Floating through the ocean Atlantic sea nettles make an almost ghostly sight. These eerie yet beautiful creatures make up an important part of their ecosystems by providing food for larger animals and eating the organisms which provide food for the rest of the food web.
Taxonomy and Evolution
In 2017 the Atlantic sea nettle was split in two after finding through genetic analysis that one of the populations was a distinct species. We will look at these two species today – the Atlantic sea nettle (Chrysaora quinquecirrha) and the bay nettle (Chrysaora chesapeakei). They are two of the 16 species of jellyfish known as sea nettles, which also includes the more famous Pacific sea nettle. These jellyfish belong to the order Semaeostomeae, a diverse group of jellyfish surrounded by four long arms with longer tentacles. It is difficult to determine their evolutionary history as jellyfish as effectively floating balls of water so do not fossilise well, although we do have fossils of jellyfish as a whole.
Biology and Behaviour
Atlantic sea nettles have a life cycle similar to other jellyfish. When eggs are fertilised they form a polyp – this can either be free-floating or will attach themselves to rocks or substrate, a bit like corals or anemone. These polyps are only a few millimetres in length, and are actually capable of reproduction. If conditions are right the polyps can bud creating clones of the jellyfish! Polyps are capable of producing around 45 buds each summer – after all very few will be able to reproduce themselves so it evens the playing field somewhat. From the polyp stage the jellyfish becomes free-floating in what is called an ephyra; this is a juvenile jellyfish and will go through six stages until they reach adulthood. The adult is called a medusa. From the bell there are four arms with up to 45 tentacles, but some have as few as 5. It is in the medusa stage that sea nettles are capable of sexual reproduction. When their bell reach 3.81 cm (1.5 inches) they release sperm and eggs into the water, females releasing over 40,000 eggs, during the summer months.
One of the most iconic things about Atlantic sea nettles is their bell. Not as brightly coloured as their Pacific relatives the Atlantic sea nettles instead have a wider range of colours. Colouration depends on where they are. Bay nettles are white except for those nearest to the open ocean who are pink to red-maroon with red stripes. Open ocean Atlantic sea nettles range in colour to include white, pink, and red. Fully grown sea nettles have a bell of 13 to 20 cm in diameter with bay nettles being smaller at 10 cm. Including tentacles Atlantic sea nettles reach around 15 cm with the bay nettle being much smaller at 13 cm in length. Now these tentacles can be painful but if you a stung urine is not the best thing to treat it with, in fact urine makes it worse. Instead, vinegar is the best thing to treat a sting. Each tentacle is covered in tiny cells called cnidocytes which deliver the toxins that makes the string so painful.
Distribution and Habitat
Sea nettles are exclusively marine jellyfish, but can exist in a wide variety of salinities. Bay nettles are capable of even heading into brackish water, where fresh and salt water mix. Bay nettles are found in Chesapeake Bay with Atlantic sea nettles being found over a much wider area. They are found as far north as Canada, across the eastern seaboard of the United States, and down into the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.
Diet and Predators
Sea nettles are predators and the tentacles that give such a powerful sting act as an adhesive for their prey. Their diet consists of smaller jellies, small crustaceans, comb jellies, zooplankton, fish eggs, and larger sea nettles can eat small minnows. They play a key role in sustaining their local habitat by eating the comb jellies that eat the tiny crustaceans called copepods that many other organisms eat. In fact, sea nettles are even protectors of eastern oysters as they eat the comb jellies that eat oyster eggs. Thanks to their stinging tentacles sea nettles have very few natural predators with their main predators being larger species of jellyfish. One of the largest reptiles in the world also eat these jellyfish – the leatherback sea turtle. Finally, one of the other predators is the strange ocean sunfish, an incredibly strange fish that we have covered in a previous post.
Conservation and Threats
Neither species have been evaluated by the IUCN, but they do not seem to be endangered. In fact, their numbers might actually be a problem. Agricultural runoff caused phytoplankton to explode in number which caused sea nettle numbers to explode. While they do protect some organisms, at the same time they do overexploit different ones which can impact the other branches of the food web – many animals eat anchovies and minnows so are impacted when sea nettles consume fish eggs.
Keith Bayha, Allen Collins, and Patrick Gaffney, ‘Multigene phylogeny of the scyphozoan jellyfish family Pelagiidae reveals that the common U.S. Atlantic sea nettle comprises two distinct species (Chrysaora quinquecirrha and C. chesapeakei)’, PeerJ, 5, (2017)
Nicolas A. Schnedler-Meyer, Thomas Kiørboe, and Patrizio Mariani, ‘Boom and Bust: Life History, Environmental Noise, and the (un)Predictability of Jellyfish Blooms’, Frontiers in Marine Science, 5, (2018)
The timeline of revolutions is never clear in regards to when we can say it began or ended. For example, we traditionally mark the storming of the Bastille as the start of the French Revolution, but there were agricultural strikes in the year preceding this. Likewise, the Mexican Revolution (dated roughly 1910 to 1920) is often cited as beginning on November 20 1910 when Francisco Ignacio Madero’s call for revolt was answered. However, historians have problematised this original starting date, and there are several other events which worked into the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. One of these we will be looking at today – the Cananea miners’ strike of 1906.
Background
Cananea in 1908
From 1876 to 1911 Mexico was ruled either directly or indirectly by Porfirio Diaz, his rule called the Porfiriato or Porfirismo. From the southern state of Oaxaca Diaz had earned support from fighting against the French invasion forces in the 1860s, and in 1876 would use this support for staging an uprising that brought him to power. For decades Diaz ruled with an iron fist, but one that ruled with a thin veneer of liberal democracy – Diaz ‘won’ elections that were either rigged or were unopposed. Diaz aimed to ‘modernise’ Mexico using a cabal of experts called cientificos to construct an industrialised, capitalist Mexico, and part of this invited foreign businesses to buy up Mexican resources. British, German, Spanish, and American companies eagerly bought up mines, railroads, oil fields, and plantations across Mexico, and with this came the economic exploitation of Mexican workers. To keep foreign investment in place the Diaz government gave concessions to foreign capital in accompaniment with rural police, the rurales, keeping order.
Cananea is still today a mining town as it was in 1906. Located in the state of Sonora it is not too far away from the US border, so it is not surprising that it would be US investors who would come to own the Cananea mines. Like many communities in northern Mexico Cananea served as a ‘frontier community’ – used by Spain and, after 1821, Mexico used these settlements to colonise the sparsely populated northern desert. Fearful of the weakness of state power in the north, especially as Mexico lost the northern half of its territory to the United States in the US-Mexican War, these settlements were geared towards expanding Mexican control to where the state was weak. However, people already lived here. Various indigenous communities lived in the area, such as the Yaqui and Raramuri, who would resist settler colonialism until the twentieth-century. Furthermore, being isolated from the centre of Mexico meant northern communities developed their own sense of independent identity – while still seeing themselves as Mexican they identified more with their local communities.
The US and Cananea
William C. Greene
The area around Cananea was good for cattle farming and copper mining. In 1896 American businessman William Cornell Greene formed the Cananea Consolidated Copper Company (CCCC) to control the copper mines in Cananea, Sonora. With the rise of telegram and electrical wiring copper was in high demand, so this made Greene one of the richest men in the world, and this wealth was built upon the exploitation of Mexican workers. This was done with collaboration with Mexican elites where the CCCC could step in to the void left by the absentee government, so Diaz’s power could be felt through the CCCC’s control over Cananea. The CCCC managed to further connect northern states into a capitalist market through the purchase of timber producing forests in the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua connected via railroad. The infrastructure development of the northern states of Sonora and Chihuahua was done solely for the purpose to aid the development of capital. Similarly, transport links from Cananea to Bisbee, Arizona were constructed as a way to ensure the smooth flow of capital. Like Cananea Bisbee was another community that revolved around mining, and was another major copper mine in the region.
Demonstrating the state’s support for the CCCC the rurales were used to keep the peace and propaganda was made to back up the CCCC. In 1907 Frederico Garcia y Alva published Mexico y sus Progresos writing that at Cananea ‘Like the palaces and cities of the marvellous tales emerged rapidly and grandly from barren fields and solitary mountains.’ Here Garcia y Alva presents the mine as bringing civilisation and life to the Sonoran desert, conveniently omitting the brutal exploitation of workers and the expulsion of Native Americans. Also the date this book was released is important. It is a year after the strike showing that it is more than likely to dissuade ideas that US, and other foreign, concessions was harmful to Mexico following the strike. Instead, the concessions were depicted as bringing resources and expertise to modernise Mexico, even though these companies were draining Mexico of its resources.
Greene’s mine held many of the same issues that early-twentieth-century mines had – poor ventilation, high risk of death, risk of injuries. What added to Cananea was that American style discrimination. This is not to say that racial discrimination did not exist in Mexico. Afro-Mexicans and indigenous peoples were regularly depicted as being backward and savage, and the more mixed-raced workers that came to Cananea from the central states of Aguascalientes and San Luis Potosi were mocked by Sonorans. Likewise, Mexico’s Chinese population would regularly face racialised violence. In 1885 the United States would pass the Chinese Exclusion Act barring Chinese from entering the US. While Chinese did try and cross the Canadian and Mexican borders to enter the US many remained in the areas where they migrated to. Intense racial discrimination that would often become violent was meted out against Chinese happened on both sides of the border culminating in several massacres during the Revolution. Despite being in Mexico, and Sonora which had a law where 70% of workers in a company had to be Mexican, Mexicans were barred from management positions in the mines, and received a fraction of the pay of American workers. Mexicans were paid 40% of the wages that an American in a similar position would be paid (5 to 3 1/2 pesos per day)!
The Strike
Greene trying to talk to striking workers, June 1906
The strike started as a protest on one of the most important days in the Mexican calendar – Cinco de Mayo. On May 5 1862 the Mexican army managed to defeat the French forces at the Battle of Puebla, and since it has been a major day of celebration. During the Cinco de Mayo celebrations at Cananea in 1906 mineworkers were together so decided to band together to protest the discrimination in employment and pay. The authorities responded as expected when capital is threatened – martial law was put in place. This would not dissuade workers and the border helped in this. We imagine the US-Mexican border as it is today as being one of the most heavily militarised borders outside of an active warzone, but this is a recent phenomenon. Right through to the 1940s the border was somewhat porous and many communities in the border region relied on this porousness to survive. The anarchist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Western Federation of Mineworkers (WFM) had been trying to unionise workers in the region and across the border in Arizona they were free from martial law to send material south. Also active in the region, and closely connected to the IWW, was the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). Despite its name the PLM was anarchist and offered a radical alternative to the Diaz dictatorship. This allowed organisers to draw from examples to the north and they were aided by the state government’s misstep. Not only did they institute martial law on a nationalist holiday, but also because Mexican workers were protesting discrimination in their own country.
Eventually, pressure built and the strike finally broke out on June 1, just under a month since martial law was declared. The strike did not have much of a central leadership but three names, (Juan José Ríos, Manuel Macario Diéguez and Esteban Baca Calderón) do appear in the historical record and they were incarcerated for organising the strike. We can assume that these three men were perhaps to main organisers at the Cananea mine. The united workers made a series of demands – all workers to receive 5 pesos for an 8-hour work day; Mexicans to be eligible for promotion; the removal of unpopular foremen; greater safety precautions; and that 75% of the employees to be Mexican to 25% American. When the strikers’ petitions were rejected, personally by Greene, the strike expanded as people from local areas joined the workers in sympathy ballooning the numbers there to 3,000. Bear in mind Cananea had a population of only 23,000. Marching in front of the company’s woodworking shop some American workers set high powered hoses on the striking miners – race here triumphed over class solidarity. Three workers were killed by the hosing, through the power of the water and trampling by the crowd, so they responded by setting fire to the shop. Four Americans died as a result but the violence would not end here.
