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Presentation (I updated it to contain my Speech Notes for those who don’t remember)

Mudskippers live in self made burrows by digging the ground up with their mouths and spitting out of it. They use these burrows to hide from predators, temperature regulation, and to guard their eggs/larvae, these burrows can also reach around 1.5 meters in the ground. Females have a high fecundity and lay nearly 2,000 eggs per gram of body mass in their partners burrows during courtship. Spawning happens potentially across the year but usually during spawning seasons of Feburary and May. These eggs are on the ceiling of a specialized air-filled chamber created by gulping air from the surface and bringing it in their chamber which is how they keep themselves and their eggs oxygenated while submerged in water especially useful during high tide in a typically hypoxic environment such as mudflats.

After mating the female leaves the male’s burrow and the male safeguards the eggs until they develop for hatching. When the eggs hatch the father removes all the air from the chamber being gulping it up and spitting it back towards the surface letting the larvae swim out from the water and drift into the surface where a majority succumb to predation. Male mudskipper tend to help the larvae with different strategies reach the surface by creating some kind of current with tale undulation, turbulence by swimming towards the burrow, or relocation by transporting the larvae in the mouth. Species demonstrate one or multiple of these behaviors yet the exact behavior of Atlantic Mudskipper remains to be found.

After around 1 to 2 months the larvae are able to defend themselves by burrowing in the mud and once they reach sexual maturity around the size of 10.8cm (males) and 11.8cm (females) on average though they can reach that point as early as 7cm (males) and 9cm (females). At maturity they’ll defend their territory aggressively, this territorial behavior is very pronounced in the Atlantic Mudskipper even for their species. When Mudskippers show off aggression against intruders they signal it by raising their first dorsal fin. If that signal doesn’t scare off the predators they battle each other by, biting, leaping and opening their mouths.

Atlantic Mudskippers have a max growth of 25 centimeters and a life expectancy of 5 years.

Osmoregulation and Thirst

The Atlantic Mudskipper is a diurnal species, their genera like to spends most of its time on land than in water. Its ability to spend all this time on land by breathing in the air with a newt word of blood vessels in the surface of its skin, where they’re respiratory gasses are exchanged with the surrounding atmosphere. However there are behavioral patterns and motivators for it to migrate from land back to the water. One vital need for water being that its skin needs to be moist for it to respirate properly out of water, usually to prevent its skin from drying Mudskippers would roll on its side to absorb the moisture from the ground to its body. Another vital prompt for it to is that its constantly regulating itself both osmotically and ionically, a unique way it keeps up this regulation is by the hormone found in mammals: Angiotensin II. This hormone contracts the blood vessels to maintain blood pressure, as well as stimulating thirst for the animal to manipulate its behavior to ‘drink’ water in events of dehydration. Other fish marine saltwater fish regulate by drinking to, but since they’re constantly in the ionized water they don’t need to stimulate thirst.

Social stimulus can motivate mudskippers as well, whenever mudskippers would make some form of communication exerted high numbers of neurohypophysial hormones particularly vasotocin these types of hormones play a key role in osmoregulation and as a result when these hormones are activated by the social behavior it also stimulated thirst in the mudskippers. These specific behaviors that involved migrated back into the ocean were categorized as reproductive with them heading back to their burrows to spawn eggs/reproduce and submission to avoid stronger competitors.

Another behavioral hormone tied to osmoregulation are corticosteroids which contain other hormone receptors such as glucocorticoid receptor. Under stressful situations these triggers regulate their mood and increase these hormones create another connection in how its behavior plays into its important function to osmoregulate and by extent its migration habits between aquatic and terrestrial environments.

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I think the idea of technology is going to be merely contextual. Most people who have close friends with conversation can probably still make it with texting and technology. But there is a hint of truth to that when talking to complete strangers, having a meaningful live debate with someone on opposing views is going to be less civil and meaningful in say, a twitter argument. Also making posts online for people who you barely met is definitely not build as much empathy, than some other people. Though like I said texting online is really contextual and varies a lot on what the conversation/platform is, which in a specific, and I’ll admit common context could or not prove what Sherry Turkle’s point.

One of Gladwell’s criticism of social media activism is the lack of organization. There isn’t much planning nor strategizing with social media networks, which leads to disorder and conflict where progress is less likely to happen. I think I personally agree to this. By going on social media for a movement where things are more impersonal, it’s much more harder to establish any sort of strategy or leadership. But this is definitely an obstacle to overcome with social media, which can be overcome by being personal and establishing leadership.

Cosmopolitans would be the idea of a global understanding and opening up of and to the many different viewpoints of all different types of people across the world. In a way he advocates for it is taking examples from the opposite of cosmopolitanism with Hitler and Stalin, isolated from and villainized outside views to the point it lead to extreme acts. How it lead to change is how outside views on a culture could lead to the culture taking in some of the views and adjusting, Chinese foot binding for example.

I was a bit confused about the hypothetical time traveling child but I got the point after a second read through.

After listening to this podcast from this American Life . I have concluded one of the best cases of changing someone’s mind is with a very personal and emotional conversation and helping lead the person talking into finding out for themselves that the topic at hand, given is in fact something that lines up to their morals. Preventing the “backfire effect” in where straight up facts about the subject would, for lack of a better word backfire and leading them to changing their mind themselves instead of forcing them. I’ve heard many claims the best way to win an argument is to be more emotional and appeal to the human side of the other, this does help me understand it more. But it also shines light the downside against it, it specifically how manipulative it is and the fact that people on the other side of the argument can use this method as equal, personally though I can’t imagine what it would sound like I can imagine it happening. There should also be the fact it won’t work on people who have an even more fundamentally different outlook on life accounted for. Like someone who’s fundamental beliefs are against aspects like abortions and gay marriage. This shows it’s one effective way to change people’s minds but has its clear downsides, and shouldn’t be the only way to convince an argument.

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