Lots of good biology talks today. Lieff on phenotypic variation in tube-bats. Umam showed some fantastic reef-dwelling species, including what seemed to a be a very intelligent animal a bit like a starfish. Mingrui gave a lot of detail on ecological energy flux, and finally there was something on mutt genetics that I could understand.
My talk came late in the day. I had chosen videos based on behavior types: common animal behaviors, human-like behaviors, and uncommon, non-human behaviors. The last were of course the most interesting so I tried to use them as punctuation in the narrative.
The presentation went fine, but the Q & A surprised me. Everyone was asking about things they had seen in their own fieldwork. Tanzen are everywhere. With the exception of those stationed in Iceland and the four in orbit, all members of the team has had run-ins with the native "dominant animal form," some of them a lot more intrusive than the guidelines generally allow.
Segaes and Jinyong described an incident while they were surveying coastal plants near a settlement. The Tanzen seemed to be gathering and foraging on a line facing them along a hillside. Each day the the line was closer. They were getting a little spooked, but when the Tanzen all stood still and seemed to be swaying in unison, Segaes yelled at them to try to scare them off. The swaying stopped, and the implacable scientists headed back to their camp at a run.
Human/Tanzen interaction is inevitable. It would be nice to have a better model for how to make it non-threatening on both sides.
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