Company police, the feared rurales, and even the federal army would come to break the strike, but Greene did not trust them fully so sent for help north of the border. Before settling into the capitalist life Greene had been involved in paving the way for capitalism by taking part in conflicts against local indigenous people, I should really have introduced him as Colonel William Cornell Greene. Through his military ties he managed to reach out to the Arizonan governor (Joseph Kibbey) who sent the Arizona Rangers, an armed militia modelled after the rurales and Texan Rangers, across the border to help put down the strike. As a precaution the US president Howard Taft also stationed the army on the border in case things escalated. The New York Times would claim the Sonoran governor Rafael Izabel would also ask his Arizonan counterpart for help although as the paper misspelt his name, calling him ‘Yzabel’, we can doubt this. With four separate armed forces from two separate nations coming down on the miners it is unsurprising that a massacre happened. Around twenty were killed, an equal number were injured, and over fifty arrested.
Arizona Rangers and rurales together
Before we go into the aftermath of the strike I want to discuss the two-nation strikebreaking force. Firstly, it shows the interconnectedness of capital in the border regions. The continued output of the Cananean copper mines was seen as essential to both Sonora’s and Arizona’s economies, where the border was more like a line in the sand so it was acceptable for Americans to cross the border to put down a Mexican strike. However, the border was still seen as real by officials; the New York Times quoted Governor Kibbey who, in an attempt to cover his back, said ‘Volunteers going into Mexico go at the risk of divesting themselves of their American citizenship and protection as such while there. I cannot permit an officer or man in the Territorial service to go into Mexico at this time. Use every precaution to preserve order on our side of the line.’ The brings us to the second point I would like to discuss, the rurales and Arizona Rangers saw themselves as the forgers of civilisation. The militias often recruited from the region and positioned themselves as the defenders of civilisation and masculinity – they were the strong men who were to fight against the ‘savage Indians’ spreading the respective American and Mexican civilisation to those regions. The socialist and anarchist ethos of several strikers fed into this ‘defense of civilisation’ rhetoric. Rejection of the central state and capital was a rejection of their idea of civilisation, so therefore had to be crushed.
Aftermath
Instead of snuffing out the flames of resistance the crackdown on Cananea ignited them. Miners fell into the open arms of the IWW and the PLM, so it is no surprise that northern Mexico became a centre of radical politics throughout the next decade. In conjunction with the Cananea strike six months later a textile strike in Rio Blanco, Veracruz would also be violently crushed (although this time it would only be Mexicans putting down the strike). These two events together helped break the veneer of the Porfiriato’s benevolence which would culminate in the Mexican Revolution in 1910, so much so that Cananea and Rio Blanco can be considered the ‘first battles’ of the Revolution. This also challenges a conventional view of the Revolution which portrayed it as an overwhelmingly rural revolution with the urban areas playing a minor role. In both these cases we see urban and industrial workers taking centre stage where even historians who downplay the urban elements, such as Alan Knight, recognise the importance of these events.
The Cananea strike would have other impacts. Immediately it caused a disaster for the governorship of Rafael Izabel. While he had secured the valuable copper concession from the strikers by allowing Arizona Rangers to cross the borders it was a flagrant overstepping of what could be allowed. He had allowed Americans, the same people who took half of the country barely fifty years earlier, to enter Mexican territory and kill Mexicans. His governorship would not last long soon after. Meanwhile, the personal rule William Cornell Greene had over the Cananea mine came crashing down during the strike. During the strike the board managed to undermine Greene resulting in him losing control of the CCCC, within the decade it would simply be another company in the Rockefeller capital empire. Finally, and most importantly for the Revolution, the strike solidified the radical unions place with the Sonoran miners. The IWW provided answers for strikers whose message of a borderless anti-capitalism resonated with those who had witnessed armed forces of two nations crush the strike. The anarchist trend further garnered support for the PLM, after all the PLM had helped the strikers, and over the next five years the PLM would use this support to try and launch several uprisings. By the 1920s anarchist unions helped organise workers in Cananea for another round of strikes. Continuing the radical history of the mine in 2007 went on strike in Cananea and would fight for their rights in an amazing 10 year struggle.
This week, which saw International Workers’ Day, it is important to remember the struggle at Cananea. Racism and capitalism go hand in hand, international capital will unite to crush workers, and chauvinism divides the working-class. Workers of the world, unite!
Bibliography:
Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire and Revolution in the Borderlands, (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2022)
Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)
Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the US-Mexico Borderlands, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006)
D.L. Turner, ‘Arizona’s Twenty-Four Hour War: The Arizona Rangers and Cananea Copper Strike of 1906’, The Journal of Arizona History, 48:3, (2007), 257-288
Norman Caulfield, ‘Wobblies and Mexican Workers in Mining and Petroleum, 1905-1924’, International Review of Social History, 40:1, (1995), 51-75
Rodney Anderson, ‘Mexican Workers and the Politics of Revolution, 1906-1911’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 54:1, (1974), 94-113
Michael Gonzales, ‘United States Copper Companies, the State, and Labour Conflict in Mexico, 1900-1910’, Journal of Latin American History, 26:3, (1994), 651-681
‘Went Against Orders: Governor of Arizona Warned Capt. Rynning and other Americans’, New York Times, (03/06/1906)
‘Armed Americans at Greene’s Mines’, New York Times, (03/06/1906)
‘Mexicans Resent Invasion’, New York Times, (22/10/1906)
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One of the best things fighting climate change are not forests but the meadows of seagrasses. Soaking up carbon they also provide homes and food for countless other plants, animals, and algae the world over. Today we’re going to be looking at this group of plants and their role in the ocean’s environment.
Taxonomy and Evolution
Despite their name seagrasses are not grasses, they simply resemble grasses. This is due to convergent evolution – where two organisms, completely unrelated to one another, evolve to resemble one another to fit similar niches. Around 70 million years ago the ancestors of seagrasses returned to the sea and the large tracts of shallow sea beds encouraged them to evolve a similar biology to grasses. All seagrasses belong to the order Alismatales but they are split across several different families – seagrasses evolved to conquer the sea independently at least three times. There are four families: Posidoniaceae, Zosteraceae, Hydrocharitaceae and Cymodoceaceae. Among these families there are roughly 60 species across 11 different genuses.
Biology
As expected, seagrasses resemble grass. They can be mistaken for seaweed, but seaweed is not related to them at all – seaweed are algae and not plants at all! Like terrestrial grasses seagrasses have roots anchoring them to the ground from which the plant grows, and as flowering plants they do indeed grow flowers. If you place a piece of seagrass next to a piece of terrestrial grass it would be difficult to tell the difference showing how evolution can repeat body plans if it works. The size of seagrasses can vary species to species, with the smallest only being a few millimetres, discounting the roots, to the tallest, Zostera caulescens, reaching 7 metres (35 feet). With over 60 species across the globe it is unsurprising that the leaves take various shapes from the small, oval-shaped paddle grass to the tall and thin manatee and turtle grasses.
Seagrasses can be fast growing, generally the shorter species, or slow growing, normally the taller species, so this impacts when they reproduce. Sometimes seagrasses can reproduce sexually where the pollen from the flowers are swept up by the currents and will hopefully fertilise another grass. Some species will then produce fruit, for the Mediterranean Neptune grass produce fruit given the name ‘sea olives’. From there the currents help distribute fertilised seeds where they will hopefully land on substrate where the seeds can then germinate. Aquatic animals can help in this with turtles, fish, and manatees ingesting the seeds and then spreading them in their faeces. Relying on the currents also means seagrasses are capable of self-fertilisation, although this is not ideal as it limits the genetic variation of the plants.
Seagrasses are also capable of asexual reproduction. Through the rhizomes seagrasses can spread and from there shoots can emerge. As a result, entire meadows, instead of being multiple different individuals, are actually only a few individuals. In 2006 a meadow of Neptune grass off the coast of Ibiza turned out to not actually be a meadow – it was simply one large individual that had grown through its rhizomes developing shoots. This giant seagrass was in the running for one of the largest organisms on the planet and is potentially 100,000 years old!
Distribution and Habitat
Seagrasses are found in the waters off the coast of every continent bar Antarctica. Although there are species found in cold water most species are found in tropical waters with the Swahili Coast and Indonesian waters having the most species. Relying on photosynthesis seagrasses have to stay relatively close to the surface, although some of the larger species are able to live in deeper depths. Neptune grass, for example, are capable of being found 40 metres down! Some species live in tidal zones leaving them ‘stranded’ as the tide comes out, but the species that do grow in tidal zones have evolved to survive temporary exposure. Seagrasses also are their local habitat. Underwater meadows made of the grasses provide shelter and home for countless algae, fish, crustaceans, jellyfish, and worms – some seagrasses even use crustaceans to spread their pollen. Seahorses are especially reliant on seagrasses with the UK’s two species of native seahorse entirely reliant on seagrass meadows.
Conservation and Threats
Seagrasses are some of the most important plants in the world with seagrass meadows being fantastic carbon sinks. Seagrass can absorb more carbon dioxide than an equivalent area of the Amazon by several factors! This has made them essential in the fight against climate change but they are also at risk. Pollution, oil spills, destructive fishing habits, and infrastructure projects have seriously damaged seagrass meadows. Not only is this bad for the seagrasses themselves but also the environment and the organisms that rely on seagrass meadows for life. The lushness of seagrass meadows takes many years to grow and develop so it is essential to ensure the safety of currently existing meadows. There are projects which have tried to conserve currently existing seagrass meadows, but it is a difficult task with it becoming harder as climate change makes ocean currents and temperatures shift.
Bibliography:
Richard K. F. Unsworth , Len J. McKenzie, Catherine J. Collier, Leanne C. Cullen-Unsworth, Carlos M. Duarte, Johan S. Eklof, Jessie C. Jarvis, Benjamin L. Jones, and Lina M. Nordlund, ‘Global challenges for seagrass conservation’, Ambio, 48, (2019), 801-815
Helen Fewster, (ed.), Flora: Inside the Secret World of Plants, (London: DK, 2018)
Len J McKenzie, Lina M Nordlund, Benjamin L Jones, Leanne C Cullen-Unsworth, Chris Roelfsema, and Richard K F Unsworth, ‘The global distribution of seagrass meadows’, Environmental Research Letters, 15:7, (2020), 1-13
Laura Guerrero-Meseguer, Carlos Sanz-Lázaro, and Arnaldo Marín, ‘Understanding the sexual recruitment of one of the oldest and largest organisms on Earth, the seagrass Posidonia oceanica‘, PLoS One, 13:11, (2018)
Jeanine L. Olsen, Pierre Rouzé, Bram Verhelst, Yao-Cheng Lin, Till Bayer, Jonas Collen, Emanuela Dattolo, Emanuele De Paoli, Simon Dittami, Florian Maumus, Gurvan Michel, Anna Kersting, Chiara Lauritano, Rolf Lohaus, Mats Töpel, Thierry Tonon, Kevin Vanneste, Mojgan Amirebrahimi, Janina Brakel, Christoffer Boström, Mansi Chovatia, Jane Grimwood, Jerry W. Jenkins, Alexander Jueterbock, Amy Mraz, Wytze T. Stam, Hope Tice, Erich Bornberg-Bauer, Pamela J. Green, Gareth A. Pearson, Gabriele Procaccini, Carlos M. Duarte, Jeremy Schmutz, Thorsten B. H. Reusch and Yves Van de Peer, ‘The genome of the seagrass Zostera marina reveals angiosperm adaptation to the sea’, Nature, 530, (2016), 331-335
On Easter Monday, April 7 1760, across the plantations of Jamaica recently enslaved Africans rose up in rebellion. Although technically several rebellions in one the iconography of the war came to surround one figure – a former warlord in what is now Ghana called Tacky. While not the first enslaved uprising in the Caribbean, or even Jamaica, and being overshadowed by more successful and larger uprisings in the Caribbean and Jamaica, Tacky’s War was a landmark in the history of Atlantic slavery.
