All questions inspired by my recent trip to Corpus Christi.<\/p>\n
Are those man-o-wars<\/a> that wash up on the beach goners, or do they just hang tight until the tide carries them out to sea again?<\/b> I checked about a dozen pages, but none of them mentioned what happens to man-of-wars once they’re beached. Eventually it occurred to me that this probably means they die — after all, if they didn’t<\/i> die it surely would have been noted on at least one of the sites.<\/p>\n Finally, I came across this page<\/a>, which states: “Once it beaches itself, all of the organisms that make up the man-of-war quickly die except for the organism that control the stinging cells. A beached man-of-war can still emit its stinging cells if someone comes in contact with its nearly invisible tentacles.” You gotta like a critter with a built-in Doomsday device.<\/p>\n What’s up with that squiggly line on the spider web?<\/a><\/b> Before I start my research, I’d like to publicly state my hypothesis: the squiggly line serves as a “DO NOT FLY THROUGH WEB” sign to birds. Let’s see if I’m close.<\/p>\n My first step was to find out the name. (Searching Google for “squiggly line spider” wasn’t doing the trick.) I did so via the usual scientific method: I had my wife ask her coworker to ask his spider-owning partner what the hell the thing is called. The answer: the stabilimentum.<\/p>\n So right there it looked like my hypothesis was shot — with a name like that it’s obviously for stabilization, right? Maybe not. While the person who named the thing assumed stabilization was its function, contemporary arachnologist aren’t so sure. In fact, they don’t seem to really know what<\/i> it’s for. But here are some of the the leading ideas (mostly taken from here<\/a>):<\/p>\n Almost every page I read about the stabilimentum concluded with some variation on the line “it probably exists for a combination of the above reasons,” which, as we all know, is science-code for “I have no idea what it does.”<\/p>\n As an aside, doesn’t “StabiliMentum” sound like a bogus “rebranding” name some marketing weasel would come up for Enron? “It shows that we’ve got stability<\/i>, right? That we’re rock solid, that we’re not going anywhere. But also that we’re moooving<\/i> — get it? That we’ve got momentum<\/i>. Picture the ads: ‘StabiliMentum: We’re Balancing Our Books. Honestly.'”<\/p>\n What the hell is a “F.M.” road?<\/b> Driving to the sea, we spent a lot of time on FM roads, e.g. “F.M. 2292.” Here in Washington we have “I” roads (Interstate) and “SR” roads (State Route) and even “FS” roads out in the wilderness (Forest Service),, but an “F.M.” road was new to us. At first we guessed the “F” stood for “Federal,” but couldn’t come up with an “M”. Finally, noting that these roads traveled through the back-country, we decided that “F.M.” was simply an abbreviation for “Farm” — but the presence of a period between the F and M gave us the sneaking suspicion we were wrong.<\/p>\n\n