Snow-Snake Karma

A friend of mine recently sent me an email, one of the many chain-letter-like kinds of stories.  This one was a funny little thing about a retired person having fun spinning out an improbable shaggy dog story for his own amusement and the entertainment of others while standing in line at a Costco checkout, at the expense of a gullible, and not very bright fellow-customer.  It prompted this response from me, which I am elaborating on here with a little more detail.

One of the people I used to work with had been transplanted to Minnesota from Pennsylvania. He loved to tell outrageous stories like that about what winter was like in Minnesota to new people who moved here, as do many of us - mostly people from warm places in the south. He could be very persuasive, including talking about the perils of "snow snakes that tunnel through the snow like worms tunnel through the ground".  There were versions that involved shoveling, some that involved slipping on what you thought was ice but were really snow snakes causing a fall.  The variations were many, always colorful and hilarious.

Except that it has been discovered in the arctic that there really are creatures like snow fleas, a kind of snow-living flea-like creature. They are properly named Hypogastrura harveyi and Hypogastrura nivicola, and they look like the photo on the right.
 There are ice worms, an entire genus of ice worms, living in glaciers, called Mesenchytraeus, that look like this photo below.

National Geographic has produced a lot of magazines about extreme environments, like the lowest levels of the ocean which is both tremendously high-pressure and very very very cold, with varieties of sea worms and eels - sorts of snake-like creatures.  After all, we've had the ceolocanth turn up, a creature in the ocean believed to be extinct since the Cretaceous period, which was not only millions of years ago, it was some 80 million years long.

We've actually had to come up with the term "Lazarus Taxon", a taxon being a group of organism, like genus or species,   Lazarus, from the individual in the Bible that Jesus raised from the dead.  They us it to describe organisms, like the coelocanth here, that have "disappeared from the fossil record" only to reappear again later.  But then to be fair, paleontology also came up with the term "Elvis Taxon"  for 'look-alike' species that were "misidentified as having re-emerged in the fossil record after a period of presumed extinction", named for Elvis impersonators.  These are taxa which look like the original, or like they may have descended from the original, but are actually the result of convergant evolution - they evolved separately to look the same, and are in fact, not related.

I'm just waiting - waiting - for some National Geo explorer to find a snow snake, eel, or large snow worm, and have the last laugh be on us, the cynics, the ones who thought other people were the gullible ones. It will be true that there is no such thing in Minnesota.  It will probably be odd and ugly-looking, like this deep sea living Humpback Anglerfish on the left - scary!

But I'm betting there is something very like a 'snow-snake' out there in the wide world somewhere, somehow.  It will turn up in glossy photos either on the cover or inside the pages of National Geographic, or Smithsonian, or one of the specialized Nature magazines for scientists, or as the centerfold of some highly specialized professional journal with a name like 'Paleontology Today' (think about it).  People around me are going to wonder why I laugh until I cry when the day finally comes that I see it.  He who laughs last, laughs best.

It will be "snow-snake karma".

I do believe that the world is still a vast and wonderous place, and that it is likely in it's size and diversity, always going to be able to surprise us. That our world is a stranger place than we can imagine, and that truth is always capable of being stranger than fiction.  Between climate change and the response to alterations like this, at least - I hope it will always be so.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iJwXzrq3lD7vHJJH4DU8uNjjihPwD9GUQP0G1