Africa and Jamaica
Cape Coast Castle
Quoting Vincent Brown’s excellent recent book on the war, ‘The Jamaican slave uprising of 1760-1761 did not begin in Africa, but it is where its story starts’. As Brown argues, understanding what was happening in west Africa is key to understanding the actions of the enslaved revolutionaries, especially in the face of racist depictions of enslaved Africans of the period – whether it be the brutal violence of the enslavers or the patronising attitude white abolitionists held. Since the first slave ship departed for Brazil in 1526 various European polities had been transporting enslaved Africans, treated as property, to the Americas as a source of free labour. Most enslaved people were forced into working on plantations across the Americas harvesting cash crops including sugar, tobacco, cotton, henequen, and coffee, and the efficiency of the slave trade (despite the high mortality) meant that the large plantations could afford to buy new slaves at a reduced cost. As a result enslaved Africans were worked for five to six years before they died through exhaustion, abuse, or disease only to be replaced. It is important to remember as well that we are talking about human lives – humans were seen as property to eventually be replaced like any other tool. High mortality also meant the slave trade had to keep supplying enslaved labourers, fundamentally changing the society of west Africa.
Europeans tapped into an already existing slave trade that had existed in west Africa, although, as argued by Akosua Adoma Perbi, slavery did not necessarily equate to the chattel slavery of the Americas. There certainly were cases of this in the gold mines and kola nut plantations of modern Ghana, however there were many enslaved people who were integrated into the household. European demand for slaves resulted in African polities going out of their way to acquire more enslaved people, and, while at a small level people were sold into slavery due to crime or debt, the most important way to acquire slaves was through war, raiding, and forced tribute. As Walter Rodney laid out in his landmark How Europe Underdeveloped Africa west African states ended up structuring their economy and society around the further acquisition of slaves to sell to Europe, who would provide further resources to acquire more slaves. This resulted in more and more conflict in order to acquire more slaves, but it also meant increasing amounts of militarily trained and political people being captured and sold into slavery. Even the elite could be sold – the King of Komenda’s brother was sold into slavery and transported to the Americas for violating the law.
From Africa enslaved people were transported to the Americas, and one of the most productive of these colonies was Jamaica. Originally a Spanish colony in 1655 the English seized the island and it soon became the English’s major sugar producing region – go to any major city in Britain and you will see the results of this. The splendour of especially eighteenth-century architecture was funded through profits derived from the enslavement of Africans in Jamaica, Barbados, and other Caribbean colonies. The 1738 anonymous poem The Pleasures of Jamaica effectively shows how the white class viewed Jamaica – a beautiful and idyllic land, with the enslaved labour out of the way and treated as part of the natural scenery:
Hither retiring, to avoid the heat,/We find refreshment in a cool retreat;/Each rural object gratifies the sight,/And yields the mind an innocent delight;/Greens of all shades the diff’rent plats adorn,/Here the young cane, and there the growing corn;/In verdant pastures, interspers’d between,/The lowing herds and bleating flocks are seen:/With joy his lord and faithful Negro sees,/And in his way endeavours how to please;/Greets his return with the best country song,/The lively dance and tuneful merry-wang./When nature by the cane has done her part,/Which ripen’d now demands the help of art,/How pleasant are the labours of the mill,/While the rich streams the boiling coppers fill,/With gladden’d hearts we see the precious juice/From tend-rest plants the useful sweet produce;/Oh! may the seasons never fail again,/Nor heavy’n deny the kind refreshing rain/To bless the soil, and fill the growing cane;/So shall our wealth with wonder still be told,/And sugar works preferr’d to mines of gold.
This idealist and sanitised version of Jamaica, where a ‘faithful Negro’ is the only reference to the brutal enslavement that the colony based its labour on, hides an anxiety white colonists felt. Jamaica is a surprisingly mountainous island covered in thick forests which gave escaped slaves the ability to live free. As mentioned, many of these enslaved people had military and political experience so they naturally put this to use forming their own societies in the mountains called ‘Maroon Towns’. One of the best known Maroon leader was Queen Nanny – her history is known mostly from oral histories, largely thanks to her successful guerrilla campaign against the British that lasted over twenty years. Maroon Towns offered a place of safety for free enslaved Africans and from 1728 the British tried to destroy the Maroon Towns – until a peace was signed in 1740 there was a guerrilla war that the British themselves feared that they may not have been able to keep hold of Jamaica. The Maroons did keep their sovereignty against the British, but entire communities were massacred and burnt to the ground during the course of the war. Here, one of the paradoxes that comes with fights for survival emerged. The British agreed to stop attacking Maroon Towns, however, maroons had to reject runaway slaves and to help put down slave uprisings. In order to survive maroons had to make a deal with the devil and help continue the oppression of fellow Africans. Part of this can also be explained by how maroons who made peace with the British were more often than not, as argued by Morgan Pierce, the descendants of escaped slaves so identified as maroons instead of free Africans.
Figures in Tacky’s War
Enslaved west Africans, mostly from modern Ghana, were called ‘Coromantees’ by the British – this was not a concrete group but rather an artificial category made by enslavers to discuss the Africans taken from Ghana. ‘Coromantees’ came from various ethnic and linguistic groups, mostly from the Fante, Ashanti, and Akyem which goes some way in explaining why large uprisings were rare. Not only could people physically talk to one another due to language barriers, but also there would be some xenophobia – these people came from different polities and were enslaved by those polities, so seeing someone from a rival polity would reignite rivalries. If anything this shows the success of the later uprising – people managed to go beyond rivalries and find a way to communicate. This enslaver to enslaved possibility also served as the background for several of the revolt’s leaders. Vincent Brown begins his book describing Apongo, called Wager by the British and was potentially originally called Attando, who had been a military leader back in Ghana, forming a business friendliness with Cape Coast Castle’s chief agent John Cope. Eventually, Apongo lost a battle and found himself sold, eventually being sold to Captain Arthur Forrest of HMS Wager before being sent to Forrest’s plantation in Westmoreland Parish. There Apongo met someone from his past – John Cope. Retiring to Jamaica the former slave trader treated Apongo as an old friend and gentleman with them having tea together, and Cope promised to ensure he would get Apongo freedom. As expected from a slave trader he never did this and died in 1756 leaving Apongo enslaved still.
The other key figure in the war was the titular Tacky. Like Apongo, Tacky was a military and political leader from the Fante Confederacy in what is now Ghana. He was fluent in English indicating he had a lot of experience with British traders, and Vincent Brown believes that he operated around Accra. Again, like Apongo, Tacky eventually lost a battle resulting in his capture and eventual enslavement in Jamaica. Agongo’s and Tacky’s cases show how Europeans misunderstood Africans – they were not meek or brutish, they were political actors who had experience in organising. As mentioned earlier Jamaica’s geography meant it was easy for maroons to form their own communities away from British enslavers, but it also meant coordinating an island-wide uprising was difficult. However, networks, including maroons who disagreed with the agreement with the slavers, allowed information to travel from plantation to plantation. Most importantly in this was the news that Britain was at war! As we’ve been covering on The Making of Today Britain and France were engaged in a global conflict which, for Jamaica, meant troops were engaged elsewhere. Prime time for a revolution.
History Rhyming – Another Easter
Very coincidentally a world war gave rebels the opportunity to revolt at Easter 160 years after the Jamaican uprising. For centuries Ireland had been ruled by government from Westminster which had led to repeated attempts by the Irish to resist London rule, and Easter 1916 saw one particularly iconic revolution. With the British distracted by the war in Europe it gave the various nationalist groups in Ireland opportunity, despite draconian British laws arresting pacifists on the mainland and nationalists in Ireland. In particular, the socialists Irish groups like the Irish Republican Brotherhood aimed to inspire a wider Irish uprising against British rule. In Easter 1916 armed Irish rebels seized control of the General Post Office intending the eventual military backlash to encourage the rest of Ireland to rise up. The rebellion was brutally supressed and while an independent Ireland was formed, it came after another war.
The War
An engraving depicting a slave uprising reflecting white anxiety
Vincent Brown has written about how we refer to this conflict. For one, he named his book ‘Tacky’s War’ due to how contemporary abolitionists who were enslaved, like Olaudah Equiano, described slavery itself as war. How can you revolt against someone actively waging war against you? Why Tacky had the revolt named after him despite being one of many revolutionaries reflected the slaver fears and confusion over the uprising. On Easter Monday April 7 1760 enslaved Africans rose up on the Trinity, Frontier, and Esher estates killing any of the masters and overseers that they managed to capture. Trinity’s owner Zachary Bayly was warned by house slaves about the rising so he managed to escape before the 2,000 people on his plantation got to him. Why did the house slaves warn their master? Ultimately we will never know their internal logic, but Vincent Brown explanation of power in colonial societies helps explain it. House slaves were in a better condition than field slaves, although this does not mean they had good lives with women in particular being at risk of sexual assault. These incredibly brutal societies forces people who should be allies into desperate fights for survival, and house slaves would have been aware of the brutal crushing of a slave uprising the previous year in the Danish Indies. Helping the master could potentially ensure safety after the uprising was crushed, especially as they too could be killed in misplaced anger.
A depiction of Trinity plantation
As thousands took over the plantations news soon spread and other enslaved people in other plantations also rose up in rebellion. Tacky’s War soon expanded far beyond Tacky. Soon Fort Haldane was captured giving them ammunition to take Port Maria and defend it from a British counterattack. Rebellions broke out across Jamaica and one especially interesting one took place in Kingston. It was clear that Apongo and Tacky intended to create an independent Jamaica and a woman was declared Queen in Kingston. In July rebels in Kingston rallied around a woman called Akua, called Cubah by the British, crowning her ‘Queen of Kingston’ as she began organising court. This is an incredibly interesting reflection of how the breakdown of established society allows marginalised people, for Akua being doubly marginalised being an enslaved woman, to get autonomy. It also fits into a wider trend in African and Jamaican history – Queen Nanny was a central figure among the maroons and some of the societies in west Africa were from societies where women held greater power. Akua would be captured and transported to Cuba (then a neutral Spanish slave colony) but her tales of fights on Jamaica to make a free black state allowed her to be smuggled back to Kingston.
One major part of Tacky’s War was the involvement of obeah. A syncretic religion, obeah emerged as an amalgamation of various west African beliefs, Christianity, and indigenous Taino belief. Similar to Haitian Vodou as obeah was practiced by enslaved communities white colonists viewed it with distrust and disdain, seeing it as superstition and witchcraft. However, obeah practitioners were tolerated as their use of herbs to heal slaves ensured enslavers did not have to ‘waste’ money on healing the same slaves they brutalised. Obeahmen and Obeahwomen were integral in connecting plantations during the planning of the uprising and were integral in sustaining the uprising. Other than acting as healers Obeahman blessings gave emotional strength to the fighters, especially as among their blessings was a resistance to bullets.
The War is Crushed
Reflecting the staggered nature of the uprising the crushing of the war was also staggered. By the time Akua was crowned ‘Queen of Kingston’ Tacky had been killed. The geographic isolation allowed the militia to break apart revolutionary lines to wipe them out, and while the British were invested in the Seven Years’ War they diverted troops to Jamaica as back up. Many of them came from the Thirteen Colonies but some came from as far away as Gibraltar. Jamaica, after all, generated vast amounts of money for the empire with Jamaica generating over three times the revenue as New England did. Unfortunately, a key reason why the rebellion was crushed was because of the maroons. Like earlier with the house slaves, the desperation of the maroons led them to aid the British militia even though if they had joined the rebels British rule in Jamaica could have collapsed. While individual maroons did oppose alliances with the British overall they fought alongside the militia which ended up crushing the enslaved rebels.
On April 12 1760 Tacky was injured in a fight with the militia and maroons and his force was roundly defeated a few days later at the Battle of Rock Valley. The area, now called Tacky Falls, saw many of the defeated rebels commit suicide – death being preferable to whatever punishment the British would inflict on them. Tacky would be shot, decapitated, and his head placed on a pike in Spanish Town until it was secretly removed by sympathisers. Apongo was captured in July and died through his injuries three days later – he was lucky not to experience the intended execution of being burned alive. Upon her return return to Kingston Akua would be captured and executed. Sixty whites and around the same amount of free people of colour were killed during the uprising to the over 400 killed enslaved people fighting for their people. Around 400 to 500 further commit suicide to avoid re-enslavement, better dying free than living in chains.
