Solving the mystery death of a Danish black-headed gull

Pet participation

What can dogs offer, tangibly, to a city? An answer is forthcoming.

Reader Dorothy Sheckler alerts Feedback that on 22 July 2024, at a Soil and Water Conservation Society conference in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Brad D. Lee of the University of Kentucky will present his views. Lee’s listed topic? “Companion canine nutrient contributions to peri-urban environments“.

During the talk, tensions may be discernible, because the host city has announced that dogs are allowed on the beach only before 10am and after 5pm this summer, and that owners “must pick up and properly dispose of the droppings”.

Mussel-bound death

Detective work and international cooperation have led to the rediscovery of a long-forgotten duo of preserved corpses.

Biologist Kees Moeliker, a scholar of surprising animal behaviour (he discovered homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck, as per Feedback on 10 February 2024), tells us what happened.

“Dramatic is the fate of a Danish black-headed gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundus) that stepped on a freshwater mussel in 1952,” he writes. “The mussel closed its valves and would not let go. The (no longer living) evidence – the gull itself with the mussel still attached to its right leg – was on display in an old photo I found deep in the internet.”

Moeliker learned that the photo had been taken at the Museum of Hunting and Forestry in Hørsholm, in the east of Denmark. In 2017, that museum became part of, and was moved to, a different institution now known as the Green Museum in Auning, in the west of Denmark. As happens with any large, variegated museum collection, some treasures resided there safely but virtually unnoticed. Moeliker got in touch with the Green Museum’s curator, who plucked the twin item (officially labelled JSH 05542) from obscurity on the long shelves of a carefully chilled building.

“In April 2024, I was allowed to view the black-headed gull in the museum’s collection storage facility, and to make this photograph,” Moeliker continues (see below). “There I learned more: the gull had not been killed by the mussel’s embrace, but had been shot – with the attached mussel and all – near Sorø in Sjælland [Denmark]. Also special, in that same Danish collection, is item JHS 05924: the single leg of a herring gull found in 1954 trapped in a half-opened tin can.”

Mustache negation

Feedback consulted a native (and, as needs be specified in the ChatGPT era, human) Iranian translator to solve a hairy mystery. A curious phrasing appears in the titles of several studies published recently in research journals in Iran. What follows are are three examples.

“Analysis of the economic diplomacy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in international relations with an emphasis on the rule of negation of the mustache“, published in Strategic Studies of Jurisprudence and Law.

“The legal jurisprudence explanation of the display of power and the increase of Iran’s military defense capabilities with an approach to the rule of negation of the mustache“, published in Protective and Security Researches.

“The role of the mustache denial rule in the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic and international relations“, published in the Iranian Political Sociology Journal.

Each paper is written in a mix of Farsi and Arabic, and includes an abstract written in English. Each abstract, like each title, includes a mention of “mustache”.

Why mustache? Feedback’s language consultant, astonished, explains: “Because the paper’s translator is a complete dunce!! In Arabic, the word for ‘a way [of doing something]’ is sometimes called sabil. In Persian [Farsi], sibil means “mustache”. Maybe the translator is simply Google.”

The world will now see what influence these mustachioed papers have on international diplomatic relations.

Mustache measuring

While pursuing the intricacies of the rule of negation of the mustache, Feedback happened across a (probably unrelated) study published in 1982, called “Survivorship curves and growth rates for a population of mustache hairs“. Written by Cliff Frohlich and Ruth Buskirk, it reports “measurements of three characteristics of mustache hairs which apparently have not been studied previously, namely, the distribution of hair lengths, the rate of hair growth, and the rate of hair loss, or weathering” – all this in “the untrimmed mustache of a 30-year-old Caucasian male”.

Eleven years later, Frohlich cited that mustache paper in a study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, about some mathematical subtleties in measuring the intensity of earthquakes. He pointed out that, like mustache-hair growth, “earthquakes are simply one of a host of phenomena for which logarithmic plots of number versus size are approximately straight”.

Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is improbable.com

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