I’ve seen a couple stories recently that grabbed my attention as unusual animal stories, or a situation where an animal is clearly an outlier in relation to its species.
The first was a story in the New York Times about a study that found traces of cocaine in a sample of sharks near Brazil. If you have access to the NYTimes online subscriptions, you can read the story here. One could clearly call this a click bait headline – sharks on cocaine! It suggests sharks going crazy because they’re high as a kite, it’s very sensational, it could be a cheesy movie, just like “Snakes on a Plane.” I wanted a picture to illustrate this idea, and was curious what AI would give me when fed the keywords “sharks” and “cocaine.” From the picture above, it seems artificial intelligence thinks that sharks who dabble in cocaine would likely be characters in a surreal animal version of Grand Theft Auto … pretty funny!
Of course, the truth behind the article and the sensational title is that it’s not quite the wild scene one might imagine. It was a very small sample size – only 13 sharks – and they pointed out that the finding of cocaine isn’t really drastically different than if they were to look for other pollutants such as antibiotics, sunscreen, insecticides, plastic, or other such things. The cocaine could have come from wastewater treatment plants (with filters unable to pull it out of excretions from people who had used cocaine) or, of course, packages of cocaine lost or dumped by traffickers. So it’s really not as exciting or dangerous as it first sounded, but it did pull me in to read about it.
The other story that caught my interest was one about a rare white buffalo found in Yellowstone National Park. I don’t know much about buffalo breeding and how likely it is to have an albino buffalo, but it wasn’t so much the idea of a white buffalo that held my interest, but rather the symbolic meaning attached to white buffaloes by the Native American Lakota people. You can read about the white buffalo prophecy in detail here, but the short version is a belief that the birth of a white buffalo signals a warning that a spiritual awakening must happen, believing that other animal species will also give birth to white animals and that it signals that “Mother Earth” is sick and has a fever. With all the focus on climate change and global warming, this makes for an intriguing interpretation and gives pause for consideration.
I was curious to see what AI could give me for a white buffalo image, and I have one here where the white buffalo is at the front of the herd, leading them in a new direction.
