Mapping Nature’s Elusive Animals
Art of the Emeryville Mud Flats
Animal Myths and Daddy Long-Legs
Start your night when the doors open at 7PM with pre-show games, beats by Citizen Zain, and info from the Oakland Public Library. Rakestraw Books will have copies of Oliver’s gorgeous book available. Then grab a drink and a seat as talks begin at 8PM.
Where the Wild Things Go
Using Modern Technology to Map Nature’s Elusive Animals
For thousands of years tracking animals meant following footprints, but now satellites, drones, cameras and cellular networks reveal the natural world in beautiful detail. See data-driven portraits of the surprising ways ants, owls, otters, turtles, and sharks navigate the world, and stunning representations of how elephants adapted to elevated railways, what drives baboon troop decisions, and how genetic islands of animals can be rescued with modern data.
Oliver Uberti is the co-author of Where the Animals Go (http://wheretheanimalsgo.com/), which uses dataviz techniques to reveal the lives of individual animals. He was previously Senior Design Editor at National Geographic and once articulated a skeleton in his living room by combining bones from a spider monkey, gorilla, kudu, fruit bat, manatee, and sabertooth tiger.
Driftwood Dragons and Mudflat Monuments in the Emeryville Industrial Wasteland
From the turbulent 1970s and the contaminated mud of the East Bay off of Emeryville rose massive, whimsical and overtly political statues and sculptures made by renegade artists from driftwood and repurposed “junk”, the remnants of which can still be seen in the bay during the I-80 commute. Hear about the origin of the mudflat sculptures during the Free Speech Movement, and how this swamp of public art and radical expression became a critical flash point during the Bay Area’s destabilizing transition from an industrial hub to a tech and real estate capital of the modern world.
Liam O’Donoghue is the creator and host of the East Bay Yesterday podcast, which was recently awarded “Best of the Bay” by East Bay Express. He started the local history podcast because he enjoys talking to old people and was running out of abandoned buildings to sneak into.
Joey Enos is an artist, historian and works as a collections manager for The National Pastime Museum. His family operated the Michel & Pelton Company from 1929-1982 and has been in the East Bay for five generations, back when Emeryville was known as “The Rotten City.” Follow Joey’s curated collection of Mudflat Art pics on Instagram @emeryville_mudflats
Tall Tales of Daddy Long-Legs
How Animal Myths Begin and Endure
All children know that daddy long-legs are actually the most poisonous spiders, but their deadly fangs are just too short to bite you. Except daddy long-legs aren’t spiders, aren’t poisonous, and don’t have fangs. Learn about the origins and propagation of famous animal myths, and discover behavioral, morphological and physiological data that makes nature more interesting, (usually) less scary, and led to changes in robotic and prosthetic design.
Ignacio Escalante is a Costa Rican Field Biologist pursuing his PhD in biomechanics and the evolution of leg loss as a defensive strategy at UC-Berkeley. When not analyzing videos he is focused on avoiding venomous pit vipers at his field site.