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42 SHAKEN TO
THE CORE
The great Indian
earthquake of 2001
is a benchmark
for geologists seeking
to understand
mid-continental
earthquakes.
BY SUSAN HOUGH
¥ POS | ine
AND ROGER BILHAM
a u

36 GENETIC HOOFPRINTS
The DNA trail leading back
to the origins of today’s cattle
BY DANIEL G. BRADLEY

COVER
Leaf cutter ants (Atta
colombica) cultivate
and protect a fungus,
which they eat.
58 INVASION OF THE PHOTOGRAPH BY
GENDER BENDERS CHRISTIAN ZIEGLER
STORY BEGINS
Se By manipulating sex and ON PAGE 50
e reproduction in their hosts,
50 BIOSPHERE III many parasites may be
A ninety-year-old inadvertent altering the evolution
experiment in tropical biodiversity of sex itself.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BY JOHN H. WERREN
CHRISTIAN ZIEGLER
TEXT BY EGBERT GILES LEIGH JR.
AND CHRISTIAN ZIEGLER PICTURE CREDITS: Page 16
Visit our Web site at
www. naturalhistorymag.com
6 UP FRONT
New Engines of Evolution
10 THE NATURAL MOMENT
Raw Bar
PHOTOGRAPH BY
HOWIE GARBER

12 LETTERS

16 CONTRIBUTORS

20 SAMPLINGS
STEPHAN REEBS

24 UNIVERSE
Naming Rights
NEIL pEGRASSE TYSON

30 BIOMECHANICS
Flap Your Hands
ADAM SUMMERS

32 FINDINGS
The Worm and the Parasite
T.V. RAJAN

64 THIS LAND
Tuff Crowd
ROBERT H. MOHLENBROCK

66 OUT THERE
Tightening Our Kuiper Belt
CHARLES LIU

68 THE SKY IN FEBRUARY

JOE RAO

70 REVIEW
The Curious Energy of the Void
DONALD GOLDSMITH

74 nature.net
Scaling Down
ROBERT ANDERSON

76 AT THE MUSEUM

80 ENDPAPER
Homing Instinct
JEFF FAIR
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 UP FRONT Th
New Engines of Evolution
ast month I noted that part of what many people don’t like about sci-
LAS stems from its conclusion that we human beings don’t occupy the PETER BROWN Editor-in-Chief

center of the universe. But another great source of discomfort about sci- Mary Beth Aberlin Elizabeth Meryman
Managing Editor Art Director
ence is its insistence that change is a pervasive feature of the world. Evo-
lutionary change, of course, has long been a thorn in the side of many Board of Editors
T.J. Kelleher, Avis Lang, Vittorio Maestro
conservative Christians. Change in the heavens, the very model of perma-
nence and order, seems to fly in the face of common sense. Maybe it’s for- Michel DeMatteis Associate Managing Editor

tunate that our resistance to change is balanced by the fact that one human Thomas Rosinski Associate Art Director

lifetime is too short for anyone to notice many of the grandest changes in Lynette Johnson Editorial Coordinator
nature. Yet the capacity of science to take the long view, to study events Erin M. Espelie Special Projects Editor
that take far more than a lifetime to unfold, often makes science the bearer Richard Milner Contributing Editor
of unwelcome tidings that undermine our yearning for stability. Graciela Flores, Marisa Macari Interns
Take evolution. One consequence of Darwinian evolution by natural
selection is that as the world changes, what lives and what dies can
change as well. In this month’s cover story, Christian Ziegler and Egbert
Mark A. FURLONG Publisher
Giles Leigh Jr. document the subtle but pervasive effects of one world-
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changing event—the construction of the Panama Canal—on the ecology
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and biodiversity of the Panamanian tropical forest (see “Biosphere HI,”
Edgar L. Harrison National Advertising Manager
page 50). Other changes with substantial effects on the world’s genetic Sonia W. Paratore Senior Account Manager
history—agricultural breeding, the transport of species from one region Donna M. Lemmon Production Manager
to another—are too slow to be perceived without specialized techniques. Michael Shectman Fulfillment Manager
Daniel G. Bradley, in his “Genetic Hoofprints” (page 36), describes how Tova Heiney Business Administrator
the magic lantern of DNA analysis has shed some surprising light on the
evolutionary history of cattle since their domestication 10,000 years ago. Advertising Sales Representatives
New York—Metrocorp Marketing (212) 972-1157,
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Now the scientific understanding of change itself is changing. In his Topp HappPER Vice President, Science Education

“Invasion of the Gender Benders” (page 58) John H. Werren describes

one way that microorganisms are playing a key role in evolutionary NATURAL HisTORY MAGAZINE, INC.
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crobiologists discovered that some of the same bacteria play a role in Natural History (ISSN 0028-0712) is published monthly, except for combined issues in
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6 NATURAL HISTORY February 2003

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 THE NATURAL MOMENT LEETERS
~< See preceding pages
A Matter of Gravity Permanent capture problem over the past
In his “Universe” column could be achieved using three centuries without
(“Going Ballistic,” almost no fuel, an attrac- having any idea that orbits
November 2002], Neil tive option because Hiten of this kind were awaiting
deGrasse Tyson eloquently carried so little. A more discovery. And who knows
covered many different complicated plan was suc- what else there is to be
and interesting aspects of cessfully followed, how- found. It is not only with
s their Latin name, “free fall?’ Of particular ever: the craft stayed in telescopes that new astro-
Ursus maritimus, wmdi- interest to me was his dis- weak capture for a few nomical objects can be dis-
cates, polar bears are true cussion of the chaotic mo- hours, then moved away covered. With even a small
seafarers: they spend most of tion of the planetary orbits from the Moon for six personal computer, a lucky
their lives aboard ships of and of the slingshot effect months to explore the guess, and enough persis-
shifting pack ice, patrolling that can give spacecraft a Earth-Moon system, and tence, anybody is now ina
for stowaway seals. In win- planetary boost. (The mo- finally returned to the position to find new solu-
ter, ice floes bring bears to tion of an object 1s chaotic Moon for placement in tions to age-old problems
the edge of Alaska’s north- if at each moment it can permanent capture. It ofa kind that were com-
ern coast, where the crea- move in infinitely many turns out that weak cap- pletely beyond what
tures may come ashore possible directions, result- ture is a slow version of Newton and the Le’s and
briefly. By early summer ing in an erratic path. the slingshot effect; re- La’s of celestial mechanics
they head north again, stick- Think of the motion of a cently weak capture was (Leverrier, Legendre,
ing close to their melting, leaf blown about by the mathematically proved to Lagrange, and Laplace, to
mobile hunting ground. wind, or a drunk trying to be truly chaotic. name a few) could handle.
Occasionally, though, a walk a straight line.) Edward Belbruno Piet Hut
bear misses the boat. The The chaos of planetary Princeton University Institute for Advanced Study
sow pictured here with her orbits is extremely subtle, Princeton, New Jersey Princeton, New Jersey
two cubs was one of fifty- and it takes careful mea-
five polar bears that failed to surement to notice it. But The figure-eight orbit that Neil Tyson’s article
follow the shrinking ice this ifa space probe passes a Neil Tyson mentions, as brought to mind my own
past September and ended body such as the Moon well as other newly discov- attempt to dig a hole from
up on Barter Island—the in such a way that the ered solutions to the old Oklahoma to China. I
largest island in the Arctic probe is almost captured three-body problem, are was seven or eight at the
National Wildlife Refuge. by the body’s gravita- so elegant that a name has time and asked my dad if I
Photographer Howie tional pull, the probe will been coined for them: could dig down behind
Garber was careful not to usually linger for a few choreographies. The figure the house. “Sure, honey,”
disturb the protective mother hours in the vicinity of eight is only the simplest he replied, barely looking
as she breakfasted with her the larger body, moving example; other orbits are up from the paper. The
cubs at the edge of the Inu- in a complicated, chaotic wildly more complex, project was called off sev-
piat village of Kaktovic. The fashion before leaving with shapes that look more eral weeks later when his
three bears had been tearing abruptly on another path like fluttering butterflies. tractor nearly fell into the
into remnants of a bowhead that 1s difficult to predict. And those three-body hole. I was terribly dis-
whale, recently caught by the The effect is called weak orbits have been quickly appointed, but now I
villagers on an authorized ballistic capture. generalized to even more have learned that a major
hunt. The whale carcass is In 1990, I designed a fascinating dances for four catastrophe was averted.
visible in the background. new kind of route to the or more bodies. Animated First of all I would have
Females with dependent Moon for the Japanese examples can be viewed been vaporized by the
young, eager for a reliable spacecraft Hiten, requiring on the Web at www.ams. fierce heat of the iron
food source, may be the three months instead of org/new-in-math/cover/ core. At best I would have
most common visitors to the usual three days for orbits! .html. popped out in the south-
such whale carcasses. But no the spacecraft to make the As a theoretical astro- ern Indian Ocean, which
one knows whether cubs fed trip and leading to weak physicist working in stellar would have been danger-
onshore will master the ballastic capture. The re- dynamics, I am sobered by ous because I couldn’t
lessons they'll need once sultant chaotic motion of- the fact that great mathe- swim. At least it is a relief
they return to the ice. fered a lot of flexibility to maticians and physicists to know the ocean water
—Erin Espelie mission planning. worked on the three-body pouring into the tunnel

12 | NATURAL HISTORY February 2003

would have surged back to aircraft. Second, a shark Wings and Stings ion, which implies the in
and forth, rather than can make a yawing (side- In his tale of initiation into tentional imposition of an
flooding the Midwest. ways) turn without bank- the pleasures and perils of agonizing death. Ethical
Gloria Jones- Wolf ing, simply by bending its rainforest field research entomologists, certainly in-
Elk Falls, Kansas body and adjusting verti- (“Bites of Passage,” cluding all who work at La
cally oriented fins to keep October 2002], Nathan Selva, use the most humane
The Shark Has Sharp Turns from sinking. Airplanes Welton writes that the methods available to kill
In his “Biomechanics” turn while remaining aloft “mad scientists” of La Selva arthropods (freezing or fast-
column on the hammer- primarily by controlling Biological Station, in Costa acting chemicals) before
head shark [“Head Turner,” the positions of ailerons Raca, “happily spend their mounting them as study
November 2002], Adam mounted on horizontally days plucking the wings off specimens. We take lives,
Summers reports that the oriented wings. aerial insects and crucifying however small, only when
shark does not bank its Nevertheless, the shark’s them on Styrofoam there is a legitimate scien-
winglike head as it turns. head may help the animal boards.” As thirty-year vet- tific reason to do so, and
He thus dismisses the idea maneuver—if not in mak- erans of research at La Selva nobody we know plucks
that the head provides lift ing sideways turns, then at and co-directors of the wings off insects.
and maneuverability, as does least in pitching it up or ongoing Arthropods of La Robert K. Colwell
the wing of an aircraft. But down. In that respect, the Selva (ALAS) project—an University of Connecticut
sharks are different from forward position of the effort to make an inventory Storrs, Connecticut
aircraft in two important large head is optimal, of all the major groups of
respects (apart from the though further analysis is insects, spiders, and mites at John T’ Longino
obvious ones). needed to confirm any such the station—we don’t mind The Evergreen State College
First, water provides hydrodynamic function. being tagged in good fun as Olympia, Washington
sharks with substantial Frank E. Fish “mad scientists.”
buoyancy, whereas air does West Chester University But there is no humor in Natural History’ e-mail
not confer the same benefit West Chester, Pennsylvania the cruel image of crucifix- address is nhmag@amnh.org

forests and
other public land y Congress:
enacted powerful

_ useless unless they’

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 CONTRIBUTORS

Howie Garber (“The Natural Moment,’ page 10) practices emergency room medicine in Salt Lake City,
Utah, but he finds wildlife photography “as challenging and exciting” as his day job. Garber has received
numerous prizes, including the 1997 BG Wildlife Photographer of the Year in the “Landscape (Wild
Places)” category. A 500-millimeter lens enabled him to photograph a mother polar bear and her two cubs
from a reasonably safe distance. More of Garber’s photographs are on view at www.wanderlustimages.com.

“Cattle is in the blood,” is the way Daniel G. Bradley (“Genetic Hoofprints,’ page 36) describes him-
self. A lecturer in genetics and a fellow at Trinity College, Dublin, Bradley grew up on a small farm
in northern Ireland and recalls tending cattle on spring mornings before going to school. Even today
not all his work is done in the lab. To help trace the origins of African cattle, he has traveled several
times to western Africa and, with help from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, he has vis-
ited remote pastoral villages in Guinea and Guinea-Bissau. He once drove through a desert strewn
with spent rocket shells to reach an area of Chad that is home to huge-horned African Kuri cattle.

On January 26, 2001, when a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the Indian state of Gujarat, Susan Hough (“Shaken to the
Core,’ page 42) immediately began to search the Internet for first-person accounts of the event. She knew the Indian
=i quake would be invaluable for calibrating the intensity of a series of mid-continental
m2 earthquakes that shook southeastern Missouri nearly two centuries ago. Hough is a
geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, California, and the author of
the book Earthshaking Science: What We Know (and Don’t Know) about Earthquakes.
Roger Bilham is a professor of geology at the University of Colorado in Boulder and an
associate director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
In the past three decades he has done extensive geodetic surveying in India and Tibet
and completed numerous investigations of historic Indian earthquakes. He is the author
1 of more than 130 articles on earthquake-related processes.

Christian Ziegler and Egbert Giles Leigh Jr. (“Biosphere III,’ page 50) teamed up in
Panama to document the way animals and plants have adapted to life on a small island in
a tropical forest. The result is their book A Magic Web: The Tiopical Forest of Barro Colorado
Island (published last month by Oxford University Press; see www.amagicweb.com).
Based in Vancouver and Panama, Ziegler (left) is a wildlife and nature photographer and
writer with a background in biology. His work has appeared in magazines throughout the
world, and in 2001 he won a prize in the BG Wildlife Photographer of the Year Compe-
tition. Leigh (right) is a tropical ecologist with thirty years’ experience on Barro Colorado
as a staff scientist for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

When John H. Werren (‘Invasion of the Gender Benders,” page 58) began his graduate studies in biology at the Univer-
sity of Utah, he focused on behavioral ecology, investigating how and why parasitic wasps manipulate .
the proportion of males and females in their progeny. But he found that there were also “genetic para-
sites” that altered the sex ratio. Some of the parasites turned out to be microorganisms. After complet-
ing his Ph.D., he entered the U.S. Army, and, as he describes it, “in one of those funny coincidences, the
Army decided that I would work on water bacteriology, despite my having no formal training in bacte-
riology. So I learned a lot of bacteriology and, in collaboration with a colleague back in Utah, found a
male-killing microbe in the parasitic wasps.” Now aprofessor of biology at the University of Rochester
in New York, Werren studies Wolbachia bacteria and their role in the evolution of new insect species.

| PICTURE CREDITS p. 10-11: © Howie Garber/Wanderlust Images; p. 20 (top): courtesy Frederieke Taylor Gallery, NY; (bottom): © Roland Seitre/Peter Arnold, Inc.; p.
22 (top): Scott A. Eckert; (bottom): Evolution 56(8)2002, p. 166; p. 24: © Giraudon/Art Resource, NY; p. 28: Image Select/Art Resource, NY; p. 32: Wellcome Library,
London; p. 33: © CNRI/Photo Researchers, Inc.; p. 35: © Sinclair Stammers/Photo Researchers, Inc.; pp. 36-37: Robert Harding Picture Library Ltd.; p. 38 (top):
Scala/Art Resource, NY; (middle): E. Strouhal © Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY; (bottom): Victoria & Albert Museum, London/Art Resource, NY; p. 39 (left):
courtesy the author; (right): Peter Arnold, Inc.; pp. 40-41: Frans Lanting/Minden Pictures; pp. 42-48: © Randolph Langenbach/UNESCO, 2001; pp. 44-45: maps by
Anita Karl, Compass Projections; p. 58: Oxford Scientific Films; p. 59: Alison M. Dunn, University of Leeds; p. 60: Frank Jiggens, Cambridge; p. 61: Molly Hunter, Uni-
versity of Arizona; photo (top): Jean Wilson; photo (bottom): Mike Rose/Jack Kelly Clark; p. 62: Andrew Weeks, University of California, Riverside; p. 63: M. Salverda
& R. Stouthamer, Duotone, Wageningen University; p. 64: © Laurence Parent; p. 65: map: Joe Lemonnier; © Laurence Parent; p. 66: courtesy the artist; p. 68: © Estate
| of Fanny Brennan, courtesy Salander O'Reilly Galleries, NY; p. 70: courtesy the artist & Marsha Mateyka Gallery, Washington, DC; p. 72: Rob Chinery/courtesy Rizzoli
| International Publications, Inc.; p. 74: courtesy the artist; p. 80: photo MichaelJ. Amaral, courtesy Audubon Society of NH, Concord.

16 | NATURAL HISTORY February 2003

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The adolescent mice made some 80 per-
cent more entries into the unprotected
passageways—and entered them with less
hesitation—than did the preadolescents or
the adults. Yet all the mice spent about the
same amount of time exhibiting a body
posture that typically indicates anxiety and
risk assessment. Interpretation? The ado-
Bill Scanga, Living Room (Tom & Jerry), 1997 lescent mice were aware of the dangers
associated with the open-sided passage-
HEEDLESS YOUTH Sometimes teenagers lated to the need to seek one’s fortune, or at ways, but adopted a devil-may-care atti-
seem drawn to risky behavior like moths to least living space and reproductive partners, tude nonetheless. (And they don’t spend
porch lights. But among adolescent mam- outside one’s natal group. much time watching TV at home with the
mals, they're not alone. Novelty-seeking— To check for teenage recklessness in a family.) (“Risk taking during exploration of
the urge to explore unknown environ- small mammal, Simone Macri and her col- a plus-maze is greater in adolescent than in
ments—seems to surface at this stage of leagues at the Italian National Institute of juvenile or adult mice,” Animal Behaviour
development. Perhaps the behavior is re- Health in Rome placed mice of varying ages, 64:541-46, October 2002)

GRAIN GAIN Nearly every day, more than half the people on gators also noted an ancillary advantage, implied by their find-
Earth eat rice, a dietary staple grown mostly in flooded fields. ings, of developing new rice varieties able to bear more grains
Unfortunately, the roots of rice plants are a source of nutrients per unit biomass: more food per plant goes hand in hand with
for microorganisms that, under the anaerobic conditions prevail- less greenhouse methane. (“Optimizing grain yields reduces CH,
ing in flooded ground, generate substantial amounts of methane emissions from rice paddy fields,” Proceedings of the National
gas. After carbon dioxide, methane is the second most damaging Academy of Sciences 99:12021-24, September 17, 2002)
greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
Not only is more methane released in the rainy season than in
the dry season, as one would expect, but greater amounts of
methane come from rice paddies with lower-than-average yields
| of grain. A team of Dutch and Filipino biologists, led by Hugo
Denier van der Gon of Wageningen University in the Netherlands,
thought they knew why. The level of methane production, they
| suggested, could depend on how much carbon is available to the
microorganisms once the plant has used up whatever carbon it
| needs to make its grains of rice. During the wet season, as well
as in unproductive fields, each plant makes fewer grains, so more
carbon could be making its way to the microorganisms near the
| roots, and more methane would be produced.
The biologists tested their idea by removing part of the stems
where the rice grains develop; as predicted, the larger the seg-
ment removed, the more methane was released. And when they
boosted photosynthesis—and therefore carbon production—by
adding nitrogen, even more methane was given off. The investi-

20 NATURAL HISTORY February 2003

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 SAMPLINGS-
2 ORM

"EXPERIMENT OF THE MONTH When included a custom-built marine speedome- underwater—deep enough to avoid the
marine biologist Scott A. Eckert first ter. At sea, if a turtle surfaced to soak up push and pull of the waves, yet shallow
tracked the deepwater dives of leatherback the rays, the speedometer would pop out enough to perhaps orent themselves to
sea turtles in the Caribbean, his data told of the water, the recording device would the sun as they traveled between foraging
him the animals were spending middays at pause, and the logged speed
or just below the surface. He presumed would drop to zero. (In earlier
| they were basking in the sunshine, as rep- attempts to measure swim
tiles often do. Eckert, who is a member of speeds, boats followed the tur-
| the scientific staff at the Hubbs Sea World tles, a technique that some biol-
| Research Institute in San Diego, had at- ogists suspected could have al-
tached depth recorders to the turtles’ tered the turtles’ behavior.)
shells, but the instruments were naturally Ten days later, when the tur-
silent about the turtles’ honzontal move- tles returned to their onshore
ments. Not entirely satisfied with his nests, Eckert retrieved the data
assumptions, he decided to verify them. loggers. Contrary to his expecta- Leatherback sea turtle, sans harness
Leatherbacks dwell primarily in the open tions, they showed that the
ocean, but in their breeding years the fe- leatherbacks never loafed: they swam al- sites. (“Swim speed and movement pat-
males drag themselves onto beaches fairly most constantly, day and night, at about a terns of gravid leatherback sea turtles [Der-
regularly to lay their eggs. When seven fe- mile and a half an hour. At night they often mochelys coriacea| at Saint Croix, U.S.
males came ashore to nest on Saint Croix, dived for jellyfish, but in the middle of the Virgin Islands,” Journal of Experimental Bi-
Eckert fitted each one with a harness that day they glided horizontally about six feet ology 205:3689-97, December 1, 2002)

THREE’S A CROWD Crossbills and squir- nent. Squirrels didn’t live in Newfoundland LETTING GO To escape a predator's grasp,
rels both feed on the seeds of conifer until they were introduced there in 1963— some prey would rather give up a limb than
cones—a dietary triangle that sets the too recently for conifers to have evolved in give up on life. Through a process called
stage for intriguing evolutionary interac- response to the change. Accordingly, the autotomy, muscles can contract violently
tions. In the Rocky Mountains, red squirrels cones of Newfoundland’s main conifer, the along the base of an appendage, breaking off
harvest most of the cones of lodgepole black spruce, had focused on the threat of the limb. Thus can sea stars cast off an arm,
pines before red crossbills can get at them. the native red crossbill. These cones are and various reptiles shed their tails.
According to Craig W. larger, with thicker Kerstin Wasson, a biologist at the
Benkman, a biologist scales than the cones Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research
at New Mexico State of the tree’s counter- Reserve in Watsonville, California, and her
University (NMSU) in parts on the main- colleagues decided to quantify the benefits
Las Cruces, the cones land, where squirrels of autotomy. They put Petrolisthes porcelain
in the Rockies have have long resided. crabs in the company of larger, predatory
few seeds and are Fittingly, Newfound- crabs and waited until a predator grabbed a
relatively wide—evo- land’s crossbills had porcelain by the claw. Two-thirds of the
lutionary adaptations unusually deep bills. porcelains jettisoned the claw and escaped
that make them less Crossbills and black spruce cones from Unfortunately, Parch- alive as the predator munched the detached
desirable to squirrels. the eastern Canadian mainland (left) man and Benkman hors d’oeuvre. The other third fought back,
But in areas where and Newfoundland (right) had to find museum but most of them ended up as a full entrée.
squirrels are absent, specimens to mea- Porcelains have large claws for their body
the cones have focused their defenses on sure the bill size of Newfoundland’s red size. Such claws may divert a predator's at-
the threat posed by crossbills. The shape of crossbills. Once the squirrels arrived in New- tention away from the main part of the porce-
the cones is different, and the scales are foundland in 1963, the local crossbills be- lain’s body, Wasson and her colleagues sug-
thicker—traits that resist the crossbills’ at- came rare, if not extinct. Because the black gest, and keep the predator safely busy for a
tempts to remove the seeds. In turn, the spruce cones were defenseless against the time. (“Hair-trigger autotomy in porcelain
crossbills in the squirrel-less areas have squirrels, the biologists reasoned, the squir- crabs is a highly effective escape strategy,”
evolved deeper bills, thereby partly counter- rels probably grabbed so many of them that Behavioral Ecology 13:481-86, July 2002)
ing the cones’ defenses. the local crossbills soon had nothing left to
Stéphan Reebs is a professor of biology at the Uni-
Now Benkman and Thomas L. Parchman, eat. (“Diversifying coevolution between
versity of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada, and
also at NMSU, have found a similar case of crossbills and black spruce on Newfound- the author of Fish Behavior in the Aquarium and
coevolution on the other side of the conti- land,” Evolution 56:1663-72, August 2002) in the Wild (Cornell University Press).

ae NATURAL HISTORY February 2003

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UNIVERSE.

cally a working definition of culture:

something everyone does or knows
about, but no longer actively notices.
While shopping at the supermarket,
most Americans aren’t surprised to
find an entire aisle filled with sugar-
loaded, ready-to-eat breakfast cereals.
But foreigners notice this kind of
thing immediately, just as traveling
Americans immediately notice that
supermarkets in Italy have vast selec-
tions of pasta, and that markets in
China and Japan offer astonishing
choices of rice. Part of the great pleas-
ure of foreign travel comes from the
flip side of not noticing your own cul-
ture while you're surrounded by it:
you realize what you hadn’t noticed
about your own country, and you no-
re
tice what people in other countries
don’t realize about themselves.
7 oie 3s

Re Se a ee eae

Anstotle teaching astronomers, Se jug dynasty, Turkey, early 13th century Snobby people from other coun-
tries like to make fun of the U.S. for
its abbreviated history and its uncouth

Naming Rights culture, particularly compared with

the millennial legacies of Europe,
Africa, and Asia. But a few hundred
years from now historians will surely
How to stake a claim in the dictionary of science see the twentieth century as the
American century—the one in which
American discoveries in science and
By Neil deGrasse Tyson technology rank high among the
world’s list of treasured achievements.
Obviously the U.S. has not always
f you visit the gift shop at the Hay- witness to a half century of American sat atop the ladder of science. And
den Planetartum in New York scientific discovery. there’s no guarantee or even likeli-
City, you'll find all manner of In the twentieth century, astron- hood that American preeminence
space-related paraphernalia for sale. omers in the United States discovered will continue. As the capitals of sci-
Famuliar things are in stock—plastic galaxies, the expansion of the uni- ence and technology shift from one
models of the Space Shuttle and the verse, the nature of supernovas, nation to another, rising in one era
International Space Station, cosmic re- quasars, black holes, gamma_ ray and falling in the next, each culture
frigerator magnets, Fisher space pens. bursts, the origin of the elements, the leaves its imprint on the continuing
But there are unusual things, too—as- cosmic microwave background, and attempt of our species to understand
tronomy Monopoly, Saturn-shaped most of the known planets in orbit the universe and our place in it.
salt-and-pepper shakers, dehydrated around solar systems other than our
ice cream of the kind originally con- own. Although the Russians reached any factors influence how and
fected for astronauts. And that’s not to one or two places first, the U.S. sent why a nation will make its mark
mention the weird things, such as space probes to Mercury, Venus, at a particular time in history. Strong
Hubble Telescope pencil erasers, Mars Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Nep- leadership matters. So does access to
rock super-balls, and edible space tune. U.S. probes have also landed on resources. But something else must be
worms. You'd expect a place like the Mars and on the asteroid Eros. U.S. present—something less tangible, but
planetarium to stock such stuff. But astronauts have walked on the Moon. with the power to drive people to
something much deeper is going on. And nowadays most Americans take focus their emotional, cultural, and
The gift shop’s offerings bear silent all this for granted, which is practi- intellectual capital on creating islands

NATURAL HISTORY February 2003

 Explore
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 of excellence in the world. On the among Roman numerals or in any es-
blind assumption that things will con- tablished numeric system. Today,
tinue forever as they are, people who with legitimate reason, the ten sym-
live in such dynamic times often take bols are internationally referred to as
the excellence for granted, leaving Arabic numerals.
the nation’s achievements susceptible
to abandonment by the very forces poe brass astrolabes were also
that gave rise to them. developed in the Islamic world.
Beginning in the 700s and contin- Derived from ancient prototypes,
uing for nearly 400 years—while they became as much works of art as
Europe’s Christian zealots were tools of astronomy. An astrolabe pro-
disemboweling heretics—the Ab- jects the domed heavens onto a flat
Mother Nature basid caliphs created a thriving intel-
lectual center of arts, sciences, and
surface; with its layers of rotating and
non-rotating dials, it resembles the
On a Norwegian Coastal Voyage, medicine for the Islamic world in the busy, ornate face of a grandfather
your “entertainment” is the breath- city of Baghdad. Muslim as- clock. The astrolabe enabled people
taking scenery of Norway's coastline, tronomers and mathematicians built to measure the positions of the Moon
and the excitement of discovering observatories, designed advanced and the stars on the sky, from which
its picturesque ports and villages. timekeeping tools, and developed they could deduce the time—a useful
For free brochures, including our new methods of mathematical analy- thing to know, particularly ifit’s time
expedition cruises to Antarctica & sis and computation. They preserved to pray. The device was so influential
the Chilean Fjords, Greenland, and extant works of science from ancient as a terrestrial connection to the cos-
Spitsbergen, call 1-800-205-3005. Greece and translated them into Ara- mos that, to this day, nearly two-
Or visit www.coastalvoyage.com. bic. They collaborated with Chris- thirds of the brightest stars in the
tian and Jewish scholars. Baghdad night sky retain their Arabic names.
gee, Norwegian Coastal Voyage Inc. became a center of enlightenment. The star names typically translate
BES RaGee. N Latin Solss
WA te aes
Arabic was, for a time, the lingua into an anatomical part of the con-
franca of science. stellation being described. Famous
The influence of these early Is- ones on the list (along with their
Didcover China lamic contributions
to science remains to
this day. For example,
so widely distributed
was the Arabic trans-
lation of Ptolemy’s
magnum opus on the
geocentric universe (originally writ- loose translations) include Rigel
ten in Greek in A.bD. 150) that even (Ar-Rijl, “foot”) and Betelgeuse (Yad
today, in all translations, the work is al-Jauza, “hand of the central one’),
known by its Arabic title, Almagest, the two brightest stars in the constel-
or eibheGrearesta: lation Orion; Altair (At-Ta’ir, “the
The Iraqi mathematician and as- flying eagle”), the brightest star in
attention to tronomer Muhammad ibn Musa the constellation Aquila; and the
detail, unequalled_
al-Khwarizmi gave us the words variable star Algol (Al-Ghul, “the
personal luxury
“algorithm” (from his name, al- demon”), the second brightest star in
and service is
, your assurance of
Khwarizmi) and “algebra” (from the the constellation Perseus (the star’s
an unforgettable journey. word al-jabr in the title of his book on name refers to the blinking eye of the
algebraic calculation). And the bloody severed head of Medusa held
OUR OTHER DESTINATIONS: world’s shared system of numerals—O, aloft by Perseus). In the less-famous
Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, Singapore,
Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, India,
Isv257d, 4.9; On /56, 9 =-though Hind: category are the two brightest stars of
Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji. in origin, was neither common nor the constellation Libra, though in
See your travel professional or aa widespread until Muslim mathemati- the heyday of the astrolabe they
call 1-800-221-7179. (corso
oT cians exploited it. Furthermore, the were identified with the scorpion:
Muslims made full and innovative use Zubenelgenubi (Az-Zuban al-Janubi,
EYE PACIFIC DELIGHT TOURS of the Zero, which did not exist “southern claw’) and Zubenesch-
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amali (Az-Zuban ash-Shamali,
“northern claw”), currently the
longest star names in the sky.
At no time since the eleventh cen-
tury has the Islamic world regained
the scientific influence it enjoyed
during the preceding four centuries.
The late Pakistani physicist Abdus Ou con Our small ships get close enough
Salam, the first Muslim ever to win to see bears on a shoreline, and
the Nobel Prize, lamented: ALASKA & THE BERING SEA :
BRITISH COLUMBIA
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There is no question, but [that] today, of
all civilizations on this planet, science is
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 because captains would not know endar—is the product of an invest- adjustment: omitting the leap day
where on Earth they were: the means ment in science within the Roman every century year that is not evenly
to determine their longitude with Catholic Church. The incentive was divisible by 400, thus correcting for
precision did not yet exist. One par- practical: the need to keep the date the Julian calendar’s overcorrecting
ticularly tragic disaster took place in for Easter in the early spring. So im- leap day itself.
1707, when the British fleet, under portant was this need that Pope Gre- This new “Gregorian calendar”
Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell, ran gory XIII established the Vatican Ob- was further refined in the twentieth
aground into the Scilly Isles, west of servatory, staffing it with erudite century to become even more pre-
Cornwall, losing four ships and 2,000 Jesuit priests who tracked and mea- cise, preserving the accuracy of your
men. That was finally enough. The sured the passage of time with un- wall calendar for tens of thousands of
British Parliament commissioned a precedented accuracy. By decree, the years to come. Nobody else had ever
Board of Longitude and offered a fat date for Easter had been set to the kept time with such precision. Enemy
cash award—Z20,000—to the first first Sunday after the first full Moon states of the Catholic Church (such as
person who could design an ocean- after the vernal equinox (thereby Protestant England and its rebellious
worthy chronometer. The timepiece preventing Maundy Thursday, Good progeny, the American colonies) were
was destined to be important in both Friday, and Easter slow to adopt the change, but eventu-
military and commercial ventures. Sunday from ever ally everyone in the modern world,
When synchronized with the time at falling on a spe- including cultures that have tradition-
Greenwich, such a chronometer cial day in ally relied on Moon-based calendars,
would determine a ship’s longitude has adopted the Gregorian calendar as
within half a degree. The captain the standard for international busi-
could just subtract the local time ness, finance, and politics.
(readily obtained from the observed
position of the Sun or stars) from the ver since the onset of the Indus-
chronometer’s time, and the differ- Fea Revolution, European con-
ence between the two would be a tributions to science and technology
direct measure of his ship’s longitude have become so embedded in West-
east or west of the prime meridian. ern culture that it may now take a
In 1735 Parliament’s challenge was special effort to notice them at all.
met by an English clockmaker, John The Industrial Revolution was a
Harrison. Three decades later, he breakthrough in our understanding of
produced his fourth and final ver- energy, enabling engineers to dream
sion—an almost palm-size item, less up ways to convert it from one form
than five inches in diameter. As valu- to another. In the end, the revolution
able to the navigator as is a live person An astrolabe of Moorish design, c. 1300
would replace human power with
standing watch at a ship’s bow, machine power, drastically enhancing
Harrison’s chronometer gave renewed body else’s lunar-based calendar). the productivity of nations and the
meaning to the word “watch.” That rule works as long as the first subsequent distribution of wealth
Because of Britain’s sustained sup- day of spring stays where it belongs, around the world.
port for achievements in astronomical on March 21. But the Julian calendar The language of energy is rich
and navigational measurement, the of Julius Caesar’s Rome was suffi- with the names of scientists who
Royal Observatory Greenwich landed ciently inaccurate that by the six- contributed to the effort. James
the prime meridian. This decree for- teenth century it had accumulated ten Watt, the Scots inventor who per-
tuitously placed the international date extra days, placing the first day of fected the steam engine in 1765, has
line (180 degrees away from the prime spring on March 11. The quadrennial the moniker best known outside the
meridian) in the middle of nowhere, leap day, a principal feature of the circles of engineering and science.
on the other side of the globe in the original Julian calendar, had slowly Either his last name or its initial gets
Pacific Ocean. No country would be overcorrected the time, pushing stamped on the top of practically
split into two days, leaving it beside it- Easter earlier and earlier in the year. every lightbulb. A bulb’s wattage
self on the calendar. In 1582, when all the studies and measures the rate of its energy con-
analyses were complete, Pope Gre- sumption, which correlates with its
f the English have forever left their gory deleted the offending ten days brightness. Watt made his famous
. on the spatial coordinates of from the calendar, declaring the day contribution while repairing a steam
the world, the world’s system of tem- after October 4 to be October 15. engine at the University of Glasgow,
poral coordinates—a Sun-based cal- The Church also initiated a further which was, at the time, one of the

28 NATURAL HISTORY February 2003

world’s most fertile centers for engi- loyed with iridium. The French de-
neering innovation. vised other decimal standards as well;
The English physicist Michael most have been adopted by all the na-
Faraday discovered electromagnetic tions of the world except Liberia,
induction in 1831, which enabled Myanmar, and the U.S. The original
him to construct the first electric artifacts of the metric system are pre-
motor. The farad, a measure of a de- served at the International Bureau of
vice’s capacity to store electric charge, Weights and Measures—located, of
probably doesn’t do full justice to his course, near Paris.
contributions to science.
The German physicist Heinrich V) eginning in the late 1930s the
Hertz discovered electromagnetic US. became a nexus of activity in
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Joule we have the joule, a unit of en- peacetime benefits for the community
ergy. The list goes on and on. of nuclear physicists. From the 1930s
With the exception of Benjamin through the 1980s, American acceler-
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 BIOMECHANICS

Flap Your Hands

To fly like a bat, you need flexible hand bones and stretchable skin across your fingers.

By Adam Summers ~ Illustrations by Shawn Gould

as digit one
carpals
i) ee
radius

humerus

digit three

phalanges

metacarpal

oth the skin, and wings that billow order Chiroptera, meaning “hand-
Boeing and change their shape with wing.” They range from the
Company and every stroke are in, a central part bumblebee-size Kitti’s hog-nosed
bats (the furry, flying of the picture. Sharon M. Swartz, bat to that fluttering horror, the
mammals) are leaders in a biologist at Brown University in vampire bat, to the Malayan flying
aeronautical performance and Providence, Rhode Island, and her fox, the largest species.
versatility, yet they have strikingly students Kristin L. Bishop and A bat’s wings are not only different
different approaches to getting (and Maryem-Fama Ismael Aguirre are from a 747’s; they are also quite unlike
staying) off the ground. The kind of investigating the fluttering flight of | the wings of a bird. They lack feathers,
flight most of us have experienced bats with both hands-on tests and obviously. And although the humerus,
begins with a stiff, strong airfoil, one computer simulations. They are radius, and ulna of birds are quite simi-
that undergoes few changes of shape learning what works, and what lar to the humerus and radius of bats
in flight. Built out of aluminum alloys doesn’t, when fliers must contend (which have only a vestigial ulna),
and carbon-fiber composites, rigid with unsteady airflows and with avian hand bones have largely fused
wings provide the steady airflow airfoils that continuously deform. [see illustration on opposite page]. But
needed to generate lift that is orderly, bats’ carpal bones conjoin at a point
predictable, and well understood. Ne a quarter of all mammal about halfway along the leading edge
Bat flight is an entirely different species are bats, and they are of the wing; the bones of the short,
affair. Rigid, strong, and heavy are the only winged animals in the class clawed first finger (homologous to our
out. Thin, whippy bones, stretchy Mammalia. All bats belong to the thumb) jut forward. The long second

30 NATUI \L HISTORY February 2003

finger forms most of the distal half of The bat they studied was the gray- finger bones, despite their flexibility,
the wing’s leading edge. The third headed flying fox (Pteropus polio- would probably break.
finger runs closely behind the second, cephalus), about the size ofa small
but all the way to the tip of the wing. chihuahua and sporting a nearly four- he computer models, taking
The fourth and fifth fingers run from foot wingspan. It’s huge for a bat, but into account bones, skin, and
the leading edge to the trailing edge just barely large enough to support the usual motions of flight, suggest
of the wing, and stretched across all the scientists’ gauges. In the initial that there are some limits to being
the fingers is a thin, flexible skin [see study, Swartz and the others attached batty. For one thing, a fruit bat that
illustration on opposite page}. gauges to the humerus and radius of flies home with a mango in its
Bones don’t bend—at least that’s the flying foxes; in later work, Swartz mouth is pushing the limits ofits
the message we get after an orthope- attached them to the fingers, between flight equipment. The model pre-
dist applies a cast to the results ofa both the first and second and the sec- dicts that even though the stresses of
misjudgment. But the bones of a bat’s ond and third knuckles (to the proxi- unladen flight bend finger bones less
fingers have adaptations that promote mal and medial phalanges, as an than halfway to breaking, the addi-
bending. The digits’ cartilage lacks anatomist would say). As the animals tion ofa heavy fruit brings the
calcium toward the fingertips, making flew about inside a long, spacious bones dangerously close to failure.
Counterintuitively, the model also
predicts that heavier bones would
humerus radius ulna carpals metacarpals phalanges cripple a bat. Its thin wing bones
make up just 5 percent of the ani-
mal’s weight, but if the bones’
weight were doubled, the stresses on
them would increase to dangerous
levels rather than diminish. The
wings’ very lightness contributes to
the safety of flight.
The computer model also makes
cage, the clear that a bat’s aerodynamics are far
rs bending of removed from those of fixed-wing
them less a bone would airplanes. Unsteady airflow and flexi-
apt than or- also flex the gauge, ble airfoils are the province of bat
dinary bone is to thereby changing the electrical flight, and given the skittish nature of
splinter under stress. Also, the resistance in the foil. The tests the average air traveler, those features
cross section of the finger bone is not demonstrated that the wing bones, are not likely to cross over to com-
circular, as is the bone in a human about the same length as a person’s mercial aircraft. But because the
finger, but flattened. This shape fur- index finger, deformed three-quarters complex movements ofa bat’s bones
ther encourages flexion (think about of an inch or more with every beat of and skin do not require intricate
how much easier it is to bend a soda the wing. muscular control, engineers still
straw if you first give it a squeeze to Swartz went on to develop a com- might try their hand at mimicking
flatten the thing). puter model of bone deformation the bat’s complicated but passive
Imagine wanting, as Swartz did, to during flapping flight. She found that wing—designing a structure whose
measure how much bat wing bones not only are flexible bones vital for variable flight surfaces wouldn’t re-
bend. It’s not easy. When bats fly, bat flight, but so too is the skin that quire a motor at every joint. Perhaps,
their wings flail up and down in such covers the hand-wing. The skin of just as the wings of houseflies have
a complex path that a three-dimen- most mammals can stretch equally in been co-opted for microflyers, dis-
sional reconstruction of the flight every direction, but bat-wing skin embodied bat wings will also become
would be impossible, even from a has many times more give along the an attractive option for flyers of
movie. Swartz and her colleagues direction between its body and its medium scale—if not for Bruce
David Carrier of the University of wingtip than it does between the Wayne in Gotham City, then for the
Utah in Salt Lake City and Michael leading edge and the trailing one. designers of small, unmanned recon-
Bennett of the University of Queens- And when the skin billows out as the naissance vehicles.
land in Brisbane solved the problem bat flies, it is stiff enough to transmit
about a decade ago by gluing minute substantial force along the length of Adam Summers (asummers(@uci.edu) is an
metal-foil strain gauges directly to the the wing and generate lift. In fact, if assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary
bones of bats. the skin were any stiffer, the delicate biology at the University of California, Irvine.

February 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 31

 FINDINGS

The Worm
and the Parasite
Some tropical scourges call for a defense
against an entire micro-ecosystem.

By T.V. Rajan

A victim of filanasis cuts into his own leg to extract

disease-causing nematodes (nineteenth-century engraving).

n the late 1960s, when I was a stu- afflicts some 120 million people she bites again, she transfers the nema-
dent at the All India Institute of worldwide, and more than a billion tode larvae to a second person. But the
Medical Sciences in New Delhi, may be at risk of contracting it. Sur- illness may remain asymptomatic for
my classmates and I had a microbiol- passed only by malaria as a cause of months or even years, leaving many of
ogy professor who enjoyed taunting human suffering from disease, filariasis its carriers hard to identify.
us as we struggled to identify badly imposes an enormous burden of ill-
preserved, poorly stained slides of ness, lost productivity, and economic @)z the basis of their own experi-
parasite larvae and eggs. “You don’t hardship on already-poor countries of ences in treating lymphatic fi-
know what this is, do you?” he would the global South. lariasis, many of my medical mentors
say, cackling gleefully. “The eye does The nematodes that cause this non- in India asserted that certain antibi-
not see what the mind does not lethal but devastating illness are otics were effective against the acute
know.’ In truth, we scientists often threadlike parasitic worms, primarily symptoms of the disease. Yet a quar-
don’t understand what is staring us in of the species Wiuchereria bancrofti and ter century ago (and, to a large ex-
the face. Like everyone else, we see Brugia malayi. As with nearly every in- tent, today as well) Western physi-
what we see through the lens of a fection caused by a parasite, the pre- cians pooh-poohed the Indian
conceptual framework. The history cise mechanism that gives rise to the approach and held firmly to the ad-
of the treatment of filariasis, and of clinical disease is unknown. One can mittedly logical, though in the end
the research that has been done on say with some confidence that none of incomplete, position that infections
the disease, is a perfect example of the most obvious mechanisms are to caused by nematodes could not be
how a framework can guide, but also blame: not the increasing population treated with antibiotics. And here the
limit, our thinking. of larvae inside the human host; not story begins to take some twists.
The disabling and often disfiguring the substances produced by the larvae, Antibiotics are small molecules
tropical disease known as lymphatic either living or dead; not the constant made primarily by soil-dwelling
filariasis is one of the multitude of motion of the adult nematodes. microorganisms of the genus Actino-
diseases for which mosquitoes are the Transmission begins when a female myces, which compete with bacteria
vector. Elephantiasis—the grotesque mosquito siphons offa few microliters in the same ecosphere. These mole-
enlargement of a limb, breast, or scro- of blood from an infected individual. cules can kill the bacteria that Actino-
tum, caused by blockage of the lymph Two weeks later, when the ingested myces encounter, but they cannot kill
vessels—is one of its most conspicuous nematode larvae have developed into a eukaryotic cells—that is, any cell with
manifestations. According to the stage that is infectious to humans, the a true nucleus enclosed by a mem-
World Health Organization, filariasis larvae enter the insect’s head. When brane. Hence most living things made

rh NATI \L HISTORY February 2003

up of eukaryotic cells—and that in- six-year life spans in their human hosts, Puerto Rico School of Medi ine “in
cludes nematodes, people, trees, and they produce vast numbers of larvae San Juan, noticed something he had
tS

virtually anything else nonmicro- that circulate in the blood. When a not seen in other nematodes, whether
scopic—are unharmed by antibiotics, mosquito transmits some of those in- parasitic or free-living. Within the
So if antibiotics cannot destroy nema- fective larvae to a new human host, vacuoles, or membrane-bound cavi-
todes, how could the Indian physi- the larvae migrate almost immediately ties of the nematode’s cells, were even
cians have treated a nematode-caused to the person’s lymph vessels. Because smaller organisms, resembling several
illness by administering them? the lymphatic system is a critical com- genera of intracellular bacteria’ collec-
Filarial infections, it should be said, ponent of the mammalian immune tively known as rickettsia.
have some unusual features. Most system, the nematode’s choice of Bacteria in this group lack cell walls
people picture a patient with an infec- home base might seem peculiar: an in- and cannot survive outside the cells of
tious disease looking feverish, ex- vader doesn’t usually position itself in the organisms they parasitize. Kozek
hausted, and generally sick. Those and the midst ofa defending army. Yet the not only concluded that what he had
other “constitutional symptoms” of nematodes have clearly adapted to that detected were bacterial symbionts; he
infectious illnesses are manifestations hostile locale all too well. also noted that the bacteria were
of the body’s reaction to the invading more numerous in female nematodes,
microorganism; they are not caused by he central peculiarity of lym- particularly in the uteri of the worms
the infectious agent itself. When they phatic filariasis—the apparent and in their developing embryos.
detect the presence of alien organisms, usefulness of antibiotics in treating Here, then, was a possible explanation
the body’s white blood cells synthesize it—should have been resolved a quar- for the effectiveness of antibiotics
proteins that cause a rise in tempera- ter century ago. At that time, several against filarial nematodes.
ture. The response is protective, Kozek’s findings, however, had
enhancing the efficacy of the the misfortune of being unfash-
body’s defense mechanisms. But ionably morphological. Ever since
one of the cardinal features of the emergence of what is widely
many parasitic diseases, particularly referred to as quantitative biology,
infections caused by nematodes, 1s any observation that cannot be
the near-absence of constitutional expressed as statistical analyses or
symptoms. Nematodes can live in as DNA sequences has generally
the body without eliciting such re- been greeted with skepticism, if
sponses; even in the face of an ac- not outright indifference.
tive infection, many people do not As it happened, a more “quanti-
experience acute symptoms. tative” study was done by another
Investigators have suggested that parasitologist at about the same
the longer two species live time, and it yielded a. complemen-
together symbiotically, the less tary, though inadvertent, result.
chance that either one will disrupt Thomas R. Klei, a parasitologist at
the other’s physiology. After all, Louisiana State University in Baton
the parasite needs a living home, Rouge, had initiated an experi-
not a dead one. Because many ne- ment with the jird Meriones unguic-
matode infections seem to have ulatus—a docile, gerbil-like desert
coevolved with people over the animal that is susceptible to many
aeons, most nematodes cause few of the same parasitic infections that
if any disruptions of human physi- afflict people. After being infected
ology, hence few symptoms of in- with filariasis, the jirds in Klei’s ex-
fection. Yet many patients who periment developed an unrelated
contract filariasis suffer episodes of X ray of the swollen lower leg of a patient with skin infection that he treated with
high fever, chills, trembling, and elephantiasis. The swelling is caused by blockage tetracycline, a broad-spectrum an-
rigor. Acute filarial fever, in fact, of the lymph vessels (red in the false-color image). tibiotic. When he and his students
can often look like an attack of an- examined the jirds at the end of the
other disease that is rampant in many groups of parasitologists interested in experiment, they found that the ani-
of the same countries where filariasis the microanatomy of filarial parasites mals treated with tetracycline were
is common: malaria. examined the organisms with electron free of nematode parasites.
Here is another oddity: While the microscopes. One of the investigators, The reigning biological dogma of
nematodes are living out their four- to Wieslaw J. Kozek of the University of the time made the finding thoroughly

February 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 33

 puzzling. After repeating the experi- B. malayi was part of the next wave of Wolbachia, her ova are compatible
ment, with the same result, Klei con- organisms whose entire genomes with the sperm of both infected and
tacted John W. McCall, a colleague at were to be sequenced. Even in the uninfected males. Thus females in-
the University of Georgia in Athens, early stages of the work on the nema- fected with Wolbachia have a repro-
who had been supplying investigators tode’s genome, Steven A. Williams of ductive edge: they produce more
with the infective larvae of a variety Smith College in Northampton, progeny. Furthermore, Wolbachia is
of nematode parasites for several Massachusetts, and Mark Blaxter of transmitted from the mother to her
years. It turned out that McCall, too, the University of Edinburgh in Scot- progeny, which suggests there will be
had noted that filarial parasites did not land noted that some of the se- more infected than uninfected prog-
grow in animals treated with broad- quences resembled the ribosomal eny in the next generation. The
spectrum antibiotics. But McCall told genes of bacterial cells rather than process has no reproductive benefits
Klei that because he could neither ex- for the insects, but it does ensure the
plain nor understand his result, he rapid spread of the bacteria. Another
hadn’t published it.
Kill off the bacteria of Wolbachia’s tricks 1s to turn some
Yet despite this cluster of indepen- living in the worm, insects that were genetic males into
dent, mutually consistent, and biologi- sexually functioning females, and
cally exciting laboratory observations
and the worm dies too. that leads to the same end result: an
made by Western investigators—and increase in the pool of infected fe-
despite the clinical successes achieved those of eukaryotic organisms such as males within the insect population.
by practicing physicians in South B. malayi. But because bacteria such All the symbiotic microorganisms
Asia—no one picked up the thread as Escherichia coli are ubiquitous in being studied in current research on
until two decades later. molecular biology laboratories, the filariasis are Wolbachia. Most insects,
investigators initially thought the se- however, seem to get along just fine
he story resumes in the mid- quences were just contaminants. without the bacterium. One insect
1990s, when Claudio Bandi of It soon became clear, however, that species may harbor Wolbachia, whereas
the University of Milan, an expert on the resemblances were not caused by a second species, belonging to the
bacteria living in insects, sought to contamination; Williams and Blaxter same genus, may remain entirely un-
determine how commonly other life- continued to extract bacterial rDNA infected. And when the bacteria
forms harbor bacteria within their from the nematodes even when the within an individual insect are killed
cells. He was aware of studies done by nematode samples were extremely by antibiotics, the insect shows no ob-
Kozek and others, noting the pres- clean. Even more telling, the se- vious deleterious effects. By contrast,
ence of bacteria in filarial nematodes. quences did not resemble the rDNA every individual filarial worm belong-
Were these bacteria, Bandi wondered, of E. coli. Instead, they were most ing to a species known to harbor Wéol-
related to the ones that live in insects? homologous to DNA sequences from bachia has been found to be infected
He and his colleagues chose a stan- rickettsia, particularly from members with the bacterium. And, as I sug-
dard technique for answering such of the genus Wolbachia. Combing gested earlier, neither the worm nor
questions: they looked at DNA se- through the literature to see if they the bacterium can live without each
quences that code for ribosomal could learn why the sequences were other. Killing the bacteria (by admin-
RNA (rDNA). These sequences are present, Williams, Blaxter, and others istering antibiotics) leaves the worms
present in the cells of all living organ- encountered the papers of Kozek, unable to develop, to mate, or to gen-
isms. Some of the rDNA sequences Klei, and McCall. Molecular biolo- erate progeny.
from heartworms were highly ho- gists had rediscovered something that A complementary finding rein-
mologous to the rDNA of the arthro- had been known to clinicians and forces the same conclusion. The
pod-dwelling bacteria. Undoubtedly, morphologists for a quarter century. genomes of the Wolbachia species
those rDNA sequences had come that live within filaria are much
from the genome of the bacteria that Ye bacteria infect at least smaller than the genomes of the bac-
live in the worm, not from the 20 percent of all known insect teria that inhabit insects. That pat-
genome of the worm itself. species, disrupting their reproductive tern is common when the relation-
A second reason for the renewed lives [see “Invasion of the Gender Ben- ship between two interacting species
interest in filarial bacteria was the se- ders,” by John H. Werren, page 58]. becomes fixed and mutually depen-
quencing of entire genomes of bio- For instance, the sperm ofa male in- dent. The smaller organism often
logically important organisms, such sect infected with Wolbachia do not jettisons substantial parts of its
as the laboratory mouse, the worm function properly when they fertilize genome, having come to depend on
Caenorhabditis elegans, and, of course, the ova of an uninfected female. But the larger organism for most of its
Homo sapiens. The filarial parasite if a female insect is infected with metabolic requirements.

34 NATURAL HISTORY February 2003

 he rediscovery of the fact that microbiologist at Case Western Re- the eighteenth and early nineteenth
bacteria live within nematodes serve University in Cleveland, Ohio, centuries to cultivate tomatoes in
poses exciting medical possibilities, and an international group of collab- North America, on the grounds that
not only for elephantiasis but also for orators demonstrated that the severe the fruit (a member of the nightshade
onchocerciasis, or river blindness, a eye pathology that occurs in patients family) was allegedly poisonous. Yet in
disease that afHicts millions of people with onchocerciasis might be caused Italy people had eaten tomatoes for
in sub-Saharan Africa. Much of the by the same molecules. hundreds of years with no ill effects.
interest centers on two prescient sug- The presence of Wolbachia in in- The Goodwins compare the episode
gestions made by Kozek and Horacio sects as well as in filarial nematodes to the rise, fall, and resurrection of
Figueroa Marroquin in their 1977 raises an intriguing evolutionary pos- such treatments as giving the plant ex-
paper on Onchocerca volvulus, the filar- sibility. Perhaps, at some stage long tract colchicine for the pain of gout.
ial worm that causes onchocerciasis. ago, the bacteria were transferred As the title of the Goodwins’ paper
First, they suggested that if the worm from insects to nematodes, since fi- implies, the treatments they studied
depends on the bacteria living inside larial nematodes reside in insects dur- were not among the questionable or
it for some critical metabolic func- ing some stages of their life cycles. even useless remedies that untrained
tion, one could treat the disease by But for reasons that are not yet clear, or irresponsible “healers” may offer
killing the bacteria. That suggestion some filarial nematodes do not con- to desperate people. On the contrary,
has proved to be entirely warranted. tain Wolbachia. the treatments were provably effec-
Achim Hoerauf and _ his tive. Clinicians simply
colleagues at the Bernhard avoided them because
Nocht Institute for Tropi- accepted theories of dis-
cal Medicine in Hamburg, ease mechanism and
Germany, have shown that drug action offered no
giving tetracycline to vic- explanation for their ef-
tims of river blindness de- ficaciousness.
stroys the Wolbachia inside Today, of course, to-
O. volvulus. Tests on ani- matoes are eaten across
mals have led to the same the globe. Could a simi-
result. In addition, a for- lar reversal be in store
mer student of mine, Heidi for antibiotics in treat-
Smith, who is now a resi- ing lymphatic filariasis?
dent in internal medicine It is hard to understand
at the Dartmouth-Hitch- the persistent lack of
cock Medical Center in interest in exploring
Lebanon, New Hampshire, such a use of antibiotics
and I have shown that unless what we have
tetracycline prevents the fi- here is an instance of the
larial larvae from molting. A larva (microfilana) of the parasitic worm Wuchereria bancrofti, tomato effect.
Hence the antibiotic may surrounded by white blood cells, magnified 500 diameters. I cannot help but con-
be useful as a preventive as clude that the scientific
well as a treatment. hysicians often disregard or even community is a microcosm of human-
Kozek and Figueroa Marroquin’s reject certain treatments because ity—unable to appreciate the impor-
second suggestion was that some of they don’t “make sense” in the con- tance of anything until we are ready to
the acute inflammation that accom- text of mainstream thinking. “The do so, not seeing with the eye what we
panies filarial infections might be tomato effect: Rejection of highly ef- have not accepted with the mind. I
caused by the bacteria living inside ficacious therapies,” a paper published wish it were different. I wish we were
the nematodes. Mark J. Taylor, a par- in the Journal of the American Medical more truly scholarly, more humble
asitologist at the Liverpool School of Association in 1984, addresses this trou- about our limited understanding of the
Tropical Medicine in England, and bling, though perhaps understandable, universe, more ready to accept that a
his associates have supported this hy- phenomenon within the medical number of things work despite our in-
pothesis by demonstrating that the community. In the paper, James S. ability to explain why.
inflammation can be attributed to Goodwin of the University of Texas
molecules called lipopolysaccharides, Medical Branch in Galveston and TV. Rajan is a professor and interim chair of
which are released by Wolbachia bac- Jean M. Goodwin note that British the department of pathology at the University
teria. More recently Eric Pearlman, a colonists refused throughout much of of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington.

February 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 35

Genetic Hoofprints
The DNA trail leading back to the origins of today’s cattle
has taken some surprising turns along the way.

By Daniel G. Bradley
 he genes present in the 1.3 billion cattle liv-
ing on the Earth today represent a stream of
inheritance that stretches back 10,000
years. The founding event in the legacy of the do-
mesticated farm animal was the capture of the for-
midable wild ox, or aurochs. Taming a long-
horned beast six feet tall at the shoulder must have
been a daunting task, but it was just one of a series
of plant and animal domestications that forever
changed the way most people live.
But just what is the genetic heritage of domestic
cattle? Was more than one kind of aurochs brought
under human control, and if so, how many ances-
tral species does that heritage encompass? How
much variation is present in the genome? What
experiences does its DNA encode to help the ani-
mal deal with heat, cold, hunger, thirst, disease,
and all the other stresses of life? Answers to such
questions do more than satisfy curiosity. Human-
ity’s dependence on cattle runs deep, and our own
well-being is therefore bound up with that of the
animal. For example, if the selective breeding that
has created a super milker should also inadvertently
lead to vulnerability to a particular disease, how
deep is the genetic reservoir that could still be
called on to fight that vulnerability?
For the past dozen years my colleagues and I at
the Smurfit Institute of Trinity College in Dublin
have been tracing the genetic origins of modern
breeds of cattle. The work has taken us from Great
Britain to South Asia to the Sahara, and from mod-
ern factory farms to pastoralist societies. Guided by
the signposts of DNA, we have virtually traveled
back in time along the genetic stream, from the
present to the ancient past, to the era when some
determined bands of people first tamed an ox.

efore modern techniques of molecular genetics

became available, the only meaningful informa-
tion about how and when domestications took
place came from archaeology. The study of those
On the move in Niger, northern Africa: Mounted pastoralists world-changing events, embedded as they are in
travel with their herd of humped, long-horned cattle.
prehistory, is a tricky business. Yet archaeozoologists
have devised a number of ingenious ways of deter-
mining, for instance, whether dusty, 8,000-year-old
collections of bones are the remains of hunted wild
beasts or the former members of a domestic herd.
Domestication is likely, for instance, if bone deposits
show the animals died at roughly the same age. The
conclusion also holds if the bones represent more
males than females (herders often slaughter males
but keep females to produce offspring) or if the
bones indicate changes in structure and a slight de-
crease in size (features that begin to show up in ani-
mals after generations of domesticated life). In the

NATURAL HISTORY February 2003 | 37

 case of cattle, yet another fea- Patterns of genetic variation
ture of domestic service is di- are like ripples in a pond, which
agnostic: the presence of cer- persist even after the stone that
tain kinds of wear and tear in caused them has sunk from view
joints or vertebrae, which in- into the depths. The geneticist
dicates that the animals were can judge from the size and di-
once beasts of burden. rection of the ripples where and
An archaeological site can sometimes when a stone was
be designated a domestication dropped, as well as how big it
center only when excavations was. Within the geographical
indicate that hunting gradually distribution patterns of cattle
gave way to herding. Archae- genes, we have determined that
ologists have documented such not one but two big stones—
a transition in the Fertile Cres- corresponding to separate do-
cent of the Near East. Extend- mestications of the two diver-
ing outward from the land gent kinds of wild ox—were
bounded by the Tigris and thrown into the pond 10,000
Euphrates Ravers, this region years ago. The resulting ripples
was the center of domestica- continue to expand and overlap.
tion for an unparalleled num-
ber ofplant and animal species, ver since Darwin, opinions
including barley, oats, and had cycled between the
wheat among the cereal grains, one- and the two-stone sce-
and the “big four” domesti- nario. Some scholars argued
cated animals: cattle, goats, that all domestic cattle had a
pigs, and sheep. But there is common origin in a single do-
evidence that cattle were also mestication center in the Fertile
brought under domestication Crescent. Others believed, on
farther east, in what are now the basis of archaeological evi-
Pakistan and India. dence, that the cattle of the In-
By tracing the ancestry of dian subcontinent were sepa-
living animals, geneticists can rately tamed. Our work has
verify and amplify archaeolog- shown that the cattle of Europe,
ical findings, thereby giving a northern Asia, and Africa all
more detailed view of domes- have closely related DNA se-
tication and its history. Blood quences and that they all belong
samples and hair follicles from to a group that corresponds
individual cattle are used to most closely to the humpless
The charactenstics of cattle arising in three
provide samples of certain ancient centers of domestication are realistically cattle known as Bos taurus. But
genes, such as the ones in the reflected in sacred and decorative arts. From top the genes of the humped, zebu
mitochondrion, the power- to bottom: a humpless cow and her calf from cattle native to India, known as
house of the cell. The DNA the Fertile Crescent, depicted in a Near Eastern Bos indicus, tell a different story.
sequences of genes can then be ivory; Egyptian wall painting of humpless cattle, On the bovine family tree, zebu
compared. Mutations in DNA from the tomb of Nefertan; and Hindu sculpture are ten times further removed
of Shiva’s sacred bull. Note the humped back of
sequences accumulate at a pace the Indian bull. from the three members of the
that remains approximately B. taurus group than those three
steady over time. The known mutation rates of are from one another. The Indian humped cattle
common sequences can serve as “molecular clocks,” belong to a genetically distinct group of their own.
which enable molecular biologists to estimate when So the genetic evidence firmly sides with the ar-
ancestral lines branched away from each other. The chaeological findings: early farmers, in what are
sequences my colleagues and I have studied indicate now Pakistan and India, did indeed capture and
that hundreds of thousands of years ago—that is, tame their own zebu-like version of the wild ox.
long before any domestication took place—two dis- Gene sequences can also be read as a record of
tinct kinds of wild cattle emerged, both of which how herding may have spread outward from those
are represented in modern populations. two domestication centers. Our genetic work had

NATURAI
HI STORY February 2003
indicated that European cows were related to the is not as extreme as it 1s in crop species, where the
ones that were domesticated in the Fertile Cres- genetic base can be sharply narrowed. But the
cent. But we wanted to find out whether they also widespread use of artificial insemination in cattle
carried a genetic inheritance from the aurochs that inevitably implies that the male ancestors of most of
still inhabited Europe when cattle were being the world’s elite milking herds are all close relatives.
herded there. (The last remnant population of Eu- Cattle raised on most European and North Ameri-
ropean aurochs was hunted to extinction in a Pol- can farms today have a pedigree going back only to
ish forest in 1627.) nineteenth-century founder animals of common
In 2001, we managed to extract DNA gene se- breeds, such as Hereford, Holstein-Friesian, and
quences from six large aurochs bones discovered in Aberdeen Angus. And though the individual ani-
Britain. The bones were between roughly 3,000 mals from which modern breeds were formed
and 8,000 years old. The ones of more recent date would have varied in appearance, most of the ani-
were from wild oxen that had lived as neighbors of mals that belong to a particular breed today look
domestic herds then kept in Britain. Our analyses remarkably uniform. Fortunately, though, there is
showed that the British aurochs sequences were still some diversity among European breeds, and
closer to sequences present in B. taurus than to valuable genetic resources may be tied up in less
those of B. indicus, but they were quite different common breeds, such as the distinctive Scottish
from any encountered in modern cattle. These Highland and the Portuguese Alentejana cattle.
wild oxen appear to have made no detectable con-
tribution to the domestic gene pool; they did not ae find an exuberant variety of breeds, how-
interbreed with their domestic contemporaries. ever, one has to look beyond the industrial-
The forebears of European cattle, then, were ized West, to regions where cattle have a place not
wholesale importations from the Near East. Today only as commodities in the economy, but in the
a British cow’s mitochondrial genes are much culture as well. The primacy of the cow is still in-
more similar to the genes of a cow—ancient or tact not just in India (where cattle are considered
modern—from Syria or Turkey, than to the genes sacred and are more numerous than in any other
of the wild ox that used to roam the island. nation) but also in Africa. In African pastoral soci-
eties, milk, meat, and sometimes blood from cattle
Ithough we detected no other sources of ge- are major sources of protein; cattle dung provides
netic input in the DNA of modern European both fuel and building material; and steers, or cas-
cattle, the animals themselves are outwardly much trated bulls, are used as draft animals. Herd owner-
changed since their ancestors migrated from the ship can also symbolize status, and individual cattle
Pertiles Crescent, By « selec-
tively breeding for traits such
as milk production, physical
conformation, and even coat
coloration, people have al-
tered the appearance, size, and
utility of livestock. After
decades of scientific animal
breeding, certain traits have
been enhanced to an extraor-
dinary degree. Milk produc-
tion per animal has doubled in
the developed world in the
past twenty years, largely because of genetic ma- Although selective breeding for high meat and milk production has
nipulation. Top Holstein-Friesian cattle favored marginalized distinctive European breeds, such as the hardy Scottish
Highland (night), vanity thrives in Africa, where cattle such as
by large-scale dairy farmers can easily produce
the Kuri, of Chad, are prized (left).
forty liters of milk a day; in contrast, a West
African N’Dama cow may give only four.
Yet selective breeding, by definition, also nar- can serve as large, mobile units of wealth. For ex-
rows the genetic base of herds, and it may have side ample, bridegrooms often present cattle as gifts to
effects as well. Breeding for milk production, for the bride’s family. Cows also serve religious or rit-
instance, could lead to reproductive problems and ual functions. The Kapsiki people of northern
increased susceptibility to disease. The predicament Cameroon, for instance, keep a cattle breed (also

February 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 39

 known as Kapsiki) specially for the skins, which genetic trend was a trickle of
are made into burial shrouds. Near Eastern and European
Such cultural intimacy between the people of cattle into the continent,
Africa and their cattle does not mean that African where they mixed with native
herders refrain from any selective cattle breeding. breeds.
But Africans breed their herds without the obses-
sion for uniformity that has emerged in the West. he third and most pro-
One of the most evident traits that African herders nounced trend 1n our ge-
select for is extreme horn size. The enigmatic Kuri netic data, however, pointed
cattle, herded near Lake Chad in north Africa, bear to a great influx into Africa of
horns of enormous length and girth. When these zebu-type, B. indicus cattle
cattle move side by side in the herd, their hollow from South Asia. A herd in
horns knock together, producing a characteristic Sudan, for instance, can now
resonant sound. The horns are selected for their ap- carry mitochondrial DNA
pearance rather than any utility. Ankole cattle, from from the domestication of a
the great lakes region of East Africa, are also bred northern African wild ox, an
for horn shape and size. Not surprisingly, the ani- event that may have taken
mals are prized status symbols. place only a hundred miles
from Sudan, but more than
A ccording to our genetic analyses, African cattle 7,000 years in the past. The
originated neither from Indian humped cattle same herd may also include
nor from Near Eastern cattle. Those findings sup- some genes that have leaked
port the separate-origins theory of cattle domestica- southward from the Fertile
tion favored by archaeologists, who had maintained Crescent in the same period.
that in Africa, too, cattle domestication was local. But strikingly, most of the
Our results confirm that African cattle stem from genes in the Sudanese herd
the domestication of a B. taurus type of wild ox that are likely to be of the B. indi-
inhabited northern Africa when the Sahara region cus type. And the cattle are
was much less arid than it is today. It may even be likely to be humped, like In-
the case that the distinctive pastoral lifestyle of dian zebu.
African tribes such as the Masai is of tremendous When we overlaid the gene
antiquity, and could pre-date the capture of cattle types on a map of Africa, we
and development of milking in the Fertile Crescent. discovered that the numbers
Although the earliest African cattle were of the of B. indicus genes peaked on
B. taurus type, modern African breeds show multi- the east coast. The clusters
ple influences, traceable through their genetic his- suggest that zebu were first
tory. I recently joined the geneticist Olivier Han- imported into Africa in large
otte and his coworkers at the International numbers by sea, rather than
Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, in via an overland route such as
a study that was part of a worldwide effort to chart one crossing the isthmus of
genetic variation in cattle breeds, in the hope of Suez. Perhaps the humped cattle were brought first
conserving diversity. to Arabia, then on to East Africa. We also deter-
Hanotte sampled the genes of fifty indigenous mined that the most purely B. indicus of African
breeds of cattle in twenty-three countries across the breeds live on the island of Madagascar, a finding
length and breadth of Africa. Then, with a tech- that also supports the idea that the Asian cattle
nique called principal-component analysis, we came to Africa by sea. The trade between Africa
were able to peel away the various overlays of ge- and India seems to have been ancient and recipro-
netic variation caused by interbreeding, as they ap- cal. African cereals such as sorghum and finger mil-
peared across the continent—rather like peeling the let appear in India as early as the second millen-
layers of an onion. As each overlay was removed, nium B.C., about the same time B. indicus may have
we exposed a new, previously unseen trend, or pat- first appeared in Africa.
tern of variation. One major trend was the dispersal Since their arrival in Africa, Indian cattle genes
over millennia of the original B. taurus-type cattle have thrived and through interbreeding, have
from the Sahara region to the forests of West Africa spread throughout the continent. Zebu are gener-
and down to the southern cape. A second, minor ally well adapted to hot and dry environments, a

40 NATURAL HISTORY February 2003

 Masai homes clustered around a corral in East Africa show
that cattle are literally at the center of village life.

boon in African regions that are becoming increas- only behind the fenced-in properties of agribusi-
ingly arid. And in the late nineteenth century, nesses and the well-guarded entrances to com-
when the cattle disease rinderpest became epi- modity-trading floors.
demic and decimated B. taurus herds, zebu genes Here in my home, Ireland, the economy was
conferred some resistance. dominated for millennia by cattle farming. The
system stretched back to the time of the herders
Te an age when most cattle in the developed who built the stone-walled fields of Ceide, in the
world have a slim family tree, humanity should west of the island, fields that have lain buried
treasure, and perhaps will come to be thankful under peat bogs for 5,000 years. The Irish word for
for, the rich weave of ancestry that persists on the a road, bothar, means a path wide enough to ac-
plains of Africa. Pastoral societies also preserve commodate a cow. And in the wider cultural set-
the cultural importance of this largest of domesti- ting cattle have literally been the alpha, if not the
cated species. In Western societies, this cultural omega, of the Western world. After all, the first
element has mostly disappeared from people’s letter of the alphabet you are now reading had its
everyday lives. Cattle retain their significance genesis as a symbolic representation ofanox. [J

February 2003 NATURAI HISTORY 41

 si
Ce a

In the Indian city of Bhuj, forty miles from the epicenter ofa recent earthquake, stands the
half-ruined city palace, or darbargarh, of the maharajas of the district of Kachchh.

HISTORY February 2003

Shaken to the Core
Mid-continental earthquakes can be even more damaging than the ones
at the boundaries of tectonic plates. The great Indian earthquake of 2001
is a benchmark for geologists seeking to understand how they happen.