Aftermath
Tacky’s War was a crisis for the Jamaican planter class. As mentioned above, the quick spread of the rebellion led planters to name the entire uprising after Tacky, when in reality it went far beyond him. Tacky was killed a few weeks into the rebellion but the uprising lasted until early 1761. The British were so fearful that they transported former rebels to other colonies, however, the legitimacy of slavery was never questioned. Fear of obeah’s connection of the rebellion led to the British colonial government to ban the religion with harsh penalties for those caught practising it. However, people still resisted. Obeah continued to be practised and another slave uprising in the 1830s in Jamaica would bring slavery to an end. Newly arrived enslaved Africans were taught about the 1760 war, spreading the knowledge of resistance to successive generations, and instead of breaking enslaved spirit the transported rebels spread their knowledge across slave societies. As late as the 1860s US slave owners complained of ‘Tackys’ in their plantations.
Other Events:
Other events happened in the second quarter of 1760. Here are a few of them:
The French attempt to retake Quebec City after it fell to the British the previous year. While defeating the British outside the city they were unable to take the city before British ships arrived on May 16.
May 11, the founder of Burma’s Konbaung dynasty Alaungpaya dies on his return from sieging the capital of Ayutthaya.
April 22, the first public display of roller skates takes place in Belgium.
June 4, the British feeling secure in their expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia has the first New Englanders to settle in former Acadian land.
Bibliography:
Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2020)
Japiur Literature Festival, ‘Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War | Vincent Brown with Matthew Parker’, YouTube.com, (16/03/2024), [Accessed 20/04/2024]
Kofi Boukman Barima, ‘Cutting Across Space and Time: Obeah’s Service to Jamaica’s Freedom Struggle in Slavery and Emancipation’, The Journal of Pan-African Studies, 9:4, (2016), 16-31
Akosua Adoma Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Centuries, (Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004)
Philip Sherlock and Hazel Bennett, The Story of the Jamaican People, (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1998)
Karina Williamson, (ed.), Contrary Voices: Representation of West Indian Slavery, 1657-1834, (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2008)
Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘Caribbean Anti-Slavery: The Self-Liberation Ethos of Enslaved Blacks’, in Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles, (eds.), Caribbean Salvery in the Atlantic World, (Kingston: Ian Randle Publications, 2000), 869-878
Max Strackbein-Bussey, ‘Magic and Divination in Jamaica’s Freedom Struggle, 1728-1824’, PhD Dissertation, Arizona State University, (2021)
Morgan Pierce, ‘The False Dichotomy: Jamaican Maroons as Resistance Fighters and Colonial Enforcers’, PhD Dissertation, East Carolina University
Samuel Momodu, ‘Tacky’s War (1760-1761)’, blackpast.org, (03/12/2021), [Accessed 24/04/2024]
Thank you for reading. For future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.
One of the most popular pets in Japan is not a cat or a dog, but the Japanese rhinoceros beetle, kabutomushi. Amazing to look at when adults, easy to take care of, and common these beetles easily made their homes in the hearts of Japan’s kids (and many adults).
Taxonomy and Evolution
Normally I like to start this section stating the scientific name of the species being covered but this is difficult with kabutomushi as there are two! I cannot find out which is the actual one, and the sources I have used have no correlation in regards to which name they use. Kabutomushi are either Trypoxylus dichotomus or Allomyrina dichotoma sharing its genus with either one other species (for Trypoxylus) or three (for Allomyrina). Kabutomushi do have eight subspecies which are separated based on geography. Kabutomushi are rhinceros beetles, in the subfamily Dynastinae, which includes some of the largest beetles in the world like the Hercules and Atlas beetles. This subfamily belongs to the scarab beetle family and with over 35,000 species they are also one of the largest families in the animal kingdom. The Japanese name comes from two words – kabuto, a helmet worn by samurai, and mushi, insect.
Biology and Behaviour
As a beetle kabutomushi start out life looking very different to their adult forms. At the end of summer small eggs are laid in humus, the dark organic matter that one of the soil layers is made of. The larvae are your typical grub and go through three stages, called instars, before they form a pupa. Within two weeks the larvae enter the second instar stage where the larvae will now congregate together. In another three weeks the larvae enter the third instar for the next eight months. Throughout the larval stage the kabutomushi will remain in the soil before forming a cocoon called a pupa at the end of spring. Within this pupa their body effectively breaks down and reconstructs to the form the adult body, and this takes only two weeks. Then, at the start of summer the adults emerge from the soil. They do not have a lot of time as an adult – only surviving for two months at the longest.
Adult kabutomushi are heavily sexually dimorphic, namely with the males having a long four pronged frontal horns and a smaller pronotal horn. Males are also larger reaching between 40 and 80 mm (1.6 to 3.1 inches) to the females 35 to 60 mm (1.4 to 2.4 inches). These horns can be long reaching 7 to 32 mm, with the larger beetles obviously having longer horns. Despite the impressive horn they can still fly – in proportion to the size of the horn kabutomushi grow larger wings. While the larvae are a white or light brown colour the adults have a brilliant reddish brown to black colouration. These beetles are also incredibly territorial when fully grown. Using their long horns males try to throw one another off of branches and logs that they call their territory, and even females will go after other females! After laying her eggs the females will then die, the males not lasting too long after mating.
Distribution and Habitat
Despite their name Japanese rhinoceros beetles are not only found in Japan. They are also found in Taiwan, Korea, China, and as far south as Thailand. Kabutomushi are therefore found in a wide variety of habitats ranging from tropical to temperate environments, but they are limited to forests. Relying on decaying vegetation as a larva and sap as an adult they rely on trees to sustain themselves.
Diet and Predators
For almost all of their life kabutomushi are vegetarians, although in their first instar they sometimes do eat other members of their species. While a larva the beetles exist on a diet of decaying vegetation and the humus in the soil that they live in. Adults love sugar feeding on fruits and tree sap, something which has made them easy to raise pets. A wide variety of animals could potentially eat kabutomushi, mostly when they are in their larval stage. Birds, raccoon dogs, amphibians, reptiles, and humans have eaten the larva – protein rich they were sometimes eaten. The hard shell of the adults means they have far fewer predators.
Conservation and Threats
Kabutomushi are not classified by the IUCN but they do not seem to be overly endangered. During the summer months they become incredibly popular pets with many stores in Japan selling them – they are so popular that there is a beetle sumo championship in Nakayama where kids can battle their beetles. These beetles have become incredibly important to Japanese popular culture – quite potentially samurai helmets were designed based off of the beetles. More recently video games, comics, anime, and competitions surround the insects; as someone who grew up playing Pokemon I can see how Heracross was inspired by kabutomushi. The popularity of the hobby has led to beetle numbers declining in certain areas, but luckily Japanese parks intervened using the hobby to help the beetles. Reaching out to families parks with dropping numbers encourage families to learn about the beetles, raise them, and release them into the wild so they can reproduce.
Bibliography:
Patrice Bouchard, (ed.), The Book of Beetles, (Lewes: Ivy Press, 2014)
Jesse N. Weber, Wataru Kojima, Romain P. Boisseau, Teruyuki Niimi, Shinichi Morita, Shuji Shigenobu, Hiroki Gotoh, Kunio Araya, Chung-Ping Lin, Camille Thomas-Bulle, Cerisse E. Allen, Wenfei Tong, Laura Corley Lavine, Brook O. Swanson, and Douglas J. Emlen, ‘Evolution of horn length and lifting strength in the Japanese rhinoceros beetle Trypoxylus dichotomus‘, Current Biology, 33:20, (2023), 4285-4297
Kenta Takada, ‘Japanese Interest in “Hotaru” (Fireflies) and “Kabuto-Mushi” (Japanese Rhinoceros Beetles) Corresponds with Seasonality in Visible Abundance’, Insects, 3:2, (2012), 424-431
Erin L. McCullough, Paul R. Weingarden, and Douglas J. Emlen, ‘Costs of elaborate weapons in a rhinoceros beetle: how difficult is it to fly with a big horn?’, Behavioural Ecology, 23:5, (2012), 1042-1048
Huan Yang, Chong Juan You, Clement K. M. Tsui, Luke R. Tembrock, Zhi Qiang Wu, and De Po Yang, ‘Phylogeny and biogeography of the Japanese rhinoceros beetle, Trypoxylus dichotomus (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) based on SNP markers’, Ecology and Evolution, 11:1, (2021), 153-173
One of the oldest domesticated plants in the world and yet one of the most controversial this week we are looking at cannabis. Hemp, weed, ganja, marijuana, skunk – no matter the name it refers to the same plant, Cannabis sativa. This post is to be read in conjunction with a Florapedia post on cannabis as a plant, which can be read here. This post aims to look at the social and political of such a controversial plant.
Domesticationand Spread
As cannabis is illegal in most parts of the world actually studying the history of it has been difficult. Recent genetic tests have found that humans began domesticating cannabis around 12,000 years ago in its originally habitat of the open plains of Central Asia and the Tibetan plateau. Then, from around 4,000 years ago, cannabis domestication created two groupings of the plant – one taller, fibre-rich version which we now call hemp, and a shorter one that produces more flowers and resin which became used as a medicine and drug. Taiwanese clay pots dating to around 8,000 BCE were made using cannabis fibres, but a recent archaeological find from western China has found evidence of it being smoked. In the Chinese section of the Pamir mountains archaeologists found evidence of a burial dating to around 500 BCE where the attendees had burnt cannabis, potentially using the fumes for psychedelic reasons. We can, therefore, tell that humans have been using cannabis as both a building material and a drug (both medicinal and spiritual) for as long as the plant has been domesticated.
The Tel Arad shrine
Cannabis is a hardy plant growing in a variety of habitats and doing so quickly, so it did not take long for cannabis to spread – this is also why it has the name ‘weed’. Traveling along trade routs it quickly made its way to east and south Asia, and to the west with archaeological sites in Greece in the 400s BCE having evidence of hemp seeds and fibres. A contemporary, Herodotus, wrote of the medicinal qualities of the plant, and that the religious leaders of the northern Scythians smoked the plant. A 2020 paper found evidence of burnt cannabis at a shrine at the site of Tel Arad, a temple from the ancient Kingdom of Judea indicating that ancient Jews burnt cannabis as part of religious rites in the 800s BCE. Taoist and early Hindu altars also present evidence of the burning of cannabis in religious rites showing how ubiquitous burning cannabis was for religions in the ancient world. However, we also see the first prohibitions on cannabis as a drug during this time period. While some Taoists used marijuana in incense it was soon denounced as an intoxicant that ruined the mind; similarly, the denunciation of intoxicants in Leviticus demonstrated a rejection of cannabis in Judaism. While cannabis was denounced as a drug, hemp was still an integral part of society – its use as a source of textile, food, and feed for livestock made it important.
Islam and early use in Africa
When cannabis spread to the rest of Europe and Africa we do not know, although it is quite likely that it spread to Africa through several, independent means. Indian merchants likely spread cannabis to east Africa, and then Africans spread it to central and southern Africa; Egypt’s incorporation into the Islamic caliphates allowed cannabis to spread from there; and Ethiopians were certainly smoking cannabis based on analysis of smoking pipes dating to the 1320s. By the 1800s cannabis as a part of ritual life had become a facet of various cultures across east and southern Africa. Meanwhile, in the Middle East a new variation of cannabis consumption had been developed – hashish. Perhaps originating in India and Nepal the compressed resin spread across Iran, the Levant, and North Africa through the connections fostered by the Islamic caliphates. This was not without controversy – the Qur’an prohibited intoxicating substances which cannabis fell into. As Mongol raiders had brought cannabis with them there was also some bias against the drug as the Mongols had devastated the Islamic world, including sacking Baghdad. However, as Islam did not explicitly prohibit cannabis people could use it as a vice.
