry chicks.

Lies to Children refers to simplified stories that we tell children (or college students, etc.) so that later on, they're ready to understand the more complicated truth. Except that science is, in the end, about telling each other stories about how the world works, and since the world is bigger and more complex than our poor brains, we have to tell each other lies as well. We can, of course, hope to find more accurate lies, and who knows, maybe sometimes we do hit the real truth. After all, we really do know more about how the world works than we ever used to. But without a teacher out there to tell us how we did, we can never really know we've got it right. We can figure out that we're less wrong than we once were, though, and that's a useful thing indeed.