Good morning –
A mostly cloudy day with a high temperature of about fifty: Whitewater’s meteorological Wednesday.
The City of Whitewater’s Zoning Rewrite Steering Committee meets this afternoon at 5 PM (agenda online). These are the early steps in a long process. There’s sure to be some worry that, if there are any changes to any zoning anywhere within the city limits, the sky will fall. It won’t. One could safely surmise that changes are likely to be mostly commercial rather than residential. If I’m right, then the benefit to neighborhoods would be a more liberalized economy, rather than direct alteration of residential regulations. Expect occasional worry and posturing nonetheless.
The Wisconsin Historical Society records that on this day in 1818, long before statehood, we had our first counties in Wisconsin:
On this date Lewis Cass, governor of the Michigan Territory, declared the first counties in Wisconsin. The counties included Michilimackinac (all areas drained by Lake Superior tributaries), Brown, and Crawford counties, which were separated through Portage. Michilimackinac County is now part of the state of Michigan. Govenor Cass later became the Secretary of War under President Andrew Jackson, as well as the Minister to France and a Michigan Senator. Cass, a Democrat, also ran for President in 1848, but lost to Whig Zachary Taylor due to factions within the Democratic Party and the formation of the Free Soil Party. [Source: Iowa County Genealogical Society]
There’s a story over at Wired about how tasmanian devils – now facing an infectious cancer plague – might survival after all. Some devils many be resistant to the disease, and their immunity many enable naturalists to repopulate other tasmanian devil colonies. (The animals’ situation is far worse than literal decimation: rather than 1 in 10 dying, stricken colonies have closer to 9 in 10 dying, and only 1 in 10 lingering on.) Brandon Keim writes that
The disease marched across the island; where it hit, up to nine in 10 Tasmanian devils were killed in the first onslaught. They were declared endangered. Scientists said extinction, except for a few individuals kept on species-level life support in zoos, was possible within 25 years.
Researchers didn’t know what to do, or even if anything could be done. But they didn’t give up; they set about gathering information, basic facts that meant little at the time but might someday come in handy. One such project was a genetic characterization of Tasmanian devil population structures.
In Tasmania’s far northwestern tip, in a 10-square-mile patch of remote mountain forest area called West Pencil Pine, biologist Menna Jones found hints of a genetically distinctive group. More research showed the West Pencil Pines devils had unique immune systems. This was no guarantee of immunity to the cancer, but it was reason to monitor them and hope.
See the full story for more information about these distinctive marsupials; I’m certainly pulling for their recovery.