An Update on the End of the World

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Spooky season. Leaves are falling, pumpkins are ripe, and Halloween is around the corner. Earth is even set to procure a tiny moon this weekend, like a little Jack-o-Lantern on its porch, as if our big Moon were not enough to summon werewolves and other creatures of the night. 

I couldn’t help but notice that many studies from this week seemed to channel the macabre mood, with a special focus on the consumption of creepy meals. Human flesh. Worlds of fire. Corpse cheese. Read on….IF YOU DARE. 

The Terror of Captain James Fitzjames

“Identification of a senior officer from Sir John Franklin’s Northwest Passage expedition,” Stenton et al, Journal of Archaeological Science Reports

The Victorian expedition that sought passage through the Arctic, but descended instead into a cannibalistic grotesquerie, is eerily embodied by the name of its auxiliary ship: Terror. 

The catastrophic tragedy of Sir John Franklin’s expedition to discover the Northwest Passage onboard HMS Terror, and the flagship HMS Erebus, ended with the disappearance of all 129 crew members by 1848. The horrifying collapse of the mission was thrown into sharper relief this week by the identification of one of the key victims, Captain James Fitzjames, from a tooth recovered in a pile of crew skeletons on the shores of King William Island. 

Fitzjames is only the second crewmember to be positively linked to DNA samples obtained from living descendants of the crew following John Gregory, chief engineer for Erebus and the first DNA match, in 2021.

Captain Fitzjames’ skull is etched with cut marks, confirming that his men consumed the flesh of his face, and probably other body parts, after he died. The evidence validates contemporaneous Inuit reports of cannibalism among the ill-fated crew, which were often dismissed with denial and disbelief at the time.

“The Inuit who provided the first definitive information concerning the end of the Franklin expedition had reported that some of the last survivors had resorted to cannibalism,” said Douglas Stenton of the University of Waterloo and colleagues in the new study. “Such news was especially distressing to 19th century Europeans, who shared a view that all cannibalism was morally reprehensible, and some therefore rejected it.”

“Surely the most compassionate response to the information presented here is to use it to recognize the level of desperation that the Franklin sailors must have felt to do something they would have considered abhorrent, and acknowledge the sadness of the fact that in this case, doing so only prolonged their suffering,” the team continued. “Concrete evidence of James Fitzjames as the first identified victim of cannibalism lifts the veil of anonymity that for 170 years spared the families of individual members of the 1845 Franklin expedition from the horrific reality of what might have befallen the body of their ancestor. But it also shows that neither rank nor status was the governing principle in the final desperate days of the expedition as they strove to save themselves.”

The latest study follows a series of major breakthroughs about the fate of the crew that has unfolded within the past decade, including the discoveries of the Erebus and Terror shipwrecks in 2014 and 2016. I recommend watching the chilling footage captured from within the submerged wrecks, which remain well-preserved. And thanks to Motherboard alumna Sarah Emerson for signal-boosting the study, which initially brought it to my attention.

In other news:

The Stinky Cheese Mummy

“Bronze Age cheese reveals human-Lactobacillus interactions over evolutionary history,” Liu, Yichen et al. Cell

I like aged cheese as much as the next turophile, but even I might draw the line at this 3,600-year-old kefir cheese found on a mummified female corpse in China, which is now officially the oldest cheese ever discovered. 

“These ∼3,500-year-old kefir cheese samples are among the few dairy remains preserved more than 3,000 years and were produced by the Bronze Age Xiaohe population,” said Yichen Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues. “By recovering DNA information from ancient fermented dairy remains, we investigate the lifestyle linked to the usage of fermented dairy by the Xiaohe population and explore the co-evolution between the fermented bacteria and their hosts.”

This woman apparently liked cheese so much, she was buried with it like a cemetery charcuterie. The ancient delicacy would probably pair pretty well with that forbidden mummy juice found in Egypt a few years ago

An Update on the End of the World

“An Earth-mass planet and a brown dwarf in orbit around a white dwarf,” Zhang, K. et al. Nature Astronomy

We know that Mercury and Venus are toast in a few billion years, as the Sun will expand into their orbits during its terminal phase as a red giant star. But whether Earth will be similarly swallowed by the Sun, or merely star-broiled at the fringes of the inferno, is a matter of debate.

Now, scientists have captured observations of another Earth-mass world, called KB200414Lb, orbiting a white dwarf, which is the final deceased form of stars like the Sun. The existence of KB200414Lb hints that planets similar to Earth might outlive their stars—though it’s unlikely that anything living on them would survive the explosive death throes of a star.

“This Earth-mass planet may have existed in an initial orbit close to [the distance between Earth and the Sun] thereby offering a glimpse into the possible survival of planet Earth in the distant future,” said Keming Zhang of the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues. 

“If Earth does indeed survive, then its orbit is expected to expand to around twice its current size, comparable to the current orbit for KB200414Lb,” the team added. “Therefore, the Earth-mass planet KB200414Lb probably represents a similar yet more fortuitous future compared to that of our own planet Earth.”

Beware the Octopunch

“Multidimensional social influence drives leadership and composition-dependent success in octopus–fish hunting groups,” Sampaio, E. et al. Nature Ecology and Evolution  

Octopuses are normally solitary animals, but some species will team up with fish in their environments to form hunting parties. Researchers recently filmed these multi-species groups, headed by big blue octopuses, in the waters of Israel, Egypt, and Australia. 

The footage reveals the complex leadership dynamics of the hunting parties, including the handsy—or rather, tentacle-y—behavior of octopuses toward fish trying to mooch off the spoils.

“Octopuses can displace fish by punching them,” said Eduardo Sampaio of Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and colleagues. “Punching involves an explosive motion of one arm directed at a specific hunting partner, which actively displaces it to outer areas of the group temporarily or permanently” 

“Across species, we found that the octopus was the main interspecific regulator of the group, perpetrating a disproportionate number of aggressive actions towards fish partners,” the team said.

So the next time you go hunting with an octopus, be sure to pitch in lest you get punched out. 

Thanks for reading the Abstract! See you next week.