[Fwd: Here come the rafting iguanas]Here come the rafting iguanas

For some reason, this reminded me of you and your raft/boat experiment...

Could the term "green iguanas" be symbolic of US currency?

Cheers,

--David

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/od/story.html?s=v/nm/19981008/od/iguanas_1.html

Yahoo! News                                Human Interest Headlines 

Thursday October 8 11:02 AM EDT 

Here come the rafting iguanas

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists said Wednesday they have solved the mystery of
how animal species were dispersed throughout the Caribbean.

Researchers had suspected that animals living on the tropical islands had
probably hitched rides on floating debris to travel to other islands. But
skeptics said the theory was improbable, unobservable and could never be proven.

Until now.

In a letter to the scientific journal Nature, researchers from the United States
and the Caribbean island of Anguilla said they have evidence that green iguanas,
originally from the island of Guadeloupe, used a natural raft to invade and
colonize Anguilla, about 175 miles (281.6 km) away.

``This species did not previously occur on the island. They arrived on a mat
of logs and uprooted trees,'' Ellen Censky, of the Carnegie Museum of Natural
History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said.

Local fisherman witnessed the arrival of the 15 refugee iguanas on the eastern
shore of Anguilla in 1995. Censky and her colleagues suspect a particularly bad
hurricane season in the Caribbean that year sparked the exodus.

``Approximately a month after the first of these hurricanes, iguanas reached the
shores of Anguilla,'' said Censky.

The scientists marked many of the males and females that arrived on the raft.
Several months later they noticed that one of the iguanas was pregnant.

``Our observations confirm that raft dispersal can occur successfully, and
document the over-water dispersal of a group of large vertebrates and their
persistence and possible reproduction after landfall,'' Censky added.

At 4:51 PM -0400 on 10/8/98, David Miller wrote:

> Could the term "green iguanas" be symbolic of US currency?

Naw... But I hereby nominate the green iguana to be the official mascot of
the cypherpunk crypto-refugee community on Anguilla.

I can see it on the "alternative" FC99 shirt now. A bunch of iguanas, (at
least one in black BDUs :-)), on a raft of (tamper resistant)
cryptoaccellerator and DES-cracker parts, styrofoam, and Stronghold and Red
Hat boxes, all with a silhouette of Anguilla looming in the background.
Maybe with Jerry Gumbs standing on the beach holding a "God Save the Queen"
sign?

But wait, there's more.  How about the Anguillan flag, with *iguanas*
replacing the dolphins...


Can you tell the equinox is over?

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga
-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'