By Susan Hough and Roger Bilham

|:the westernmost corner neither Gujarat nor New York

of India, south ofa huge is situated atop a seismically
salt marsh known as the active boundary between the
Rann of Kachchh, lies the Earth’s great tectonic plates—
old walled city of Bhuj, rigid blocks of the planet’s
administrative headquarters brittle outer layer that can
of the district of Kachchh. To measure thousands of miles
a Westerner, even a traveler across but are often less than a
equipped with a Lonely Planet hundred miles thick. Given
guidebook, the area seems such a substantial platform,
remote. A single train arrives one would not expect either
in Bhuj each day; rarely does a state to undergo many earth-
tourist disembark. Yet, like quakes—certainly not as
most of India, the city and sur- many as take place in the re-
rounding region are densely gions situated above active
populated and rich in archi- plate boundaries.
tectural heritage. Deep cracks in a wall, caused by the But the earthquakes that
Two years ago these human earthquake’s severe shaking, flank the portrait do strike places like Gujarat
and architectural riches be- of a nineteenth-century ruler of Kachchh. and New York have a partic-
came, in an instant, the preconditions for tragedy. ularly long reach. In regions along plate bound-
On January 26, 2001, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake aries—coastal California and Alaska, but also the
struck India about forty miles northwest of Bhuj. Himalaya and the Andes—the crust is a jumble of
The quake was the first major temblor to take once-distinct terrains. Over geologic time, as tec-
place on land, and away from a tectonic plate tonic plates have ground past each other, rocks
boundary, since the invention of the modern seis- have been cracked, ruptured, and folded, thereby
mometer in the 1880s. It killed more than 18,000 mixing and mangling ancient terrains. Earthquake
people and wrecked hundreds of thousands of waves cannot propagate efficiently in such a com-
buildings across the Indian state of Gujarat. plex, fractured setting. In regions that lie within
Less than a year and a half later a much smaller, plates, however, the underlying crust is older, less
magnitude 5.1 mid-continental earthquake hit fractured, and less complicated, and the waves re-
New York State just south of the Canadian border. verberate over much greater distances from an
This one, the Au Sable Forks quake of April 2002, earthquake’s epicenter.
did little damage, but its unfamiliar rumblings were The Bhuj temblor strongly shook the ground as
felt all over the northeastern United States. A tem- far as 300 miles from its epicenter in the district of
blor that size in Los Angeles would barely be no- Kachchh. High-rises toppled in Ahmadabad, a
ticed in earthquake-jaded San Diego, a hundred large industrial city almost 200 miles away. In the
mules away. hardest-hit towns and villages, people and build-
Gujarat and New York are on virtually opposite ings alike were thrown down violently. Writing to
sides of the globe, but in geological terms they have BBC News Online, a resident of one devastated
much in common. Unlike California or Alaska, town described the scene as she and her father

February 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 43

 stood on the balcony of her apartment block, infrastructure, and the possible release of radiation
watching everything around them shaking and from nuclear power plants.
crumbling. “We were in the jaws of death waiting The Bhuj earthquake offers lessons for other re-
for it to gulp us,” she wrote. “Any small jerk could gions as well. Modern seismic monitoring and
have caused the building to collapse.” analysis have established it as the standard against
which to compare anecdotal descriptions of other
huj was truly a shock heard round the world, a large mid-continental quakes in the historical
wake-up call both for its horrific immediate ef- record. Among the most important such earth-
fects and for its even more frightening implications. quakes, at least for North Americans, were three
Earthquake damage reflects not only the magnitude powerful shocks that struck the southeastern corner
of a main shock but also a region’s population den- of Missouri, near the town of New Madrid, in
sity and the vulnerability of its buildings, roads, and 1811 and 1812. The New Madrid earthquakes
other structures. As recently as October 2002 a were strong enough to temporarily reverse the
course of the Mississippi Raver and cause damage as
far away as coastal South Carolina [see “The After-
shocks That Weren’t,” by Susan Elizabeth Hough,
March 2001}.

ale probe the full implications of what hap-

pened in western Gujarat in 2001, geologists
are seeking to understand as much as possible
about the region’s earlier geologic history. The
ancient port of Debal, on the Indus River delta,
was destroyed in A.D. 893 by an earthquake, and
another temblor is thought to have submerged the
nearby city of Samaji in 1668. In 1819 an enor-
mous, magnitude 7.8 earthquake known as the
Allah Bund (Dam of God) hit Kachchh. Less than
two centuries later came Bhuj. And between the
Allah Bund and Bhuj events there were six earth-
quakes in Gujarat greater than magnitude 6.
Moreover, recent excavations of mutilated skele-
tons, which seem to have been buried suddenly
magnitude 5.9 earthquake in the southern Italian under a jumble of strata, have led some scholars to
village of San Giuliano di Puglia took twenty-nine conclude that the highly organized Harappan civ-
lives; three days later a magnitude 7.9 quake in ilization of the Indus Valley, which flourished in
Alaska claimed none. the fourth and third millennia B.c., may also have
It is sobering to contemplate what might take suffered earthquake devastation.
place when the next major earthquake hits the The Allah Bund and Bhuj earthquakes were of
Himalayan region. The combination of poten- roughly the same strength, and they generated
tially great magnitude, efficient earthquake wave strikingly similar patterns of damage. Captain James
propagation, crowded cities, and fragile buildings MacMurdo, the first colonial administrator of
could threaten the lives of tens of millions of Kachchh, experienced the 1819 event firsthand; his
people. For comparison, consider the effects of reports echo vividly across the centuries: “Many of
the magnitude 7.8 shock that took place in the in- the villages . . . are reduced to heaps of rubbish,” he
dustrial city of Tangshan, China, in 1976. Tang- wrote. From Bhuj he relayed accounts of “a violent
shan has the unhappy distinction ofbeing the only undulating motion, so that it was with difficulty
large city to have suffered a direct hit from a major [that people] could keep [their] legs.”
earthquake in the past hundred years; the death The two earthquakes are now thought to have
toll there may have been as high as 750,000, ruptured closely neighboring faults, cracking
though the official tally is closer to 250,000. A fu- through the earth’s crust. Like the Bhuj quake, the
ture large Himalayan earthquake could cause an Allah Bund largely reduced the two closest towns,
immediate six-figure death toll in India and Paki- Bhuj and Anjar, to rubble. It also created a broad,
stan—not to speak of the likelihood of widespread towering ridge—a natural dam—across the nearby
epidemics, the obliteration of costly and essential (and now dry) Puran Raver. Downstream from the

44 | A I {
AI
HISTORY February 2003
ridge the land sank, leaving an enormous
depression that flooded with seawater. A
fort that had stood on the riverbank south
of where the ridge formed became a ruin
surrounded by seawater for fifteen miles in
every direction. (Today the structure is in-
visible, buried beneath a crust of salt.) Sur-
vivors inside the fort were ferried to the
shores of the new lake; by the time they
reached that relative safety, local residents
were pulling both the living and the dead
from the remains of their villages. Not only
did the ridge dam the flow of freshwater
from the north; it also put an end to trade
along the Puran River.

alt. anticipate and help prepare for future

earthquakes, earth scientists rely heavily
on data from past events. Mostly they ana-
lyze data from seismometers deployed
around the globe, as well as data from the
two dozen satellites that make up the Global Posi- and tracked to within the any buildings in the center of Bhuj had
tioning System (GPS). The satellites can give posi- thickness ofa fingernail. OS ee ere cep acaaa
; ¥ : tion that proved particularly vulnerable to
tions so accurately that geologists can monitor the Of course, no such data eae
long-term deformation, or warping, of the earth’s are available either for the
crust with extraordinary accuracy: the glacially Allah Bund or for any of the
slow motions of tectonic plates can be measured _ other large mid-continental earthquakes in recorded
history, including the New Madrid quakes in North
America. Many important seismic events simply
took place too long ago to have left behind evi-
dence from which earth scientists can extrapolate.
Yet even without seismic recordings, one can
ee
=
sometimes infer the subsurface character of an
earthquake from the wrinkles it creates at the sur-
in
face. Much of what is known about the source of
AI
the largest New Madrid shock has been inferred
——— from descriptions of a small region of uplift that
|
peers
created a waterfall on the Mississippi Ruver. In the

) same way, the Allah Bund ridge has provided clues

about the mechanism and size of that earthquake.
V
he New Madrid and Allah Bund quakes were
strikingly similar in ways other than the sur-
face uplift they produced. Sizable mid-continental
earthquakes tend to strike in ancient, fault-riddled
zones of relatively weak rock, which arise where
landmasses begin to part. (One of the most con-
spicuous contemporary examples of an ongoing
parting is the splitting of the African plate along
the East African Rift System, which is creating the
deep lakes that run from Lake Albert to Lake Tan-
Various kinds of tectonic boundaries of the Indian ganyika.) Numerous subsidiary cracks develop in
plate reflect its current northeastward motion
(arrow). Moving at 1.7 inches a year (relative to the the crust, widening along with the main rift over
Eurasian plate), the Indian plate is pushing up the geologic time. Some of the cracks link up, ulti-
Himalaya and creating the high Tibetan plateau. mately forming deep lakes and new oceans; others

February 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 45

 languish, but they can be reactivated by new tec- substantial size, the slippage along the fault stopped
tonic forces millions of years later. propagating well before it reached the earth’s sur-
Both the Allah Bund and the New Madrid face. Geologists found nothing to map except rela-
earthquakes resulted from ruptures along steeply tively modest secondary ground disruptions.
inclined cracks, or thrust faults. Such ruptures But there are other ways to reconstruct the
make it possible for a block of crust to ramp up details of movement along a deep fault, a study
over adjacent rock. That slippage between blocks worth pursuing on both academic and practical
of crust temporarily relieves the stresses that led to grounds. Earthquakes of the same magnitude—
the ruptures in the first place, but the slippage also quakes that release the same amount of energy over-
creates new points of stress. In fact, every large all—do not always generate fault ruptures of the
earthquake leads to a substantial redistribution of same size, and differences in the size of a rupture
the stresses in its immediate locale, raising the lead to differences in the shaking of the ground.
specter of future redistributions, and future shocks, The longer the rupture, the lower the dominant fre-
on adjoining faults. quency of its vibrations: The same principle deter-
Unfortunately, such a broad-brush picture offers mines the pitch of an organ pipe or a string on a
little insight into the where and when of the next double bass: the larger the pipe, or the longer the
earthquake: the geological understanding of stress unstopped string, the lower the note. Even though a
musical instrument 1s enclosed in air and a rupture is
enclosed in rock, both transmit sound waves
An earthquake as powerful as the one through their respective mediums.
that struck western Gujarat in 2001 rings As it happens, buildings are generally most vul-
nerable to shaking within a fairly narrow range of
the earth like a bell, and geologists respond to frequencies; they absorb vibrational energy pri-
marily at their own resonant frequencies, just as a
the seismic signal as if it were a fire alarm. plucked string does. The kinds of structures most
common throughout Gujarat—masonry buildings
redistribution is still in its infancy. Any hope of typically one story high and almost never higher
making useful forecasts will require more data from than ten stories—are affected primarily by vibra-
large earthquakes. For example, even after nearly tions of between one and ten cycles a second. That
two centuries of study, geologists cannot say when is a fairly high frequency for a large earthquake.
the next large earthquake will strike the New Recent investigations reveal that earthquakes of
Madrid area. And if events in that area follow the magnitude 7 or greater that have relatively small
pattern of events in western Gujarat, the next great ruptures will shake particularly violently at fre-
central U.S. earthquake might take place, not in quencies between one and ten cycles a second.
New Madrid, but in the southwestern corner of The severe damage caused by the Bhuj earthquake,
Tennessee—close to the city of Memphis—or per- coupled with its magnitude, suggested that the
haps near the southwestern corner of Indiana, quake had an unusually small rupture area.
where a magnitude 5.0 quake struck in June 2002. Without a surface rupture to measure and assess,
seismologists could turn to three other kinds of
MN earthquake as powerful as the one that hit data: the distribution of aftershocks; the “strong
western Gujarat in 2001 rings the earth like a motion” seismic recordings from the vicinity of the
bell. The waves it generates cannot be felt by people event; and deformations, or warping, of the sur-
living in other regions of the world, but seismic sen- face. Data on aftershocks and on strong motion
sors virtually anywhere on the globe can detect from a main shock come from records made by
them. For geologists, the seismic signal of a big seismic equipment deployed before an earthquake
earthquake 1s like a fire alarm, instantly causing con- takes place. Deformation data are most valuable if
cern and impelling a quick response. the region was surveyed before the quake.
Geologists rushed to Kachchh, expecting to
map the surface pattern of faulting. Large earth- ollowing the Bhuj shock, seismologists faced
quakes generally cause a visible giant crack or a frustration at nearly every turn. Few modern
displacement of the surface rocks and soil. But the selsmometers Were in place in Gujarat at the time of
investigators in Kachchh found only a few minor the quake. In spite of its history of earthquakes, the
cracks and bulges, all of which were attributable to region was thought to be less vulnerable to damage
the effects of violent shaking rather than to deeper than are areas in which large or frequent quakes
breakage along a fault. In spite of the temblor’s have hit more recently. One such area is the 1,500-

NATURA Hl TORY February 2003

mile arc of the Himalaya, which lies along the The heavy dome of a funerary monument, or chhatri, outside the walls
boundary of two colliding tectonic plates. (The of the old city of Bhuj still rests on its supporting columns, despite having
rocked back and forth during the earthquake’s violent shaking.
Himalaya, the world’s highest mountain range, is
still being squeezed upward by immense pressures
as the northeastward-moving Indian subcontinent the British Raj to enable accurate mapping of the
collides with the rest of Asia.) Lacking recordings region. The recorded positions of the markers es-
of the Bhuj earthquake’s strong motion, investiga- tablished a baseline for geologists, who could then
tors had no detailed seismic evidence of the patterns measure how much the markers had shifted after
of motion along the fault. Moreover, the positions the quake. So when Indian, Pakistani, and U.S.
of the quake’s aftershocks could not be pinpointed teams of earth scientists sped to the region in early
until teams of seismologists were able to analyze 2001, they brought along both high-tech GPS sur-
data gathered with portable instruments during the veying units and quaint Victorian descriptions of
weeks and months following the main shock. the survey points’ positions.
What saved the day for the investigators was a de- Although simple in principle, the field investiga-
tailed survey of Gujarat—part of the Great Trigono- tions were quite complicated in practice. Some
metrical Survey of India—that was completed in of the markers had been destroyed by the violent
the mid-nineteenth century. Thousands of en- shaking of the pillars surrounding them; many
graved stone markers, placed deep within pillars, others had been lost to scavengers and small
had been installed on hilltops during the heyday of children during the preceding century and a

February 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 47

 half. Nevertheless, the scientists located a dozen of Such accounts, properly weighed and inter-
the old markers; several had shifted more than preted, can yield an estimate of an earthquake’s in-
three and a half feet. An analysis of the altered po- tensity—the severity of shaking at a particular loca-
sitions confirmed that, deep in the crust, a fault tion—typically stated as a Roman numeral between
some twenty-five miles long had slipped, on aver- I and XII. Near the Bhuj main shock the inferred
age, about twenty feet—a massive amount. The intensities reached [IX to X, strong enough to cause
rupture of the fault had terminated more than catastrophic damage to masonry structures.
three miles below ground. These investigations helped establish the Bhuj
Months later, after studying their seismometer earthquake as a yardstick and made it possible to
data to infer the locations of aftershocks, seismolo- assign more accurate magnitudes to the largest
gists also concluded that the rupture area was deep quakes at New Madrid: between 7.2 and 7.5, al-
and surprisingly compact. The combination of a most as large as the earthquake that devastated
relatively short rupture and a large amount of slip- western Turkey in 1999.
page, as in the Bhuj quake, leads to unusually strong
stresses at the edges of the rupture. Those stresses he historical record of earthquakes in Gujarat is
can stretch or compress rock well beyond its break- also prima facie evidence that a cluster of major
ing point. Indeed, a flurry ofaftershocks took place shocks can occur in areas removed from active plate
around the underground Bhuj rupture. The posi- boundaries. The devastation in Bhuj provides clear
tions of the aftershocks seemed evidence that such shocks can
to confirm that the stresses had cause enormous damage.
been great enough to cause ex- If ithe lessons of Bhuj “re
tensive cracking and fragmenta- sobering for North America,
tion of the crust surrounding the they are staggering for India
parts of the fault that had moved and Pakistan. Home to 1.2 bil-
during the main quake. lion people, the two countries—
though riven by social, political,
Tr the end, modern data gave and religious upheavals both in-
earth scientists a fairly good view ternal and external—jointly face
of the underground processes that the imminent deadly hazard of a
led to the earthquake. But assess- great Himalayan earthquake. The
ing the severity of shaking at the ongoing collision between the
surface was an entirely different Indian and Eurasian plates creates
kind of challenge, and it was the enormous stresses throughout
shaking, after all, that had caused India, which account for the
the damage. Some disruptions at shocks away from the plate
the surface—sand blows, for in- boundaries. And the sustained
stance, which are literally foun- uplift of the Himalaya themselves
tains of sand that erupt at the sur- is accompanied by great earth-
face like geysers—were widespread, quakes that represent a common
and geologists were able to docu- enemy of countries along and
ment them. But such effects yield at near the mountains’ arc. Recent
best only indirect information. calculations indicate that several
A finely crafted doorway in the Bhuj
Because of the almost com- earthquakes as large as magnitude
darbargarh’s Ranivas Palace, built in the
plete lack of direct, immediate seventeenth and eighteenth centurnes, 8 are due along fully half the
seismographic data on the Bhuj remains largely intact. length of the Himalaya.
earthquake itself, earth scientists Humanity has never had to face
turned instead to a time-honored source of infor- potential earthquake devastation of this nature and
mation: personal anecdotes describing damage and scale. Multiple urban targets of great size and vul-
other effects. By collecting accounts in the field as nerability have never before existed in areas where
well as compiling the descriptions published in the strong seismic shaking is common. As a result, what
media and on the Web, investigators were able to was impossible even half a century ago is now not
map the shaking during the event. The effects only possible but, in some places, probable. As hor-
ranged from the near-total collapse of villages to rific as it was, the Bhuj earthquake was really only a
barely perceptible shaking felt by residents of warning shock. Its legacy will depend on the extent
India’s east coast. to which the world heeds the warning. L

|
NATUI I HISTORY February 2003
The Maya The Aztecs + The Incas «The peSineicc ay
The Babylonians « The Egyptians + The Persians _

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Biosphere III
A ninety-year-old inadvertent experiment
in tropical biodiversity is unfolding on several islands
created by the construction of the Panama Canal.
Photographs by Christian Ziegler
Story by Egbert Giles LeighJr. and Christian Ziegler

ow does a tropical forest manage to stay green despite an onslaught of

leaf-eating sloths, monkeys, porcupines, and iguanas, not to mention a
plethora of leaf-chewing and sap-sucking insects? Most flowering
plants defend their leaves with toxins that deter all but the most specialized
pests. Animals that the plants recruit as seed dispersers and pollinators enable
some of the young plants to escape notice until they are large enough to survive
the depredations of specialist pests. The animals also ensure that mature plants
are cross-pollinated even if other members of the species are not close by.
In the Jurassic period, 150 million years ago, a few square miles of tropical for-
est harbored relatively few species of plants: conifers, cycads, seed ferns, and the
like. Dependent on cross-pollination by wind, members of a species had to grow
near each other, and so the pests, too, spread easily from one plant to another.
Plants therefore had to invest heavily in pest resistance, leaving fewer resources for
quick growth. Fifty million years later, aided by animal pollinators, a baroque di-
versity of faster-growing, flowering plants entered the tropical forest. After the
dinosaurs died out, they became dominant.
Damming a tropical river, however, creates a reservoir that reduces forest to is-
land fragments. Small islets cannot support resident pollinators and seed dis-
persers, and many of those essential reproductive helpers will not cross the water
to visit. On such islets, a Jurassic world returns, where plant diversity plummets
and animals help themselves to plants without helping them in any way.
What happens on a large fragment? Barro Colorado, in central Panama, is a
six-square-mile island that was cut off from the mainland when the Chagres
Raver was dammed in 1912 to form part of the Panama Canal. Since then, the 1s-
land has been losing species. At least seven mammals have disappeared, including
the herds of white-lipped peccaries. Various insect-eating birds that nested or for-
aged on the ground have vanished. The large ocellated antbird is also absent: it
can only catch insects flushed by army ants, and one year the ants did not swarm
in large enough numbers to support it. Biologists owe such details to a field sta-
tion built on the island soon after it was declared a biological reserve in 1923.
Since 1966, when the station became part of the Smithsonian Tropical Research
Institute, the island has become one of the world’s best-studied tropical forests.
Barro Colorado is large enough to show how a tropical forest supports a diver-
sity of plants and animals. Nearby islets of less than three acres, however, support
no resident mammals at all. They have no agoutis to store seeds by burying them,
so seeds of many tree species are ravaged by insects, and these tree species are
dying out. Although Barro Colorado still holds many secrets, it has made clear
that forest fragmentation has intricate repercussions.
A lingers after emerging from one of the white co- their strength before eventually killing them. The white co-
coons attached to the mottled surface of a sphinx moth coons here belong to such a parasitoid, a wasp in the family
caterpillar. In a tropical forest, “the enemy of my enemy’ is Braconidae. Some parasitoids are themselves subject to such
my friend.” Plants muster various defenses of their own to attack, by hyperparasitoids. The emerged wasp is actually
ward off insect herbivores, but they also benefit from a pest’s one that has parasitized the wasp larva in one of the cocoons.
natural enemies. Among these-allies are wasps whose larvae (“Great fleas havelittle fleas upon their backs to bite ’em/
live in and on the larvae or adults of other insects, sapping And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.”)

February 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 5

 cicada has just emerged
from its larval skin after
spending years underground as
a larva sucking xylem sap from
roots. This kind of sap is a di-
luted food, and so a cicada larva
grows slowly. When it finally
crawls out of the ground one
night, it climbs a plant, hooks
onto it, and metamorphoses
into an adult. The mature ci-
cada continues to live off sap
while pursuing its brief adult
life seeking a mate. (An insis-
tent noise, rather like the sound
of a high-pitched buzz saw,
that pervades the forest is the
male advertising its presence.)
Insects that suck plant juices,
such as cicadas, leafhoppers, and
aphids, slow plant growth every
bit as much as leaf-chewers do,
but they leave no visible evi-
dence of their depredations.
aa ROTTER

f ebruary 2003
 es covered in moss, a walking stick (Au-
tolyca sp.) is a master of camouflage. Stick insects
are among the many leaf-eaters that plants must con-
tend with. A tropical forest such as Barro Colorado not
only includes many kinds of trees, but the various spe-
cies are also well mixed over the landscape. The most
logical explanation for the intermingling is that the in-
sects that specialize in consuming a particular species are
likely to kill any young plants growing close to their
parents or to others of their kind. A tree species can
maintain a scattered population by relying on friendly
insects and other animals to pollinate their flowers and
spread their seeds across long distances.

any plants, including this Croton billbergianus tree, have nectaries on the bases of their young
leaves that attract ants (a nectary is visible here near the ant’s head). The ants can scare off some
potential herbivores. In the case ofthis Croton, however, some resident Thisbe irenea caterpillars have
induced the ants to leave them in peace. The caterpillars curry favor by drinking the plant’s nectar and
turning it into a liquid the ants prefer. Accordingly, the ants let the caterpillars devour the leaves at will
and even defend the caterpillars against some of their enemies. The caterpillars have structures on their
bodies that attract ants with sound, and when danger threatens, they can even summon their defenders
by releasing chemicals that mimic the alarm signals of ants. Another plant whose nectaries attract ants is
the swollen-thorn acacia (Acacia melanoceras), a tree with bulbous hollow thorns where the ants can
nest. An acacia’s resident ants—members of the species Pseudomyrmex satanicus, justly named for
its obnoxious stings—chew off the tips of encroaching vines, repel herbivores, and maintain a clearing
around their plant’s base.

February 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 53

 fig fruit starts out as a flower head, then turns itself the trees must ensure that the fruits don’t overheat in the
outside in to form a ball, or syconium, that is lined sun and kill the wasps inside. Species that produce rela-
on the inside with flowers. The wasp pictured here special- tively large figs, which cannot shed heat to the surround-
izes in laying its eggs in the syconium from the outside, ing air as readily as small figs can, provide a steady
with its long ovipositor, and leaves the pollinating of the stream of water to their fruits throughout the day, which
flowers to another species of wasp. Each species of fig cools through evaporation. The trees rely on other ani-
tree—in Barro Colorado there are eighteen—has its own mals to eat their ripe fruit and disperse the many seeds
species ofpollinating wasp. Pollinators enter the syconium that have been spared by the wasps. Trees with red fruit
through a hole at one end and lay eggs in about half the are served mainly by birds, which are attracted to the
flowers. The larvae grow inside the developing fig seeds, color red. Species with green fruit depend mainly on
no more than one to a seed. When the adult wasps emerge fruit-eating bats, which they attract during the night
from their seeds, they mate among themselves inside the with a distinctive scent.
frit. The males then chew a hole in the syconium’s wall, Fig trees are often “keystone species” —dispropor-
and the fertilized females—dusting themselves with the tionately important to the maintenance of other spe-
pollen that the flowers are only now producing—fly off in cies—in tropical forests of the Americas and Asia. Fig
search of new trees in which to lay their eggs. trees do not invest heavily in defenses against the herbi-
lo feed its pollinators, each fig species must always vores; instead they grow fast, produce an abundance of
have some trees with fruit ready to pollinate, whether or nutritious foliage and fruit, die relatively young, and rot
not the season is propitious for fig seedlings. Moreover, quickly when dead.

NATUR Al HISTORY February 2003

 he poisonous green spines
of this caterpillar, from
the moth family Limacodidae,
discourage potential predators
such as birds. Caterpillars are a
diverse and abundant group of Zed «
a 4 ss
leaf eaters. Many feed on only ae
one genus or species of plant, Baw &

owe’,
collectively enhancing tree di-
versity by preventing any one 4
species from crowding out the
others. A casual visitor to a
tropical forest may not spot the
caterpillars feasting on the veg-
etation, but only an upward
glance is required to see their
handiwork: tree leaves that
have holes and ragged edges or
that have been reduced to a
delicate network of veins. One
might also experience what
sounds and feels like a gentle
rain—but it is the falling of the
frass, or feces, of leaf-eating
caterpillars overhead.

Adapted from A Magic Web: The Tropical

Forest of Barro Colorado Island, Photographs
by Christian Ziegler, text by Egbert Giles
Leigh, Jr. (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002). ©2002 by Oxford
University Press, Inc. Photographs ©2002
by Christian Ziegler

February 2003 NATURAI t1 IST¢

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 A Culex pipiens mosquito, newly emerged from its pupal skin: Males of the species, if infected by Wolbachia bactena,
produce sperm that is incompatible with the eggs of uninfected females. Other Culex species have protozoan infections
that are transmitted through the eggs and kill the male larvae but not the female ones.

Invasion of the
Gender Benders
By manipulating sex and reproduction in their hosts,
many parasites improve their own odds of survival
and may shape the evolution ofsex itself.

By John H. Werren
February 2003
 ex is fraught. Every teenager can attest to the but can infect small aquatic crustaceans called cope-
havoc it wreaks—and to its unique power to pods. When a female copepod ingests the remains
change a life. Of course, that’s one of life’s of a male mosquito larva killed by the protozoans,
lessons that survive far beyond the teenage years— the copepod also ingests the spores. The protozoans
and far beyond the human condition. To anyone then infect the female copepod and turn her
who explores the ramifications of sex in other spe- ovaries into a “protozoan factory,’ generating the
cies, its permutations seem bottomless. In recent kind of spores that can infect mosquito larvae.
years, the study of evolution, ofparasites, and even When the mosquito larvae are filter feeding, they
of disease has often led back to sex. Particularly take in the spores from the water, and so complete
fascinating are the ways in which some parasites the cycle. Thus the parasite has the best of both
manipulate sex and reproduction in their hosts— worlds: it exploits its female mosquitoes for trans-
stories of exploitation and subterfuge that have mission via eggs, and the male mosquitoes for in-
amazed and astonished even life scientists long fectious passage to new hosts. Pretty clever for an
jaded by tales of biological intrigue. organism without a brain.
Take the case of Nosema granulosis, a protozoan Other male-killers include various bacteria that
that often resides within the cells of Gammarus make themselves at home in fruit flies, wasps, but-
duebeni, a small shrimp that lives in intertidal pools terflies, and beetles. In those insects, though, the
along the coasts of Europe. When an infected only way the microorganisms make it into the next
mother shrimp reproduces, the protozoans hitch a generation of hosts is through the eggs of infected
ride in the cytoplasm of her eggs and thereby infect mothers. No sex-change operation on a male insect
her offspring. But if the protozoans infect a male is possible; no suitable “third-party” species like the
shrimp, they cannot readily infect his offspring by copepod is available to provide the parasites in males
hitching a ride in his sperm, because sperm contain with an alternative host. For parasites that end up in
so little cytoplasm. As a result, N. granulosis is trans- a male, the options
mitted solely by female hosts, not by the males. are limited. Killing
So what happens when the protozoan ends up in the male insect has
a baby male shrimp? That would seem to be the end zero cost to the par-
of the line. What’s a protozoan to do? To bypass this asite, but what is the
dead end, N. granulosis takes over the sex-determin- benefit?
ing mechanism of the shrimp and converts the male In some cases it
into a female. That bit of genetic magic assures the appears that killing
protozoan’s passage to future generations—though off male hosts en-
how it accomplishes this, no one knows. hances the survival
Naturally, if the protozoans were to become too of the hosts’ infected
common in host populations, they could drive the sisters. After all,
shrimp to extinction by causing a scarcity of males. without the males to
Fortunately for the survival of both species, the compete with, the
protozoans are not transmitted to all the eggs of an infected female in-
infected mother; in the wild, in fact, they typically sects have more re-
infect fewer than afifth of the baby shrimp. sources for them-
selves. That alone, of
arasites that manipulate the sex of their hosts are course, doesn’t help
fe ca reproductive parasites—and they are not the parasites in the
as rare as one might like to think. Some, such as N. male insects. Unlike
Shrimp of the species Gammarus duebeni,
granulosis, convert males into females, but a wide- the A. californica pro-
top, often harbor protozoans that are
spread and diverse array of microorganisms simply tozoans, they gain transmitted through the shnmp’s eggs. In
kill the sons of their hosts; the daughters, which nothing directly, be- a step that ensures their own transmis-
transmit the microorganisms, are allowed to live. cause they die along sion, the protozoans can change a male
The protozoan Amblyospora californica, for in- with their hosts. host into a female. Bottom: The protozoan
stance, is transmitted through the eggs of infected They do gain indi- species in question, Nosema granulosis.
female mosquitoes, but it kills the developing male rectly, however, be-
larvae. Once again, that would seem to be a dead cause the death of the male insects benefits the par-
end for the protozoans in the males, but all is not asites’ “family.” All the parasites passed along by the
lost. The protozoans in the males develop into spe- infected mother insect are genetically identical to
cialized spores that cannot infect other mosquitoes one another (that is, they are a clone). The parasites

February 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 59

 females remain uninseminated. Female leks are ex-
tremely rare in nature; in most species that form
leks, it is the males that aggregate to attract the fe-
males. But under the pressure of male-killing bac-
teria, the white-barred Acraea appears to have
evolved an unusual but adaptive mating system.
Biologists have just begun to document the di-
versity of male-killing bacteria in nature, and it is
likely that a large percentage of invertebrate species
play host to them. Vertebrates may also harbor
male-killers, though none have yet been found.
People need not worry, though: given the intense
study of our own species, if we carried male-
killing microorganisms, they would certainly have
been discovered by now.
The white-barred Acraea is an extreme case;
male-killers rarely infect a fraction of a population
large enough to force a change in the mating sys-
tem ofa host species. Yet some biologists speculate
that even a relatively small proportion of infected
individuals (say, 5 percent) pushes the sex-deter-
mining genes of a host species to change in ways
that enable it to escape or to suppress the male-
killing effects. The cat-and-mouse game between
male-killers and their hosts may be one of the mo-
tors contributing to the great diversity of sex-deter-
Some populations of the white-barred Acraea, above, are infected by mining mechanisms that occur in nature.
Wolbachia bactena that kill off most of the males. The female butterflies
then assemble in courting areas, which attract the few remaining males. he undisputed virtuosos of reproductive para-
sites are bacteria of the genus Wolbachia, which,
that happen to infect a daughter insect benefit from like many of their brethren, are transmitted in the
the additional resources available to her. So, by cytoplasm of eggs. These bacteria also infect across
killing males the extended clone of parasites in- species boundaries, which has made them unusually
creases within host populations. For infected insect widespread in invertebrates. Wolbachia bacteria in-
mothers, however, the infection is a disaster, because fect many insects, arachnids (mites and spiders),
all of their sons are killed. crustaceans, and parasitic nematodes. At least 20
percent of all insect species harbor them, and the
hen male-killers become widespread, they proportion could be as high as 70 percent—biolo-
can even affect the mating system of their gists are still trying to determine the number. Be-
hosts. Francis M. Jiggins, a biologist at the Univer- cause most animal species are invertebrates, the
sity of Cambridge, has detected male-killing abundance of Wolbachia’s hosts makes the genus
microorganisms in high proportions of the individ- among the most common parasitic bacteria on the
uals in some populations of African butterflies, and planet. Analysis of its DNA indicates that the bacte-
the highly skewed sex ratios that result lead to ria have lived in insects for at least 50 million years,
changes in the mating system. In Acraea butterflies and in invertebrates for at least 100 million. Only
males normally congregate at food plants, and mat- ten years ago Wolbachia was regarded as an obscure
ings take place there when the females arrive to lay little group of bacteria, but the genus has come up
their eggs. But in some populations of the white- in the world, at least in the eyes ofbiologists.
barred Acraea, so many females are infected with Its broad distribution is one of the major mys-
male-killing bacteria (more than 95 percent in some teries of Wolbachia: how can one genus ofbacteria
cases) that males are extremely scarce. In those pop- infect so many kinds of hosts? Some investigators
ulations, females assemble in courting areas called speculate that species that are ecologically associ-
leks to attract the few males that are flying about. ated in some way (predators and prey, for instance,
These lucky males procure many matings, but there or competitors feeding on the same food resource)
is still not enough sperm to go around, and many may occasionally exchange Wolbachia. But con-

60 NATURAI HISTORY February 2003

vincing evidence has not yet surfaced to back up no longer reproduce sexually. In the small parasitic
the speculation. wasp Encarsia formosa, antibiotics lead to the pro-
Wolbachia bacteria are masters at manipulating duction of males, but the males cannot mate: the
the reproductive and cell biology of invertebrates. genes needed for male courtship have been lost.

Parasites that are passed on through the eggs of their host species face
a potential dead end ifthey find themselves in a son of their former host.

Like other reproductive parasites, some members of Other wasp species have similar stories to tell. In
the genus kill the male insects they infect, whereas some, the females no longer respond to courtship;
others turn males into sexually functioning females. in others, the males no longer produce functional
Some even induce parthenogenesis 1n their hosts— sperm. Given enough time, mutations accumulate
a mode of reproduction in which eggs develop into in the genes for sexual characteristics, and the spe-
females without fertilization, thereby dispensing cles can no longer revert to sexual reproduction.
with males and their sperm. Parasitic parthenogen- Their reproduction becomes completely depen-
esis has been noted in more than three dozen spe- dent on the bacteria that live inside their cells.
cies of insects, mainly wasps. The bacteria accom-
plish this trick by manipulating the basic processes ut perhaps the most intriguing effect of Wol-
of the cell in such a way that the single set of chro- bachia is the ability of some ggea sey ge
mosomes in the egg is duplicated, and the unfertil- strains to induce an incompati- } Po
ized egg develops into a female. bility between host sperm and
When the bacteria in parthenogenetic insects eggs, a process that may even
are killed with common antibiotics such as tetracy- implicate the microorganisms
cline, the insects usually revert to sexual reproduc- in the evolutionary divergence
tion. Sometimes, however, the insect species have ofinsect species. The discovery
been parthenogenetic for so long that when the of these capabilities has a long
Wolbachia bacteria are eliminated, the insects can history. Wolbachia bacteria were

Above: A kind of bacterium living in this Encarsia wasp causes it to reproduce parthenogenetically—that 1s,
the wasp’s eggs develop into females without the need for fertilization. Top right: The as-yet-unnamed
bacterium, a relative of soil bacteria of the genus Cytophaga.

February 2003 NATURAL HISTOR‘ Y 61

 aTae diversity of the en-
cryption mechanisms
raises the possibility that Wol-
bachia could play a role in the
evolution of new insect spe-
cies. If different populations
ofa species, or closely related
species, are infected with dif-
ferent strains of Wolbachia,
the bacteria could prevent
the insects’ gene pools from
A Brevipalpus phoenicis mite, left, can be mixing. Just such a circum-:
infected with the Cytophaga-like bactena, Stance may have arisen in
above, which enable the mite to reproduce jewel wasps, a genus (Naso-
parthenogenetically. Other mite species nia) of small parasitic wasps
carry Wolbachia bacteria that induce in- that kill fly pupae. There are
compatibility between sperm and egg.
three closely related species
of jewel wasps, but each is in-
first observed in the 1920s, when the pathologists fected with its own distinct Wolbachia. The bacteria
Arthur Hertig and S. Burt Wolbach, working at render any matings between the different wasp spe-
Harvard Medical School, found them inside the cies incompatible, thereby preventing the develop-
eggs of Culex mosquitoes. Hertig later named the ment of hybrids.
bacterial genus in honor of his colleague and men- Biologists have also discovered that Wolbachia
tor. In the 1950s the German biologist Hannes plays an essential developmental role in some host
Laven discovered that when males from some strains species. For example, if Wolbachia bacteria in the
of the mosquito C. pipiens were crossed with fe- wasp Asobara tabida are eliminated with antibiotics,
males of another strain, the offspring died as em- the female wasps fail to develop ovaries and so
bryos. Laven subsequently showed that the effect become sterile. Filarial nematodes—parasitic
was inherited through the mother’s lineage. As he “worms” that cause such diseases as river blindness
viewed it, the cytoplasm in the eggs of certain and elephantiasis in people and heartworm in
strains of insects was incompatible with the sperm dogs—also need the bacteria if their embryos are
from certain other strains. Laven was apparently to develop properly. Antibiotic treatment of adult
unaware, however, that bacteria had earlier been worms kills the embryos, rendering the adults ster-
discovered in the eggs of the insects. ile. This discovery has increased interest in the pos-
It wasn’t until the early 1970s that two other in- sibility that nematode diseases can be controlled
vestigators, Janice H. Yen and A. Ralph Barr of the with antibiotics [see “The Worm and the Parasite,” by
University of California, Los Angeles, made the T’ Vv Rajan, page 32].
connection. They showed that Laven’s “cytoplas- To study the details of Wolbachia’s capabilities,
mic incompatibility” was caused by the bacteria. biologists have experimentally transferred the bac-
Antibiotic treatments that eliminated the bacteria teria from one insect species to another. The
also changed the compatibility relationships be- method is similar to the microinjection techniques
tween males and females. developed for in vitro fertilization: a needle con-
The basic pattern is that eggs from uninfected fe- taining the bacteria from one insect is injected into
males are incompatible with sperm from infected the egg ofa different, uninfected species. Not sur-
males. The Wolbachia present in the testes of males prisingly, perhaps, the “foreign” Wolbachia bacteria
biochemically “encrypt” the developing sperm, can have different effects in their new hosts. For
probably by altering proteins that bind to the sperm example, in the adzuki bean borer moth (Ostrinia
DNA. The same strain of Wolbachia must then be scapulalis), Wolbachia tarns a male host into a fe-
present in the egg to “decode” the encrypted sperm. male. When the same bacteria are injected into the
Otherwise the chromosomes from the sperm are not common flour moth Ephestia kuehniella, however,
properly processed in the fertilized egg, and the em- they simply kill the males.
bryo dies. The actual mechanisms are still a mystery,
but it is already clear to investigators that there are lerted to the newly recognized importance of
many different kinds of Wolbachia, which differ in Wolbachia in manipulating invertebrate repro-
their encryption systems. duction, investigators are now discovering an en-

ORY February 2003

tire pantheon of sex-manipulating microorganisms Like Wolbachia, mitochondria are inherited
that are transmitted from females to their offspring through the cytoplasm, and therefore from moth-
through eggs. A recent finding is a relative (as yet ers but not from fathers. And, like Wolbachia, mito-
unnamed) of soil bacteria in the genus Cytophaga. chondria that skew the sex ratio of their “host” or-
Biologists have shown that the unnamed bac- ganisms toward females can be favored by natural
terium induces parthenogenesis in hosts as varied selection. Biologists have demonstrated that in
as wasps and mites, and is likely to be widespread. many plants, such as corn and rye, mitochondrial
Others await discovery. The genus Rickettsia, variants cause an abortion of the male parts of the
which is a member of the same family as Wolbachia, plant, the pollen-producing anthers. The effect is
includes a number of disease-causing bacteria spread known as cytoplasmic male sterility, and it leads to
by arthropods, such as the microorganisms responsi- an increased production of seeds, which transmit
ble for Rocky Mountain spotted fever and typhus. the mitochondria. A contest ensues: plant genes
Recently, Rickettsia bacteria that are transmitted evolve that suppress the renegade mitochondria,
through eggs and cause male-killing have been and new mitochondrial variants arise that can es-
identified. I anticipate that once additional discover- cape the new control.
ies are made, it will be clear that most members of
the genus are engaged in distorting sex in arthro- s far as anyone knows, animal mitochondria
pods, and that causing disease in vertebrates 1s a rel- do not play such games. The reason may be
atively uncommon trait. The widespread occur- sumply that animal mitochondria have much
rence of reproductive parasites illustrates a basic smaller genomes than their counterparts in plants,
principle: whenever a microorganism is inherited and therefore may not be able to draw from as rich
through the eggs of its host, it will be selected for its a grab bag of genetic trickery. Fortunately for ani-
capacity to manipulate the host’s reproduction in mals and plants, most of the time mitochondria are
ways that enhance the microorganism’s transmission. quite well behaved.
An even more remarkable story than that of The comparison with mitochondria raises one
Wolbachia and other reproductive parasites belongs final, tantalizing question about bacteria of the
to the “microbes” present in nearly all plants and genus Wolbachia. Given their ubiquity, their
animals—the mitochondria. Flourishing in the adopted homes within the cells of other organisms,
cytoplasm of nearly all nucleated cells, mitochon- and their heritability through the eggs of their
dria are specialized hosts, why haven’t
organelles, with their they evolved into
own DNA. They are organelles like the
the cell’s power sta- mitochondria before
tions, generating en- them? Perhaps it’s
ergy for cellular only a matter of time
metabolism. There is before they do. If
now overwhelming bacteriologists take a
evidence that mi- peek in, say, 50 mil-
tochondria evolved lion years, they might
from a symbiotic bac- well find that Wol-
terium during the bachia bacteria have
early evolution of nu- been tamed by some
cleated cells. In fact, invertebrate group
on the basis of simi- and have evolved into
larities in their DNA, a new kind of cell or-
biologists now think ganelle. What service
The small parasitic wasp Trichogramma kaykai deposits its
mitochondria and Wol- eggs within the eggs of butterflies. Inside the ovaries of this that organelle might
bachia may be distant wasp are Wolbachia bactena that induce parthenogenetic perform is anyone’s
relatives. development of the wasp eggs. guess. CL]

February 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 63

 THIS LAND

like coati scurried across the road and

into the adjacent woodland, just as
one did thirty years before. A Mexi-
Formations of volcanic rock dominate can jay was drinking from a catch
basin at a public water fountain, just
a landscape in southeastern Arizona. as Beverly remembered one doing
three decades ago. And the thick-
billed parrot, the only parrot whose
native range once extended north of
the Mexican border, was still
A bout 27 million years ago, in described them imaginatively yet ac- nowhere to be seen (the species was
f A what is now the southeastern curately: “chess pieces—pawns and extirpated from this locale in 1922,
A Acorner of Arizona, a volcano castles, knights and bishops, kings and and predators have foiled attempts to
spewed out vast amounts of hot ash queens, all crowded together at one reintroduce it). But I did notice that
and pumice that fused into a 2,000- end of the chessboard.” the trees lining the road had grown
foot layer of rock known as rhyolitic When my wife Beverly and I somewhat taller.
tuff. Subsequent erosion has trans- pulled up to the entrance station of We followed the main park road,
formed the landscape into an incom- the monument, a cheerful and enthu- which winds about eight miles
parable collection of spires, chimneys, siastic ranger asked if we had ever vis- through Bonita Canyon and on up to
and balanced rocks. Located about ited before. “About thirty years ago,” Massai Point. The canyon is forested
thirty-five miles southeast of Willcox, I replied. “Well, nothing has changed mainly with pines and junipers, but
Arizona, Chiricahua National Monu- much,” the ranger told us. And she other trees grow along the streambed
ment was established in 1924 to pro- was right. The stone pillars and bal- that the road follows for much of the
tect these formations. The botanist anced rocks looked the same, of way. (Water flows through the stream
and author Janice Emily Bowers has course, but that wasn’t all. A raccoon- most predictably during the months

Rock formations and trees, viewed west from Massai Point

|
64
4 NATURAL HISTORY February 2003
|
 formation called Natural Bridge, but Mixed conifer forest Ponderosa pine,
we decided it was time to turn back. Douglas fir, and Arizona cypress
First-time visitors should be sure to the dominant trees above layers of
follow the trail to Heart of Rocks for Apache pine, Chihuahua pine, pinyon
a close-up view of some of Chiri- pine, silverleaf oak, Emory oak,
cahua National Monument’s most Arizona white oak, alligator juniper,
popular rock formations, with names Arizona madrone, and pointleaf
such as Duck on a Rock and Punch manzanita. Among the wildflowers,
and Judy [see photograph on this page]. flowering shrubs, and grasses are Chir-
Big Balanced Rock is perhaps the icahua Mountain columbine, desert
most famous (and most photo-
graphed) of all.

HABITATS

For visitor information, contact: Streamside forest Along the

Chiricahua National Monument
streams and washes are Arizona
13063 East Bonita Canyon Road
sycamore, Fremont cottonwood,
Willcox, AZ 85643
(520) 824-3560 Arizona walnut, velvet ash, and Ari-
www.nps.gov/chir/ zona cypress. Flowering herbs and
shrubs include horsetail, seep willow,
of July and August, when a shift in desert broom, threadleaf ragwort,
wind direction brings “monsoon” desert willow, hummingbird trum-
rains.) At the end of the drive we got pet, chokecherry, Apache plume,
a superb view of the rocks and pinna- western white honeysuckle, mutton
cles below. grass, and skunk-bush.
On the way back we stopped in
Bonita Canyon to hike the Natural Chaparral Principal woody plants are
Bridge Trail, which heads north for alligator juniper, Emory oak, Mexi-
half a mile or so, then turns west- can pinyon pine, Arizona cypress, and
Punch and Judy
ward out of the canyon and enters an the shrubby Toumey oak, deerbrush,
upland woods. About 120 acres here and mountain mahogany. Wildflow- blazingstar, Santa Ruta Mountain aster,
have been designated Picket Park. ers, grasses, and flowering shrubs plains blackfoot, southwestern cosmos,
The ground cover, particularly on include woolly Indian paintbrush, purple locoweed, Alpine.false spring
ridges that get the full brunt of the bristlehead, rabbitbrush, turpentine parsley, false Solomon’s seal, showy
sun, 1s mostly chaparral, a commu- bush, yellow hawkweed, threenerve goldeneye, cardinal catchfly, Huachuca
nity of drought-tolerant plants, often goldenrod, dwarf desert peony, Amer- Mountain geranium, satin bunchgrass,
with leathery leaves that inhibit ican threefold, pinyon ricegrass, cen- Wright’ silktassel, and bear grass.
evaporation. Oak woodland pre- tury plant, Palmer’s agave, and small
dominates below the ridges, on palmleaf thoroughwort. Pine and oak woodland usually oc-
rough, south-facing slopes where curs in canyon bottoms, which pro-
heavy exposure to the sun combines Oak woodland The primary woody vide enough moisture for the growth
with steep terrain broken by plants are dwarfed and gnarly and of Arizona cypress, Arizona white
columns, cliffs, and ledges. include Toumey oak, silverleaf oak, oak, alligator juniper, netleaf oak, and
Continuing our hike through Arizona white oak, netleaf oak, silverleaf oak. Wildflowers and flow-
Picket Park, we reached a zone where Emory oak, Mexican pinyon pine, ering shrubs include antelope horns,
mixed conifer forest, with stands of and alligator juniper. Wildflowers pineneedle beardtongue, dwarf false
rare Apache pine and Chihuahua and shrubs include longstalk green- pennyroyal, Chihuahuan _brickell-
pine, grows amid the rock forma- thread (whose flowers resemble a bush, Missouri goldenrod, roving
tions. Finally we came to a pine and dandelion head), Wright’s beebrush, sailor, cliff fendlerbush, mutton grass,
oak woodland nestled in a narrow, antelope sage, evergreen sumac, sotol, and Ross’ sedge.
steep-walled canyon. At the canyon century plant, bear grass, ocotillo,
bottom is an impressive stand of Ari- cliff fendlerbush, turpentine bush, Robert H. Mohlenbrock is professor emeritus
zona cypress. From there the trail evergreen rock fern, and beggartick ofplant biology at Southern Illinois University
would have taken us south to a rock three-awn (a grass). in Carbondale.

February 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 65

OUT THERE

Tightening Our Kuiper Belt

From the edge of the solar system come hints ofa disrupted youth.

By Charles Liu

ore and more often, some findings that, though useless to the ar- every icy dirt ball. The reason is that in
new astronomical discovery gument about what to call Pluto, sug- the past decade or so, astronomers have
is thrusting Pluto and its gest that the Kuiper Belt is a surpris- discovered disks of dusty gas as large as
home, the Kuiper Belt, into the public ingly sharp edge cinching our solar 100 billion miles in diameter orbiting a
eye. Most of the attention focuses on system five billion miles out from the number of stars much younger than,
Pluto’s status as one of our solar sys- Sun, and that it holds some clues to but otherwise quite similar to, our
tem’s major planets. Should it retain our solar system’s early history. Sun. According to current astrophysi-
that status, even though astronomers
know Pluto really is just a ball of ice
and rock, smaller than our Moon?
A few months ago the flames were
fanned again, when Michael E. Brown
and Chadwick A. Trujillo, both as-
tronomers at Caltech, announced the
discovery of a large new Kuiper Belt
object (or KBO) that they dubbed
Quaoar (after the creation force of the
Tonga tribe who lived in the Los An-
geles area). No one was calling Quaoar
a major planet; it’s only 800 miles Eva Lee, Eyesites, 2000
wide. Yet Pluto—about 1,400 miles in
diameter—isn’t that much bigger than ING after the Dutch American cal models, planets originate in these
Quaoar, and Quaoar’s orbit looks astronomer Gerard Kuiper, one disks, and our solar system represents
much more like the orbits of the other of the first people to posit its exis- one possible outcome of the evolution
eight major planets than Pluto’s does. tence, the Kuiper Belt is a doughnut- of such a disk. The Kuiper Belt is
Pluto-bashers everywhere hailed shaped zone of space, populated by probably what remains of the Sun’s
Quaoar as further proof that the runt comets and comet-like bodies, which original disk, so its shape, size, and
of the traditional nine planets should lies beyond the orbit of Neptune. thickness serve as critical benchmarks
be reclassified as just another KBO, al- KBOs are small—most are less than for understanding how planetary sys-
beit a larg e one. 100 miles across—and made up al- tems form, grow, and age.
But all the hoopla missed the scien- most entirely of ice and rock. They’re Neptune’s orbit, a nearly circular
tific point. For many of us as- remnants of the solar system’s early ellipse some three billion miles away
tronomers, it’s not Pluto, Quaoar, or history, relatively unaltered by four from the Sun, traces the Kuiper Belt’s
any other individual KBO that mat- and a half billion years of stellar and inner edge. The belt’s outer edge is
ters; it’s the Kuiper Belt itself that planetary evolution. far less certain, though. Of more than
counts. And if you take the Pluto- Someday astronomers will get the 600 KBOs discovered to date, none
Quaoar episode as an occasion for a chance to study KBOs up close, and of those with nearly circular orbits is
closer look at the Kuiper Belt, you the objects will provide an unparal- more than roughly five billion miles
get into some pretty intriguing scien- leled glimpse into the chemical and from the Sun. That suggests the
tific questions. For) example, Ro physical conditions of the early solar Kuiper Belt’s outer boundary could
Lynne Allen of the University of system. But the scientific value of the well lie there. But the outer bound-
British Columbia in Vancouver and Kuiper Belt as a whole is even greater aries of the disks orbiting the younger
her collaborators recently published than the sum of the information in stars | mentioned are as much as

February 2003
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twenty times farther away from their predictions of the model, she trained solar system suffered a major disturb-
central stars. If the Kuiper Belt is the four-meter telescope at the Kitt ance—perhaps a near-collision with a
what's left of such a disk around our Peak National Observatory in Ari- passing star—that chopped the outer
Sun, why is it so small? zona on portions of the band of sky regions off the Sun’s circumstellar
where the model suggested she disk. If so, such a cropping would
o resolve this discrepancy, astron- would find the outer Kuiper Belt. have directly affected the develop-
ene have proposed a com- Sure enough, she found dozens of ment of our entire planetary system.
posite shape for the Kuiper Belt, new KBOs there to be sure, but For one thing, a larger disk might
with an inner part that bulges like a none of them were more than five have caused many more comet colli-
bagel, and an outer part that’s thin billion miles away. By Allen’s calcu- sions early in Earth’s history. If the
like a dinner plate. According to that lations, the observations strongly passing-star scenario can be con-
model, the belt extends a long way suggest that the KBO distribution firmed, it may show that the develop-
out, but the hypothetical KBOs that has a sharp boundary at that distance, ment of life on Earth was linked to a
would allegedly make up the outer and that a thin outer Kuiper Belt chance but crucial event in the his-
part of the belt haven’t been discov- simply does not exist. tory of the Kuiper Belt.
ered because they're confined to a So the question remains: why is the
narrow band—about the width of an Sun’s Kuiper Belt so much smaller Charles Liu is an astrophysicist at the Hayden
outstretched pinkie—across the sky. than the disks of other stars? One pos- Planetarium and a_ research scientist at
Entemivynnes Wena) loctestuthe sibility is that, billions of years ago, our Barnard College in New York City.

THE SKY IN FEBRUARY

By Joe Rao

Swift Mercury background, then moving above and down, dazzles the eye at magnitude
shines low along to the right of the planet as the weeks —2.6. Jupiter is at opposition to the
the east-south- go by. On the morning of the 27th a Sun on February 2; it rises at sunset,
eastern horizon waning crescent Moon appears on the stands highest in the south at mid-
about an hour southeastern horizon, well below and night, and sets at dawn. At dusk on
before sunrise in to the right of Venus. the 15th, Jupiter climbs the east-
the first week of northeastern sky alongside the Moon,
February. The Mars rises between 2:30 and 3:00 which is just one day from full.
planet, as bright A.M. local time throughout the
as magnitude —0.1, reaches its greatest month, and is well up in the south- Saturn, in the eastern part of the
western elongation from the Sun on southeast by dawn. Shining at magni- constellation Taurus, is high toward
the 4th, 25 degrees from the Sun’s tude 1.3, the planet passes 5 degrees the south in the early evening hours.
glare. For the rest of the month Mer- north of the first-magnitude star It sets in the west at around 4 A.M. at
cury falls back toward the Sun and, as Antares on February 1, as it moves the beginning of the month and
early as midmonth, is hopelessly lost through the constellation Ophi- about two hours earlier by month’s
in the morning twilight. uchus. Although Mars remains rather end. At magnitude —0.2, Saturn car-
inconspicuous, its luminosity contin- ries on its grand show for viewers
Brilliant Venus graces the dawn low in ually increases as the Earth’s smaller, with telescopes, as the great ring sys-
the southeast, though not quite so faster orbit brings the two planets tem continues to tilt steeply toward
brightly as it did in January. The planet closer. Mars reaches opposition in Earth. Late on the night of February
fades from magnitude —4.3 to —4.1 and August, when it will be just 11, the Moon appears to pass less than
sinks about 5 degrees lower into the 34,646,418 miles from the Earth, but 3 degrees to the north of Saturn.
sunrise. It has also entered its uninter- in mid-February it’s still 154 million
esting season for telescopic observers; miles away. Seen through a telescope, The Moon is new on February 1 at
it looks like a small, featureless, gib- it presents a minute disk. A fat cres- 5:48 A.M. It reaches first quarter on
bous Moon for the rest of the year. But cent Moon will be hovering well the 9th at 6:11 A.M., full on the 16th
Venus is still immensely brighter than below and a bit to the left of Mars on at 6:51 PM., and last quarter on the
any other point of light. Early risers in the morning of the 25th. 23rd at 11:46 A.M.
the first half of the month can enjoy
watching the “teapot” of Sagittarius Silvery white Jupiter, low in the east Unless otherwise noted, all times are given
gliding below Venus in the starry this month as the sky darkens at sun- in Eastern Standard Time.

ATURAL HI TORY February 2003

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REVIEW

The Curious Energy of the Void

Dark energy is making the universe bigger and bigger, faster and faster.

By Donald Goldsmith

n February 1998 new Alexander Friedmann soon

observations of explod- demonstrated that such a
ing stars in distant static universe must be bal-
galaxies stood the world of anced, as it were, on a knife
cosmology on its ear. The edge: the slightest tremor
expansion of the universe, would topple it over in one
far from slowing down, as direction or the other, into
earlier theories had im- a state of either expansion
plied it should, turned out or contraction. Another,
to be speeding up. Objects even more serious objec-
in the universe are moving tion to Einstein’s solution
apart from one another appeared in 1929, when
at progressively greater Edwin Hubble discovered
speeds. The new findings that the cosmos is indeed
foretell a future in which expanding. On distance
the cosmos becomes an scales as large as the ones
unimaginably vast, cold, between clusters of galax-
dead, and barren expanse ies, all objects are moving
of near-nothingness. away from all other objects
How did astronomers at speeds that increase in
reach such astartling con- proportion to the distances
clusion? between them. (Cosmolo-
In 1916 Einstein, shortly gists imagine the expand-
after completing the for- ing universe most simply as
mulation of his theory of the three-dimensional ana-
general relativity, discov- logue of the skin of a bal-
ered that the solutions to a loon. As the balloon ex-
key equation within the pands, every point on the
theory implied that the =
skin of the balloon moves
universe must always be ei- Andrea Way, The Holy Tree, 1997 away from all others, yet no
ther expanding or con- one point is motionless.)
tracting. Einstein’s pencil-and-paper Einstein soon pronounced the cosmo-
discovery took him by surprise, be- The Extravagant Universe: logical constant a dead letter, calling it
cause astronomers of the era had no Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, his “greatest blunder.”
evidence to suggest that the universe and the Accelerating Cosmos The results announced in 1998 ef-
either expands or contracts. To fix by Robert P. Kirshner fectively resurrected Einstein’s “blun-
what he then took to be an error, he Princeton University Press, 2002; der.” Those observations included
restated his key equation with an addi- $29.95 two kinds of measurements: first, the
tional, constant term—which quickly distances to certain kinds of super-
became known as the cosmological 1917, the universe could exist in a novas, or exploding stars, that as-
constant. If the constant had precisely state of perfect, static balance. tronomers discovered in distant galax-
the right value, Einstein wrote in But the Russian mathematician ies; and second, the speeds with

URAL HISTORY February 2003

which those galaxies are receding
from us. But when astronomers tried
to describe the relation between
those distances and speeds, they
found they had to restore Einstein’s
full equation from 1917, including a
Aerial view of the island
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he value that the 1998 observa-

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over several months’ time. But unlike leadership of one of the SN Ia ob- but it remains Satisfyingly in mind.
other supernovas, all type Ia super- server groups—into the larger cosmic The Extravagant Universe presents an
novas at their brightest generate nearly story. Along the way he pauses to de- intriguing history of how supernova
the same amount of energy per sec- scribe a host of astronomical phe- observers discovered the accelerating
ond. Thus they furnish astronomers nomena, from the life cycles of stars universe. But the full story of the ac-
with “standard candles,’ objects that to the effect of the cosmological con- celeration has another crucial aspect.
are almost identical in their intrinsic stant on the universe’s expansion. In 1999 and 2000, radio astronomers
luminosities. If observers can iden- Kirshner shows an impressively announced that entirely independent
tify two such supernovas in different deft touch with complex explana- observations—made by radio tele-
galaxies, measuring how bright they tions, and he doesn’t hesitate to scopes studying the faint glow from
appear at their peak outputs is enough bridge gaps in the reader’s knowledge the early universe known as the cos-
to calculate their relative distances. For with an apt metaphor. For example, mic microwave background (CMB)—
example, if one SN Ia appears four one of the constraints on the synthe- likewise imply a nonzero cosmologi-
times as bright as another, the fainter sis of every element heavier than cal constant. Hence they, too, imply
supernova must be twice as distant as helium is that no atomic nucleus only an accelerating universe.
the brighter one (by simple geometry, slightly heavier than helium 1s stable The new data are arguably even
the brightness decreases with the in nature. As a result, no natural more fundamental than the observa-
square of the distance). process can make the heavier ele- tions of distant supernovas. Not only
This method works only if as- ments by adding protons or neutrons do they reveal an accelerating uni-
tronomers can identify exploding one by one to a helium nucleus. How verse; they also record how the
stars as members of the SN la class then do stars succeed in doing so? amount of radiation generated by the
and can control for the fact that, even As Kirshner puts it, they “skip across universe 1n the earliest years of its ex-
within that class, some variation does that gap, as improbably as crossing a pansion varies in different directions
exist. Beginning in 1995, two com- stream by stepping on a salmon, to in space. By measuring those varia-
peting groups of astronomers have fuse three helium nuclei into a single tions astronomers can determine how
been obtaining brightness measure- carbon nucleus.” The image may strongly space is curved. The amount
ments of type Ia supernovas to ana- not exactly explain the phenomenon, of curvature depends on the sum of
lyze the expansion of the universe.
At first the findings of the two PHOTOGRAPHY & ART
groups contradicted each other, lead-
ing to suspicions within each group
that the data from the other group
were flawed. The cause of science
could hardly ask for more favorable
circumstances. There 1s probably no
better way to check the accuracy of
one group’s results than to pit that
group against another, particularly if
the second group suspects the first of
promulgating grievous errors. In this
case, happily, the results converged.
As improved techniques began to
eliminate the differences in the obser-
vational data, both groups concluded
that their measurements could be ex-
plained only if the universe has a
nonzero cosmological constant.

ber Kirshner, a supernova ex-

pert at Harvard, has written an
excellent insider’s account of the race
to discover the fate of the cosmos. In Dodo: A Brief History, by Errol Fuller (Universe Publishing, 2002; $22.50)
No extinct animal is less extinct as a cultural icon than the dodo. Missing from the Earth
The Extravagant Universe Kirshner since the late seventeenth century, the flightless bird from Mauritius lives on in historical
skillfully weaves the details of his ca- accounts, literary sources, and popular myths, many gathered together in Fuller's
reer—which brought him to the sumptuous book. They fill in admirably for the dearth of evidence about the real thing.

ATURAL HI TORY February 2003

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the CMB observations, yet those
data are highly relevant to the story
because they have sharply increased
astronomers’ confidence that the cos-
mic expansion is accelerating. A fur-
ther exploration of that story, how-
Michael Yudell and Rob DeSalle, Eutifors
THE GENOMIC
ever, would require another book.
The Extravagant Universe delivers the
promise of its subtitle extremely well,
REVOLUTION
UNVEILING THE UNITY OF LIFE
and should serve as the definitive in-
sider’s story of how Kirshner led his
motley group of astronomers to glory
in their search to find the fate of the “As we begin to explore the
universe. Nothing now remains for Age of the Genome, there is a
cosmology—except to explain why pressing need for public discourse
the universe has turned out the way it on this vitally important topic. It
has. That’s a big challenge for our simply cannot be for experts only.”
new century, but, given the remark-
—Ellen V. Futter, President,
able successes so far, it may prove to
American Museum of Natural History
be well within our grasp.
Rob DeSalle and
Michael Yudell, Editors
272 pages ® 6x9
A companion title to
Donald Goldsmith, an astronomer and science
writer, won the 1995 Annenberg prize, given Hardcover ¢ $27.95 The American Museum of Natural
by the American Astronomical Society for out- ISBN 0-309-07436-3 History’s Fall 2001 exhibit
standing contributions in popularizing astron-
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(Perseus Books). vf Joseph Henry Press ¢ an imprint of The National Academies Press
HA www.jhpress.org * 888 624-7651
nature.net UNIVERSE
ES
San Francisco has introduced a Web (Continued from page 29)

Scaling Down site (www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/

solar_system/index.html) that will
ment number 95 is americium; num-
ber 98 is californium; number 103 is
blast you off to a great start. You type lawrencium, for Ernest O. Lawrence,
By Robert Anderson in how big you want your model sun the American physicist who invented
to be, and the site does the rest, cal- the first particle accelerator.
t’s a pretty safe bet that you're culating the size of each planet and its
never going to travel more than a distance from the Sun. I typed in 9.5 ver-larger accelerators reach ever-
few thousand miles from home— inches for my model, the diameter of J_uhigher energies, probing the fast-
how could you, without becoming a basketball, and was surprised to receding boundary between what is
an astronaut and leaving the Earth it- known and what is unknown about
self? So how can you hope to get an the universe. The big bang theory of
intuitive grasp of the size of the solar cosmology asserts that the universe
system? Given the distances, mea- was once a very small and very hot
sured in millions and billions of miles, soup of energetic subatomic particles.
my guess is it’s nearly impossible. You With a super-duper particle smasher,
might as well try to conjure a visceral physicists might be able to simulate
sense of geologic time—surely a the earliest moments of the cosmos.
Richard E. Prince, The Wand’ring Planets, 2002
quixotic exercise, when you think In the 1980s, when U.S. physicists
about the seconds ticking by as life learn that the Earth would be the size proposed just such an accelerator
evolves from jellyfish to human. ofa peppercorn, eighty-five feet from (eventually dubbed the Supercon-
But still, you can try. And if you the Sun, and Pluto would be almost ducting Super Collider), Congress
have any interest in astronomy, the two-thirds of a mile away. The Web was ready to fund it. Plans were
wow factor is well worth the effort of site also calculates such things as the drawn up. Construction began. A cir-
thinking about how the solar system distance to Alpha Centauri—after the cular tunnel fifty-four miles around
would scale down to a more manage- Sun, the nearest bright star. On my was dug in Texas. Physicists were
able size. Now the Exploratorium in chosen scale its distance would be eager to peer across the next cosmic
4,351 miles. Much beyond that, frontier. But in 1993, when cost over-

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AT THE MUSEUM
AMERICAN MUSEUM 6 NATURAL HISTORY ro)

AstroBulletin Showcases Cutting-Edge

Research at the South Pole
©
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crowave Background: The New Cos-

mology, takes viewers to this forbidding
place and shows how scientists are un-
raveling the story of the universe.
Produced as part of the Rose Cen-
ter’s AstroBulletin program, Cosmic
Microwave Background: The New Cos-
mology will be screened at the Mu-
seum during regular Museum hours
through June 2003 in the Black Hole
or decades, cosmology, the study of Vivian Trakinski and Jason Lelchuk cel- Theater of the Frederick Phineas &
the origin and evolution of the uni- ebrate their arrival at the South Pole, Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth
which is designated by the marker in the
verse, garnered little support within the and Space’s Dorothy and Lewis B.
foreground.
scientific community because few be- Cullman Hall of the Universe. More in-
lieved there was enough direct evi- formation about the CMB will be fea-
dence to support such inquiry. Today, than it is now, supporting the notion of a tured on AstroBulletin kiosks in the
however, it is generally agreed among Big Bang-type origin. Cullman Hall of the Universe.
both astronomers and physicists that Scientists from the University of The AstroBulletin employs high-
the universe was created some 10 to Chicago’s Center for Astrophysical definition video, computer anima-
20 billion years ago in an explosion Research in Antarctica (CARA) are tions, and images from satellites, ob-
dubbed the “Big Bang.” studying the CMB at the Amundsen- servatories, NASA, and the Hubble
But how can we know about an event Scott South Pole Station. Taking ad- Space Telescope to dramatize cosmic
that took place so long ago? The cos- vantage of Antarctica’s long winters, events, explain astronomical con-
mic microwave background (CMB)— dry conditions, and endless sky, they cepts, and report recent discoveries
called a “background” because it is de- are making what are arguably the in the field of astrophysics. Cosmic
tectable from every direction across the most detailed measurements ever of Microwave Background: The New
sky—is a whisper of microwave radia- the CMB, thereby building a body of Cosmology and other elements of the
tion, a vast curtain of energy. By identi- data that will increase our under- AstroBulletin are made available to
fying and observing the CMB, scientists standing of the origin and evolution of museums, science centers, planetari-
are able to draw conclusions about the the universe. ums, and other public spaces nation-
distant history of our universe, as far In December 2001, Vivian Trakinski wide and around the world.
back as its creation. The pervasiveness and Jason Lelchuk, members of the
The AstroBulletin is generously supported by
and uniformity of the radiation through- Museum’s Science Bulletins produc-
Toyota Motor North America, Inc. Significant
out the universe suggests that it re- tion team, journeyed to the South Pole educational and programming support is pro-
mains from a time when the universe to visit the scientific team working vided by the National Aeronautics and Space
was significantly hotter and denser there. Their short film, Cosmic Mi- Administration (NASA).

THE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HisTORY BY THE AMERICAN Museum OF NATURAL HISTORY.
 Sa

by an early human species to colonize Europe. And the laier

material is closely related to the Neanderthals who were a
species that lost out when Homo sapiens finally entered Eu-
rope. So here are two separate attempts to be a European,
as it were.

AN INTERVIEW Q: You mentioned the Sima de los Huesos, or Pit of the

Bones. Why is this site so unusual and intriguing?
with lan Tattersall
Human fossils are not that common and this particular
Co-curator of site is the most astonishing concentration of human fossils
The First Europeans: that has been found anywhere in the world.
Treasures from Hellish conditions, by the way. Absolutely hellish, horri-
the Hills of Atapuerca ble, cramped, at the bottom of this shaft in the ground. You
have to walk 700 yards into a cave through dark passages
lan Tattersall is Curator in the Division of Anthropology and in the pitch dark and over a rough floor. And then you have
author of many books on human evolution including, most to descend 50 feet vertically down a shaft in the dark ’til you
recently, The Monkey in the Mirror: Essays on the Science of come to a slope that leads down even further into the cav-
What Makes Us Human. : ity where these bones collected.

Q: What is the significance of this exhibition? Q: What do these hominids teach us about ourselves or
This is the first time outside Spain that this extraordinary about what it means to be human?
material that documents the very earliest attempt by human What it mainly teaches us is what a special phenomenon
beings to occupy Europe has been on display. Homo sapiens is. There’s something qualitatively different
There are two sites at Atapuerca. One is literally a hole in about Homo sapiens compared to any previous hominid
the ground that’s filled with human bones that are thought to species. | think it’s important to understand that we weren’t
be about 400,000 years old. This is the Sima de los Huesos gradually burnished by evolution to do what we do superbly
site, or the Pit of the Bones. well. We are more like an accidental product that happens
There is another site, only half a mile away, called Gran to have all these new cognitive capacities and we're still ex-
Dolina [where] an enormous sequence of archaeological ploring the ways in which they can be used.
deposits was exposed. Low down in that sequence were
found human bones that are about 800,000 years old, Q: You use both the terms "humans" and "hominids." What's
twice as old as the other hominids at the Sima. It’s just the distinction?
pure coincidence that these two extraordinary sites are so There is no universally agreed definition for what "human"
close to each other. means. The word was invented before people knew any-
thing about the apes, let alone before anybody had any con-
Q: How does this material fit in with the human fossil record? cept that we had close extinct relatives. So "human" is a
We tend to think of human evolution as having been a very elusive term. And we do all tend to use ita little
kind of a single-minded slog from primitiveness to perfec- loosely—I certainly tend to use it rather loosely. | don’t think
tion. And it really was not like that at all. It was instead a that it matters, just as long as we realize that what is human
matter of new species going out into the environment and is contextual, is something that we sort of intuitively recog-
competing with other life forms, and succeeding or failing nize rather than rigorously define. In the strictest sense
and going extinct. none of the Atapuerca people were human; but there is
This material that we’ll have on display is some of something that we can recognize as humanity in all of them.
the best evi-
dence that we <=
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THE FIRST EUROPEANS: BTee First Europeans will reveal the mys-
iS]
have for this =Ee
teries of ancient humans in western Eu-
o
wo Treasures from the Hills
pattern in human > rope through exquisitely preserved hominid
=Ss
of Atapuerca
evolution. | think
a
a
a
and animal fossils—some up to one million
aoS
Through April 13, 2003 years old—found in the hills of Atapuerca in
that the earliest
the Spanish region of Castilla y Leon. This
material we’re
remarkable exhibition provides Americans their first-ever glimpse of these
going to have "first Europeans," and explores what their existence teaches us about
on display [from what it means to be human today.
Gran Dolina] was
Co-organized by the American Museum of Natural History and Junta de
the product of Castilla y Leon
a failed attempt
 MUSEUM EVENTS

EXHIBITIONS > WORKSHOP

Einstein Hands-On Einstein
Through August 10, 2003 Saturday, 2/8
Gallery 4, fourth floor 11:30 a.m.—1:00 p.m. (adults)
This exhibition profiles this extra- 2:00-3:30 p.m. (teens, ages 14-17)
ordinary scientific genius, whose Explore the basic physical and
achievements were so substantial mathematical properties of gravity
and groundbreaking that his name and space-time.
is virtually synonymous with science
in the public mind. EINSTEIN FOR EVERYONE
Organized by the American Museum of The Sun and Its Energy
Natural History, New York; The Hebrew Uni- Saturday, 2/1, or Sunday, 2/23
versity of Jerusalem; and the Skirball Cultural 1:30-3:00 p.m.
Center, Los Angeles. Einstein is made pos- Learn about the Sun and how much
sible through the generous support of Jack
we depend on it. (Ages 7—9)
and Susan Rudin and the Skirball Founda-
tion, and of the Corporate Tour Sponsor,
TIAA-CREF. An Expedition into Space-Time
Under Antarctic Ice Sunday, 2/2, 10:30 a.m.—12:00 noon
The Butterfly Conservatory: Through March 2, 2003 Observe a cosmic ray, play with a
Tropical Butterflies Alive in Winter Spectacular large-format photographs laser, and learn about black holes.
Through May 26, 2003 by one of the world’s leading under- (Ages 7-9)
The butterflies are back! This popular water photographers, Norbert Wu.
exhibition includes more than 500 live, This exhibition is made possible by the Adventures in Light!
free-flying tropical butterflies in an generosity of the Arthur Ross Foundation. Sunday, 2/2, or Saturday, 2/22
enclosed tropical habitat where Developed by Norbert Wu Productions and 1:30-3:00 p.m.
visitors can mingle with them. produced by the Pacific Grove Museum of You’re never too young to start play-
Natural History.
The Butterfly Conservatory is made ing with light! (Ages 4-6, each child
possible through the generous support of PERFORMANCES with one adult)
Bernard and Anne Spitzer and Con Edison. Einstein and Love
<=
Friday, 2/14, 7:30-9:00 p.m. CHILDREN’S
Join the "Physics Chanteuse" for a ASTRONOMY PROGRAMS
=z
=
=
7)
=
Gx Valentine’s Day show that pays trib- Journey through the Solar System
x
=
oe ute to the life and loves of Einstein Three Wednesdays, 2/5—19
while exploring physics and more. 4:15-5:45 p.m. (Ages 10-13)

Cosmic Cabaret Space Explorers

Sunday, 2/16, 2:00-3:00 p.m. Telescope Star Party
This vaudeville act for a family Tuesday, 2/11, 4:30-5:45 p.m.
audience weaves music and magic (Ages 12 and up)
with the latest research and
theories in physics.
Remains of a Rainbow: Rare Plants
and Animals of Hawaii
Through March 2, 2003
| A Taste of Th ings to Come!
Color and black-and-white pho-
|To whet your appetite for the exhibition Chocolate, opening at the Museum on
tographs of Hawaii’s endangered
| June 14, the Museum Shop introduces a full selection of Godiva chocolates, just
species.
| in time for Valentine’s Day. Visit the Main Shop and also pick up a copy of the ex-
Organized by Umbrage Editions, New York, | hibition’s delicious companion book, Chocolate: The Nature of Indulgence.
in association with Environmental Defense.

