TOP TUNA: After clinching the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series regular season championship, Mayetta’s Martin Truex Jr. pursues his other passion, fishing. Long sponsored by Bass Pro Shop, Martin acquired his angling smarts by fishing LBI waters. Here the Southern Regional High School graduate shows his big game fishing talent, landing a hefty tuna. (Supplied Photo)
I just got wind of a remarkable winter word: apricity. No, your mother didn’t use it all the time!
Ever notice how anything you say on social media has commenters swearing that either they or someone they know of has done it bigger and better?
Anyway, the meaning of apricity should leave you with a dreamy-eyed feeling and place a warmish glow upon your face. It is the mellow warmth issued by the sun in winter. One definition even has it as “the love of sunlight/warmth in winter.” It might also have a cat-in-a-sunbeam feel.
While hibernal sun warmth is mainly for subtle short-term apricity, it can have some skin impacts. Ask anyone who snow skis or faces the sun for hours while late-season surfcasting.
Despite low UV indices, a winter sunburn, when coupled with windburn, can cause quite the facial inflammation. Admittedly, a subtle winter tan stands out among the ghost-faced hoi polloi. Just don’t grab one from those egregiously bad sunlamps.
Sun trivia (just for the warm feel of it, i.e., the apricity of it): According to Tropicaltanjoplin.com, “Staying hydrated allows our bodies to naturally exfoliate toxins and impurities, which promotes healthier looking skin and a darker, longer-lasting tan.”
EIGHT-LEGGED ARRIVALS: This time of year bears a kinda shadowy, lurky feel to it, ideally suited to offer the latest arachnid news, focusing on a huge invasive spider moving our way from the south.
Many/most folks go a-quiver at the mere mention of spiderness. The ubiquitous eight-leggers are high on yuck lists, fostered by the fact that, on average, every one of us is within 5 feet of a spider … all life long! At your desk? Yep. On your couch or easy chair? Spiders nearby. Sleeping? Close all night, amigo.
Studies show the average worldwide soul fears arachnids, even though only 0.5% of spider species are potentially dangerous to humans.
How greatly are they feared? On a 10-level scale, the average fear of spiders is 4.5 for men and 5.6 for women. Gen-Xers fear them most, at 5.10, with Boomers least concerned but still harboring a 4.70 fright level.
Per capita, a strong majority of everybody dislikes spiders to some degree. Only snakes evoke a greater fear factor. And those trepidations might be inborn.
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig recently discovered what they interpret as a genetic inclination to fear snakes and spiders. Their findings indicate “Babies as young as six months old feel stressed when seeing these creatures– long before they could have learnt this reaction.”
I’m among the few folks who favor spiders, though I refuse to even acknowledge arachnids like ticks and chiggers. Those despicable bloodsuckers are spiders in leg numbers only – may they succumb to any and all future nuclear holocausts.
Even as an arachnophile, the opposite of arachnophobe, I’m not big on our recluse spiders, N.J.’s most dangerous toxic arachnid. They’re hard to see and easily irritated … and ugly to boot.
In the same breath, I have a favorable fascination with black widows, having once kept a couple as macabre pets. Able to live for many years in captivity, mine became tame. One black widow I named Gertrude thoroughly enjoyed climbing on my hand. She would come out of hiding to climb aboard the minute I put my hand in her cage. She likely did it for the warmth – or was there more? “Are you flirtin’ with me?” Her thinking: “What a meal this guy will make after we’re betrothed.”
Although black widows in the wild are quite capable of putting venomous fangs to human skin, they are decidedly uninclined to do so. From my research, most full-blown fangings occur when a widow falls or is trapped inside clothing. Construction workers doing demolitions are common bite victims. Reaching under a pile of firewood or sundry debris, beneath which a widow has homed herself, is also a proven bite scenario. Bites are rarely fatal but need antivenin to shorten the aftereffects.
With that creepyish warmup, I finally get to the new arachnid coming to town, speaking of the Joro spider. The large invasive Asian immigrant, a member of the orb weaver family, is almost certain to be spinning its expansive web in our parts rather soon. It has rapidly worked its way north from an introduction point in Georgia. It’s already common to Maryland.
While a Joro’s body is only a couple inches in length – “That’s more than long enough, thank you very little” – its gangly striped legs can be 4 inches long. Perspective-wise, it covers an open palm.
