Wednesday is science day for this blog site, and today I reach into my bag of odd creatures and select the horseshoe crab.  The odds are high that you have never seen one. There is an Atlantic species that lives along the coastline from Maine to the Yucatan Peninsula. There are three other species, mostly found in Southeast Asia. Coastal areas having none of them:  Europe, Africa, South America and large parts of Asia and the Pacific. Aquariums generally don't have them.  These are Kujukushima horseshoe crabs at the Saikai National Park in Japan on Kyushu near Sasebo. They spend most of their lives in deep, offshore waters, only coming to shallow coastal beaches to spawn during high tides at night during full and new moons. There has been habitat destruction. Another reason is that, where they are found, large-scale and unregulated operations have killed them off. From the 1850s to the 1960s, millions of horseshoe crabs were annually harvest primarily for use as fertilize...

HERE IS SOME VERY VERY GOOD NEWS FOR THE ELDERLY.  From the  New York Times  this morning: Before Omicron, a typical vaccinated 75-year-old who contracted  Covid had a roughly similar risk of death — around 1 in 200  — as a typical 75-year-old who contracted the flu. ( Here  are the details   behind that calculation, which is based on  an academic study.) Omicron has changed the calculation. Because it is milder  than earlier versions of the virus,  Covid now appears to  present less threat to most vaccinated elderly people than the  annual flu does . Let me repeat:  SENIORS WHO ARE FULLY VACCINATED AND BOOSTED, IF YOU GET INFECTED WITH THE CURRENT COVID-19 DISEASE, YOUR MORTALITY RATE WILL BE  LESS  THAN THE ANNUAL FLU.  I'm exaggerating here, but perhaps if you get all the necessary shots, and are so unlucky as to get infected by the Omicron variant ( which is now by far the dominant strain around the worl...