THE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HISTORY BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
GLOBAL WEEKENDS in-depth exploration of the planets,
Black History Month stars, galaxies, and the universe.
Movement ’63: The Pinnacle of the
Civil Rights Struggle in America SPACE SHOWS
Saturday, 2/1-22, 1:00-5:00 p.m. The Search for Life: Are We Alone?
Films, discussions, and performances Narrated by Harrison Ford. Every half
Now Starry Nights: Fridays under
of spoken word, poetry, dance, and hour Sunday-Thursday and Saturday,
the Sphere comes right into your
music honor this explosive period in 10:30 a.m.—4:30 p.m.; Friday, 10:30
home ina live broadcast by
American history. a.m.—7:30 p.m.
WBGO, Jazz 88.3 FM.
HAYDEN PLANETARIUM
Tune in Friday, February 7,
PROGRAMS
at 5:30 p.m. for the best in world-
The Train Station at the End
class jazz, live from the Rose
of the Universe
Center for Earth and Space.
Sunday, 2/9, 12:00-3:00 p.m.
Grand Central Terminal, with its
Media Sponsorship for
breathtaking starry ceiling, will serve
Starry Nights is provided by
as the backdrop for this discussion of
CenterCare Health Plan.
selected concepts in astronomy. Wear
comfortable walking shoes.

Become a Member
Look Up!
of the American Museum
Saturday and Sunday, 10:15 a.m.
of Natural History
(Recommended for children ages 6
and under) As a Museum Member you will be
among the first to embark on new
LARGE-FORMAT FILMS journeys to explore the natural
In the Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak world and the cultures of humanity.
IMAX® Theater
Pulse: a STOMP Odyssey A few of the many valuable bene-
Take a rhythmic voyage of discovery fits you will enjoy as a Member in-
around the world of percussion. clude:

Kilimanjaro: To the Roof of Africa e Unlimited free general

Grand Central Terminal
Follow a team of hikers up Africa’s admission to the Museum
highest mountain. and special exhibitions, and
Celestial Highlights discounts on the Space Show
Tuesday, 2/25, 6:30-7:30 p.m. INFORMATION and IMAX® films
This monthly tour of the heavens Call 212-769-5100, or visit e Discounts in the Museum
offers a view of the constantly www.amnh.org. Shop, restaurants, and on
changing night sky. tickets to programs
TICKETS AND REGISTRATION e Free subscription to Natural
Courses Call 212-769-5200, Monday-Friday, History magazine and to
Using a Telescope 8:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m., and Saturday, Rotunda, our newsletter
Four Mondays, 2/3-3/3, 6:30-8:30 p.m. 10:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m., or visit e Invitations to Members-only
This course covers the basic function- www.amnh.org. A service charge special events, parties, and
ing of telescopes as well as locating may apply. exhibition previews
celestial objects and using charts and
other aids for observation. All programs are subject to change. For further information about all
levels of Membership or to enroll,
The Science of the Rose Center AMNH eNotes delivers the latest call the Membership Office at (212)
Five Tuesdays, 2/4—3/4, 6:30-8:30 p.m. information on Museum programs 769-5606 or visit www.amnh.org.
Join five of the scientists who devel- and events to you via email. Visit
oped the Rose Center’s content on an www.amnh.org to sign up today!
 ENDPAPER
OETA
ROS

Homing Instinct
By Jeff Fair

y the time | hired on to survey the common from the top ofa tall pine nearby. I paddled over to
loon population of northern New Hamp- investigate. The tree became very quiet. After a
shire, back in 1978, bald eagles were long few minutes, a human form descended the tree
gone as a nesting species. Shot as predators, trapped trunk. I observed that she’ was none too happy at
for the taxidermy trade, left homeless as, one by one, being discovered.
their ancient nesting trees were sawed out from Somewhat reluctantly she explained that a small
under them, and then poisoned inadvertently to the team from the Audubon Society was constructing
brink of extermination by insecticide, our national a nest replica to entice the new eagle pair. The tree
symbol had little reason to stick around. The last pair seemed a safer site for a new eagle nest than the
of bald eagles in New Hampshire had nested near exposed top of a tree on the lakeside, where the
the top ofa huge old white pine tree near the west- team feared duck hunters might shoot the eagles,
ern shore of Lake Umbagog. They laid their final or (far more likely, I thought) bird-watchers might
clutch of eggs in 1949, then disappeared. love them to distraction. Regardless, the initiative
Years passed. Sometime in the late 1960s that last under way above us was an act of wildlife manage-
eagle nest, long-empty and derelict, tumbled out of ment, highly classified, and I was sworn to secrecy.
its tree and crashed to the ground.
More years passed. Occasionally an eagle ap- eS did find the loon nest, but late that summer
peared near Lake Umbagog. Observations became we saw the eagles carrying sticks, and we knew
more frequent. By 1981 I was spotting bald eagles something was happening. By the following spring
during many of my surveys around the lakeshore, they had finished installing a huge and ungainly pile
their white heads and tails glowing like spotlights of branches near the top of a tall white pine—not
against the dark alder and fir. Sometimes one the tree that had been chosen for them, but the very
would perch in the old “eagle tree.” same tree where the last active eagle nesters had
In 1987 a raptor biologist made their home in 1949.
working on Lake Umbagog How did a young eagle,
observed a bald eagle with a hatched a continent away and
yellow tag in its wing. The tag belonging to a species that had
identified the bird as a male ab- not nested in these parts in
ducted in 1984 from a nest in four decades, come to choose
Alaska and released in New the eagle tree? We may never
York State as part of the east- know the answer. It is enough
ern recovery effort. He seemed for now to observe, in a time
quite willing to resettle here: of population modeling and
by 1988 he was seen regularly species management, that these
in the company of an adult fe- patterns of resilience, of hope
male. That was the summer I itself, are carried within the
heard voices from a tree. individual: a young eagle, an
I was in my canoe near the ancient pine, perhaps even a
shoreline ofa quiet backwater, dutiful field biologist, kneeling
more than a mile from the in his canoe.
lake and the eagle tree, search-
ing for the nest of a pair of Jeff Fair has visited New Hampshire’s
loons I had been tracking all Lake Umbagog every year since 1978
summer. Suddenly I heard the Three-week-old eagle chicks in the “eagle tree” to count loons andlisten for voices in
English language issuing forth nest on Lake Umbagog the trees.

RAL HISTORY February 2003

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 MARCH 2003 ViOREUNMiEma tate NUMBER2

FEATURES

60 ON THE SCENT
The trail of a giant
water bug leads from
Arizona to Vietnam.
BY ROBERT L. SMITH

63 BUG JUICE
BY LE ANH TU PACKARD

50 VIETNAM'S SECRET LIFE

Naturalists are finding that the key
to the country’s extraordinary
biodiversity may lie deep in the past.
BY ELEANOR J. STERLING,
MARTHA M. HURLEY, AND RAOUL H. BAIN

COVER
Vietnamese fishing raft
STORY BEGINS
ON PAGE 50

PHOTOGRAPH BY
ROBERT VAN DER HILST

PICTURE CREDITS: Page 14 64 THE GOLDEN NUMBER

Visit our Web site at Nature seems to have a sense of proportion.
www.naturalhistorymag.com BY MARIO LIVIO
DEPARTMENTS

UP FRONT
This Stop Is Vietnam
10 THE NATURAL MOMENT
Pretty Poison
PHOTOGRAPH BY
MARK MOFFETT

12 LETTERS

14 CONTRIBUTORS

16 SAMPLINGS
STEPHAN REEBS

32 UNIVERSE
Stick-in-the-Mud Science
NEIL pEGRASSE TYSON

38 BIOMECHANICS
Open Wide (and Fast)
ADAM SUMMERS

70 THIS LAND
My Life as a Forest Creature
NGUYEN THI DAO

72 OUT THERE
Let’s Make a Galaxy
CHARLES LIU

73 THE SKY IN MARCH

JOE RAO

75 REVIEW
Table Talk
HANS CHRISTIAN VON BAEYER

78 BOOKSHELF
LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL

82 nature.net
Les Grands Sites
ROBERT ANDERSON

84 AT THE MUSEUM

88 ENDPAPER
Lost and Found
BETH A. MIDDLETON
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 UP FRONT

This Stop Is Vietnam

sn't it odd, really, that so much of what we outsiders know about
Vietnam is colored by the memory of the war? As someone who PETER BROWN Editor-in-Chief

came of age in the late 1960s, I still find it hard to put aside the terrible Mary Beth Aberlin Elizabeth Meryman
Managing Editor Art Director
associations some of the names conjure: Mekong River, Gulf of Tonkin,
Ho Chi Minh trail (soon to be a major superhighway), even the de- Board of Editors
T. J. Kelleher, Avis Lang, Vittorio Maestro
scription “mountains and jungles of Vietnam.” Yet behind those names
Michel DeMatteis Associate Managing Editor
from ten thousand wartime dispatches 1s a land that is home to an in-
credible diversity of life-forms, including literally hundreds of species Thomas Rosinski Associate Art Director

new to science that were hidden by decades of conflict. Lynette Johnson Editorial Coordinator

Vietnam lies at the center ofa tectonic traffic jam. Mountains and Erin M. Espelie Special Projects Editor
rivers arose from collisions of three tectonic plates, creating an immense Richard Milner Contributing Editor
variety of ecosystems in the country as well as some formidable barriers Graciela Flores, Marisa Macari Interns
to species migration. Swings of climate—hot and cold, wet and dry—
buffeted the landscape. During ice ages long ago, sea levels plunged and
the continental shelf off the shores of Vietnam turned into dry land. Mark A, FURLONG Publisher
Some species roamed across the newly exposed land. Then, when the Gale Page Consumer Marketing Director
climate warmed and sea levels rose again, populations became trapped Maria Volpe Promotion Director
and isolated on newly created islands. Other species, which once Edgar L. Harrison National Advertising Manager
ranged freely across cool valleys, were chased up to cooler mountains as Sonia W. Paratore Senior Account Manager
the lowland climate began to warm; eventually they became isolated by Donna M. Lemmon Production Manager
altitude instead of by seawater. With time, the isolated populations Michael Shectman Fulfillment Manager
evolved and diverged, then remixed when the barriers to their spread Tova Heiney Business Administrator
eventually receded once more.
Advertising Sales Representatives
With this issue the editors of Natural History invite you back to Vietnam, New York—Metrocorp Marketing, 212-972-1157,
a country that has become both a hot tourist destination and an ecologist’s Duke International Media, 212-598-4820
Detroit—John Kennedy & Assoc., 313-886-4399
dream. Jom Nguyen Thi Dao as she recalls running as a child through the Minneapolis—Rickert Media, Inc., 612-920-0080
forests of Cuc Phuong National Park, Vietnam’s oldest national park (see West Coast—Auerbach Media, 818-716-9613,
“My Life as a Forest Creature,’ page 70). Marvel at photographer Mark Parris & Co., 415-641-5767
‘Toronto—American Publishers Representatives Ltd., 416-363-1388
Moffett’s glorious image of a caterpillar native to the rainforests of Vietnam Atlanta and Miami—Rickles and Co., 770-664-4567
(see “Pretty Poison,’ page 10). Enjoy the reminiscences of Le Anh Tu National Direct Response—Smyth Media Group, 646-638-4985
Packard, as she recalls the aromatic dishes her grandmother flavored with
the sublime extract of the ca cuong, the water bug that for the Vietnamese 1s
practically a symbol of the highest culinary art (see “Bug Juice,” page 63).
Finally, take a field trip with Eleanor J. Sterling, Martha M. Hurley, and
Raoul H. Bain (see “Vietnam’s Secret Life,” page 50) to discover how the NATURAL HiIsTORY MAGAZINE, INC.
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vee Reiser
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nee
 THE NATURAL MOMENT DETERS
Sw eC
~ See preceding pages
All in the Family? Neanderthal [see illustration modern humans were two
In his search for differences below]. | wonder how morphologically different
between Neanderthals and many men as good look- types. Their skeletal differ-
modern humans, Juan Luis ing as this fellow were entiation was substantially
Arsuaga [““Requiem for a greater than that of closely
Heavyweight,’ 12/02— related present-day species
o be seen or not to be 1/03] may have missed the such as lions and tigers,
1a Most slug cater- importance of similarities. which can interbreed in
pillars survive their vul- He thinks no Neanderthal captivity but don’t usually
nerable youth by making a genes have reached us, but mix in nature. But even
visual statement. Orange- why should we even substantial morphological
tinted skin, black body rings, assume genes specific to differences between two
and piercing yellow eyespots Neanderthals existed? straphanging this morning populations do not neces-
mark the Vietnamese larva Even though today we on the A train. sarily imply the populations
of Setora fletcheri pictured can readily distinguish, Milford H. Wolpoff are genetically isolated (un-
here. But this brazen display say, Europeans from University of Michigan able to interbreed).
fades away with adolescence. Aboriginal Australians, Ann Arbor, Michigan Neanderthals evolved
First the flashy spikes col- their distinctive character- in Europe from their
lapse. Then a spherical co- istics do not reflect unique In my view, modern hu- Middle Pleistocene ances-
coon is spun. The brown, genes. Different human mans evolved in situ from tors. Modern humans ap-
mature moth finally emerges groups simply have differ- Neanderthals in Europe, as pear later in the European
with a more conservative ent proportions of certain they did from robust forms fossil record; either they
strategy: to blend in. genetic variations (such as elsewhere. Furthermore, evolved locally from the
Not all of the slug cater- blood types A, B, AB, or the two manifestations of Neanderthals (as Mr.
pillar’s decoration is just for O). So some other kind of human form could never Brace states), or they came
show. At any sign of danger, evidence of Neanderthal have encountered each from elsewhere and re-
each cluster of spines blooms ancestry is needed. other, because only one placed the Neanderthal
into a bristly sphere. Glands Studying Pleistocene existed at any given time. “aborigines.” I think the
at the base of the spines pro- Europeans, my colleagues Abundant archaeologi- second scenario 1s the
duce venom rich in hista- and I found a long history cal research has shown more likely. Nevertheless,
mines—liquid peril for any of gene flow between var- that the in-situ refinement Neanderthals and modern
would-be attacker. ious populations, includ- of late Mousterian tools humans could have inter-
Photographer Mark Mof- ing Neanderthals. And in gave rise to the toolmak- bred locally on a small
fett stealthily approached this a study of anatomical sim- ing traditions of the sub- scale, and Neanderthals
S. fletcheri in Tam Dao Na- ilarities, we could not dis- sequent Upper Paleolithic. could thereby have con-
tional Park, north of Hanoi, miss the possibility that The late so-called tributed to the gene pool
where the mountains rise half the ancestors of early Neanderthals who made of the earliest modern
from the fertile Red River modern Europeans were those tools were almost human population in
Delta as “islands in a sea of Neanderthals. Of course, indistinguishable from the Europe. If the gene con-
clouds.” The description evolution has continued early ““moderns’”—the tribution was small,
well suits the numerous and to modify genes and Cro-Magnons—who suc- though, those rare
distinct niches that isolate anatomy, and there are no ceeded them. Moreover, Neanderthal genes would
the residents of Tam Dao, Neanderthals left. But Mr. Cro-Magnon teeth and probably have disappeared
making it a kind of un- Arsuaga might indeed be degrees of robustness are in a few millennia, long
tapped, continental Galapa- carrying that drop of exact equivalents of late before the present—unless
gos, teeming with exotic Neanderthal blood. Neanderthal teeth and de- the Neanderthal genes
organisms. Trekking at twi- Would a Neanderthal grees of robustness. gave their bearers greater
light in the park, Moffett pass unrecognized on a C. Loring Brace fitness. If the morphologi-
spotted this larva shining on New York subway? Museum ofAnthropology cal differences between
the path. Even in the dark, Probably. The artist Karen University of Michigan Neanderthals and con-
he notes, it glowed “like Harvey built up muscle Ann Arbor, Michigan temporary humans re-
a marine creature’—much and flesh around a cast of sulted from different fre-
too extravagant to resist. the skull of the 70,000- JUAN Luis ARSUAGA quencies of the same
—Erin Espelie year-old La Ferrassie REPLIES: Neanderthals and genes, as Mr. Wolpoff

12 NATURAL HI STORY March 2003

states, those unique thing in the observable uni- that Earth’s centrality in the NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
Neanderthal gene combi- verse began expanding from Ptolemaic system implied REPLIES: Mr. Danielson
nations have been lost. the same point, wherever our specialness. On the implies that I and my
But my two colleagues one happens to be is, for all contrary, for medieval writ- 6,000 astrophysicist col-
and I agree on something practical purposes, the cen- ers “central” implied “low,” leagues around the world
quite important: Nean- ter of everything. What to and the very center was the are all deluded. Perhaps so.
derthals had a human us appears to be a faint very lowest. That’s why But not without good
mind. They had self- proto-galaxy near the edge Dante placed Hell dead cause. If the center of the
consciousness and lan- of the universe is, to its in- center in his universe. universe were indeed a
guage, engaged in rituals, habitants, the center of That’s why Pico said we cosmic slag heap and not a
made long-term plans. their own expanding and Earth-dwellers inhabit “the special place, why did
Some investigators divide uniformly distributed uni- excrementary and filthy everybody get so upset
all past and present beings verse. It 1s as correct for parts of the lower world.” when they learned it
into just two categories: each of us to say “I am at Copernicus’s removal of might not be occupied by
they (creatures without a the center of everything” as the Earth from that cosmic Earth? Why was Coper-
mind) and we (the pre- it is to say there is no cen- pit was not a demotion but a nicus afraid to publish his
sent-day human species). I ter. One is entitled to feel as promotion. Galileo thus ex- heliocentric system? Why
say Neanderthals were on important or as humbled as ulted that, in the new cos- was Galileo subjected to
our side of the line. one’s temperament dictates. mology, Earth was no longer the Holy Inquisition? The
Robin C. Chapman “the sump where the uni- psychology of human
Central Questions Virginia Beach, Virginia verse’s filth and ephemera behavior argues differently
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s collect” but was now free to from the phantasmagoria
“Delusions of Centrality” I take exception to Neil join “the dance of the stars.” of Dante and Pico.
[12/02—1/03] comes close Tyson’s version of the his- Dennis Danielson
to saying what I would put tory of science. He accepts University of British Columbia Natural History’ e-mail
this way: Because every- the pandemic presumption Vancouver, Canada address is nhmag@amnh.org.

: Sic there are laws

children and comm

_ law firm that works

-natural resource orl

EARTHJUSTICE
y Because the earth needs agood lawyer eee ee ahi screaming, tag- layir 1gON n your own backyard.
‘ ig
ea
CONTRIBUTORS

Mark Moffett (“The Natural Moment,’ page 10) made his first foray into tropical rainforest research at
the age of seventeen, catching snakes for a Costa Rican expedition led by naturalist Max Nickerson. Mof-
fett continued to explore rainforest habitats as a graduate student at Harvard, where he studied under the
evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson. While doing his dissertation in biology, Moffett traveled for more
than two years in Asia, teaching himself photography in his spare time. He has won international awards
for his pictures, some of which were exhibited in twenty-five countries as part of the 1992 World Press
Photo exhibition. He photographed the brilliantly colored slug caterpillar in northern Vietnam.

Conservation biologist Eleanor J. Sterling (far left) (“Vietnam’s

Secret Life,’ page 50) is the director of the Center for Biodiver-
sity and Conservation (CBC) at the American Museum of Nat-
ural History in New York City. She has spent the past fifteen
years engaged in field research, studying threats to biodiversity.
Coauthor Martha M. Hurley (center left) is a postdoctoral re-
search fellow at CBC. She is part of the team analyzing data
from the CBC’s biotic survey in Vietnam, under way since the
ar late 1990s. Together with Sterling and their colleague Minh
Duc Le, Hurley is also ae of a forthcoming book that will highlight Vietnam’s remarkable biodiversity. Coauthor
Raoul H. Bain is a herpetologist who earned an M.Sc. in zoology from the University of Toronto, with a focus on the
diversity of Southeast Asian amphibians. He began doing scientific fieldwork in British Columbia as a technician in pa-
leontology and has since worked in Alberta, Tennessee, and the Bolivian Andes. Bain has made four field trips to Viet-
nam since 1995. The publication of Sterling, Hurley, and Bain’s article coincides with the exhibition “Vietnam: Jour-
neys of Body, Mind, and Spirit,’ which will open at the American Museum of Natural History on March 15.

Robert L. Smith (“On the Scent,” page 60) has been sorting out the paternal behavior of water bugs for more than two
decades. When he read Le Anh Tu Packard’s reminiscences of the aromatic condiment derived from one water One spe-
cies, Lethocerus indicus (“Bug Juice,’ page 63), he was charmed and also eager to supply
the scientific side of the story. Smith is an associate professor of entomology at the
University of Arizona in Tucson. He recently collaborated with the zoologist Ara
Kaitala to tell Natural History readers about another critter, “The Bug That Lays the
Golden Eggs” (March 2002). Packard was born in Thailand of ethnic Vietnamese par-
ents, and raised mainly in Bangkok, Yangon (Rangoon), and New York City, but as a
child she also lived for more than halfa year in Vietnam. She now appreciates many
cuisines, but the flavors she grew up with still call to her. An economist based in Penn-
sylvania, Packard often returns to Vietnam on missions for the United Nations and the World Bank. She is a technical
advisor to Vietnam’s finance ministry and an academic advisor to a nonprofit Vietnamese research organization.

An art enthusiast as well as an astrophysicist—and thus well versed in mathematics—Mario Livio (“The
Golden Number,” page 64) recently combined his passions to delve into the mysteries of a number that
pops up repeatedly in both nature and human creativity. The result was his recent book, The Golden
Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World’s Most Astonishing Number (Broadway Books, 2002). Born in Romania,
Livio holds a doctorate in theoretical astrophysics from Tel Aviv University and is now head of the sci-
ence division at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland—the organization respon-
sible for the scientific program of the Hubble Space Telescope. Livio is also the author of The Accelerating
Universe: Infinite Expansion, the Cosmological Constant, and the Beauty of the Cosmos (John Wiley & Sons, 2000).

|PICTURE CREDITS Cover: ©Robert van der Hilst/CORBIS; pp. 10-11, 12 (left): OMark Moffett/Minden Pictures; p. 12 (right): University of Michigan Photoservices;
|p. 16 (top): € as Dalton/Photo Researchers, Inc.; (bottom): ©Gary Byerly; p. 18 (top): ©Alex Dudley; (bottom): Giansanti Gianni/CORBIS SYGMA,; p. 32: cour-
|tesy Rosenberg+ Kaufman Fine Art/NYC, edition of 20; p. 36: ©2001—)2 Steve Irvine; p. 50: Raoul Bain, Center for Biodiversity & Conservation (CBC), American
| Museum of Natural History; p. 51: ©Rod Williams/Nature Picture Library; pp. 52 (middle & bottom) & 54 (bottom): ©Kevin Frey (CBC); p. 52 (top): Paul Sweet (CBC);
| pp. 53 & 55: maps by PatriciaJ.Wynne; pp. 54 (top), 59, & 71 (top): ©Tilo Nadler, Endangered Primate Rescue Center, Cuc Phuong National Park; p. 55 (top): OMark
|Moffett; p. 58: Daniel Harder, Arboretum at UCSC; pp. 60 & 63: courtesy Caroline Wischmann; pp. 61-62: courtesy Robert L. Smith; pp. 64-65: courtesy the artist &
| Robert Klein Gallery, Boston; p. 66: NASA & Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); p. 67: © Bill Varie/CORBIS; p. 69: ©1990 Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth,
| Texas, bequest of the artist, nitrate negative P1988.18.59; p. 70: ©Jeffrey Aaronson/Network Aspen: p. 71 (bottom): courtesy Sheila Rosenthal; map by Joe LeMonnier;
| p. 72: NASA & Michael Corbin (CSC/STScI); p. 74: Fanny Brennan, Galaxy, 1997, Estate of Fanny Brennan, courtesy Salander O’Reilly Galleries, NY; p. 75: courtesy
| the artist; p. 78:collection John Frederick Walker; pp. 80 & 82: Mary Evans Picture Library; p. 88: courtesy The Modern Primitive Gallery, Atlanta.

NATURAL HISTORY March 2003

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SAMPLINGS By Stephan Reebs

DRINKING IN THE DARK Far from city

lights, with only the Moon and stars to
guide them, people see in shades of gray.
That’s because our eyes have just two kinds
of photoreceptors—rods and cones—and
the rods, the only receptors that work well
in dim light, do not detect color. Until re-
cently, biologists had assumed that all ani-
mals shared the same visual limitation. But
the animal world has a knack for coming up
with species whose sensory powers surpass
our own. This time, a humble nocturnal
moth is our superior.
The elephant hawkmoth (Deilephila
elpenor) locates flowers in the dark of night
and feeds on their nectar. When the moth’s Elephant hawkmoth (actual size), foraging by color
cousins, the butterflies, seek nectar in the
daytime, they rely on color to distinguish late dusk, Kelber and her colleagues trained various shades of gray. Almost unfailingly the
and remember flowers particularly rich in sixteen hawkmoths to find the sugar solu- moths chose—that is, touched first—the
nectar. Almut Kelber, Anna Balkenius, and tion placed in the centers of artificial flow- color to which they had been trained. By
Eric J. Warrant, all biologists at Lund Uni- ers. Some hawkmoths were trained to seek contrast, six people asked to discriminate
versity in Sweden, thought that having the blue flowers, others the yellow ones. Then among the disks under the same low light
color vision would be just as useful for the the biologists dimmed the room to the level failed miserably. Once again, it seems, we are
nocturnal hawkmoth. So they set out to of starlight and presented the moths with a bested—though we do have the brains to
prove for the first time ever that at least display of variously colored circles (minus the prove this fact to ourselves. (“Scotopic
one animal can perceive color at night. sugar solution). One circle was the animal's colour vision in nocturnal hawkmoths,” Na-
Under limited light, similar to that of training hue (blue or yellow); the rest were ture 419:922-25, October 31, 2002)

AFTERMATH OF A CATACLYSM Most scientists agree that by the collision—that sloshed back and forth across the Earth.
| about 65 million years ago a catastrophic meteor impact wiped Some of the spherule beds are as much as a foot thick, so the
| out the dinosaurs. That collision, however, is dwarfed by events impacts that created them must have been enormous. By com-
| that took place billions of years earlier, when the Earth was only parison, the impact layer left by the meteor that did in the
a billion years old. dinos is less than an inch thick.
According to Gary R. Byerly, a geologist at Louisiana State Byerly and his coworkers have analyzed the lead isotopes in
University in Baton Rouge, and his colleagues, during the Earth’s small zircons extracted from the lowest (hence the oldest) spherule-
early history four meteors slammed studded layer. The relative abundance
into the planet with such force that of those isotopes, which reflect the
they vaporized rocks for hundreds of slow decay of uranium over the mil-
miles around. The clouds of rock lions of millennia since the spherules
vapor quickly condensed and fell were formed, has enabled the geolo-
back to Earth as a rain of small gists to calculate the age of the layer:
rounded particles called spherules. nearly 3.5 billion years. That makes it
Spherules occur in what are now the earliest evidence discovered so far
South Africa and western Australia, of an asteroid impact. In those days,
embedded in layers of sedimentary bacteria were the Earth’s principal
rock that contain unusually abun- life-forms, and they've turned out to
dant, and thus demonstrably extra- be a lot tougher than the dinosaurs.
terrestrial, chromium isotopes and After all, they're still with us. (“An
iridium. The spherules are mixed up archean impact layer from the Pilbara
with inorganic detritus, perhaps be- and Kaapvaal cratons,” Science 297:
cause of a tsunami—also generated Spherule—a raindrop made of rock 1325-27, August 23, 2002)
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SAMPLINGS
SLE

FROZEN DINNERS One September after- EXPERIMENT OF THE MONTH Any runner knows that if you want to cover a long
noon a dozen years ago, two hikers came distance, you shouldn't start too fast. And that may be a sound rule of thumb for a
across a mummified man at the edge of an runner's entire lifetime. Experiments with people as well as with laboratory animals
alpine glacier in northern Italy. Now known continually demonstrate that rapid growth leads to early death. Now it appears that
as the Tyrolean Iceman, or Otzi (after the the same trend holds for some wild animals, too.
Otzal Alps, where he was discovered), the Mats Olsson, now at Goteborg University in Sweden, and Richard Shine of the Univer-
5,200-year-old corpse has been the subject sity of Sydney in Australia captured pregnant southern snow skinks (Niveoscincus mi-
of much analysis and discussion, including crolepidotus) at the summit of Mount Wellington on Tasmania and then placed their
conflicting assertions about his diet. newborns in pens on the same
Now, adding to earlier investigations into mountain. The pens encompassed
Otzi’s diet, the molecular anthropologist the skinks’ natural habitat, and
Franco Rollo and his colleagues, all of the the baby animals were individually
University of Camerino in Italy, have ex- marked and given plenty of extra
tracted intact DNA fragments from the worms to eat. Four times during
mummy's intestinal contents and compared the first three months of their
the DNA with known sequences from modern lives, the little reptiles were
plants and animals. Their analysis shows caught and weighed to establish
that Otzi’s second-to-last meal (the remains their growth rate. Then they were
lower down in the intestinal tract) included released into the wilderness at the
the meat of an ibex (a wild goat), cereals mountain’s summit. Southern snow skink (adult version)
(grains of the grass family, possibly culti- Twice in the next four years the
vated), and various other plants. His last investigators recaptured the skinks across an area that far exceeded the animals’ ca- _
meal was red deer meat. pacity for travel. Individuals that weren’t recaptured were thus presumed to have per-
Today the red deer (Cervus elaphus) is at ished. As the biologists expected, skinks that had grown fast as youngsters—raised,
the periphery of human affairs. Five thou- one might say, with a silver spoon—figured prominently in the group of missing indi-
sand years ago, however, Europeans relied viduals. That silver spoon, say the authors, “may sometimes be tarnished.” os
heavily on the animal. Carvings depicting The physiological reason for the link between fast growth and lower life expectancy _
red deer occur prominently at Neolithic _ is still unclear, but the implication for evolutionary studies is important. Although
alpine archaeological sites. Some of the fast growers generally outcompete their rivals during any given reproductive season, _
equipment Otzi carried (a curved spike, an in the course of a lifetime they may not leave more offspring in the next generation, +3
contrary to what has commonly been assumed. Olsson and Shine say the slow starters ‘
may compensate for their languid pace by living longer and getting more chances é
breed. (Growth to deathi inlizards, i: Evolution 56:1867-70, September 2002)—

CORE VALUES Besides preserving the oc- droughts took place about 8,300, 5,200,
casional frozen mummy, glaciers and ice and 4,000 years ago; the latter two dates
fields contain evidence of the climates of coincide with known societal upheavals in
long ago. As ice is consolidated from the Africa and the Middle East. Overall, how-
annual snowfall, the quantities and compo- ever, Africa’s climate was relatively warm
sition of dust and atmospheric gases and wet from about 11,000 to 4,000 years
Otzi the Iceman
trapped in the ice signal spells of wet and ago, becoming drier and cooler thereafter.
edge sharpener for stone tools, a quiver) dry, hot and cold. For glaciologists, examin- But the cool phase is over. In the past
was made from the red deer’s skin or antlers. ing an ice core extracted from the depths of 100 years, Kilimanjaro’s ice fields have
And some historians maintain that people a glacier is like reading the table of con- shrunk 80 percent. At current warming rates
deforested Europe during the Mesolithic pe- tents of a history book. the frozen fields, which have survived for
riod to favor the growth of red deer herds. Ice cores recently extracted from the top aeons just south of the equator, are ex-
The creature is thus thought to have been of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in pected to vanish by the year 2020. (“Kili-
on early continental menus—an inference Africa, have now yielded a picture of tropi- manjaro ice core records: evidence of
that Rollo and his colleagues have now di- cal climate change for the past 12,000 Holocene climate change in tropical Africa,”
rectly confirmed. (“Otzi’s last meals: DNA years. Glaciologist Lonnie G. Thompson of Science 298:589-93, October 18, 2002)
analysis of the intestinal content of the Ohio State University in Columbus and an
Stéphan Reebs is a professor of biology at the Uni-
Neolithic glacier mummy from the Alps,” international team of geoscientists drilled versity of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada, and
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sci- down to the bedrock to extract cores as long the author of Fish Behavior in the Aquarium and
ences 99:12594-99, October 1, 2002) as 167 feet. Analysis has shown that major in the Wild (Cornell University Press).

L HISTORY March 2003

 Rear

Get away from it all

on an exciting birding adventure
Conserving a delicate
ecosystem - Irving
Eco-Centre, La Dune de
Bouctouche

RB,
D ra “Ww - “A

WO
TR,

) | vu U LN

important to many of North America’s

EW BRUNSWICK’S BAY rare birds. The park is also home to a
of Fundy, One of the network of coastal trails where you can
Marine Wonders of the catch sight of shorebirds reeling in the
World, is a prime feeding tidal wake.
ground for migrating birds. Campobello Over on the Acadian Coast, you'd
Island and Grand Manan Archipelago better bring your binoculars to the
(one of Thayer’s Top 100 Birding Hot wildlife reserve at Cape Jourimain
Spots) are located at the mouth of the Nature Centre...over 170. different
bay and are home to more than 390 species of birds are protected here by
species of birds. John James Audubon, Farther along the Fundy Coast, the Canadian Wildlife Service! In
author of Birds of America, discovered make sure you stop and tour the gleam- Sackville, visit the Tantramar Marshes.
and sketched some entirely new bird ing mud flats of the Irving Nature Situated on one of North America’s
species here. Nearby Machias Seal Park in Saint John, a 600-acre estuary major migratory bird routes, they offer
Island is one of the few Puffin acclaimed for its amazing bird staging prime nesting and feeding grounds for
colonies in the world where visitors area. And visit the interpretative cen- Marsh Hawks and countless waterfowl.
can go ashore and view them in their tre of nearby Fundy National Park to Constructed over 200 years ago, the
natural habitat. discover why Fundy’s ecosystem is so marshes are the largest man-made
agricultural land mass in Canada and as spot the Tern and endangered
home to the Sackville Waterfowl Piping Plovers as they nest in the frag-
Park. This 55-acre park has a net- ile marshes.
work of boardwalks and walkways Head up to the northeastern tip of the
which allows species such as the province to the serene Miscou Island,
Common Snipe and the Tree Swallow the site of the Oldest Lighthouse in
to be observed without harming the Eastern Canada and home to a burgeon-
lush grasses and wetlands in which ing bird sanctuary. You'll find Yellowlegs,
Above left: One of many
they thrive. Sandpipers, Northern Gannets and
exquisite, pristine waterfalls
Continuing up the coast you'll dis- many more on Miscou’s spectacular
at Fundy National Park;
cover a provincial eco-treasure...the coast. You should see the island in the
above center: OST,
Irving Eco-Centre, La Dune de fall...the thick brush that covers the bogs
Ablaze - the wee o
Bouctouche. “The Dunes,” as they are for miles on up to the lighthouse turns an ed peat bogs of Miscou
known locally, also offer an extensive amazing fire red. It makes for an Island; top right: the color-
boardwalk system along one of the last incredible birding backdrop! ful Atlantic Puffin
remaining white sand dunes on the It’s all part of the wonder of bird- bottom right: A bird-
northeastern coast of the continent. watching. ..and it’s waiting for you next watcher's paradise, Cape
Here you will see rare plants as well door in New Brunswick, Canada! Jourimain Nature Centre.
 Paar catia ae
Our Discovery Beaches
eee 3 : BU uur one siuie
ee ee | _=Most Distinctive Dunes!
oh tas ALE Bouctouche

Meanie Jour Miles of the Maritimes”

iy oF Fundy... MostSpectactilar Rivers:

Find New He Hes Melt sietcmete (kee

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hgsas

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OUTH OF CUBA—AND JUST in the Caymans (the other subspecies are grove habitat, is a natural rookery, home
480 miles south of Miami—the in Cuba and the Bahamas). to an estimated 5,000 nesting pairs of red-
Caymans consist of a trio of You can spot this native bird along footed boobies (one of the largest breed-
islands: Grand Cayman, Cayman the National Trust’s Mastic Trail, a ing colonies in the Western Hemisphere).
Brae, and Little Cayman. All are blessed restored 200- year-old footpath through a Boobies mate for life and nest from
with sun-kissed beaches, waters teeming 2-million-year-old woodland area located February through July in the mangrove
with fish flecked with gold, and a grand in the dense interior of Grand Cayman trees within the sanctuary. You'll also find
900 years of culture, history, and beauty. Island. The picturesque trail winds from 200 pairs of magnificent frigate birds.
But the Caymans are also home to over swamplands tangled with black man- While on Little Cayman, keep an eye out
220 bird species, including the Cayman groves to forests; past mango, tamarind, for migratory shorebirds, which are seen
parrot, Amazona leucocephala cayma- and calabash trees and delicate wild frequently here. You’re likely to see
nensis, one of two subspecies found only banana orchids to grassy glades dotted waders as well as a variety of herons,
with palm trees. The best time to see the stilts, and even the endangered West
Cayman parrot is February through Indian whistling duck. You may also see
May; you’ll often find it nesting in the hol- the whistler in the North Side district of
low tops of dead royal palms during Grand Cayman at the Willie Ebanks
Bradley
Patricia
March and April. Be on the lookout for Farm (located at the end of Hutland
Caribbean dove, West Indian woodpecker, Road). The farm is also home to blue-
Cuban bullfinch, and smooth-billed ani. winged teals, coots, grebes, and an
Book a guided tour at (809) 949-1996. occasional osprey or peregrine falcon.
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BELIZE LODGEE bs EXxct

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“ITH ALMOST 700 BIRD haven for 540 species of birds. Bini Stay at the foothills of the Maya
species, Canada is a natu- are so plentiful that it’s not unusual for Mountains and hike along miles of
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birders. From Newfoundland and species in a single outing. a Maya ruin and alocal indigenous vil-
Labrador to Yukon, from British What better way to see the birds lage. Or stay deep in the heart of the
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alleled bird watching. path vacation arranged by Belize some of the last undisturbed lowland
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 UNIVERSE

Stick-in-the-Mud Science
You'll need your brain and plenty ofpatience—but not much more—
to take the measure ofthe Earth and its motions.
By Neil deGrasse Tyson

or a century or so, various the same spot on the horizon.

blends of high technol- And on two days a year the
ogy and clever thinking shadow of the stick at sunrise
have driven cosmic discovery. points exactly opposite the
But suppose you have no tech- shadow of the stick at sunset.
nology. Suppose all you have When that happens, the Sun is
in your backyard laboratory is rising due east, setting due
a stick. What can you learn? west, and daylight lasts as long
Plenty. as night. Those two days are the
With patience and careful spring and fall equinoxes (from
measurement, you and your the Latin for “equal night”).
stick can glean an outrageous On all other days of the year the
amount of information about Sun rises and sets elsewhere on
our place in the cosmos. It the horizon. So the adage that
doesn’t matter what the stick is the Sun always rises in the east
made of. And it doesn’t matter and sets in the west was in-
what color it is. The stick just vented by somebody who
has to be straight. never paid attention to the sky.
Hammer the stick firmly into If you're in the Northern
the ground where you have a Steve Irvine, Analemma above Keppel Henge, Hemisphere while you're track-
clear view of the horizon. Since May 2000 to May 2001 ing the points on the horizon
you're going low-tech, you where the Sun rises and sets,
might as well use a rock for a hammer. noon—the shadow points due north you'll see that those spots inch north
Make sure the stick isn’t floppy and or due south, depending which side of the east-west line after the spring
that it stands up straight. Your cave- of the equator you're on. equinox, eventually stop, and then
man laboratory is now ready. You’ve just made a rudimentary inch south for a while. After they
Ona ‘clear “morning, track the sundial. And if you want to sound cross the east-west line again, the
length of the stick’s shadow as the Sun erudite, you can now call the stick a southward inching eventually slows
rises, crosses the sky, and finally sets. gnomon (I still prefer “stick”). Note down, stops, and gives way to the
The shadow will start long, get that in the Northern Hemisphere, northward inching once again. The
shorter and shorter until the Sun where civilization began, the stick’s entire cycle repeats annually.
reaches its highest point in the sky, shadow will revolve clockwise around All the while, the Sun’s trajectory is
and finally lengthen again until sun- the base of the stick as the Sun moves changing. On the summer solstice
set. Collecting data for this experi- across the sky. Indeed, that’s why the (Latin for “stationary Sun”), the Sun
ment is about as exciting as watching hands ofa clock turn “clockwise” in rises and sets at its northernmost point
the hour hand move on a clock. But the first place. along the horizon, tracing its highest
since you have no technology, not path across the sky. That makes the
much else is competing for your at- f you have enough patience and solstice the year’s longest day, and the
tention. Notice that when the cloudless skies to repeat the exercise stick’s noontime shadow on that day
shadow is shortest, half the day has 365 times in a row, you will notice that the shortest. When the Sun rises and
passed. At that moment—called local the Sun doesn’t rise from day to day at sets at its southernmost point along

32 NATURAL HISTORY March 2003

 ‘AWorld of Adventure
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 China &
Yangtze Cruises the horizon, its trajectory across the four seconds. The almost-four-minute
sky is the lowest, creating the year’s mismatch between the sidereal and
Discover the best value to China longest noontime shadow. What else solar days forces the Sun to migrate
to call that day but the winter solstice? across the patterns of background
For 60 percent of the Earth’s surface stars, creating the impression that the
and about 75 percent ofits human in- Sun visits the stars in one constellation
habitants, the Sun is never, ever di- after another throughout the year.
rectly overhead. For the rest of our Of course, you can’t see stars in the
planet, a 3,200-mile-wide belt around daytime—other than the Sun. But the
the equator, the Sun climbs to the ones visible near the horizon just after
zenith only two days a year (OK, just sunset or just before sunrise flank the
one day a year if you’re smack on the Sun’s position on the sky, and so a
tropic of Cancer or the tropic of sharp observer with a good memory
Capricorn). Id bet the same person for star patterns can interpolate what
who professed to know where the Sun patterns lie behind the Sun itself.
rises and sets on the horizon also
started the adage about the Sun always yi again taking advantage of
See China's imperial treasures and its being directly overhead at high noon. your timing device, you can try
legendary scenic splendors, including something different with your stick in
the spectacular Yangtze River Gorges. S° far, with a single stick and her- the ground. Each day for an entire
Choose from our expertly designed culean patience, you have iden- year, mark where the tip of the stick’s
deluxe escorted tours, 11 to 21 days. tified the cardinal points on the shadow falls at noon, as indicated by
Stay at deluxe hotels and cruise aboard compass and
the four days of
the best ships on the Yangtze, Victoria
they syear that The Sun seldom rises due east,
Cruises. All meals, daily sightseeing and
all cruise excursions are included, plus mark the change and—for most of Earth’s inhabitants—
of seasons. Now
performances and cultural highlights.
you need to in- it’s never, ever directly overhead.
From only $1898 incl. airfare.
vent some way
to time the interval between one day’s your timer. It turns out that each
Tibet, Silk Road local noon and the next. An expensive day’s mark will be in a different spot,
Mongolia & Siberia chronometer would help here, but and by the end of the year you will
one or more well-made hourglasses have traced a figure eight, known to
will also do just fine. Either timer will the erudite as an “analemma’”’ [see
enable you to determine, with great photograph on page 32].
accuracy, how long it takes for the Sun Why? Earth is tilted on its axis by
to revolve around the Earth: the solar 23.5 degrees from the plane of the
day. Averaged over the entire year, that solar system. This tilt not only gives
time interval is equal to twenty-four rise to the familiar seasons and the
hours—exactly—though this doesn’t wide-ranging daily path of the Sun
Journey to the last travel frontiers of the include the leap second added now across the sky, it’s also the dominant
Far East. Visit mystic Tibet. Retrace the and then to account for the slowing of cause of the figure eight that emerges
steps of Marco Polo along the legendary the Earth’s rotation by the Moon’s as the Sun migrates back and forth
Silk Road. Explore remote Mongolia and gravitational tug on Earth’s oceans. | across the celestial equator through-
its timeless Gobi Desert. Discover Siberia Back to you and your stick. We’re out the year. Moreover, the Earth’s
and its hauntingly beautiful Lake Baikal, not done yet. Establish a line of sight orbit about the Sun is not a perfect
one of the world's wonders. Choose from from its tip to a spot on the sky, and circle. According to Kepler’s laws of
17 to 19-day deluxe escorted tours at an use your trusty timer to mark the mo- planetary motion, its orbital speed
unbeatable value. ment a familiar star from a familiar must vary, increasing as we near the
constellation passes by. Then, still Sun and slowing down as we recede.
See your travel agent using your timer, record how long it Because the rate of the Earth’s rota-
or call 800-613-5465 takes for the star to realign with the tion remains rock-steady, something
stick from one night to the next. That has to give: the Sun does not always

UNIWGRLD interval, the sidereal day, lasts twenty-

three hours, fifty-six minutes, and
reach its highest point on the sky at
“clock noon.” Although the shift is
America's Leader for Travel to China & Asia
www.uniworld.com
34 | NATURAL HISTORY March 2003
slow from day to day, the Sun gets
there as much as fourteen minutes
late at certain times of year. At other RIVER CRUISES
times it’s as much as sixteen minutes
early. On only four days a year—cor- Discover the Most Enjoyable and Hassle-free
responding to the top, the bottom, Way to Travel through Europe
and the middle crossing of the figure
eight—is clock time equal to Sun
time. As it happens, the days fall on or
about April 15 (no relation to taxes),
June 14 (no relation to flags), Septem-
ber 2 (no relation to labor), and De-
cember 25 (no relation to Jesus).

me up, clone yourself and your

stick and send your twin due
south to a preselected spot far beyond
your horizon. Agree in advance that
you will both measure the length of
your stick shadows at the same time
on the same day. If the shadows are
the same length, you live on a flat—
or a supergigantic—Earth. If the
shadows have different lengths, you
can use simple geometry to calculate See the best of Europe from her legendary Choose from 35 cruises,
the Earth’s circumference. rivers, away from crowded highways and 7 to 21 days
The astronomer and mathematician checking in and out of hotels. Visit great Dutch & Belgian Waterways
Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276-194 cities and charming medieval towns and
watch a fairy-tale world of castles, vineyards Rhine River through
B.C.) did just that. Comparing shadow
the heart of Europe
lengths at noon in two Egyptian and quaint villages float by. You unpack
cities—Syene (now called Aswan) and only once. In most places your ship docks Danube River to Budapest
Alexandria, which he overestimated in the historic heart of the city. You stay in or to the Black Sea
to be 5,000 stadia apart—Eratos- each port from half a day to two full days. Grand Cruises from Amsterdam
thenes derived a value for Earth’s cir- All shore excursions are included. to Vienna or to Budapest
cumference that was within 15 per- France - Seine River through
Aboard your luxurious ship, enjoy the
cent of being correct. The word Normandy or Rhéne through
comforts of a floating hotel: spacious cabins
“geometry, in fact, comes from the South of France
with picture windows, elegant one-seating
Greek for “earth measurement.”
dining, friendly English-speaking service, non- Po River through Northern Italy
Although you’ve now been occu-
smoking environment and intimate small-ship Douro River through
pied with sticks and stones for several
ambiance (maximum 130 guests). Portugal & Spain
years, the next experiment will take
only about a minute. Use a stone to
From only ‘1998 incl. airfare Elbe River from Berlin to Prague
pound your stick into the ground at
an angle other than vertical, so that it
resembles a typical stick in the mud.
Tie a stone to the end of a thin string
and dangle it from the stick’s tip. Now
you've got a pendulum. Measure the
length of the string and then tap the
bob to set the pendulum in motion.
Count how many times the bob
swings in sixty seconds.
The number, you'll find, depends
very little on the width of the pendu-
lum’s arc, and not at all on the mass of
America’s Leader in River Cruising
www.uniworld.com
 the bob. The only things that matter equator, the plane still rotates, but extreme rising and setting points of
are the length of the string and what more and more slowly as you move the Moon. Begun in about 3100 B.c.
planet you're on. Working with arela- from the Poles toward the equator. At and altered during the next two mil-
tively simple equation, you can deduce the equator the plane of the pendulum lennia, Stonehenge incorporates out-
the acceleration of gravity on Earth’s does not move at all. Not only does size monoliths quarried far from its
surface which is a direct measure of this experiment demonstrate that it’s site on Salisbury Plain in southern
your weight. On the Moon, with only the Earth, not the Sun, that moves, but England. Eighty or so bluestone pil-
one-sixth the gravity of Earth, the with the help of a little trigonometry lars, each weighing several tons, came
same pendulum will move much more you can also turn the question around from the Preseli Mountains, roughly
slowly, executing fewer swings per and use the time needed for one rota- 240 miles away. The so-called sarsen
minute. There’s no better way to take tion of the pendulum’s plane to deter- stones, each weighing as much as
the pulse of a planet. mine your latitude on our planet. fifty tons, came from Marlborough
The first person to use a pendulum Downs, twenty miles away.
ntil now your stick has offered no to demonstrate the Earth’s rotation Much has been written about the
Wise that the Earth itself ro- was Jean-Bernard-Léeon Foucault, a cultural and scientific significance of
tates—only that the Sun and the French physicist who surely con- Stonehenge. Historians and casual ob-
nighttime stars revolve at regular, pre- ducted the last of the truly cheap lab- servers alike are impressed by the as-
tronomical knowledge of these an-
cient people, as well as by their ability
to transport such obdurate materials
such long distances. Some fantasy-
prone observers are so impressed that
they even credit extraterrestrial inter-
vention at the time of construction.
Why the ancient civilizations that
built the place did not use the easy,
nearby rocks remains a mystery. But
the skills and knowledge on display at
Stonehenge are not. The major
phases of construction took a few
Thomas Kellner, Stonehenge, 33#34, 2002 hundred years in toto. Perhaps the
preplanning took another hundred or
dictable intervals. For the next experi- oratory experiments. In 1851 he in- so. You can build anything in half a
ment, find a stick more than ten yards vited his colleagues to “come and see millennium—I don’t care how far
long and, once again, pound it into the the Earth turn” at the Panthéon in you have to drag your bricks. Fur-
ground at a tilt. Tie a heavy stone to Paris. Today there’s a Foucault pendu- thermore, the astronomy embodied
the end ofa long, thin string, and dan- lum in practically every science and in Stonehenge is not fundamentally
gle it from the tip. Now, just like last technology museum in the world. deeper than what can be discovered
time, set it in motion. The long, thin with a stick in the ground.
string and the heavy bob will enable iven all that one can learn from a Perhaps these ancient observatories
the pendulum to swing unencum- Gympie stick in the ground, what perennially impress modern people
bered for hours and hours and hours. are we to make of the world’s famous because modern people have no idea
If you carefully track the direction prehistoric observatories? From Eu- how the Sun, Moon, or stars move.
the pendulum swings, and if you're ex- rope and Asia to Africa and Latin We are too busy watching evening
tremely patient, you will notice that America, a survey of ancient cultures television to care what’s going on in
the plane of its swing slowly rotates. turns up stone monuments that the sky. To us, a simple rock align-
The most pedagogically useful place to served as low-tech astronomy centers, ment based on cosmic patterns looks
do this experiment is at the geographic though it’s likely they also doubled as like an Einsteinian feat. But a truly
North (or, equivalently, South) Pole. places of worship or embodied other mysterious civilization would be one
At the Poles, the plane of the pendu- deeply cultural meanings. that made no cultural or architectural
lum’s swing makes one full rotation in On the morning of the summer reference to the sky at all.
twenty-four hours—a direct measure solstice at Stonehenge, for instance, Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse ‘Tyson is the
of the direction and rotational speed of several of the stones in its concentric Frederick P Rose Director of the Hayden
the Earth beneath it. For all other po- circles align precisely with sunrise. Planetarium in New York City and a visiting
sitions on Earth, except along the Certain other stones align with the research scientist at Princeton University.

6 | AT LAL HI PORY March 2003

Were looking jor people to—

Write Children’s Books By Kristi Holl you require an aptitude test,” says
Nikki Arko, Raton, NM. “Other schools
f you’ve ever dreamed of writing for children, here’s your chance sign you up as long as you have the
to test that dream. . . and find out if you have the aptitude to money to pay, regardless of talent or
make it a reality. If you do, we'll teach you how to crack one of potential.”
today’s most rewarding markets for new writers.
“I'd take the course again
The $2 billion children’s market in a heartbeat!”
The tremendous recent success of children’s books has made the “My most recent success has been the
general public aware of what we’ve known for years: There’s a publication of the novel I started for
huge market out there. And there’s a growing need for new my last Institute assignment,” writes
writers trained to create the nearly $2 billion of children’s Jennifer Jones, Homer, NY. “Thank
books purchased every year. . . plus the stories and you for giving me the life I longed for.”
articles needed by more than 600 publishers of “Td take the course again in a
magazines for and about children and teenagers. heartbeat!”, says Tonya Tingey,
Who are these needed writers? They’re Woodruff, UT. “It made my dream
ordinary people like you and me. a reality.”
“But am I good enough?” Don’t let your dream die—
Fifteen years ago, I was where you may be send for your free test today!
now. My occasional thoughts of writing If life as a successful writer is your
had been pushed down by self-doubt, and dream, here’s your chance to test
I didn’t know where to turn for help. Then, that dream. We’ve developed a
on an impulse, I sent for the Institute’s free revealing aptitude test based on
writing aptitude test and it turned out to be our 33 years of experience. Just fill
the spark I needed. I took their course and out and mail the coupon below to
my wonderful author-instructor helped me receive your free test and a 32-page
to discover, step-by-step, that my everyday introduction to our course, Writing for
life—probably not much different from Children and Teenagers, and 80 of our
yours—was an endless creative resource instructors.
for my writing! There is no obligation.
The promise that paid off
The Institute made the same promise
to me that they'll make to you, if you
edits. I point out your strengths and
show you how to shore up your weak-
Writing
Aptitude —
demonstrate basic writing aptitude: nesses. Between your pushing and my
You will complete at least one manu- pulling, you learn how to write—and ro
1
71
!
script suitable to submit to editors by the how to market what you write. 1
!
1
|

time you finish the course. | !

Iam the living proof ! !

| I

I really didn’t expect to be published

What I got from my instructor at the : Get both free
before I finished the course, but I was. | |

I sold three stories. And I soon discov- Institute changed me from a “wannabe” I 1
| Institute of Children’s Literature :
ered that that was not unusual at the into a nationally published writer. 93 Long Ridge Road
‘ |

Institute. Now, as a graduate and a While there’s no guarantee that every 1 West Redding, CT 06896-0812
nationally published author of 24 student will have the same success, I z - I
5 Yes, please send me your free Writing
children’s books, and more than 100 we're showered with letters like these Zz
uw
fe .
Aptitude Test and illustrated brochure.1 |
stories and articles, I’m teaching: ’m from current and former students. 2 understand I’m under no obligation, and
passing along what I’ve learned to “Since graduating from your course,” 2 no salesperson will visit me.
aspiring writers like you. says Heather Klassen, Edmonds, WA, = 1
in Please circle one and print name clearly:
‘T’ve sold 125 stories to magazines for 3 Mr. Mrs. Ms. Miss E7959 |}
One-on-one training with children and teenagers.”
your own instructor 2
Q

“Before this, I didn’t know if my

g |
< 1

My fellow instructors—all of them pro- work was typical or bland, or if there s Name |
fessional writers or editors—work with was even a spark of life in it,” writes 39 |
their students the same way I work Kate Spanks, Maple Ridge, BC. “I now Z
g Street :
with mine: When you’ve completed an have over 30 articles published. ...” ° !
assignment on your own schedule, at “,, .a little bird. . .has just been
oO
!
1
|
I = :
your own pace, you send it to me. I given freedom” | City ;
read it and reread it to make sure I get |
I
1
1

everything out of it that you’ve put into This course has helped me more than I |
l
1
1

it. Then I edit it line-by-line and send can say,” says Jody Drueding, Boston, MA. : State Zip '
“Tt’s as if a little bird that was locked up
you a detailed letter explaining my
inside of me has just been given the 7!
I
Recommended for college credits by the Connecticut}
3
Kristi Holl, a graduate of our course, has published freedom of the garden.” 1 Board for State Academic Awards and approved by I
24 books and more than 100 stories and articles. She ! the Connecticut Commissioner of Higher Education. i
is now an instructor at the Institute. “.. .] was attracted by the fact that Loe ee a ee = = = = al
BIOMECHANICS

Open Wide (and Fast

The law of physics that propels rockets into space
enables an Australian turtle to catch a darting fish.

By Adam Summers
Illustrations by Shawn Gould

low and steady might win races fold its neck side-
for tortoises, but it’s not clear ways into a deep
that the same strategy would hollow at the front Starting from a re-
work for a pond turtle ambushing its of the shell. laxed S-bend, similar to
prey. Imagine one of these torpid But the long the usual starting position for
reptiles trying to hide its awkward neck also en- the turtle, imagine extending the
shell from a school of minnows: The ables the turtle to “head” of the rule ina straight line
turtle crouches warily behind a tuft of ambush fishes and tad- towards a target by adjusting each of
vegetation. Suddenly . . . long pause poles by shooting its head far for- the hinges a bit at a time. Impossible?
... the creature lumbers out from its ward, almost as far as the entire No, but certainly extremely tedious.
blind, racing along at inches per sec- length ofits body. A turtle relying on vertebral mus-
ond in hot (but clumsy) pursuit of its The turtle’s head lies at the end of cles to extend its neck confronts the
meal. Favorable comparisons between eight neck vertebrae, which are con- same problem—and being methodical
the turtle and, say, a cheetah lying in nected to the body by more than is no way to catch a darting little fish.
wait for a Thomson’ gazelle do not fifty muscles. Given such a complex But, as Aerts points out, the rule can
spring to mind. anatomy, one might think that mak- be quickly and accurately extended to
Yet—who’'d have thunk 1t?—sev- ing a high-speed stab at a fish would the target if the head is grasped and
eral turtles make fine ambush preda- call for neuromuscular coordination yanked in the desired direction. The
tors. The massive alligator snapper, worthy of Barry Bonds hitting a joints move where they will; perhaps
for one, lures fish into its gaping slider. Not so. In fact, as Peter Aerts, they each follow different bending
mouth by twitching the tipof its a biologist at the University of patterns with each new extension.
tongue. Another, the Australian Antwerp in Belgium and his col- But the head gets where it’s going
snake-necked turtle, grabs its prey leagues have found, the turtle’s rapid without wavering off course.
with a quick, serpentine strike. The capture of prey paradoxically requires What a handy solution to the
basic mechanics of its strike are both far less motor control than does a problem of extending the carpenter's
surprising and surprisingly effective. slow, deliberate bite. rule! Yet, at first blush, it appears ir-
The Australian snake-necked turtle relevant to the case of the turtle. After
(Chelodina longicollis) is a member of ow can the stimulation of dozens all, why would a hunted fish yank a
the suborder Pleurodira, a group of He muscles in the complicated turtle’s head anywhere—when it
turtles limited to the Southern multijoint system that constitutes the probably wouldn't want to touch that
Hemisphere. Many, the Australian turtle’s neck be coordinated injust the head with a ten-foot pole? But nature
snake-neck included, have far longer right sequence and with just the right has other ways to get the job done, as
necks than their cousins, the timing for the turtle to get its head to Aerts and his colleagues Johan van
Cryptodira. One consequence 1s that its quarry? Consider, as Aerts did, a Damme and Anthony Herrel real-
a pleurodire cannot retract its head folding carpenter’s rule with ten seg- ized. With a little help from Sir Isaac
into its shell by bending its neck up ments (representing the head, the Newton, a turtle can actually pull its
and back; instead, the animal must eight vertebrae, and the body). own head towards its prey.

RAL HISTORY March 2003

 f that action seems about as likely almost exactly the opposite of what trolling the strike, the biologists im-
as a fish committing suicide, recall happens when an unattended garden planted fine wire electrodes into the
Newton’s third law: for every action hose is turned on: the straight hose, animal’s neck muscles to detect the
there is an equal and opposite reac- reacting like a rocket to the water activity of each muscle. Sure enough,
tion. Here the action is a sudden suc- shooting out its end, writhes into S- as one would expect if the
tion, caused when the turtle floods curves. In the case of the turtle, an S- Newtonian explanation is correct,
its mouth and throat with a large vol- curved neck straightens when water is the vertebral muscles were largely
ume of water. The linchpin of the sucked inside. quiet during extension, whereas the
system for controlling this action is a To bolster their hypothesis, the muscles of the hyoid were firing.
bony structure called the hyoid appa- Belgian biologists developed a mathe- One consequence of the “head pull”
ratus. In most vertebrates the hyoid matical model that derives the rear- mechanism 1s that the turtle must aim
supports the tongue, as it does in the ward-rushing volume of water from its head at the target in the water be-
snake-necked turtle. But in the fore opening its mouth and throat.
snake-neck, it also pushes down a Indeed, early in the strike, before the
bone called the hypoglossum turtle’s head accelerates, the turtle takes
(which, as its name suggests, aim at the prey animal—using its ver-
is situated beneath the tebral muscles. It turns out that the
tongue), thereby expanding muscles of the vertebral column are
the turtle’s mouth. The
hyoid also moves bones
known as branchial arches,
which expand its throat.
The change in the the observed
width of the neck expansion of the
is twofold. neck. From the mass and
Expanding the speed of the moving water, they
neck down- could calculate the resultant for-
ward and to ward motion of the head and neck
the sides needed to offset the momentum of
the water. Although the predictions of
the model break down as the distance
between the head and prey be- well suited for
comes minuscule, they closely that task.
match the movements ob-
served during much of the he Australian
turtle’s strike. (When the snake-necked
head is close to the prey, turtle is a popular pet on
the model tends to its native continent.
overestimate head Fortunately for its owners,
movement because the animal’s rapid strike capa-
causes water to it does not com- bility works only in water; the
rush into the mouth and flow down pensate for the mass of a mouthful of air is not
the throat. The Newtonian reaction neck’s connective enough to draw the head forward.
to the rearward-rushing water then tissue and muscles, Anyone carrying a snake-necked
snaps the head forward almost instan- which absorb some turtle is safe from a speedy bite.
taneously (the acceleration of the of the kinetic energy as they stretch.) That’s not to say that slow and
head can be more than four times the To further rule out the possibility steady can’t still win a race—or deliver
acceleration of gravity). The effect 1s that vertebral muscles might be con- a bite. If you're handling suchaturtle,
keep a wary eye on its slow-moving
head. Like the careless hare, you'd
If the airplane won't come to the hangar, bring the hangar to the airplane. The
Australian snake-necked turtle catches its prey by opening its mouth—the movement
surely hate to be caught napping.
of muscles and bones in its head and neck rapidly expands its throat, which
instantaneously fills with water. The momentum of inrushing fluid, by virtue of the Adam Summers (asummers@uct.edu) is an
third law of motion, jerks the turtle’s head forward and, assuming the turtle has assistant professor ofecology and evolutionary
aimed correctly, directly at the fish. biology at the University of California, Irvine.

March 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 39

 SSR

Left: Blackwater National

Wildlife Refuge;
below: Calvert Cliffs;
bottom left: Clustered
spires in Frederick

Maryland Breit
Dan

The Land Between Tide and Time

From the shores of the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic
Ocean to the peaks of the majestic Allegheny Mountains,
Maryland is a state of natural wonders.

re ADDLE THROUGH THE FER- — Creek Lake, discover a waterfall, do a lit-

4
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4
i BS
i\ ,
SEN
eres Chesapeake as ducks, geese, If you're a history buff, head to the
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through the unspoiled forests of western George's Counties. Just outside the
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Looking for an adventure in the great battlefields to the spectacular
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BA reerecT DAY Foe CALLING

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ter of boating and water sports, includ- Enjoy first-class fishing, 150 miles
ing fishing, crabbing, sailing, and swim- of spectacular shoreline, beautiful
ming. Annapolis, Maryland's capital city forests, and many lakes, ponds, and
and America’s sailing capital, has more extensive wetlands.
eighteenth-century buildings and houses The county's abundant undeveloped
than any other city in the U.S. It's also areas support a dense population of
the home of the U.S. Naval Academy bald eagles and 321 other bird species.
(410-263-6933), founded in 1845. Stop ivery spring for the past fifty years,
at the Armel-Leftwich Visitor Center for nearly 1,500 great blue herons have
a map of the facilities, and don’t miss nested in the treetops of Nanjemoy
the model ships and history exhibits at Creek Great Blue Heron Sanctuary.
the Academy's Museum. If you prefer the This creek, popular with fishermen,
countryside, drive along the rural west- also is a good spot to sight ospreys and
ern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, past bald eagles.
fishing villages and farms dating from The Chicamuxen Wildlife Management
ene
the colonial era, to the “lost” town of Area (301-743-5161), tucked away on a
London, unearthed in the 1990s. peninsula, harbors rare and endangered
err
ea
species, such as the Louisiana thrush,
on about twenty acres of wetlands.
The State Capitol-at Ann
Calvert County Purse State Park (801-743-7613), a
ninety-acre reserve of gently rolling
hills, woods, and marshlands, is the
N THIS SOUTHERN MARYLAND perfect site for fossil hunting. And
county, you can take a cruise Cobb Island, bordered by the Potomac
around Solomons Island, a historic and Wicomico Rivers, lures birdwatch-
fishing village where the Patuxent River ers as well as fishing, boating, and
meets the Chesapeake Bay. You can seafood lovers.
hunt for more than 600 species of fos- History buffs won't want to miss
sils on the open beaches at Calvert the Dr. Samuel A. Mudd House (301-
AAACCVB Cliffs State Park—majestic cliffs, 645-6870) in Waldorf, home to the
formed more than 15 million years ago, country doctor who set the leg of John
that dominate the Chesapeake Bay. Wilkes Booth, President Lincoln’s
Walk on the elevated boardwalk assassin, unwittingly helping him to
through the primeval beauty of Battle escape to Virginia. Costumed guides
Creek Cypress Swamp in Prince now take visitors around the early
Frederick, the northernmost naturally Victorian frame farmhouse, dating to
occurring stand of bald cypress in about 1754 and furnished with original
\merica. Visit the picturesque towns of pieces. Also a must-see is the small
Chesapeake Beach and North Beach. town of Benedict, the only spot in the
Here you'll find the Chesapeake Beach United States where foreign troops
Railway Museum and the largest fleet of have invaded our shores. During the
charterboats in the state. When you War of 1812, British forces landed in
visit Calvert County, you'll discover why Benedict, marched to Washington,
Southern Maryland Is Fun. D.C., and burned the city.
 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION a

Dorchester County
& ANNE/ ARUNDEL COUNTY
Maryland ‘s
Historic State Capital
ORCHESTER COUNTY IS THE
Heart of Chesapeake Country.
Marshes and waterways are
filled with wildlife and birds, and
quaint watermen’s villages are sprin-
CALVERT COUNTY
kled through the “Cape Cod of the
iscover a place where there
South.” The port town of Cambridge, are still places to discover...
founded in 1684, is lined with historic Southern Maryland hospitality
homes and museums, including the only an hour from Washington, D.C.

Your FREE Guide to Annapolis

Brannock Maritime Museum, with ¢ Fossils & Fishing
exhibits on Chesapeake Bay history. * History & Heritage
& Anne Arundel County * Seashore & Seafood
Outside of Cambridge, the Dorchester
For 500 miles of coastline and three ¢ Antiques & Attractions
Heritage Museum has exhibits on avia- centuries of America’s history, visit ¢ Lighthouses & Landmarks
tion, archaeology, and local history, Annapolis & Anne Arundel County.
Charming seaport towns, country air, 800-331-9771
great shopping, dining, hotels—plus the www.co.cal.md.us/cced
magnificent Cheaspeake Bay!

Call now for details. WELCOME

|CALVERT COUNTY |
www. Visit-Annapolis.org BUENA AB)
or call 1-800-394-5717 WELCOME
Ta ee Le)

USFWS

and the Richardson Museum focuses on

the Bay’ long heritage of wooden boat
building. Also nearby is the Spocott
Windmill, the only post windmill in
Maryland, which still grinds flour on
special occasions. Blackwater National
Wildlife Refuge, just south of
Cambridge, is an important nesting and
feeding area for three of the nation’s
endangered species: the bald eagle, the
Delmarva fox squirrel, and the pere-
grine falcon. And at the Harriet Tubman
Museum, learn about the famous
woman who helped slaves escape to
freedom on the Underground Railroad.
 Frederick Coun ty

) | ESTLED IN THE \PPALACHIAN

/ Mount ains and Piedmont Tourism
Frederick
of
Council
Co

j % Plateau, Frederick County has

more farms than any other county in
Maryland. Vineyards and covered Garrett County The natural beauty of Garrett County
bridges dot this county, and the largest
water garden in the U.S., the Lilypons
Water Gardens, is in Buckeystown. The N THE MOUNTAINS OF WESTERN sions and. rental equipment available for
county also is a center of Civil War his- Maryland, the Deep Creek Lake Area hiking, birding, mountain biking, canoe-
tory sites, including the Monocacy offers visitors recreation and relax- ing, rafting, or kayaking.
National Battlefield, the site of the 1864 ation in 90,000 acres of lakes, forests, This rural area is sparsely populated —
battle that played a pivotal role in rivers, and parkland. only thirteen traffic signals in the entire
defending Washington D.C. The Barbara From the high adventure of whitewa- county. The small towns reflect a quieter
Fritchie House and Museum is a replica ter sports on the Youghiogheny and time: neighbors still gather in communi-
of the house where 96-year-old Fritchie Savage rivers to peaceful paddling on ty parks for picnics on the 4th of July and
reportedly confronted General Stone- lakes and reservoirs, there is something caroling at Christmas. Shops and festi-
wall Jackson when Confederate forces for everyone. vals feature the craftsmanship of
marched into Frederick in early Eco-tourism and nature tourism Allegheny Mountain artisans and the ele-
September 1862. opportunities abound, with guided excur- gant simplicity of Amish woodworking.

Deep Creek Lake Area

Western Maryland
e can see...or as far as your paddling, —
cycling or meandering takes you...
~ along pristine waterways and scenic
roadways to the essence of what the
Eastern Shore of Maryland once was
and still is,
in Dorchester County.
Come surround yourself
in the heart of Chesapeake Country.

iver more A ASS ‘call

po Wwww.garrettchamber.com 1-800-522-TOUR
* www.tourdorchester.org
ef
we 1-800-800-5777 MARYLAND
WELCOME DORCHESTER COUNTY, MARYLAND
 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

Seneca Creek State Pa

Montgomery

6245), which commemorates the life of

the founder of the American Red Cross.
Then explore the nearby Chesapeake
and Ohio (C & O) Canal National
Historic Park, near the Potomac River.
The canal was operated from 1828 to
1924, primarily for hauling coal, and
Montgomery County hundreds of original structures, includ-
ing locks, lock houses, and aqueducts,
remain. Plan a hike or bike tour along
Where the National Road crossed the UST OUTSIDE OF WASHINGTON, the canal’s towpath, which provides a
northern part of the county in the 1800s, D.C., Montgomery County is not nearly level, continuous trail through the
inns and taverns were built to accommo- your ordinary suburb. It offers spectacular scenery of the Potomac
date travelers. Some of these still wel- visitors the best of urban sophistication River Valley.
come visitors seeking lodging or a home- and country leisure, from museums and If you'd rather be fishing, head to
cooked meal. galleries to theaters, historic sites, and Little Seneca Lake in Black Hill Regional
At the end of the nineteenth century, pristine parks. Start your exploration Park, just north of Germantown, where
the B&O railroad brought the wealthy with a visit to Glen Echo, a former you might hook some largemouth bass,
and powerful from “down east” to vaca- amusement park that now is a year- tiger musky, crappie, catfish, and sever-
tion in the cool mountain Summers. Many round center of dance, theater, and the al types of sunfish. Rent a rowboat or
ornate Victorian “cottages” remain in the arts. The park includes the Clara canoe, take a ride on a pontoon boat, or
Mountain Lake Park area. Barton National Historic Site (801-492- find a spot in the fishing pier. Hike,

ot
i PS

Stay here...and see it all!

One of America’s “Dozen Distinctive
Destinations.” Tour 20+ historic sites @
museums such as the National Museum of
Civil War Medicine, follow new Civil War
i STAY WITH US
AND SEE THE BEST OF THE NATIONAL CAPITAL REGION
Trails, the C&O Canal or the Appalachian
Trail, enjoy a wide array of restaurants, & Make the most of your trip by staying with us in Montgomery County, Maryland.
shopping in the “Antiques Capital of Here, you'll enjoy value and quality in our wide selection of lodgings and restaurants as
Maryland.” Just a short drive to Gettysburg, well as the opportunity to visit our many historic sites and national parks. Our
Harpers Ferry, Washington D.C. & Baltimore. | |3 METRORail stations will transport you to Washington, DC's many attractions.
ae |
| Call for our Visitor Guide at 800-925-0880 or by visiting www.visitmontgomery.com
Pico

For free info call: 1-800-800-9699

www.fredericktourism.org
CONFERENCE AND VISITORS BUREAU OF MONTGOMERY COUNTY, MD, INC
| 1820 PARKLAWN DRIVE, SUITE 380 * ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND 20852
 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

ORDERING WASHINGTON, D.C.

and a mere thirty-seven miles
from Baltimore, Prince George’s
County offers a range of historic, cul-
tural, and popular tourist sites.
Tour historic homes such as
Darnall’s Chance House Museum (301-
952-8010) in Upper Marlboro, one of
Maryland's oldest buildings, dating to
1704; the Montpelier Mansion and
Cultural Arts Center (301-953-1376)
in Laurel, a fine eighteenth-century
Georgian house that was a haunt of
horseback, or mountain bike through George and Martha Washington's; the
the miles of trails that meander through Marietta House Museum (301-464-
the quiet forests of this vast park. After 5291) in Glenn Date, a plantation
a day in the outdoors, treat yourself to a home from circa 1813; and Riversdale
feature at the Olney Theatre Center (301-864-0420) in Riverdale Park,
(301-924-3400), presenting the musical built between 1801 and 1807 and pat-
satire Mainstage through March 30th. terned after an eighteenth-century
Belgian mansion.
Aviation fans won’t want to miss

Natural Beauty
the free tour of the Paul E. Garber
Preservation, Restoration, and Storage
Facility (reserve a tour at 202-357-
...Comes in many forms 1400), where aircraft are restored
Discover scenic habitats, wildlife exhibits and before they are displayed at the
educational experiences, all just minutes from Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum;
Washington, DC, Annapolis and Baltimore. the College Park Aviation Museum
Prince George's County offers natural (301-864-6029); or the Airmen
beauty in all its forms. Memorial Museum (800-638-0594) in
Suitland, honoring leaders in aviation.
° Cedarville State Forest
Schedule a visit at NASA’s Goddard
© Merkle Wildlife Sanctuary &
Space Flight Center and Museum (301-
Visitor Center
286-8981) in Greenbelt, the major U.S.
¢ National Colonial Farm
laboratory for developing and operat-
¢ National Visitor Center at
ing unmanned scientific spacecraft. On
Agricultural Research Center
March 18th, you can participate in
* National Wildlife Visitor Center
Goddards Sun-Karth Day 2008: Live
¢ Watkins Nature Center
From the Aurora, and learn about the
¢ Patuxent River Park
sun, its structure, and processes.
For additional information, contact: If you have children, don’t miss
Prince George's County
Prince George’s most popular tourist
Conference & Visitors Bureau
301-925-8300 (or 888-925-8300) attraction: Six Flags America (301-
TOU RT UmtTeater eMac| 249-1500). The theme park features
an exciting collection of roller coast-
%
Pes
Learner | ers, including the new Batwing, where
MARYLAND
WELCOME
you fly face down through corkscrews
and twists.
 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

N LOVELY QUEEN ANNE'S COUNTY,

on the scenic Eastern Shore of the
Chesapeake Bay, enjoy a succulent
crab or oyster dinner beside a bustling
marina, fish and crab on the Bay, boat
through wandering rivers, bicycle BU Cigar is
through historic and picturesque small Lower
yy aay
towns, and hike through marshes and
RYU
woodlands on the Cross Island Trail.
Start your visit on Kent Island, just Free Bird
across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Guide &
Kstablished as a trading post in 1631, Checklist

the island is the oldest settlement in ieee ike)

Maryland. In Stevensville, the island's Ww. Visitworcester.org
largest town, visit the restored
Stevensville Train Depot and Christ
Church, home to Maryland’s oldest
congregation, founded in 1631.
Matapeake State Park, on the
island's western shore, offers views of
the Bay Bridge, boat ramps, and a 900-
foot-long fishing pier. Terrapin Beach
Nature Park, off MD 18, includes a one- igor BEM actos
mile nature trail, pond, two observation Kent Island, MD ~
a7
blinds, and a boardwalk to the
Chesapeake Bay.
Just east of the island, in
Grasonville, the Chesapeake Bay
Environmental Center, operated by the
Wildfowl Trust of North America, is a
900-acre sanctuary with trails around
six waterfowl ponds, each representing
a different wetland habitat. You may
see deer, red fox, herons, swans, tur-
tles, geese, and many species of ducks
and other migratory birds traveling
north and south on the Atlantic Flyway.
The visitor center has a large picture
window overlooking a waterfowl pond,
hands-on exhibits for children, and an
aquarium featuring creatures from the
gotta
Chesapeake Bay WELEOME

The sixty-acre lake at Tuckahoe

State Park, six miles north of the town
of Queen Anne, is a haven for boaters
and anglers. Tuckahoe Creek meanders
through the park’s wooded marshlands, Maryland’s Eastern Shore...
and the Adkins Arboretum is home to ..the rat race ends here!
native Maryland trees and plants.
 SPECIAL ADVERTIS ING SECTION

. Still Making History!