Now to the odd part. Despite their invasive nature, the spiders are being somewhat embraced as a benefit to the ecology, a highly uncommon reaction to not-from-here critters.
Joros feed on insects that local spiders do not, such as the adult brown marmorated stink bug. They’re mildly poisonous but hard to provoke into biting. What’s more, their bite is not much to speak of.
“They’re also not aggressive towards humans, nor are their fangs big enough to pose any kind of threat,” Andy Davis, a biologist at the University of Georgia, told phys.org in an article titled “Huge spiders to colonize US East Coast, but maybe it’s a good thing.”
Davis begs for clemency and understanding, not stigmatization.
“I don’t really think the Joros deserve to be squashed or killed like the spotted lanternfly – they’re really not out to get us, and it’s not their fault, either, that they’re here. They were literally along for the ride,” he said.
As to the Joro’s overall temperament, The New York Times has gone as far as headlining “These Spiders Look Frightening, but They May Be Scaredy-Cats,” acknowledging “Joro spiders are spreading around the United States and may turn up in New York soon. Recent experiments suggest that they may be shyer than other arachnids.”
When they get here, you can’t miss them. The females are knock-out gorgeous. Per anypest.com, females have “deep blue and yellow bands on their legs, and the abdomen is an infusion of red, yellow, and black in asymmetrical patterns.” Males are plainer, mainly mottled brown.
Left to their own trekking devices, they would take a long time to hit South Jersey, a more northerly geographical point with a survivable climate for Joros. However, it is proven they readily adapt to motorized travel, hitching rides on trucks, boats and trains.
JELLIES WITH SOUL: Anyone with an iota of coastal experience is fully familiar with jellyfish, be it on sight alone or through personal contact, as was the stinging case during those summers of yore when lion’s mane jellies arrived in droves, able to commandeer oceanside bathing beaches by literally stinging people out of the water.
Now we’re coping with bayside sea nettles. They can sting one good, though seldom seriously, especially when compared to the savage stings of the occasionally hereabouts Portuguese man-o-wars.
Overall, most jellies we see are harmless, short of injuries suffered when one bumps against the leg of certain unnamed bathers who instantly and hysterically climb onto the back of the nearest man, woman, or child – though I’ve rarely climbed onto a child’s back since they seldom offer enough safe distance from whatever just bumped my leg.
There are 2,000 worldwide jellyfish species. Those few that sting respond to essentially the aura of an enemy, keeping in mind a jelly has no observational skills, nor does it put any heart into its stings since, well, it has no heart. As to having a soul of sorts, more on that in a minute.
Interestingly, a jellyfish’s stinging apparatus, located within a tentacle, utilizes a harpoon-equipped cell known as a nematocyst. It acts all on its own volition, albeit in unison with thousands of fellow nematocysts occupying the tentacle.
Of the cell’s functionality, NOAA explains, “The cell’s thread is coiled under pressure and wrapped around a stinging barb. When potential prey makes contact with the tentacles of a (jellyfish), the nematocyst cell is stimulated. This causes a flap of tissue covering the nematocyst – the operculum – to fly open.”
When a veritable army of nematocysts let loose with their venomous harpoons, it not only repels an enemy, but can also imbue and capture prey. The imbued prey is then moved toward a jelly’s multipurpose mouth, which both digests food … and excretes the waste. Hmmm.
I’m harping on jellyfish harpoons since they’re in the news.
A story at medicalnewstoday.com titled “Milking deadly jellyfish for new medicines” begins by noting, “The study of venom in medicine has traditionally been confined to understanding its effect as a toxin and developing antidotes. But scientists are becoming increasingly interested in studying venom systems and their toxins in order to discover ingredients to make new drugs.”
Now to the highly updated aspect of jellyfish knowledge, wherein these primordially primitive predators are getting an in-depth exam, seeing they have clearly survived planetary extinction events. Being asked: Is its unprecedented survival just blind ecological luck, or is it due to highly advanced survival characteristics?
This is a nice lead-in to a motivational (for me) commercial for a brain-assist drug-of-sorts known as Prevagen. This hugely popular product, made by Quincy Bioscience, a Wisconsin-based manufacturer, is being marketed as an over-the-counter brain health supplement “clinically shown to be safe and to improve memory and support brain function, such as mild memory loss associated with aging,” per Quincy.