You may have heard of the claim that the Hashashin Order, the Assassins, would take large amounts of hashish before going to kill targets, and that is how we got the word ‘assassin’. However, there is actually no concrete evidence to support this claim with it coming from the work of French Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy. According to de Sacy taking hashish led to a ‘state of temporary insanity losing all knowledge of their debility [users] commit the most brutal actions, so as to disturb the public peace.‘ De Sacy’s view was inspired by an already existing prohibition on hashish and not historical reality. Hashish was extensively taken by a group in the Islamic world – labourers. The theological grey area cannabis fell into gave poorer Muslims, who lacked the funds and ability to get alcohol substitutes, a vice to engage in. Martin Lee and Ryan Stoa both bring up a figure called Soudoun Scheikhouni trying to prohibit hashish consumption based on a Sufi order, popular among Egyptian labourers, using it in the fourteenth-century. However, both cite Soudoun Scheikhouni as being an emir appointed by the Ottoman Empire which is impossible as the Ottomans did not control Egypt until the 1500s. As neither cite where they got the information I am disinclined to accept it, but hashish was popular with labourers in the Middle East. Sixteenth-century Baghdadi poet Muhammad Ibn Soleiman Foruli wrote a poem depicting two scholars debating the properties of wine and hashish. The poet concluded that hashish was ‘a friend of the poor, the Dervishes and the men of knowledge’. For the poor it was easy to get hold of – it was already being grown for medicinal uses and hemp was an important product.
From Europe and Africa to America
An eighth-century Greek depiction of cannabis
While all this was happening cannabis had spread across West Africa and Europe. Smoking cannabis would not become popular in Europe until much later, but cannabis was an integral part of European society. Cannabis was important in folk medicine with it being used to treat a wide variety of ailments ranging from arthritis to menstrual pain. Hemp was integral to the lives of so many people. From being used as fodder to feed livestock to the fibres to make clothing. An irony that Martin Lee pointed out was that Protestant prohibitionists in the twentieth-century would denounce cannabis as the ‘devil’s weed’ while Gutenberg’s Bible was printed on paper made from hemp. In the 1500s, when England was expanding its navy to combat Spain, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I ordered peasants to grow hemp to go towards rope production. Cannabis would also fall victim to a literal witch hunt. The climate crisis of the Little Ice Age sparked fears of witches leading Pope Innocent VIII in 1484 to issue a papal bull supporting investigations into witchcraft. Those who were invested in herblore, especially women, were denounced as witches, and those harvesting hemp for medicinal means had the accusation of witchcraft hanging over them.
In 1492 Christopher Columbus brought to the attention of Europeans of a ‘New World’. European settlers began displacing indigenous communities through genocidal actions, and the settlers brought their crops with them. The Spanish brought hemp to Mexico, the Portuguese to Brazil, and the French and English to North America. In fact, the first crops that the Puritans grew were fields of hemp, and it soon became law that colonisers had to grow hemp. Indigenous communities in the Spanish Americas soon adopted cannabis, and smoking cannabis became incorporated into several religious rites (both indigenous and syncretic). Cannabis was also brought to the Americas through the brutality of the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved Africans brought cannabis seeds with them and when given the chance managed to grow their own hemp crops. Chris Duvall posits that the word marijuana comes from the Kimbundu word mariamba. European enslavers would personally use the knowledge enslaved Africans had of the plant to improve their own crops – George Washington famously experimented with hemp to improve output, but he would do this only be exploiting the labour of those he owned as slaves.
Colonisation, Racism, and Weed
Emile Bernard’s Smoking Hashish
Throughout the history of cannabis its prohibition has been explicitly tied to those excluded from established society. In the 1550s the Spanish colonisers in Mexico attempted to prohibit the smoking of cannabis citing it as ‘dulling’ the senses of indigenous labourers. As European power spread to Asia and Africa the colonies became laboratories for often pseudoscientific ideas of race which cannabis fed into. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 saw many of his soldiers take up hashish as wine and tobacco were not readily available. The general he left in charge, Jacques-Francois Menou, viewed hashish as a health problem which was compounded by Menou marrying into the local elite who viewed hashish as a destabilising vice. Menou banned the production of cannabis, even in its hemp form, and hashish spread to Europe with the image of Oriental decadency. Almost every European depiction of Egyptian society depicted someone smoking hashish; that and the harem became ingrained in the European mind of a backwards Arabic and Islamic culture. Taking inspiration from France the reforming Ottoman Empire would issue a general ban on cannabis in the 1860s, especially if it meant it could allow them to crack down on the Sufi Heddawa Brotherhood in Morocco and Tunisia which grew weed. Similarly, the US invasion of Mexico in 1846 brought Americans into contact with smoking cannabis for recreation. Benjamin Smith argues that the US press labelling Mexican women ‘Maria’ and men ‘Juan’ led to the naming the drug marijuana.
The British pioneered marijuana prohibition. Cannabis as a drug had been commonplace in Hindu India, so Britain’s use of Indians as labourers (often as slaves in all but name) spread recreational usage of cannabis to east and south Africa, Oceania, and the Caribbean. Usage of bhang led to cannabis to get the name kush and ganja. British colonial officials viewed themselves as ‘guiding’ colonised peoples towards civilisation as a parent does a child, and this view went hand-in-hand with Christian moralisation and scientific racism. Recreational cannabis was seen as holding colonised people back, encouraging subversiveness, and, most importantly, impacting the productivity of the colonies. By the 1920s anti-cannabis laws had been implemented across colonies including India, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Jamaica, and South Africa. Of course, prohibition never stops people from taking weed. A clear example of this is the emergence of Rastafarianism in the 1930s. Coming from Jamaica Rastafarianism is a African diasporic religion that held Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as the messiah and viewed the smoking of cannabis as a way to achieve a higher state of mind.
Prohibition and Counterculture
From the 1920s the anti-cannabis laws that had been implemented in the colonies spread to the metropole. Growing hemp managed to survive for longer seeing a boost in acceptability during the Second World War when governments encouraged hemp production – unthinkable today but the US government sponsored a movie in 1942 called Hemp for Victory to encourage people to grow hemp for the war effort. In 1925 the Second International Opium Convention, at the request of the Egyptian and South African governments, would add marijuana to the internationally prohibited substances which continues to this day. The US would officially prohibit all forms of cannabis in 1937, with a small exception during the war years, thanks to the work of the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics Harry Anslinger. A die-hard moralist and supporter of Prohibition from the end of alcohol prohibition in 1933 he focused on the next best thing – drugs. Anslinger’s campaign managed to hit a chord with the American public, aided by media mogul William Randolph Hearst, by portraying marijuana as a direct threat to white middle-class youth. Weed’s popularity in the jazz circuit and among Mexican labourers allowed Anslinger to whip up racialised fears of white Americans that their children were being preyed upon by African-Americans and Mexicans. The cinema got behind his campaign in 1936 producing the now infamous Reefer Madness – a story of everyday white youth taking weed leading them down a path of murder, suicide, and ruin.
Jimi Hendrix
While Anslinger was waging his war against weed a vibrant counterculture involving marijuana was in existence. This was nothing new – during France’s crisis over hashish several French intellectuals founded the Le Club des Hachichins (The Hashish-Eaters Club) that would include figures like Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. In 1920s America many jazz players were barred from drinking at the same speakeasies they performed at so weed served as relaxants. Louis Armstrong famously smoked marijuana on the daily. Meanwhile, American artists and tourists found it easy to cross the border into Mexico where attitudes to weed were more relaxed until the 1930s when Mexico also implemented prohibition. Weed would continue to be key to other subcultures including the beatniks of the 1950s.
In the 1960s a new movement swept the world – the hippies. Especially the US based hippies took weed as part of the movement with it becoming a key image of the youth rebellion. Famously the Beatles managed to hide marijuana right on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. Parts of Mexico and Colombia had their economies revolve entirely around the production of marijuana it was so important. However, a culture war was brewing. As scientists and health officials debated whether marijuana was as dangerous to one’s health as alcohol or tobacco a conservative backlash against youth revolt zoned in on drugs. In the US the champion of this ‘War on Drugs’ was the president himself, Richard Nixon. If he criminalised drugs he could criminalise African-Americans and anti-war protestors, and soon weed was public enemy number one. The War on Drugs is too complicated to discuss here, but needless to say it has been an unmitigated disaster leaving tens of thousands dead, homeless, and needlessly incarcerated. With a quiescent Mexico US planes sprayed herbicides on areas believed to be growing marijuana and opium poppies which took out peasant crops as well. In Colombia the weed industry simply diversified, the far more profitable cocaine began running from the coast of Colombia to Miami.
Jay and Silent Bob, popular in the 1990s and represented the stereotype of the ‘stoner’ community
The 1960s was another turning point in the modern history of cannabis. In 1963 CBD was partitioned from the psychoactive THC which allowed it to be synthesised. For the first time since the 1940s marijuana could legally be used for medicinal purposes. Then in 1976 the Netherlands partially decriminalised marijuana – while personal possession was illegal weed was perfectly legal in certified coffee shops. Since then more states have decriminalised marijuana or allowed medicinal marijuana, that is until 2013. In that year Uruguayan president Jose Mujica became the first world leader to fully legalise recreational marijuana usage, and others have followed. Activist groups have emerged to campaign for the legalisation or decriminalisation of weed, most notably the Cannabis Action Network in the US and Canada. As they held their meetings at 4:20 this became the international symbol of marijuana and newly emerged ‘weed culture’ celebrate the drug on April 20 for this reason. We have gone from subcultures heaving marijuana being a facet of the culture, like the beatniks, to having a subculture revolve around weed itself.
From the ancient plains of the Tibetan plateau to virtual every student block of flats weed has been part of our culture. I hope this post has helped shed some insight into how we have interacted with this unique plant.
Bibliography:
Martin Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana – Medical, Recreational, and Scientific, (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2012)
Bradley Borougerdi, Commodifying Cannabis: A Cultural History of a Complex Plant in the Atlantic World, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018)
Chris Duvall, The African Roots of Marijuana, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019)
Chris Duvall, ‘An African history of cannabis offers fascinating and heartbreaking insights – an expert explains’, The Conversation, (27/12/2023), [Accessed 14/04/2024]
Benjamin Smith, The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade, (London: Penguin, 2021)
Guangpeng Ren, Xu Zhang, Ying Li, Kate Ridout, Martha L. Serrano-Serrano, Yongzhi Yang, Ai Liu, Gudasalamani Ravikanth, Muhammad Ali Nawaz, Abdul Samad Mumtaz, Nicolas Salamin, and Luca Fumagalli, ‘Large-scale whole-genome resequencing unravels the domestication history of Cannabis sativa’, Science Advances, 7:29, (2021)
Ryan Stoa, ‘A Brief Global History of the War on Cannabis’, The MIT Press Reader, (23/01/2020), [Accessed 15/04/2024]
Lina Britto, Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia’s Drug Paradise, (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020)
Richard Bonnie and Charles Whitebread II, The Marijuana Conviction: A History of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States, (New York, NY: Lindesmith Center, 1999)
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Weed, ganja, Mary Jane, marijuana, skunk, pot – no matter what you call it we are talking about the same plant Cannabis sativa. For thousands of years humans have been cultivating cannabis as a drug and also building material. Hemp has been for millennia used to make rope, clothing, and even food. This post is the first part of a two-parter, which will be linked to when written. This one will look at cannabis as a planet while later this week we will have the second post which will look at the social and human history of cannabis use.
Taxonomy and Evolution
As cannabis is illegal or criminalised in various parts of the world this had actually made researching the plant difficult – you need the plant to study the plant but getting said plant is difficult when it is illegal. It is also difficult determining which cannabis plants are full species or if they are breeds or cultivars. Until a 2018 genome analysis there was believed to be two species, Cannabis sativa and Cannabis indica, but we now know it is potentially just the one, Cannabis sativa. Marijuana belongs to the family Cannabaceae splitting off from the rest of the family around 27.8 million years ago with its closest relative, Humulus, giving us hops – the thing we make beer from! These plants belong to the order Rosales meaning they are distantly related to roses.