Tae not start your next trip at the
beginning? Visit Maryland’s first
colony... Enjoy a narrated Skipjack sail of
our natural features... Participate in an
archeological dig... Camp in the shadow of
Civil War heritage... Tour one of our light-
houses. Over 3 1/2 centuries of history and
400 miles of shoreline await!
Call for your FREE visitors guide.
1-800-327-9023
Sa snake Cones
\ HAPED BY THE CHESAPEAKE BAY N TALBOT COUNTY, EXPLORE
St.TINT
MAR’ ornanyy'g
MARYLAND and its mighty tributaries, the the unspoiled beauty and historic
WELCOME
_# Patuxent and Potomac Rivers, St. lore of Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Marys County lies on a verdant peninsula Start your tour of this county's charm-
that has fostered a traditional lifestyle ing and historic small towns in the
anchored in the natural bounty of the waterfront village of St. Michaels,
Tidewater. Historic sites abound, including called “the town that fooled the
St. Marys City, the state's colonial capital British” because during the War of
and its premier oudoor living history muse- 1812 the townspeople hung lanterns in
um and archaeological park. The tidal land- the trees and the British cannons over-
scape of creeks and tributaries offers great shot the houses. Here, the Chesapeake
opportunities for canoeing and kayacking, Bay Maritime Museum features
and here, the waterman’s way of life still exhibits on boat build-
centers on the seasonal harvest of crabs ing, Chesapeake Bay
and oysters—available for sampling at craft, steamships, and
Explore historic
crabhouses and waterside eateries decoy carving. Easton,
Easton, one of
America's top throughout the county. rated among the Top
one hundred Ten Best Small Towns in America, is a
ire econ Mate elem nostalgic All-American hometown, and
lamest igiia| i ea he <
Tilghman Island, surrounded by the
Discover 300 2 “ \: tu Chesapeake Bay, is a working water-
years of maritime Mh, men’s village with excellent fishing (it’s
history, the F
TY7 home to the last commercial sailing
Chesapeake Bay fleet in North America) and fresh
and the waterfront
seafood.
villages of St. Michaels,
Take the longest cable-free ferry
Tilghman Island and Oxford.
in the U.S. to Oxford, once a major
ee Rete BAY-STAY for yourfree port and shipbuilding center, or
isitors codand calendar ofevents. explore picturesque Wye Mills,
home to the historic Grist Mill and
Museum, the Wye Church, and the
Little Red Schoolhouse.
 SPECIAL ADVERTI SING SECTION
Birds of the :
Mid-Atlaniic
and Where to Find Them
John H. Rappole
View sample pages at
/EAR AFTER YEAR, VISITORS
www.jhupbooks.com/rappole
return to the untouched wilder-
This is the only
=. ness of Worcester County, where comprehensive field
they sail, canoe past majestic cypress- guide to bird life in
es along the Pocomoke River, catch the area that also
directs readers to ‘ Biel »
crabs, and fish on the bays, rivers, public sites where
ocean, and inlets. each species can be ere to tind them.
Situated on Maryland’s lower east- found. Noted orni-
thologist John H.
ern shore, Worcester was not connect-
Rappole provides
ed to the mainland until 1952, and it’s extensive informa-
retained much of its natural beauty. tion about every
Heron wading in a marsh species, and each entry is accompanied
Bald eagles, snowy egrets, great blue
by a color photograph.
herons, otters, muskrat, and deer “¥OUNDED IN 1878 IN BALTIMORE, 288 pages, 387 color photos, 346 maps, $21.95 paper
inhabit the banks of the Pocomoke Johns Hopkins is the oldest uni-
River. The county is home to the year- versity press in continuous oper- Rock Creek Park
round beach resort of Ocean City, the ation in North America. Three recent Gail Spilsbury
pristine marshlands of Assateague, a publications are of special interest to “This testament to the rustic splendors of
natural barrier island, and the quaint naturalists. Birds of the Mid-Atlantic Rock Creek Park—its woodlands and
historic town of Berlin, with its clusters and Where to Find Them, by John trails, meadows and streams—serves as an
eloquent tribute to the great urban
of charming bed-and-breakfasts, his- Rappole, is a comprehensive field
wilderness that lies at the heart of the
toric inns, and antique stores. guide to bird life in this area, with lists nation’s capital.’—Smithsonian
of the best sites to spot specific birds. 96 pages, 56 illustrations, $21.95 cloth
It provides extensive information about
every species: description, identifica- The Great
tion details, habitat, vocalization, Marsh
range, seasonal occurrence, and distri- An Intimate Journey into a
bution. Each entry is accompanied by a Chesapeake Wetland
color photograph. Rock Creek Park, by David W. Harp and Tom Horton
Gail Spilsbury, celebrates Rock Creek View photos at
Park, a resplendent wilderness retreat www.jhupbooks.com
in Washington, D.C. Spilsbury tells the “Dave Harp and Tom
Sanderling Horton have managed to
riveting story of the park’s formation
capture the beauty and
Worcester also offers visitors a and preservation, focusing on how essence of our disappearing
unique glimpse into the lives of early Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and other marshland.’—William
African-American pioneers, who set- visionaries laid down precedents for its Baker, President, Chesa-
peake Bay Foundation
tled the county in the mid-1600s. In the preservation. In The Great Marsh: An
144 pages, 120 color photos,
Berlin community of Germantown, visit Intimate Journey into a Chesapeake $29.95 cloth
two of the oldest structures from this Wetland, David W. Harp’s stunning pho-
period: the Comfort Powell House and, tography and Tom Horton's graceful Water’s Way
right next door, the New Bethel prose capture the beauty and essence Life along the Chesapeake
Methodist Church. The Julia A. Purnell of the disappearing marshland of Photography by David W. Harp
Museum in Snow Hill displays the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Essays by Tom Horton
memorabilia of William Julius “Judy” Dorchester County. The fertile waters “This book is a singing
‘ tribute to the bay. —Islands
Johnson, who enjoyed a professional and soggy vegetation are home to
Magazine
baseball career from 1918 to 1939. In ducks, geese, eagles, and dozens of 132 pages, 112 color photos,
Pocomoke City, the Sturgis One Room other species. Essays discuss how the $19.95 paper
School Museum, built about one hun- endangered marsh functions as a
dred years ago, is an African-American refuge for migrating butterflies and the The Johns Hopkins University Press
schoolhouse. bogs yield archaeological treasures. 1-800-537-5487 © www.jhupbooks.com
 Vietnam's Secret Life
Naturalists exploring the country’s mountains
and forests are finding that the keys to its
extraordinary biodiversity may lie deep in the past.

By Eleanor J. Sterling, Martha M. Hurley, and Raoul H. Bain

long Vietnam’s border with Laos runs the Truong Son range,
known to the Laotians as Saiphou Louang and to much of the
rest of the world as the Annamites. But the mountains are be-
coming known—to conservation biologists as well as to everyone else
concerned with preserving the world’s species—as a region of excep-
tional biodiversity. In the early 1990s investigators began visiting
Vietnam’s natural areas in greater numbers than at ogy, who would have thought that large or
any time since the beginning of what is known to medium-size mammals would remain to be de-
the people of the region as the Second Indochina scribed? And that list doesn’t even include the
War. And the investigators—ecologists, evolution- saola, the sole member of Pseudoryx, a genus en-
ary biologists, and specialists in a broad spectrum of tirely new to the cattle family. Weighing in at
life-forms—soon confirmed what the local peoples about 220 pounds, the saola is the largest land-
had long known: an astounding array of organisms dwelling mammal introduced to science since the
dwell in the country. For many biologists to this kouprey, or gray ox, was described in 1937. (That
day, entering Vietnam 1s animal ranged through northern Cambodia and
like entering uncharted adjacent areas of Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, but
territory, an area of vast bi- may now be extinct.)
ological abundance, where But Vietnam promises more to biologists than
new species, it seems, can just the windfall that 1s the Truong Son range. Ever
turn up virtually anywhere since the mid-nineteenth century, up until the be-
you look. ginning of the Second World War, forays by Viet-
Biologists exploring the namese and visiting naturalists had sketched a
Truong Son have discov- spotty but telling portrait of the country’s biodiver-
ered—or, importantly, re- sity. More recently, since peace came to Vietnam,
discovered—three previ- further hints of biological abundance have come
The Sichuan whipping frog has been assigned
to the species Polypedates dugritei—but ously unrecognized species from collaborations between Vietnamese and for-
herpetologists are now realizing that these of muntjac, or barking eign investigators.
frogs actually form a group of species, not just deer; one species of pig; But only in the past ten years have biologists un-
one. The several species probably arose when and one species of rabbit derstood that the newly recognized charismatic
climate change stranded ancestral frog poputa- [see illustrations of the latter megafauna are only the tip of an iceberg of here-
tions on separate mountaintops; the confusion
for zoology arose when the climate changed
two animals on page 53). tofore unknown species that live in the Truong Son
again, first warming and then cooling, enabling Those findings alone are as well as in other, primarily montane, areas of
the new (but similar-looking) frog species to remarkable; after hundreds Vietnam. Among the organisms new to science
disperse before they were isolated once more. of years of systematic biol- (though, again, not to natives of the area) are three

March 2003
The male red-shanked douc langur (Pygathrix nemaeus nemaeus)—a stunning arborealist endemic
to Southeast Asia—lives in the forests of the northern end of Vietnam's Truong Son Mountains and
adjoining lowlands. Because it rarely leaves the trees, climatic change affecting the range of its
rainforest home could have forced the monkey into moist, albeit restricted “refuges,” leading to the
divergence of today’s three subspecies of douc: black-, red-, and gray-shanked.

March 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 1 Sid

 species of birds, nine- mountains, the shifting courses.of rivers, and the ex-
teen species of am- pansion and contraction of seas and forests have suc-
phibians, sixteen spe- cessively isolated and reunited populations of plants
cies of reptiles, and, and animals. As new habitats arise and old ones shift,
justiesince, thet year existing organisms can disperse, adapt, or die. Those
2000, at least twenty- three options have largely created the unusually
nine species of fish and complex mosaic of life that exists in the region today.
516 species of inverte- Mountains and hills wrinkle the vast majority of
brates. And—perhaps Vietnam’s 127,000 square miles. Major mountain
just as intriguing— blocks include the highlands in the northeast, the
The green pricklenape lizard (Acanthosaura
many of the species Hoang Lien Son in the northwest (the southeast-
capra) is endemic to Indochina. The genus ranges
across mainland Southeast Asia as well as on the
native to Vietnam do ernmost extension of the Himalaya), and the
island of Sumatra, perhaps indicating dispersal not occur anywhere Truong Son along the border with Laos. A range of
during dry periods when the Sunda shelf was ex- else: a phenomenon forest habitats, each adapted to a different amount of
posed; the foothills of the Himalaya prevent the known as endemism. yearly rainfall, blanket the slopes of these mountains.
creature from spreading to the west. The lizard The seasonality of the rainfall is, in part, a conse-
prominently displays its dewlap, or fold of loose
skin, both to ward off predators and to threaten
he ferment of sci- quence of the monsoon circulation pattern, the
competitors during courtship. entific activity in domunant climatic feature of southern and eastern
Vietnam in the past Asia for at least the past seven million years. In the
decade is a result of winter, strong northeast monsoon winds blow, as air
several historical devel- flows from cold, high-pressure areas in Asia along
opments: the restora- the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau toward a
tion of political stabil- hot, low-pressure zone over Australia—a process
ity after decades of that brings cold, dry winds to Vietnam. In the sum-
war; the recent open- mer, air masses move in from the opposite direction,
ing of strategic border from Australia and the Indian Ocean; passing over
areas to scientists; and Vietnam the air releases moisture picked up along
the reopening of the the way, hence the country’s summer rains. Those
country to foreign sci- dynamic circulation patterns interact with the ter-
Megalaima franklinii auricularis, a subspecies of entific collaborators, rain and the surrounding ocean to expose Vietnam
the golden-throated barbet, has been observed in such as our group from to widely varying amounts of rainfall.
only a few parts of the central Truong Son and in
southern Laos—a region that has proved a ven-
New York’s American Temperature and humidity vary with topogra-
table aviary of recently discovered endemic spe- Museum of Natural phy; in general, the higher the elevation, the
cies. As a result, the area is now the focus of History. Of course, cooler and wetter the climate. The interaction of
conservation efforts. Vietnam’s turbulent upland areas with moisture-laden moving air
political history can masses creates a “rain shadow”: windward slopes
only explain why so wring most of the moisture from the clouds and
many discoveries are remain substantially wetter than the leeward slopes.
emerging just now. In the Truong Son, for example, the coastal-facing
History and politics eastern slopes are wetter than those facing west.
(aside from the de- Meanwhile, a variety of climates dot Vietnam’s
struction they wreak) interior. Regions without prolonged dry periods
have little to say about support moist evergreen forests; seasonally dry
the country’s bio- forests—mixtures of evergreen and deciduous
diversity—particularly trees—grow in areas of more mixed dry and wet
about why so much of periods; and dry deciduous forests range across
The rhinoceros snake (Rhynchophis boulengeri)
ranges across northeastern Vietnam and its small that biodiversity is en- southwestern regions with expanded dry seasons.
offshore islands, through China’s Guangxi region, demic to it. In addition, Vietnam also hosts ecosystems as di-
to the northeast of Vietnam, and China's Hainan The real roots of the verse as temperate coniferous forests, mangrove
Island, but it cannot be found in China's Yunnan region’s _ biodiversity forests, grasslands, and coral reefs.
Province, northwest of Vietnam. Depressed sea lie in the dynamic
levels during ice ages would have opened the is-
lands to colonization, and the return of warmer
interplay over time Gyceniet speaking, Southeast Asia lies at the
weather would have isolated them there, but the of geographic, geo- interface of three converging continental
inland mountains are still too dry and too cold to logical, and climatic plates: the Eurasian, Indo-Australian, and Philip-
be hospitable to these arboreal snakes. forces. The heaving of pine Sea. Continental plates, which are formed

52] NATURAL HISTORY March 2003

from Earth’s rigid, brittle lithosphere, or crust, reaching into the higher elevations and latitudes.
move gradually across the planet, buoyed by move- Sea levels rose, covering the continental shelves
ments from below, in the Earth’s mantle. Some- and land bridges, splitting up and isolating popula-
times the plates break into pieces; an aggregation tions and individual species. Those processes have
of continental fragments broke off from the prehis- continued throughout the Cenozoic Era up until
toric supercontinent called Gondwanaland about what is, geologically speaking, the present day. In
400 million years ago. Over the course of the en- Southeast Asia, long-term cycles of isolation and
suing 200 million years, some pieces of the broken recolonization have been the evolutionary norm.
continent migrated north to collide and fuse with
Asia at higher latitudes, in the process creating hose cycles fueled the rise of new species, led
much of what is now Vietnam. The Truong Son to the extinction of others, and, in general,
range arose during collisions that took place be- determined the distribution of the
tween the late Paleozoic and early Meso- present-day flora and
zoic Eras, between 340 million and 255 Indochinese warty| fauna OL eSSoutheast
million years ago. Asia. Thus the geolog-
Later, between 55 million and 40 mil- ical~and climatic his=
lion years ago, what is now the subconti-
nent of India broke off from Gondwana-
land and migrated north, colliding with
Eurasia. The fusion of the two land-
masses led to a major influx of new spe-
cies, which dispersed through India and
into Southeast Asia. As the collision of India with
Asia continued—and it continues to this day—the
rising Himalaya and the Tibetan
Plateau essentially isolated Southeast
Asia from invasions by species from
the north and west [see “The Anguid
Odyssey,” page 55).
While the Himalaya were rising,
Earth’s climate began to fluctuate be-
tween cool and warm phases. Conti-
nental glaciers formed and retreated and, in re-
sponse, sea levels fell and rose. When sea levels
fell, the shallow Sunda continental shelf became
exposed (today it lies beneath the seas south of
Vietnam). The Sunda shelf linked landmasses that
are now separated, forming bridges that joined
mainland Southeast Asia to the Sunda Islands—in-
cluding Borneo, Java, and Sumatra. A mixture of CURRENT KNOWN DISTRIBUTION OF
THE ANNAMITE STRIPED RABBIT
rainforest and grassland, woodland and sedge HISTORICAL DISTRIBUTION OF
THE SUMATRAN RABBIT
blanketed the emergent land. CURRENT KNOWN DISTRIBUTION OF
During such glacier-forming cold periods, THE INDOCHINESE WARTY PIG
| HISTORICAL DISTRIBUTION OF
when much of the Gulf of Thailand and parts of J THE JAVAN WARTY PIG
verrucosus
the South China Sea disappeared, the monsoons
picked up substantially less moisture than they do Both the recently described Annamite striped rabbit and the Indochi-
today. Seasons became more distinct. Forests previ- nese warty pig (rediscovered after more than 100 years) are known to
ously limited to mountain elevations descended to range in only a small stretch of the northern Truong Son. Their closest
lower levels, and grasslands proliferated, pushing likely relatives, however—the Sumatran striped rabbit and the Javan
out lowland evergreen rainforests. The most recent warty pig, respectively—range more than 1,500 miles away, on the
islands for which they are named. Fluctuating sea levels and changing
cold period took place about 18,000 years ago, the
habitats could have spurred multiple cycles of isolation and recolo-
climax of the last ice age. nization across land bridges, eventually leading to the evolution of
In contrast, during the warmer periods between distinct species. Genetic analyses of the striped rabbits indicate that
glacial advances the climate became wetter and less they became separate species some eight million years ago. (The
seasonal, and the evergreen rainforests expanded, drawings here are an artist's interpretation of field observations. )

March 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 53

 flora and fauna to migrate back and forth from the
mainland to Hainan Island. But the drier, cooler
climate of Yunnan Province limited the westward
dispersal of at least some of the species.
Sea levels far lower than they are today also en-
abled amphibians and reptiles to travel freely back
and forth between the Greater Sunda Islands and
mainland Southeast Asia. As a result, the two areas
share roughly afifth of their amphibian and reptile
species. In fact, investigators comparing present-
day species distributions with measurements of
contemporary ocean depths can demonstrate how
low sea levels must have fallen during some geo-
logical periods. Moving across the sea would have
been hard for reptiles and practically impossible
for amphibians, whose permeable skin does not
tolerate saltwater.

eas away from the seas, climate and geogra-

The Cat Ba langur (Trachypithecus poliocephalus) lives only on
phy can also playa role in the rise of new species
Cat Ba, a small rocky island not far off the coast of Vietnam— as well as in endemism. Here, however, Vietnam’s
Just the sort of environment to promote the evolution of an en- climatic cycles drove organisms up and down
demic species, whether through environmental influences or mountains rather than back and forth across land
even through a process such as the founder effect, by which a bridges that were later flooded.
small group of organisms become distinct from ancestral popu- For example, when the climate warmed, mon-
lations because of the isolation ofa limited gene pool. The
monkey’s numbers were never large, and it is thought to be sen-
tane forest communities contracted and moved up
ously threatened by the encroachments of tourism. Ironically, the mountain slopes, where the climate was rela-
tourists could also prove to be its saving grace: they often pay tively cool. Those contractions could keep forest
top dollar to see rare primates on minute islands. populations living on separate slopes isolated for
substantial periods of time—in some cases, long
tory of the region can serve biologists as a kind of enough to differentiate into distinct species. Later,
Rosetta stone, helping them to decode and disen- when the climate cooled again and the forests ex-
tangle the patterns of Vietnam’s biodiversity as well panded downslope, those now-distinct species
as to pinpoint where new species might be found. could disperse throughout the lowlands. If further
Consider, for example, some of the distribution warming phases pushed the new species back up to
patterns of Vietnamese amphibians and reptiles. high elevations, many might end up populating
Northeastern Vietnam shares more than twenty of new, or more widespread, areas than the ones
these species with China’s Hainan Island and where they originated. The effect, of course, is
Guangxi autonomous region. China’s Yunnan virtually identical to that of rising and falling sea
Province, however, which borders both Vietnam levels, which led to island endemism. But the mix-
and Guangxi, shares none of them. Sea-level ing of evolutionary lineages and the resultant di-
changes, in concert with climate, help explain the versity means zoologists are faced with a tangle
patterns. Low sea levels during the Pleistocene that they are only now sorting out.
Epoch, beginning 1.8 million years ago, enabled Bird endemism also seems to follow such a tan-
gled pattern. Montane
forests above about
The male crested argus (Rheinardia ocellata) has the
longest tail feathers of any bird in the world, reaching a 3,000: feet in the
maximum length of nearly seventy inches. Two separate Truong Son are rich in
regions host the birds: the Truong Son of Vietnam and songbird diversity, no-
Laos, and montane areas on the Malay Peninsula. The tably in the flycatchers
disjunct range could be a consequence of sea-level changes and Old World war-
and vanations in forest cover in recent geological times,
blers and related spe-
leaving the species in only these evergreen forest refuges.
This photograph was taken using a “camera trap”—a cies. Two of the three
camera attached to a motion detector that can do field- new bird species de-
work when no one is around. scribed in the central

| NATURAL HISTORY March 2003

Truong Son (the black-crowned barwing, the which habitat may have expanded or shrunk with
golden-winged laughingthrush, and the chestnut- time, could help explain why, even in such an
eared laughingthrush) are endemic to the area. Eden of biodiversity as Vietnam, the Truong Son
Biologists have recognized range outshines the rest of
eleven endemic subspecies of the country. (Indeed, in ad-
babblers there as well. These dition to the species we
discoveries have led the con- mentioned earlier, the rain-
servation organization Bird- forests of the Truong Son
Life International to desig- harbor about a dozen en-
Mater this, “recionms) Ob the demic species of frogs.)
Truong Son a high priority
for bird conservation. UeJee ak some pat-
terns of endemism are
he patterns of endemism not so easily explained. Viet-
and speciation observed The Anguid Odyssey nam 1s host to several princi-
in Vietnam are set in motion Pictured above is a limbless glass lizard of the pal kinds of primates: gib-
when the separated popula- family Anguidae, genus Ophisaurus. (These animals bons (lesser apes), langurs
tions become trapped by may look like snakes, but their ears and movable and macaques (which are
some kind of barrier that de- eyelids are telltale distinguishing features.) Several both monkeys), and lorises
velops between them. But species of glass lizards are endemic to Southeast (which are prosimians). The
Asia, but the story of how they got there (and
that barrier need not be ele- ranges of many of those ani-
where they went afterward) is no less interesting
vation, or a land bridge that than endemism. Onginating in North Amenca, the mals are clearly restricted, yet
Inas’ been flooded. In the ancestors of limbless glass lizards probably migrated strangely, for many of them,
Truong Son another kind of to western Europe between 40 million and 50 no discernible geographic
barrier has arisen, in the form million years ago, across a land bndge (not shown barrier has been identified.
of a moist refuge surrounded in this contemporary map). They then expanded Several but not all of Viet-
into northern Afnca and western Asia. As species
by a drier environment. radiated throughout eastern Asia, the uplift of the
nam’s primate species live
As we noted earlier, the Tibetan Plateau between 10 million and 25 miltion only east of the Mekong
Truong Son act as a barrier to years ago isolated the new species from populations Raver, even though there 1s
the monsoon winds, giving to the west. At roughly the same time, one eastern no apparent reason that they
rise to high rainfall and a re- lineage returned to North Amenca via the Bering could not raft across. Even
duced dry season on the east- land bridge. The result: Vietnam’s three species of more strangely, the ranges of
glass lizards count different North American species
ern slopes. As a result, moist as their distant ancestors and closest relatives.
all but two of Vietnam’s pri-
evergreen forests have grown mates—the lesser slow loris
historically at all elevations to and the bear macaque—are
the east of the main ridge restricted to either the north
(though today much of the or the south of the country.
land at lower elevations is de- A 195-muile-wide transition
forested). In contrast, on the zone, between 14 and 17 de-
western slopes drier semi- grees north latitude, serves
evergreen forests are more as a barrier between north
common. and south, but no climatic or
The moist evergreen for- geographic reasons have been
est may have been able to identified for the existence of
persist on the eastern slopes this barrier.
of the Truong Son despite Ecologists, confronted
increasingly dramatic climate with such a checkerboard
fluctuations during the past distribution, have speculated
three million years. Those that competition for food or
tropical rainforests may have other resources might limit
provided a refuge for forest- the expansion of one species
dependent species during into another one’s range. Al-
colder, drier, more distinctly though that explanation
seasonal periods. Such an sounds plausible, it is under-
extra. dimension, along mined by the observation

March 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 55

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 The golden Vietnamese cypress (Xanthocypanis viet- How well do the
namensis), a conifer that inhabits the northern available data support
reaches . Vietnam, was first described by scientists in that hypothesis? The an-
2001. Mature trees bear both needles (left) and scales swer is not yet clear. A
(nght)—a a highly unusual
« condition for a mature tree.
(It is much more common for a conifer to have one
combination of compe-
kind of leaf when young and the other kind when tition among species for
mature.) The “discovery” was no surpnse, of course, to available resources and
the region's indigenous people; they have long sought climatic factors were
out the tree’s fragrant wood, leaving the species’ sur- probably at work, but
vival in serous question.
more study needs to be
done before biologists
that species such as the Assamese macaque and the have a solid picture of primate evolution in Viet-
pigtailed macaque, whose ranges do not overlap in nam. Biodiversity, it seems, is not merely a result of
Vietnam, live side by side in Laos and China. In- geographical and climatic obstacles and effects. The
terspecific competition cannot be the only answer. irony is that, although geographic ranges are better
Other investigators have speculated that glacia- known for primates than for any other group of or-
tion during the Pleistocene Epoch—accompanied ganisms in the region, those ranges are perhaps the
by colder temperatures, depressed rainfall, and in- ones biologists are least able to explain.
creased seasonality—might have forced primates
into ecological refuges. Species that ended up in n seeking to understand the origins of Vietnam’s
the northern areas were presumably better able to biodiversity, biologists have to be wary of snap
manage the cooler weather year-round than were judgments. Particularly for species identified only
the species that favored the south. in the past decade, it is virtually impossible to de-

WHERE ON EarTH Is THE KHTING VOR?

pecies are often described from remains; such work subcategories within the family Bovidae: the goats and _
is the obvious domain of paleontology. But some- sheep; the oxen, bison, and buffaloes; and the common
times zoologists hoping to find extant organisms begin domesticated cattle. :
by doing the same thing. In 1994 a new ox-like species Not surprisingly, then, aGide ertopeds ab
was described solely on the basis of horns that had whether or not the khting vor ever existed. Were
been sold as hunting trophies at markets in south-cen- horns in fact creations of local craftsmen, prized for
tral Vietnam and eastern Cambodia in the early twen- their value as ritual objects or in traditional medicine?
tieth century. The animal was given the scientific Further molecular work has shown that the specimens
name Pseudonovibos spiralis, and it was expected to be are actually from common cattle, and sophisticated ie
similar to other wild cattle found in the same area, in- amination of the horns themselves indicates that th
cluding the gaur and the kouprey, or gray ox. Suppos- unique ringing patterns and torsion were created by
edly it inhabited the deciduous and semi-deciduous carving, heating, and twisting. Given the limited num-
forests of southern Indochina. Its horns, shaped like a ber of horns collected to date (between sixty and sev-
lyre, were ringed with knobs and twisted at the tips: a enty), the problems of contamination associated with _
combination unique among mammals. the recovery of “ancient” DNA, and the extremely _
The horns, it was thought, might represent the re- limited data on its Possible geographical habitats, the —
mains of an elusive animal known in the Khmer lan- question of the khting vor’s legitimacy has become ex-
guage of Cambodia as the khting vor, a name describing tremely difficult to resolve in its favor. .
the shape of the horns (from khting, meaning gaur, and Stull, a recent camera-trapping survey of Cambodia, ss
vor, a liana, or creeping vine). In the traditional folk- in which cameras activated by tripwires were leftin _*
lore of the region, the khting vor 1s a snake-eating wild forests, could have finally removed such uncharitable
ox. Its horns are held to protect people and their skepticism. Unfortunately, though, no pictures of the |
homes against snakes, and are also ground into a pow- animal were obtained. Either the khting vor is expert at
der for treating venomous bites. avoiding zoological paparazzi, or, as with the unicorn|
DNA was recovered from the horns, but considerable before it, its only proper place is in the pages ofJoey :
doubt arose from its analysis. Confusingly, it suggested Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings. H
the animal belonged to not one but three quite different :
hao M.H.
Ris
z es

58 |
ATURAL HIS TORY March 2003
termine whether their ranges are restricted by passage of deep time, to the problem of conserva-
long-term geological or climatic factors, or simply tion—which strives to match the double-time pace
because of habitat loss or degradation. Some species of economic development—we might be able to
may be “bastard endemics”—occupying only a protect areas before they've been thoroughly ex-
subset ofa formerly larger geographic range—sim- plored, perhaps leaving some of Vietnam’s diversity
ply because they have retreated, say, to mountain- for the future to discover. O
top islands in a sea of cultivated or seri-
ously degraded land.
Acknowledging the ability of environ-
mental degradation to create endemism
brings a practical urgency to the theoreti-
cal study of the factors that create endemic
species. In short, the study of endemism is
not just a pursuit for evolutionary biolo-
gists; 1t is an issue for conservationists and
environmentalists to consider as well.
Vietnam has arelatively long history of
seeking to redress environmental degrada-
tion. As far back as 1962, Ho Chi Minh,
the revolutionary general and president of
North Vietnam from 1945 until 1969,
established the country’s first protected
area, Cuc Phuong National Park [see
“This Land,” by Nguyen Thi Dao, page 70).
By 1990 more than ninety reserves, cov-
ering some 4 percent of the country (or
about 3.2 million acres), had been placed
under government protection. The Viet-
namese government still has plans to
roughly double that protected area, but in
the region’s second most populous nation,
the demands of economic development
must compete for land with efforts to
conserve biodiversity.

n that context, the study of endemism

Lee help governments and others set
priorities about what to protect. Cer-
tainly it makes sense to determine those
priorities, as conservationists have done in
the past, on the basis of which species are
endemic. After all, ifa local population of
a widespread species were to go extinct, at
least there would still be other popula-
tions in the world, but endemic species
have much more restricted ranges. The
loss ofa single population, or a couple of
populations of such species, could easily
lead to the species’ extinction. The gray-shanked douc langur (P. n. cinereus) was first described by
The trick, then, is to identify areas of biologists in 1997. It shares the Truong Son with red- and black-sha‘iked
endemism preemptively, without waiting douc langur subspecies, which live to its north and south, respectively. This
animal, however, was found not in the forest but for sale in a market, and
for some remarkable discovery to send
it currently lives in a center for rescued primates. Only a handful of these
everyone scrambling to save a rare and ob- animals have been seen in the wild. Considerable debate exists as to
viously threatened organism. By applying whether these subspecies ought to be lumped into one species or split
the study of endemism, rooted in the slow into three. For now, the lumpers hold the upper hand.

March 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 59

 Rubbing of a ca cuong water bug, from an urn in Mieu Temple, Hue, Vietnam

On the Scent
The trail of a giant water bug leads from Arizona to Vietnam.
By Robert L. Smith

any years ago, as a graduate student Sometimes while studying my bugs in mountain
drawn to behavioral ecology and aquatic streams, I came across another species of water
insects, I encountered my first water bug bug, Lethocerus medius. That one belongs to an-
in the mountain streams of southern Arizona. The other subfamily of giant water bugs, the Letho-
species was Abedus herberti, a member of one sub- cerinae, which don’t carry eggs on their backs. In-
family of giant water bugs, the Belostomatinae. stead, the female attaches large clutches of eggs in
This bug has a remarkable behavior: the male often the open air, to vegetation and other material that
carries the eggs of its progeny on its back. That emerges above the water’s surface. I kept my eye
same behavior, rarely seen in other groups of in- out for her deposits but never saw any, nor did |
sects, has been observed or inferred in more than a find any immature bugs. The reason was that these
hundred species belonging to five genera of the bugs usually live in the still waters of ponds and
same water bug subfamily. At the time, however, lakes, not in streams. Arnold Menke, a specialist in
no one had adequately explained it. That’s when I water bug systematics, then at the Smithsonian
knew these bugs were the ones for me. Institution in Washington, D.C., suggested I look
In my subsequent investigations I learned that for them in the desert, in so-called cattle tanks.
the male acquires the eggs while mating repeat- Cattle tanks are natural depressions in the
edly—sometimes more than a hundred times— ground. They are usually bone dry in May and
with the female. His possessiveness ensures that his June, when surface temperatures can exceed 140
sperm alone are responsible for fertilizing all of the degrees, but they rapidly fill with runoff during
eggs she lays on his back. The male then carries the southern Arizona “monsoons’—thunder-
the eggs until they hatch, keeping them wet and storms that arrive soon after the human-made
making sure they can breathe [see “Daddy Water fireworks of the Fourth of July. The ponds begin
Bugs,” February 1980]. to teem with algae and other life that has lain dor-

60 NATURAL HISTORY March 2003

mant, and, summoned by the rains, some insect eggs from above. But the male also acted just like
species in the mountain streams fly to the desert the males among my “back brooders,” regularly
below to gorge on the bounty. interrupting both egg laying and watering to insist
Among the opportunistic migrants is L. medius, on another bout of sex. When the female finally
the largest giant water bug in Arizona. Adults can finished laying all her eggs, she swam off, while
measure nearly three inches long, and they come the male remained behind for about a week, tend-
equipped with piercing, sucking mouthparts and ing the eggs until they hatched.
clawed raptorial front legs. They are big enough
to ambush tadpoles too chunky for any other in- y lucky accident I discovered that the males
sect predators. The female water bugs use most of were also valiant at defense. One day I tapped
their nutrient bounty to produce eggs, whereas several times on the top of an egg-bearing stake
the males expend energy on grabbing and defend- with my pocketknife, to
ing home bases on the emergent vegetation, from seat the stake more firmly
which they court females ready to lay eggs. in the mud. The resident
bug, which had been rest-
n the mid-1980s, in the company of my friend ing head-down below the
Eric Larsen, then a graduate student working on water's surface, rushed up
other water bugs known as back swimmers (he to the eggs, covered them
now teaches at the University of Chicago), I began with his body, spread his
studying the reproductive behavior of L. medius. raptorial front legs, and
We noted early on that the bugs laid their eggs on extended his beak. I was
sticklike objects extending two feet or more above so startled that I dropped
the water. Mesquite branches, steel and wooden my knife into the water.
fence posts, and partly submerged cocklebur plants In the minute it took
were all popular. me to retrieve my knife,
In the second year of work I tried an experi- a possible explanation for
ment. I stripped several ponds of their potential such a formidable display
egg-laying sites and substituted new ones, sticking occurred to me. Birds
several dozen flat wooden stakes into the mud. might threaten eggs that
After several weeks I was pleased to find that eggs were suspended above
had been laid on a number of my stakes. After an- the water (though I had
other week I captured bugs in nets as they were never seen that happen). A
resting underwater on the stakes. Talk about instant charging giant water bug
gratification! Every stake with eggs also harbored a could be a good deterrent,
bug, and every bug was a male! Moreover, stakes and such behavior would
without eggs rarely harbored a bug of either sex. be favored by natural se-
I learned that male bugs not only hang out on lection. I tested how other
the objects that bear their eggs but also brood the bugs reacted to a “pecking
eggs by bringing them water. That finding was bird simulation” and dis-
confirmed independently by Noritaka Ichikawa, a covered that the bugs’ re-
A female L. medius lays her eggs, whi le
biologist at the Himeji City Aquarium in Japan, sponses were consistent
the male above her keeps them moistened
working with L. deyrollei, a Japanese water bug with my hypothesis. with water.
species. His laboratory studies show that underwa- During several years of
ter, a brooding bug both imbibes water and satu- observing I was amazed by other feats of the brood-
rates its body. The wet insect then quickly crawls ing males. Ifa person (or perhaps a cow) abruptly
up to the eggs and positions himself head down approached a male positioned on his eggs, the bug
over them, dripping and regurgitating water into would usually jump into the water and swim sev-
the clutch. Ichikawa and I have proved that the eral yards away. The first few tumes that happened, I
eggs of the species we study desiccate and dieifleft despaired that the dad would ever find his eggs
unattended in open air, and that they drown again—but every bug always did, and quickly, even
within hours if submerged. at night. Indeed, male bugs could find the right
Early in my field research I witnessed my first stake in the midst of a forest of stakes, even ifI
mating pair of L. medius. While the female laid added extras nearby just to sow confusion. Some-
eggs at the lower edge of the clutch, the male times, too, a female laid eggs on a dead cocklebur
demonstrated his commitment by irrigating the plant. I watched in awe as, even in the dark, the

March 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 61

 male repeatedly as- William S. Bowers and Philip Evans, chemical
cended the maze ecologists in the department of entomology at the
of branches, nearly University of Arizona in Tucson, I analyzed the
flawlessly making contents of glands from L. medius as well as from
the correct choices another North American species, L. americanus.
at as many as five Both species contained the same chemical—trans-
branching points. hex-2-enyl acetate—that occurs in L. indicus, and
How did he do it? both sexes produced it, though the males carried
more than ten times as much as the females did. In
began to focus fact, it now seems that all two dozen species in the
on an anatomi- genus Lethocerus produce the same chemical.
Galkteature that Could the gland be used for defense? Not likely.
had been recog- In handling hundreds ofthe bugs, I have never had
nized in L. indicus, one discharge its scent gland on me (though dis-
an Asian water tressed bugs regularly evacuated the stinky contents
bug species. L. in- of their guts). Besides, the gland product is not
dicus possesses a noxious or foul smelling; on the contrary, it is very
gland with an pleasant. Might the gland manufacture sexual
outlet on the un- pheromones? That, too, is a non-starter. Such at-
derside of its tho- tractants are usually produced by only one sex, and
rax. Asian biolo- typically they are complex chemical blends that
gists have taken a differ sharply, even among closely related species.
special interest in The water bug product is basically made up of one
the gland, because fairly simple compound.
Among the largest of the giant water bugs, L. medius
its fragrant exu- Instead, I think, in emergent-brooding water
dines regularly on small vertebrates such as fish fry date is a highly bugs the gland functions to lay down a chemical
and tadpoles. valued flavoring trail that can be followed during egg laying and
among gourmet egg brooding. The opening for the gland’s secre-
chefs, particularly in Vietnam but also in other re- tion is directly between the hind legs, perfect for
gions of Southeast Asia and southern China [see marking vegetation. If I am right, the gland en-
“Bug Juice,” opposite page|. Curiously, the gland oc- ables male bugs to find their eggs both day and
curs in both males and females, but the gland in the night. And this explanation accounts for the ab-
male is reported to be as much as twenty-five times sence of the gland among back-brooders, whose
larger than the one in the female. behavior is thought to have evolved later than that
In fact, that organ, called the metathoracic scent of emergent brooders: they simply don’t need it.
gland, is a basic feature of Heteroptera, the insect Why do both sexes possess the gland when only
order to which giant water bugs belong. The the males brood? While laying her eggs, the mother
organ commonly releases a noxious chemical used water bug periodically returns to the water to re-
in defense (in the stink fresh herself. Further-
bug, for instance) or more, she can be
a pheromone used in knocked off the egg-
courtship. Mysteriously, laying site by her mate’s
though, the gland is insistent attempts to
absent in back-brood- copulate. The gland
ing giant water bugs may be useful to her in
such as A. herberti. finding her way back to
Moreover, though it is her eggs for the few
present in emergent- hours it takes her to
brooders such as L. finish laying them. But
medius, biologists had the males apparently
not determined what need larger glands; they
function it or its prod- have to find the eggs
ucts might fulfill for many times each day
the bug. A male L. medius returning from a dip has to navigate to the top for a week or more, not
With the help of of a maze of branches to return to his eggs. just for a few hours. O

62 NATURAL HISTORY March 2003

 Bug Juice
y earliest memories of the ca aunts, who lived in the old quarter of
cuong water bug can’t be Hanoi, scoured the city, but alas, no
separated from the pleasures luck! The market seemed to have
of eating. My grandmother, who been cornered by people who
lived with us in Bangkok, would By Le Anh Tu Packard planned to leave the country.
prepare her traditional Vietnamese On my second trip, in 1992, I met
dish of noodles in a glorious chicken Vu Quang Manh, a zoologist and an
broth topped with thin slivers of recalled an earthy proverb: Ca cuong authority on the ca cuong. (He is cur-
omelet, steamed chicken breast, and chet den dit con cay (the ca cuong, dead, rently an associate professor at Hanoi
a smooth-textured paté. It was served on reaching the anus remains in- National Pedagogic University and
with nuoc mam, a fish sauce mixed tense). It is a variant of the adage that head of the Vietnam Soil Ecology So-
with lemon juice, minced ginger, no one can change the basic nature of ciety.) He told me that the bug, which
garlic, and just one drop of the things. That the ca cuong is widely inhabits ponds and waterlogged fields,
essence extracted from the ca cuong’s believed to be an aphrodisiac adds subsists mainly on a diet of small fish,
scent glands. That one drop suffused further ambiguity to the proverb. tadpoles, large aquatic insects, and
the dish with an indescribable fra- Other friends have offered depic- snails. According to Manh, even the
grance, enough for the entire family. tions of the bug—rubbings from a carcasses of some large waterfowl
Even at the age of five I knew that temple in Hue, Vietnam’s former im- show signs’of the insect’s deadly bite.
the ca cuong was a wonderful, pre- perial capital [see illustration below and In the 1980s ca cuong could still be
cious creature. In times of war and on page 60|—and recounted stories seen flying around Hanoi’s Ba Dinh
social turmoil, vials of its aromatic about the ca cuong in ancient times. Square, attracted by the lampposts and
essence were literally a liquid asset, by the spotlights illuminating the
more valuable (and more portable) mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh. They
than gold. My mother told of fami- were also common near Ho Tay (West
lies that escaped from Laos to Thai- Lake). Now they are gone from both
land in 1946, driven out by the terror places, driven away by chemical fertil-
of French bombs. Vials of the sub- izers and pesticides. Manh reports
lime essence they brought with them more recent sightings of the bugs in
provided the capital they needed to Van Long Wetland Nature Reserve in
start a new life. David Marr, a historian at the Aus- Ninh Binh Province, south of Hanoi,
Even after coming to America in tralian National University in Can- a pesticide-free riverine wetland.
1960, I never stopped yearning for the berra, forwarded me a 1928 article on
ca cuong. Miniature vials contributed the region’s edible insects that in- hat this fabulous creature may dis-
by visiting relatives were gratefully re- cludes the story, perhaps apocryphal, appear from Vietnam would be a
ceived and sparingly used. Then, in of how the bug got its name. Legend tragedy for our culture artd cuisine—
the late 1980s, an uncle who traveled hasiat that<lrieu Da 207-137. B.C), a the rough equivalent of abolishing
frequently to Vietnam told me that Chinese general who became ruler of truffles from French cuisine. Fortu-
my beloved ca cuong was hardly to be central Vietnam, sent the Chinese nately, Manh is leading a project to
seen anymore. I was shocked, and re- emperor a tribute of precious objects, create a hospitable habitat for the
solved to learn more about the fate of including a number of the insects. water bug—one free of chemical fer-
this gastronomic delight. The emperor then wrote to ask the tilizers and pesticides. An effort to save
insect’s name. To inflate the bug’s the ca cuong is an important compo-
invited a dear friend who lives in value, Da called it a cinnamon-tree nent of a wider effort to promote sus-
Paris to share his memories of the weevil. But the emperor sent back an tainable organic agriculture and to
ca cuong. Noting that their season artfully worded, reproachful reply, protect Vietnam’s environment.
came in late spring and early summer, that no one in that region would call Cultivating the ca cuong and ex-
he said his images were of bugs it by that name, and Trieu Da ought porting its essence could help poor
caught, cooked whole, and then not assume that his betters would be farmers increase their income and
mashed in a bowl with some nuoc so easily fooled. As a result, the insect generate hard currency revenues for
mam fish sauce. The family would came to be called ca cuong, a man- the nation. Even non-Vietnamese
gather round, dipping boiled cabbage gling of the phrase Da cuong, meaning epicures, on tasting the flavor of the
leaves in the shared bowl. For him, “Da embarrassed.” ca cuong, may fall under its spell. And
the ca cuong evoked not so much On my first trip back to Vietnam, why not? Whoever thought, after all,
physical or olfactory sensations as the in 1990, I asked about procuring ca that Westerners would develop such a
promise of changing seasons. He also cuong essence. One of my indulgent passion for raw fish? Ol

March 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 63

Nature seems to have a sense ofproportion.
By Mario Livio

Olivia Parker, Equinox, 1992

 hat do:
¢ the arrangements of sunflower seeds;
e the branching of leaves on a stem;
e the flight path ofa diving falcon;
the breeding of rabbits;
the spiral shapes of nautilus shells and other mollusks;
the shapes of spiral galaxies; and
the way black holes change from one “phase” to another
all have in common? What shared thread connects the petal arrangement in a red
rose with the art of Salvador Dali and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright?
The answer is, all these phenomena share a close association with a single, extra-
ordinary number. No wonder the number in question has earned the name
“golden ratio.”
The golden ratio—aka G “golden section,’ “golden number,” and even “divine
proportion” —is hardly, by itself, a novel concept. The systematizer of Greek geom-
etry, Euclid, who taught in Alexandria around 300 B.c., defined the number in
Elements, his famous work on geometry and number theory. But Euclid’s definition
was entirely geometric and betrayed not the slightest acquaintance with the role of
the golden ratio in the natural world. In fact, it was nothing more than a modestly
amusing way for geometers to divide a line into two unequal parts. Little did Euclid
know that his innocent-looking division would preoccupy mathematicians, physi-
cists, botanists, psychologists, and artists for the next few millennia.

uclid’s number (the name “golden ratio” was applied centuries later) emerges
from geometry in the following way: Take any line segment and divide it into
two parts, in such a way that the longer part of the line segment is in the same pro-
portion to the shorter part as the entire line segment is to the longer part. The ratio
in question is the golden ratio [see diagram below]. (You don’t need to follow the
mathematics to understand the rest of this article, but for readers who are interested,
here’s how to figure
out the value of Eu-
clid’s number: Sup- | |.
pose the length of the <2 a | >
shorter part is 1 and
the length of the longer part is x. That makes the length of the original line segment
equal to x + 1. According to Euclid’s definition, then, the value of the golden ratio
is x/1, the ratio of the longer part to the shorter part. But that ratio must also be
equal to (x + 1)/x, or the ratio of the original line to the longer part. The solution
for x is then a straightforward, albeit technical, matter of high school algebra.)
Turn the crank, and the number that solves the equation for x is equal to the
never-ending, never-repeating number 1.6180339887 . . . , commonly denoted by
the Greek letter phi, or @. Phi is not to be confused with the Greek letter pi, or 1,
which stands for a more familiar never-ending, nonrepeating number also present
throughout Euclid’s work. Pi, whose decimal value is 3.1415926535 ... , is simply
the ratio of the circumference ofa circle to its diameter. But pi also makes guest ap-
pearances in the most diverse parts of natural science. In that respect phi is like pi: its
original definition can be understood by virtually anyone, but it reappears in a re-
markable variety of arcane and mysterious guises.
Also like pi, the number phi is an irrational number, one that cannot be expressed
as a ratio of two whole numbers, such as 3/1, 3/2, 5/7, or 23/39. In fact, phi 1s
mathematically the “most irrational” number, in the sense that, if you try to ap-
proximate it as what is known as a continued fraction (one in which fractions are
added in the denominator ad infinitum), you find that the approximation converges
on it more slowly than continued-fraction approximations do for any other irra-
tional number.

March 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 65

 In a golden rectangle the ratio of the and 55, or 144 and 89. Even 233 and 144
longer side to the shorter is equal to has been reported. Amazingly, if you cal-
phi. A square removed from one end culate these as ratios (55/34, 89/55,
leaves a smaller golden rectangle, and 144/89, 233/144), you find that they get
that process can be repeated indefi-
nitely. The smooth spiral that passes
closer and closer to the value of the
through the successively smaller golden ratio phi!
squares is called a loganthmic spiral, The patterning of sunflowers is closely
whose properties give it special promi- related to one of the discoveries made in
nence in nature. 1837 by two French brothers, Auguste
and Louis Bravais. Auguste, a crystallog-
he number phi would have remained in the rapher, and Louis, a botanist, observed that as new
elias obscurity of pure mathematics were it leaves are put forth from the tip of many growing
not for its propensity to pop up where least ex- plants, each new leaf advances by an angle of
pected. Take, for instance, the head ofa sunflower. roughly 137.5 degrees from the preceding leaf,
The florets form various clockwise and counter- around the circumference of the stem. That angle
clockwise spiral patterns, intertwined and criss- is what you get if you divide the number of de-
crossing but otherwise unmistakable to the eye. grees in a complete circle, 360, by the number
Each floret arises in the center of the sunflower phi, and then subtract the result from 360.
and gets pushed outward by its successors; the spi- But why should the leaves of a plant arrange
ral patterning is an outcome of the way the florets themselves in a pattern that is based on a number
are most easily and efficiently packed as they grow. derived from the division ofa line? If the angle be-
The number of clockwise spirals and the number tween the leaves is, say, 90 degrees (which is equal
of counterclockwise spirals vary, depending on the to 360/4), or any other simple fraction of 360 de-
size of the sunflower. Usually you find 55 twisting grees, the leaves will align one above the other on
one way and 34 the other, but you may find 89 the stem, leaving large spaces unfilled. (In the case
of 90 degrees, they will make four lines along the
stem.) Such an arrangement would probably be
undesirable for the plant, because overlapping
leaves would shield one another from the light
they need. By arranging themselves according to
an angle determined by phi, the leaves can fill the
spaces in the most efficient way possible, with the
least amount of overlap.

Bee is hardly the only context in which the

golden ratio appears. Take the so-called golden
rectangle, in which the ratio of the length to the
width is equal to phi. If you snip off a square from
the rectangle, the rectangle that remains is also a
golden rectangle. You can continue this process of
smipping off squares ad infinitum, generating
smaller and smaller golden rectangles. No other
rectangle gives rise to the same shape as you snip off
successive squares. If you then connect the succes-
sive points where the whirling squares cut the sides
of the rectangles, you get a curve known as a loga-
rithmic spiral [see illustration at top of page].
The name follows from an observation by the
seventeenth-century Swiss mathematician Jakob
Bernoulli. Bernoulli noted that the logarithm of
the distance from the spiral’s center at any point
along it is proportional to the angle by which you
advance. To express the same thing another way, if
you follow the spiral through a series of full, 360-
Whirlpool Galaxy, in the constellation Canes Venatici degree turns, the distances measured along the rays

6 | NATURAL HISTORY March 2003

emanating from the center, or “pole,” of the spiral growth. And it is through that pattern that the
to a point on the curve form a geometric series. In golden ratio is intimately related to the Fibonacci
other words, each distance is a constant multiple of sequence, a celebrated series of numbers discov-
the preceding one.
Bernoulli recognized
that the logarithmic spiral
does not alter its shape as
its size increases, a prop-
erty known as self-simi-
larity. For that reason,
Bernoulli noted, the spiral
“may be used as a symbol,
either of fortitude and
constancy in adversity, or
of the human body, which
after all its changes, even
after death, will be restored
(O) its sexact’ and |perfect
self”’ He asked to have the
spiral engraved on_ his
tombstone—but, sadly, ig-
norance prevailed, and the
tombstone artist carved
only the simple coil (the
shape formed by, say, a role
of paper towels) known as
the Archimedean spiral. Bill Varie, Rose in Bloom, 1998
Another intriguing prop-
erty of the logarithmic spiral is that it is equiangular: ered by the early thirteenth-century Italian mathe-
if you drawastraight line from the pole to any point matician Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci.
on the spiral curve, the line always cuts the curve at
precisely the same angle. Falcons bank on this prop- I his book Liber abaci (“Book of the Abacus’),
erty when attacking their prey. Vance A. Tucker, a published in 1202, Fibonacci posed the follow-
biologist at Duke University in Durham, North ing fanciful problem about the breeding of rabbits:
Carolina, studied falcons for many years and discov-
A certain man put a pair of rabbits in a place surrounded
ered that they usually follow a slightly curved trajec-
on all sides by a wall. How many rabbits can be produced
tory to their victims, rather than plummeting in a from that pair in a year if it is supposed that every month
straight line. Tucker eventually realized that the fal- each pair begets a new pair, which from the second
cons’ trajectory could be a consequence of keeping month on becomes productive?
the fovea of one or the other eye, the most acute
part of their vision, locked onto their target. To The solution to the problem 1s fairly simple. Start
make use of the fovea during a straight downward with one pair of baby rabbits. After a month you
plunge, the falcons would have to cock their heads still have only the one pair of rabbits, now nearing
some forty degrees to one side or the other. But maturity. In the third month, however, you have
Tucker showed in wind-tunnel experiments that two pairs of rabbits (the original pair, plus their first
cocking the head would slow the falcons down two babies). Come back in another month and you
considerably. By keeping their heads straight while have three pairs, because the first pair has generated
keeping their target in view from the most advanta- another set of babies. In the fifth month you have
geous angle, the falcons naturally follow the curve five pairs (because the first pair of babies has be-
of a (highly drawn-out) logarithmic spiral. come old enough to reproduce). And so on.
Nature just loves logarithmic spirals. You can You end up with the sequence of numbers 1, 1,
find them in phenomena ranging from the shell of eA 58 2d 3s 21134955, 89) 1445233 -and-so.on,
the chambered nautilus to hurricanes and spiral in which each term (from the third on) is equal to
galaxies. Sometimes, as in the case of the nautilus, the sum of the two preceding terms. The sequence
they are a natural outcome of a pattern of additive was named the Fibonacci sequence by the nine-

March 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 67

 teenth-century French mathematician Edouard age, are brighter than older ones. But how do
Lucas. For the sake of historical accuracy, one such spiral arms retain their shape over long peri-
should note that this sequence of numbers actually ods of time? The reason this question is an astro-
appeared even earlier than Fibonacci, in a rule for physical puzzler is that a galaxy does not rotate
the construction of meter in a category of Sanskrit about its center like a disk of solid material, in
poems known as matravrittas. Indian poets wrote which all parts simultaneously make a complete
about the rule in detail before Fibonacci was born, circuit. Instead, the closer to the center the stars
but Western mathematicians were unaware of their or other matter lie, the faster they rotate. A spiral
contributions until the appearance ofa 1985 article arm made up of some fixed group of bright stars
by Parmanand Singh, a mathematician then at Raj should quickly get “wound up”—but that would
Narain College in Hajipur, India. imply that spiral galaxies were much rarer than
You may have noticed that some of the numbers they are observed to be.
in the Fibonacci series have already been men- The explanation is that the spirals are not struc-
tioned: they are the same as the tures of connected material stream-
numbers of clockwise and counter- ing out from the center ofa galaxy,
1/1 = 1.000000
clockwise spirals appearing in sun- as they might appear. Instead, they
2/1 = 2.000000
flowers. And recall that the ratios of 3/2 = 1.500000 are the result of waves of gas com-
the numbers of spirals were good ap- 5/3 = 1.666667 pression sweeping through the
proximations of phi. It turns out that 8/5 = 1.600000 disk. Where gas is compressed, the
if you calculate the ratios of succes- 13/8 = 1.625000 © birth of new stars is triggered. Be-
sive Fibonacci numbers [approximated — 21/13= 1.615385 cause matter is not uniformly dis-
to the sixth decimal place in the table at 34/21 = 1.619048 tributed throughout the galaxy, the
right], the ratios oscillate about phi 55/34 = 1.617647 waves sustain a spiral effect as a
but also converge on it as you go far- 89/55 = 1.618182 kind of interference pattern.
ther out along the sequence. | 144/89= 1.617978 The golden ratio makes an unex-
Thus Fibonacci numbers are a 233/144 = 1.618056 pected appearance even in the
kind of golden ratio in disguise, and 377/233 = 1.618026 thermodynamics of certain black
they, too, pop up in the most unex- 610/377 = 1.618037 holes. Black holes can be either
pected places. One is in the micro- 987/610 = 1.618033 nonrotating (in physicists’ terms,
tubules of an animal cell, which are they have no angular momentum)
hollow cylindrical tubes of a protein polymer. To- or spinning. Spinning black holes (called Kerr
gether they make up the cytoskeleton, a structure black holes, after the New Zealander physicist Roy
that gives shape to the cell and also appears to act as Kerr) can exist in two states, one in which they
a kind of cell “nervous system.” Each mammalian heat up when they lose energy and one in which
microtubule is typically made up of thirteen they cool down. They also can undergo a phase
columns, arranged in five right-handed and eight transition from one state to the other. The transi-
left-handed structures (5, 8, and 13 are all Fi- tion can take place only when the black hole
bonacci numbers). Furthermore, occasionally one reaches a state in which the square of its mass is
finds double microtubules with an outer envelope precisely equal to phi times the square of its angu-
made up—you guessed 1t—of 21 columns, the next lar momentum (in the appropriate units). This
Fibonacci number. The precise reason that the Fi- seemingly magical appearance of phi stems from
bonacci numbers show up in microtubules is not another unique mathematical property of the
clear, but some investigators have argued that mi- golden ratio: its square can be obtained simply by
crotubules structured this way are more efficient adding 1 to phi (you can check that statement with
than other possible structures are as “information a pocket calculator).
processors.” Because these sets of numbers are so
small, however, the apparent connection with the n this and countless other ways, the golden ratio
Fibonacci series may be coincidental. Lbisten the feeling of amazement that Einstein
regarded as essential for all intellectual endeavors.
urning from the microscopic to nature on a In Einstein’s words:
large scale, one finds that the spiral arms of The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It
many disk-shaped galaxies are often close to loga- is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of
rithmic spirals [see photograph on page 66]. The spi- true art and science. He who knows it not and can no
ral arms stand out because that is where many longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as
stars are being born, and younger stars, on aver- dead, a snuffed-out candle. O

IIR A
lL HISTORY March 2003
Carlotta Corpron, Chambered Nautilus in Space Composition, c. 1950

March 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 69

THIS LAND

My Life as a Forest Creature

Growing up with the Cuc Phuong National Park

By Nguyen Thi Dao

ing no heed to the scratching thorn-

bushes. Snakes are common in Cuc
Phuong; some, such as the banded
krait, are deadly poisonous.
My friends from the local Muong
ethnic group told me that if you didn’t
disturb the snakes and the bees, they
wouldn't go out of their way to hurt
you. Relocated from their traditional
villages in the center of the park, the
Muong now occupy shanties in the
parched, stony foothills. From their
dusty doorways they can hear the
thrumming forest and sense the karst
mountains towering above, even when
Forest vegetation hugs the rugged karst terrain. the peaks are shrouded in clouds.
The legendary May Bac (“silver
was born in a hammock onafor- back then!—stuck in a tree trunk cloud”) Peak was the place I thought
est path in Cuc Phuong National while I played. The machete, he most of conquering, because it is the
Park. (The health center to which said, could kill the tree. highest mountain in the park, about
my mother was being carried was just My friends and I took little-used 2,100 feet. Once you are up there,
a little too far away.) The path is still routes to the outer edges of the valley you are enclosed in a cloud of forest
used, though it no longer leads back to graze and mind our cows and mist. Sometimes the cloud creeps
to our home. As a little girl, I was water buftalo—the job of most rural into the bottommost corners of the
lucky enough to have the forest as a kids. Mainly, though, our cows grazed lowest valley.
playground, but my family was relo- themselves, and we explored the forest
cated out of the park in the late and the streams. Adventure was always he forest is never still. Insects,
1990s. Unfortunately my favorite around the corner. Once, while col- particularly the humming cicadas,
litchi trees were not relocated with us. lecting wild honey from a hive of the are its pulse. Tree frogs that never
Declared a protected area by Ho large forest bees, I was caught by the come down to the ground break into
Chi Minh in 1962, Cuc Phuong be- angry swarm. I will never forget the a chorus on some unseen and unfelt
came Vietnam’s first national park in panic. Luckily, one of the village el- cue; land crabs the size of small dogs
1966. It was spared the effects of the ders picked me up, held me tight, and clatter through the undergrowth.
war, unlike much of the nation’s en- spat chewed rosebud juice at each of Butterflies light up the gloom, con-
vironment. Covering roughly ninety the stings, gently dabbing it on. The gregating in sunny spots and above
square miles, it encompasses forested pain instantly subsided. pools. At least 280 species, including
limestone karst mountains and one On another occasion I was walking birdwings, live in the park. They often
main, central valley. Sometimes we through the forest, looking for my land in muddy areas, and when you
children were caught in restricted cow, when I suddenly felt I was being come near them, they take off and cir-
areas by the forest rangers, but not watched from above. I looked up and cle around you. In spring and summer
often. I remember one ranger saw a green snake as thick as my big I used to swim ina colorful butterfly
gently telling me not to leave my toe. I was scared stiff and ran as fast as sea. It felt like being in a fairy world.
machete—we all carried rusty knives I could through the dense forest, pay- It rains a lot in summer. I once got

HISTORY March 2003

lost with my friends in a downpour. year-old Téerminalia myriocarpa. B@tsdeary
\
We thought it would be a good ‘idea It takes seventeen people to \ a
pete ten
“ee~
to follow a stream out of the forest, encircle it, stretching their )
because we knew that streams some- arms around its trunk.
times intersected our usual paths. How About 450 species of
disappointed we were when the stream mamunals, birds, reptiles,
we were following suddenly disap- and amphibians—38 per-
peared underground! (NowI realize cent of the known species in
that Cuc Phuong has a natural under- Vietnam—live in the park.
ground drainage system that absorbs all Many are endemic, such as
the rainfall.) Luckily, we found our way Delacour’s langur, which we
out after five hours of struggle, soaked Vietnamese often call the
and mosquito bitten. A lot of leeches white-shorts langur because of its For visitor information, contact:
helped themselves to our blood. white bottom. It is a hard animal to Cuc Phuong National Park
There are many spot in the for- Nho Quan District
caves in the park’s est, because the Ninh Binh Province
limestone terrain. vegetation 1s Vietnam
We used to play dense and these (84-30) 848-006/-009/-007
hide-and-seek in monkeys are Fax: (84-30) 848-008
them; they were very smart.
pleasantly warm It is lovely to A SAMPLING OF SPECIES
in winter and cool wake up in the
in summer. The morning in the Mammals Clouded leopard, Asian
must-visit exem- park; you hear golden cat, Owston’s palm civet,
plar is Nguoi Xua the birds singing Asiatic black bear, crested gibbon,
Cave (prehistoric and you see them Delacour’s langur, Phayre’s langur,
man cave), where flying overhead. lesser slow loris, Chinese pangolin,
human remains You can also see Cuc Phuong squirrel, giant flying
as old as 12,000 the silver pheasant squirrels, and horseshoe bats.
years have been along the trails;
discovered. the males look Birds Eurasian tree sparrow, white-
particularly hand- rumped munia, scaly-breasted
he best season some with their munia, common kingfisher, white-
to visit Cuc long white tails. breasted kingfisher, melodious
Phuong is from Many noctur- laughing thrush, black-throated
the beginning of nal animals also laughing thrush, long-tailed shrike,
December, when live in the park, green peafowl, grey peacock pheas-
the heavy rains are such as Owston’s ant, silver pheasant, great hornbill,
over, through palm ctvet, Indian pied hornbill, chestnut-neck-
April. It is often which loves to laced partridge, red-collared wood-
dry and pleasant eat the noisy pecker, and red-vented barbet.
then. But as chil- crickets and
dren, my friends quiet earth- Other animals include snakes, such as
and I found sum- Young Owston’s palm civets worms. When cobra, king cobra, and banded krait;
mer to be the best I was a child in geckos, turtles, and frogs; fish (among
season for collecting wild fruits, many the forest at night, the bats swooping them the Cuc Phuong catfish) and
of which are similar to their cultivated past my ears or the movement of crabs; and countless insects and spiders.
counterparts. We had to compete an unseen animal in the dark
with the squirrels and bats. would make my hair stand on end. Trees Parashorea chinensis, Terminalia
Cuc Phuong is home to an esti- Sometimes it still does. But it is myriocarpa, Tetrameles nudiflora,
mated 2,000 plant species; just last year always magical on a summer's eve Cinnamonum balansae, Dracontomelum
my brother, a park botanist, discovered when the fireflies are out; they make duperreanum, and Cuc Phuong pear.
a new orchid (Vietorchid aurea). The the forest look like a Christmas
park is also renowned for its big trees. night, with thousands of little lights Neuyen Thi Dao is a conservationist with the
The most famous one is a thousand- blinking in giant Christmas trees. World Wildlife Fund Indochina Programme.

March 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 71

OUT THERE
gas, dust, and other matter, totaling at
least a few million times the mass of

Let’s Make a Galaxy the Sun, all held together by mutual

gravitational attraction. At least our
own Milky Way fits the definition
pretty well—though it’s on the hefty
Astronomers have identified a cosmic infant side as galaxies go, made up of about
100 billion stars that stretch across
“nearby” 70 million light-years from Earth. 100,000 light-years.
According to current models, be-
tween two and four billion years after
By Charles Liu the universe began with a (big) bang,
clumps of matter had formed in vast
numbers. Each clump was larger than
alaxies in the universe are course, such great distances pose severe a typical cluster of stars, but smaller
rather like the cells in an ani- challenges even for the most powerful than a modern-day galaxy. As gravity
mal. Just as cells combine to telescopes. Unfortunately, there is no acted on these subgalactic clumps,
make an animal’s organs and systems, other choice. - pulling them ever closer together, re-
so, too, do galaxies come together to Then again, maybe there 1s. In the gions of space that were already rela-
make the superclusters and filaments past several years, new evidence has tively dense with clumps became
that define the large-scale structure of suggested that some galaxies may still even denser, and did so more quickly,
the cosmos. Not surprisingly, in much be forming. Now, according to as- than regions where the clumps were
the same way that biologists examine tronomers Michael R. Corbin of the initially relatively sparse. Large collec-
cell development to understand the Space Telescope Science Institute in tions of clumps created deep gravity
aging process in animals, astronomers Baltimore and William D. Vacca, now wells that sucked in smaller groups of
study galaxy formation to decipher at the University of California in clumps, even as those collections coa-
the evolution of the cosmos. Hence, Berkeley, a smoking gun may be in lesced to make single, larger bodies.
the study of the origin of galaxies is view—a nearby galaxy, caught in the Today, billions of years later, we ob-
one of the most important topics in act of birth. serve the resultant hierarchy of cos-
modern astronomical research. mic structure: subgalactic clumps that
In this case, though, the biologists hat do we astronomers mean combined to form galaxies, which in
have it much easier. Animals repro- by “galaxy”? We usually rec- turn gathered into groups and clus-
duce, and so biologists have a steady ognize one when we see one, but ask ters, which then collected into fila-
supply of newborn cellular agglomera- us for a definition and we have a ments and superclusters.
tions for comparison and scrutiny. But much tougher time. Here’s a reason- Since all that clumping and cluster-
astronomers have only one universe to able working definition: a galaxy is a ing started so long ago, cosmologists
observe, and it’s mighty long in the vast, contiguous collection of stars, don’t expect, by and large, to find
tooth—13 billion years old, ac- such primordial subgalactic ob-
cording to the best current esti- jects in the universe today. Much
mates (about three times the age of the current observational re-
of Earth). Worse, according to search on galaxy formation
current thinking, the vast major- therefore focuses on dwarf galax-
ity of galaxies formed long, long ies, with less than one-hundredth
ago. So when we astronomers the mass of the Milky Way. Some
want to study the earliest mo- kinds of dwarts have many more
ments in galactic “life”? we have young stars than do their larger
to approach our work more like siblings, and offer the possibility
paleontologists than like biolo- of studying present-day galaxy
gists, seeking to understand an an- evolution on a manageable scale.
cient world with only fossilized Corbin and Vacca examined a
remains as a guide. To glimpse sample of dwarf galaxies chosen
galaxies in their embryonic stages, for their compact size and the
astronomers have to look far back youth of their star populations.
in time, across distances amount- One of the dwarfs, called POX
ing to billions of light-years. Of Blue compact dwarf galaxy, POX 186 186, caught their eye. (The
 THE SKY IN MARCH
nomenclature has nothing to do with
skin disease—‘POX” is a kind of By Joe Rao
shorthand for the informal name of
the survey that discovered the object Mercury, acting
in 1981.) With the Hubble Space more the lamb
Telescope, Corbin and Vacca made a than the lion, en-
high-resolution image of the galaxy ters March still
—and found a small, apparently new- lost in the Sun’s
born minigalaxy just 70 million light- glare. It reaches
years away and a mere 100 million superior con-
years old. The shape, size, and age of junction—dis-
the dwarf galaxy all seem consistent appearing, from
with the idea that POX 186 1s actu- our perspective,
ally made up of two partly coalesced behind our 9star—-onja March 621.
subgalactic clumps, in the act of com- Thereafter, it begins climbing into the
ing together to make a new galaxy. western evening twilight. By month’s
end, equipped with binoculars, you
ow could such a young galaxy be might see the planet just above the
forming before our eyes? After western horizon about half an hour
all, according to conventional wisdom, after sunset. Mercury gets higher in the
subgalactic clumps were all swept up sky with each passing day, on its way
long ago into galaxies like our own. to its best showing in 2003, which
The location of POX 186 may provide takes place during the first half of April.
a critical clue. Nestled between mat-
ter-rich filaments and superclusters are Bright Venus, unmistakable at magni-
“voids” of intergalactic space. Only a tude —4, rises at about 4:30 A.M. local
sparse smattering of galaxies occurs in time all month long. A telescope
these vast, empty volumes of space. shows it in gibbous phase, a small
POX 186 resides near the edge of such replica of the gibbous Moon. At sun-
a void, in the direction of the constel- rise in early March it is less than 20 de-
lation Bootes; Corbin and Vacca found grees above the horizon, as seen from
no other galaxies within 15 million mid-northern latitudes, and each week
light-years of the dwarf. Maybe that’s it sinks lower in the sky, heading to-
why the two subgalactic clumps sur- ward superior conjunction. The planet
vived so long: exiled in the void, they is now fleeing ahead of Earth in our
remained undisturbed for more than race around the Sun, but its seemingly
10 billion years, never encountering breakaway speed is mostly the effect of
any other clumps—until now. having the inside track; its speed,
The discovery that a nearby dwarf about 22 miles a second, is only
galaxy is actually in its infancy 1s, slightly greater than Earth’s 18.5. Seen
though fascinating, hardly heretical. from our moving platform in space,
In fact, understanding the ancient, Venus will disappear into the glare of
distant subgalactic clumps is still es- the Sun in July and pass behind the
sential for unraveling the mysteries Sun in mid-August.
of galaxy birth and formation. But
POX 186 does open the door to a Mars ascends about four hours before
new line of inquiry, because as- the Sun, crossing the meridian over-
tronomers now know that it’s also head shortly after sunup. The planet
worthwhile to look closer to home. moves rapidly eastward through the
More little blobs of matter may be constellation Sagittarius in March, ap-
lurking in the voids. pearing as a fairly inconspicuous yel-
lowish orange light near the constella-
Charles Liu is an astrophysicist at the Hayden tion’s teapot pattern. The big Martian
Planetarium and a_ research scientist at show, though, comes in late August, for information’ call 1-800- 11-9671 Hed
Barnard College in New York City. when Mars, having shifted into the es just ‘minutes fromFoxwoods® ResortCasin
92 of exit 79A off1-395.
 fcr COUNmy

evening sky, will be more luminous

aoe some dinosaur and closer to the Earth (about 34.6
tombstones. million miles away) than it has been in
many millennia. Perhaps in the year
In Montana’s Custer Country, you can 2287, when the two planets again ap-
walk where dinosaurs once roamed.
proach within 34.6 million miles of
Places such as Makoshika State Park
each other, people will be gazing at
and Carter County Musuem let you
see dinosaur digs and rare fossils—
Earth from the surface of Mars.
including one of only three known
duck-billed dinosaur skeletons. Battle- Jupiter is king of the night sky this
fields, the Lewis & Clark Trail, unique month. Visible high in the south dur-
cities and more will round out your ing the evening hours, the brightest
legendary vacation. Call or go online “star” in the sky after Venus invites
for a FREE Vacation Guide. inspection the moment you set up a
telescope. As seen from Earth, Jupiter
1-800-346-1876 ext. 0324
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eeyour free Outer ca gurnyotGuide it lies less than a degree away from the
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points. Jupiter’s bright disk against
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Peseta ssrB St pga cree this background should make a pretty
sight. On March 14 a waxing gibbous
Moon passes about 3.5 degrees above
Duck Southern Shores Kitty Hawk — Kill Devil Hills and to the left of Jupiter.
Nags Head Roanoke Island Hatteras Island

Saturn appears high in the constella-

tion Taurus in the south-southwest-
ern sky at dusk. The planet sets
shortly after 2:00 A.M. local time on
March 1 and about two hours earlier
by the end of the month. Even a small
telescope reveals Saturn’s wonderful
rings, tilted almost as far as they ever
tilt toward Earth. Saturn will be 90
degrees east of the Sun, or at east
quadrature, on March 13. The long
shadow the planet casts on its rings 1s
easily seen from Earth, giving the en-
semble a greater appearance of depth.