The manufacturers emphasize Prevagen’s jellyfish roots – and a secret ingredient called apoaequorin, a protein that stems from Aequorea victoria, a bioluminescent hydrozoan jellyfish that is found off the west coast of North America.
As to the supplement’s ability to assist the human mind, a study group taking apoaequorin showed a statistically significant 10% to 16% improvement in verbal learning and working memory at the end of 90 days. Of note, the study just happened to be done by the manufacturer.
The Prevagen claim that it is being sourced from jellyfish is quite the stretch, though it truthfully harks back to the supplement’s early days. Nowadays, Prevagen is made from – wait for it– E coli bacteria.
Yes, E. coli as a memory rescue. One might see why the company prefers to place a marketing emphasis on the gorgeous jellyfish side of things. In ads, Prevagen is promoted as residing within a deep-blue ocean realm. Hey, as weird as my mind can go, I’d still have a hard time developing a sales pitch highlighting E coli bacteria for the brain, though showing a little E coli bacterium sporting a downsized 10-gallon hat and riding cavalry-like on the backs of jellyfish … “Giddy up, brain cells!”
By the by, a scientific dietary mention should be made that a diet rich in berries, fish and leafy green vegetables is more effective than many a bottle of jellyfish/E coli supplements.
JELLYFISH FUN TIME: Onward to theorizing why jellyfish have been around for 500 million gooey years with no discernible bodily changes. On the simpler side, they might be extraordinarily happy with their lot in life, i.e., “up a lazy river in the noonday sun.” Then there are the emerging findings that jellies might have more going for them than anyone has ever imagined.
A neurosciencenews.com article “Jellyfish Show Remarkable Learning Skills” indicates that jellyfish, despite provenly brainless, have dang decent memories. How is that even possible?
Jellies might also have communication skills, advanced communication skills. To understand this requires scientific open-mindedness coupled with a fondness for phantasmagoric thinking since it comes down to telepathic interconnectivity.
For starters, imagine jellyfish having 500 million years of developing and perfecting extrasensory communication necessitated by having no mouth to speak of – though humans have long known you need no brains to speak effusively. Speaking of which, human speech is a paltry 300,000 years old, with an apex achievement being an impressive assortment of cuss words.
For yinz of a doubter’s bent, keep in mind the recent discoveries that vegetation has long been intercommunicating in an ethereal, extra-dimensional manner, not just issuing ga-ga-grade warnings about smelling smoke, but employing full-blown telepathic conversing.
Like jellyfish, vegetation has had hundreds of millions of years to perfect its hyper-dimensional communication system. We are abject newbies at communicating, forced to use primitive verbal sound-making methods, backed by egos that refuse to believe in any higher communicating being done by what are thought to be lower lifeforms.
As we uncover the extent of plant life’s ethereal communication abilities, we could simultaneously unlock the intercommunicating processes of not only jellyfish, but loads of other seemingly silent marine creatures as well. In doing so, we might be able to directly ask jellyfish how we can improve our memories.
So, a jellyfish, a laurel bush and a rabbi walk into a bar …
RUNDOWN: It’s one for the record books, speaking of togging pressure at the BL South Jetty. Check the photo with this column. Never in the history of that jetty have so many anglers been rocking out. The current tog take there is tops in the state. Amazing, T-company.
Striped bassing is also maintaining steam with gonzo-grade hooking. Many days find boat can’t-miss fishing, even with a fleet in play. Though slightly smaller stripers are now hunkered down beneath bunker pods, many a 40-pounder is coming to light. Also, in perfect time for Thanksgiving, it’s now a breeze to find fish in that myopic 28- to 31-inch keeper range. Many a holiday table will be graced with both turkey and bass.
Beach bassing is fun and occasionally brisk. As with boat bassing, holiday stripers in the keeper-size range are there for the taking.
How about folks nailing those next-to-shore bluefin tuna! They’re catching gorgeous bluefins within eyesight of the LBI and IBSP beaches. This allows smaller vessels, unequipped to make long treks to the canyons, to go big game.
The 2023 LBI Surf Fishing Classic is reaching its peak. It has a couple prime weeks to go. Join up and pinch the big-dollar prizes. See lbisfc.com.
jaymann@thesandpaper.net
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