Biology
We do not actually know what pre-domestication cannabis looks like, millennia ago wild and domesticated interbred so we indirectly lost truly wild marijuana. If you see wild growing marijuana it is technically feral domesticated marijuana, something that through genetics and archaeological findings seemed to have occurred around 12,000 years ago. Around 4,000 years ago, so after 8,000 years of domestication, two lineages of cannabis emerged. One produced taller, unbranched stems with higher fibre contents from which hemp comes from; the other, produces shorter, unbranched stems with more flowers and resin which the drug comes from. Both types are a coarse and bushy herb from which 3 to 9 lancet-shaped leaves grow. These plants can grow to be very tall reaching 4 metres (13 feet) in height, although plants reaching 5 metres (16 feet) have been recorded. They also reach this height quickly if conditions are right, being able to achieve this in four to six months. After bamboo cannabis is the fastest growing plant, something that has made them so desirable as crops.
Hemp has historically been used throughout the world as their fibres are incredibly strong, around six times as strong as cotton fibres. Hemp fibres are also more absorbent and requires less energy compared to cotton – while a single cotton field can leave the land dry this is not the case for a field of hemp. For just as long a time humans have also been using marijuana as a drug. Cannabis contain many different naturally occurring molecules including cannabidiol (CBD) and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). CBD is a relaxant but it is THC that causes the psychedelic properties in weed. While humans might use it for recreation cannabis evolved to produce THC as a defence mechanism – any animal that might consume cannabis will get a blast of unpleasant tastes, upset stomachs, and nausea deterring it from eating the plant again. Through selective breeding humans have altered how strong THC is in different strains of marijuana. Cannabis has also evolved other chemicals to defend itself including one to deter insects and another to protect itself from harsh UV rays.
Cannabis are flowering plants and are some of the few plants to be dioecious, meaning that a plant will only produce seeds or pollen. Only 5 to 10% of plant species reproduce this way showing how rare it actually is. Cannabis rely on the wind for pollination, although in the very rare cases that a cannabis plant produces both pollen and seeds they are capable of self-pollination. After pollination small flowers grow, and from there seeds develop.
Distribution and Habitat
Cannabis evolved around 19 million years ago around the Tibetan plateau and even today cannabis grows best in open, dry, and sunlit environments. Being spread by wind it meant that it did not take long for them to spread from the Tibetan plateau with it soon adapting to a wide variety of habitats. One reason why we call marijuana ‘weed’ is because it grows like a regular weed. Domesticated cannabis has been harder to pin down, but genome sequencing found it to be domesticated around 12,000 years ago in east Asia. This means that cannabis is one of the oldest domesticated plants – older than corn, potatoes, and soy. The discovery of a burial site in Parmirs, west China dating to around 500 BCE revealed that people had burnt marijuana indicating that its usage as a drug dated from at least this time. Marijuana soon spread across China, India, and Central Asia, and soon it arrived in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and in the sixteenth century the Americas.
Conservation and Threats
The IUCN has not classified marijuana as they do not classify domesticated organisms, and marijuana being illegal across much of the world has made actually evaluating how rare it is impossible. Clandestine growing most likely has meant that marijuana is far from endangered, and as more areas decriminalise and allow cannabis (medical and otherwise) the 420 plant will not be threatened.
Bibliography:
Robert Clarke and Mark Merlin, Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013)
Guangpeng Ren, Xu Zhang, Ying Li, Kate Ridout, Martha L. Serrano-Serrano, Yongzhi Yang, Ai Liu, Gudasalamani Ravikanth, Muhammad Ali Nawaz, Abdul Samad Mumtaz, Nicolas Salamin, and Luca Fumagalli, ‘Large-scale whole-genome resequencing unravels the domestication history of Cannabis sativa‘, Science Advances, 7:29, (2021)
John Partland, ‘Cannabis systematics at the levels of family, genus, and species’, Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research, 3:1, (2018), 203-212
Meng Ren, Zihua Tang, Xinhua Wu, Robert Spengler, Hongen Jiang, Yimin Yang, and Nicole Boivin, ‘The origins of cannabis smoking: Chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs’, Science Advances, 5:6, (2019)
John McPartland, William Hegman, and Tengwen Long, ‘Cannabis in Asia: its center of origin and early cultivation, based on a synthesis of subfossil pollen and archaeobotanical studies’, Vegetation and Archaeobotany, 28:1515, (2019)
They might not look like much but the trilobites were perhaps one of the most successful groups of animals to ever inhabit the planet. Very few groups of animals managed to be found over such a long period of time, over such a wide area, and filling so many ecological niches – the only other group as successful and diverse are the insects. Existing for 250 million years and with more than 20,000 species (with more being discovered all the time) it is no wonder that we discuss the ‘Triumph of the Trilobites’.
Discovery and Fossils
The success of trilobites has meant that humans have sort of always known about them. In 1886 a team in France were looking for Ice Age remains near the site of Arcy-sur-Cure only to find that ancient humans were using 400 million year old trilobites as jewellery. This was not a unique case. Ancient peoples as far apart as Australia and British Columbia were using trilobites as jewellery, and medieval Europe and China wrote of ‘swallow stones’ and ‘scorpion stones’. The Ute of Utah referred to Elrathia kingi as ‘little bugs turned to stone.’ This is somewhat accurate as fossilisation involves organic matter turning into stone. The Ute would use Elrathia as pendants to ward off disease and harm. In the late-1600s Reverend Edward Lhwyd described seeing strange ‘flat fish’ which he recorded for study – this would later be identified as a trilobite. It took until 1771 for trilobites to get their name. German naturalist Johann Walch would name them ‘trilobite’ meaning ‘three lobed’ from their body being split into three parts.
Trilobite fossils are so common that you can buy some fossils relatively cheaply. Sites from Utah, British Columbia, Germany, Morocco, China, and Siberia have unearthed some of the richest deposits of trilobite fossils, but many more sites have revealed a treasure trove of trilobites. Not only do we have the trilobites themselves – stomach contents, trackways, and burrows have also been found.
Biology
Isotelus
Trilobites came in variety of shapes, designs, and sizes, but they all share a basic body plan. This is where their name comes from. Running down the centre of the trilobite there is the axial lobe surrounded by the two pleural lobes, but they can be divided by three again. We have the cephalon, which is effectively the head, then the thorax, the middle of the body, and the pygidium, the bottom. This simple body plan was one of the key reasons for the success of the trilobites – its simplicity meant it could be adapted to many different environments, so trilobites only had to evolve slightly to adapt to new environments. Trilobites are arthropods, the phylum of invertebrates that also includes arachnids, crustaceans, and the equally as successful insects. Arthropods have a hard exoskeleton made out chitin, a hard polymer, and trilobites have their chitin mixed with calcium phosphate and calcite which is how they have managed to fossilise so well. Trilobites can range greatly in size and to show this I am now going to show you my two fossil trilobites. These two trilobites lived roughly at the same time and place, (Ordovician Morocco), but their sizes varied. The first is a member of the genus Phacops which only fills the palm of my hand thanks to the rock that it is attached to.
Meanwhile, we have a member of the genus Diacalymene which sits perfectly in the palm of my hand as shown below.
The smallest trilobites could easily sit on your fingernail whereas others could become giants. The largest known trilobite species is Isotelus rex, which came from the Middle to Late Ordovician period so 460 to 443 million years ago, and reached a staggering 72 cm (28 inches) in length. Trilobites managed to reach large sizes early on in their evolutionary history with Paradoxides reaching 37 cm (15 inches) during the Cambrian period 514 to 497 million years ago at a time when most other life was tiny. Trilobites are also mostly known for their amazing eyes. Not only were they some of the first animals to develop eyes, but they were some of the first to develop complex eyesight with compound eyes. We can actually tell a lot about the lifestyle of a trilobite based on what type of eye they had. Opipeuter had gigantic eyes that allowed it to have a 360 degree vision indicating it was free-swimming; Neoasaphus had its eyes on stalks indicating that its body was submerged in algae and debris while on the look out for predators; and Ductina was blind indicating it was a burrower.
Paradoxides
Trilobites managed to evolve into every niche possible with their body shapes showing this. Many were detritivores, meaning that they scavenged for food on the sea or reef bed, others fed exclusively on algae, some were filter-feeders, and others were active predators. The large size of Paradoxides has indicated that it might have been a predator, scuttling across the reef looking for worms, smaller trilobites, and invertebrates for food. A 2021 paper hypothesised that two species, Redlichia rex and Olenoides serratus from the Cambrian, used their legs to crush the shells of smaller animals before eating them by noticing the similarities between them and modern horseshoe crabs. Similarly, a 2016 paper found trace fossils from Rusophycus whose tracks crossed over the burrows from a worm-like animal indicating that Rusophycus was hunting the burrower. Trilobites were also hunted. Many trilobites, including the famous Phacops, have been found curled up like a woodlouse which would protect their softer underside from potential predators. By the Devonian, 419-358 million years ago, trilobites with elaborate spikes and spines, like Koneprusia of Morocco, evolved to deter any predators. Some trilobites may have even been able to venture onto land. A 2014 paper found trilobite tracks dating to 540 million years ago in Canada indicating that they managed to even make it to the land.
Evolution and Orders
Koneprusia
Trilobites first appear in the fossil record around 521 million years ago with a 2021 paper finding the oldest known one to be a member of the genus Parabadiella from south China. This was the Cambrian and is famous for being the era where life first diversified into a wide variety of forms, including the ancestors to every group alive today. This is known as the ‘Cambrian Explosion’, but palaeontologists are now acknowledging that this ‘explosion’ was setup by the earlier Precambrian geological conditions. We do not know from which group of earlier animals the trilobites evolved from, with earlier suggestions that they came from the worm-like Spriggania now seeming unlikely. From the Cambrian trilobites diversified, reaching a peak during the Silurian, but began to vanish through the Devonian. By 358 million years ago the trilobites were reduced to four families, but they continued on until the end of the Permian where the worst extinction event in history wiped them out. This meant that it took 3 of the 5 mass extinction events, and many more smaller ones, to wipe out trilobites! Throughout that time roughly 10 (possibly 11) orders of trilobites emerged. Here I also want to thank the YouTube channel GEO Girl whose video on the trilobite orders helped me get my head around a confusing taxonomic history.
Redlichiida. One of the oldest of the orders of the trilobites they are noted for being quite flat with an oval shape. Olenellus is one of the most basal trilobites with the segments of their had not fused together. The giant Paradoxides also belonged to this genus. They were found in the early Cambrian until the middle Cambrian, so 524 to 501 million years ago.
Agnostida. These were incredibly small trilobites, ones that can easily fit on your fingernail. Unlike other trilobites they only had a few segments in their thorax and they were mostly blind entirely lacking eyes. However, they were very numerous and globally widespread (which makes them very good for dating how old a fossil site is). They were also around for a long time from 520 million years ago to the Late Ordovician 444 million years ago.
Ptychopariida. Another order of trilobites that lived 520-444 million years ago. These were a very diverse order although they have been used as a ‘wastebasket taxon’ where specimens were incorrectly thrown into the one taxon. Mostly triangular in shape they have a distinctive horseshoe shaped glabella with a lot of thorax segments.
Corynexochida. These are another early Cambrian trilobite but managed to make their way into the Devonian vanishing from the fossil record around 355 million years ago. These had solid and block-like heads with 7-8 thorax segments.
Asaphida. Another Cambrian trilobite but they evolved later in the Cambrian around 510 million years ago and remained in the fossil record until the end of the Ordovician around 444 million years ago. This is a diverse order ranging from the aforementioned giant Isotelus rex and the stalk-eyed Neoasaphus. Asaphids had more rounded heads and pygidium.