The Moon is new at 9:35 P.M. on

March 2 and reaches first quarter at
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REVIEW

Table Ta
Stories of the stuff
that makes up the world

By Hans Christian von Baeyer

hen I was in college nearly even a liquid like

half a century ago, we stu- mercury? Who dis-
dents were entranced by covered it? When?
the inimitable campus bard, Tom Where? How? What
Lehrer, singing “The Elements.” At a does the name mean?
breathtaking pace he rattled them off: What’s it good fore
The lore and lure of
There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, se- the elements—the
lenium,/And hydrogen and oxygen and stuff that we and the
nitrogen and rhenium/And_ nickel, rest of the universe
neodymium, neptunium, germanium,/
are» made Ol —cast
And iron, americium, ruthenium, ura-
nium,/Europium, zirconium, lutetium,
their spell far beyond
vanadium/And lanthanum and osmium the circle of profes- Vivian Torrence, The Periodic Table, 1991
and astatine and radium/And gold, pro- sional chemists.
tactintum and indium and gallium [in- For answers to the questions con- In the middle of the good book, be-
hale]/And iodine and thorium and jured up by Lehrer’s ditty back in the tween a list of electronic configurations
thulium and thallium. "50s, I used to turn to my “rubber and the periodic table, there was an
bible?’ We all called it that, rather essay titled “The Elements’”—like the
The song went on to list a total of than The Handbook of Chemistry and song. It was an alphabetical list of
102 elements, but Lehrer, then a Physics, because it was published by thumbnail sketches, each no longer
math instructor at Harvard, was well The Chemical Rubber Publishing than a paragraph, of the properties and
enough informed to end on a cau- Company and printed on thin India histories of the elements, from ac-
tious note: “These are the only ones paper, like a bible. Now in its eighty- tinlum to zirconium. In 3,000 pages,
of which the news has come to Har- one brief chapter was the only reposi-
vard,/And there may be many others The Ingredients: tory in the great reference for anec-
but they haven't been discovered.” A Guided Tour of the Elements dotes about people and stories about
His caveat turned out to be well ad- by Philip Ball places of origin, discoveries, applica-
vised. The most recent element to Oxford University Press, 2003; tions, and etymologies. This brief sec-
be discovered, number 118, was $22.00 tion of my bible relieved the tedium of
promptly undiscovered again. the surrounding pile of dry data, and
What a world of drama and mystery third edition (my tattered copy is the provided a reassuring reminder that the
is evoked by those wonderful names! thirty-eighth), this fat book has been entire enterprise is of human origin.
The occasional familiar one—life-giv- an indispensable reference for four
ing oxygen, much-coveted gold— generations of scientists. Before com- Ithough an alphabetical listing of
saves the list from academic obscurity puters, that’s’ where you looked up the elements is more practical
and imbues it with an aura of rele- stuff like the value of the tangent of than Lehrer’s purely poetic arrange-
vance. At the same time, the strange 79.7 degrees, the density of sulfur, ment, it is not much more scientific.
names cry out for more information. and all the other grains of informa- The number of ways to shuffle a hun-
What does that one look like? Is it tion that give physical science its dred names is almost unlimited. A his-
normally a gas, or a solid, or perhaps gritty texture. torian of science might compile alist

March 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 75

 by year of discovery—starting with seven chapters, with the history and odic table encoded enough chemical
Aristotle’s element of water, which explanation of the periodic table information to enable him to fill sev-
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier unmasked taking pride of place in the middle. eral pages. The genius of Mendeleyev
as a compound in 1783, and ending Leading up to it is a short history of shines brightly from the pages of Ball’s
with the nameless superheavies that the elements, from Aristotle to the book, underlining the blatant injustice
seem to be forever embroiled in con- seventeenth-century chemist Robert of his being passed over for a Nobel
troversy. An economist might classify Boyle, followed by two intimate por- Prize. (He was a leading candidate in
the elements by price, an industrialist traits of individual elements. 1905 but was edged out by Adolf von
by usefulness, a geologist by abun- The first close-up describes oxygen Baeyer, my great-grandfather.)
dance on Earth, an astronomer by as “‘a bridge between the new and the The final three chapters bring the
their place in the scheme of nucleo- old, between the alchemical roots of story up to date. Ball describes nu-
synthesis, a physician by necessity for Robert Boyle’s ‘chymistry’ and the clear accelerators as atom factories
health. By far the most significant list syntheses of endless wonders in today’s for synthesizing short-lived, heavy
for scientists is Dmitri Mendeleyev’s chemical plants.’ The second sketch, elements—atom by expensive atom.
periodic table of 1869—one of the of gold, begins with the story of King He explains the isotopes—chemically
great triumphs of the human intellect. Midas and his golden touch. Here Ball identical forms of an element, which
But what if you want to conduct a stumbles. His degrees in physics and differ only in atomic weight—with
guided tour for the public? How chemistry establish his authority in special emphasis on their usefulness in
would you choose your itinerary? things scientific, but like other scien- historical, geological, and even astro-
Which of the possible enumerations tists he can become careless when re- nomical dating. And he ends the tour
of nature’s building blocks with a glimpse at the world
would most suit your stroll? of applications, starting with
The answer, of course, is “none What a world of drama ubiquitous iron and conclud-
of the above.’ The Italian ing with the noble gas ar-
writer Primo Levi’s semi-auto-
and mystery is evoked gon which, after a century of
biographical book The Periodic by the names of the elements! haughty celibacy, was finally
Table comprises only twenty- induced to form a compound
one elemental chapter names. in the year 2000.
“Brilliant Light,’ the English-Ameri- counting myths—as though it didn’t After I finished reading this charm-
can neurologist Oliver Sacks’s remi- matter, since they are fictitious any- ing little book, I felt a bit short-
niscences of his chemical boyhood way! He conflates various versions of changed: How can a map (the peri-
(published in The New Yorker and the Midas tale, moves Maidas’s land- odic table), two leisurely stops (at
later expanded in his book Uncle locked kingdom of Phrygia from cen- oxygen and gold), and four tutorials
Tungsten), pushes the envelope of in- tral Anatolia to the distant shores of add up to a “guided tour’? But when
clusiveness with mentions of forty- the Aegean Sea, and, without com- I looked for the names of elements in
five elements. Sacks recalls how he ment, injects a gruesome nineteenth- the index, I was astonished to count
once drove his parents to distraction century embellishment in which eighty-four, excluding tabulations.
with an enraptured chemical mono- Midas turns his daughter to gold. Practically all of them are there! Ball’s
logue until they were forced to ex- achievement is the exact opposite of
claim: “Enough about thallium!” List he chapter of Ball’s book devoted Lehrer’s: It teaches by seduction,
mania, even in the scientific realm, is to the convoluted history of the where the latter startles by exhibi-
not a universal passion. periodic table describes its profound tionism. By weaving the elements
impact on chemistry and physics. For seamlessly into a coherent narrative,
hilip Ball, an English science Sacks, who as a boy was enchanted the author has given meaning to the
writer and contributing editor for with chemistry, the table was “the entire system without overwhelming
Nature, 1s far too experienced to be- most beautiful thing in the world.” Its the reader with the profusion of its
come boxed in by the lure of compre- explanation in terms of Niels Bohr’s parts. That’s good writing.
hensiveness. He explains his approach 1913 model of the atom shone like a
in the preface: “No piano tutor “brilliant light” of understanding.
Hans Christian von Baeyer is Chancellor Pro-
would start by instructing a young Ball’s own youthful experiences
fessor of Physics at the College of William and
pupil to play every note on the key- with the periodic table were less lyrical Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and the au-
board. Far better to show how just a but more productive. When he was re- thor of Taming the Atom: The Emergence
few keys suffice for constructing a quired to write an examination essay of the Visible Microworld. His next book,
host of simple tunes.” Accordingly, on niobium, for instance, his mere on information, will be published this summer
his little book is divided into just knowledge of its position in the peri- by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

|
76 |NATURAL HISTORY March 2003
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 America’s BOOKSHELF By Laurence A. Marschall
Last Morgan
ARTESRCREADE

Silver Dollar A Certain Curve of Horn:

The Hundred-Year Quest
than five feet long, mysteriously
showed up in the University Museum
of Natural History in Florence, Italy.
for the Giant Sable Antelope But no European had ever seen the
ofAngola antelope in the flesh.
by John Frederick Walker Hunters—and in the early decades
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002 of the twentieth century most natu-
$26.00 ralists were hunters—wanted not only
to see the giant sables but to bag
Agee can compel our love or them. Following the discovery of a
admiration. Some amuse _ us; few herds of giant sables in central
some annoy us. But only a few can Angola by a British railway engineer,
enchant. For some reason—their Frank Varian, just before the First
bearing, their elusiveness, the re- World War, a few heads and hides
moteness of their habitat—such spe- made it to the trophy rooms and mu-
cial animals embody an idealized seums of the world, but sightings
view of nature, becoming the locus were sporadic. Until the 1970s, when
of human projections of power, no- the behavioral ecologist Richard D.
The Revived 1921 Date, bility, and sensitivity of near-mythic Estes, now head of the International
Fine Quality proportions. The bald eagle, the gray Conservation Union’s Antelope Spe-
whale, and the snow cialist Group, con-

oy? 12. leopard are three such

creatures. And so is
_ CORREIOS | ducted the first (and
only) field studies of
the giant sable ante- the giant sable, little
Outstanding Introductory Offer: lope of Angola, the was known about its
get a low, low price on the unique subject of John Fred- habits, how closely
final Morgan silver dollar of 1921. erick Walker’s fasci- related it was to other
It was redesigned by the U.S. Mint’s nating account, and a PRETA
PALANCA
species, or even the
George T. Morgan 43 years after he rare and endangered FUPPOTRAGUS
VARIANT
NIGEY size of its population.
created his original Morgan silver mammal that few
dollar of 1878. people outside its L didn’t help that
Capstone of the World’s Greatest homeland have ever the homeland of
Silver Dollar Series: America’s heard of. the giant sable was
longest silver dollar series was Any visitor to a VIG, MAIA PORTO,
deep in the center
suspended in 1904, and the U.S. Mint
game park in southern of Portuguese West
destroyed existing hubs six years later.
So the revived final 1921 date had to Africa can attest to the beauty of the Africa, one of the most repressive and
be recreated by the venerable U.S. common sable antelope, two races of neglected of the European colonies.
Mint Chief Engraver. It has a unique which (Hippotragus niger kirkii and Before the last decades of the twenti-
look in the series, with generally less Hippotragus niger niger) roam the savan- eth century, the region was scarcely
relief. Our well-preserved Fine quality nas from South Africa to Zambia. Jet touched by modernization; Portugal’s
passed through American commerce black, with ramrod bearings and large chief interest—until Angola achieved
in the roaring 20s, when “‘a dollar arcs of heavy horn on their equine independence in 1975—seemed to be
was a dollar.”
heads, they are a sight impossible to extracting as much mineral wealth as
Our Lowest Price Ever: ONLY forget. But the giant sable (Hippotragus possible with the labor of an op-
$12.95. Order #34623. Limit 3. niger variani), whose horns are almost a pressed population, and then shipping
Add a total of $2 postage and
handling. 30-Day No-Risk Home
foot longer than those of its common it along the one railway (which Varian
Examination: Money-Back relatives—and whose markings are had helped build) that connected the
Guarantee. To order by credit card, even more striking—has been seen in frontier with the Atlantic coast.
call the toll-free number below. the wild by only a few naturalists. In But independence scarcely made
Or send a check or money order to: the 1800s travelers heard rumors that things better. The pre-independence
International Coins & Currency such animals lived between the Zam- freedom fight degenerated into a civil
62 Ridge St., Dept. 4339 bezi River and the western coast of war that tore the country apart for the
Montpelier, VT 05602 Africa, and an enormous horn, more rest of the century. By some estimates,
1-800-451-4463
Order at www.iccoin.net
(many more great deals) 78 | NATURAL HISTORY March 2003
more than a million Angolans died and
some 12 million land mines were em-
placed. In the ensuing chaos even the
few naturalists who study the giant
sable lost track of them. There was fear
that many of the antelopes had been
caught in the crossfire: even though
Angolans venerate the giant sable as an
icon of their nationhood, the warring
armies have been known to slaughter
other endangered species for the lucra-
tive profits that the animals’ pelts,
horns, and ivory bring on the black
market—or simply for a bite to eat.
Has the giant sable survived? John Norway-The Perfect Change of Place. From its majestic fjords to its
Frederick Walker, a journalist who
dramatic arctic landscapes to its picturesque ports, Norway's 1,250-mile west
caught the enchantment of the animal
in his youth, decided to find out for coast is a stunning stretch of scenery. And with a Norwegian Coastal Voyage
himself. The resulting book, a riveting you can discover it all, while enjoying the relaxed atmosphere and comfort of
account of his research and travels, re- a First Class/working cruise ship. For more information, call
calls Peter Matthiessen’s tale of a simi- Discover Norway” at 1-866-6-NORWAY (866-666-7929), or
lar search for the snow leopard in the

C
visit www. visitnorway.com/us.
frigid Himalaya. But where Matthies-
sen struggled against inner ghosts,
Walker mainly does battle with bu- Norway
Norwegian
reaucratic bungling and Third World Scandinavian Airlines Coastal Voyage A Pure Escape
corruption, making his book more a
chronicle of the politics of conserva-
tion than a search for the meaning of
life. It would spoil a wonderfully told
story to reveal how it all comes out.

Coal:A Human History

by Barbara Freese
Perseus Publishing, 2003; $20.00 ‘Tiger in the Forest:
PSiseinbl Nature Based Tourism
he history of coal, of course, ta Soultnease Agi
spans time on a geologic scale.
Yet Barbara Freese, a former assistant The allure of recently discovered species, coupled
attorneygeneral of Minnesota, brings with spectacular natural land- and seascapes, and fascinating
welcome brevity to that history in ancient cultures, is drawing record numbers of travelers to
this readable book about the black Southeast Asia. How the region responds to the conservation
stone Emerson called “a portable cli- concerns and economic potential of increased nature-based
mate.’ The thesis. of Freese’s book,
tourism will determine the sustainability of the region’s
natural areas and local communities. Conservation biologists,
not startling by any means, is that coal economists, policy makers, community representatives,
is a mainspring of the modern world: tourism professionals, and travelers will examine current
love it or hate it, it is here to stay. It practices, challenges and opportunities that lie ahead, the
generates most of our nation’s electric integral role of science, and recommendations for action.
power, and will continue to do so as
In addition, an international conference on Vietnamese culture, Vietnam
other fuels become depleted. But the a in the 21st Century: Journeys on the Ground and in the Imagination,
use of coal poses urgent challenges for EUMO sep « will be held on March 22 and 23. Both conferences coincide with
the quality of life on our planet. the Museum’s new exhibition, Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind &
Spirit and an accompanying photography exhibition that highlights
It was in Great Britain that the use of the biodiversity of Vietnam and the CBC’s conservation work there.
coal first took hold, perhaps because of
Please call 212-769-5200 or visit the CBC oe ‘ ch eee eis) -
and the Museum’s CTS CRNIN amnh.ore
 its abundance in readily accessible out- themselves into industrial powers.
crops. As London and other great pop- Freese sketches the impressive role of Measuring America:
ulation centers burgeoned in the four- coal in feeding the forges of England How an Untamed Wilderness
teenth century, forests began to vanish, and in transforming the virgin conti- Shaped the United States
and coal became the fuel of choice. Yet nent of North America into a nation and Fulfilled the Promise
as early as the thirteenth century, royal of railways and manufacturing centers. of Democracy
commissions had been set up to deal These examples from the great by Andro Linklater
with pollution from coal burning. Ap- sweep of history highlight the deep Walker & Company, 2002; $26
parently their efforts were to no avail, and abiding chasm between the power
for in a seventeenth-century book with of coal to create wealth and the enor- ie January of 1790, addressing the
the apt Latin title Fumifugium (from mous costs that unleashing such new U.S. Congress for the first time,
fumus, “smoke,” and fugo, “to chase power exacts from society. Although George Washington set forth three
away), a minor government official Freese shares the wonder of the Victo- priorities for the fledgling nation: to
named John Evelyn described atmos- rians at the accomplishments of indus- defend its sovereignty, to strengthen its
pheric contamination that blotted out trialized civilization, she doesn’t skimp economy, and to establish a uniform
on describing its dark side. The system of weights and measures. In its
coal that powers our indus- modern-day guise of “homeland secu-
tries—bringing cheap textiles, rity,’ that first imperative continues to
central heating, and fresh fruit preoccupy Washington today, as does
into our lives—also causes black the economy. But the integrity of
lung disease, mine disasters, and common measuring standards is secure
acid rain. In her penultimate across the land. Grain merchants no
chapter Freese describes a visit longer use larger bushels to buy from
to China, which seems to be the farmer than to sell to the miller,
reprising the Industrial Revolu- and ‘“‘a quarter-pounder” weighs the
tion in fast-forward. There, coal same in Boise as it does in Baltimore.
still plays the central role it once The success of George Washington’s
played in the West, despite program for reforming weights and
growing competition from nu- measures, Andro Linklater argues, was
clear, natural gas, and hydro- essential not just to the eventual emer-
electric energy sources. At an gence of a consumer economy, but to
accelerating rate—and with a the development of the national char-
population greater than that of acter of the United States.
Europe and North America What the founding fathers had in
combined—China is making mind was not merely to establish fair
the same mistakes. and uniform measures, but also to cre-
Coal seller, c. 1830 But today the stakes are ate a framework for the general com-
higher, as coal consumption merce of the nation. The central fea-
the Sun, resulting in a capital city that continues to rise. It’s not just London, ture of this vision was to measure, to
resembled “the Suburbs of Hell?’ Four Pittsburgh, or Beying anymore; the classify, to rationalize the land itself.
hundred years of official concern had planet as a whole suffers when fossil Armed with standard English measur-
led only to a worsening of London’s forests burn. Cities in the eastern ing chains (the origin of the twenty-
smog problem—and that was before United States feel the stinging breath two-yard-long unit), compasses, and
the Industrial Revolution! of Midwest power plants. The smoke transits (surveyor’s instruments with
from Shanghai wafts over Los Ange- mounted telescopes), the surveyors
Ee royal worry could not stop the les. And global atmospheric concen- laid out a rectilinear grid from coast to
use of coal, it is clear, because its trations of carbon dioxide threaten to coast, following imaginary beelines
immediate value as a fuel far out- alter the climate in ways that, though across rugged brush, treacherous mud-
weighed the inconvenience of soot- still uncertain in their details, will un- flats, and precipitous mountainsides.
stained sheets and acrid breezes. And doubtedly be momentous. As this The payoff for the surveyors’ monu-
if coal had been essential to the emer- human history of coal makes clear, mental effort was that it became easy
gence of urban England from the there are no easy answers. But books to sell homesteads and mineral rights,
Dark Ages, it was even more impor- as lucid as Freese’s make a welcome to establish towns, to construct rail-
tant as mercantile and agricultural so- contribution to the search for a sus- roads and canals. America’s reputation
cieties in the West began to transform tainable energy economy. as a land where hard labor is repaid by

80 NATURAI HISTORY March 2003

|
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 success—a reputation that drew immi- Congress, unable to properly distin-
grants from far and near—has its roots guish Jefferson’s system from the one
in the uniform survey maps and sec- tarred by the French Revolution,
tion markers of these survey parties. began to drag its feet, wondering why
For all the good intentions, though, it should get rid of the familiar inches
the measurement of America was nei- and yards in favor of a system based on
ther as systematic nor as rational as its a line throughaforeign city.
originators might have wished. Link- By the time the system came up
later cites a good many cases in which for a vote, surveyors had already
judgment was skewed by the inertia begun to divide and sell vast tracts of
of local custom or the expedience of land in the Ohio Valley, using the old
politics. One of his most entertaining English measures. The explosion of
and enlightening anecdotes 1s the story land. sales settled the issue de facto:
of how the U. S. might well have cho- Too much time and money had al-
sen the metric system from the start, Metric series—length, c. 1880 ready been invested in the old sys-
given its clear superiority over pounds, tem. It was too late to change. The
gills, acres, and chains. that some such scientifically based dec- U.S. did adopt a decimal coinage.
Thomas Jefferson led the fight for imal system ought to guide the new But the great land surveys, the build-
metric measurement, and was the nation, and decimalization of length ing of the railroads, and the growth
most influential champion of a system and weight seemed only a vote away. of American industrial society itself
based on decimal multiples of the But the French Revolution changed all took place under a uniform but
length of a pendulum that swung all that. In the 1790s the French offi- cumbersome system of units first
through its arc once a second. Not cially adopted a metric system based elaborated in the sixteenth century.
only would the system be easy to ma- on the length of a quadrant of the
Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Su-
nipulate; it also relied on a standard Earth’s meridian. The segment of lon- pernova Story, is WK.T? Sahm Professor of
kept not by the government but, in ef- gitude they chose to measure ran just Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylva-
fect, by the immutable laws of physics. to the east of Paris—decimal to be nia, and director of Project CLEA, which pro-
By the time Washington addressed the sure, but linked, unfortunately, with duces widely used simulation software for edu-
Congress, it was conventional wisdom the geography of continental Europe. cation in astronomy.

nature.net around France and across the cen- would condense on the cool walls
Era
turies, traveling back to prehistoric and corrode the artwork.
times, Roman Gaul, and the Middle The collection also includes Arago
Les Grands Sites Ages. The tour of Chauvet gave me a
good feel for the layout of the cave’s
Cave, near France’s border
Spain, where the 450,000-year-old
with

subterranean galleries, with their Tautavel Man was discovered; a look

By Robert Anderson
magnificent examples of figures and at the Gallic populations of Provence;
forms created 31,000 years ago: spot- and an investigation of a trio of me-
alee French Ministry of Culture ted panthers, engraved horses, a pro- dieval villages northwest of Grenoble
and Communication has created cession of red rhinoceroses, and the settled by “farmer-knights.” Finally,
a tour de force with its “Great Ar- ubiquitous hand-print “signatures” from the country that gave the world
chaeological Sites” (www.culture.fr/ of the Paleolithic artists. In the casé of Jacques Cousteau, the French min-
culture/arcnat/en/grsites.htm), a Chauvet, virtual viewing is not just a istry offers a site dedicated to under-
collection of nine elegantly designed surrogate for visiting in person; it is, water archaeology. You can spend
Web pages, conveniently translated lamentably, as close as most people fascinating hours, all warm and dry,
into English, that merit your atten- will ever come to seeing those trea- exploring a host of discoveries off the
tion as a browser even if you aren't a sures. Like the better known Lascaux Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of
devotee of French history. Cave (another featured site in the vir- France, submarine sites in Egypt, and
I was first drawn to the collection tual collection), it is sealed to the shipwrecks around the world.
by a page offering a virtual tour of public because the acidic combina-
Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern tion of carbon dioxide and water Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer
France. Soon I found myself hopping vapor exhaled by throngs of tourists living in Los Angeles.

TURAL HISTORY March 2003

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 AT THE MUSEUM
AMERICAN MUSEUM 6 NATURAL HISTORY )

Unique Collaboration Culminates in Exhibition

hen the exhibition Vietnam: the Missouri Botan-

Vf cere of Body, Mind & ical Garden, the In-
Spirit opens at the American stitute of Ecology and
Museum of Natural History in New York Biological Resources S
MI
D

on March 15, 2008, it will be the prod- in Hanoi, and the

uct of an unprecedented collaboration Vietnam National Uni-
between the AMNH and the Vietnam versity, Hanoi. As the
Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi. The in- project developed, it
stitutions share a common mission of became clear that
studying, preserving, and interpreting the study of an eco-
culture, and their collaboration pro- system was incom-
vides an ideal opportunity to reveal the plete without informa-
richness of Vietnamese culture to an tion about the people
American audience. who lived and worked
Vietnam and the United States there.
share a difficult and complex history. The AMNH and
Perhaps because the two countries the VME had begun
Vietnam Museum of Ethnology intern
did not resume full diplomatic recogni- a relationship in the early 1990s
Hoang Thi To Quyen during her training in
tion until 1995, Vietnam is still largely when Nguyen Van Huy, Director of the objects conservation lab at the
misunderstood by Americans whose the VME, and Laurel Kendall, Curator American Museum of Natural History
knowledge often is limited to memo- of Asian Ethnographic Collections at
ries of the war. Vietnam is, in fact, an the AMNH, traveled to each other’s ods, collection cataloging, and cura-
incredibly diverse country, with more institutions to discuss future projects. tion, and, in turn, have learned from
than 50 ethnic groups. Showcasing In 1998, the VME became the local VME staff about Vietnam and its mate-
Vietnamese culture, with its melding sponsor of the ethnographic compo- rial culture. As plans for the exhibition
and juxtaposition of the traditional and nent of the CBC’s Vietnam project. In have stepped up, five professionals
the contemporary, the exhibition pro- 1999, plans for a major collaborative from the VME have served residencies
vides American audiences an un- exhibition on Vietnamese culture took at the AMNH conserving objects and
precedented opportunity to experi- shape, with Drs. Kendall and Huy helping AMNH curators interpret and
ence life in Vietnam in the 21st as co-curators. describe the artifacts to be exhibited.
century. Such an exhibition would not As the relationship has developed, Three more have traveled to the
have been possible without the part- each institution has benefited from the AMNH to help prepare for the exhibi-
nership of two museums on opposite experience and expertise of the other. tion’s March 15 opening.
sides of the world. The VME has provided many objects Just as the exhibition focuses on the
The AMNH has a significant his- in the exhibition and the scholarly ex- notion of journeys, the collaboration it-
tory of scientific and scholarly work pertise to interpret them. The AMNH self can be seen as a journey—of two
in Vietnam, beginning with zoological has lent its conservation and curatorial countries with a complex and difficult
expeditions in the early 20th century. expertise and years of experience in past moving toward a future of under-
More recently, in 1997, the AMNH’s developing exhibitions. AMNH staff standing and friendship. According to
Center for Biodiversity and Conser- members have held training work- Dr. Kendall, “An encounter with Viet-
vation (CBC) initiated a biodiversity shops in Hanoi on textile and object nam in the 21st century is an important
project in Vietnam in conjunction with conservation, ethnographic field meth- step toward healing.”
Rept eeraeee
THE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HISTORY BY THE AMERICAN Museum OF NATURAL HISTORY.
Center for Biodiversity and Conservation’s
Spring Symposium Addresses Sustainable Tourism
!
}

uch of the world’s biodiversity is located in devel- The decision to focus the
oping tropical countries, areas that have become 2003 symposium on_nature-
| increasingly popular as tourist destinations. While based tourism and its impact on
the traveling public’s growing interest in visiting these biodiversity conservation grew out
unique places can bring with it much-needed revenue and of the CBC’s long-standing work in
jobs, as well as increased incentive to conserve natural Southeast Asia and discussions
areas, many scientists are concerned that tourism-related with colleagues there, specifically
activities will result in serious consequences for already those in Cambodia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic,
threatened ecosystems. Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. In discussing the vari-
Increased pollution; overuse of natural resources; the in- ous factors that affect biodiversity in this region, which har-
troduction of invasive species; disruption of migration, feed- bors a significant proportion of the world’s rare and en-
ing, and breeding patterns; habitat transformation; and demic plants and animals, tourism emerged as an
even harassment of animals are among the possible—and important issue.
potentially irreversible—ramifications of na- Tiger in the Forest will provide an impor-
ture-based tourism. There is also urgent TIGER IN THE FOREST: tant forum for information exchange and
concern about maintaining and protecting a SUSTAINABLE NATURE-BASED partnership-building among biologists,
region’s cultural integrity, which can be TOURISM IN SOUTHEAST ASIA tourism-industry professionals, conserva-
enormously affected by the influx of visitors tion practitioners, governmental decision
Thursday and Friday,
and increased industry. March 20 and 21 makers, and community stakeholders. The
Tourism is now the world’s largest indus- 9:00 a.m.—6:00 p.m. conference sessions will focus on the
try, and nature-based and cultural travel is needs of unique and fragile. ecosystems;
Advance registration Is
widely considered its fastest growing seg- recommended. Please visit
the economic and conservation potential of
ment. While such travel now accounts for an research.amnh.org/biodiversity nature-based tourism; case studies of well
estimated $100-200 billion per year world- or call 212-769-5200. designed, properly monitored, and sustain-
wide, there is still no universally agreed- able tourism sites; and sharing of caution-
upon definition of the word “ecotourism,” nor are there stan- ary tales of lessons learned. In addition, the symposium will
dard industry or policy guidelines to minimize its impact on examine what responsible travelers can do—no matter
the environment or cultures. what the destination—to minimize their impact on natural
- On March 20 and 21, 2003, the Museum’s Center for Bio- areas and biodiversity.
diversity and Conservation (CBC) will address this complex The symposium is organized by the CBC in collaboration
topic during its eighth annual symposium, Tiger in the For- with the Wildlife Conservation Society and World Wildlife
est: Sustainable Nature-Based Tourism in Southeast Asia. Fund.
A key aim of the conference is to develop recommended In 1993, in response to increased threats to biodiversity,
guidelines for decision makers, tour operators, conservation the Museum created the CBC to focus its scientific and ed-
practitioners, and consumers. ucational resources on conservation policy and action.

Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind & Spirit

March 15, 2003—January 4, 2004
CHESEK/AMNH
C.
Gallery 77, first floor

Explore daily life in the early 21st century among Vietnam’s

more than 50 ethnic groups. The objects on display range
from the traditional to the contemporary, and often merge the
two, reflecting the dynamic process that has created modern
Vietnamese culture.
Organized by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, and the Vietnam
Museum of Ethnology, Hanoi. This exhibition and related programs are made pos-
These paintings are worn as sible by the philanthropic leadership of the Freeman Foundation. Additional gener-
masks during Yao initiation ous funding provided by the Ford Foundation for the collaboration between the
AMNH and the VME. Also supported by the Asian Cultural Council. Planning grant
rituals in Vietnam.
provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
 MUSEUM EVENTS

EXHIBITIONS Organized by the American Museum of Nat- with an address by Mae Jemison, the
Biodiversity of Vietnam ural History, New York; The Hebrew Univer- first African American female astro-
sity of Jerusalem; and the Skirball Cultural
Opens March 20 naut, followed by film screenings and
Center, Los Angeles. Einstein is made pos-
Akeley Gallery, second floor sible through the generous support of Jack
tours of Museum exhibits.
This exhibition of photographs high- and Susan Rudin and the Skirball Founda-
lights Vietnam’s remarkable diversity tion, and of the Corporate Tour Sponsor, Beneath the Myth of the Kalahari
of plants and animals and the Mu- TIAA-CREF. Bushman
seum’s Center for Biodiversity and Thursday, 3/13, 7:00 p.m.
Conservation’s ongoing research The Butterfly Conservatory: Travel writer Rupert Isaacson dis-
there. Tropical Butterflies Alive in Winter cusses his book The Healing Land:
Through May 26, 2003 The Bushmen and the Kalahari,
This exhibition is made possible by the gen- The butterflies are back! This popular followed by a book signing.
erosity of the Arthur Ross Foundation. exhibition includes more than 500 live,
free-flying tropical butterflies in an en-
The First Europeans: Treasures closed tropical habitat where visitors
from the Hills of Atapuerca can mingle with them.
Through April 13
Gallery 3, third floor The Butterfly Conservatory is made possible
The First Europeans reveals the through the generous support of Bernard and
Anne Spitzer and Con Edison.
mysteries of ancient humans in west-
ern Europe through exquisitely pre-
served hominid and animal fossils CONFERENCE
found in northern Spain. Vietnam in the 21st Century: Dawid Kruiper, traditional leader
Journeys on the Ground of the Xhomani bushmen
Co-organized by the American Museum of and in the Imagination
Natural History and Junta de Castilla y Leon. Saturday and Sunday, 3/22 and 3/23 The Empty Ocean
10:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m. Tuesday, 3/18, 7:00 p.m.
Einstein This conference on recent fieldwork in Richard Ellis addresses the fate of the
Through August 10, 2003 Vietnam highlights contemporary mar- ocean’s wildlife in his latest book, The
Gallery 4, fourth floor riage, tourism and local identity, envi- Empty Ocean.
ronmental issues, religious traditions,
and more. Please call 212-769-5891. Journeys: A Dialogue
Tuesday, 3/25, 7:00 p.m.
FILM SCREENING The co-curators of Vietnam will
Tay Puppet Story: Tham Roc Village discuss how staff of two museums
Vietnam Museum of Ethnology and with distinct traditions of museum
Richard Connors. 2000. 30 min. practice worked together on the
Sunday, 3/23, 12:30 p.m. exhibition’s implementation.
In this story of cultural revival, the last
surviving members of a venerable WORKSHOP
puppet troupe lead young appren- Animal Drawing
OF
COLLECTION/UNIVERSITY
HAMPSHIRE
JACOBI
LOTTE
NEW
tices in mounting the first public per- Eight Thursdays, 3/6—5/1
formance in nearly 50 years. Post- An intensive drawing course among
screening discussion. the Museum's famed dioramas.
This exhibition profiles this extraordi-
nary scientific genius, whose LECTURES FAMILY PROGRAMS
achievements were so substantial Women as Society Builders Andrew Lost
that his name is virtually synonymous Saturday, 3/8, 10:30 a.m.—1:00 p.m. Saturday, 3/15, 2:00 p.m.
with science in the public mind. Celebrate International Women’s Day Meet author J. C. Greenberg.

THE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HisTORY BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
 |
Cosmos 1: Reaching for the Stars TICKETS AND REGISTRATION

|
Monday, 3/24, 7:30 p.m. Call 212-769-5200, Monday—Friday.
MICKENS/AMNH
R.
Learn how “light pressure” has the 8:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m., and Saturday,
power to send a solar sail out among 10:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m., or visit www.
i
the stars. With Louis Friedman. amnh.org. A service charge may apply.

Celestial Highlights All programs are subject to change.

Tuesday, 3/25, 6:30-7:30 p.m.
xe,
This monthly tour of the heavens
COME ON IN,
Identification Day offers a view of the constantly
Saturday, 3/29, 1:00-4:30 p.m. changing night sky. THE WATER'S FINE!
Bring your basement curios and
he Museum Shop features an
garage-sale finds of natural and SPACE SHOWS
ocean of new items to cele-
cultural objects to this perennial The Search for Life: Are We Alone?
brate the May re-opening of the
favorite event, and Museum scien- Narrated by Harrison Ford
Milstein Hall of Ocean Life. A new
tists will try to identify them. Please Every half hour, Sunday—Thursday
line of products celebrating the
call 212-769-5176. and Saturday, 10:30 a.m.—4:30 p.m.;
iconic Blue Whale, plush sea crea-
Friday, 10:30 a.m.—7:30 p.m.
tures, and a variety of distinctive
Puppets on Parade gifts are available now. Stop in or
Saturday, 3/29, 1:00-4:30 p.m. Look Up!
log onto www.amnh.org.
Explore the diverse art of puppetry Saturday and Sunday, 10:15 a.m.
as it illustrates traditional and (Recommended for children ages 6
contemporary stories. Please call and under) AMNH Discovery Tours
212-769-5315. Expeditions throughout the world
LARGE-FORMAT FILMS with distinguished scientists and
CHILDREN’S ASTRONOMY In the Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak educators. Visit www.amnh.org or
PROGRAMS IMAX® Theater call 800-462-8687 or 212-769-5700
|Want to Be an Astronaut and plan your adventure today!
Saturday, 3/8, 12:00 noon—1:30 p.m., Pulse: a STOMP Odyssey
or 2:30-4:00 p.m.
Become a Member
(Ages 4-6, each child with one adult)
of the American Museum
of Natural History
Star Myths: An Introduction
to Mythology As a Member you will be among
Sunday, 3/16, 1:00-2:30 p.m. the first to embark on new jour-
(Ages 7-9) neys to explore the natural world
and the cultures of humanity. As a
Fly Me to the Moon Member you will enjoy:
Saturday, 3/29, 12:00 noon—1:30 p.m.,
e Unlimited free general
or 2:30-4:00 p.m. Scene from Pulse: a STOMP Odyssey admission to the Museum
(Ages 4-6, each child with one adult)
and special exhibitions, and
Take a rhythmic voyage of discovery
discounts on the Space Show
Space Explorers around the world of percussion and
Myths and Constellations of the movement.
and IMAX° films
e Discounts in the Museum
Spring Sky Shop, restaurants, and on
Tuesday, 3/11, 4:30-5:45 p.m. Kilimanjaro: To the Roof of Africa
tickets to programs
(Ages 12 and up) Follow a team of hikers up Africa’s
e Free subscription to Natural
highest mountain.
History magazine and to
HAYDEN PLANETARIUM
Rotunda, our newsletter
PROGRAMS INFORMATION
e Invitations to Members-only
The Life and Death Call 212-769-5100 or visit
events and previews
of Planet Earth www.amnh.org.
Monday, 3/3, 7:30 p.m. For further information 212-769-
Peter Ward discusses his latest book, 5606 or visit www.amnh.org.
coauthored with Don Brownlee.
 ENDPAPER
ERNETE AE

Lost and Found

By Beth A. Middleton

missed a turnoff on the interstate and sud-

denly found myself in heavy traffic on a high-
way unknown to my mental map. I tried to
find a place to pull off and study my Rand
McNally, but all the exits led to abandoned
buildings and blighted industrial complexes.
Michael Kalish, Pickup, 2001 Few urbanites understand the panic the city
brings on in country bumpkins. If we get lost, we
y father always knew just which direction risk being blinded by fright. We have no survival
he wanted to go and how he wanted to skills for the city. John Muir, America’s most fa-
get there. Of course he did have a secret: mous country bumpkin, grew up on a farm not far
he and his truck never left the secure confines of the from my parents’ place. So Muir and I were both
dairy country south of Lodi, Wisconsin. He drove products of the same rural landscape. When the
the back roads of Dane County in a big Ford F-150 obstacle of Louisville stood in Muir’s way during
pickup on his rounds, delivering tractor oil to the his famous thousand-mile walk, he navigated the
farmers and carrying pesticides back to our own city with his compass and talked to no one.
place—the same pesticides that probably caused his Now here I was on an unknown highway, surely
kidney cancer. I marveled at how he never got lost. headed into the city’s most treacherous section,
I have fond memories of wandering our farm, and all I had to guide me out of danger were my
bringing my father his lunch during the spring farmer’s instincts—the legacy of generations of
field work. On his infrequent breaks he taught people living close to nature. My father had taught
me—as his mother had taught him—the names of me to love the land, hate the politics. Surely there
the plants and animals that tenaciously clung to was something in that philosophy to guide me out
the wild nooks and crevices of our land. My farm of this heart of darkness called Saint Louis.
background turned out to be excellent training
for my adult occupation as a wetlands ecologist G2 and trucks hurtled by at amazing speeds.
and environmentalist. “Go east, drive to the river,’ my ancestors
After my father died, I rescued his truck from our shouted—just when my brain was millimeters away
dirt-floor garage. Its back bumper, which had taken from stone-cold shutdown and my heart was
the brunt of many an unloaded oil barrel, drooped pounding like a half-killed rabbit going into shock.
as forlornly as the tail of a dog that’s lost its master. And so I steered my dad’s truck along a course that
The cab still smelled vaguely of farm animals and followed no map except the faint natural marks of
cigar smoke. | fixed it up and made it my own. the land. I drove east, away from the sun. The road
The pickup had been the perfect vehicle for my began to slope toward the river. My heart pounded
father, but it raised eyebrows and drew surprised less; my head cleared. The blighted city gave way to
comments from my colleagues in Carbondale when cranes and riverside loading equipment and then,
I self-consciously parked it next to their Toyotas and there were the Mississippi and the Gateway Arch to
Hondas in the faculty parking lot of Southern IIli- Illinois. I drove across some bridge and soon found
nois University. “It was my dad’s,’ I told them, as myself in the farm country east of Saint Louis. The
though that would explain everything. wheels of my dad’s truck hummed beneath me. |
One day I drove the truck out of comfortable, was safely on my way back home.
rural southern Illinois and into the city of Saint
Louis. I was driving alone, with no one sitting be- Beth A. Middleton is now a research ecologist at the U.S.
side me to read the map, and memorized the route Geological Survey’s National Wetlands Research Center in
before entering the city. But on my way back, I Lafayette, Louisiana.
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 AUPARi ea 2010)3 MiOUSULM Ems diate NUMBER3

fice Ami Wak ceo

52 DATE WITH EXTINCTION

For a thousand years before people settled
in New Zealand, a small alien predator
may have been undermining the islands’
seabird populations.
BY LAURA SESSIONS

COVER STORY
44 THE LONGEST WINTER
A series of deep freezes descended across the
Earth 750 million years ago, each lasting millions
of years. The spring that finally took hold may have
triggered the present bloom of multicellular life.
BY GABRIELLE WALKER
COVER
Lynn Davis, Iceberg 31,
Disko Bay, Greenland, 2000
STORY BEGINS
ON PAGE 44

Pee ae ee,
58 ARCTIC COVENANT
Springtime in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SUBHANKAR BANERJEE Visit our Web site at
TEXT BY VITTORIO MAESTRO www.nhmag.com
D EPARTMENTS

THE NATURAL MOMENT

So Fleeting a Spring
Photograph by Christian Ziegler
UP FRONT
Life on Ice
10 LETTERS

14 CONTRIBUTORS

16 SAMPLINGS
Stéphan Reebs
20 UNIVERSE
Reaching for the Stars
Neil deGrasse Tyson
22 FINDINGS
How Bears Feed Salmon to the Forest
Robert S. Semeniuk
24 How Bears Change the Salmon
Scott M. Gende and Thomas P. Quinn

42 BIOMECHANICS
Throwing Yourself into It
Adam Summers

62 REVIEW
Happy Birthday, DNA!
Everett I. Mendelsohn

70 BOOKSHELF
Laurence A. Marschall

73 nature.net
Oil to Burn?
Robert Anderson

74 OUT THERE
Warp Factor
Charles Liu

75 THE SKY IN APRIL

Joe Rao
76 AT THE MUSEUM

80 ENDPAPER
Both a God and a Rogue
Ravi Corea

PICTURE CREDITS: Page 14

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 THE NATURAL MOMENT UP FRONT
~ See preceding pages

Life on Ice
know, the picture on our cover this month makes it look as if we’re all
about to collide with an iceberg. And, truth be told, there seems plenty
to be anxious about. A few weeks ago, those of us who live or work in
py year in Panama, just after Manhattan (the editorial staff of this magazine, for instance) thought that
the first downpour of the we had gone from yellow alert to orange, along with the rest of the coun-
rainy season, the flowers of the try. Then the mayor reminded us that we'd been there, done that—New
guayacan tree (Iabebuia guayacan) York City had been stuck in orange ever since the code went into effect.
burst open. The explosion of Maybe it’s small consolation—but things could be worse, much worse.
blossoms, whose timing coincides Compared with what the Earth has undergone in its geological past, even
with the northern temperate the many human insults to our planet seem puny and fundamentally insub-
spring, announces the end of the stantial. A few weeks ago Gabrielle Walker stopped by our offices to show
four- to five-month-long dry sea- us her latest report about what’s hot on the geological front. A grand idea,
son. The downpour, and a tem- first conceived many years ago but rejected soon afterward, has now re-
perature change, are thought to turned with such compelling vitality—and 1s so well supported by the evi-
trigger the trees’ ready buds to dence of rocks all over the world—that it is stimulating new work and new
swell and bloom. Water plays such thinking across an entire scientific community. Walker’s story, with apolo-
a critical role that, depending on gies to Laura Ingalls Wilder, is called “The Longest Winter” (page 44).
rain patterns, a blossom-filled tree Walker isn’t kidding. The “winter” in question lasted as long as 10 mil-
may be just a short distance away lion years. The average annual temperature at the surface of the Earth hov-
from a dry, unadorned one. ered around 40 degrees below zero. Conditions were antarctic.
Native bees are drawn to the Most ice ages—certainly the ones people are most familiar with—are
sensory delights of the guayacan, self-limiting: the ice advances, then retreats once again. The retreats may be
but the trees’ golden-petal lucre is the result of global warming by atmospheric greenhouse gases, among them
something of a cheat: the blos- carbon dioxide (CO). Exposed rock continually draws CO, out of the at-
soms are not receptive to pollina- mosphere and chemically locks up the carbon. During an ice age, however,
tors for more than a day, and they the more the Earth’s landmasses get covered by ice, the less rock 1s exposed
remain on the trees for only a few to CO,, and so the more CO, remains in the atmosphere. The atmospheric
days before descending—like mi- CO, eventually warms the Earth and reverses the march of ice.
grating butterflies—to the forest But about 750 million years ago the continental tectonic plates hap-
floor. Photographer Christian hazardly arranged themselves around the equator. That seems to have
Ziegler found the guayacan tapes- turned an “ordinary” ice age into a runaway catastrophe. Even after the
try pictured here not quite a mile polar ice began advancing, continental rock remained exposed, and it
from the Smithsonian Research continued sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. The warming effect of
Station on Barro Colorado Island atmospheric CO, steadily diminished. By the time the ice reached the
in March. Detecting a “light, tropics, 1t was too late. Ice quickly covered what was left of the Earth.
sweet smell” in the air, Ziegler said Only the slow release of CO, by volcanoes eventually restored the green-
he spotted leaf-cutter ants carting house warming and enabled life to get a fresh start.
away clippings of guayacan flow- There’s clearly a hopeful message in that fresh start. April, at least in the
ers—an easily digestible meal for temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere, brings mud, blossoms, new
the insects’ symbiotic fungi. life—in short, the promise of spring. So, lest winter seem too prominent a
Hours after dropping from the topic for an April issue of Natural History, two photographers bring us their
branches, Ziegler noted, the trees’ contrasting visions of renewal. Subhankar Banerjee portrays the robust
saffron blossoms—even the ant’s glory of the vernal Arctic, which must gather all its life forces in the short
radiating trails—had darkened to months between breakup and freeze up (see “Arctic Covenant,’ page 58).
yellow-brown. By the end of the Christian Ziegler, at the beginning of the Panamanian rainy season, docu-
day the flowers had lost all their ments the fragile beauty of falling blossoms that retain their color for just a
brilliance, blending in with the few hours (see “So Fleeting a Spring,” page 6).
leaflitter of the forest floor. And there it is, the simplest, most bracing antidote nature has for all
—Erin Espelie our anxieties: Spring will come again. Count on it.
—PETER BROWN

| NATURAL HISTORY April 2003

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 LETTERS
SE EAIIAE
Foresight and Hindsight in Africa and in all en- with elephantiasis, it helps bacteria, what their rela-
After reading T.V. Rajan’s demic areas in the Ameri- to bind the affected limbs tionship with the nema-
article on lymphatic fila- cas, which include Brazil, with compressive bandages. todes was, and whether
riasis [“The Worm and Colombia, Ecuador, That and, of course, the they might provide a new
the Parasite,’ 2/03], I Guatemala, Mexico, and practice of proper hygiene drug target.
thought your readers Venezuela. helps reduce swelling and Since that meeting the
might like to know of on- One oral dose a year of discomfort. research community has
going efforts to apply re- ivermectin (trade name, WHO ranks lymphatic been galvanized into ac-
cent medical discoveries Mectizan) kills the micro- filariasis as the second lead- tion. Groups in Germany
to the treatment and pos- scopic infant worms. ing cause of permanent and headed by Achim Hoerauf
sible elimination of both Merck & Co., Inc., has long-term disability. But and Dietrich Bittner have
filariasis and the related donated the drug to the WHO also considers the tested standard antibacter-
parasitic disease onchocer- world for as long as there disease eradicable—one of ial drugs in animals and
clasis.
Onchocerciasis (river
blindness), characterized
by incessant, debilitating
itching and eyesight dam-
age, 1s spread through the
bite ofa small black fly
that breeds in rapidly is a need, and our center only six infectious diseases started a long-term trial of
flowing rivers and streams. has enabled the delivery in that category. The Carter tetracycline for onchocer-
of more than 40 million Center is now working in ciasis in Africa. Their ini-
treatments—about nine Nigeria, which has the tial results report a pro-
million annually. Two greatest number of infected longed and significant
years ago our center’s task people in Africa, with the improvement 1n clinical
force for disease eradica- government, health author- status. (Note that it could
tion concluded that it is ities, and villagers. Our have been otherwise: If
feasible to kill the adult hope is that filariasis can be the bacterium were just a
worms and eliminate river eradicated there in the next hitchhiker, a parasite of
blindness in the Americas fifteen years. the parasite, treatment
if at least 85 percent of Jimmy Carter with drugs might cure the
Larva of the parasitic worm
the people living in en- The Carter Center parasite of its disease, and
Wuchereria bancrofti, which
causes filariasis demic areas are treated Atlanta, Georgia give rise to more human
with Mectizan twice a disease.)
Eighteen million people year. A more effective The Edna McConnell Those promising find-
are infected with the dis- treatment of adult worms Clark Foundation for ings have prompted a
ease worldwide. Adult will be needed to accom- many years sponsored re- search through records to
victims can neither farm plish the same goal in search on onchocerciasis identify earlier experiments
nor care for their children. Africa. (the spectrum of infections in which animals, treated
Fertile bottomlands are Fortunately, the trans- including river blindness), with tetracycline for other
abandoned for fear of con- mission of lymphatic filari- including meetings that reasons, were cured of fi-
tracting the disease, and asis can also be halted by brought workers together larial nematodes. Mr.
people move to less fertile treating infected individu- from many countries and Rajan suggests that such
grounds, disrupting farm als just once a year. The fields. The 1998 meeting experiments were ignored
economies. A global effort treatment must continue highlighted a series of because the results did not
to fight this disease in- for four to six years with a findings suggesting that fit into a “reigning biologi-
cludes the Carter Center, single-dose combination of Wolbachia were present in cal dogma.” We would beg
the Lions Clubs Interna- oral medicines, most com- human filarial nematodes. to differ: they were ignored
tional Foundation, the monly albendazole and Many of us left the meet- because the experiments
World Bank, and the ivermectin. Bed nets also ing determined to find out were not designed to mea-
World Health Organiza- help control the transmis- whether the “bacteria-like sure the effects of drug
tion (WHO). We at the sion of the infection by bodies” seen under the treatment. Filarial life cycles
Carter Center work both mosquitoes. In patients microscope were in fact are difficult to maintain,

NATURAI rORY April 2003

and failures are common: eral, do not lack cell walls, centage of similarity be- same number Mr. Zimmer
one particular crash in the as Mr. Rajan states. tween the two species’ cites as today’s consensus.
cycle of infection would Claudio Bandi DNA sequences underesti- Although Morris
not be especially notewor- University of Milan mates how similar people Goodman was an early pi-
thy. With hindsight one Milan, Italy and chimps really are in the oneer in molecular primate
can now identify the cause panoply of nature. relationships, it was Vin-
of the failure, but it was Family Ties At the other end of the cent M. Sarich and Allan
not evident in the original It is not at all clear, as scale, two DNA sequences C. Wilson who, in 1967,
experiments. Carl Zimmer writes in that share no common an- applied the concept of a
Mark Blaxter and Katelyn Fenn “Searching for Your cestry, and are thus as evo- molecular clock, which set
University of Edinburgh lutionarily different as they the stage for the current
Edinburgh, Scotland can be, still probably match views of human evolution.
at a fourth of their nu- Sarich and Wilson esti-
Mr. Rajan is correct that cleotides by chance alone. mated that humans and
certain preconceptions (or (The DNA alphabet offers chimpanzees diverged
misconceptions) on the only four “letters” to about five million years
part of “Western” physi- choose from.) By that logic, ago, an estimate now sup-
cians may lead to the re- human DNA 1s at least ported by much additional
jection of clear evidence one-quarter identical to molecular data. Ramapithe-
for the efficacy of nontra- carrot DNA, in spite of the cus, dated at 14 million
ditional or “nonsensical” fact that we are manifestly years old and declared a
disease treatments. Inner Chimp” [“The Evo- not one-quarter carrot. hominid solely on the basis
My colleagues and I lutionary Front,” Thus, for distant relatives, of its jaws and teeth, was
were the first to identify 12/02-1/03], that human DNA similarities overesti- the first putative ancestor
the filarial bacteria as Wol- beings and chimpanzees are mate biological similarities. to be deposed by the new
bachia. Together with Nor- so “astonishingly similar” Jonathan Marks molecular approaches. But
bert W. Brattig and his genetically. University of North Carolina the lessons of history are
coworkers in Hamburg, DNA sequences are at Charlotte soon forgotten. Mr. Zim-
Germany, we are now one-dimensional, inviting mer, like many others,
studying the effect of Wol- decontextualized compar- In the first half of the readily accepts the new
bachia-derived molecules isons, but bodies are three- twentieth century there skull from Chad, dated
on human and canine im- dimensional. So if human was little agreement about from between six and
mune cells. Results show
that Wolbachia proteins are
in part responsible for pro- man and chimp DN. differ by1.58 percent, justwhat q
ducing such mediators of
immune responses as cy- h say about he differ nce between the two species?
tokines. As Mr. Rajan mhz eocay

rightly states, these cy-

tokines cause many of the and chimp DNA sequences which animal is the closest seven million years ago, as
symptoms of acute filariasis are 1.58 percent different, living human relative. Var- the earliest hominid, even
(fever, headaches, chills, is that more or less than the ious advocates promoted though the clock for ho-
and so on). difference between a every known ape. The case minid evolution did not
Two additional points: human femur and a chimp for the chimpanzee was begin ticking until at least
First, the caption to the il- femur? If we put a person not fully made until the a million years later.
lustration on page 32 states and a chimp next to a sea work by Charles G. Sibley Adrienne Zihlman
that the person depicted 1s urchin, we can readily see and Jon E. Ahlquist on University of California,
a victim of filariasis. But that the two primates DNA hybridization in Santa Cruz
the worm being removed match up almost perfectly 1984. They measured sim-
by the patient is likely Dra- bone for bone, muscle for ilarities between entire CARL ZIMMER REPLIES:
cunculus medinensis, which muscle, organ for organ— genomes, and determined Molecular clocks are infor-
belongs to another super- and that in every case the that people and chim- mative but not as precise as
family. Second, Wolbachia, sea urchin is the odd man panzees are 98.6 percent Adrienne Zihlman implies.
and “rickettsiae” in gen- out. If anything, the per- identical, virtually the One recent estimate for

April 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 11

the common ancestor of most damaging greenhouse make the important obser- Tropics: more than 60,000
humans and chimps puts gas in the atmosphere.” vation that the interplay square miles of forest are
the date between 4.6 mil- Indeed, methane is the sec- between plant and animal lost each year, creating a
lion and 6.2 million years ond most damaging green- species 1s central to shaping patchwork of uncon-
ago; another puts it be- house gas governed by the the diversity of tropical nected fragments. Studies
tween 3.3 million and 8.3 Kyoto Protocol, but the forests. Their study of the such as Messrs. Leigh and
million years ago. The age major greenhouse gases 1n Ziegler’s underscore the
of the Sahelanthropus site in the atmosphere are, in value of preserving large
Chad is not certain either, order of their warming ef- tracts of land, and of con-
because it is estimated from fect, water vapor, carbon sidering such a web of in-
the dating of similar sites. dioxide, and then methane. teractions in making deci-
That’s why the discoverers Like carbon dioxide and sions about forest
of the fossil maintain only methane, water vapor has management and conser-
that it can be tentatively many anthropogenic vation. Now is the time to
dated to between six mil- sources, from the burning make these critical land-
lion and seven million of hydrocarbons to the ex- use decisions before too
years ago. Given the over- cess evaporation from fragmentation of a much of what they aptly
lap and fuzziness of these reservoirs, lakes created by Panamanian forest shows call a magic web 1s lost.
estimates, Sahelanthropus 1s dams, and rice paddies. that the elimination of Phyllis D. Coley and Thomas
not ruled out as a hominid. WD. Benton some animal species can A. Kursar
Albuquerque, New Mexico dramatically alter the sur- University of Utah
Misting in Action vival of certain plants and Salt Lake City, Utah
In “Grain Gain,” Reading the Tree Leaves the composition of species.
[““Samplings,” 2/03], Egbert Giles Leigh Jr. and Unfortunately, similar Messrs. Leigh and Ziegler
Stephan Reebs states: Christian Ziegler “experiments” are taking offer an intriguing discus-
“Methane is the second [““Biosphere III,” 2/03} place throughout the sion of the unintended

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 sAMPLINGS
2SSE

MULTITASKING If you're lucky enough EAU DE DANGER Do animals smell few ounces of water from the pike
to have a backyard vegetable garden this fear? Mostly the answer is no. Sight, not tanks. One of the new groups (the ex-
summer, pull up a bean plant (or any smell, is what reveals a frightened crea- perimental group) also received a few
other legume) and take a look at its roots. ture’s (or person's) emotional state. But ounces of the water from the tank that
The little swellings you'll see are nodules for animals in a watery environment, the had been disturbed by the fake heron
formed by the plant and inhabited by smell of fear does indeed act as a head. The second new group (the con-
bacteria. But don't be alarmed: there’s no strong signal—albeit more as a warning trol group) received the same amount
disease. The plant needs nitrogen to to potential victims than as a giveaway of water from a tank containing charr
make proteins, but the nitrogen in the to predators. that hadn't been disturbed.
plant’s environment takes a “raw” form It is known that frightened crayfish, When the charr in the experimental
the plant cannot use. That's where the crabs, fish, and tadpoles spurt ammonia group then encountered a pike in a test
bacteria come in: they “fix” the nitrogen in their urine and through their gills. For tank, they gave the unfamiliar predator
in a molecular form that makes it avail- neighboring animals—even unrelated a wider berth and avoided capture for a
able to the plant. In exchange, the plant species—the fluids serve as a kind longer time than did the charr in the
supplies the bacteria with sugars and of universal “disturbance cue,” causing control group. Mirza and Chivers con-
other compounds. them to seek cover or become more clude that when charr detect disturb-
The nitrogen-fixing partnership has
long been the subject of intense scientific
study—if only because so many of the
world’s protein-rich crops are legumes: al-
falfa, soybeans, and peas, to name a few.
Now Rieko Nishimura, a molecular biolo-
gist at the University of California, Berke-
ley, and several of her colleagues at
Japanese universities have provided in-
vestigators with a new tool: a mutant form
of the legume Lotus japonicus, a “model”
organism well known to plant geneticists
around the world. The mutant form is
called astray because it grows long hori-
zontal roots that, with respect to gravity,
have “gone astray.”
More to the point, the astray form gen-
erates many more nodules than the plant's
nonmutant form, and it makes them early
in its life. Astray has aboveground abnor-
malities as well. For example, its stem is
Brook charr can tune in to the smell of fear.
elongated and its color a washed-out
green—typical features of plants that lack circumspect, even though they may not ance cues, they pay attention to other
access to light. Thus the astray gene is in- be able to sense the predator directly. odors in the vicinity and thereafter treat
volved both in the plant's responses to Now two biologists at the University those odors as suspicious, and so they
light, an attribute of the aboveground of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon have are more alert to potential predators
world, and in the formation of roots and shown that disturbance cues can even and can survive longer. (“Behavioural
nodules underground. And the gene's lead some fish to identify previously un- responses to conspecific disturbance
multiple talents offer a window into the known predators. Reehan S. Mirza and chemicals enhance survival of juvenile
evolution of nodulation in legumes: cer- Douglas P. Chivers scared young brook brook charr, Salvelinus fontinalis, during
tain proteins that were operating in the charr (also known as brook trout) by encounters with predators,” Behaviour
light of day were co-opted for work within striking the water surface of the charr’s 139:1099-1109, 2002)
the darkness of the soil. (“A Lotus basic tank with a fake heron head. Then they
Stéphan Reebs is a professor of biology at
leucine zipper protein with a RING-finger collected a sample of the water. They
the University of Moncton in New Brunswick,
motif negatively regulates the develop- also collected water from tanks contain- Canada, and the author of Fish Behavior in
mental program of nodulation,” Proceed- ing predatory northern pike. Then they the Aquarium and in the Wild (Cornell Uni-
ings of the National Academy of Sciences subjected two new groups of charr to a versity Press).
99:15206-10, November 12, 2002)

HISTORY April 2003

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 UNIVERSE
SIAMREIN

Reaching for the Stars

Instead of counting smart bombs, perhaps we should count smart scientists.
By Neil deGrasse Tyson

|n the months since the space shut- missions, each more ambitious than If we are to win the battle that is now
tle Columbia’s fatal reentry through the one before, led to six lunar land- going on around the world between free-
Earth’s atmosphere, it seems that ings. We walked on the Moon, just as dom and tyranny, the dramatic achieve-
everyone has become a NASA critic. we said we would. Surely Mars was ments in space which occurred in recent
After the initial shock and mourning, next. Those adventures sparked an weeks should have made clear to us all, as
no end of journalists, politicians, scien- unprecedented level of public interest did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of
this adventure on the minds of men
tists, engineers, policy analysts, and or- in science and engineering, pumping
everywhere, who are attempting to make
dinary taxpayers began to debate the eager, inspired students through the a determination of which road they
past, present, and future of America’s entire U.S. educational pipeline. should take.
presence in space. Although I have al- What followed was a domestic boom
ways been interested in this subject, my in technology that would shape our Clearly the president knew that al-
recent tour of duty with the President’s lives for the rest of the century. though bravery may win battles, sci-
Commission on the Future of the US. ence and technology can win wars.
Aerospace Industry has further sharp- beautiful story. But let’s not fool And Kennedy was hardly the first
ened my senses and sensitivities. ourselves into thinking we went leader to call for an expensive military
Amid the occasional new argu- to the Moon because we're pioneers program.
ments on the op-ed pages and TV talk or explorers or selfless discoverers. We But what about discovery for its
shows were questions that get rolled
out with every new woe in the space ae
Ne AES t snot fo. iL ae ;
own sake? Are the scientific returns
on a manned mission to Mars inher-
program: Why send people into space Oe ae es ently important enough to justify its
instead of robots? Why spend money costs? After all, any foreseeable mis-
in space when we need it here on sion to Mars will be long and im-
Earth? How can we get people ex- mensely expensive. But the United
cited about the space program again? States is a wealthy nation. It has the
Yes, excitement levels are low. But money. And the technology is imag-
lack of enthusiasm is not apathy. In this inable. Those aren’t the issues.
case, the business-as-usual attitude went to the Moon because Cold War Expensive projects are vulnerable
shows that space exploration has passed politics made it the militarily expedi- because they take a long time and
seamlessly into everyday culture, so ent thing to do. must be sustained across changeovers
most Americans no longer even notice In 1961, just weeks after the Soviet in political leadership as well as
it. We pay attention only when some- cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the through downturns in the economy.
thing goes wrong. first person to orbit Earth, President Photographs of homeless children and
In the 1960s, by contrast, space was John F Kennedy told Congress: unemployed factory workers juxta-
an exotic frontier—traversed by the posed with images of astronauts frol-
few, the brave, and the lucky. Every I believe that this nation should commit it-
icking on Mars make a powerful case
self to achieving the goal, before this dec-
gesture NASA made toward the heav- against the continued funding of
ade is out, of landing a man on the moon
ens caused a splash in the media—the and returning him safely to the earth. space missions.
surest evidence that space was still un- A review of history’s most ambitious
familiar territory. But most people have forgotten the projects—the ones that have garnered
For many, particularly for NASA rest of his speech. Kennedy never an uncommonly large fraction of a
aficionados and all of the people en- suggested the Moon landing be ac- nation’s gross domestic product—
gaged in the aerospace industry, the complished for its own sake. He was demonstrates that only three goals have
1960s was the golden era of American issuing a powerful appeal to vanquish won such support: defense (the Great
space exploration. A series of space Communism: Wall of China); the promise of eco-

20 |NATURAL HISTORY April 2003

nomic return (the voyages of e We should explore Pluto
Columbus and Magellan); and and its newly discovered
the praise of power (the pyra- family of icy bodies in the
mids of Egypt). And for expen- outer solar system, becaiise
sive projects that fulfill more they hold clues to our
than one of these functions, planetary origins.
money flows like beer from a
freshly tapped keg. The 44,000 ¢ We should probe Venus’s
miles of U.S. interstate express- thick atmosphere to un-
ways make a crisp example. derstand why its green-
Conceived in the Eisenhower house effect has gone
era to move materiel and per- awry, giving rise to a sur-
sonnel for the defense of the face temperature of 900
nation, that network is also degrees Fahrenheit.
heavily used by commercial ve-
hicles. That’s why there is al- No part of the solar sys-
ways money for roads. tem should be beyond our
In the current space program reach; we should deploy
the empirical risk of death re- both robots and people to
mains high. With two lost get there (robots make poor
shuttles out of 113 launches, an field geologists). And no
astronaut’s chances of not com- part of the universe should
ing home are about 2 percent. hide from our telescopes;
If your chances of death were 2 we should launch them into
percent every time you drove orbit and give them the
to the Piggly Wiggly, you grandest vistas for looking
would never drive your car. To back at the Earth and at the
the Columbia crew, however, rest of the solar system.
the return was worth that risk. With missions and pro-
I’m proud to be part of a Hects such as those, the US:
species whose members occa- can guarantee itself an acad-
sionally and willingly put their emic pipeline bursting with
lives at risk to extend the the best and the brightest
boundaries of their existence. Rufino Tamayo, El hombre, 1953 astrophysicists, biologists,
Such people were the first to chemists, engineers, geolo-
leave the cave and see what was on the bombs, perhaps we should be count- gists, and physicists. And they will
other side of the cliff face. They were ing our smart scientists and engineers. collectively form a new kind of
the first to climb the mountain. They And there is no shortage of seductive “missile silo”’—filled with intellec-
were the first to sail the ocean. They projects for them to work on: tual capital—ready to come forward
were the first to touch the sky. And whenever they are called, just as the
they will be the first to land on Mars. e We should search Mars for fossils nation’s best and brightest have al-
But somebody has to write the and find out why liquid water no ways come forward in times of need.
check. We’ve made it out of the cave longer runs on its surface. For the U.S. space program to die
and up the mountain. Now explo- along with the crew of the space
e We should visit an asteroid or two,
ration costs real money. When no- shuttle Columbia—because nobody is
and learn how to deflect them. If
body writes the check, we stall on the willing to write the check to keep it
one is discovered heading our way,
last breached frontier. going—would be to move backward
how embarrassing it would be for
just by standing still.
us big-brained, opposable-thumbed
ctually, there may be a way to
humans to meet the same fate as the Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the direc-
keep going places. But it involves proverbially pea-brained dinosaurs. tor of the Hayden Planetarium in New York
a slight shift in what the government City. He was a presidential appointee to the
usually calls national defense. If science ¢ We should drill through the kilo- twelve-member Commission on the Future ofthe
and technology can win wars, as the meters of ice on Jupiter’s moon Eu- U.S. Aerospace Industry (wwww,aerospacecom
history of military conflict suggests, ropa and explore the liquid ocean mission.gov), whose final report was submitted to
then instead of counting our smart below for living organisms. the White House in November 2002.

April 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 21

|
 "SPR RS
Reimchen estimates that before the
expansion of commercial fishing and
industrial logging in the twentieth
century, when salmon were more
abundant throughout coastal streams,
each of the 30,000 black bears living in
the salmon watershed may have caught
on average 500 fish a year. If half of
each carcass was left uneaten on the
forest floor (a reasonable estimate), he
figures the nutrient transfer into the
rainforest amounted to more than
25,000 tons a year, of which 3.4 per-
cent was nitrogen.
And salmon carcasses are by no
means the only way bears spread
salmon-derived nitrogen to the terres-
Leftovers from an ursine banquet: nutrients from
trial ecosystem. Other field biologists,
the parts that were eaten will also fertilize the
plants . . . indirectly. such as Grant V. Hilderbrand, formerly
of the Alaska Department of Fish and
Game, and his colleagues, have docu-

How Bears Fee mented two other major means: urine

and feces. Hilderbrand, who studied
brown bears in Alaska, maintains that

Salmon to the Forest

urine is particularly important. Bears
consume salmon in the late summer
and fall to accumulate the fat reserves
they will need to hibernate—and that
females will need to birth and provide
Tiees get the table scraps from a fish dinner. milk for their cubs. Although some of
the nitrogen from the salmon goes
Story and Photographs by Robert S. Semeniuk into building muscle tissue and meet-
ing other physiological demands, the
bears’ fat tissue is virtually nitrogen-
earing night-vision gog- (the bears get most of their catch in free. Consequently, much of the nitro-
gles, Thomas E. Reim- the dark). The field study is part of an gen in the salmon protein is excreted.
chen maneuvers our in- investigation born more than a dec- “The bottom line,’ Hilderbrand says,
flatable boat around rocks, deadfalls, ade ago at Bag Harbour in the Queen “is that if the bears leave half of each
and barnacles as we pick our way in Charlotte Islands. One day in 1992, as carcass in the forest, the other, eaten
the dark up an estuary in Canada’s Pa- Reimchen was sitting under giant half also is ultimately deposited in the
cific Northwest. In our wake we leave Sitka spruce trees and looking at half- forest as well.”
brilliant bursts of bioluminescence, as eaten salmon carcasses strewn about
schools of fleeing salmon agitate uni- on the forest floor, he realized that Ree boat carries us out of
cellular algae called dinoflagellates. the abundance of carcasses and the the salty estuary and up the
Why the “dinos” emit light is open abundance of giant trees adjacent to Klekane River into the conifer rain-
to interpretation. One explanation, the river was probably no coinci- forest of the coastal mainland of British
Reimchen tells me, is that the light dence. Ever since that moment, he Columbia. After the boat has been
attracts fish that eat zooplankton such has collected evidence that the au- safely tied up at the bank, Reimchen
as copepods, which are predators of tumn return of salmon from the Pa- leads me and two of his coworkers,
the dinoflagellates. cific Ocean to the streams of their Deanna D. Mathewson, also of the
A biologist at the University of birth is much more than just the an- University of Victoria, and Daniel R.
Victoria in British Columbia, Reim- nual migration of fish. The run of Klinka, a graduate student of Reim-
chen specializes in predator-prey in- salmon constitutes a major flow of chen’s, along a creek into the pitch-
teractions. We are here to observe marine nutrients into estuaries and black woods. To avoid surprising any
black bears catching spawning salmon coastal watersheds. bears, Reimchen trudges steadily for-

22 | NATURAI rORY April 2003

ward, uttering low guttural sounds. appears into the forest with a big chum a[se bear returns in about fifteen
Then, at the edge of the creek we stop salmon in its mouth. minutes and starts fishing again,
and wait quietly; I scan the forest on Black bears favor the bigger chum by swatting and grabbing. Bears exer-
the opposite bank. salmon to the smaller pink salmon; cise various techniques. Some pa
“There is a bear downstream walk- they are more apt to eat pink salmon tiently wait in the shallows and then
just flop into the water on their bellies.
Reimchen says that by day at Bag Har-
Some bears have a taste for salmon brains; bour, black bears would just wade in
others eat everything but the fish’s testicles. and snorkel, or search overhangs and
logs, and catch fish without any great
motion. Salmon are more quiescent at
ing towards us,’ someone whispers in the stream, and usually carry chum night, he adds, and can readily be ap-
softly. The splash of the footsteps salmon into the forest. At Bag Har- proached in the water. “At night I can
sounds closer than the animal appears bour Reimchen had predicted that pick up big chum salmon; as long as I
through my night-vision goggles. The bears would take larger and thus more don’t take them out of the water, or
bear lunges forward, crashes through valuable catch farther into the forest, squeeze them too hard, they allow me
the water, but misses a fish. The bear where other bears and scavengers to hold them.”
moves upstream slowly, to within per- would be less likely to interfere. That Reimchen notes that black bears
haps fifty feet of us, and takes another led him deeper into the forest in catch more male fish than females.
lunge. Again, no catch. On its fourth search of carcasses. Occasionally he “Males are always darting around,” he
inyerthe bear succeeds) I hear*the found them as far as 200 yards away notes, “fending off other males and
crunch of fish skull, and the bear dis- from the streams. chasing females,’ whereas females are

A grizzly catches pink salmon in Knight Inlet of the mainland coast, near Vancouver Is land

April 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 23

 more likely to hide in the shadows, draped over a rock or a mossy log. to be scavenged successively by eagles,
say, under a log. The distinguishing The sperm are made up mainly of nu- martens, ravens, crows, gulls, beetles,
hump on the male’s back may also cleic acids (DNA), and they are meta- and fly larvae. Even deer and squirrels
make it easier to see or catch [see “Fin bolically hard to digest because they feed on salmon carcasses.
Tuning,” below}. may yield high levels of nitrogenous Reimchen and his colleagues ex-
Some bears eat only parts of the toxins. In contrast, eggs are mainly amine, weigh, and take a broad range
fish—they bite out the brain, or strip yolk—in other words, oils. Often of data about each carcass: lower jaw
out just the eggs.
oo
Other bears leave bears delicately skin and eat only the length; body length; sex; weight of
nothing except a pair of intact testicles fattest parts of the fish, leaving the rest testes, or the number of eggs in the

Fin Tuning death. Thus the energy reward for the bears is much greater if
they kill a salmon that has just entered a stream—particularly
a female salmon, whose lipid-rich eggs are the bears’ choic-
By Scott M. Gende and Thomas P. Quinn est meal. Bears may be able to distinguish energy-rich fish by
their appearance because the loss in lipid and protein also
ears that live near salmon streams and spawning grounds leads to a loss of skin color and an increase in body fungus.
Be. to grow larger, have more cubs per litter, and belong By contrast, in larger or more structurally complex streams,
to denser populations than do bears without access to salmon. bears do not or cannot selectively target the larger fish or the
No big surprises there. But what difference do the bears make most recent arrivals.
to the salmon? Does being the prey of bears measurably affect The results of bear predation are evident in the salmon them-
salmon ecology, behavior, or evolution? Three criteria must selves. Compared with the salmon in large streams, the ones in
hold for the answers to be yes. First, bears have to kill a “high small streams where predation is high tend to be smaller and to
enough” proportion of a salmon population. Second, preda- spawn their eggs sooner after entering the stream.
tion can’t be random; some fish must be
favored, or ignored, according to some A nother effect of the bears is reflected
morphological or behavioral trait. Third, in the dorsal humps of male sockeye
and most important, predation must influ- and pink salmon: they are smaller than the
ence salmon fitness, or in other words suc- humps of salmon not exposed to bears.
cess at reproduction. Because salmon re- Usually—even accounting for differences
turning to freshwater streams will soon die in body length—males with relatively large
anyway, whether killed by bears or not, the humps win out in the competition for fe-
answers are far from obvious. males. The hump may serve the practical
Having observed the interactions of Pink salmon in Knight Inlet purpose of making the fish's profile too fat
bears and salmon for many years, we have for another male to bite, but it is also used
concluded that the three criteria can be met only at small in display. To some extent, too, females may prefer a larger
streams. First, in small streams, bears can kill a high proportion hump in their mate. Other things being equal, a larger hump
of the salmon; the fishing requires less effort there than it does would seem to be the way to go.
in wider and deeper streams. The back-to-belly thickness of a male sockeye salmon may
Second, perhaps because of the greater visibility or “catcha- range from four to ten inches. Yet some of the streams they
bility” of large fish in shallow water (or because of the simple spawn in can be as shallow as three and a half inches deep. In
preferences by the bears) large salmon (at least in small streams) those streams, the larger the hump, the more it will stick out of
are more likely to be killed than smaller ones. By targeting the the water. Such a hump may be more readily visible to bears,
large fish, bears may be maximizing the energy they gain from and it may make maneuvering harder for the fish (in small
food, compared with the energy they spend in catching the fish. streams, stranding is a more severe problem for large-humped
Third, in small streams bears preferentially kill salmon that males than for small-humped ones). Either way, the large-
have not yet spawned. The reason is that salmon do not eat humped males are the ones more easily captured. Here, too,
once they enter freshwater; instead, they draw on their own bear predation becomes a powerful source of natural selec-
stores of fat, or lipid, as well as protein, for the energy to mi- tion, countering the selective pressures that otherwise would
grate upstream and reproduce. Consequently, the longer a maintain a large hump.
salmon has been in a stream, the lower its energy content.
Salmon just entering streams carry as much as 90 percent Scott M. Gende is an ecologist at the Pacific Northwest Research Sta-
more lipid and 50 percent more protein than do salmon that tion in Juneau, Alaska. Thomas P Quinn is a professor in the School
have spent some time on the spawning grounds and are near of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington in Seattle.

