By Juaniyo E.Y. Arcellana
THIS MUST BE one of the hardest things, having to write the introduction to this collection of column pieces, book introductions, essays and speeches, interviews, written and spoken during a lifetime devoted to the word and whatever its ramifications.
WASHINGTON — The blue whale is the largest creature on Earth and perhaps the biggest that ever lived, so it is no surprise it has a huge appetite. But the strategies this behemoth uses to get enough food has not been well understood — until now.
Scientists said last week that a study of blue whales off California’s coast that used tags to track their movements and their prey, tiny shrimp-like crustaceans called krill, showed these marine mammals are not indiscriminate grazers as long thought.
Instead, they feed more intensely when krill density is high but avoid doing so when there is less krill in order to save oxygen for future dives.
“We found that blue whales have a complex strategy of switching from conserving oxygen when prey quality is low, to intense foraging at the expense of oxygen when prey quality is high,” said research ecologist Elliott Hazen of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center and the University of California Santa Cruz.
Blue whales are filter-feeders, using baleen plates in the mouth made of keratin, also found in people’s fingernails, to strain krill from ocean water.
When lunge-feeding, the whale accelerates and opens its mouth, taking in a volume of prey-laden water up to 130% of its weight. Its throat distends, filling with water, and then it uses throat muscles and its tongue to force water out of its mouth through baleen plates that act as a sieve to keep the krill.
Blue whales eat up to around four tons of krill daily.
“The whales are much more actively assessing their environment and taking advantage of prey in ways that were unknown before, to maximize energy gain,” added ecologist Ari Friedlaender of Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute.
The study included information from more than 50 whales, using tags applied via suction cups and data on prey.
Blue whales, found in all the world’s oceans, are listed as endangered thanks to 20th century whaling that drove them nearly to extinction.
There are about 10,000 worldwide. They reach up to about 98 feet (30 meters) long and 180 tons.
“Blue whales face a gauntlet of risks in the ocean from ship-strikes to human noise, and for an animal living on the knife-edge these dense patches of prey are critical to put on mass and ultimately reproduce,” Hazen said.
The research appears in the journal Science Advances. — Reuters
Getting The Edge In Professional Selling
By Terence A. Hockenhull
LIKE MANY SALES MANAGERS, I am scurrying around trying to scrape together some additional sales to make sure we meet our third-quarter targets and close out the year with respectable sales. The sales team are working hard; they are seeing plenty of clients and appear to be identifying opportunities to propose our products. However, this is where we fail to perform well.
PARIS — A frontline drug in the fight against malaria, artemisinin has a history going back many centuries, for it traces its past to ancient Chinese medicine. Tu Youyou, who helped discover its therapeutic treasures in lab work at the height of China’s Cultural Revolution, was honored on Monday with the 2015 Nobel Prize for Medicine. Following is a fact file on the drug:
1. WHAT IS IT?
Artemisinin kills Plasmodium parasites that cause malaria. It derives from a plant called sweet wormwood — Artemisia annua in Latin, or qinghao in Chinese.
It comes to us today comes from work in 1970s by Ms. Tu and her team, who spotted references to a fever-easing plant in ancient Chinese medical texts and sought to extract the active ingredient to combat malaria.
From the 1990s, artemisinin gradually took on a frontline role, replacing previous generations of medicines that had lost their effectiveness as malaria parasites became resistant to them.
The drug acts fast initially to attack the parasite, but is used in conjunction with longer-lasting medicines to destroy the holdouts, said Teresa Tiffert, a malaria researcher at Cambridge University.
2. HOW DID IT CHANGE MALARIA TREATMENT?
Artemisinin has greatly increased the odds of survival for people hit with the most stubborn strains of the disease.
The chances of dying from malaria have halved from one in five a decade ago to nearly one in 10 today in severe cases where people were hospitalized.
While vital, it is but one element in a broader strategy to fight malaria, which includes simple, low-cost measures such as distributing insecticide-treated bed nets.
The coordinated effort has driven down deaths by nearly three-quarters over the past decade, said parasitology expert Colin Sutherland at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
World Health Organization (WHO) statistics show malaria deaths have fallen from about 2 million per year in the early 2000s to an estimated 584,000 in 2013.
Health authorities estimate there are nearly 200 million new cases of the disease every year, with about 90% of deaths in Africa.
3. WHAT IS ITS FUTURE?
The malaria parasite has a tremendous ability to mutate, causing it to build resistance to treatments when they are prescribed or used incorrectly.
There have been two examples in history of malaria drugs losing their effect, at a cost of millions of lives.
From the 1950s to 1970s, chloroquine-resistant parasites spread from Asia to Africa.
Chloroquine was then replaced by sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP), which itself lost its parasite-killing powers and was followed by artemisinin.
In February this year, researchers said they had observed malaria strains showing resistance to artemisinin in Myanmar, and raised fears it could spread westward to Bangladesh and India, even beyond.
In Africa, where malaria claims most of its victims, some artemisinin-based therapies are also no longer working as well as they used to, doctors say.
At a WHO meeting this year, experts will weigh recommendations to beef up the combination therapy, perhaps by increasing doses of the drug or the duration of treatment.
“I’m reasonably confident that we can get another five to seven — maybe 10 years’ life out of our artemisinin combination approach, by which time we should have a new generation of combination therapies ready to go,” Mr. Sutherland said. — AFP
Dragon boat racing, a watersport that evolved from ancient Chinese rituals, is alive and well in the Philippines. Of the 20 teams under the Philippine Canoe-Kayak Federation, two are featured in this month’s spread: Drago Pilipinas and the Philippine Titans.
“We’ll be bold enough to say that we had a lot to do with popularizing outdoor sports in the Philippines. We promoted the category, we supported the community, we baked the pie.” — Willy Sy, Primer Group of Companies co-founder
For nearly a century, girls’ high school basketball was the number one spectator sport in the state of Iowa, captivating fans and making heroes and celebrities of the young women who played it. Here is a piece of basketball history written by women.
Some of Jean Henri Lhuillier’s business philosophies came from playing tennis. “In business you have to have discipline. To get better, you have to keep wanting to learn. Understanding that there is a winner and a loser is also important. If you win, then good. If you lose, accept it and improve.”
As it is in life, so it is in poker: those with little to lose will risk a lot. Butch Dalisay says that the key to getting ahead early is to take risks early.
“I have heard all the excuses in the world. … I bring Gold’s Gym to them. How else can the enrolled members not work out?” — Mylene Dayrit, CEO of Gold’s Gym Philippines