Harpetida and Trinucleida. Depending on what source you use these are either one order or two. If they are the same order then Harpetida first appears in the fossil record in the Cambrian 490 million years ago and managed to survive until the end of the Devonian 360 million years ago. These are really bizarre trilobites having giant horseshoe-shaped heads with almost now pygidium and thorax.
Phacopida. We have covered some part of this order in the past, which you can read here. They are one of the best known orders with Phacops and Diacalymene belonging to this order, and are the ones capable of curling up into a ball. First appearing in the Early Ordovician 485 million years ago until the end of Devonian 358 million years ago.
Odontopleurida. These are unique in several ways. The first, we do not actually know when they first appear in the fossil record, however estimates of the middle Cambrian have been suggested. They lasted until the end of the Devonian. The second, unlike other trilobites Odontopleurida were quite rare. The third, these are the trilobites with the impressive spines and spikes.
Lichida. These trilobites lived in the Ordovician and the Devonian but were not as common as the Phacopida. Their phygidium were massive, often larger than their heads, and small spikes on their bodies. Like the above Odontopleurida we can see that both of these orders evolved appendages to drive off predators.
Proetida. If we gage success by time then by far the Proetida were the most successful order of trilobite first appearing in the Cambrian and only going extinct in the Permian mass extinction event 250 million years ago. After the Devonian they were the only trilobites left, although they were rare after this. A big reason for their success was their conservative, barely changing body plan which made them adaptable to different environments ensuring their survival.
Surviving Extinctions
An enrolled Phacops
As a class of animals trilobites managed to survive 270 million years on this planet, although this is nothing compared to sponges and jellyfish. Nevertheless, they managed to diversify and become major parts of their environments with it taking three mass extinction events to wipe them out. Each mass extinction event deeply impacted trilobites. The first was the Ordovician-Silurian extinction which cut off the trilobites when they were most abundant, however we do not fully know what caused this extinction event. Global cooling and shrinking of the oceans is believed to have wrecked environments, and we can see that trilobites were impacted. However, with 40% of marine life now extinct it gave trilobites the ability to diversify. This was not the same for the Devonian mass extinction event. A gradual increase in carbon in the ocean, partially caused by newly evolved terrestrial plant matter decomposing in the ocean, caused a significant portion of marine life to suffocate. Trilobites were further impacted by a new arrival in the Devonian: jawed fish. Suddenly things that could bite through their armour so with the deoxygenation of the oceans spelled the almost doom for trilobites. It would be the worst mass extinction event in history that would wipe out the trilobites. The Permian extinction event saw 57% of families go extinct, and with them the trilobites finally vanished.
Bibliography:
Andy Secher, Travels with Trilobites: Adventures in the Paleozoic, (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2022)
Riccardo Levi-Setti, The Trilobite Book: A Visual Journey, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014)
Petr Kraft, Valéria Vaškaninová, Michal Mergl, Petr Budil, Oldřich Fatka, and Per E. Ahlberg, ‘Uniquely preserved gut contents illuminate trilobite palaeophysiology’, Nature, 622, (2023), 545-551
Ben G Thomas, ‘Triumph of the Trilobites’, YouTube.com, (17/02/2019), [Accessed 07/04/2024]
Zhiliang Zhang, Mansoureh Ghobadi Pour, Leonid E. Popov, Lars E. Holmer, Feiyang Chen, Yanlong Chen, Glenn A. Brock, and Zhifei Zhang, ‘The oldest Cambrian trilobite – brachiopod association in South China’, Gondwana Research, 89, (2021), 147-167
Tara Selly, John Warren Huntley, Kevin L. Shelton, and James D. Schiffbauer, ‘Ichnofossil record of selective predation by Cambrian trilobites’, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 444, (2016), 28-38
Sam Gon III, ‘The Trilobite Eye’, trilobites.info, (01/09/2014), [Accessed 10/04/2024]
Beth Askham, ‘Some trilobites crushed their prey to death with their legs’, Natural History Museum, (05/03/2021), [Accessed 09/04/2024]
Russell D. C. Bicknell, James D. Holmes, Gregory D. Edgecombe, Sarah R. Losso, Javier Ortega-Hernández, Stephen Wroe, and John R. Paterson, ‘Biomechanical analyses of Cambrian euarthropod limbs reveal their effectiveness in mastication and durophagy’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 288:1943, (2021)
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The beluga sturgeon. Not only is it one of the rarest fish in the world but it is also one of the largest. These fish can live for a staggeringly long time which enables them to reach such large sizes. However, demand for their caviar has led to them being driven to near extinction, and their future is not the brightest.
Taxonomy and Evolution
Beluga sturgeon, not to be confused with the adorable white beluga whale, have the scientific name Huso huso. They are the only member of their genus alongside the other impressively large kaluga sturgeon. Beluga are, of course, sturgeons which belong to the order Acipenseriformes which also includes the paddlefish. This is an old order of fish dating back to the Jurassic period, although sturgeons appear in the fossil record during the Late Cretaceous. Huso is not nearly that old with the oldest fossils belong to the genus dating to around 5 million years ago.
Biology and Behaviour
I cannot overstate how big beluga sturgeon are. If we include all fish then belugas are in the top ten, but if we only include the bony fish (so discounting the sharks and rays) then they are the second largest fish after the ocean sunfish. This still comes with a caveat. As belugas grow very slowly and they have been so thoroughly exploited belugas have not reached their largest sizes for a very long time. The largest ever found was in the Volga river all the way back in 1827 which was a female that reached a staggering 7.2 metres (23.7 feet) and a weight of 1,571 kilograms (3,463 pounds)! Historical sources from the 1400s regularly described sturgeon reaching 6 metres but that is sadly something of the past. The largest belugas of today reach just over 3 metres (10 ft) and 264 kilograms (582 pounds). Female belugas are larger than the males and this is largely how you can tell the difference between male and female belugas.
Belugas have the ability to reach a century in age, but none have managed to reach that age for a very long time with most being poached by their fifties. Belugas swim upriver to spawn where the species is divided between those who spawn in the spring and those who spawn in the autumn. Young belugas will stay in rivers until they reach between 6 and 11 centimetres before they migrate to the seas travelling an incredible 24 kilometres a day. Growing slowly it takes about four years for belugas to reach a metre in length. However, they do not become sexually mature until they reach 10 years for males and 15 for females, although some can take until 25 years for sturgeon to become sexually mature. They do not spawn every year, sometimes spawning every four years, and like many fish there is no parental care for their eggs. Sturgeons change form as they age. Babies and juveniles look like mini versions of the adults with a spindle-shaped body, five rows of bony scutes, and a long, slightly curved, snout ending in four barbels a bit like a catfish. These barbels are used for sensory purposes – helping sturgeons navigate and hunt in murky river waters. The largest and oldest sturgeons look incredibly different. The barbels disappear and the head effectively becomes one large mouth. Sadly these truly giant belugas have not been seen for a good century due to human exploitation.
Distribution and Habitat
Belugas are relatively unique among fish as they can live in both saltwater and freshwater, and can easily navigate from one type of water to another. They can even live in polluted waters, but they do show signs of stress in polluted water so it is not a healthy life. Belugas are found in the Black Sea, Sea of Azov, and the Caspian Sea with them moving into the rivers that flow into those seas, mainly the Ural and Volga rivers. In the past they had a much wider range being found in many more rivers and also the Adriatic Sea. Just over a century ago they could follow the Danube up through to Austria and Hungary, and the Volga all the way into central Russia. The rivers of Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania all have belugas, but this is a fraction of a much wider range.
Diet and Predators
Belugas are not only predators but top predators with them inhabiting the same niche that seals and otters hold in other Eurasian freshwater bodies. As belugas age their diet changes moving from invertebrates to fish. Starting off with crabs and other small crustaceans as they get larger they move onto squid, cuttlefish, and fish. Larger sturgeons have been seen eating smaller sturgeons – both fellow belugas and other species of sturgeon. Of course the largest sturgeons have no natural predators but smaller ones can be hunted by a wide range of animals including larger sturgeons, catfish, pike, ospreys, seals, otters, and eagles.
Conservation and Threats
As mentioned throughout this post, things are not looking good for beluga sturgeons. When the IUCN last assessed the beluga sturgeon in 2019 they gave it a ranking of ‘Critically Endangered’ meaning there is a real possibility that they could go extinct in the foreseeable future. Part of this is the building of dams which disrupted their migration routes and has actually made the fish stressed by the disrupted river currents. However, the biggest reason why they have become so rare is because of exploitation, primarily for caviar. Beluga caviar is one of the most luxurious caviars in the world, but belugas have to be killed in order to get this. As belugas take over a decade to reach maturity caviar production can easily wipe out a population. It is now illegal to trade beluga caviar that is not produced from a farm, but it has not stopped poaching. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union efficient conservation methods for belugas collapsed. The demographic disaster of the USSR’s collapse forced more communities to resort to poaching to survive directly impacting belugas. There have been some attempts to conserve belugas. In 2020 7,000 captive-bred sturgeons were released into the Danube with the hope that these six month old sturgeons would help re-establish the population in the Danube. Whether this will help, time can only tell.
Bibliography:
Joseph Nelson, Terry Grande, and Mark V.H. Wilson, Fishes of the World, Fifth Edition, (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2016)
‘Thousands of Critically Endangered Beluga Sturgeon Released into the Danube’, WWF Blog, (29/06/2020), [Accessed 05/04/2024]
J. Gessner, M. Chebanov, and J. Freyhof, ‘Huso huso’, IUCN Red List, (2022), [Accessed 05/04/2024]
Elisa Boscari, Ilaria A. M. Marino, Chiara Caruso, Jörn Gessner, Martina Lari, Nikolai Mugue, Anna Barmintseva, Radu Suciu, Dalia Onara, Lorenzo Zane, and Leonardo Congiu, ‘Defining criteria for the reintroduction of locally extinct populations based on contemporary and ancient genetic diversity: The case of the Adriatic Beluga sturgeon (Huso huso)’, Diversity and Distributions, 27:5, (2021), 816-827
Larissa Graham and Brian Murphy, ‘The Decline of the Beluga Sturgeon: A Case Study about Fisheries Management’, Journal of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, 36, (2007), 66-75
Cultures around the world have a myth or folklore about a trickster, but it is rare that several different cultures share the same image of a trickster. From California to the Appalachian mountains various Native American cultures adopted Coyote as the trickster. Sometimes a creator, other times a destroyer, both wise and foolish, Coyote (or Old Man Coyote) is a popular tale. Today we’ll be looking at some of these stories and exploring how they came about.
Tricksters, Coyotes, and Oral Stories
Tricksters are found across the planet’s folklore, mythology, and religion – we have discussed two of them on this blog, Anansi the Spider from Akan folklore and Loki of Norse mythology. Tricksters can use dishonesty and tricks for their own benefit, the benefit of others, maliciousness, or simply fun. Br’er Rabbit of African-American folktales were used as inspiration for enslaved Africans and their descendants for undermining slavery; whereas the Greek god Hermes uses tricks to poach his brother Apollo’s cows but gives the world cooked meat and the lyre. Meanwhile, we can see the snake in Abrahamic religions that tempts Adam and Eve into eating the forbidden fruit as being a trickster – using his guile he tempts Adam and Eve into going against God’s rules forever casting humans out of Paradise. Tricksters serve as both cautionary tales and tales of admiration. As argued by Lewis Hyde, tricksters needs relations with people and institutions that have ‘traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that their boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having these boundaries regularly disturbed.’ Tricksters therefore serve as a way to test the fabric of society, if pushing it too far it often backfires on them.
Coyote appears in folk tales and myths in many different cultures found across the United States and Canada, and to a less extent Mexico. These stories were also told orally so were subject to change and adaptation with each telling which created a diversity in Coyote tales even among the same culture. One story I will tell today is from the Apsáalooke, (the Crow people), where Old Man Coyote creates the world until deceived by his brother Coyote into bringing war to humanity. That is just one version of the story – others have Old Man Coyote willingly introduce war to humans with his brother, others have Old Man Coyote and Coyote being the same being, and others Old Man Coyote did not make the world. The oral nature of the Coyote tales also likely allowed it to spread, especially as many of the cultures who had Coyote myths were semi-nomadic and had the ability to take their stories over a wide distance in a short period of time. This would have resulted in a blending and adapting of Coyote stories.