24 |n
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body cavity and on the ground; posi- sen, a biologist at McGill University in with its concentration in the air. That
tion of the carcass and its distance Montreal, suggested that Reimchen makes it fairly straightforward to mea-
from the stream; body condition and measure the relative proportions of ni- sure the relative contribution marine
intactness; presence or absence of the trogen isotopes in the tissue of forest nutrient sources such as salmon make
brain. In addition, the biologists col- plants. Specifically, Rasmussen noted, to trees and other plants.
lect tree cores and plant-tissue sam-
ples in as many watersheds as possible.
Nitrogen isotopes in tree rings record
uring his initial investigations in changes in the annual run of salmon.
Bag Harbour, Reimchen had
reckoned he could gauge historical
trends and fluctuations in the flow of Reinchen should measure the pro- Although other investigators were
salmon by examining the yearly portion of nitrogen that is made up of already measuring nitrogen 15 to esti-
growth rings of trees. The number of the isotope nitrogen 15. (By far the mate the contribution of salmon-de-
salmon entering Bag Harbour has var- most common form of atmospheric or rived nitrogen to aquatic habitats,
ied enormously during the past half- oceanic nitrogen is made up of the iso- Reimchen was one of the first to apply
century, ranging from 500 to 35,000 a tope nitrogen 14, so called because the procedure in terrestrial plants. For
year. Presumably, Reimchen reasoned, each atomic nucleus of nitrogen 14 example, to isolate the contribution of
trees grew faster, and their growth contains a total of fourteen protons salmon to the forest nutrient mix, he
rings became thicker, in the years in and neutrons.) Nitrogen 15, which has has compared the nitrogen-15 pro-
which salmon were more abundant. an extra neutron, becomes more con- portions in vegetation growing above
But he didn’t know how he could rule centrated in marine life-forms at pro- and below waterfalls that are barriers
out some independent external factor: gressively higher levels of the food to migrating salmon. Similarly, he
after all, tree growth might be largely chain. Hence in salmon, a fourth-level has looked at the proportion of
determined by rainfall. consumer, the concentration of nitro- nitrogen 15 to see ifit falls off as one
Then a colleague, Joseph Rasmus- gen 15 1s relatively high, compared moves inland from the salmon-charged

ory

The rainforest on Princess Royal Island, northwestern British Columbia, gains

marine nutrients when salmon return to their natal waters to spawn.

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Che ultimate China
& Yangtze ‘River streams. The results have confirmed where the salmorm have now become
that trees closest to the salmon streams rare or have even vanished. Many such
EXPENeNce. draw the largest share of marine nutri- stories are largely rejected by fishery
Pacific Delight Tours’ ents. In fact, fully half of the nitrogen biologists as exaggerations. After all,
tradition of superb quality in some old-growth trees near salmon how could anyone say whether salmon
and innovation is reflected streams comes from salmon. existed in some now-quiet stream,
in our GOLDVACATIONS®— But Reimchen’s goal has remained sometime in the past? “Now, for the
extraordinary the ambitious one he started with: to first time, we have a method of an-
examples of chronicle the annual ups and downs swering that question,’ says Reim-
personal discovery of marine-derived nitrogen. To do chen—and perhaps of determining the
and life-enriching that, he had to measure the propor- abundance of such salmon in the past.
journeys. tions of the nitrogen isotopes in each Reimchen’s work is not the only
Travel in style with a growth ring. Together with the age of window into that past. Hilderbrand
small, select group. Enjoy the ring, he reasoned, that difficult and his colleagues analyzed hair speci-
distinguished deluxe hotels measurement would give him the mens from grizzly bears that existed in
and the comfort of cabin S data he sought. Oregon’s Columbia Ruver Valley until
suites on the Yangtze River, with private Reimchen and his colleagues set 1931. The investigators have shown
shore excursions daily. Exceptional out to drill and extract half-inch that an average of 58 percent of the
culinary and cultural experiences further cylindrical cores from old-growth grizzlies’ diet came from salmon. Even
enhance each GOLDVACATION. cedar, spruce, and hemlock trees. At grizzly bears as far as 800 miles from
For details see your travel professional first, however, no mass spectrometer the ocean consumed salmon. Reim-
could measure the trace quantities of chen’s research could add a new di-
usta
or call 1-800-221-7179. :
nitrogen 15 present in the minute mension to those findings. Mapping
CEYE PACIFIC DELIGHT TOURS wood samples cored from a single
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starts, though, Reimchen founda lab- marine and terrestrial habitats; in prin-
oratory in Davis, California, that has ciple, that could be done with remote
been systematically able to resolve dif- sensing by satellite.
ferences in nitrogen-15 levels in sam-
THEY WERE ORIGINALLY DESIGNED
TO KEEP PEOPLE OFF
ples as small as one—or at most just a A s we come to the end of our
few—tree rings. As one might expect, ighttime observations, Reim-
OUR ISLANDS. the greatest annual swings in concen- chen speaks about how his work feeds
IRONIC, DON'T YOU THINK? tration occur in the trees closest to the into the formulation of conservation
streams. Independent historical data of policies. “People act as if they harvest
salmon abundance correlates well the surplus, and are the only har-
with nitrogen-15 signatures in rings vesters. They think that all the dead
during the past fifty years. Because it fish in the stream are wasted.’ But the
takes a year or so for nitrogen to be work of Reimchen and other investi-
incorporated into a tree, however, the gators shows that not only do salmon
nitrogen-15 fluctuations lag the fluctu- replenish the forest; they also revital-
ations in salmon by one to three years. ize streams and estuaries with carbon,
Reimchen’s team has also found high nitrogen, phosphorous, and other
total nitrogen levels in the rings of minerals. Among salmon themselves,
trees nourished by salmon, suggesting the circle of life is particularly inti-
that such trees grow relatively fast and mate: nearly half of the nutrients con-
large. The investigators are currently sumed by juvenile salmon comes
examining watersheds where the from their dead parents. “In ecosys-
salmon populations have dropped off tems there is no surplus,” says Reim-
sharply, and expect to document the chen. “Everything is used.”
For your free Outer Banks Ttavel Guide
and Getaway Card, call 1-877-298-4373 general chronology of those changes.
or visit www.outerbanks.org
Robert S. Semeniuk is a freelance writer and

a ame
HOMe OrTne First Puont,
he records of early European set-
tlers—even the memories of Na-
photojournalist based in Bowen Island, British
Columbia. For further information about the
tive American elders—recall rivers that work of Reimchen and his colleagues, see
ran with thousands of salmon, rivers web, uvic.ca/reimlab/.

28 | NATURAL HISTORY April 2003

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everything there is to see and do in the Visitors from the United States are TOP: PONTOON BOAT EXCURSION
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 VERTISING SECTION / distinctive destinations

n Wild and Wonderful West Virginia,

nature is always nearby. Hike
through rugged backcountry, canoe
along meandering rivers, hook some
troutinacold andclear stream,
or thrill
to some of the best whitewater rafting
east of the Colorado.
If birding is your pleasure, visit
Monangahela National Forest (304-636- sprawling 909,000 acres. It is home to
1800), a secluded getaway set in a 230 species of birds, including war-
blers, a variety of migratory hawks,
and songbirds. Monangahela includes
Cranberry Glades, whose unique
plants are descended from seeds that
took root more than 10,000 years ago.
Watoga, West Virginia’s largest state
park, in the Allegheny highlands,
attracts wetland birds such as wood-
cocks, wood ducks, and waterthrushes.
In Tucker County, Canaan Valley is
a beautiful and rare
treasure with sig-
nificant wetlands
and northern for-
est. Canaan’s high
altitude and moist
climate support
many unusual and
rare plants and al Oe
animals, including
almost 600 plant
species and nearly
300 species of mammals, birds, rep-
tiles, amphibians, and fishes.
West Virginia’s varied terrain is
criss-crossed with miles of trails. The
popular AppalachiantTrail becomes part
of West Virginia in the Eastern Panhan-
dle, and the Allegheny Trail winds over
300 miles, starting at the Mason-Dixon
Line. Explore historic rail trails such as
Take a look at life from 2,000 feet and gain a whole new perspective.
Bring your family closer together in the mountains of West Virginia. the Greenbrier River and the North
Bend, the “trail of tunnels,/’ which give
www.callwva.com FREE TRAVELGUIDE 1-800-CALL WVA a sense of the B & O Railroad and the
towns it once connected.
 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION / distinctive destinations

‘ith its wild, dramatic NORWAY by fjords and a backdrop of

landscapes, Norway mountains. Over a thousand
is a land of incomparable years old, Oslo has bustling
beauty. From serene fjords waterfront restaurants, a
to immense forests, from dynamic nightlife, and fasci-
meandering rivers to burst- nating museums where you
ing waterfalls, the country can explore Norway's cultur-
has a spectacular range of al history and Viking her-
scenery. Lovers of the out- itage. Bergen, a charming
doors can take a walk on a port city, is the gateway to
glacier, and on the same the country’s most impres-
day, walk barefoot along a sive fjords. Also not-to-be-
fine sandy beach. Or what missed is Alesund, Norway’s Pee ee U8
Vacation for lwo to:
about a deep-sea fishing trip in the art nouveau fishing capital, or Kristian-
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morning and horseback riding along sund, a charming town on three SJE Tales ailais tees
the fjords in the afternoon? You can islands.
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Air Canada will provide transportation to and from
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Air Canada. One-week automobile rental provided
on a transparently clear fjord. a once-in-a-lifetime travel adventure. by New Brunswick Tourism and Parks.
Norway’s cosmopolitan cities in- Then, Drive to the Wonder!
Drive to St. Andrews and spend two luxurious nights at
clude its colorful capital, Oslo, framed Photo: Mattias Persson / Norwegian Tourist Board the renowned Fairmont | Package includes
two nights’ accommodation, golf lesson, 18 holes of golf,
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North of Virginia! Experience the French flavour o7 our
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village of Le Pays de la Sagouine in Bouctouche!

Norway-The Perfect Change of Place. Whether it’s Oslo’s cultural

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Air Canada offers more flights from the United States
Norwegian to New Brunswick than any other airline!
Coastal Voyage A Pure Escape
 VERTISING SECTION / dis
Sgaieased
SRG 7

CAYMAN _
Cayman, with a population
under 100. Deserted sandy
beaches and mangrove-

ISLANDS
fringed lagoons make for
outstanding wetland bird-
ing, with over 70 migrants.
There are also resident
THE BEAUTIFUL CAYMAN pied-billed grebe; colonies
ISLANDS ARE RENOWNED of tricolored, snowy, and
FORTHEIR SPECTACULAR yellow-crowned_ night-
CORAL REEFS, PRISTINE heron and_ black-necked
BEACHES, A GRAND 500 stilt; and one endemic land
YEARS OF CULTURE bird, the Greater Antillean
AND HISTORY —AND grackle. The Booby Pond
OUTSTANDING BIRDING. Nature Reserve has the
Photos: Top left,Patricia Bradley; Above, Yves-Jacques Rey-Millet
largest red-footed booby
hile travelers are THE CAYMAN ISLANDS ARE HOME TO OVER 200 BIRD colony in the Caribbean—
ae familiar with SPECIES SUCH AS THE BROWN RED-FOOTED BOOBY more than 20,000 birds—
Grand Cayman, the “Sister (TOP LEFT) AND THE VITELLINE WARBLER (ABOVE). and a magnificent frigate-
Islands/’ Cayman Brac and bird colony. Stop by the
Little Cayman, also entice explain the biodiversity of thrush and a subspecies of viewing platform at Grape
visitors with their worldly, birds, forests and wetlands, the rare, threatened Brac Tree Pond, a favored breed-
relaxed Caribbean life- and butterflies and reptiles. parrot, Amazona leuco- ing site for a growing pop-
style. Both islands are best And the islands are peace- cephala hesterna (asecond ulation of threatened West
known for their superb, ful and crime-free. subspecies, caymanensis, Indian whistling-duck.
The
world-famous diving. But Cayman Brac, whose occurs on Grand Cayman). only West Indian endemic
the Sister Islands are also bluff plateau is about 70 Counts estimate 400 par- duck, the “whistler” is nor-
wonderful birding desti- percent tropical forest, has rots, with only about 60 mally shy, but a robust con-
nations, with over 200 the most resident land breeding pairs. A must for servation effort at Great
species (80 percent are birds. Endemic subspecies birders is a visit to the Pond has made it uncon-
migrants). include Caribbean elaenia, National Trust’s protected cerned with visitors.
Each island
has an inter- bananaquit, loggerhead parrot reserve. And don’t In between birding out-
pretative center, a muse- kingbird, thick-billed vireo, miss the Brac’s colonies of ings, you can take in the
um, walking and hiking and vitelline warbler (con- brown boobies and white- Sister Islands’ many cultur-
trails, wetland boardwalks, fined to the Cayman and tailed tropic birds. al sites, including historic
and viewing platforms. Swan Islands). Found only Just five miles west of houses that give a glimpse
Beautiful ceramic signs on the Brac are red-legged Cayman Brac lies Little of eighteenth-century life.
 TISING SECTION / distinctive destinations

DELTA QUEEN mighty rivers as you dance to the great

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authentic steam paddle-wheelers offer favorites from long ago. And on the enjoyment.” Whatever cruise you
three- to eleven-night cruises on ten American Queen, you can gaze out the choose, you will benefit from Delta
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Yes, life is sweet ifyou just slow down to savor it. And here on the lazy river, you'll be
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 CRUISE
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 OMECHANICS

Throwing
Yourself into It
Were the weights held by Greek long jumpers
a help or a hindrance?

By Adam Summers ~ Illustration by Patricia J. Wynne

Jumper holding weights, Greek red-figure

cup, Evergides Painter, fifth century 8.C.

t the Summer Olympics of in Alsager, England, is fasci-

1968, in the dry, thin air of nated with human loco-
Mexico City, Bob Beamon motion. He has explained why
redefined the limits of human per- small children like to skip but
formance. The altitude of the venue adults don’t, how toddlers tod-
had led many sportswriters to specu- dle, and what a strolling gait
late that records would fall, and the would look like on another
long-jump record was certainly in planet. Now, with his col-
jeopardy. Jesse Owens’s mark of 26 league Luca Ardigo, he has
feet 8.5 inches had finally been sur- turned his attention to the role of an- them back behind his body. But were
passed in 1960 after having stood for cient Greek sporting equipment. In the halteres carried to encumber, and
twenty-five years; in the ensuing the process he has unraveled a minor thus handicap, the best athletes? Or
eight years it had been pushed eight archaeological puzzle. were they, somehow, performance en-
inches. But no one was expecting Records of the eighteenth Greek hancers? Minetti and Ardigo, working
what was to come. In the Mexico Olympiad, held on the plain of with mathematical models and mea-
City long-jump finals, in a transcen- Olympia in the city-state of Elis in sures of jumping performance, have
dent display of physical coordination, 708 B.C., are preserved as detailed found that the latter 1s the case.
Beamon jumped twenty-two inches paintings on the sides ofvases.
farther than anyone ever had. At Documented in some of the sporting he distance covered in any jump
29 feet 2.5 inches it remains the scenes are athletes holding peculiar depends on three factors: the
Olympic record, the oldest one still stone or lead implements called hal- angle and the velocity of the takeoff
standing; even now, thirty-five years teres. The function of these imple- and the starting point of the jumper’s
later, the long-jump world record is ments had never been entirely clear. center of mass. Although handheld
just two inches greater. From the paintings on the vases, ar- weights don’t increase the jumper’s
Given Beamon’s achievement, it chaeologists had gathered that in the velocity (indeed, intuitively one would
seems ludicrous to say he could have standing long jump (not to be con- think they had the opposite effect) or
done even better. But a new study of fused with the running long jump, for change the launch angle, they do affect
Olympic long jumping suggests that which Beamon is celebrated), the the center of mass.
if he had been carrying a gallon
gall jug athlete would hold one haltere in each Consider our depiction of an an-
of milk in each hand, he might still hand. During takeoff, he (the ancient clent jumper moving his arms [see il-
have the world record today. Olympics were not co-ed affairs) lustration above]. As the athlete swung
Alberto Minetti, a biomechanist at would swing them both forward; his arms forward, his center of mass
Manchester Metropolitan University then, while landing, he would swing would move forward and upward be-

GZ
fore his feet had even left the ground. added force of the muscle would ac- may not seem like much, but ever
In effect, the jumper gained the tually generate more power, leading for the untrained jumpers of the ex-
advantage of leaping from a slightly to an increase in jump distance. periment, it would add seven inches
higher position, set a little past the Using a computer model of a or so to a ten-foot standing long
takeoff line. As the jumper then jumper, the two investigators deter- jump. The last time the standing
came in for a landing, he would mined that adding between eight and jump was an Olympic event, at the
swing his arms backward. That fifteen pounds of weight did increase 1912 games in Stockholm, the three
motion did nothing to change the takeoff velocity. Heavier weights than medal-winning jumps were sepa-
trajectory of his center of mass, those offset the increase in muscle rated by less than four inches; the
which traced a parabola as the force, leading to takeoff velocities ei- winner leapt just over eleven feet.
jumper moved through the air. But it ther equal to or slower than those of Assuming a modern long jumper
did enable the athlete to push his feet an unburdened jumper. The model could master the awkward matter of
farther out in front of his center of predicts improvements in jumpers’ swinging both hands together during
mass than he could without the launch velocities of about 2 per- a running start, a similar gain would
halteres. As long as the extra weight cent—an enormous gain in perform- add about a foot to the distance.
hadn’t slowed his takeoff, that push ance at elite levels of competition. Perhaps Mike Powell, the cyrrent

PLL LPL GLLSLYLS SLL SSL SLI SLL SAAS! LL LILA MALALL LA SSA SLL SLL LL

would have enabled him to go far- ‘he predictions of computer world-record holder, would be in-
ther, much as if he had swung over a models are often more com- terested in coming out of retirement
fence and, at just the right moment, pelling than the empirical results with to try out a well-used set of stone
pushed off the top rail. living, breathing (and misbehaving) hand weights.
In spite of all the swinging and human beings. But in this case quite
weight-shifting, the extra weight might the opposite is true. People untrained Adam Summers (asummers@uci.edu) is an
still seem an obstacle for a jumper. in long jumping were asked to select assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary
After all, the kinetic energy of any ob- a set of randomly weighted halteres, biology at the University of California, Irvine.
ject—a jumper included—is equal to and then to jump while swinging
half its mass multiplied by the square of their arms from a platform that mea-
its velocity. It might seem that adding sured takeoff forces. Jumpers carrying
mass would reduce takeoff velocity, weights ranging from two to about
and, that because of the squared veloc- twenty pounds managed to increase
ity, such a trade-off would be far less their takeoff power by more than 5
efficient for the jumper. Yet there is percent. Minetti and Ardigo attrib-
good reason to suppose that takeoff uted the improvement over the com-
power might actually increase with puter model to the energy-storing
increasing weight—at least within effect of the body’s elastic tissues: ten-
limits. The more slowly muscles con- dons, ligaments, and muscles. Such
tract, the more force they are able to tissues stretch like rubber bands when
deliver, which is why heavy weights loaded. When the jumper takes off,
can only be lifted slowly. Perhaps they spring back and return the en-
with some small increase in weight, ergy to the jumper. Jumping youth holding weights, Greek red-
Minetti and Ardigo reasoned, the Such a small increase in power figure cup, fifth century B.C.

April 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 43

The Longest Winter
A series of deep freezes descended across the Earth 750 million years
ago, each lasting millions of years. The spring that finally took hold
may have triggered the present bloom of multicellular life.

By Gabrielle Walker

ook around, take in the intricacies of life on ordinary—the biggest climate catastrophe the
Earth, and then consider this: complex life is Earth has ever known. That idea has been lurking
a very recent innovation. For billions of in the scientific shadows for nearly sixty years, but
years the only earthlings were made of goo. Hud- Hoffman has now brought it firmly into the lime-
dling together in the primordial sludge, they coated light. Marshaling evidence in rocks from Australia
the seafloor and inched their way up the shore with and Namibia to Russia and Newfoundland, Hoff-
the tide; they clustered around steaming hot springs man contends that life’s richness, diversity, and
and soaked up rays from the faint young Sun. Dull sheer overwhelming complexity arose from a
green or brown, excreting a gloopy glue that prodigious disaster known as “snowball Earth.”
bound them into mats, these creatures were little
more than bags of soup. Each was just a single cell. ome 750 million years ago, says Hoffman, ice
Each had mastered the rudiments of how to eat, began to creep southward and northward from
grow, and reproduce, no more. Each was its own its strongholds at the North and South Poles. Indi-
cottage industry in a society that had no interest in vidual crystals of ice first appeared in the sea like
collaboration or specialization. The Earth was tiny floating snowflakes. They were smashed to-
Slimeworld, just about as gether by wind and waves,
simple as life gets. their fragile arms broken
Then, suddenly, roughly For a few thousand years, ice and their debris turning
590 million years ago, the water slick. The surface
something shook the Earth crept from its strongholds at thickened and froze. In
out of its complacency. the Poles. But when the ice some places, the ice con-
That event—whatever it gealed into large pancakes,
was—gave rise to the be- reached the Tropics, its slow with raised edges like those
ginnings of eyes, teeth,
legs, wings, feathers, hair,
creep became a sprint. of giant lily pads where
they bumped and crashed
and brains. For life, it was against one another.
the Industrial Revolution. Forget the old cottage For perhaps a few thousand years, the ice stole
industries where each single cell had to perform all unheeded toward the equator, while most of the
the tasks of living. Now factories with specialized Earth’s life-forms bathed in the warmth of the
departments could thrive. From that moment, sim- shallow, equatorial seas. Geysers blew. The Sun
ple slime yielded its preeminence to the complex shone. Rain fell. There was no hint of the devasta-
creations that heaved their way out of the sludge and tion to come.
started life’s long march toward modernity. What- But when the ice reached the Tropics, its slow
ever triggered that chain of events was ultimately re- creep became a sprint. In a matter of decades, ice
sponsible for the existence of you and everyone engulfed the tropical oceans. It spread out from
you've ever known. shallow bays and grew a skin, then a carapace,
Paul F Hoffman, a geologist at Harvard Univer- over the oceans. It clung to the beaches and
sity, thinks the culprit was something truly extra- scraped against the microbial mats coating the

ORY April 2003

Andy Goldsworthy, Thin ice, made over two days, welded with water from dripping ice, hollow
inside, Scaur Water, Dumfriesshire, 10-11 January 1987

|
April 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 45
 seafloor. In some places the shell of ice stayed thin brian seafloor are occasional giant boulders,
enough to crack and seal again. In others it was dropped by icebergs that were once passing over-
thousands of feet thick. head. Only one agent could have transported so
At first the land itself remained bare. Then ice many kinds of rock such long distances: glacial ice.
began to accumulate there, too, condensing out of Hoffman was far from the first person to imagine
the thin air of mountain ranges, creat- an ice-encased world—which isn’t sur-
ing great frozen rivers that prising, since the “ice rockss
flowed down to fill the SOUTH
are ubiquitous. Halfa cen-
surrounding valleys. In onmreni CHINA tury earlier an English
the end, the whiteout geologist named Wal-
was complete. Earth’s ter Brian Harland had
surface looked like begun to develop the
the frigid waste- outlines of a “great
land of Mars, or one infra-Cambrian ice
of Jupiter’s ice-covered age. And in themdate
moons. Instead of adding its 1980s, by examining mag-
warmth, sunlight bounced netic iron particles in Aus-
off the bright surface and A proposed distribution of Earth’s landmasses 750 tralian ice rocks, Joseph L.
was dazzled back into space. million years ago (Laurentia would become part of Kirschvink, a geologist at
North America, Baltica part of present-day Europe).
The average temperature Geologists now speculate that this continental
Caltech, had shown that ice
plummeted to —40 degrees arrangement may have created conditions that fad reached the equator im
Fahrenheit. Clouds by and gave rise to “snowball Earth.” Precambrian times. Even so,
large disappeared, except few geologists believed the
perhaps for minute ice crystals high in the atmos- entire Earth could have frozen over. Snow and ice
phere, which scattered sunsets into blue and green reflect sunlight much more effectively than rocks.
rimmed with vibrant pink. No rain fell, and little A shiny white icebound Earth ought to send the
snow. Every day brought silent, unremitting cold. Sun’s rays bouncing back into space, and if the
Hoftman’s snowball wasn’t just another brief planet ever got into such a state—so the reasoning
cold blip in an otherwise fairly comfortable world, went—it should never be able to get out of it.
like the ice ages of the more recent geological past. But in 1992 Kirschvink presented a brilliant so-
Instead, it was the coldest, most dramatic, most se- lution to that conundrum. The snowball, he sug-
vere shock the planet has ever undergone. The en- gested, was melted by volcanoes. Then as now,
tire world was coated with a layer of ice nearly a volcanoes studded the Earth, periodically spilling
mile thick, and for perhaps 100,000 successive out heat, gas, and molten rock. Whether beneath
centuries the Earth was a frozen white ball, deso- the sea or on land, they were perfectly happy to
late and all but lifeless. erupt under ice—as they do today in Iceland [see
There may have been as many as four snowball “The Ice Above, the Fire Below,” by Robert S. White,
episodes until 590 million years ago, when the last with photographs by Ragnar Th. Sigurdsson, June
one melted. Some microorganisms survived the 2002]. And one of the main gases to come from
deep freeze, of course—if they hadn't, they wouldn’t the heart ofa volcano is carbon dioxide, CO, the
still be around today. Maybe they huddled around gas that threatens us all with global warming. Car-
undersea volcanoes or near hot springs, or found bon dioxide lets sunlight in but prevents the Earth’s
fissures and cracks in the sea ice where the Sun’s body heat from escaping, and so provides an effec-
rays could shp through. But for many, perhaps most tive way of warming up a planet. Each volcanic
of them, the snowball was disastrous. eruption, Kirschvink realized, would pour a little
more CO, into the sky, eventually turning the air
ee for the snowball is written in the only into a thick blanket. And after millions of years of
surviving record from the late Precambrian: frigid stasis, the ice would finally succumb, melting
rocks. All over the world, on every single continent, within perhaps just a few centuries.
rock outcrops contain mad jumbles of pebbles and The aftermath of the melting would have been
stones of every shape, size, color, and provenance. hell on Earth. Dante, says Kirschvink, would have
They are scratched and scarred from having been been proud of it. To lock the CO, back up in the
bulldozed out of their home territory and dragged rocks and clear off the blanket would have taken
hundreds of miles across the landscape. And lodged tens of thousands of years. In the meantime, aver-
in siltstone outcrops that used to form the Precam- age annual temperatures soared to 100 degrees F

46] NA
or higher. Intense hyperhurricanes brought floods the carbonates showed up wherever the ice rocks
of acid rain. The Earth had leapt from the freezer were deposited, on every single continent. And
into the fire. that 1s peculiar, because one of the first lessons
Although Kirschvink’s inferno was astirring idea, every geologist learns is that the Earth is emphati-
he didn’t pursue it. Before moving on to other cally not one big layer cake. Individual regions end
things, however, he not only invented the term up layered with quite different kinds of rock. You
“snowball Earth” but also mentioned his ideas to simply aren’t supposed to get single events that
Paul Hoffman. A few years later the spark ignited. blanket the entire planet with the same kind of
rock. Period. Except that on every continent, ice
n the mid-1990s Hoffman was working among rocks are capped by carbonates.
Precambrian ice rocks in Namibia and becom- So how could an icehouse turn into a hothouse?
ing increasingly baffled by a mysterious layer of The answer came from Hoffman’s colleague Daniel

Lynn Davis, Iceberg 30, Disko Bay, Greenland, 2000

carbonate rock immediately on top of them. This P. Schrag, a geochemist also at Harvard. Schrag rea-
“cap” of carbonate bore no pebbly interlopers, no soned that the cap carbonates were a direct conse-
boulders, no signs of ice at all. And carbonate quence of the snowball and its aftermath. The way
rocks form at the bottom of balmy seas, so finding Schrag envisioned it, the acid that rained onto the
carbonates right above signs of ice was bizarre— ground in torrents after the snowball ended fell onto
like seeing palm trees in Antarctica. What’s more, a thick layer of dust, left behind by millions of years

April 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 47

 of grinding by the glaciers. In the post-snow-
ball world, that combination of ground-up
rock and acid rain was a chemical factory wait-
ing to happen. (Think how much faster sugar
dissolves when it’s not bound up in a lump.)
Rock dust and acid met, mated, and were
swept off into the sea. They set the waters
fizzing and foaming, creating a Coca-Cola
ocean. Oceans frothed and bubbled with dis-
solved CO; rocks dissolved like baking pow-
der. All around the world, the post-snowball
ocean turned milky with flakes of white. They
poured down onto every inch of the ocean
floor. From the chemistry of acid rain and rock
dust had come a massive outpouring of car-
bonate, blanketing the entire planet. The flakes
squeezed together, hardened, and turned back
into rock. They became the cap carbonates.

Hai and Schrag put their ideas to-

gether with Kirschvink’s and published
the amalgam in the journal Science in August
1998. That fall Hoffman went from one insti-
tution to another, purveying the good news
in impassioned lectures. He had never, he said
repeatedly, been so convinced that something
was right.
But some in his audience were disturbed
by the sheer extremity of the snowball vi-
sion. To buy into the snowball, you had to
think of our home planet acting like some
eerily alien world. You had to imagine
oceans freezing over completely, even at the
equator; an ice age that spanned 150 million
years; a planet that plunged from the coldest
temperatures it had ever undergone into an
intense hothouse within a few centuries; CO, NY Hoffman continues to bolster his geo-
levels hundreds of times higher than have ever logical case, he has had to leave the biolog-
been seen in the geological record; and rates of ical implications of the snowball theory to the
rock weathering like nothing on Earth today. work of other specialists. How, for instance, did
How could anyone accept a theory that was so the earlier life-forms survive the deadly ice? And
far out of the box? could the snowball have provided the creative
In the past half decade, plenty of adversaries spark for the new, complex life that followed?
have attacked the snowball theory, and Hoffman To answer the first question, you need to think
has had to answer their objections. Yet so far, the about heat. Any hot spring or volcano on a shallow
theory has survived every challenge with its core enough ocean floor would have created at least a
intact. And Hoftman’s proselytizing has brought small hole in the ice above it. So there would have
about a sea change in scientific attitudes. Virtually been at least a few puddles and cracks in which liv-
everyone now agrees that the period from about ing things could have grabbed their chance to make
750 million until 590 million years ago was a time and store food, as they do in Antarctica today. And
of extraordinary ice, cold, and catastrophe. Even according to Douglas H. Erwin, a conservation
critics who think the tropics had at least some re- modeler and the interim head of the Smithsonian’
maining open water—a scenario appropriately National Museum of Natural History, all you would
called “slushball Earth”—admit that ice went al- have needed to get virtually all the extant species
most all the way around. through the snowball epoch was about a thousand

nS oo
 : printing press marked the begin-
ning of language. Complex, multi-
cellular life-forms could easily have
been around for millions of years
before the Cambrian, and just not
left such a clear record of them-
selves in the rocks.
If Hoffman is right, if the snow-
t= -* ball truly triggered the invention of
multicellular life, the world’s first
complex creations must have ap-
— peared shortly after the ice re-
= ceded. The question is, did they?

C) way to answer the ques-

tion is to supplement fossil
hunting with a more oblique ap-
proach: the molecular clock. The
genetic material inside every living
cell carries information about its
ancestry. But DNA changes slightly
with each generation, with each
tick of the genetic clock. If you
measure how much DNA has
changed from one species to an-
other, and if you know how fast
the clock was ticking, you can
track evolution backward even
without the help of fossils.
Most molecular clocks have indi-
cated that complex animals
emerged long before the snowball,
too long ago for it to have triggered
A their appearance. Different clocks,
Norbert Wu, Sea Ice Lead, McMurdo Sound, Antarctica however, have also yielded radically
different dates: some said biological
havens of open water, with about a thousand indi- complexity began 800 million years ago; others said
viduals in each. What’s more, because snowball-era more than a billion. That inconsistency frustrated
creatures weren't exactly gargantuan, each haven Kevin J. Peterson, a biologist at Dartmouth College
could have been no wider than a dinner plate. in Hanover, New Hampshire. Determined to prove
But the second question is trickier. Until re- once and for all that the beginnings of complexity
cently, most biologists had assumed that complex, had nothing to do with the snowball, he decided to
multicellular life-forms arose about 545 million make the most accurate molecular clock he possi-
years ago, during an event called the Cambrian ex- bly could.
plosion. But that event couldn’t possibly have been Peterson chose echinoderms, a family ofcreatures
triggered by Hoffman’s snowballs. They ended that includes urchins and sea stars. Working back-
around 590 million years ago, and 45 million years ward, checking each result against the substantial
is far too long to sit around with a lighted fuse number of well-dated available fossils in that family
waiting for the bang. In fact, fame has come to (until he ran out of fossils), he finally had his answer.
Cambrian creatures mainly because they invented He was stunned. The last common ancestor of all
skeletons, scales, shells, spines—in short, all the complex animals lived sometime around 700 mil-
various bodily supports that stick around long lion years ago. In other words, the appearance of
enough after death to turn into clear, unambigu- that ancestor coincided almost exactly with the end
ous fossils. But they needn’t have been the first of the first icehouse episode of snowball Earth.
complex animals, any more than papyrus or the Recall that Hoffman thinks he is dealing with a

April 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 49

 series of events, not just one. Perhaps complex an- the planet. Now Schrag has taken that idea a few
imals were triggered by the first freeze-over and steps further. When continents spread out to the far
then survived the remaining episodes of ice. It’s north and south, they act as a brake on the spread
also possible that despite Peterson’s care, his clock of the polar ice caps. White ice reflects sunlight,
overestimates the age of complex animals; some which causes cooling, and that breeds more ice.
biologists think that genetic changes happened Rocks, by contrast, normally prevent the Earth
more quickly in the past, and that all molecular from overheating: in the chemical reaction known
clocks yield older times than they should. as weathering, rock and water combine with at-
If an icebound Earth really did trigger complex- mospheric CO,, thereby removing one of the
ity, encouraging life to diversify and experiment, major greenhouse gases that volcanoes pump out.
how could it have done so? New species often arise But if polar ice starts to spread, the rocks of high-
when a single population of creatures becomes iso- latitude continents no longer soak up CO). Instead
lated from its fellows for a long time, perhaps a mil- the gas stays in the atmosphere to do its greenhouse
lion years or so. Or perhaps the ice opened up a thing, warming up the Earth and melting the ex-
niche for complexity by wiping large areas of the cess ice. That’s what happens in the reassuring con-
planet clean of life. Until the enveloping mats of tinental arrangement we have today.
slime were kept from hogging all the resources, Now imagine what would happen if all the con-
there might have been no way to innovate. tinents were arranged in a band around the equator.
The most popular idea about how to trigger The polar ice caps could spread with impunity. By
complexity, however, is to shock the system with the time ice reached the equatorial continents, a

When the continents bunch together near the equator, an alternating

icehouse-hothouse cycle may ensue—until the continents move on.

oxygen—the agent that “burns” food and enables snowball would be unstoppable. And as long as the
animals to develop large and complicated bodies. continents stayed in the tropics, the alternating
For millions of snowball years, when life would icehouse-hothouse cycle would continue—until
have been restricted to a few small refuges, unused eventually the continents moved on.
nutrients would have built up in the sea, making it
into a tasty chemical soup. As soon as the period of he good news 1s that another snowball is un-
ice was over, the white planet would have become likely to be imminent. Reassembling the con-
green. Massive colonies of bacteria and algae tinents into a band around the equator will take at
would have soaked up sunlight, made food, and least a few hundred million years. But the bad
belched out oxygen as a waste product. That sud- news—at least if the threat is a snowball—is that
den pulse of oxygen may have been just what the Earth has come a long way since the simple
complex life was waiting for. days of Slimeworld, and life is now a complex web
of interdependent creatures. If another snowball
GQ): question remains outstanding: Why did should ever engulf the Earth, many—perhaps
the snowball ever happen at all? The answer most—of those creatures would perish.
may lie in a peculiar alignment of the continents. Perhaps our descendants will be so unimagin-
As the world’s tectonic plates drift over its surface, ably advanced that they will be able to prevent a
the continents sometimes scatter and sometimes snowball. But the Earth is a powerful and stubborn
bunch together. On rare occasions they arrange force. It limits our resources, and its geological will
themselves in a band around the equator—and is extremely hard to check.
there’s reasonably good data suggesting that might If distant descendants of the human lineage can-
have been the case during Hoffman’s snowball. not stop another snowball, could they weather it?
More than a decade ago Kirschvink suggested That, too, is hard to imagine. Getting a few simple
that if all the available landmasses were collected in marine creatures through the ice is one thing, but
the tropics, they would reflect more of the incom- the complex creatures that inhabit our planet today
ing sunlight than seawater does, and so help cool present a much bigger challenge. Antarctica is the

50 NATURA
Lynn Davis, Iceberg 34, Disko Bay, Greenland, 2000

most hostile place on Earth. Unless you take your Through geologic time, the Earth has constantly
own life-support system of food, fuel, and shelter taken on remarkable new identities. One moun-
along with you, you die. And on a snowball planet, tain range rises; another falls. Oceans open here
Antarctica takes over everywhere in the world. For and close there. Change doesn’t alarm the Earth; it
any truly complex creatures, the result would is a fundamental part of its nature. We human be-
surely be disastrous. Norse mythology has a word ings, and the other creatures that share our slice of
for it: after the catastrophe of Fimbulwinter comes geologic time, are the fragile ones. O
Ragnarok, the end of the world.
But a new snowball would not be the end for all
This article has been adapted from Snowball Earth: The Story of the Great
life on Earth, any more than the earlier ones were. Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life As We Know It, by Gabrielle
Our planet is, after all, a master of invention. Walker, which is being published this month by Crown.

April 2003 NATURAL HISTORY

 Date with Extinction
For a thousand years before people settled
in New Zealand, a small alien predator may have been
undermining the islands’ seabird populations.
By Laura Sessions

Oe ee eee

Hutton’s shearwater, a species of petrel, is still abundant near the shores of New
Zealand's South Island. Here the birds rest on the sea within sight of their nesting
area, about 5,000 feet up in the Seaward Kaikoura Range.

52 | NATURAL HISTORY April 2003

 ur yellow Zodiac bobbed across the chop- _ species from the mainland on the en-
py sea and made its way slowly through croachments of civilization. But in
the clouds of seabirds that wheeled and reality, the early Polynesian settlers
soared around us. Albatross, cape pigeons, diving were not responsible for the de-
petrels, mollymawks, mottled petrels, and sooty struction of many of the seabird
shearwaters all took their turns skimming our bow __ populations. Even before people set-
wave for fish. In the distance my boat mates andI __ tled this southern land, other visitors
could see the final stop on our sub-Antarctic tour: may have already irrevocably altered
the Snares Islands, about 130 miles south of New the New Zealand environment.
Zealand’s South Island. The chorus of screeching Those earlier arrivals on the New A Hutton’s shearwater skims the
birds drowned out our rumbling boat motor, and Zealand mainland were Pacific rats | 0cean surface, a habit that gives
even from several miles away we could smell the (Rattus exulans), or kiore, as they are Shearwaters their name.
acrid white guano that coats much of the Snares’s called in the Maori language. It has
rocky coasts. During the summer breeding season been known for almost a decade that these small
the Snares, whose entire area stowaways helped drive some of the native bird
totals not much more than one species from the mainland, or, in some cases, to
and a quarter square miles, are outright extinction. According to the standard ac-
home to more than 6 million count of the invasion, the rats arrived in New
seabirds—as many as nest along Zealand between 800 and 1,000 years ago, in the
the coasts of Great Britain and canoes of the first Polynesian settlers. But in 1996,
Ireland combined. Richard Holdaway, an independent extinction bi-
Today in the New Zealand ologist, presented evidence that the rodents first
archipelago, such dense seabird made landfall perhaps a thousand years earlier.
colonies persist only on small That date has called into question the entire se-
offshore islands, but at one time quence of prehistoric events that shaped New
much of the coastline of the Zealand—and, not surprisingly, has fueled much
North and South Islands (by far debate in New Zealand about the strength and va-
New Zealand’s two largest is- lidity of Holdaway’s evidence.
lands, commonly called the But even more, Holdaway has hypothesized that a
mainland) would have been rat-generated crash in island bird populations could
equally pungent and raucous. have led to “a cascade of damage” and even to a
New Zealand once supported change in the nearshore oceanic food web: seabird
one of the most diverse seabird colonies generate a prodigious quantity of guano,
faunas in the world; the coun- which can form a kind of organic bridge between
try was particularly rich in spe- sea and shore, enriching soil and promoting plant
cies of petrels. Nowadays those growth. If the seabird populations crashed, Hold-
populations have crashed, and away argues, so did this bridge. The islands would
many species have been extir- have lost a major source of nutrients. If Holdaway 1s
pated on the mainland. One right, the rats had accidentally landed on a choke
can only imagine what it must point of the ecosystem, causing a ripple effect that
have been like for ancient Poly- went far beyond the destruction of seabirds.
nesian seafarers reaching the
shores of uninhabited New hanks to their remoteness—New Zealand lies
Zealand. The archipelago, no 1,200 miles east of its nearest neighbor, Aus-
doubt a welcome sight after tralia—the North and South Islands faced the on-
months of arduous ocean sail- slaught of invaders considerably later than did many
ing in a double-hulled canoe, other islands around the globe. But just as they have
would also have presented a far on Hawaii and Guam, alien species that were sud-
different scene from that of denly introduced onto the islands have had devastat-
most of New Zealand today. ing effects. New Zealand birds were particularly at
But did these colonizers en- risk, because they had evolved for millennia in the
counter a truly pristine environ- absence of mammalian predators (indeed, the only
ment? It would be easy to land mammals of prehistoric New Zealand were
“round up the usual suspects” three species of ground-feeding bats). Many of the
and blame the loss of so many native birds were flightless and seminocturnal, mak-

April 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 53

 ing them easy prey for the rats and the eleven other discovered at non-archaeological sites, that is, sites
introduced species of predatory mammals that even- without evidence of human settlement, with accel-
tually prospered in the archipelago. Even seabirds erator mass spectrometry (AMS)—a relatively new
were vulnerable; though they can spend months of and particularly sensitive method of radiocarbon dat-
each year at sea, many of them nest in ground bur- ing. To his astonishment, the AMS readings showed
rows and are helpless against terrestrial threats. that some of the bones were as old as 2,000 years.
As an ecologist and environmental writer, one That may sound recent by the standards of North
of my main interests is to understand the damage American or European archaeology, but it is ancient
that relatively recent introductions—from stoats to history for New Zealand, the last large habitable
wasps to possums—have wreaked on native plants landmass to be settled by people. The early date
and animals. Often enough, I have discovered, suggested that rats had not only occupied New
even one such invader can set in motion aspiral of Zealand before any other introduced land mammal,
but that they had appeared on the scene more
than a millennium before any human settlers.

ow firm are Holdaway’s findings?

How likely are they to stand up to
further scientific scrutiny? The late as-
tronomer Carl Sagan once remarked that
“extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence.” The implications of Holdaway’s
theory of early rat arrival are far-reaching,
both for ecology and for the protohistory of
Polynesian migrations. And sure enough,
his findings have been hotly contested by
some archaeologists, who have questioned
the accuracy of his radiocarbon dates.
Atholl Anderson, an archaeologist at the
Australian National University in Canberra,
argues vigorously that dates earlier than 800
A pair of Pacific rats feed on fruit. But given the chance, these years ago, as determined by AMS measure-
mouselike rats readily devour small adult birds, chicks, and eggs. ment, can be explained by contamination of
Evidence suggests that Pacific rats were the first mammalian predators
bones in the deposits. Recently, however,
introduced to New Zealand.
Holdaway published the results of a compar-
ill effects [see “A Floral Tiwist of Fate,” September ison between radiocarbon dating and a second tech-
2000, and “New Zealand Sweet Stakes,” May 2001]. nique, known as optical dating, carried out by
It was through those interests that I first met Hold- geochronologist Bert Roberts of the University of
away, and became acquainted with his work, in Wollongong in Australia. Optical dating determines
2001. Holdaway not only shares my concerns when the quartz grains in the sediments containing
about the current state of New Zealand’s ecosys- the fossilized bones were last exposed to sunlight.
tems; he also adds perspective by looking to the The technique made it possible to estimate how
past. He hopes to document the species of prehis- long the sediments and the rat bones had been
toric New Zealand, how its ecosystems worked, buried. The results of those tests confirmed the ra-
and what they can say about the islands today. diocarbon chronology for the Pacific rat fossils.
From 1991 until 1995 Holdaway took part in a Archaeologists also point to the lack of evidence
collaborative study to examine fossils for signs that for human colonization of New Zealand before
early Polynesian settlement had led to changes in about 800 years ago. Known for their intrepid voy-
animal populations and the mix of animal species. ages throughout the Pacific, the people who first
When rat bones were discovered at some of the fos- permanently settled New Zealand were eastern
sil sites, he decided to test the assumption that the Polynesians in language and culture, and they were
rats had arrived in New Zealand with the people to become the direct ancestors of the Maori
who settled in the islands about 800 years ago. (Ar- people. Holdaway believes that any population of
chaeologists have established the dates of those set- more than about fifty people occupying New
tlements on independent grounds.) Zealand for any length of time would have left
Holdaway measured the ages of the fossil rat bones clues to their presence, such as bones of large flight-

‘
94
less birds killed for food, or the he idea that intermittent
remains of cleared forests—as visitors carried rats to the
the first settlers did. Yet no evi- islands several times is borne out
dence for settlements more by a study of the mitochondrial
than 800 years old has ever DNA of Pacific rats by Lisa Ma-
come to light. tisoo-Smith, an anthropologist
So if the colonizers didn’t at Auckland University in
bring the rats, how could the Auckland, New Zealand. Mati-
animals have come to New soo-Smith compared genetic se-
Zealand? Pacific rats originated quences in Pacific rats from
in southeastern Asia. Could New Zealand with the same se-
they have made the trip on quences in rats of the same spe-
their own? The answer is surely cies from other Pacific islands.
no. The animals are reluctant Random mutations in mito-
swimmers, unable to cross chondrial DNA accumulate at a
water barriers more than 200 slow but relatively constant rate.
yards wide, even in the tropics. Matisoo-Smith reasoned that
And it is unlikely that they the mutations could serve as a
rafted on vegetation to New clock for determining the ar-
Zealand from some _ far-off rival dates of rats on various is-
South Pacific isle. In spite of Skeleton of the neck and head ofamoa,a _Jands across the Pacific. Assum-
long-necked flightless bird that grew as tall
their relatively long tenure in ing the rats arrived with early
as six and a half feet. Native to the islands
the North and South Islands, of New Zealand, moas were rapidly hunted Polynesians (or perhaps with
they did not reach some of to extinction by the Maori. (Photograph by the Lapita), the rodents’ mito-
the offshore islands of New Rosamond Purcell) chondrial DNA could serve as
Zealand until quite recently. an independent record of pre-
Holdaway agrees with that scientific consensus: historic human migrations. Her data show that the
people brought rats to New Zealand. In fact, the rats living in New Zealand today carry genetic her-
Polynesians are known to have sometimes trans- itages from various lineages of R. exulans, suggest-
ported Pacific rats—perhaps at times for food— ing that they were introduced to New Zealand
throughout the vast Pacific triangle, from Hawaii more than once, from various geographic sources.
to Easter Island to New Zealand. But Holdaway Ecologists have only recently come to recognize
thinks the people who brought the rats to New that the rodents could have fundamentally altered
Zealand were earlier seafarers
known as Lapita, who were prob-
ably the ancestors of the Polyne-
sians. The Lapita left no archaeolog-
ical evidence of their presence in
New Zealand, Holdaway argues,
simply because their visits to such
southern latitudes were so transient.
They may have touched on New
Zealand shores intermittently for
centuries before they, or other early
Polynesians, decided to stay. And for
rats to have arrived, become feral,
and established themselves in the
new habitat, they need not have
“jumped ship” or been purposefully
introduced in great numbers. Pacific
rats, after all, are rodents, and so
they are prolific reproducers; arriv-
Maori seafarers power a war canoe in inshore waters, as depicted in this engraving by
ing at the right time of year, one Paulo Fumagalli and his assistants. The Maoni, a Polynesian people, were the first
pregnant rat could eventually have group to establish permanent settlements in New Zealand. Their oceangoing vessels,
populated an entire island. unlike their war canoes, were double-hulled and had triangular sails.

April 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 55

 New Zealand. Indeed, Holdaway and his col-
leagues have found evidence that within a hundred
years or so of their arrival, Polynesian settlers had
hunted the giant flightless birds known as moas to
extinction. But if Holdaway’s work is on the mark,
New Zealand was far from pristine when the Poly-
nesians came to stay. Rats that arrived 1,000 years
before any permanent human occupation would
have had more than twice as long as people had to
alter their adopted ecosystem.

Ithough Polynesians might occasionally have

killed and eaten lizards and the small flightless
wrens that were once widespread throughout the
islands, they would hardly have hunted such
smaller prey to extinction. The Pacific rat was the
only small feral mammalian predator in New
Zealand before the European era began with the
arrival of Captain James Cook in 1769. (Archaeol-
ogists think that Polynesian dogs, also introduced
by Polynesian settlers and kept for food, had little
impact on native species.) The blame for those ex-
A kakapo, New Zealand's ground parrot, uses its stubby wings tinctions clearly rests with the rat.
for display but not for flight. Adults are too large for Pacific rats When Pacific rats arrived in New Zealand, they
to threaten directly, but their eggs are a manageable mouthful.
found themselves in a land of plenty. Millions of
seabirds nested in ground burrows. Other birds,
New Zealand’s ecosystems. Until a decade ago, such as the flightless wrens, emerged at dusk to
most biologists thought that Pacific rats, unlike forage, the rats’ favorite time to hunt. The rats
Norway rats (R. norvegicus) and black, or ship, rats simply did what any hunter would do. Their vic-
(R. rattus), were vegetarians. Pacific rats do feed fre- tims were well-adapted to avoiding birds of prey,
quently on plants and insects, but they are also avid which had always occupied the islands. But preda-
meat eaters when the opportunity arises. More- tory birds attack from above, relying on their ex-
over, because rats are nocturnal, few people had ac- cellent vision to sight prey during daylight. The

By indirectly disrupting the flow of nutrients from the sea, the small
Pacific rat may have altered island wildlife throughout the Pacific.

tually seen them in the act of predation until in- rats hunted by night, on the ground, with their
frared video captured them at their gruesome tasks. keen sense of smell.
But by now biologists have observed them at- A series of inadvertent natural experiments, in-
tacking adult saddlebacks (a native songbird whose volving the mix of people, rats, and wildlife on
numbers are dwindling) and devouring eggs of the some of New Zealand’s offshore islands, suggests
little shearwater (a native petrel). Petrel chicks are in even greater detail how rats may have affected
sometimes skinned alive and their eyes eaten out. native fauna over time. For example, on off-
And Pacific rats are voracious. In New Zealand shore islands such as Aorangi and Stephens—
they weigh in at less than half a pound but can de- which became home to Polynesians but never
vour any prey as large as they are and eat eggs two- to Pacific rats—petrels, other small birds, inverte-
and-a-half inches long. They can even threaten the brates, frogs, and lizards still abound. Those species
eggs of such large birds as the kakapo, the heaviest have largely disappeared from islands inhabited for
parrot in the world and now one of the rarest. long periods by Pacific rats.
The Polynesians themselves are usually blamed It is the petrels, though, that most dramatically il-
for irrevocably changing the landscape ofa pristine lustrate the magnitude of the damage that rats prob-

|
56 |)
NATURAL HIST ORY April 2003
1
ably inflicted in New Zealand. Thirteen species of tebrates, lizards, birds, bats, and other herbivores.
petrel once bred on the South Island. Today only six Take the case of Hutton’s shearwater. Holdaway es-
still breed there, and only one, Hutton’s shearwater, timates that a remnant colony of these birds on the
remains on the island in great numbers. The seven South Island still supplies more than 1,000 pounds
extirpated species certainly disappeared before the of guano per acre in each breeding season. Extrapo-
Europeans arrived and may have been gone even lating from that estimate, he maintains that before
before the Polynesians settled in New Zealand. the appearance of the rats, seabird colonies could
The petrel species that became extinct were pre- have supplied two million tons of fertilizer a year.
cisely the ones whose size and habitat made them The possible implications of the loss of such a
most accessible to the Pacific rats. Petrel species that nutrient flow are astonishing. Pacific rats have
were too big a mouthful for rats persisted on the spread to hundreds of islands and have eliminated
mainland, even in lowlands, where rats were com- hundreds of seabird populations. If those changes
mon. In contrast, the smaller petrel species all disap- have equally disrupted hundreds of food webs, it
peared, even where their breeding habitats re- could be that these small rodents have altered island
mained intact. Scarlett’s shearwater, for instance, wildlife across the entire Pacific. Holdaway’s next
disappeared from the west coast of the South Island, step 1s to collaborate with investigators from a vari-
even though the area retains some of the largest ety of disciplines to examine the possible connec-
tracts of relatively undisturbed forest in the country. tions between petrel disappearances and changes in
The only small petrel species that survived were the those food webs. The Pacific rat may be the only
ones that nested on rat-free offshore islands or in mammal in the world, besides our own species, that
cold mountainous regions, inhospitable to subtropi- has fundamentally altered an ecosystem on a conti-
cal rats. Many of those refuges were later invaded by nental scale. O
other, even feistier rat species and by
stoats introduced by Europeans.

f rats were responsible for killing off

petrels and other native species,
what additional effects might their
depredations have had? By eliminating
huge colonies of seabirds, for instance,
Pacific rats could have generated eco-
logical damage far beyond the extinc-
tion of particular species.
Holdaway has drawn particular at-
tention to the amount of organic
waste once generated by the seabird
colonies—mainly guano, but also lost
eggs, dead birds, spilled food, and
molted feathers. That waste would
have constituted a bonanza of nutri-
ents that flowed continuously from
the sea to the land. (Miners on other
oceanic islets, such as Nauru and
Christmas Island, have come across
guano-derived phosphate rock de-
posits as thick as seventy-five feet.)
The massive wastes of the seabird
colonies on the mainland would have
added phosphorus, nitrogen, and car-
bon to relatively nutrient-poor soils,
and lowered the pH of the soil. The
birds would also have aerated the soil
as they burrowed to shape their nests. The Westland petrel, big and mean enough to fend off even large Norway
The nutrients would have fostered the and black rats, is one of the few petrel species that still breeds on the New
growth of plants that sustained inver- Zealand “mainland,” and whose numbers are on the rise.

April 2003 NATURAL FES ORY 57

 Photographs by Subhankar Banerjee

ere the summer sun lingers

above the horizon from mid-
May until mid-August. Here
the sky of the long winter night dances
with the luminous curtains of the aurora
3 borealis. The setting is the Arctic Na-
Capitate lousewort, temporarily tional Wildlife Refuge, in the north-
shrouded bya summer snowfall eastern corner of Alaska. Its 30,000
square miles of wildlands straddle the
Continental Divide, including the four highest peaks and most of the
glaciers in the Brooks Range. Waterways that flow northward cross the
tundra of the coastal plain and empty into the Beaufort Sea; waters flow-
ing southward pass through forests of spruce and birch to join the mighty
Yukon River or the Porcupine River, one of the Yukon’s tributaries.
In May and early June the coastal plain serves as the principal calving
ground for the Porcupine herd of caribou. Musk oxen give birth on the
plain a bit earlier, from mid-April until mid-May. In the past few years,
apparently as a result of global warming, the coastal plain has had more
snow than usual and, as a consequence, a later spring thaw. Driven to the
foothills to find forage, the musk oxen are more often giving birth there,
even though that makes them and their young more vulnerable to griz-
zly bears. The net result is that their numbers are in decline.
Altogether the refuge is home to thirty-six species of land mammals
and nine marine mammals that frequent its coast. About seventy species
of birds nest on the coastal plain; another sixty-five make their annual
pilgrimages from lands as distant as South America and Southeast Asia,
Just to feed on the clouds of early summer insects.
The refuge was created in 1980, enlarging a national wildlife range es-
tablished in 1960. Nearly 14,000 square miles are designated as wilderness
and are governed by the 1964 Wilderness Act. Mining and timber cutting
are forbidden, and recreational equipment is circumscribed. But the coastal
plain, despite its prvotal ecological role, is not classified as a wilderness area.
Owned by the citizens of the United States, the Arctic National Wild-
life Refuge is now managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
(www.r7.fws.gov/nwr/arctic/arctic.html). More than 300 archaeological
sites, however, attest to the priority of an indigenous human presence.
Exploiting the tundra and the sea are Inupiat Eskimos, traditional hunters
of bowhead whales, while in the interior forests live the Gwich’in
Athabascan Indians, whose fate and culture have long been joined with
the herds of caribou. Inhabiting settlements on the periphery of the
refuge, these people remain among its best-informed guides.
—VITTORIO MAESTRO

58 | NATURAL HISTORY April 2003

In the springtime the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge of Alaska comes to life.

Mount Michelson looms over caribou on the-coastal plain. As many as 120,000 animals belong to
the Porcupine herd, named for the Porcupine River, which flows across the southeastern corner of
Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Each spring the animals travel northward and congregate
on the coastal plain in the refuge and in adjacent Canadian territory.

April 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 59

 PN

Marsh fleabane grows in the valley of the East Fork of the Chandalar River,
the refuge to join the Yukon River. In the distance, Nichenthraw Mountain
reflected in an unnamed la

In the fall 300,000 snow geese stop in the coastal plain of the refuge
to bulk up on the root stalks of tall cotton grass before heading south
to their wintering grounds.

PY a ee eas
eto teeth Ves
Ree

<A

eae
Pate

aeer
 Standing among sharp-edged
peaks, at the convergence of
mountain and sky, I am alone at
a place without roads or people,
not even trails except those
trodden by wild sheep and
caribou; there is nothing to violate
the peace, with the mountains
still unaffected by humankind.
Here one can recapture the
rhythm of life and the feeling of
belonging to the natural world.
—GEORGE B. SCHALLER

Rock lichens in the valley of the Hulahula River, which flows northward across
the coastal plain and empties into the Beaufort Sea.

Big predator species such as the polar bear and wolf

eorais bunpreselen sencinipe: manesive courtshie signify the biological health of the Arctic ecosystem.
display. The world population of the species is only eviag , 5 PE
about 15,000. The birds migrate each year from But to me, in such a harsh environment, the smaller
Argentina to the coastal plain of northeastern
Asseagend sehaceniiCeanads: life-forms suc as s the
ife-forms such Ameri
the American pper,
dipper, songbire I
aa songbird
saw feeding on the open waters of the Hulahula
River in November, signify its spiritual health.
—SUBHANKAR BANERJEI

These photographs by Subhankar Banerjee will soon be published in

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land (Seattle;
The Mountaineers Books, 2003).

April 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 61

 REVIEWS

Happy Birthday, DNA!

Return with us now to those thrilling days of discovery, fifty years ago this month.

By Everett |. Mendelsohn

Watson and DNA:

ames D, Watson opened his irrev- 1953 and its implications for how ge-
erent and at times malicious popu- Making a Scientific Revolution netic information is replicated marked
lar book, The Double Helix, with by Victor K. McElheny the opening of a major shift in how
the comment: “I have never seen Perseus Publishing, 2003; $27.50 genetics would be practiced. Prior to
Francis Crick in a modest mood.” 1953 the replication process was “black
Watson was referring of course to his Rosalind Franklin: boxed.” In contrast, following the
partner in the discovery of the struc- The Dark Lady of DNA work of Watson, Crick, Wilkins, and
ture of DNA. The narrative is clear: by Brenda Maddox Franklin, genes were understood as
immodesty led to success. It is that HarperCollins, 2002; $29.95 molecules, and the search for how the
singular success that is now being cel- molecules functioned and how they
ebrated, the fiftieth anniversary of the their discovery does mark a critical influenced the development of the
three papers on DNA (one by Watson milestone in the coming age of molec- structures and processes of living or-
and Crick, one by Maurice Wilkins ular biology. The combined effort 1s as ganisms became the focus of the new,
and two coauthors, and the third by important as any discovery in twenti- very active, and very large field of
Rosalind Franklin and a coauthor) eth-century science. The detailing of molecular biology. Numerous Nobel
originally published in the journal the double helical structure of DNA in Prizes were awarded for the scientific
Nature on April 25, 1953. discoveries that resulted, and numer-
The tone of the papers, obviously ous patents were granted for the appli-
constrained by the editorial policies cation of the new science to medicine,
of what was at the time indisputably agriculture, and commerce.
the premier journal of science, was
subdued if not comically understated: ictor McElheny’s book Watson and
DNA: Making a Scientific Revolu-
We wish to suggest a structure for the salt
of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.).
tion is the first full biography of Watson
This structure has novel features which (Crick has yet to be the subject ofa full
are of considerable biological interest. biographical account). In McElheny’s
account, Watson’ is a long and eventful
Watson and Crick knew, however, life in science: the DNA discoveries;
that if their structure was correct, the appointment at Harvard; the years
they were on to something very big, as director of the Cold Spring Harbor
and in one of the last paragraphs of Laboratory on Long Island, New York,
their “Letter” to Nature they stated during which Watson oversaw its re-
their claim: construction as a leading center for bi-
ological research; and the vigorous ef-
It has not escaped our notice that the spe-
forts he made as the first director of the
cific pairing we have postulated immedi-
ately suggests a possible copying mecha- Human Genome Project.
nism for the genetic material. Beside In their initial paper Watson and
James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 Crick conceded that they had not
One could almost say, “The rest is molecular model of DNA, made up of metal done experimental work on DNA,
plates and rods, arranged helically around a
history.” The details sketched by Wat- nor had they collected X-ray data;
retort stand. Each plate represented one
son and Crick relatively rapidly stimu- of the four bases whose complementary rather, they relied on previously pub-
lated enormous amounts of experi- arrangement “suggest[ed] a possible copying lished data. In their final paragraph
mentation and further theorizing. Yes, mechanism for the genetic material.” they note:

62 RA rorY April 2003

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 consequences of the build- cies of mollusk blur the were no mutualistic associ- that were evidently
ing of the Panama Canal. natural order, creating a bi- ations between plants and pierced by a large pierc-
That an “upscale” rainfor- ological cacophony where animals analogous to the ing-and-sucking insect.
est could be reduced in once a desert symphony ones observed today. In Furthermore, fecal pellets
ninety years to a Jurassic- played. But there’s a bright late Pennsylvanian de- in the same deposit con-
like, low-rent district in side: electric power galore. posits (beginning about tain the same or similar
terms of biodiversity is in- Now we can catch the na- 298 million years ago), in prepollen. Do such find-
structive. Public works ture channels in Phoenix which plant tissues are ings simply point to
pollen eating, or was the
insect providing a mutual-
istic benefit to the plant
as well?
Conrad C. Labandeira
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C.
projects in the United and see the lights of Las preserved in considerable
States offer similarly dra- Vegas from space. anatomical detail, there is ERRATUM: The caterpillar
matic examples of these in- Daniel J. Lenihan evidence for intricate asso- pictured on page 55 of
advertent experiments in National Park Service ciations. One example, “Biosphere III” (February
ecology. Lake Powell and Submerged Resources Center from the Calhoun Flora of 2003) should have been
Lake Mead comprise 500 Santa Fe, New Mexico Illinois, is a seed fern that identified as belonging to
square miles of lake where bears prepollen (a kind of the family Saturnidae, not
once “a river ran through.” I am not so sure, as Messrs. microspore) far bigger than Limacodidae.
Now fish swim around in Leigh and Ziegler main- any known wind-dispersed
Anasazi ruins, and exotic tain, that more than 150 pollen. The prepollen was Natural History’s e-mail
vegetation and invader spe- million years ago there produced in large organs address is nhmag@amnh.org.

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CONTRIBUTORS

An acclaimed photographer as well as a tropical ecologist,

CHRISTIAN ZIEGLER (“The Natural Moment,” page 6)
spends part of the year based on Panama’s Barro Colorado
Island, where he recently collaborated with Egbert Giles
Leigh Jr. on A Magic Web, a book about the biodiversity of the
PETER BROWN Editor-in-Chief
island’s rainforest. More of Ziegler’s work can be seen at
www.naturephoto.de. Mary Beth Aberlin Elizabeth Meryman
Managing Editor Art Director

GABRIELLE WALKER (“The Day the Earth Froze Over,’ page Board ofEditors
T. J. Kelleher, Avis Lang, Vittorio Maestro
44) has traveled to all seven continents in search of stories
Michel DeMatteis Associate Managing Editor
about science. She has been to the South Pole, climbed trees
Thomas Rosinski Associate Art Director
in the Amazon rainforest, and pulled fresh lava from a volcano
in Hawaii with a rock hammer. Walker, who earned her doc- Lynette Johnson Editorial Coordinator

torate in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge, Erin M. Espelie Special Projects Editor
has been an editor at Nature and the features editor at New Sci- 8 Richard Milner Contributing Editor
entist, for which she now acts as a consultant. Last fall she was a visiting pro- Graciela Flores, Marisa Macari Interns
fessor in the geosciences department at Princeton University. Snowball Earth,
from which her article has been adapted, is her first book.
Mark A. FURLONG Publisher
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 (

Peter street mY
the American Museum of Natural History
and Junta de Castilla y Leon.
 By Stéphan Reebs

INCREDIBLE JOURNEY li Here’s one for

the record books: longest documented
travel in the wild by a wild mouse. The
new world-record holder is a three-quar-
ter-ounce female white-footed mouse
that took just a month to travel at least
9.2 miles across a stretch of New England
forestland.
Chronicling the achievement was
Thomas J. Maier of the USDA Forest
Service’s research station in Amherst,
Massachusetts, who trapped, tagged,
and recaptured the peripatetic rodent.
Most often it’s the males that travel long
distances, generally to avoid other A vagabond's search rewarded
males and to seek a mate, but Maier’s
mouse, too, had good reasons for her A potential competing claim: another six forest roads, three small streams, a
trek: the local mouse population had white-footed mouse once ran the equiv- two-lane primary highway, and a power
burgeoned, autumn food supplies were alent of twenty-three miles in twenty- line right-of-way. (“Long-distance move-
low (acorns were in particularly short four hours, but that was inside a well- ments by female white-footed mice, Per-
supply), and the females in nearby areas, oiled running wheel in a laboratory. omyscus leucopus, in extensive mixed-
suffering equally scarce resources, were Maier’s adventurer ran mostly through wood forest,” Canadian Field-Naturalist
in no mood to be welcoming. forest, but she also had to cross at least 116:108-11, 2002)

YOUR PLACE OR MINE? Think of the word “household,” and after all, and you double the number of households, even if the
the associations that usually come to mind are positive: warmth, overall population remains constant.
safety, sharing, interconnectedness. But conservationists are be- For the most part, that's progress. Households get smaller when
ginning to understand the word in a negative way. The problem standards of living rise, when single people become more affluent,
is that in many “hotspots” of biodiversity—Brazil, south-central when women become more educated (which not only gives them
China, Florida's Indian River County—where native species are greater access to paid work but also leads to fewer children), and
both abundant and threatened by human activities, the number when fewer generations live together under the same roof. But
of households is growing faster than the human population itself. there is a downside. As Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University in
That's because today’s average household includes fewer people East Lansing and his colleagues at Stanford University have re-
than yesterday's: halve the number of people living as a unit, cently pointed out, more housing units consume more land and
more construction materials. And smaller households re-
eee ee
duce sharing: each individual uses up more resources.
The consequent urban sprawl and energy consumption
strain ecosystems and erode biodiversity.
Analyzing United Nations data, Liu and his team
note that in sixty-five non-hotspot countries, house-
holds and populations grew at similar rates between
1985 and 2000—about 1.7 percent annually. During
the same. period, though, seventy-six hotspots grew,
on average, at the annual rate of 1.8 percent in popu-
lation but 3.1 percent in number of households. The
reduction in household size alone (from 4.7 to 4.0
people per household, on average) resulted in 155
million additional residences established in those
hotspots in the final fifteen years of the twentieth cen-
tury—bad news for the flora and fauna. ("Effects of
household dynamics on resource consumption and
Suburban households, proliferating in Asia biodiversity,” Nature 421:530-33, January 30, 2003)

16
NATURAL HISTORY April 2003
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We have also been stimulated by a Yet I’m not sure either of them is en-
knowledge of the general nature of the tirely comfortable sharing the lime-
unpublished experimental results and light with Franklin. The irony is that
ideas of Dr. M.H.E Wilkins, Dr. R.E. Franklin looms as large as she does
Franklin and their coworkers at King’s
today in part because of the way Wat-
College, London.
son portrayed her in The Double Helix.
Maurice Wilkins, who did important Maddox recounts Watson’s first en-
work on the X-ray crystallographic counter with Franklin, which took
analysis of DNA, went on to share the place at a lecture she gave as part ofa
Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick colloquium at King’s College. Wat-
in 1962. Rosalind Franklin, a col- son, in recalling the lecture for his
league of Wilkins’s at King’s who had book, betrays something of his atti-
produced some of the clearest X-ray tude toward women: “Momentarily I
pictures of DNA, died young, of wondered how she would look if she
ovarian cancer, on April 16,91958: Watson (right) and Crick in 1953, shortly after took off her glasses and did something
working out the structure of the DNA molecule
Franklin had been a focus of parody novel with her hair.’ But he says little
in Watson’s Double Helix, but her pic- or nothing about the stunning X-ray
tures had been shared with Watson [ is fitting that these two biogra- pictures she had made and which he
and Crick, and they proved to be cru- phies are part of the public record hoped would give him the evidence
cial in confirming their structural of the fiftieth-anniversary celebra- he and Crick needed to support their
analysis of DNA. Unable to defend tions. And there is little doubt that developing theory of a helical struc-
herself from the grave, she became a Watson and Crick will get the lion’s ture for DNA.
feminist icon and the subject of two share of attention—after all, they are Instead, Watson went on to belittle
biographies; Brenda Maddox’s Ros- both still alive and active, and both Franklin’s dress and her lack of “lip-
alind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA have enjoyed long and quite successful stick to contrast with her straight black
is the more recent. careers since their youthful discovery. hair.” Maddox concludes that “Watson
could not have given the world his
‘Rosy’ if Rosalind had been alive.” A

Human Wildlife number of scientific colleagues, as well

as friends and family of Franklin’s who
were sent copies of the draft manu-
The Life That Lives on Us script, protested Watson’s account of
Dr. Robert Buckman Franklin, as well as his references to
others. In response to his critics Wat-

be
“In Human Wildlife, Dr. son added what Maddox calls “a pious
Robert Buckman takes us on epilogue,” which was published with
an engrossingly detailed the first edition of the book in 1968.
journey through the hoards of From that historical vantage, Watson
organisms that thrive within, writes, virtually everyone mentioned
reasts Ulta si T BUCKMAN |
on, and uncomfortably close in the book was still alive, with “one
to our bodies. The voyage unfortunate exception. . . .:”
includes a mix of humorous Rosalind Franklin died at the early age of
text and astonishing photo- thirty-seven. Since my initial impressions
graphs. From bedbugs to of her . . . (as recorded in the early pages of
bacteria, the doctor reminds this book), were often wrong, I want to say
something here about her achievements.
us that even when we think
we are by ourselves, we are The rest of the paragraph and the
never alone.” —Jeffrey C. May, concluding one that followed tried to
author of My House is Killing make amends, but the text in the body
Me! of the book remained unchanged.
But if Watson had been so clearly
208 pages, 270 color photos
nasty and catty about Franklin that he
$21.95 paperback
now sought to apologize, he seemed
The Johns Hopkins University Press unmoved by the anger both Wilkins
Available at bookstores ® 1-800-537-5487 © www.jhupbooks.com
66 | NATURAL HISTORY April 2003
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 and Crick expressed at the book’s tone volume of “autobiography,” titled count of the lecture Watson was in-
and content. In a vivid section of his Genes, Girls, and Gamow, is further 1l- vited to give at Harvard in George
biography, McElheny chronicles their lustration of the type.) Wald’s introductory course on: biol-
reactions. Wilkins thought The Double McElheny has known Watson for ogy, on the day after Watson’s Nobel
Helix should not be published. It was more than four decades, covering him Prize was announced in October
“extremely badly written, juvenile, first as a science reporter for The Boston 1962. The book closes as Watson is
and in bad taste.’ Crick, McElheny Globe during Watson’s years at Har- made an honorary Knight of the
notes, was even more savage: elit vard. He also spent four years working Order of the British Empire, in Janu-
shows such a naive and egotistical for Watson at Cold Spring Harbor. Al- ary of last year. In between, McEl-
view of the subject as to be scarcely though he thanks Watson for years of heny does a thorough job of pulling
credible.’ And perhaps most tellingly, friendship, he is also at pains to point together an account of the 1953 dis-
it “grossly invades my privacy... . [It out that “Watson did not participate in covery of the structure of DNA, inte-
was] a violation of friendship.” Several this project.” That may be literally grating into it the views of many oth-
years later, in an article in Molecular Bi- true, yet Watson clearly gave his bless- ers, both contemporary and later.
ology celebrating the twenty-first an- ing to this biography. He steered Taken together with the “formal”
niversary of the 1953 paper, Crick histories of that discovery (by Robert
confessed that he too had contem- C. Olby of the University of Pitts-
plated writing a book. He had gotten burgh and by Horace Freeland Judson
as far as a title, The Loose Screw, and the of George Washington University),
opening line: “Jim was always clumsy McElheny’s book adds valuable ele-
with his hands. One had only to see ments to the story of how that impor-
him peel an orange. ... tant work was accomplished.
. 99

But to his credit, McElheny also

f the text of The Double Helix is gives full rein to the many manifesta-
what brings these two biographies tions of “brat/genius” behavior (his
together at one moment in time, there words) and the criticisms of it. Ac-
is no question that both of them go far cording to McElheny, Watson’s “bad
beyond that text. Both are filled with boy” image is richly deserved, and in
detail, much of it previously unknown part self-inflicted (perhaps self-crafted
or only hinted at. Each one provides is more accurate) in Watson’s two au-
valuable historical appraisals of both tobiographical volumes. McElheny is
Watson and Franklin by members of also well aware of the controversy
the founding generation of DNA X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA. This arising out of Watson’s (and Crick’s)
studies, as well as by subsequent gen- image of the B form of DNA was obtained by failure to appropriately recognize the
Rosalind Franklin in 1953, and was a crucial
erations of practitioners. The inter- work of Franklin, as well as the con-
piece of evidence supporting the structure
views noted by each biographer are proposed by Watson and Crick. tingent nature of the discovery itself.
prodigious and in many cases add He notes Watson’s own retrospective
context and color. McElheny to many colleagues who judgment: “We were lucky. I don’t
But the two books are also quite gave extensive interviews and who think it was any great intellectual in-
different. McElheny’s is one of hero- helped review the manuscript. He still sight.’ And elsewhere, Watson said:
ism mixed with quirkiness; Maddox’s directs the archives at Cold Spring “The DNA structure was ready to be
one of tragedy and attempted recon- Harbor, and made sure McElheny solved. I can’t imagine two years
struction. Both directly and implicitly could make good use of them through going by [after 1953] without some-
offer accounts of how science oper- unencumbered access. Accordingly, one else making the discovery.”
ates, how its practitioners behave, though Watson and DNA is not an
how its institutions function (or mal- “authorized” biography, it is one com- Rae Maddox moves directly
function), and how myths are made posed from deep within the molecu- into the territory that McElheny
and destroyed. McElheny’s focus is a lar-biology community. eschewed in his volume. She explores
man who is at once both immodest the life, work, and personality of
and ill at ease. Although McElheny is Mia wants to insist that Franklin. A strong-minded, complex,
at pains to avoid discussion of Wat- there is much more to Watson and highly intelligent woman, Frank-
son’s private life and family, his sub- than his reputation as “biology’s bad lin was born into a prominent, well-
ject’s personal immaturity and curious boy,” and the book 1s bracketed with to-do and well assimilated Anglo-
attitude toward women cannot be tales of honor and scientific recogni- Jewish family. Her biographer locates
overlooked. (Watson’s most recent tion. McElheny opens with an ac- her in time, in place, and in culture.

