November 25, 2006

• Steller

  An illustration of the Mind Of The Web:

  Browsing around GoogleEarth while I drink my coffee, I end up noticing that there's some National Geographic featured content in connection with Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge. Naturally, I grouse. Er, sorry. Couldn't help myself.

  Anyway, this is a place I've been to and photographed. And down at the bottom of the article there's a link to a list of endangered species, by region. Granted, it's ten-year-old information, but I start poking around the list for the Northwest, since I kinda sorta live here.

  Now, I wasn't aware that there's a Steller's sea-lion. I was aware of the Steller's jay, a raucous variant on the blue jay (Corvids make me happy for some reason), so I wondered: Who's this Steller guy?

  Well, it turns out Georg Wilhelm Steller was a German biologist who was working for the Russian government in the mid-1700s, accompanying Vitus Bering (as in Bering Strait) on an ill-fated voyage looking for an eastern passage to the northwest of North America. If you look at a map, you'll see an island called Bering island. That's because the ship wrecked there, and most of the crew died. Steller, however, continued in biologist mode and made all kinds of observations, introducing many New World species to science, including seals, sea otters, sea lions, sea cows, and sea birds. Take any kind of animal, put 'sea' in front of it, and Steller discovered one.

  The remaining crew eventually constructed a new boat and made it back to the Kamchatka peninsula, where Steller spent a few years studying the biology of the region. He never made it back to St. Petersburg, though, dying of fever. His papers made it back, though, and the species he discovered were given his name.

  He didn't make it to 40, either.

  Also, looking for images of Steller's jays, I found this, which is abstract art based on the color patterns of birds.

  Update: RamenDragonElok points out: There's also a Steller's Sea Eagle, which lives on the Asian coast ranging from Kamchatka to Japan. Basically an Asian bald eagle, with it's white in different places.

  • 3:06 pm
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