The question now arises, why is Coyote a coyote? Again, reflecting the uncertainty of tricksters, Coyote’s being varies from tale to tale. In some he is a man called Coyote, others he is an anthropomorphic coyote, and others he is a literal coyote. Sometimes he is Old Man Coyote, sometimes he is just Coyote. As argued by Barry Lopez, coyote often represents human values placed onto the figure of coyotes as actual coyotes often do not represent the bold and brash personality of actual coyotes. However, coyotes have many qualities that make them good trickster figures – smart, very adaptable, and opportunists. Many people encounter coyotes when they are scavenging through their garbage or raiding farms placing the coyote in an ideal position to be turned into a trickster. For a similar reason for other Native American cultures the raven became a trickster representation and both also were seen as being associated with death. Both animals are opportunists eating things they’ve caught but also scavenging making them a liminal being – one close to the living and the dead. Coyote, like many tricksters, is a contradictory one – wise and foolish, helper and hinderer, kind and devilish, close to the living and the dead.
Coyote as Creator
This is one version of the Apsáalooke creation story, and if you read the post on Creation stories you will find similarities with others from around the world. Millennia ago there was just water and in the water floated Old Man Coyote. Despairing one day of his loneliness he spotted two ducks bobbing on the water. He asked the ducks if they could dive underwater and see if they could spot anything, so they did. After a while, in which Old Man Coyote became very worried, the ducks returned – one carried mud and another a stick. Old Man Coyote took the mud and the sticks from which he moulded the land. Plants soon grew and stop them from drying out he carved lakes and rivers to keep them hydrated. Old Man Coyote was still lonely so from his thought he created a brother; as he was Old Man Coyote he named his brother Coyote. Coyote said that Old Man Coyote had done a good job so far, but the world was a bit boring, so together they created forests, valleys, mountains, and plains to liven up the world. As they did this they chatted and from their discussions the animals began to pop into existence – wolves and coyotes and woodpeckers and bears and deer and bison and snakes and butterflies, and finally humans. Old Man Coyote was happy with the world, but Coyote was a troublemaker. He riled up Bear to challenge Old Man Coyote, but a quick curse forced Bear to sleep in her den during the winter. Old Man Coyote was especially proud of humans but life was hard for them – having no fur they shivered in the cold and with no fangs they could not hunt. Coyotes new plan was hatched. He said that humans were struggling and maybe giving them weapons humans could hunt buffalo for food and to make clothing. Old Man Coyote agreed and introduced humans to weapons falling into Coyote’s trap. He had taught humans how to argue and now armed they learnt war. Old Man Coyote despaired, seeing how his beloved humans were now killing each other.
We see in this version of the tale the contradictory nature of Coyote rationalised – there is both the wise Old Man Coyote and the malevolent Coyote. However, as mentioned, this is just one version of the tale. In some versions Old Man Coyote and Coyote are in agreement to bring war to humanity; in others it is just Old Man Coyote; and others there is no Coyote, instead there was a creator called either Akbaatatdia or Iichíkbaalee. Crow creation tales are not the only ones that Coyote appears in. The Dine, (Navajo), of the US Southwest also feature Coyote in their creation story, the Dine Bahane. This story features humans travelling through four worlds before arriving in the Fifth World where we live today. The First World was a dark place covered by water, and alongside the first humans there was Wise Coyote and Angry Coyote (although in many versions they are the same being). Coyote, whether intentionally or not, helps humans reach the other worlds, but not always without issues. In the First World Angry Coyote’s arguments ends up bringing witchcraft into the world and later steals the children of Water Monster. However, this turned out to be a good plan as Angry Coyote plugged the gap between the Fourth and Fifth Worlds preventing Water Monster from coming through.
In the Dine Bahane the two aspects of Coyote emerge – one of selfishness and spite, but one of guidance and ingenuity – regardless if there are one or two Coyotes. I want to discuss two other stories where Coyote helps create humans showing the dichotomy of the figure. The first comes from the Nez Perce. Once there was a monster who was swallowing animals whole so Coyote decided to fight back, but as a weak animal he had to use his brains.He called to the monster and made friends with him, so one day Coyote casually asked the monster if he could see inside the Monster’s stomach. Bemused, the monster agreed and Coyote went inside to check that the rest of the animals were fine. Then he killed the monster from the inside. Elated that the monster was dead Coyote said he would create a new people: humans. Carving the monster into four he threw the pieces away and where it landed a new group of humans emerged. Finally he wiped the blood on his hands on the ground from which the Nez Perce themselves emerged. This ‘Creation through Dismemberment’ shares many similarities with other Creation stories, with it also highlighting Coyote’s ability to use tricks for the benefit of others. Meanwhile, the Miwok people of California had a Coyote creator that was selfish. All the animals decided to make a new one, the human, but all disagreed about what traits humans should have. Puma wanted humans to be quiet hunters like himself; Bear said humans should be super strong like him; Deer said they should have antlers like his; and Raven said they should have wings for soaring. The animals agreed to make sculptures and tomorrow they’ll bring the sculptures to life. While the other animals slept Coyote, wanting humans to be in his image, smashed the other sculptures leaving just his, so humans ended up being like Coyote – sneaky and wily. As William Bright has argued, humans projected our own characteristics onto Coyote so this version becomes very literal. It also shows how humans have survived – like coyotes we have had to use our brains to survive.
Coyote the Fool
Often Coyote stories serves as lessons and deals with intimate topics that elsewhere may be seen as being taboos. Sex, greed, and scatological humour often are represented in these tales. One such comes from the Lipan Apache. One day Coyote saw some juicy berries so he went to eat them. “Don’t eat the berries,” the bush they were growing on said, “They’ll give you bad gas.” Coyote ignored the bush’s warning and ate the berries, but soon the ‘find out’ from his ‘fuck around’ soon caught up to him. With a belly ready to burst Coyote spotted Crow tucking into a dead buffalo. Despite his stomach ache Coyote’s greediness eyed up the buffalo so he called over to Crow. How about a game? Whoever could poop the farthest wins the buffalo. Although Crow was saving the buffalo for his family he agreed to the challenge, and he pooped as far as he could. Then Coyote let his bowels open and he naturally won. An upset Crow begged Coyote to have some of the buffalo, and feeling ‘kind’ Coyote let him have the meat around the ribs, joints, and eye sockets. While Coyote is to be ridiculed, eating berries he knew to be dangerous, the true moral lies with Crow. His gambling cost his family showing the error in making bets. Coyote also comes afoul of poorly thought of bets. In another story from the Cochiti Old Man Coyote looked at Old Woman Beaver with lust so made a bet with Old Man Beaver – whoever caught the most fish could have sex with the other’s wife. Coyote thought his wiliness would trump Beaver’s knowledge only to find out he could not catch anything. Beaver and Old Woman Coyote had sex, and Old Woman Coyote boasted that Old Man Beaver was better in bed than Old Man Coyote. These stories further highlight different concepts of what is taboo. For Europeans these stories crossed too much into the private of bodily fluids and sex, whereas different ideas of what is a taboo in Cochiti and Apache culture meant it was simply risqué.
Coyote in Life and Death
As mentioned earlier, Coyote myths often place themselves in the liminality between life and death. We have already encountered stories where Coyote created life, but the Blackfoot had a story where Old Man Coyote and Old Woman Coyote create the process in order to create life: they were the first to have sex. Old Man Coyote and Old Woman Coyote were commenting how similar they were except that their bags were different. Old Man Coyote had a penis in his and Old Woman Coyote had a vagina. They agreed that putting these items between their legs was best as it would not get in the way. Then, Old Woman Coyote noticed that Old Man Coyote’s penis could go in her vagina. Sex was then created, and during the first love making the two discussed the role of men and women in Blackfoot society. Unlike the other Creation stories here Coyote literally made the process for life to happen, but it also shows the casualness to sex. Anthropologists recording Blackfoot stories in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century were embarrassed and actually edited or omitted from these stories references to sex. Here Coyote was a taboo, but for the Blackfoot he was simply creating a natural part of the world reflecting his own characteristics – his own inquisitiveness.
With life, there is also death. Coyote stories have also discussed how he brought death into the world. Among the Maidu Coyote appeared in several stories. When humans were first made by the Earth Initiative Coyote laughed at the look of them which the Earth Initiative chastised him for. Coyote lied saying he had never laughed bringing lies into the world. Later, when humans were fully made the land was a paradise which irked Coyote. He decided that death needed to come into the world so he got Rattlesnake to hide behind a stone while he organised a race. When someone passed Rattlesnake was to jump out and bite them. However, the person at the front of the race was Coyote’s own son who became the first person to ever die when bit by Rattlesnake. A distraught Coyote wept the first tears regretting ever bringing death to the world. A tale from the Zuni resembles the Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice. One harsh winter Coyote’s wife died and his howls of anguish was heard by all. It was so sad that a death spirit visited Coyote and made a deal. If Coyote followed his exact words then his wife would return to the land of the living. He did. The spirit took Coyote to the spirit realm and told him, “Make your journey back with your wife. Do not touch her, not even a hair for six days.” Coyote begun the way home with the spirit of his wife following behind. However, before the six days were over, whether it was love, lust, or both, Coyote tried to embrace his wife who vanished in his arms. The spirit appeared and told him, “You ignored my rules so you will never see your wife again, and the dead will remain dead.” While there are stories where Coyote maliciously brings death to the world but these stories are interesting for making Coyote a victim as much as a perpetrator. His own short-sightedness resulted in the loss of his loved ones, and we are meant to feel his pain. After all, Coyote is meant to represent us – we are short-sighted and guided by emotion in the face of life and death.
Coyote, Gifts, and Ego
It is a common trend in trickster stories that using their wits they bring something positive to the world as either a by-product or intentional from their actions. Coyote is no exception from this. In tales of how humans got fire it is often Coyote who is the one to steal fire on behalf of humans. Among the Wasco in Oregon Coyote does some good but for selfish reasons. One night Coyote bumped into six wolf brothers looking at the night sky. Asking what they were looking at the youngest wolf told Coyote that there were some animals up in the sky which they could not get to. Bold Coyote announced he could get them to the animals, pulled out a bow and arrow, and fired into the air. The arrows stuck into the sky and each other forming a ladder which the seven canids could climb. After a long climb they reached the sky where the animals turned out to be two bears. The wolves went to play with the bears while Coyote admired the view. He descended his ladder taking each arrow with him. When back on the ground he looked up seeing the wolves and bears were now stars in the sky – they were the Big Dipper. He called over Meadowlark and asked him to spread the news of what he has made. Coyote made the Big Dipper, one of the most iconic constellations that we use to navigate, and he wanted people to know it was his doing. His benevolent act was only done to benefit his own ego and to get adoration.
Conclusion
Coyote is a figure as diverse as the peoples of the Americas. Most of the stories we have discussed today come from the west of what is now the United States and Canada, but Coyote tales are found as far east as the Appalachians. Just these western stories alone cover a huge area encompassing hundreds of cultures and nations. Oral stories further allowed Coyote to diversify, but all through that time Coyote represents us. He can be compassionate, egotistical, impulsive, a thinker, and a fool. With each telling he shifted and changed, and that is the point of Coyote. A trickster never remains the same, much like human society.
Bibliography:
David Leeming, The Oxford Companion to World Mythology, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
Lewis Hyde, Tricksters make the World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998)
William Bright, (ed.), The Coyote Reader, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994)
Barry Lopez, Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with his Daughter: Coyote Builds North America, (New York, NY: Open Road, 2013)
Scott Leonard and Michael McClure, Myth and Knowing: An Introduction to World Mythology, (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2004)
Lewis Twiby's Past and Present 