68 NATURAL HISTORY April 2003

Her father’s family had come to Eng- peraments of the personalities in-
land from Breslau, in Silesia (now part volved, the science on which they
of southwestern Poland), in 1763 and were working was yielding answers to
prospered through the generations in each one of them. The history of the
banking and publishing. One of her discovery is certainly linked to indi-
relatives was the first high commis- viduals, but, in this case particularly, it
sioner of Palestine. Her mother’s fam- also transcends them. One indication
ily included the first Jewish professor of how far along the research was on
at an English university and the first several fronts was the simple fact that
Jewish lord mayor of London. There a single step taken by the original
were suffragists and socialists, a trade group (Watson and Crick) was able to
union organizer, and a London city meet with such complete success. As
councillor in her heritage. the biochemist John Edsall remarked
Maddox looks at length at in 1962: “No fundamental revision of
Franklin’s early career and provides a the picture has been required since
detailed and sympathetic account of the early formulation of Watson and
her unhappy (albeit, coincidentally, Crick. © Thats assessment wiremains
highly productive) years from 1951 Rosalind Franklin in an undated portrait largely true to the present day.
until 1953. She spent those years at Of course, even after fifty years key
King’s College working with Wilkins, Franklin is well served by Maddox’s elements of the molecular processes of
and most of her encounters with Wat- intelligently written and eminently reproduction and development are still
son and Crick took place there. They fair biography. being sought. Efforts to modify or-
were stiff and unfriendly meetings, ganisms through molecular manipula-
and led Crick to refer to Franklin as any commentators have asked tlon—genetic engineering—are being
“that dark lady” —the phrase Maddox whether Franklin would have widely practiced in agriculture, and
adopts as a subtitle. Franklin’s move in shared the Nobel Prize with Wilkins, more circumspectly experimented
1953 to Birkbeck College, London, Watson, and Crick had she been alive with in medicine. Virtually all these
and to the laboratory of the crystallo- in 1962 (the Nobel Prize is never developments have been controversial.
grapher J.D. Bernal, provided a much awarded to a deceased scholar). Still Genetically manipulated foods have
friendlier and more supportive envi- others have contested whether she been greeted with stiff resistance in
ronment, where her talented research would have deserved it. Counterfac- Europe, even while they have been
continued. tual history seldom yields adequate much more readily accepted in the
But by then Franklin’s work with answers, and I see little point to in- United States. Genetic manipulation
DNA had ceased. Instead, she began dulging in it here. But the wisdom of in humans—gene therapy—has met
to carry out quite successful studies of fifty years of hindsight does allow sev- with only mixed success, as well as
the structure of tobacco mosaic virus eral incontrovertible observations. with some highly visible failures. It
(she located the infective element of The very fact that the Nobel Prize has also brought into sharp focus the
the virus in its ribose nucleic acid). for physiology or medicine was split ethical issues raised by seeking to treat
Part of what is known about three ways and the chemistry prize in genetically linked diseases via the ge-
Franklin’s work of that period comes the same year was shared by the bio- netic engineering of human beings.
from two obituaries Bernal wrote at chemists Max Perutz and John Not yet tried, but even more contro-
the time of Franklin’s death, one for Kendrew for their work on the struc- versial, would be any scheme to engi-
The Times of London and the other ture of proteins, illustrates how much neer the future by genetically manipu-
for Nature. In both he recounted her scientific activity was focused on lating the reproductive cells. The
scientific work, and dealt delicately cracking the structures of important genetic revolution begun in 1953 is
but fairly with how credit had been biological molecules. The chemist unlikely to have run its course, either
assigned for the discovery of the heli- Linus Pauling, already a Nobel laure- scientifically or culturally, by the time
cal structure of DNA. As Bernal ate for work that led to the elucida- our grandchildren celebrate its one-
summed up her contributions: tion of the helical structure of pro- hundredth anniversary, in 2053.

As a scientist Miss Franklin was distin-

teins, was also racing to find the
guished by extreme clarity and perfec- structure of DNA. Everett I. Mendelsohn is a professor ofthe his-
tion in everything she undertook. Her Although the high drama in the tory of science at Harvard University. He has
photographs are among the most beauti- story of Watson, Crick, Wilkins, and worked extensively on aspects of the social and
ful X-ray photographs of any substance Franklin arises, in part, from the re- sociological history of science and the relations
ever taken. markably different styles and tem- between science and modern societies.

April 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 69

 BOOKSHELF By Laurence A. Marschall

From the start it was Katherine’s since been convincingly linked to

Among Stone Giants: show. Although she had little formal Polynesian cultures to the west, mak-
The Life of Katherine Routledge training in archaeology, she knew ing Easter Island seem a bit less mys-
and Her Remarkable Expedition what to look for and how to listen. In terious and remote. But Katherine
to Easter Island her party’s seventeen months on the Routledge’s work stands the test of
by Jo Anne Van Tilburg island she made drawings and water- time. In a letter to her mother, writ-
Scribner, 2003; $26.00 colors of each landmark. She sat daily ten as she was packing to leave the is-
with village elders, compiling note- land, Katherine wrote: “If people ask
An a century has passed since books of their replies to her questions you if we have ‘solved the riddle, you
Katherine Routledge and her about the old ways, the ancient gods, can say that we do not claim to have
husband Scoresby raised the anchor how the island and its people came to done that, but we have found much
of their custom-built ninety-foot be. While Katherine sketched and that is new & interesting.” That is an
schooner Mana and set sail for adven- scribbled, Scoresby collected artifacts apt description both of Routledge’s
ture. Few Europeans had ever visited from caves and burial sites, and mem- work and of Van Tilburg’s elegant and
Rapa Nui, as the local residents called bers of the Mana’s crew photographed compelling biography.
Easter Island, but all Victorians with an and mapped with military precision. It
ounce of romance in their soul knew was the first true attempt to conduct Tycho & Kepler:
of the island’s alluring riddle. Kather- an archaeological survey of the island. The Unlikely Partnership
ine hoped to solve it. That Forever Changed
Although Rapa Nui had no trees, it an Tilburg has dug deeply into Our Understanding
had a forest: hundreds of huge stone Katherine’s family records and of the Heavens
statues were scattered across its barren the notebooks of the Mana expedition by Kitty Ferguson
landscape. Who had carved these to present a convincing picture of sci- Walker & Company, 2003; $28.00
otherworldly monuments? And what ence as it was practiced in an era when
purpose—teligious, ceremonial, com- natural history was a popular sport of
memorative—could justify such a the moneyed class. Because govern- hen Copernicus first proposed
large investment of labor and re- ment funding was rare, wealthy ama- a universe with the Sun at its
teurs, rather than professional associa- center in 1543, most of his sixteenth-
tions and peer reviewers, set research century contemporaries regarded the
agendas. Today’s field-workers may idea as interesting but hardly revolu-
employ far more culturally sensitive tionary. Geometrically, it made little
and environmentally sound tech- difference whether the Sun or the
niques than did the Routledges, who Earth stood still, and the crude obser-
looted gravesites with abandon and vations of the time offered precious
spaded like gardeners through delicate little evidence for telling one case
layers of artifact-bearing earth. But a from the other. Even those partial to a
well-managed expedition today sun-centered scheme hedged their
would be hard-pressed to provide as bets by harrumphing, at least in pub-
colorful a cast of characters, or grist lic, that, yes, this Copernicus was a
for such a lively story. clever fellow, but whatever the merits
Scoresby was arrogant and tactless; of his model, it was, after all, only a
the crew of the Mana was mutinous model. God could have chosen to
(usually in response to Scoresby’s out- make the Earth revolve around the
rageous behavior); Katherine was Sun—but simply didn’t.
often sidelined by bouts of hallucina- In private, though, some of his
Oldest Easter Island statue, on the
slope of the volcano Rano Raraku tions and depression. The islanders contemporaries believed He did.
staged an armed revolt during Tycho Brahe, a Danish nobleman and
sources? The Routledges, possessed of Katherine's stay. By the time the cou- amateur astronomer, thought Coper-
Katherine’s inherited fortune as well ple’s seventeen months came to an nicus might be on to something.
as the Victorian mania for collecting, end, war-torn Europe must have Tycho had seen a new star appear in
were determined to find out. Their seemed like a haven. the heavens in 1572, and he deter-
expedition made landfall on Rapa Later archaeological surveys did mined that it lay far beyond the
Nui, after an eventful year at sea, on better work than the Mana expedi- Moon, in a region of the firmament
March 29, 1914. tion, and the history of Rapa Nui has where, according to the conventional

70 | JATURAL HISTORY April 2003

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 astronomy of his day, nothing ever continue his father’s royal indulgence
changed. Convinced that the old pic- of Tycho’s expensive hobby. Smokechasing
ture of the Earth-centered universe So Tycho packed up and wandered by StephenJ. Pyne
needed repair, Tycho proposed a hy- through Europe, eventually stopping The University of Arizona Press,
brid system in which the Sun carried in Prague. There he found a patron 2003; $37.50
the orbiting planets around a station- in Rudolph I, the Holy Roman
ary Earth. But Tycho knew that his Emperor—and, just as important, a We the harmattan blows south
proposal would be just another clever new assistant named Johannes Kepler. from the Sahara, nighttime
model without the support of careful Twenty-five years Tycho’s junior, satellite images of Ghana and Nigeria
astronomical measurements—mea- Kepler was an impoverished German light up like fireflies on a summer’s
surements Tycho, with the right re- mathematician on a quest to prove evening: West Africa is burning. The
sources, would be happy to make. his own pet theory about the mo- harmattan is a dry wind in a dry sea-
tions of the planets. son. Later, when the rains return, fires
Kr Frederick II of Denmark pro- Science writer Kitty Ferguson be- can still be sparked by lightning, but
vided the money Tycho needed gins her book with this meeting of most of the harmattan fires are set by
for his purposes, and granted him the Kepler and Tycho, and continues in rural agriculturists, who recognize
little island of Ven (formerly Hven), at flashbacks of the lives of the two great and welcome their help in clearing
the mouth of the Baltic Sea, within figures viewed against the unsettled and fertilizing their fields. The fires
view of Hamlet’s fabled castle, Elsi- backdrop of post-Reformation Eu- complete a cycle as old as respiration
ropem lakemeseparacelyanas itself, for both the carbon-rich detri-
many earlier biographers have tus and the oxygen that burns it ulti-
done, the stories of the two mately come from plants, making
astronomers seem merely ec- wildfire a closing step in the process of
centric: Tycho’s artificial nose respiration. From a global perspective,
and Kepler’s mother’s trial for fire is an integral element of the bio-
witchcraft are the only details sphere, an essential cog in the mar-
my students usually remem- velous engine that gives life on Earth
ber. But Ferguson’s approach, its dynamic stability.
enlivened with the dramatic For those of us who live in cities,
pacing of a mystery novel, that truth is far from obvious. In an
shows beautifully how the urban setting fire is a disaster, but in
obsessions of the pragmatic, the wilderness, fire takes on quite a
imperious Brahe meshed per- different function. It is best regarded
fectly with the obsessions of as a tool of control, not an evil to be
Observatory of Tycho Brahe, 1546-1601
the idealistic, pensive Kepler. eliminated. One of the paradoxes of
nore. There Tycho erected a battery of They were an odd couple, indeed, rural fires is that, by trying to elimi-
precise sighting devices (the telescope and Tycho, weary and wary of the nate them, we make them worse
had not yet been invented); for almost world by the time they met, resisted when they do occur: in the year 2000
thirty years, he andastaff of assistants full collaboration with the young wildfires in the United States burned
compiled nightly observations of the Kepler to the very end. As it was, he at least seven million acres, called out
positions of the planets. died scarcely a year after their meet- 30,000 firefighters, and cost the na-
As the data accumulated, however, ing, and Kepler became heir to the tion more than $2.5 billion. Many
Tycho found he lacked the mathemat- finest observations of the planets ever were kindled in areas where dry un-
ical skills, not to mention the time made. From those, he showed con- dergrowth had accumulated for
away from his aristocratic lifestyle, to clusively that the Earth and the plan- decades, the result of aggressive fire
make the calculations he needed to ets orbited the Sun—though in ellip- control. Smokey Bear should have
prove his point. By the last decade of tical orbits, not the circular ones been sued for negligence.
the sixteenth century, the fifty-year- Copernicus preferred. Kepler’s laws If informed opinion is more sensi-
old astronomer was facing a midlife led, in turn, to Newton’s laws of mo- tive to such issues nowadays, the credit
crisis, afraid that immortality was slip- tion, which laid the groundwork for is due in large part to Stephen Pyne,
ping from his grasp. Nicolaus Reimers modern physics and cosmology. If the our most eloquent narrator of the nat-
Bar, a former assistant, had written a story of Tycho and Kepler was, as ural history of fire (a branch of litera-
scurrilous book claiming Tycho’s sys- Kitty Ferguson’s subtitle states, an ture he almost single-handedly
tem as his own. Worse, Denmark had “unlikely partnership,” it was none- created). His style is recognizable by its
a new king, who was not inclined to theless a marriage made in heaven. heavy load of metaphor and by its

72 NATURAL HISTORY April 2003

William Buckleyesque use of re- Yet Pyne remains on message,
condite, albeit evocative, language. always returning to his point that
(As I read the book, my notepad good public fire policy must
quickly filled up with unfamiliar strike a balance between total
words and phrases: “‘swiddeners,” suppression and uncontrolled
“impauperate,” and “lithic hori- burning, and urging that such a
zon,’ to mention a few.) policy be set locally, to meet
Readers of Pyne’s earlier books local needs. Whether or not
will hear echoes of many familiar you ve heard all this before, it’s
themes in Smokechasing, a collec- rewarding to hear it again, if only
tion of miscellaneous essays from for the pleasure of a prose style
recent journals and magazines. that slices through tangled thick-
Some show how the approaches of ets like a bulldozer clearing afire
developing countries must differ line, and lights up the darkness
Forest fire in Spain
from those in the industrialized like a blazing forest.
world, both in learning to manage fire mix’ fires that burn in places such as
Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Su-
and in reconciling the priorities of the canyons of California, where
pernova Story, is the WK.T: Sahm professor
public forest preserves with the con- urban sprawl has turned forested areas ofphysics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylva-
cerns of private industries that depend into residential compounds. And a few nia, and director of Project CLEA, which pro-
on forest products. Other essays deal of the essays are just rousing good sto- duces widely used simulation software for edu-
with the growing problem of “‘inter- ries of fires and of firefighters. cation in astronomy.

nature.net
the expense of extracting a barrel of low-sulfur crude
from rock formations. Iraq’s reservoir is so shallow that
Oil to Burn? the lifting cost is under a buck. Compare that with $2.50
in Saudi Arabia and between three and four dollars in the
Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea. The ease with which
By Robert Anderson Iraqi oil shoots to the surface doesn’t bode well for the
environmental devastation that will take place if these
aniel Yergin, writing at the end of the 1990-91 fields are set ablaze.
Gulf War, concluded his monumental history of Regardless of its scale, such a disaster wouldn’t make
oil, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, much difference to global petroleum stocks, which took
with this prediction: “The fierce and sometimes violent hundreds of millions of years to accumulate. By most
quest for oil—and for the riches and power it conveys— reasonable estimates, peak world oil production is just a
will surely continue so long as oil holds a central place.” few years away. For detailed background on oil as a finite
How long that would be, he made no bets. As I write, a resource, go to hubbertpeak.com, named for the petro-
second war with Iraq is contemplated. According to leum geologist who correctly predicted the 1970 peak
some expert prognostication on the Web, the king of in U.S. production. The information on the site makes it
natural resources may, once again, be consumed and disturbingly clear that oil will follow the pattern typical
wasted in spectacular wildfires. of other finite resources: its extraction rate will reach a
At its height, the Kuwaiti inferno burned oil at a rate high and then dwindle to nothing. Similar dire predic-
equivalent to 10 percent of total world demand. Jonathan tions (but more attractively displayed) are outlined by
Lash, president of the World Resources Institute (www. James J. MacKenzie in “Oil as a Finite Resource: When
wr1.org), foresees the possibility of a similar catastrophe if Is Global Production Likely to Peak?” (www.wri.org/
war comes again, as he writes in his article “The Envi- wri/climate/jm_oil_001.html), another page on the
ronment: Another Casualty of War?” (click on “About WRI site. Don’t miss the links on the right for the text
WRI,” at left, then click on “From the President’’). and slide show of MacKenzie’s project “Thinking Long
Forbes magazine’s Paul Klebnikov (forbes.com/global/ Term.’ Humanity will soon be on the downward slope
2002/1028/024_print.html) sketches the mammoth size of the oil age. How we all cope with that will be the
of the Iraqi reserves, which may ultimately exceed those story of the century.
of Saudi Arabia. He also notes that the fields currently
producing in Iraq have the world’s lowest “lifting costs”’: Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles.

April 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 73

 have shown that a number of physical
processes can warp a galaxy, so it’s a

Warp Factor
matter of figuring out which scenario
applies. Now an innovative new analy-
sis of the problem by Jeremy Bailin, an
astronomy graduate student at the
University of Arizona in Tucson, has
A spinning dwarf may have twisted our galaxy’s disk. implicated a small satellite galaxy, cur-
rently being ripped to shreds by the
gravity of the Milky Way.
By Charles Liu
he Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal
Galaxy, so named because of its
shape, size, and location in the sky,
was discovered in 1994. It appears to
be in a roughly polar orbit around the
Milky Way—that is, above and below
the galactic disk—about 50,000 light-
years from the galactic center. That
orbit brings the dwarf galaxy far too
close to the huge gravitational tidal
forces of the Milky Way for the dwarf
to remain intact. As a result, the
Sagittarius Dwarf now looks some-
thing like strands of spaghetti spilling
from the front ofa pasta-making ma-
An edge-on view of the spiral galaxy ESO 510-G13, in the constellation Hydra chine, the galaxy’s matter being
(visible from the Southern Hemisphere), shows the warp in its disk, much like drawn out over hundreds of millions
the warp in our own Milky Way. The warp suggests that ESO 510-G13 may have ofyears by intergalactic tides.
swallowed another, smaller galaxy in its past.
Gravitational collisions between
small satellite galaxies and big spiral
stronomers sometimes de- of matter streaming around a common galaxies have long been regarded as
scribe the shape of our home center of gravity. (The swirling pattern possible culprits in the warping of a
galaxy, the Milky Way, as a ofa hurricane far better resembles our larger galaxy’s disk. The best known
thin-crust pizza with a plum stuck in spinning galaxy than a flying Frisbee satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky
the middle. The plum is the slightly does.) For another thing, our galaxy’s Way—the Large and Small Magel-
oblong central bulge, protruding disk isn’t flat; it’s warped, like an old- lanic Clouds—are too far away, and
about 3,000 light-years above and fashioned phonograph record left out have the wrong orbital characteris-
below the galactic plane, comprised in the hot sun. Picture that sun-baked tics, to have warped our galactic
mostly of older stars; it makes up the record spinning on a turntable—or a home. The Sagittarius Dwarf seems a
core of the Milky Way, and includes disk of pizza dough spun into the air much more likely candidate, simply
a black hole two and a half million by a skilled chef: our galaxy goes because it is only a third as far from
times the mass of the Sun. The crust through the same kind of floppy, the center of the Milky Way as the
of the pizza is the galactic disk—the wobbly gyrations, though at a rate Magellanic Clouds. But in astron-
source of most of our galaxy’s light. best measured in revolutions per hun- omy—unlike in real estate—location
Thin and flat, the disk is 100,000 dreds of millions of years. isn’t everything; to show a direct
light-years across, about 1,000 light- Why does the Milky Way have such connection between warp and dwarf,
years thick, on average, and includes an odd-looking warp? We astronomers the orbital motion of the Sagittarius
more than 80 percent of the galaxy’s have been puzzling over that question Dwarf must be linked to the rotation
hundred billion or so stars. for decades, but no definitive answer of the Milky Way’s disk.
The plum-and-pizza picture works has emerged. One thing we do know: Bailin’s study is the first to find such
well enough, but like most simple when it comes to warps, our galaxy is a link. His analysis of the galactic warp
metaphors, it breaks down if you push hardly unique. About half of all spiral is based on angular momentum—a
it. For one thing, the galactic disk isn’t galaxies are warped to some degree. measure of how much a system 1s spin-
1 rigid body, but a loose agglomeration Theoretical and computational models ning or rotating. Just as objects moving
 itEee Su, IN APRIL By Joe Rao
ina straight line have momentum, ob-
jects spinning or orbiting around an Mercury — climbs the center of the faint zodiacal constel-
axis have angular momentum; and just progressively high- lation Cancer, the crab. On the 3rd,
as the momentum of two objects er above the west- Jupiter reverses its retrograde, or west-
combine when they collide, so too ern horizon every ward, motion among the stars and be-
does their angular momentum. Imag- evening at dusk in gins moving slowly east, away from the
ine two figure skaters coming together the first half of Beehive. The waxing gibbous Moon
for a combination spin. When they the month, but the slowly approaches Jupiter from the
make physical contact, their individual improving view 1s west—falling for another of Jupiter's
spiraling motions combine to produce offset by the plan- famed seductions—in the overnight
a single, unified whirl. et’s fading _ bril- hours between the 10th and the 11th.
lance. On the 1st the planet shines at
tarting with the latest measure- magnitude —1.4; about thirty minutes Saturn rides the constellation Taurus,
ments of the structure and spin of after sunset, it is very low above the tespullyeintos April. ihe: planetais
the Milky Way, Bailin deduced the west-northwestern horizon. On the readily visible, shining pale yellow at
angular momentum of the warped following evening the Moon—visible magnitude 0 in the west-northwestern
portion of the Milky Way’s disk. He as an exceedingly thin sliver—hovers sky during the first half of each night
then compared that measure with the about 4 degrees below and to the left of the month. On April 7, the same
angular momentum of the Sagittarius of Mercury. On the 16th the planet night a fat crescent Moon glides well
Dwarf—and found for the first time, reaches its greatest elongation (20 de- above Saturn, the Earth will finally at-
within the margins of measurement grees east of the Sun) and appears no- tain its maximum Saturnicentric lati-
error, that the two angular momenta ticeably higher in the sky, but shines tude. Translation: Saturn’s ring system
are identical in both quantity and di- more dimly, at magnitude +0.2. For will list at its greatest possible angle to-
rection. Such a coupling of the angu- the rest of the month Mercury sinks ward the Earth, 27 degrees—making
lar momentum of two bodies almost back down to the horizon while fad- for a stunning, brilliant display even
never happens by chance; usually, it ing rapidly, and is out of sight well be- through the lens of a small telescope.
takes place only when two spinning fore the end of April. The last such event took place in Sep-
systems, like the skaters, come into tember 1988, and the next one isn’t
contact. The coupling isn’t enough to Venus rises like clockwork about an due until October 2017. The rings
prove cause and effect by itself, but it’s hour before the Sun all month. The appear to hide the north end of the
solid circumstantial evidence that the planet lingers low in the eastern planet, and stick out a bit behind the
interaction of the Sagittarius Dwarf predawn sky. south end. Don’t miss it!
with the Milky Way disk created the
warp in our galaxy. Mars—god of war—glares ever more The Moon is new on the 1st at 2:19
With enough spinning, warps in fiercely at the Earth. The pumpkin- PM., Eastern Standard «Time. It
disks eventually disappear. That’s why colored planet rises in the southeast reaches first quarter on the 9th at 7:40
a pizza chef spins pizza dough, tossing about four hours before the Sun and PM., waxes full on the 16th at 3:36
it into the air again and again: in time, nearly reaches culmination by sunrise. P.M., and wanes to last quarter on the
the thick lumps get spun out, leaving Mars is one magnitude, or roughly 23rd at 8:18 A.M. Our satellite reaches
the disk smooth, even, and thin. Some two-and-a-half times, brighter now perigee at 1:00 A.M. on the 17th, or-
day, that will probably happen to the than it was on January 1. If your daily biting just 221,937 miles from Earth.
Milky Way, too. Sooner or later—the routine this month rouses you while Beachcombers, take note. Very high
latest calculations range from a few the sky is still fairly dark, look to the tides can be expected from the coin-
hundred million years to a few billion southeast to watch the planet brighten cidence of perigee with the full
years from now—our galaxy will over April’s course from magnitude Moon—a phenomenon known as an
work out the kink in its disk. That is, +0.5 to magnitude 0. At midmonth it astronomical spring tide.
unless another dwarf galaxy like Sagit- stands just 104 million miles from
tarius appears, coming along with just Earth. The planet leaves the constella- “Spring ahead” in much of Canada
the right orbit, giving the Milky Way tion Sagittarius, the archer, for Capri- and the United States, as daylight
disk just the kick it needs to start corn, the sea goat, on the 21st. saving time returns on Sunday, the
warping all over again. 6th. Remember to set clocks ahead
Lordly Jupiter, high in the southern one hour.
Charles Liu is an astrophysicist at the Hayden sky at dusk on the 1st, descends toward
Planetarium and a_ research scientist at the west. It starts the month just to the Unless otherwise noted, all times are given
Barnard College in New York City. east of the Beehive star cluster, near in Eastern Daylight Time.

April 2003 NATURAL HISTORY LS

AT THE MUSEUM
AMERICAN MUSEUM 6 NATURAL HISTORY ro

AN INTERVIEW
WITH MELANIE STIASSNY FINNIN/AMN
D.

rz

Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life

Reopens May 17
Melanie Stiassny is Axelrod Research Curator of
Ichthyology in the Division of Vertebrate Zoology and
a lead curator of the renovation of the Milstein Family
Hall of Ocean Life. She spoke with us about the
oceans, the new hall, and the blue whale.

Q: You’ve said that we know more able to say how many species exist on that can unravel very, very, quickly.
about the dark side of the moon than the planet. But probably about 80 to So | also want visitors to the hall to
we know about the ocean. 90 percent of all life on Earth is found be empowered in a sense, to have an
A: Which is sadly true. As terrestrial in the ocean. And it’s not just the idea of how their behavior as individu-
creatures, we tend to think of life on our quantity or “biomass’—the actual als can impact the oceans but how it
planet as being essentially life on land. amount of living material—it’s also the can also help to save them.
It couldn’t be further from the truth. diversity, the number of different kinds
A little over 70 percent of the Earth’s of living things. Q: Can you tell us a little bit about the
surface is covered in water. We've The people visiting the new Hall of renovation?
seen the blue marble from outer Ocean Life are going to be exposed A: | hope people are going to be very
space. It’s blue because there’s so to kinds of organisms that they’ve happy when they come back to the
much water on Earth. And 362 million never heard of, they’ve never even hall. This is one of the most beloved
square kilometers of that is marine— imagined. And yet these organisms halls in the museum—for good rea-
the world ocean. Yet perhaps as little all work together to create some- son. We want people to experience
as 1 percent of the ocean floor has ac- thing incredibly diverse and funda- all the wonder they felt in the older
tually been explored. The ocean as a mentally important for life on the en- version, but to be amazed by the new.
whole is very much the “final frontier,” tire planet. We didn’t want to change it beyond
the last truly wild place on our planet. recognition, but we did want to tell a
It’s a place that is not only extraor- Q: When people leave the hall, what much richer story. By giving the
dinary in its dimensions and all of do you want them to think? oceans a proper introduction and a
the implications of its size but it’s A: Well, that’s really difficult because real explanation as to what they are,
also the place that was the cradle of there are so many different things. But where they came from, how long
life on Earth. But instead of every- | want people to walk away with an un- they’ve been around, what's living
thing leaving the cradle, in fact, most derstanding of how remarkably su- there, and that it all functions as a
things have stayed in the ocean. perlative the oceans really are. Not complex whole, | think that’s going to
Most of the life on Earth is still living just in terms of sheer size and beauty, be an eye-opener for many visitors.
in the ocean. but also in their ecological complexity It’s also going to be tremendously
and the tremendous biological wealth beautiful.
Q: | think most people are surprised they contain. Perhaps above all, | want | think we steer a very nice path be-
by the amount and diversity of life them to understand how absolutely tween being absolutely state-of-the-
under the water. critical ocean health is to the health of art, but at the same time, keeping this
A: Its phenomenal. Estimates vary all life on Earth. The oceans are a se- kind of majesty and splendor of the old
and, believe it or not, we’re not even ries of interconnected ecosystems style of exhibit. | really hope people

THE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HisToRY BY THE AMERICAN Museum OF NATURAL HISTORY.
 ny

appreciate how much thought actually

went into that because we do know starry Nights Hits the Airwaves
how dear much of the old hall was.
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A: As you know, the blue whale is a

kind of “jewel in the crown’ for this in-
stitution. An incredible animal, the
largest that ever lived. Ours is a fe-
male (they are slightly larger than
males). When she was installed in
1969, we knew so little about blue
whales that we actually got some of
the anatomical details wrong. She
WGBO’s Gary Walker introduces Antonio Hart and The Antonio Hart
had been modeled from a specimen Quintet during the February 7 live broadcast of Starry Nights.
about to be butchered and decompo-
sition had already begun to distort fter three years of crowd- Jimmy Heath, The Jazz Passengers,
her frame. We've now corrected that, A pleasing performances, Starry Jerry Gonzalez and the Fort Apache
and we’ve metaphorically released Nights, the American Museum Band, and Ray Barretto and New World
her back into her habitat—the open of Natural History’s jazz performance Spirit. The first WBGO broadcast aired
ocean. Now, when you come into the series, burst onto the airwaves this in February 2003 with the Grammy-
hall and see this beautiful animal winter. The Museum and WBGO Jazz nominated alto saxophonist Antonio
you'll not only learn about blue 88.3 FM have teamed up to broadcast Hart and The Antonio Hart Quintet.
whales, and whales in general but select Starry Nights performances live Nearly 1,000 jazz enthusiasts attend
also about work being done in whale from the spectacular Rose Center for Starry Nights each month, and have
conservation throughout the globe. Earth and Space where two sets—at been treated to a wide spectrum of
And you’re going to learn about the 5:30 and 7:00 p.m.—take place on the today’s best jazz, ranging from Afro-
habitat that the whale lives in. In first Friday of each month. Tune in at Cuban fusion to Latin and blues
short, we have really tried to insert all 5:30 p.m. on Friday, April 4, for this rhythms. A selection of authentic tapas,
of the organisms that live in the month’s broadcast. sparkling water, sangria, wine, and beer
ocean into their ecological context. WBGO, the only full-time jazz sta- combined with the sounds of hot jazz
So that now the blue whale in a tion in the New York metropolitan and the cool blue, “otherworldly” glow of
sense becomes the ambassador to area, will carry a total of six live broad- one of New York’s boldest architectural
the open ocean—the largest habitat casts this year of Starry Nights. Feb- treasures, makes Starry Nights one of
on our planet. ruary 7 inaugurated the collaboration, the city’s most popular attractions.
and future broadcasts will take place WBGO 88.3 FM serves the New
The magnificent restoration and rejuvenation of
on April 4, June 6, August 1, October York/New Jersey metropolitan area
the Museum's beloved Milstein Family Hall of
Ocean Life is made possible by the generosity
3, and December 5, from 5:30 to 6:30 with straight-ahead jazz, blues, and
of Paul and Irma Milstein. The Museum grate- p.m. Gary Walker, WBGO’s Morning award-winning news and public affairs
fully acknowledges the critical role of the City of Jazz host for 13 years and winner of programming. Non-commercial WBGO
New York, the New York City Council, the De- the 1996 Gavin Report Jazz Radio is supported by over 14,000 members
partment of Cultural Affairs, and the Borough Personality of the Year award, will host and has 400,000 weekly listeners.
President of Manhattan in the realization of this
the hour-long broadcasts. WBGO also streams its broadcast
project. The Museum deeply appreciates major
support from Edwin Thorne and from Swiss Re. Starry Nights was launched soon signal to audiences worldwide at
Significant support has also been provided by after the Museum opened its acclaimed www.wbgo.org. It was named Jazz
The Marc Haas Foundation, Ruth Unterberg, Frederick Phineas & Sandra Priest Station of the Year for 2001 by the
MetLife Foundation, and Mikimoto. Additional Rose Center for Earth and Space in Gavin Report and also is the recipient
generous funding was provided by Jennifer February 2000. The series kicked off of the Blues Foundation’s Keeping the
Smith Huntley, Patricia S. Joseph, William H.
with Ray Vega’s Latin Jazz Sextet. Blues Alive Award for Achievement in
Kearns Foundation, Denise R. Sobel and Nor-
man K. Keller, Mrs. Frits Markus, Jane and Since then, over 35 celebrated jazz Non-Commercial Radio.
James Moore, David Netto, Mrs. John Ungar, groups have appeared, including Media sponsorship for Starry Nights is pro-
and the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, Inc. Bobby Sanabria and Quinteto Ache, vided by CenterCare Health Plan.
 MUSEUM EVENTS
i

EXHIBITIONS The First Europeans: Treasures FILMS

Vietnam: from the Hills of Atapuerca A Dream in Hanoi
Journeys of Body, Mind & Spirit Through April 13 (In Vietnamese and English with
Through January 4, 2004 Gallery 3, third floor English subtitles)
Gallery 77, first floor The mysteries of ancient humans in Tuesday, 4/1, 7:00 p.m.
This comprehensive exhibition pre- western Europe are revealed through Two theater companies, one
sents Vietnamese culture in the early exquisitely preserved hominid and American and one Vietnamese, work
21st century. The visitor is invited to animal fossils found in the hills of together to stage the first perform-
“walk in Vietnamese shoes” and Atapuerca in northern Spain. ance in Vietnam of A Midsummer
explore daily life among Vietnam's Co-organized by the American Museum of Night's Dream.
more than 50 ethnic groups. Natural History and Junta de Castilla y Leon.
=
The Season of Guavas
Einstein (In Vietnamese with English subtitles)
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Through August 10, 2003 Thursday, 4/10, 7:00 p.m.
Gallery 4, fourth floor Since falling from a guava tree as a
G
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This exhibition profiles this extraordi- youth, Hoa, now in his fifties, has
nary scientific genius, whose been trapped in his childhood memo-
achievements were so substantial ries. His obsession with returning to
that his name is virtually synonymous his childhood home leads to a series
with science in the public mind. of unforeseen events.
Organized by the American Museum of
Natural History, New York; The Hebrew Chac
Vietnamese clay toys depicting zodiac symbols
University of Jerusalem; and the Skirball (In Vietnamese and English with
Cultural Center, Los Angeles. Einstein is English subtitles)
Organized by the American Museum of
made possible through the generous support
Natural History, New York, and the Vietnam Saturday, 4/19, 2:00 p.m.
of Jack and Susan Rudin and the Skirball
Museum of Ethnology, Hanoi. This exhibition The director embarks on an emo-
Foundation, and of the Corporate Tour
and related programs are made possible by tional and physical journey to dis-
Sponsor, TIAA-CREF.
the philanthropic leadership of the Freeman
cover what caused her mother to
Foundation. Additional generous funding pro-
vided by the Ford Foundation for the collabora- The Butterfly Conservatory flee Vietnam with an American man.
tion between the American Museum of Natural Through May 26, 2003
History and the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology. More than 500 live butterflies fly freely PERFORMANCES
Also supported by the Asian Cultural Council. in an enclosed tropical habitat. Creativity in Moschen
Planning grant provided by the National
The Butterfly Conservatory is made possible Saturday, 4/5, 8:00 p.m.
Endowment for the Humanities.
through the generous support of Bernard and Juggler Michael Moschen brings
Anne Spitzer and Con Edison. his innovative object manipulation
Biodiversity of Vietnam to the Museum.
Through January 4, 2004
Akeley Gallery, second floor Experience the sights Spring Essence: Poetry and
This exhibition of photographs high- and sounds of a bustling Preservation
lights Vietnam’s remarkable diversity Sunday, 4/13, 2:00 p.m.
of plants and animals.
Vietnamese
Selected poems from the 18th-century
This exhibition is made possible by the Marketplace Spring Essence sung in the original
Arthur Ross Foundation and by the National Vietnamese, and read in English.
Science Foundation. at the Museum, throughout
the run of the Vietnam exhibition. When You’re Old Enough
Sample traditional foods Saturday, 4/26, 4:00 p.m.
and take home A dance-theater work in which a
a one-of-a-kind handicraft. young Vietnamese American woman
77TH STREET LOBBY, FIRST FLOOR searches for an identity.

THE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HISTORY BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HisTORY.
LECTURES Undersea Fossils LARGE-FORMAT FILMS 1

The Genomic Revolution: Unveiling Sunday, 4/27, 10:30 a.m.—1:30 p.m. In the Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak
the Unity of Life IMAX°® Theater
Tuesday, 4/1, 7:00 p.m. Origami Birds
A discussion about the scientific, so- Sunday, 4/27, 10:30 a.m.—1:30 p.m. Opens April 12
cial, and ethical implications of the Coral Reef Adventure
Human Genome Project. The Magic of Science
Sunday, 4/27, 11:30 a.m.—12:30 p.m. Ongoing
Science and Society: Academic Pulse: a STOMP Odyssey
Freedom vs. National Security HAYDEN PLANETARIUM
Wednesday, 4/2, 7:00-8:30 p.m. PROGRAMS Through April 11
A panel discussion on the topic of Strange Worlds: Radar Encounters Kilimanjaro: To the Roof of Africa
intellectual freedoms versus national with Earth-Approaching Asteroids
security concerns. Monday, 4/7, 7:30 p.m. INFORMATION
With Steven J. Ostro, Jet Propulsion Call 212-769-5100 or visit
Krakatoa: The Day the World Laboratory, NASA. www.amnh.org.
Exploded: August 27, 1883
Thursday, 4/10, 7:00 p.m. City of Stars TICKETS AND REGISTRATION
Simon Winchester discusses his Sunday, 4/13, 12:00—3:00 p.m. Call 212-769-5200, Monday-Friday,
latest book. References to the cosmos in New 8:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m., and Saturday,
York City, with Neil deGrasse Tyson. 10:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m., or visit
World Monument Preservation in www.amnh.org. A service charge may
Hue, Vietnam apply.
Wednesday, 4/23, 7:00 p.m. Einstein in Berlin
With Minja Yang, Deputy Director of Monday, 4/14, All programs are subject to change.
the World Heritage Centre, UNESCO. 7:30 p.m.
Tom Levenson AMNH eNotes delivers the latest in-
Operation Babylift: The Adoptee discusses his book formation on Museum programs and
Experience on Einstein’s years events to you via email. Visit
Saturday, 4/26, 2:00 p.m. in Berlin. www.amnh.org to sign up today!
Roundtable discussion with
Vietnamese who were adopted by
American families in 1975. 2003 Isaac Asimov Memorial Become a Member
Panel Debate of the American Museum
Land Mines: The Legacy of War The Big Bang _of Natural History
Wednesday, 4/30, 7:00 p.m. Tuesday, 4/22, 7:30 p.m.
Activists and advocates discuss inter- The world’s leading cosmologists As a Member you'll enjoy:
national education and community debate how the universe was born. e Unlimited free general
assistance initiatives. admission to the Museum
Celestial Highlights and special exhibitions, and
GUIDED WALKS Tuesday, 4/29, 6:30-7:30 p.m. discounts on the Space Show
Spring Bird Walks in Central Park A view of May’s night sky. and IMAX° films
Eight-week sessions begin 4/1, 2 & 3 ¢ Discounts in the Museum
SPACE SHOWS Shop, restaurants, and on
KIDS AND FAMILY The Search for Life: Are We Alone? program tickets
Vietnamese Woodblock Prints Narrated by Harrison Ford ¢ Free subscription to Natural
Sunday, 4/6, 11:00 a.m. or 3:00 p.m. History magazine and to
Passport to the Universe Rotunda, our newsletter
Printmaking a Hand-Book Necklace Narrated by Tom Hanks ¢ Invitations to Members-only
Sunday, 4/6, 1:00 p.m. special events, parties, and
Look Up! exhibition previews
Mummies Saturday and Sunday, 10:15 a.m.
For further information call 212-
Sunday, 4/13, 10:30 a.m.—1:30 p.m. (Recommended for children ages 6
769-5606 or visit www.amnh.org.
and under)
 ENDPAPER
anna
BSR

Both a God and a Rogue

By Ravi Corea

feel a sense of great loss at the sight ofa dead know him as Ganapathi and pray to him for wis-
elephant. Its colossal size, thick eyelashes, wrin- dom; Hindus invoke the blessings of Ganesha at the
kled skin, long prehensile trunk, and huge cal- beginning of all enterprises.
loused footpads evince an animal of magnificent
proportions. On a deeper level, what also come to oday the elephant in Asia is at a crossroads.
mind are the things I’ve learned since my childhood Fewer than 50,000 remain. (Within a far more
in Sri Lanka—the myths, folklore, and all the fan- restricted range, their African cousins number more
tasies of supernatural powers attributed to ele- than 600,000.) In Sri Lanka, as elsewhere, the ele-
phants. The stories form an integral part of the cul- phant’s mythical and worldly roles are in conflict.
ture in my country. Every year for the past decade, between 100 and 150
I still remember the first time I saw an elephant. elephants have been killed in their increasingly in-
It was a huge male, with sweeping white tusks. I tense competition with people for land. Still revered
was about three years old. | thought the elephant as a god, the elephant has now become a rogue that
never ended! He took over my entire visual world. steals crops, destroys property, and plunders villages
in the dark of night, killing farmers and settlers.
Two years ago in a village in the island’s North
Central province, a young woman named Sudu
Menika went to her temple to pray. There she made
a special offering to Ganapathi on behalf of her old-
est son. Later that night a call went out that an ele-
phant was on the rampage. Sudu Menika was run-
ning for shelter, her second-born son in her arms,
when the elephant appeared and rushed at her from
the side, striking her with its trunk. The infant
landed on a heap of straw, which probably saved his
life. Sadly, though, his mother died a short time later.
In one night she had both prayed to the elephant god
and met her death from its earthly counterpart.
The conflict between people and elephants is
The royal elephant Dal Badal chasing his attendant,
most often measured by such physical loss, but
Mewar, Rajasthan, India, c. 1750
there is also an emotional price to pay. The ele-
According to an ancient Sri Lankan belief, if you phant’s godly status is deeply ingrained in the local
creep under an elephant’s belly, you will be safe culture and religion, yet, to protect themselves, the
from graha dosha (bad planetary effects) and deva Sri Lankans persecute the animal. That internal
dosha (the evil eye), and you will drive away your conflict takes its toll: whenever a marauding ele-
fears. With a sense of wild adventure and intense phant is killed, the entire village gathers to pay its
excitement—and urged on by my nanny—I solemn respects. Most of the mourners are seeing a
crouched down and crawled under its seemingly wild elephant in the light of day for the first time,
infinite mass. I will never forget how it felt: as an animal that lived and breathed, but that they also
though I were crawling forever. Only when you are worship as a god. In our relentless push for devel-
underneath an elephant can you appreciate its size. opment we have displaced this living symbol of the
Elephas maximus has been domesticated in south divine and turned it into a rogue.
Asia for more than 4,000 years, and from time im-
memorial the elephant-headed Lord Ganesha has Ravi Corea studies at Columbia University’s Environmental
occupied a place in the Hindu pantheon. Both Research Center, and is the president of the Sri Lanka Wildlife
Hindus and Buddhists revere the god: Buddhists Conservation Society (www.SLWCS. org).

80 NATURAL HISTORY April 2003

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 MAY 2003 VOLUME 112 NUMBER4

Bue wAne UURCESS

(2) THE WATER PLANET

48 A YEN FOR
THE TRADITIONAL
Street performers sell ritual
and nostalgia in modern Japan
BY INGRID FRITSCH

COVER STORY

40 A PLENITUDE OF OCEAN LIFE (s)

A new census of the sea is revealing
microbial cells in undreamed-of numbers.
BY EDWARD F. DELONG

COVER
Alexis Rockman,
Biosphere:
Hydrographer’s
Canyon, 1994

52 TEMPLES FOR WATER [) STORYPAGEBEGINS

ON 40
The stepwells of western India were a magnificent
architectural solution to the-seasonality of the water supply. Visit our Web site at
TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY MORNA LIVINGSTON www.nhimag.com
DEPARTMENTS
(@) THE WATER PLANET
6 THE NATURAL MOMENT £[}
Bubble Feast
Photograph by Duncan Murrell
8 UP FRONT 2)
Thinking Blue
10 LETTERS

12 CONTRIBUTORS

14 SAMPLINGS [€)
Stéphan Reebs
18 UNIVERSE
Dust to Dust
Neil deGrasse Tyson
22 FINDINGS
Mycological Maestros
Jessie Gunnard, Andrew Wier,
and Lynn Margulis
38 BIOMECHANICS
Serpents in the Air
Adam Summers
58 THIS LAND
Bogs and Burning Woods
Robert H. Mohlenbrock

60 REVIEW
Hydro Dynamics
Sandra Postel

67 nature.net fe)
www-dot-H,O
Robert Anderson

68 BOOKSHELF
Laurence A. Marschall

70 OUT THERE
Sharper Focus
Charles Liu

72 THE SKY IN MAY

Joe Rao

76 AT THE MUSEUM

80 ENDPAPER
Of Mice and Masai
Richard Milner

PICTURE CREDITS: Page 12

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— —

THE NATURAL MOMENT Ciba haar

~< See preceding pages

Thinking Blue
ne of the most astonishing discoveries a visitor can make duringa first
love affair with New York City is “the whale,” a ninety-four-foot life-
o say that baleen whales feed size model of a blue whale that has swum overhead since 1969 in the vast
by passively filtering krill Hall of Ocean Life, at the American Museum of Natural History. For sixteen
is almost to insult the mammals’ months, though, the whale has been swimming in the dark—getting a thor-
truly sophisticated behavior. ough cleaning and anatomical updating as the entire exhibition gets a face-
Humpback whales (Megaptera lift. This month, on May 17, the whale resurfaces into public space.
novaeangliae) are known to hunt But even without such a motivating occasion as the return of the whale,
in remarkably cooperative and co- you don’t have to be a mariner to think about the Earth as the water planet.
hesive groups. Pictured here, in
All you have to do is gaze at one of those glorious images of our planet that
an Alaskan inlet, is a humpback
NASA has made from space. What biologists see, though, when they look at
mid-maneuver in a feeding mode
known as bubble-netting. The the blue of our planet is more like sap or film than simple liquid, a soupy
giant’s grooved throat, studded goo so thick with suspended, replicating cells that it constitutes a kind ofliv-
with sensory nodules and acorn ing plenum, a continuous fullness of life.
barnacles, bulges with Pacific her- Edward F DeLong brings the story of microscopic sea life up to date in his
ring—an elusive and fast-moving article, “A Plenitude of Ocean Life” (page 40). DeLong recounts how the so-
species compared to krill—caught called Archaea, whose identity as one of the three great branches of life went
by coordinated efforts. unrecognized until a few decades ago, are now known to comprise between
At a depth that depends on the 20 and 30 percent of all oceanic microbial cells. Previously unknown genera of
number of feeding whales and bacteria-size “picoplanktonic life”’ DeLong reports, reach densities greater
the quantity, location, and kind of
than 100,000 cells per milliliter of seawater. One such genus, Prochlorococcus,
prey, one whale begins the hunt
constitutes half of the total chlorophyll-based biomass in the open ocean.
by blowing massive air bubbles.
Another member of the pod There are several themes here worth exploring beyond the sea. One is
(often six or seven whales in all) the affinity of life with water of any kind. The quest for freshwater has dri-
sounds a deep, resonant call that ven great architecture (see “Temples for Water,’ by Morna Livingston, page
signals a move to drive the school 52), and it is lable to drive terrible future wars (see “Hydro Dynamics,” by
of fish upward, trapping them at Sandra Postel, page 60).
the surface in a roiling “net” of Life is also drawn to other forms of life. Somewhere in a rainforest, inside a
bubbles. As sonar studies have rotting log, lives a colony of termites. Inside the termites live protists and bac-
shown, each whale probably takes teria that digest wood cellulose. Yet the colony not only forages; it also farms.
a particular position in the herd- Within the log grow mushrooms, apparently cultivated by the termites for
ing operation of every hunt. food. Throughout the example run themes of mutual dependence, coopera-
For decades photographer Dun-
tion among species, habitat made from the tissues of other organisms.
can Murrell has observed the
humpback whales by paddling un- The great champion of this point of view is Lynn Margulis, who joins us
obtrusively alongside the pods in in this issue with her thrilling, infectious enthusiasm for the world of the very
his kayak. The whale in the pho- small (see “Mycological Maestros,” by Jessie Gunnard, Andrew Wier, and
tograph, Murrell says, “launched Margulis, page 22). Margulis has inspired her students for many years with
from the water,’ catching him her supreme confidence in their own powers of scientific observation. She
slightly off-guard—a minor jolt firmly believes that armies of biologists must still be trained to bring back to
for the photographer, who, that science the secrets of the living Earth. At Natural History, we are honored to
very same morning, had been share her niche, and to bring her words to you. —PETER BROWN
sprayed with blowhole oil, slapped
by a monstrous flipper, and mo-
Natural History (ISSN 0028-0712) is published monthly, except for combined issues in July/August and December/January, by Natural History Magazine, Inc., at the Amer-
mentarily beached on the body of ican Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Soreet, New York, NY 10024, E-mail: nhmag@ammh.org. Natural History Magazine, Inc., is solely responsible
for editorial content and publishing practices, Subscriptions: $30.00 a year; for Canada and all other countries: $40.00 a year. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and
a whale. —Erin Espelie at additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2003 by Natural History Magazine, Inc. All rights.reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without written consent

aie
of Natural History. Send subscription orders and undeliverable copies to the address below, For subscription information, call (800) 234-5252 or, from outside ULS., (515) 247-
a 7631, Postmaster; Send address changes to Natural History, P.O. Box 5000, Harlan, [A 51537-5000, Printed in the U.S.A

ATURAL HISTORY May 2003

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ORGANIZED BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, NEW YORK, AND THE VIETNAM MUSEUM OF ETHNOLOGY, HANOI. This Pein Pr ch PLP ISR ean ot
possible by the philanthropic leadership of the FREEMAN FOUNDATION. Additional generous funding provided by the Ford Foundation for the collaboration between the American :
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 LE Td Biss

Rights and Wrongs enlightening than to say @D raises two excellent and
In his “Universe” column that Islam has zealots today. Two intriguing properties appropriate questions. He
(“Naming Rights,” 2/03], of phi (@), the golden ratio, is right to find it counter-
Neil deGrasse Tyson ac- The Shadow Knows did not make it into Mario intuitive that new energy
knowledges that slavery in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s arti- Livio’s article “The Golden appears as space expands—
the United States affected cle on low-tech science Number” [3/03]. not to mention that it’s a
scientific endeavors. But he [““Stick-in-the-Mud Elementary algebra shows violation of just about
ignores the fact that many Science,’ 3/03] reminded that subtracting one from every physical rule in the
of the Islamic nations me of my career in educa- phi yields its reciprocal books. That is one reason
whose history he lauds also tional television nearly half (1/phi); and the fact that (and there are more!) con-
had questionable records on a century ago. Sputnik 1 phi + 1 is equal to the servative cosmologists have
human rights. He refers to had begun to orbit, and square of phi yields, by been slow to accept the ex-
Christian zealots but makes suddenly Americans no- simple addition, the further. istence of dark energy.
no mention of zealots of ticed that their schools were fact that the sum ofphi and Nevertheless, new results
any other kind—among not teaching much science. its reciprocal is equal to from the Wilkinson
them the Islamist zealots Auburn University decided two times phi. Microwave Anisotropy
who are responsible for the to televise a class in science It is small wonder that Probe (WMAP) satellite
decline in the once-great for the upper elementary many of the ancient Greeks seem to confirm almost
scientific communities of grades; I was a physical regarded geometry as a beyond a doubt that space
the Islamic world. chemist, but I could talk to form of magic. does teem with dark en-
Dawn Bailey kids, so they picked me. Maxwell Manes ergy. Cosmologists like to
Fayetteville, Arkansas Because one bake sale could Brooksville, Florida call the new energy “the
buy a couple of television ultimate free lunch.” If it’s
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON sets for a school, I soon had Curiouser and Curiouser any help, according to our
REPLIES: Dawn Bailey’s cri- thousands of students. In his book review “The conception ofphysics, the
tique is entirely within rea- Besides doing four half- Curious Energy of the universe as a whole does
son, but I didn’t have space hour broadcasts a week, I Void” [2/03], Donald not have to obey the same
to include each culture’s made a lot of school visits. Goldsmith states: “As the rules as a closed, localized
full negative history. In my Among the simple experi- universe expands, . . . more system does.
essay I made two assump- ments I carried in my purse space continuously comes As for the uniformity of
tions, both of which derive was the “sun tracker;’ which into being, and so the total the cosmic background
largely from the way his- included an empty thread amount of dark energy also radiation, there are two
tory has been presented in spool, a straight pin, and a increases proportionately.” salient facts. First, the back-
school textbooks in the pencil stub with a bit of In effect, energy 1s ground is amazingly uni-
West: (1) many (if not eraser remaining. To assem- continuously created—an form, arriving in the same
most) readers are unfamiliar: ble it, you put the pencil stub assertion that, for me, is amounts and with the same
with the Islamic world of into the hole of the spool quite counterintuitive. spectrum from all direc-
the eighth through and stuck the pin straight up Later he writes, “The tions. Second, astronomers
eleventh centuries, and (2) in the middle of the eraser. amount of radiation gener- have now detected ex-
every reader is familiar with All the class had to provide ated by the universe in the tremely small deviations
the technological domi- was a sheet of white paper earliest years of its expansion from uniformity—the so-
nance of Europe and the and a window into which varies in different directions called anisotropies of the
United States. the sun shone at noon. in space.” But that seems to cosmic background radia-
So to mention that If you set the spool on contradict a reference to tion [see “Sharper Focus,” by
Islam was advanced while the paper on the window- “the pervasiveness and uni- Charles Liu, page 70]. The
Europe was in squalor is sill, and made a dot on the formity of the radiation anisotropies, small as they
more enlightening to the paper every day at noon throughout the universe” are, carry large amounts of
reader than to say that Islam where the shadow of the made elsewhere in the same information about the uni-
was in squalor while Eu- pinhead fell on the paper, issue (“At the Museum”). verse as it existed when the
rope was advanced. And to you could plot a pretty Howard J. Naftzger radiation was first set loose,
say that the US. participa- good analemma in the Kensington, California a few hundred thousand
tion in the Industrial Revo- course of a year. years after the big bang.
lution was delayed, in part, Charlotte R. Ward DONALD GOLDSMITH By measuring the
because of slavery is more Auburn, Alabama REPLIES: Howard Naftzger anisotropies on various an~

|
1 0| NATURAL HISTORY May 2003
|
gular scales, cosmologists kept to breed, or intractable calves would likely join chondrial genes in African
can (amazingly) hope to de- and so escape or be eaten, the domestic herd. cattle seem to have re-
termine the curvature of the outcomes that are geneti- JamesJ. Moore mained B. taurus.
universe, which amounts to cally equivalent. Tractable University of California, Thus I agree that the
determining the total quan- calves born to wild mothers San Diego study of mitochondrial
tity of all kinds of matter would only be captured and La Jolla, California variation alone cannot
and energy. My book The tamed with some effort; be- eliminate the possibility
Runaway Universe deals to cause the early inhabitants DANIEL BRADLEY REPLIES: that ephemeral encounters
some degree with these of Britain already had do- James Moore highlights an introduced nuclear DNA
not-so-simple subjects. mestic cattle, few farmers important limitation that from British aurochs into
would have bothered. applies to all genetic evi- the domestic gene pool.
Cattle Call In short, a one-way dence based on one marker Studies of other marker
Daniel G. Bradley con- “filter” would be applied system: different genes can systems, particularly the Y
cludes that British aurochs to nuclear genes, which represent different strands chromosome, will clarify
did not interbreed with Mr. Bradley’s work on mi- within the history of a that question. In fact,
early domestic cattle tochondrial DNA could population and thus tell however, our preliminary
(“Genetic Hoofprints,” not detect. Wild aurochs different histories. In fact, data from modern British
2/03]. But that assertion bulls breeding with do- cattle studies present one of cattle with Y markers have
overlooks that fact that (es- mestic cows would con- the best examples of un- not revealed any traces of
pecially early on) domesti- tribute nuclear genes, but coupling of maternal and divergent chromosomes
cation is a social as well as a no mitochondrial genes, other ancestral strands. The that might indicate sub-
biological process. Calves to early cattle; as long as massive influx of Bos indicus stantial wild male input.
born to tame mothers living such domestic cows gave genes into African cattle
with humans would either birth and raised their seems to have left no ma- Natural History ’s e-mail
prove tractable and so be calves near humans, their ternal legacy: the mito- address is nhmag@amnh.org.

phe!
‘cud as
t charge.)
 CONTRIBUTORS

gee §=DDUNCAN MuRRELL (“The Natural Moment,” page 6)

is a naturalist who has been kayaking with Alaskan
humpback whales for more than twenty-five years. He
will be exploring the marine life around the islands of
PETER BROWN Editor-in-Chief
Sri Lanka and Madagascar in the coming year. His pho-
tograph of a bubble-feeding humpback whale was made Mary Beth Aberlin Elizabeth Meryman
Managing Editor Art Director
in Tenakee Inlet of Chichagof Island, Alaska.
Board of Editors
T. J. Kelleher, Avis Lang, Vittorio Maestro
As a five-year-old tyke wading in the northern California
Michel DeMatteis Associate Managing Editor
surf, EDWARD FE. DELonG (“A Plenitude of Ocean Life,”
Lynette Johnson Associate Managing Editor
page 40) was knocked down by a large wave and dragged
Thomas Rosinski Associate Art Director
a little way out to sea. He has had a serious interest in—
Erin M. Espelie Special Projects Editor
and respect for—the ocean ever since. A senior scientist at
the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Cali- Richard Milner Contributing Editor

fornia, DeLong studies the smallest marine microorgan- Graciela Flores Intern

isms known, a category called picoplankton. His current research topics include
methane cycling in the deep ocean and the application of genomics to the study
of microbial communities. DeLong enjoys swimming, hiking, scuba diving, and Mark A. FURLONG Publisher
cross-country skiing, pastimes he puts to good use in his work. Cross-country Gale Page Consumer Marketing Director
skiing, for instance, enabled him to crisscross Antarctic ice packs when he set Maria Volpe Promotion Director
out to collect seawater samples by drilling holes through ice two meters thick. Edgar L. Harrison National Advertising Manager
Sonia W. Paratore Senior Account Manager
After receiving her license to teach piano in Germany, INGRID Donna M. Lemmon Production Manager
FritscuH (“A Yen for the Traditional,’ page 48) went on to Michael Shectman Fulfillment Manager
earn a doctorate in ethnomusicology (with a focus on the Tova Heiney Business Administrator

Japanese bamboo flute) at Cologne University. She has subse- Advertising Sales Representatives
quently done extensive fieldwork on the social and religious New York—Metrocorp Marketing, 212-972-1157,
organization of guilds of blind musicians and shamans in Japan. Duke International Media, 212-598-4820.
Detroit—John Kennedy & Assoc., 313-886-4399 -
Currently BeecuG is a professor at the Institute of Japanology in Minneapolis—Rickert Media, Inc., 612-920-0080
Cologne, Geriuay Her article on chindonya is just one aspect of her fascina- West Coast—Auerbach Media, 818-716-9613,
Parris & Co., 415-641-5767
tion with the itinerant performers and street artists who have characterized Toronto—American Publishers
Japanese culture for many centuries. Representatives Ltd., 416-363-1388
Atlanta and Miami—Rickles and Co., 770-664-4567
National Direct Response—Smyth Media Group,
Architectural photographer and historian MORNA LIv- 646-638-4985
INGSTON (“Temples for Water,’ page 52) has lugged two
cameras and assorted photographic accessories from north-
ern Tunisia to southern Tuscany to the arid lands of western Topp HappPER Vice President, Science Education

India. On her journeys she has visited myriad works of ar-

chitecture, including ancient Roman baths, Renaissance
NATURAL HisToRY MAGAZINE, INC. —
gardens, and the “water buildings” commissioned by Hindu Cuartes E. Harris President, Chief Executive Officer
queens and Muslim sultans that are the subjects of her arti- CHARLES LALANNE Chief Financial Officer
cle and photographs in this issue. Livingston is the author of Steps to Water: Juby BULLER General Manager
The Ancient Stepwells of India (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002). When CHARLES RODIN Publishing Advisor
not traveling to villages searching for water buildings to study and photo- For subscription information, call (800) 234-5252
(within U.S.) or (515) 247-7631 (from outside U.S.).
graph, Livingston teaches in the School of Architecture and Design at For advertising information, call (212) 769-5555.
Philadelphia University.

PICTURE CREDITS Cover and p. 43: courtesy the artist and Gorney Bravin + Lee, NY; p. 14 (top): Flip Nicklin/Minden Pictures; (bottom): Mark Edwards/Peter Arnold Inc.; p.16
(top): © Warren Morgan/CORBIS; (bottom): ©Xiao, S. and A.H. Knoll, 1998; p. 19: ONeil Folberg, from Celestial Nights (Aperture, 2001); pp. 22, 24, 26, and 74: courtesy the au-
thors; pp. 40-41: ©2002 Norbert Wu/www.norbertwu.com; pp. 42 and 45: illustrations by PatriciaJ.Wynne; p. 40 (top), 42 (bottom), 43 (middle and right), 45 (bottom) and 46 (bot-
tom): ©2003 Bill Curtsinger; p. 42(middle), p. 45 (middle), 46 (top left): ©Peter Parks/imagequest3d.com; p. 45 (top right): courtesy the author; p. 46 (right): © Kurt Buck; p. 44:
ORalph White/CORBIS; pp. 48, 49, 50(bottom), and 51 (top): ©Hans Jorg Sautter; p. 49 (top), 50 (top) and 51 (bottom): courtesy the author; p. 52-57: courtesy the author; p. 58 and
59 (top left): ©1995 Paul Rezendes; p. 59 (top right): ©Dr. Alan K. Mallams; p.59: map by Joe LeMonnier; pp. 61 and 67: ©2003 David Goldes, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, NYC;
p. 68: © Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY; p. 69: ©Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 70: NASA/WMAP Science Team; p. 72: Fanny Brennan, Galaxy,
1997, Estate of Fanny Brennan, courtesy Salander O’Reilly Galleries, NY; p. 80: OCynthia Hart designer/CORBIS.

12 | NATURAL HISTORY May 2003

 Ges"
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EVOLUTION ;
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 SAMPLINGS /@ By Stéphan Reebs
tend across thousands of miles and in-
volve thousands of whales.
Sperm whales live in groups of be-
tween ten and twenty animals. They com-
municate through what are called
codas—brief series of clicks—distin-
guished not only by the number of clicks
but also by the intervals between the
clicks. Some whale groups, for instance,
always make five regularly spaced clicks,
whereas others always make a longer
pause before emitting the final click in
the coda:
While moving through the seas, groups
of sperm whales gather for days at a time
Sperm whales congregating at the surface of the sea with their counterparts; although groups
from different vocal clans may occupy the
YOU SAY TOMATO, | SAY TOMAHTO both biologists at Dalhousie University in same general area, each group mingles
Not all members of the same species Nova Scotia, Canada, have completed an only with others that click the same
whistle the same tune. Groups of white- extensive analysis of the cocktail chatter dialect. And those dialects are probably
crowned sparrows and killer whales, for of thousands of sperm whales, recorded learned—the result of a cultural process
instance, may utter different songs or throughout the Pacific and the Caribbean that, in this case, is literally oceanic in
calls on similar occasions. Populations of between 1985 and 2000. They identified scale. (“Vocal clans in sperm whales
cetaceans that share a vocalization “di- at least six distinct dialects among the [Physeter macrocephalus],” Proceedings
alect” are known as vocal clans. whales—five dialects in the Pacific and of the Royal Society of London B 270:
Now Luke Rendell and Hal Whitehead, one in the Caribbean—some of which ex- 225-31, February 7, 2003)

FOLD THREE TIMES AND DRINK One ence Foundation, and her colleagues
of the world’s most notorious water- suggested that the cloth simply be
borne diseases is cholera, caused by the folded into four to eight thicknesses.
bacterium Vibrio cholerae. For decades (The cloth was also to be washed and
bacteriologists have known that the or- sun-dried after each filtration.) That sin-
ganism lives in close association with gle act, they contended, would drasti-
zooplankton, particularly the minute cally reduce the incidence of cholera,
crustaceans known as copepods. A because the multiple layers of cloth
single copepod, in fact, can harbor as would provide a mesh fine enough to re-
many as 10,000 V. cholerae—just about move all the zooplankton.
enough to trigger the disease. Not sur- Enlisting the participation of 133,000
prisingly, cholera outbreaks often follow people from sixty-five Bangladeshi vil-
zooplankton blooms. lages, Colwell and her team recently
In rural Bangladesh, where cholera is completed a three-year study of the
endemic, villagers drink untreated sur- method. They found not only an impres-
face water. Systematic chemical treat- sive rate of compliance—fewer than 1
ment is often too expensive, many wells percent of the households didn't follow
are heavily contaminated with arsenic, instructions—but also a 48 percent re-
and boiling the water is often difficult duction in the incidence of the disease,
and costly. Women (traditionally the to 0.65 cases a year per thousand
water carriers for their households) do people. (“Reduction of cholera in
filter drinking water through a piece of Bangladeshi villages by simple filtra-
old cotton sari cloth, but only to remove tion,” Proceedings of the National
coarse debris. So the cell biologist Rita Academy of Sciences 100:1051-55,
R. Colwell, director of the National Sci- Collecting water in rural Bangladesh February 4, 2003)

14 NATURAL HISTORY May 2003

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 SAMPLINGS
TAS
PRAT

NOT GUILTY About 11,500 years any of the other thirty-three mam-
ago in North America, people malian genera that became ex-
started using fluted stone points tinct at about the same time. And
for hunting. Archaeologists have although tools made from the
called those people "Clovis," after bones of large mammals were
the town in New Mexico where the found at some sites, their pres-
characteristic stone points were ence doesn’t prove the animals
first discovered. That same epoch, were hunted; the tools could have
11,500 years ago, appears to coin- been fashioned from the skeletons
cide with the disappearance of nu- of scavenged animals.
merous large mammals from Grayson and Meltzer also point
North America, including the giant out that the North American ex-
beaver, the mastodon, and various tinctions coincide with similar ex-
An array of Clovis points
ground sloths. Some people have tinctions in Europe and Asia, yet
argued that Clovis hunters were respon- large mammals was supposedly promi- Clovis hunters didn’t live there. The ar-
sible for the extinctions, but the claim nent. Only fourteen of the sites con- chaeologists thus argue that the Clovis
has now been disputed by two archaeol- tained secure evidence of killing or hunter should be exonerated as the
ogists, Donald K. Grayson of the Univer- butchering, such as impact-fractured cause of the North American extinctions.
sity of Washington in Seattle and David projectile points within the animal re- Perhaps, they suggest, a widespread en-
J. Meltzer of Southern Methodist Univer- mains, cut marks on bones, or skeletal vironmental event such as climate change
sity in Dallas. dismemberment—and only mammoths was responsible. (“Clovis hunting and
The two examined published evi- or mastodons were present at those large mammal extinction: A critical review
dence for seventy-six sites where the as- sites. Not one site yielded clear evidence of the evidence,” Journal of World Pre-
sociation between Clovis people and that Clovis people had actively hunted history 16:313-59, December 2002)

EXPERIMENT OF THE MONTH Amid all the fan- serve as a ready source of calcium or phosphorus for the com-
fare that has accompanied recent discoveries of pounds that would constitute the fossil. But the Bristol experiment
fossilized Precambrian invertebrate eggs found suggests that orphaned eggs, including those produced by small,
in China and elsewhere, a few grumbles of dis- soft organisms, could still have become naturally fossilized. (“Exper-
belief have been heard. After all, invertebrate | imental mineralization of invertebrate eggs and the preservation of
eggs are made of soft tissue, so shouldn't they de- Neoproterozoic embryos,” Geology 31:39-42, January 2003)
Artificially compose long before min-
mineralized egg eralization begins?
The answer is: not nec- TRAVELING LIGHT Why do some plant fungal species and 24 percent fewer viral
essarily. Derek Martin, Derek E.G. Briggs, immigrants spread so widely and destruc- species infected the plants in the U.S.
and R. John Parkes, all of the University of tively in their adopted lands, yet remain than in Europe. And for individual spe-
Bristol in England, dropped lobster eggs relatively innocuous back home? Presum- cies, the lighter the burden of pathogens,
into vials containing seawater and natural ably the new host country lacks some of the more states officially listed the plant
sediments, then sealed the vials and incu- the disease-causing fungi and viruses that as a "noxious weed." The few pathogens
bated them at 59 degrees F. After three afflict the plant in its native land. Hence, still afflicting the expatriate plants were
weeks the intact eggs were coated with a as long as the plant can resist the new an even mix of introduced and indige-
thin layer of calcium carbonate, which stabi- pathogens it encounters in its adoptive nous ones. Thus, both their escape from
lized their shape. Mineralization had begun. home, it will become... a weed. old pathogens and their resistance to
The process depends on two key factors: Charles E. Mitchell and Alison G. new ones contributed to the invaders’
the lack of oxygen (a gas that speeds de- Power, both biologists at Cornell Univer- success. ("Release of invasive plants from
composition) and the presence of anaerobic sity, delved deep into the databases of fungal and viral pathogens,” Nature
bacteria (whose metabolic activity helps the U.S. Department of Agriculture and 421:625-27, February 6, 2003)
make minerals available). Paleontologists identified 473 plant species introduced
Stéphan Reebs is a professor of biology at the
had previously thought that invertebrate (whether by accident or on purpose) into University of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada,
eggs couldn't be fossilized unless the the United States from Europe. They and the author of Fish Behavior in the Aquarium
exoskeleton of a relatively large animal (the found that, on average, 84 percent fewer and in the Wild (Cornell University Press).
mother, for example) lay close enough to

May 2003
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 UNIVERSE
FSR SOE

Dust to Dust
In the darkest regions of the Milky Way are vast interstellar clouds
harboring the remains of dead stars and the nurseries for new ones.
By Neil deGrasse Tyson

casual look at the Milky Way tronomers to address the problem was you have a live-in mammal. Last I
on a dark, clear night reveals an American, George Cary Com- checked, nobody’s epidermis has got-
a cloudy band of light-and- stock, who wondered why faraway ten into the interstellar dust. But the
dark splotches extending from hori- stars are much dimmer than their dis- cosmic clouds do include a remark-
zon to horizon. With simple binocu- tance alone would indicate. Following able ensemble of complex molecules
lars or a backyard telescope, the dark up on Comstock’s observations, the that emit microwaves, and dust that
and boring areas of the Milky Way Dutch astronomer Jacobus Cornelius emits primarily in the infrared part of
look like, well, dark and boring areas. Kapteyn named the culprit in 1909, the spectrum. Not until the last third
But the bright areas resolve into when he presented evidence that of the twentieth century, however,
countless stars and nebulae. clouds of “meteoric dust” in the space did the astrophysicist’s tool kit enable
In a small book titled Sidereus Nun- between the stars not only absorb the us to observe the powerful emissions
cius (The Starry Messenger), pub- overall light of stars, but do so un- and chemical richness of the stuff be-
lished in Venice in 1610, Galileo gives evenly across the rainbow of colors in a tween the stars.
an account of the heavens as seen star’s spectrum. Specifically, the clouds Interstellar clouds are intriguing for
through a telescope, including the attenuate blue light more than red, yet another reason. Deep within
first-ever scientific explanation of the making the Milky Way’s faraway stars them, through the effects of their in-
Milky Way’s patches of light. Refer- ternal gravity, the dust and gas be-
ring to his yet-to-be-named instru- come thick enough to condense into
ment as a “spyglass,” he is so excited If no one knew that clumps of matter. If conditions are just
he can barely contain himself:
stars exist, there would right, those clumps can form larger
and larger clumps, and eventually full-
The Milky Way itself, . . . with the aid of be plenty of reasons fledged stars. In other words, those
the spyglass, may be observed so well that giant clouds are stellar nurseries.
all the disputes that for so many genera- to think they should
tions have vexed philosophers are de-
stroyed by visible certainty, and we are never form. Ge clouds in the Milky Way are
liberated from wordy arguments. For the not always capable of starbirth.
Galaxy is nothing else than a congeries of More often than not, even after a
innumerable stars distributed in clusters. look dimmer and, on average, redder cloud forms, it is confused about what
To whatever region of it you direct your than the ones nearby. to do next. Actually, we astrophysicists
spyglass, an immense number of stars im- Ordinary hydrogen and helium, are the confused ones. We know the
mediately offer themselves to view. the principal constituents of cosmic cloud is trying to collapse under its
gas clouds, don’t redden light. But own weight and make one or more
Surely to Galileo and his contem- large molecules do—particularly the stars. But the cloud’s rotation, as well
poraries, the “innumerable stars” were ones that include atoms of carbon as turbulent motion within it, acts
where the action was. Why would or silicon. And when the aggrega- against collapse. So, too, does ordinary
anyone care about the dark areas, tions of such atoms and molecules get gas pressure. Galactic magnetic fields
where stars were presumably absent? big enough, we call them dust. also fight collapse: they penetrate the
Three centuries would pass before Most people are familiar with dust cloud and, latching onto any charged
anybody figured out that the dark of the household variety, though few particles roaming within, restrict how
patches are thick, gigantic clouds of know that, in a closed home, it is the cloud can respond to its own grav-
gas and dust, which obscure more dis- made up mostly of dead, sloughed-off ity. What’s scary is that if no one knew
tant star fields. Among the first as- human skin cells—plus pet dander, if in advance that stars exist, frontline re-

ATURAIL 1iSTORY May 2003

search could offer plenty of convinc- chemistry into their supercomputer The temperature within each collaps-
ing reasons stars should never form. models before they can even think ing pocket—soon to become the
Like the Milky Way’s several hun- about tracking the turbulent motions core of a newborn star—rises rapidly,
dred billion stars, gas clouds orbit the of large, massive clouds. A further breaking nearby dust grains into then
center of the galaxy. On the galactic challenge is the humbling fact that constituent atoms. Eventually, if the
scale, stars are minute specks, a few the original cloud 1s billions of times collapsing gas heats up to 10 millon
light-seconds across, in a vast ocean of wider and a hundred sextillion (100 x degrees, the positively charged pro-
space. In contrast, some gas clouds are 10°') times less dense than the star the tons (which are just naked hydrogen
huge, spanning hundreds of light- models are trying to simulate. And atoms that have been stripped of their
years. Such clouds can be as massive as the laws of physics that matter at one electrons) move so fast that their nat-
several million suns. And as they lum- size or on one timescale are not nec- ural repulsion no longer keeps them
ber through the galaxy, they
often collide with each other,
entangling their innards. Some-
times, depending on their
relative speeds and their angles
of impact, the clouds stick to-
gether like hot marshmallows;
other times, adding injury to
insult, they rip each other apart.
If a gas cloud’s temperature
drops below about a thousand
degrees Kelvin, conditions be-
come favorable for forming
complex molecules and dust.
Below a hundred, conditions
become ideal. Those chemical
transitions have consequences
for everybody. Dust grains,
which are made up of billions
of atoms, absorb visible light
—strongly attenuating the
brightness ofstars behind them.
The dust then re-emits the
energy as infrared radiation,
which freely escapes the cloud.
Whatever the forces that
make a cloud colder and denser,
they may eventually lead to the
cloud’s gravitational collapse.
And that, in turn, leads to the
birth of stars. Nature thus poses
a paradoxical precondition. To
ctealenamstare-—-thiatvistosiieat ras glee

matter hot enough for it to un- Neil Folberg, Sagittarius, 2000

dergo thermonuclear fusion—
the temperature inside the star’s parent essarily the right things to worry apart. In fact, those protons get close
cloud must first be as cold as possible. about on another. enough to be pulled together by a
Nevertheless, astrophysicists can short-range, attractive, monstrously
A t this point in the life ofa cloud, safely assert that in the deepest, dark- strong nuclear force (whose technical
astrophysicists can only gesticu- est, densest regions of an interstellar name is “strong nuclear force”).
late to show what happens next. cloud, with temperatures around 10 When protons bond with each
Theorists and computer modelers degrees above absolute zero, pockets other under the influence of that force,
face the challenge of incorporating of gas finally collapse, converting the process is known as thermonuclear
all the known laws of physics and their gravitational energy into heat. fusion. The by-product of fusion is the

May 2003 NATURAL HI STORY 1 97

 element helium, whose mass is less to the star’s prodigious luminosity. death. In the end, their outermost
than the sum of its parts. The missing About a hundred times the mass of the layers become so tenuously con-
mass becomes boatloads of energy, as Sun seems to be the limit; if any more nected to the rest of the star that they
described by Einstein’s famous equa- mass from the parent cloud tries to drift into space, exposing the spent
tion E=mc?, where E is energy, m 1s join the action, it gets pushed away by nuclear fuels that powered their 10-
mass, and c is the speed of light. As the starlight alone. billion-year lives. The gas that returns
energy moves outward, the gas be- So potent is the pressure of intense to space ultimately gets swept up by
comes self-luminous. And though this starlight that the luminosity of just a passing clouds, only to participate in
crucible remains enclosed, womblike, few high-mass stars can heat up and later rounds of star formation.
within the greater cloud, its glow disperse nearly all the dust and gas In spite of the rarity of the highest-
nonetheless announces to the rest of from the original cloud. As the cloud mass stars, they hold nearly all the
the Milky Way that a star is born. dissipates, dozens, if not hundreds, of evolutionary cards. They boast the
brand-new stars—siblings of one an- highest luminosity—a million times
Ae ees know that stars other, really—are laid bare for the rest that of the Sun—and, as a conse-
come in a wide range of masses: of the galaxy to see. quence, the shortest lives: only a
from a mere tenth to nearly a hun- The Great Nebula in Orion—situ- few million years. The cores are hot
dred times that of our Sun. Each giant ated below Orion’s belt and midway enough to cook hydrogen into
gas cloud holds a multitude of cold down his sword—is just such a nurs- dozens of heavier elements, starting
pockets, all of which form at about ery. Within the nebula, thousands of with helium and proceeding to car-
the same time and each of bon, nitrogen, oxygen, and
which gives birth toa star. so forth, until they get to
For every high-mass star The highest-mass stars are the brightest iron—of all the elements
that’s born, a thousand the one whose nucleus has
low-mass stars emerge.
and shortest-lived, but they cooked the lowest energy per parti-
But only about 1 percent the elements that gave rise to us. cle. Any fusion beyond iron
of all the gas in the origi- will absorb rather than re-
nal cloud participates in lease energy.
starbirth, and that presents a classic stars are being born, spread among With no more nuclear fuel, such
challenge: How and why does the tail several rich clusters. Four of the most stars die spectacular deaths in super-
(the stars) wag the dog (the cloud)? massive stars trace the Orion Trapez- nova explosions, making still more
The mass limit on the low end is ium, and they’re busy blowing a giant elements in their fires and briefly out-
easy to determine. Below about a hole in the middle of the cloud from shining their entire home galaxy. The
tenth of the Sun’s mass, the pocket of which they formed. New stars are explosive energy spreads heavy ele-
collapsing gas does not have enough clearly visible in detailed images of ments across the galaxy, blowing holes
gravitational energy to bring its core the region made by the Hubble Space in its distribution of gas and enriching
temperature up to the requisite 10 Telescope, showing many infants nearby clouds with the raw materials
million degrees. A star is not born. swaddled in nascent, protoplanetary to make dust of their own. The blast
What forms instead is a “brown disks comprised of dust and other waves of the supernovas move super-
dwarf” [see “When a Star Is Not molecules drawn from the original sonically through the clouds, com-
Born,” March 1996]. With no energy cloud. And within each of those disks pressing the gas and dust, and possibly
source of its own, a brown dwarf just a solar system forms. creating pockets of extremely high
gets progressively dimmer with time, density—the preconditions for the
living off what little heat it was able to Fe a while, the cluster of newborn formation of stars.
generate from its original collapse. stars stays intact. But eventually, A supernova’s greatest gift to the
With such a feeble luminosity, a owing to the steady gravitational tugs cosmos is to seed clouds with the
brown dwarf is supremely difficult to of enormous passing clouds, the en- heavy elements that form planets and
detect, requiring methods similar to semble falls apart, its members scat- protists and people, so that once again,
the ones used to discover planets out- tering into the general pool of stars in further endowed by the chemical en-
side the solar system. In fact, only in the galaxy. The low-mass stars live richment from an earlier generation of
recent years have enough brown practically forever—so dim are they, high-mass stars, another star is born.
dwarfs been discovered in sky surveys and so meager is their consumption
to merit sorting them into categories. of fuel. The intermediate-mass stars, Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the
The exact mass limit at the high such as our Sun, sooner or later turn Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden
end isn’t well understood, but what into red giants, swelling a hundred- Planetarium in New York City and a visiting
astrophysicists do know we can credit fold in size as they march toward research scientist at Princeton University.

20 NATURAL HISTORY May 2003

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NATURALIST AT LARGE

Mycological Maestros
In the Ecuadorean rainforest, a “missing link” in the evolution of termite agriculture?

By Jessie Gunnard, Andrew Wier, and Lynn Margulis

rom the vantage of our lab- of insects that live in symbiotic collab- recently evolved branch of termites.
oratory at the University of oration with bacteria and swimming The latter group of species is part of
Massachusetts in Amherst, the protists: the insects ingest wood and a broader classification commonly
eye can wander over the majestic the protists living in their bloated ab- known as the “higher termites,’
landscape of the Connecticut River domens digest the wood particles, which are termites that do not depend
Valley. It is a landscape profoundly mainly the cellulose; some bacteria on hindgut protists to digest their
shaped by cultivation: field bound- change the sugars from cellulose to food. Some higher termites thrive, in-
aries are marked, the soil is tilled and smaller compounds that pass through stead, by cultivating monocultures of
fertilized, and specially selected crops the intestinal wall. Other bacteria fungi: they farm mushrooms. How
(strawberries, asparagus, tomatoes, “fix” nitrogen from the air, making it and when that behavior evolved in
termites has long been an open ques-
tion. But we suspect the H. tenuis in
our plastic bin may provide an impor-
tant clue to the answer. We think that
at least one Amazonian population of
this species of lower termites engages
in some form of fungus cultivation. If
our hypothesis is correct, the insects
would constitute, in some real sense, a
“missing link” of termite evolution.
Such a possibility might sound—to
coin what is perhaps an apt phrase—
like wood candy: a delight to special-
ists like us who can digest the stuff,
but hardly of more than passing inter-
est to the rest of science. But because
they rely completely on other organ-
The banks of the Tiputini River in Ecuador—home to a population of the isms to process the wood they ingest,
termites Heterotermes tenuis that was examined by the authors lower termites are ideal animals for
the study of symbiosis. And symbiotic
apples) grow in patches and rows. nutritionally available. H. tenuis and relations—the coexistence, in physi-
Farming has been carried on full tilt other termites that depend on their cal contact, of two (and often more)
by people somewhere in the world hindgut crew of microorganisms to different species of organisms during
for the past 10,000 years. nourish themselves with wood belong most of their lives—place the gener-
Some other animals, too, have to a group of insects known by the ally touted mechanisms of evolution
moved beyond hunting and gathering. misleading name “lower termites.” in a revealing light. Classic Darwinian
In a shoebox-size plastic bin in our They would more accurately be called evolution—the process whereby heri-
laboratory, termites of the species Het- earlier or older termites. table variation gives rise to new spe-
erotermes tenuis busy themselves in Their collaboration is a pretty neat cles—must occur, but how? Perma-
their home, a log flown in from Ecua- trick, but it differs greatly from the nent symbiotic relations may well be
dor. These termites belong to a family equally remarkable activities of a more the most important factor underlying
 Sb]
09 —
4

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 rapid evolutionary change, and the totermitidae, the members of which
study of termite symbioses could offer once ranged across the globe. Today
important insights into the process by only one species remains, and its range
which fungal agriculture evolved. is limited to the area around the port
city of Darwin, Australia. Other fami-
he story of H. tenuis began for us lies of lower termites, which rely on
in January 1999, when a team of both protists and bacterial symbionts to
graduate students, including Wier, digest their woody food, include the
visited the Tiputini Biodiversity Sta- Rhinotermitidae, the familiar subter-
tion in the eastern lowlands of ranean termites that love wooden
Ecuador. The station, on the Tiputin1 houses; Hodotermitidae, foraging har-
River deep in the Amazon rainforest, vester damp-wood termites, many na-
is a biologist’s delight. Great but- tive to Africa; and Kalotermitidae,
tressed trees tower overhead; epi- which eat and nest in dry wood.
phytic bromeliads, kin to pineapples, The remaining termites are consid-
ROBERT KANDEL
perch on many branches and trunks. ered “higher,” because of their appar-
By the time sunlight filters through ently more complex social organiza-
“The epic story of the world's the strangler figs enveloping their host tion. They no longer rely on hindgut
most vital resource, from the trees, and the few remaining rays
formation of the solar system to meet the diversity of luxuriant
the controversial issues of palms, there is little light left over
today.” —Library Journal for ground cover. The forest
floor is almost bare.
“Does for water science what
Wier had come to study the
Hawking's A Brief History of Time
dangling, clinging vines, the epi-
accomplished for astrophysics.”
—Soroosh Sorooshian
phytes, and the colorful fungi of
$27.95
the rainforest. But he also sought
to document symbiotic micro-
organisms: in standing water, 1n
This milky white dot, a growth of the fungus Delortia
the trees, and associated with
palmicola, might hold the key to the origins of
termites. He saw termites every- termite agriculture.
where in the dead wood sur-
rounding the biodiversity station— protists to digest their food. Instead,
even in the hardwood steps built into these animals—by far the majority of
the muddy trails. Throughout his termite taxa—have evolved various
visit he made photographs of rotting other food-gathering strategies: some
logs covered with cup fungi, and of higher termites even enjoy a diet of
walking palms, many infested with leaves, fruits, nuts, decaying plant mat-
termites. He didn’t know at the time ter, and soil bacteria. Other higher ter-
that one colony was H. tenuis (that mites, however—though lacking the
identification was made later by complex wood-digesting, swimming
Rudolph H. Scheftrahn of the Uni- gut protists of their lower termite rela-
versity of Florida in Fort Lauderdale); tives—still rely on woody fiber made
but once back in the laboratory, he of cellulose and lignin. To extract the
easily determined that all the insects nutrients from the cellulose, they culti-
“Boulter writes with clarity and
that looked like white ants in one vate fungi, which they fertilize with
verve. ... Perhaps this book,
rotting log carried protist symbionts. wood chips, then harvest and devour.
like a splash of cold water, will
help wake us up.” Termites, a group of some 6,000
—Los Angeles Times species, have lived in wood and di- hatever the skills of a pro-
gested it for at least the past 100 mil- fessional human mushroom
“A whirlwind of a book.” lion years. The group’s ancestry can grower, they pale next to the virtuosity
—Wichael J. Benton, author of be traced to a lineage of wood-ingest- of the termite farmers. The termites
Walking with Dinosaurs ing cockroaches. prepare and fertilize the soil; prune the
Presumably, the first termite family unruly growth of filamentous hyphae,
to evolve was the cockroach-like Mas- or threads of tissue that make up the

24] NATURAL HISTORY May 2003

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body of the fungi; incessantly weed Once excreted, the fungal mycelium [the part of ancestral lower termites devel-
out a multitude of extraneous fungi, mass of hyphae emanating from the fun- oped into Macrotermes farming culture
bacteria, and debris in order to grow gus] grows into tiny spheres, about the size has remained unanswered.
pure cultures of Térmitomyces (“termite ofa small pinhead. These spheres, packed The Ecuadorean H. tenuis may hold
with fungal spores, are the most prominent part of the answer. As we tried to keep
fungus”); and finally reap their tasty
feature of the fungus gardens. To the ter-
harvest—all with a social dexterity that the termites alive in our laboratory, a
mites, the scene must appear as a field of
even the most gifted laboratory team crisis tipped us off to something spe-
tightly packed giant puffballs would to us.
of microbiologists cannot imitate. cial. We had been pleased at how well
In the course of millions of years of Thus the termites do not feed directly our damp termites were thriving.
practice and extraordinary evolution- on the wood-fungal mash; the wood Then an enthusiastic student inadver-
ary success, fungal agriculture has led is fodder for the Termitomyces. The tently overwatered the colony just be-
to the development of termitaria, termites themselves eat the pinhead- fore a weekend, leaving a flood inside
mounds that can house as many as size bits of mycelium for breakfast, the termites’ box. Such errors usually
several million individual termites and lunch, and dinner. kill laboratory colonies of termites of
their crops. J. Scott Turner, an animal The insects control and restrict the any species. The problem is not so
physiologist at the State University growth of their fungi much the same much that the termites drown, but
of New York in Syracuse, has that overwatering encourages
studied, at length, the atmos- fungi to grow so copiously that
pherically regulated mounds of they overwhelm the boxed-in in-
Macrotermes natalensis, a southern sects. A pool of water in an incu-
African mound-building species bator can kill a colony of wood-
[see “A Superorganism’s Puzzy eating termites in a weekend.
Boundaries,” by J. Scott Turner, The following Monday morn-
July/August 2002]. These termi- ing should have been grim. But
taria are spectacular structures, surprisingly, the flooded H.
rising as high as nine feet in the tenuis colonies thrived. To our
air, and Turner has documented untrained eyes, their response
the many complex ways the ter- seemed comparable to the
mites can regulate the internal pheromone-driven repair work
environment of the termitaria. that Macrotermes undertake after
For example, such a termitar- an abundant rainfall. Flooding,
ium maintains levels of carbon it seems clear in retrospect,
dioxide and humidity far above H. tenuis workers and soldiers on a log must be commonplace in the
those of the outside air, and it termites’ Ecuadorean habitat.
can harness the wind for gas ex- way a gardener might force the flow- The colonies that actively respond to
change, acting like a lung. The system ering of a bulb indoors, manage fertil- their ravages are the ones that survive
relies on hundreds of thousands of ization, or train the shape of a shrub. to leave offspring.
worker animals, constantly communi- That active care prevents the forma- And there was more. Less than a
cating via pheromones, both to build tion of mushrooms—the sexually ma- week after the flood, minuscule,
and to maintain the mounds. ture stage of the fungal group known translucent dots, the color of skim
The key asset of the entire termite as Basidiomycota; the presence of milk, began covering the rotten wood
city is its fungus farm. Workers scour mushrooms in a termitarium is a sure of the log. Within two weeks the dots
the hinterland for wood and other sign that the termites have died. grew to the size of pinheads, and
vegetation, then carry it back to the stayed that way for months. Under
termite city in their guts. Upon re- Ithough naturalists first observed the microscope we could see that the
turning to the mound’s fungal gar- the fungus-termite relation as pinheads were almost pure cultures of
dens, they excrete their forage: a mash long ago as the late eighteenth cen- a single distinctive type of fungal
made up of wood, all kinds of fungi tury, investigators do not know when, spore—much purer than the mixture
(both Termitomyces and others that the where, or in which species or set of of species that one would usually ex-
workers inadvertently swallow as they species fungal farming developed. Stu- pect to find growing in a natural sam-
labor outside), and microorganisms. dents of nature know that any termite ple. The spores themselves were made
The mycologist Elio Schaechter, in (whether higher or lower) that swal- up of three cells clumped close to-
his charming book In the Company of lows wood inevitably swallows fungal gether [see photograph on page 74], all
Mushrooms, has closely observed what spores. But the question of how and turgid and, indeed, nearly bursting
happens next: when that inadvertent feeding on the (Continued on page 74)
) )

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courtesy
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Charlotte-Genesee Lighthouse

© Fort Ticonderoc¢
Photo courtesy of NSB

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he 454-mile Seaway Trail—the state’s | harbors and historic beaches, where Drive, Sackets Harbor, New York
only National Scenic Byway—parallels you may sail, fish, or rent a boat. In 13865. History buffs should ask for a
the St. Lawrence River, Lake Ontario, | the Sandy Pond area, you'll enjoy the | copy of the Seaway Trail Guide to the
the Niagara River, and Lake Erie, carry- | beauty of fragile barrier beaches, | War of 1812, which details its 42 his-
ing visitors through an eclectic array | dunes, lagoons, and freshwater marsh- | toric war sites.
of large towns, quaint villages, pictur- | es. In Henderson Harbor, birdwatchers _ Past Lake Champlain and beneath
esque bays, and rolling farmland. | should seek out the secluded Lake | the Adirondack Mountains, stretching
Harbors, lighthouses, fishing, wildlife, Ontario Islands Wildlife Management from the Mohawk River to Quebec,
and history all contribute to the trail. | Area, which includes Little Galloo visitors will find the Lakes to Locks
Plan on at least four days to drive | Island. Little Galloo is home to a pop- Passage, a designated All-American
Road. This byway parallels the lake
| and its canal, with plenty of history,
For a one-of-a-kind New York adventure, plan a scenic views, and state parks abundant
_ with hiking trails, lakeside beaches,
vacation along the state’s Scenic Byways. | ana wildlife. Bring along bicycles,
| because the road’s bikeways are
along the entire route, and take along | ulous shorebird rookery: some 60,000 | known as some of the best cycling
bicycles: the Seaway includes many | pairs of birds are found here. It has the | trails in the country. Lake Champlain
miles of excellent bike trails. |_ largest ring-billed gull colony in North | is especially delightful for sailing and
Start your exploration at the Seaway America, New York’s only Caspian | boating but will also appeal to lovers
Trail Discovery Center in Sackets | tern colony, and scores of cormorants, of history. Long the home of the Huron,
Harbor. Housed in the Federal-style | herring gulls, great black-backed gulls, Algonquin, and Iroquois, the strategi-
Union Hotel, dating from 1817, this | and black-crowned night herons. cally located lake was the site of many
one-of-a-kind museum offers three| The Seaway Trail’s most well- | battles throughout the French and
floors of interactive exhibits featuring | known attractions include the phenome- | Indian War, the War for Independence,
the trail’s many attractions. Sackets | nal Niagara Falls, the Thousand Islands, | and the War of 1812.
Harbor itself has many historic homes. | and historic lighthouses. For more | For more information about both
As you drive along Lake Ontario’s east- | information, phone 800-SEAWAY-T, or | of these Scenic Byways in New York
ern shore, stop to explore protected | write to Seaway Trail, Inc., 109 Barracks | State, visit http://www.byways.org.
 G *

ING Got een wescToles oy caROLUE CMCHLLaTe for you to explore and enjoy.
NG anita elite arteronal rom (coe tele RomKCChCepLott ‘Il find it all amid
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STATEOFNEWYORK __ iloveny.com. And, let the ot we o
George E. Pataki, Governor
EMPIRE STATE DEVELOPMENT ee ros
Charles A. Gargano, Chairman See
 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

PRS OD TE TAU
Aa. gl)
Tourism New Brunswick

BRUNSWICK,
the sight of countless shorebirds reel- || Drive that shoulders the awesome
ing and diving, and explore the coast | Bay of Fundy or discover the songs
from the amazing Fundy Trail. _ and spirit of New Brunswick’s French
But the wonder doesn’t stop culture on the Acadian Coast!
| there in New Brunswick! Take a | One thing is for certain in New
/ pontoon boat tour between the| | Brunswick...there’s never a question
ew Brunswick, Canada, has so many | towering cliffs of Grand Falls Gorge! | of what you can do...only what you
wonders waiting to be experienced Or visit preserved sand dunes such | can do next! The province is home
and explored! New Brunswick’s as the Irving Eco-Centre, La Dune | to two of Canada’s National Parks!
Bay of Fundy is One of the Marine de Bouctouche, for a tranquil tour Head to Kouchibouguac National
Wonders of the World. Twice a day, through our one-of-a-kind Natural | Park and take a seaside stroll along
the world’s highest tides rise and | Wonders! _ its endless sandy stretches! In Fundy
fall almost 48 feet (14 metres...that’s One ofthe best ways to tour New | National Park, you can hike and
equivalent to a four-storey building!)! Brunswick is through our five incred- | camp just moments away from this

Walk on the ocean floor and just six ible Scenic Drives! Discover world- | renowned natural phenomenon.
hours later, kayak above the very renowned salmon-fishing on the Got a day? Try our incredible Day
same spot! Paddle under the arch at Miramichi River Route! Find new | Adventures! Kayak to see a sandbar
the famous Hopewell Rocks, towering inspiration touring some of Earth’s full of seals, explore caves, learn to
rock formations carved by millions oldest mountains on the Appalachian | dip candles or how to catch and
of years of surging Fundy tides! Set Range Scenic Drive! Tour the scenic | cook a lobster! There are also our
sail to see all kinds of whales. Playful splendour of every bend and twist in | amazing Top Attractions! From visit-
Humpbacks, giant Finbacks, and the St. John River on the River Valley | ing the fictional village of Le Pays de
even the rare Right Whale! Thrill at Route! Follow the Fundy Coastal | la Sagouine to crossing the world’s
longest covered bridge in Hartland, it’s the
“A” list of everything there is to see and do in
the province! Experience the life of a Loyalist
at Kings Landing Historical Settlement! Or \
|
\
discover the meaning of our famous Acadian
|
joie de vivre (joy of life) as you sing along to \

the dinner theater at the Village Historique \

\
|

Acadien! And no stop would be complete |

\
without visiting the charming towns and }
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villages that make up Hometown New
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Brunswick! |
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Shop for unique local crafts such as blown

glass and paintings by renowned Maritime
artists! Feast on a lobster roll to go or sit down

r rr 197
WEIS cnectaci}/
VleWs...Spectacul
et i (di (labia

to a romantic candlelight seafood supper!

Then, end the day at a downtown hotel in one Visit us on-line at
of our world-class cities or tucked away in a
www. TourismNewBrunswick.ca/natural
chateau, chalet, or a cosy seaside inn!
Our neighbors from the United States are or call 1-800-561-0123 for your free New Brunswick
always amazed at our favorable exchange rate, Vacation Planning Kit! Check out our neighbors at
where two US dollars can equal up to as much
as three Canadian dollars! That means you
www. TourismNewBrunswick.ca/Neighbours.
can see more wonders fora lot less!
 ©~ Uncover
theEco-treasures of -
SURO aR etnies
ait : ~~ Most Distinctive Dunes
La CSC , and Our Discovery Beaches!
ler

Suu VE idles
Most'Spectacular Rivers!”

Find New Inspiration Touring Some of

Earth's Oldest Mountains!
 The Hopewell Rocks,
Hopewell Cape,
at low tide.
6:25AM

Succulent Seafood, World-class is

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oH ais] ofFredericton

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 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

yoming has 14 scenic byways he Grand Canyon State’s scenic

or “backways,” including byways and historic roads trans-
what many would call the port visitors to all of its natural
most beautiful highway in wonders and many hidden treas-
America—the Beartooth High- ures off the beaten path.
3 way (U.S. 212), built in the Get your kicks on Route 66,
BE
CAN'T
WRONG 1930s. From the Custer National Forest to probably Arizona’s most famous
Yellowstone National Park, the Beartooth road, which crisscrosses the state from
Highway is one of the most spectacular east to west. Although portions have been
replaced by an interstate, this historic
route still manages to convey what it was
like to travel across the United States in
the 1920s. Route 66 crosses the Navajo
PIONEERS
500000
Indian Reservation and nears the Hopi
Indian Reservation, where you might pick
up some Native American crafts. The road
is also not far from Canyon de Chelly,
Walnut Canyon, Meteor Crater, and the
Homolovi Ruins.
The Kaibab Plateau-North Rim Park-
Way, a national Scenic Byway, crosses over
the gorgeous Kaibab Plateau and travels
through two forests: the Kaibab National
Forest and the Grand Canyon National
Park. There are plenty of places to hike and
camp along the route. Groves of golden
aspen, flowery meadows, ponds, and out-
Photos courtesy of USFS and National Scenic Byways Online
crops of limestone break up the dominance
PLAINS
THE
INTO
AND National Forest routes on this continent. of the regal coniferous forest. This byway
The Beartooth offers travelers the ultimate travels to the brink of the spectacular north
high-country experience as it winds rim of the Grand Canyon, which is 1,000
through the Custer, Shoshone, and
Gallatin National Forests.
The highway’s sixty-nine miles cross
from lush forests to alpine tundra. The
rugged Beartooth area boasts 20 peaks
reaching over 12,000 feet in elevation.

6-
ATE?
OUTE/
Glaciers are found on the north flank of =\
nearly every mountain peak that is over
11,500 feet high. Stop along this byway to
hike across broad plateaus and to admire
Rocky Mountain goats, moose, black bears,
grizzly bears, marmots, and mule deer.
Points of interest include the spectac-
ular Yellowstone National Park, the coun-
try’s first and largest national park, and
Shoshone National Forest, which sprawls
STATE OFFICE OF TRAVEL & TOURISM
along Yellowstone’s eastern border.
aSr
BR
fae
‘(ill 800-225-5996 Learn more about the Beartooth at
www.wyomingtourism.org www.byways.org. BUOZ
B0JQ
JO
WSIN
 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

Neon
feet higher than the south rim. Wildlife is | least an hour to explore this 42-mile-long
abundant across the Kaibab Plateau, which | Scenic Byway. For more information, visit
is over 8,000 feet in elevation. Allow at | www.ArizonaScenicRoads.com.

_ Air Canada will provide transportation to and from

_ Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada and any major
_ airport in the continental United States served by
Air Canada. One-week automobile rental provided
by.New oS Tourism and Parks.

Then, Drive toineWonder!

Drive to St. Andrews and spend two luxurious nights at
Office
Arizona
o the renowned Fairmont Algonquin! Package includes
two nights’ accommodation, golf lesson, 18 holes of golf,
buffet breakfast daily, and three-course dinner at The
- Clubhouse Grill. Enjoy a whale-watching adventure with
QuoddyLink Marine, and seeMore Kinds of Whales
_More Often Than Anywhere Else in the Bayof Fundy,
One ofthe Marine Wonders of theWorld! Includes
aa Fok CD of ae experience.

Then Pa three fabulous nightsat The Ship's Daten

Inn in Hillsborough! Includes three nights in a whirlpool
_ suite, full breakfast each morning and candlelight dinner
- each night for two, one picnic lunch for two, a welcome
package and bottle of wine, Also ‘includes admission to
Albert County Museum and The Hopewell Rocks,
where you'll experience The World's Highest Tides
-and Walk on the Ocean Floor! Plus, your choice of two
activities such as kayaking, horseback riding, personal
guided tour, and more!

Next, you're off to Shediac for a two-night stay at the

fine LAuberge Gabriéle Inn! Package includes
accommodation with private bath and ocean view, ful
breakfast for two each moming, lobster supper wii
bottle of wine (lobster substitute available), an arrival gift,
and two daily passes to Parlee Beach Provincial Park,
where you can swim some of the Warmest Saltwater
North of Virginia! Experience the French flavour of
Acadian culture with a one-day pass to the fictional
village of Le Pays de laSagouine in Bouctouchel

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or a vacation site that’s secluded, ly barrier islands are worth the trip. | species of birds, mostly marine and
beautiful, and undiscovered, head _ Part of Maritime Quebec, the fles de | shorebirds, live or pass through the
to the fles de la Madeleine Islands. | la Madeleine will enchant you with | islands. The best times for birding are
These islands are located in the their unspoiled white beaches and | in the spring and fall during the nest-
middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, | fragile dunes, green valleys, and ing and migration seasons. Many of
a five-hour ferry red cliffs. The steel-gray ocean | the nesting birds live in colonies:
ride from Prince | surrounds the islands and is visible — the northern gannet, the blacklegged
Edward Island | from just about every house. _ kittiwake, the heron, the double-
(Souris). You can | The main road, Route 199, con- | crested shag, the thick-billed murre,
also take a ferry | nects the six main islands. Most of | the Atlantic puffin, and the razorbill.
cruise directly | the road’s 65-mile length crosses long | The endangered piping plover, found
from Montreal. | stretches of dune landscape, where | nowhere else in Quebec, nests on
However you get motorists spy sandpipers, plovers, | the islands’ beaches.
there, these love- and seagulls along the beaches, and The fles de la Madeleine have
_ the red sandstone cliffs that form | two nature reserves: Ile Brion, whose
_ much of the islands’ coastline. Small, © stunted forests are home to over 140
wooden houses, often painted in | bird species, and Pointe de Est in
bright colors, dot the landscape. Grosse fle, an essential stopping
_ Fishing is a way of life here, as can be | point for migratory shorebirds and
_ seen by the multitude of lobster boats | ducks. Rocher aux Oiseaux, an ele-
in the harbor at Grande-Entrée, which | vated rock northeast of Grosse Ile, is
locals call the “Lobster Capital of difficult to reach (reserve a boat
Quebec.” Try a lobster roll dipped in tour), but worth the effort: this
butter or a fine gourmet meal of snow | refuge for colonies of petrels, north-
crabs or scallops at one of the islands’ ern gannets, razorbills, murres, and
many restaurants. gulls is one of the most important
Harbor and gray seals are fairly bird watching sites in the gulf.
common around the Iles de la | For more information, visit www.
Madeleine and can be easily spotted tourismeilesdelamadeleine.com or
in their natural habitat. About 200 call 1-877-624-4437.
 a Te IE) relaxing ty wil ENG Nee acs UTS ace a mai
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seafood cuisine. To ee are info.

i
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ILE QUEBEC |} MARITIME
Bas-Saint-Lanrent, Gaspésie,
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on ae
aneRe cao
 BIOMECHANICS
FFE ERIS

spread ribs

A paradise tree snake

flares its ribs and curves
itself into an S as it glides
through the air.

Serpents in the Air

A little contortionist can go a long way.

Story by Adam Summers ~ Illustration by Patricia J. Wynne

he ophiophobe worries, tions from which snakes can suddenly To most people, any airborne
somewhat irrationally, about appear: from above. snake is a flying snake—why bother
snakes—whether they’re Although as a group snakes appear with fine distinctions when the very
slithering across the sidewalk, lurking singularly unsuited for aerial ex- idea of an airborne snake is probably
in laundry hampers, or even appear- ploits, herpetologists (those intrepid unnerving enough to contemplate
ing on television. If you, too, are biologists who specialize in reptiles in the first place? But to biologists,
burdened by such anxieties, you and amphibians) have heard credible an animal is properly called a flier
might just skip this month’s accounts of “flying” snakes for more only if it can generate enough force
“Biomechanics.” There’s plenty to than a hundred years. Only lately, to gain altitude in still air. A critter
engage you in the rest of the maga- however, has one investigator begun is a glider (but not a flier) if it can
zine, and what you’ll undoubtedly to exhaustively document the extent manage at least a foot of horizontal
retain from this column will be just and mechanics of those animals’ travel for every foot it falls. An ani-
one more item in the list of direc- aeronautical talents. mal that moves less in a horizontal

38 | NATURAL HISTORY May 2003

|
direction than it does in the vertical Southeast Asia, on the grounds of the increase in body width effectively
is said to “parachute” (unless it the Singapore Zoological Gardens. halves the ratio of the snake’s body
jumps or falls). A passive aerialist, To get the snakes to jump, he in- weight to the area of its underside, a
of course, might catch an updraft duced them to slither out on a perch measure known as wing loading, and
and so soar to a higher altitude, but more than thirty feet above the a crucial indicator of aerobatic talent.
the lack of actively generated up- ground. When a flying snake pre- For example, the wing loading of a
ward force still technically disquali- pares to jump, it dangles like the let- highly maneuverable bird such as the
fies it as a flier. ter J from a branch. It then flings it- chimney swift is ten times smaller
self upward and away from the than that of the aeronautically chal-
branch, only to begin falling at such lenged common loon. Wing loading
FLEXED POSITION a steep angle that few would call in the paradise tree snake falls be-
it anything but a plummet. tween those two extremes, but it’s
Yet after falling less than closer to that of the swift.
ten feet, the two-foot-long
snake assumes an S shape Bes in aerodynamics have also
and begins to undulate, suggested that the snake’s tight
much as if it were crawling S-bends make its entire body act like
across the ground, albeit a highly slotted wing. In airplanes,
more slowly and with more slotted wings have gaps that run
lateral movement. At the along their entire length, from fuse-
same time, the angle of its lage to wingtip; because of the way
trajectory begins to flatten air flows through the gaps, such
out, eventually decreasing to as wings develop more lift at low
NORMAL POSITION
little as 13 degrees. The snake— speeds. Flaps along the trailing edge
Until quite deft at avoiding obstacles— of airplane wings have the same ef-
recently her- seems to swim through the air; in fect. That principle is also at work in
petologists thought all flying snakes Socha’s tests the snakes landed as far the spread between the feathers on
were parachutists, barely able to slow as sixty-nine feet from the thirty- the wing tips of the best low-speed
their descent, let alone to take active foot-high launch point. In the shal- gliders, such as vultures and hawks.
control of their own direction and lowest moments of their glide The gaps between the bends of the
altitude. After all, such control (when their fall angle has decreased S-shaped snake in flight could pro-
would seem to require a body part in to its minimum), the snakes can duce more lift than the snake would
the shape of an airfoil, and tubular travel nearly four times farther hori- have if it shot, arrowlike, through
snakes apparently lack the broad, zontally than they fall vertically, the air. Any extra lift is crucial for
thin surfaces that guide the descent which easily surpasses the one-to- maneuvering while glidimg.
of such better-known gliders as fly- one benchmark ofa gliding animal. The advantages of gliding for a
ing squirrels, colugos (flying lemurs), One of the most important factors snake seem obvious: moving
frogs, and lizards. But John J. “Jake” in the snake’s midair shift from free through the air from tree to tree by-
Socha, a biomechanist who recently fall to glide is a dramatic increase in passes a host of earth-bound preda-
received his doctorate from the the width of the animal’s body. Like tors, and a flying snake threatened
University of Chicago, has, by re- most other snakes, a flying snake is by an arboreal animal can just
constructing the three-dimensional roughly circular in cross section. But launch itself out of the tree. But the
flight path and mechanics of the while a member of Chrysopelea is paradise tree snake glides so expertly
snakes’ glides, discovered that it falling after launch, it flares its ribs so that it could, in principle, mount an
doesn’t necessarily take webbed far outward that its belly becomes airborne attack, either on a passing
legs—or limbs at all—for an animal concave. With its body molded into bird or on some more pedestrian
to turn a fall into a long glide. a highly flattened C, the area of the prey that, like the ophiophobe, is
snake’s ventral silhouette—that 1s, its expecting anything but a snake
[° fact, explaining what it takes for silhouette when seen from below— assault from above.
a snake to glide sounds a bit like nearly doubles. It’s as though the
an episode of Sesame Street: today’s hood present on some cobras were Adam Summers (asummers@uci.edu) is an
program is brought to you by the extended along the entire length of assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary
letters J, S, and C. Socha worked the paradise tree snake’s body. biology at the University of California, Irvine,
with the paradise tree snake, The flattening of the snake essen- and he once caused a snake to appear unex-
Chrysopelea paradisi, a native of tially turns the animal into an airfoil: pectedly in a laundry hamper.

May 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 39

 e

A new census ofthe sea is revealing that

microbial cells thrive in undreamed-of numbers.
They form an essential part of the food web.

By Edward F. DeLong

he Polar Duke, our 1ce-worthy Norwegian

vessel, was immobilized—beset, to use the
correct nautical term—by enormous sheets
of sea ice. It was early August 1995, late winter in
Antarctica, and the two-meter skin of frozen seawater
that enveloped us was a seasonal expression of the
Southern Ocean. Our destination was Palmer Station, a
research station run by the National Science Founda-
tion and situated on Anvers Island, off the Antarctic
Peninsula. Evidently, though, our group of American sci-
entists and support staff had set out just a little too soon. It
took ten days for a change in wind and the breakup of the
ice pack to free the ship, but by then we were low on fuel
and forced to return to Chile to be resupplied. When we
finally made it to Palmer Station, we were a month behind
schedule. Only two months were left of our field season,
and that was spent largely on cross-country skis, hauling
sleds laden with carboys full of seawater.
So went the first visit of my research group to Antarc-
tica. Our aim was to search out and quantify the range
and biomass of a peculiar group of microorganisms
known as archaea. The wisdom of the day was that the
critters should not be present at all in the cold, oxygen-
rich waters of the Southern Ocean. But a sample of
Antarctic seawater collected in early 1990 at Palmer Sta-
tion, carried to California, and given to us for analysis
suggested otherwise. We hoped to show that archaea
were major players even below the pack ice.
Archaea (originally dubbed archaebacteria) were not
even recognized as a separate branch of life until the
1970s, when the microbiologist Carl R. Woese and his
colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham-
 oi

A crack in the sea ice in the Antarctic. The frigid waters of the Souther
microorganisms than was once believed.
AACROPLANKTON
~f{ectual size),
paign made a thorough analysis appear to be flourishing in marine waters both
of their ribosomal RNA. This shallow and deep and at all latitudes—polar, tem-
kind of RNA, which plays a role perate, and tropical. They turn up in the guts of
in protein synthesis, occurs in abyssal sea cucumbers and in sediments at the bot-
the small structures called ribo- tom of the sea. Quantitative surveys now show that
somes that exist in every known archaea comprise between 20 and 30 percent of all
kind of cell. Because of its ubiq- the microbial cells in the ocean.
uity, ribosomal RNA can serve
as a kind of universal bar code for he discovery and enhanced understanding of
all organisms, placing them in so many new microbial groups stems not only
proper historical relation to one from the quest to look in new places. Modern-day
another on a single evolutionary microbe hunters also have new, high-tech tools for
tree. Woese concluded that Ar- identifying and counting microbial life. In the past
chaea is one of three major evolu- the method of choice had simply been to culture a
tionary branches of life, as deeply sample of, say, seawater and then see what grew.
rooted as Bacteria and Eukarya. Although that approach is still being perfected,
(Eukarya, whose cells con- many cells stubbornly refuse to grow under
tain a nucleus and other laboratory conditions. The new tech-
structures, encompass niques, some based on the tricks of
plants, animals, fungi, molecular biology, enable biologists to
and protists—proto- find out what is in the samples by di-
zoa, algae, and lower rect observation.
fungi.) Microbial life is proving to be far
Apart from their more diverse than cultured samples
evolutionary heritage, could suggest. A lot of the newly recog-
archaea appeared to have nized life in the oceans is so small that its
one thing in common: they Radio larian size is reflected in its name: picoplankton.
thrived in extreme envi- The plankton comprises the floating “wan-
ronments. At the time of our ex- derers” of the sea, single-celled and multicelled
pedition, we knew some lived in plants and animals (including many immature lar-
saline lakes five times saltier than val forms) that move primarily by drifting with the
the ocean; some lived in anaero- currents [see illustration at left]. Anything smaller
bic (oxygen-free) habitats, where than 0.05 millimeter but larger than 2.0 microns,
even trace amounts of oxygen capable of passing through fine-mesh nets, is con-
would prove lethal; and some sidered nanoplankton (the prefixes “nano-” and
lived in hot geothermal environ- “pico-” do not literally correspond to such mea-
ments that would cook most or- surement units as the nanometer or the picometer;
ganisms to a crisp. Among them they arise instead from naming traditions in marine
was Pyrolobus fumarii, which could biology). The picoplankton comprises the smallest
grow in anaerobic deep-sea hy- cells, ranging between 0.2 and
drothermal vents at temperatures 2.0 microns across (between
as high as 235 degrees Fahrenheit. 1/500th and 1/50th the di-
Our surveys of the frigid, ameter of a human hair).
aerobic Antarctic waters turned Until the 1970s, pico-
up archaea in great and unex- plankton was thought to
pected numbers. Indeed, we be an insignificant ele-
have learned that cold-adapted ment of the marine micro-
cousins of heat-loving archaea bial food web; its biomass
seemed much too low to play
Plankton, sea life that drifts with the a primary role. But estimates Ditylum brightwellii
currents, ranges from the macroscopic of the numbers of micro- diatoms
to the microscopic. The so-called
scopic planktonic organisms
picoplankton comprises cells between
0.2 and 2.0 microns across. Anything climbed dramatically in the late 1970s, when the
smaller (such as a virus) is part of the so-called epifluorescence microscope was devel-
so-called femtoplankton. oped. This instrument, coupled with the use of flu-
orescent dyes that cause individual microbial cells sunlight to produce a rich food harvest
to glow under ultraviolet light, enables the cells to that supports all the other inhabitants of
be easily seen and counted. Technically, the process the ocean’s surface, and most denizens
is an easy one. You simply add the dye, which binds of the deep as well. As recently as
to DNA ina sample of seawater, wait five minutes, twenty-five years ago, all that productiv-
collect the seagoing microorganisms onafilter, and ity was credited to eukaryotic algal spe-
observe them under the microscope. It is now cies, including diatoms, dinoflagellates,
known that the density of mi- and their relatives. That now turns out
croorganisms ranges from to have been a faulty conclusion that
tens of thousands per mil- arose from a major oversight.
liliter in the deep ocean Shortly after epifluorescence microscopy was
to millions per milliliter developed, the first of a new kind of photosyn-
in the energy-rich waters thetic microorganism was discovered: marine pi-
near the surface. coplanktonic cyanobacteria of the genus Syne-
One might object that chococcus. Biologists were already familiar with
such a technique could not cyanobacteria—they used to be called blue-green
distinguish live cells from a algae—because some kinds collect into so many
Corethron, a genus lot of dead detritus floating individuals that they are visible in the aggregate.
of phytoplankton
around in the water. Studies But the new cyanobacteria were much smaller,
in the early 1980s, however,
which drew on biomedical tech-
niques to measure the synthesis
of DNA and protein, showed
that marine picoplankton can
double in biomass every day or
so. So the cells observed with
fluorescent dyes are very much
alive and metabolically active. (In
fact, the only reason the seagoing
populations of picoplankton stay
roughly constant is that protist
predators are busily grazing on
them at about the same rate as
the picoplankton reproduces.)
The metabolic activity within
the huge biomass of picoplankton
represents a massive flow of car-
bon and energy. Some of the car-
bon is given off as carbon dioxide
gas, but much of it remains
locked up in organic molecules
that help sustain the rest of the
food web. Particularly important
to the carbon cycle as well as to
the entire oceanic food web are
the microorganisms that live at or
Hear the ocean's. surface:’. the
forests of the sea are microscopic.

if has been known for some

time that the top 600 feet of
the water column in the oceans 1s
a region of intense photosyn-
thetic activity. Carbon dioxide is
combined with the energy of Alexis Rockman, Ice Shelf, 2003

May 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 43

more abundant, and far more widely distributed Field experiments have now
than any previously known kind of “algae.” shown that in the open ocean
Like plants and genuine algae, cyanobacteria pos- Prochlorococcus cells reach concen-
sess a kind of chlorophyll—so-called chlorophyll trations of hundreds of thousands
a—that enables them to “fix” carbon in the pres- per milliliter of seawater. In fact,
ence ofsunlight, that 1s, to remove the carbon atoms Prochlorococcus constitutes half of the
from carbon dioxide gas and incorporate them into total chlorophyll-based biomass in the
organic molecules. In the process the ocean. So picoplankton, once thought to
cyanobacteria give off oxygen, as do all be sparse and functioning mainly to re- Picoplankton
plants that contain chlorophyll. Un- cycle organic matter back into plant nutri-
like plants, though, cyanobacteria ents, proves to be much more central to the
lack a second kind of chlorophyll, carbon cycle. The fact that picoplanktonic
known as chlorophyll 6, which in cells circulate in such vast numbers and are
concert with chlorophyll a helps grazed upon by protists means that they
plants capture light. supply nutrients directly to larger organisms.
But cyanobacteria do harbor cer- e This microscopic portion of the food web has
tain other pigmented proteins that been dubbed the “microbial loop.”
help them harvest light energy. The jyantis shrimp| arva
proteins, known as phycobiliproteins, LT our laboratory at the Monterey Bay Aquar-
fluoresce red under the epifluorescence microscope, ium Research Institute, my colleagues and |
and that is how the new, tiny cyanobacteria were so are exploring a new technique of archiving the
easily detected and enumerated. By 1979, John B.
Waterbury of the Woods Hole Oceanographic In- NUMBER OF
stitution in Massachusetts and John McNeil OCEAN ZONES PERCENT OF PICOPLANIKTON CELLS
OCEAN VOLUME IN ZONE (<1075)
Sieburth of the University of Rhode Island on Nar- ree 55 ae eee T
a
apy er eee
ee hy a
ONpe

ragansett Bay had shown that Synechococcus was ex-

tremely abundant in coastal and open-ocean envi-
ronments, reaching densities greater than 100,000
cells per milliliter. Later experiments showed that at
certain times and places these cells can be responsi-
ble for as much as half of the primary production of
food in the ocean.
Then, in the late 1980s, the
oceanographers Sallie W.
Chisholm of the Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology (METERS)
DEPTH
and Robert Olson of Woods
Hole discovered another
small (less than a micron in
diameter), red-fluorescing kind
of cell that was even more
Ceratium longipes, 701%
abundant than Synechococcus.
a dinoflagellate
The new cells—in size, also Although the photic zone represents a small percentage of
a kind of picoplankton—were eventually cultured the ocean's volume, it contains the highest concentration of
and isolated in the laboratory and given the genus picoplankton cells. The smallest ocean zone by volume is the
name Prochlorococcus. They turn out to be closely re- Hadal, named after Hades for its great depth,
lated to Synechococcus, but the two genera differ in
their pigment composition. Chisholm and her genomes of microorganisms en masse. The idea is
coworkers at MIT have now also determined the to get a better understanding of the genetic, bio-
entire genome sequences of two Prochlorococcus chemical, and physiological properties of the or-
strains, which represent high- and low-light- ganisms, as well as of their natural history.
adapted “ecotypes.” The low-light-adapted strain Large DNA fragments, as long as 200,000 base
has significantly more genes than the high-lhght pairs, are gathered higgledy-piggledy from mixed
strain, perhaps because it needs more accessory pro- microbial populations and then cloned to create, in
teins to efficiently gather light that is in short supply. effect, an archive of microbial genetic diversity. Such

May 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 45

 a “library” serves as a repository of ee the study of fossils known as stroma-
all the genes and genomes present tolites, a residue of the larger forms of
in the original microbial popula- cyanobacteria, biologists have long known that
tion that was sampled. We can microorganisms have played key roles in the nat-
quickly search such libraries for the ural history of the Earth. Cyanobacteria were
presence of particular genes—and among the early actors on the stage of life; their
by extension, the presence of the pro- capacity for photosynthesis and the oxygen they
teins and metabolic functions that the generated forever altered the global environment.
Mysis shrimp larva
genes encode. We can also screen our They essentially paved the way for the evolution
libraries for markers that identify just which species of other forms of life. Given the abundance of
of microorganism the genes belong to. In addition, newly discovered cyanobacteria, one can only
proteins encoded by individual genes can be readily begin to appreciate what an important role they
produced, making it possible to study their struc- continue to play in the carbon cycle.
ture, function, and role in the natural world. And the cyanobacteria exemplify just one way
Unexpectedly, when we created one of our li- that marine microorganisms support the biosphere.
braries, we discovered a previously unknown kind Bacteria, archaea, and other microorganisms are
of photoprotein. The protein molecule, which also vital to the nitrogen cycle: they break down
came from the genome of a widespread planktonic organic nitrogen to produce ammonia; they con-
bacterium, absorbs light of a characteristic wave- vert ammonia to nitrate, an essential plant nutri-
length—much as does rhodopsin, the light-sensi- ent; and they recycle nitrate into other nitrogen-
tive pigment in the human eye. Indeed, the new containing compounds in oxygen-poor zones such
photoprotein is chemically related to the as marine sediments. Some cyanobacteria can even

Carbon, nitrogen, and other elements get cycled through the biosphere thanks
to a host of microorganisms, but we hardly notice the job they do.

rhodopsin family. And we have shown that, like

rhodopsin, it can convert light into energy usable
by the microbial cell. The function it serves for the new cells from simple
bacteria—whether, for example, it enables them to nitrogen gas. In short,
fix carbon dioxide the way plants do, or is used to without microorganisms,
garner more energy for other cellular purposes— nitrogen wouldn’t cycle at all,
remains an open question. and neither would most
Euglenozoan covered
Searching in Monterey Bay, from which the other elements. with symbiotic bacteria
original genetic sample had It is important to recog-
come, we found that the nize that such transformations depend on an en-
novel form of rhodopsin tire community of microorganisms; no single spe-
occurs in natural commu- cies can carry out all of them on its own. Their
nities of marine pi- interrelations are fantastically complex, forming
coplankton. Further sur- systems that have been tuned by evolution in ways
veys in the oceans from that work together. Therein lie the reasons for
Antarctica to Hawaii re- much of our ignorance about them. When they
vealed that variants of the are going about their jobs, when everything is in
photoprotein exist virtually balance and seemingly normal, we are least likely
everywhere, in varying col- Shrimp-like species, to notice them. It’s only when something breaks
ors. In deep waters the pho- order Cladocera down—when, say, excess nitrate in runoff waters
toprotein is “tuned” to ab- creates a noxious algal bloom—that we begin to
sorb the blue wavelengths of light most abundant pay attention.
there. In shallower waters, it absorbs the more en- Microorganisms have been our planetary engi-
ergetic green light available at the surface. It never neers, the biological stewards of the Earth, for as
fails: every time we dip into the living ocean, we long as the world has had oceans, at least 3.5 bil-
find something new. lion years. They still have a lot to teach us. O

|
46 NATURAI HISTORY May 2003
 pcos he was in thea oo
ientistswarning against the destri

: byhiswifeGillian.
: Among the many graduate studer ts
: whose careers Norman helped to laun
. was the late Dr. Stephen Jay Gould, : NORMAN ANDD GILLIAN IN THEIR MUSEUM OFFICE, WITH A MAP OF THE
whose articles delighted Natural History WORLD N5 MILLION YEARS Aco
readers. With their belief in support: : :
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 {[.-» Tr? sy

A AWE

In modern Japan, street performers sell ritual

and nostalgia to compete with high-tech advertising.
By Ingrid Fritsch

The good old chindonya, changing the world from dark embarrassed giggle. After my informants have re-
to light, people both young and old clap their hands, assured themselves that I really mean chindonya,
chinchira dondon chin dondon. . . . they often ask, “Are they still around? I remember
—Lyrics from a chindonya troupe in Kumayama, Japan them from my youth.”
The characters of my curiosity—the chin-
J hen I tell Japanese people of a certain donya—are troupes of elaborately costumed street
age that I am an anthropologist inter- musicians hired to draw customers to shops, stores,
ested in chindonya, my questions invari- cabarets, and pachinko (pinball game) parlors. Mem-
ably prompt a smile accompanied by aslightly bers of these troupes, made up of at least three

co
people, parade through the streets first encountered chindonya
playing an assortment of Japanese during a stay in Japan some
and Western musical instruments. years ago. On a pleasant day in
Once their music has attracted a April, while strolling around the
crowd, the chindonya—who also city of Toyama looking for
sport sandwich boards or carry cherry blossoms, I approached
banners displaying their employ- the city hall, where a crowd had
ers’ advertisements—deliver sales gathered for the annual national
messages, distribute flyers, or per- chindonya competition. Sud-
form short dramatic routines such denly, about twenty-five groups
as sword dances. of performers appeared, wearing
Their main instrument, the chin- gaudy makeup and wigs, and
don, is made up of a small metal costumed as old-fashioned samu-
gong (the “chin” sound) and two rai, geisha, and clowns. Before
traditional Japanese drums (the parading, the groups jointly
“don” sound), mounted together played “Take ni suzume” (Spar-
on a wooden frame [see photograph row on the bamboo), an old va-
on opposite page|. The instrument, riety-hall tune now thought of as
developed at the beginning of a kind of theme song of the
the twentieth century, is usually chindonya. It is one of the few
played by a man. Accompanying musical pieces common _ to
it is a large cylindrical drum, troupes all over the country.
the gorosu, generally played by a In the past, becoming a mem-
woman. A clarinet, trumpet, saxo- ber of a chindonya troupe was a
phone, or accordion carries the last resort for people who had no
melody. The repertoire includes prospects in the regular job mar-
military marches, old Japanese dit- ket. Chindonya were tolerated,
ties, songs from kabuki theaters or but looked upon with disdain.
yose variety theaters, and some- These days the social standing of
times Jazz. the performers has improved,
Chindonya still work the streets partly because of the sentimental-
for advertisers, though their live izing of the Japanese folk arts, but
promotional performances may also because the chindonya them-
seem old-fashioned and out of selves view their occupation in a
place in Japan’s highly industrial- more favorable light.
ized mass-media society. But Chindonya troupes date back to
throughout their history the per- the end of the nineteenth century,
formers have struggled against when the Japanese way of life was
obsolescence in the face of so- rapidly becoming industrialized
cial trends, discrimination, world and westernized, and manufactur-
events, and new technological ers decided it was essential to ad-
developments. The current resur- vertise new products. In 1845 in
gence of interest in chindonya has Osaka, a candy salesman named
benefited from the cultural need Amekatsu offered his special ora-
for ritual—and from favorable torical and theatrical talents to ad-
media attention linking chindonya vertise for a local variety theater.
to “the good old days.” Yet even That episode is accepted as the
the waves of nostalgia have failed birth of chindonya (though the
to create any real increase in the term does not appear until the
demand for their services. Unless early twentieth century), because
the chindonya figure out how to it is the first documented case of
evolve or change with the times, it advertising for someone else’s
seems unlikely they will be able to products in Japan. Later, under
preserve the traditions of their pro- Amekatsu’s followers, the activity
fession in Japanese society. became known as fdzaiya, for the

May 2003 NATURAI HISTORY 49

 ety-hall artists put out of work by
the popularity of the movies. Dur-
ing the Second World War street
performances were prohibited alto-
gether; afterwards, when the econ-
omy had recovered somewhat but
advertising media lagged, street ad-
vertising blossomed again. In those
days many circus artists also joined
up, and it 1s estimated there were as
many as 2,500 chindonya in Japan in
the 1950s and 1960s.
As television commercials be-
came more widely used, the popu-
larity of street-advertising troupes
once again subsided. The oil crisis
of 1973 and the ensuing recession
reduced the number of chindonya
cat)
ed
even more drastically. In 1989,
Troupe members of the Chindon TsGshinsha agency in Toyama, Japan, display
when the emperor Showa lay
their traditional costumes. dying, all outdoor public perfor-
mances were prohibited
street vendors’ attention- for several months, and
getting cries of “tézai, td- the younger chindonya
zai” (literally “east-west,” who were able to find
the Japanese equivalent of other jobs changed their
Heart yer ‘heanmye!): professions.
In 1885 in Tokyo, a simi-
lar advertising business meee only thirty
known as hiromeya (wide to thirty-five chin-
eyes) recruited brass bands donya troupes still exist
to march through the in Japan, and most of
streets, sometimes for their members are more
weeklong parades, to ad- than sixty years old. The
vertise new consumer majority of the troupes
products such as beer, cig- are based in and around
arettes, and toothpaste. Tokyo, where fifteen
For the past century specialized talent agen-
chindonya troupes have cies operate. Almost all
undergone many cycles are family businesses run
of waxing and waning. by chindonya. A few
By 1910, when newspa- businesses have taken on
pers and other means of young apprentices, but
advertising had become most cannot afford to
widespread, many of the hire outsiders as perma-
performers left their nent employees. A num-
troupes to work as “com- ber of young performers
mentators” (benshi) or who have studied with
musicians in silent-movie the masters dream of
theaters. When talkies starting advertising agen-
were introduced less than cies themselves, but jobs
two decades later, many nowadays are scarce.
turned back to street Whereas _ traditional
performance, joined by The traditional chindon drum pictured above is named for the chindonya troupes are
touring actors and vari- sound of the instrument's gong (chin) and of its drums (don). still declining, a new

50 NATURAI HISTORY May 2003

 Asian countries outside Japan. Since 1997 the
firm has released two CDs and two videotapes.

According to Hayashi Kojiro, founder of

£\Chindon Tsdshinsha, the role of the
chindonya at some events goes beyond mere
entertainment and approaches the religious
function formerly filled by practitioners of
ancient folk rituals. Virtually no practitioners
of those old art forms are left today, and so
the chindonya are called on to administer
cleansing rites for new homes and to per-
form songs and dances of benediction. Wear-
ing fairly traditional costumes, chindonya
can create an auspicious atmosphere, though
in fact they are closer in character to cabaret
artists than to folk artists.
Whether or not such initiatives can give the
chindonya another chance for survival remains
to be seen. Veterans and young members alike
complain about the emphasis on formal social
events and folkloric performances. Such prac-
tices, they say, will bring about the downfall
of the traditional role of the chindonya: street
advertising. That may happen anyway; it
would be rash to predict otherwise, given the
economic realities of marketing in modern
Japan. But it would be just as unwise to pre-
dict that the waves of nostalgia and continued
The oyakata (leader and owner) ofa chindonya agency in Osaka antiquarian interest in chindonya will come to
dips gracefully on the streets of Kyoto. an end anytime soon. O

trend has been successfully pro-

moted by one Osaka-based
agency, Chindon Tsdshinsha. Be-
sides doing advertising for small
clothing boutiques, restaurants,
video shops, or beauty parlors, eeTC
4

the firm, which procures about ay

700 job engagements per year,
also carries out campaigns for SY.
4af)
politicians, city officials, and large
companies. In addition, there 1s a
great demand for chindonya to
perform onstage at company
celebrations, wedding parties,
and summer festivals in commu-
nities in and around Osaka. By
taking on engagements from
Japanese businesses with foreign
peony
SSS
1
offices, as well as from festivals :
. ea
&

based abroad, the performers in

the agency have also made
appearances in Europe, New
Zealand, the United States, and in A handbill from 1900 shows a musical band advertising a local miso soup shop.

May 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 51

 Temples for Wa
ter
The stepwells of western India were a magnificent architectural
solution to the seasonality of the water supply.
Text and photographs by Morna Livingston

bapur Stepwell at Budthal, in the state of Gujarat, India, built in approximately

vater table is high, the well’s bottom story is underwater
 or all of recorded his- n concept, the Indian step-
tory the land that is well is cunningly simple.
now western India has Monsoon rain is caught in a
been seasonally arid. The depression or behind a hand-
western monsoon sharply di- built earthen dam. The rain-
vides the annual cycle into water percolates down through
wet and dry, making the earth fine silt, which screens out
glisten with rain for three particulates, until the water
months, then leaving the sur- reaches an impermeable layer
face parched for the remain- of compact clay that keeps it
ing nine. In the dry months — Small relief sculpture ofa swirling shrub, from sinking deeper into the
the rivers shrink to a trickle Vadthal Stepwell, 16th century ground. In that way the
or even disappear. muddy runoff of the monsoon
Millennia ago, to make it possible to survive is stored near the surface as a giant sheet of clear
with such a drastically variable water supply, the water: an underground aquifer.
region’s inhabitants began to devise ways of man- A Gujarati stepwell simply penetrates the
aging and mediating the resource. In southwestern aquifer. It is filled by seepage; there is no obvious
Gujarat, in the late sixth and early seventh cen- water current. The fall and rise of the water level
turles A.D., anonymous masons dug deep trenches at the bottom of the well reflects the droughts and
into the earth to reach dependable, year-round deluges at the surface. A long staircase, punctuated
groundwater. Building upward, they lined the with landings, leads down to the well at the bot-
walls of the trenches with huge stone blocks, laid tom. When the water table is high, during and
without mortar, and paved the slope of each shortly after the monsoon, the visitor descends
trench with stone stairs leading up from the water. only a few steps to drink or bathe or fill the house-
Thus were built the first stepwells—visible archi- hold vessel; when the water is low, she must de-
tecture that gave access to an invisible landscape of scend farther, as deep as nine stories down, to
underground aquifers. where the final flight disappears into clear, dark
The idea proved immensely practical, and so it water. At each landing is an open porch, supported
soon spread northward to what is now the state of by columns and protected from exposure to the
Rajasthan, to areas barely moist enough to farm. broiling sun, where the visitor can pause to enjoy a
Ultimately, several thousand stepwells were built quiet moment in the cool shade.
in the towns and villages of western India. The Much of the soil in the stepwell region is a fine
grandest period of stepwell construction spanned alluvium (which is what makes it such an effective
half a millennium—from the late eleventh water filter), eroded from the western Himalaya,
through the sixteenth century—dotting the coun- far to the north. Broken down as it travels, and
tryside with exquisitely embellished public monu- broken down further by 5,000 years of farming,
ments, the most extravagant of which is the Rani the soil holds few rocks. Hence the stone for con-
ki Vav, or Queen’s Stepwell, at Patan, Gujarat. structing the stepwells had to be brought on
Owing to its delightful qualities and lucid de- wooden-wheeled oxcarts from distant quarries to
sign, the stone stepwell remained the state of the the chosen sites. Brahmin theologians planned the
art in Indian water management for more than a monuments; low-caste artisans called somparas did
thousand years. Yet with the onset of the British the engineering and hard labor. Diggers moved
Raj in India in the nineteenth century—and with the dirt with hoes and lifted it in baskets; masons
it, the installation of pipes and taps for drawing plied their trade with poles and ropes, hammers
and distributing water—stepwells fell on hard and chisels. Some of the workers were women—a
times. The demise of the stepwell as a source of practice still evident in the region today.
water, as a gathering place, and as a focal point for The heavy blocks of stone were marked with
many of the deepest feelings of the local people hand-size, deeply carved numbers and letters to in-
has brought about a tangled mix of environmen- dicate their intended placement; the somparas,
tal, social, and even religious consequences that though illiterate, were nonetheless highly skilled at
continue to unfold to this day. interpreting the marks and then fitting the muddy

May 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 53

 blocks together by touch, in accordance with the husband’s family, she does a good deal of the
building plan. All the effort and expense were sup- work.) At least at the stepwell she could laugh and
ported by a flourishing trade in such items as in- joke and splash with other young women who
digo dye, perfume ingredients, and locally printed were equally isolated by the strict patriarchy that
fine cotton cloth. Stepwells were prestigious public prevailed in much of South Asia.
gifts, and the financing of them was worthy of Women also frequented stepwells as an indirect
great and wealthy patrons: queens, wives of promi- consequence ofa Hindu doctrine holding married
nent traders, even successful prostitutes. women solely responsible for the gender of their
A stepwell was host not only to people but also to children. As is still the case today, women remained
entire communities of bees, fish, lizards, palm squir- low in the family hierarchy until they gave birth to
rels, parrots, pigeons, and turtles. Images of fish, a boy, and so even unmarried girls performed ritu-
shrimp, and snakes were carved into half-hidden als intended to make them mothers of men.
walls and obscure nooks, delighting anyone who
encountered them. With the arrival of every mon-
soon, the whole world joined the stepwell in hatch- Going to the well was often
ing, sprouting, recharging, and refreshing. But even the lone independent activity
the pleasures of water cannot explain the staying
power of the stepwell as an institution: its almost permitted to young women.
unvarying form, its appeal to donors, its astounding
beauty. Those persistent qualities derived from its For both girls and women embedded in this set
role as a dramatic and imaginative metaphor for the of beliefs, one of the few comforting acts was to
Ganges, the greatest of India’s rivers: Gujarati step- beg for help from the mother goddess, Devi, who
well inscriptions explic- lived in every stepwell. They could worship Devi
itly declare that the by bathing—for water is believed to be one of the
water found in them forms the goddess takes—or by invoking her name
comes from the Ganges. while pouring water over their heads. Not surpris-
Thus to bathe in a step- ingly, then, most stepwells included shrines to
well was to take a ritual Devi, adorned with garlands of fresh flowers, strips
bath in that sacred river, of silk, oil lamps, incense, jewelry, and vermilion
and thus to attain the pigment. Women even sprinkled milk on the walls
Hindu pilgrim’s dream around the shrine and on the parapet surrounding
of reaching the sacred the top of the well—in hopes that their symbolic
city of Varanasi. act would bring them plenty of good breast milk
for their children [see photograph at top of page 56].
i the heat of the day The mother goddess is central to women’s lives,
men, rested sin athe and the term Mata, or Mother, figures in the names
cool pavilions of step- of perhaps a third of the stepwells—Mata Bhavani,
wells, but women were Matri Mata, Bhadrakali Mata.
the ones most deeply Women born into the lower castes, however,
associated with water. were excluded from the stepwells. Traditionally, all
Throughout the region low-caste individuals would have obtained drink-
they collected water ing water from muddy pools near the boundary of
in a lhota, a round- a village—unless someone from a higher caste drew
Reflection in clear water, Anko! Mata Stepwell, bottomed, short-necked it for them as an act of charity. Such restrictions on
Davad, 11th century
jar with a wide lip that access to a nominally public water source throw
kept the liquid from into sharprelief the age-old contradictions between
spilling. They carried the jar, often for long dis- the demands of doctrine and the necessities of life.
tances, atop a cloth ring that cushioned their heads.
(Even today, when most villages have communal Pee differences—generally such an
water taps, the water must still be carried home.) explosive and destructive issue—played a
But going to the well was not simply an onerous creative role in the development of the stepwell.
task. Often it was the lone independent activity Beginning in the mid-eighth century, Muslims
young women were permitted, and so in fact it began to wrest control of various Hindu kingdoms
was a welcome respite. (To this day in much of through many small conquests. By the end of the
India, when a bride moves into the home of her twelfth century, Muslim sultans had come to ascen-

YATURAI HISTORY May 2003

Seeing the sky from four stories down: The Rani ki Vav, or Queen's Stepwell, Patan, late 11th century

dancy in Gujarat, marking the onset of many cen- wells nearby. Among them are Queen Rudabai’s
turies of Islamic power in the region—and the end Stepwell at Adalaj and the Ambapur Stepwell at
of the glory days of the Hindu stepwell. By the early Budthal, the most majestic ever built.
fifteenth century India’s medieval Hindu kingdoms
had largely dissolved. Yet the stepwell itself lived on. t was only with the British rise to power in
India’s Muslims were cosmopolitan people, more India in the early nineteenth century, that op-
interested in politics, war, and trade than in agricul- position to stepwells as key elements of the Indian
ture; their soldiers operated under a mandate, water system emerged. To the British, stepwells
amounting to a religious injunction, never to harm were a sanitary disaster. The installation of rural
a stepwell, even in war. The Muslims brought to taps became a top priority of the Raj. Not without
India the secular, social traditions of the hamam, or reason, the British colonialists feared disease from
bathhouse, and the geometric, nonfigurative tradi- the mixing of bathing and drinking water; more-
tions of Islamic ornamentation. In 1411 the sultans over, the stepwells hosted a waterborne parasite,
established Ahmadabad as their first Indian capital; the guinea worm.
soon afterward they built a series of elegant step- Postcolonial, independent India continued the

HISTORY So
 British policy of promoting villagers are repossessing and rehabilitating them
taps instead of stepwells. But as homes for Devi. They ornament the stepwell
to bring water to those taps, shrines to the goddess in much the same colorful
the Indian government em- way as they decorate their own homes for festivals,
barked on the construction imbuing otherwise austere, monochrome stepwell
of gargantuan dams. Partly entrances with afestival air.
by accident and partly by de- At the same time, historians and preservationists
sign, those projects have have begun to recognize the value of stepwells as
helped cause the destruction superb works of architecture, ancient monuments
of an important but unsung that deserve to be left intact and be protected.
component of the medieval Their potential for tourism, moreover, has not
water system: the many gone unnoticed by the government: officials from
thousands of earth-walled the Archaeological Survey of India have begun to
a
“ %
v dams that slowed the mon- charge admission. Those “official” uses, of course,
soon runoff, protecting top- run head-on into conflict with the more exuber-
wit F;
j
aM eekatiie
»Se
Walls surrounding shrines to Devi, the soil and giving rainwater ant ways that villagers have been incorporating the
mother goddess, are often white with time to seep into the ground buildings into their own popular culture.
dried milk. and replenish the aquifers. As A newly adopted stepwell is quickly embell-
for the stepwells themselves, ished with welded metal—considered, in all its
some became repositories for trash and old tires, a forms, a symbol of status. The government leans
few became the basements of new buildings, oth- toward installing metal fences, gates, and toll-
ers became latrines. In Mehmadabad, Gujarat, a booths, whereas the villagers prefer shrine doors,
large apartment block collapsed into a stepwell turnstiles, handrails, and occasionally a pergola.
near the market. Yet scores of wells remain usable. The government’s color choice is gray or rust,
Gujarat’s stepwells rode out a magnitude 7.6 and its additions always have a lock and key; the
earthquake that struck the Indian state on January village work is multicolored and does not prevent
26, 2001; their large, flat stones, superbly joined entry. Even when electricity is installed, it con-
and weighted down by the stones above them, are veys the differences in cultural perspective: near
hard to rock [see “Shaken to the Core,” by Susan government stepwells it lights a toll booth; at vil-
Hough and Roger Bilham, February 2003]. Much lage stepwells it enables the locals to see the god-
more destructive to the stepwells in the long run dess more clearly.
have been powerful pumps and increased irriga- Regardless of which patron gains the upper hand,
tion, both of which can lower the water table though, none 1s likely to reintroduce the stepwell as
until a stepwell no longer reaches it, or until salt, a way to mitigate the chronic water shortages that
saltpeter, or petroleum contaminate the water, continue to plague this part of the Indian subconti-
permanently ruining its nent. Disputes over
taste. Today the once- water rights in the dry
wholesome water— season have become al-
proclaimed by some of most daily news. Today
the inscriptions in the the stepwells are more
stepwells to be “as like footnotes to a miss-
sweet as milk”—is just ing text—a vanishing
a memory. way of life—than solu-
tions to the water prob-
; |owadays the con- lem. What they offer
SSristiswms), Mtliaty the modern age is their
once upon a time, step- igiaicamaaaais prc beauty, their solidity,
wells were a fine thing. Miciteead aay and the intelligence of
Villagers still look ‘ their engineering, all of
upon them fondly, not which speak volumes
as water wells but as about how people were
open, public spaces. once willing to match
No longer interested in their demands to the re-
drinking from them or newable capacities of
bathing in them, the Secondary staircase in the Rani ki Vav the planet. O

56 NATURAL HISTORY May 2003

the water at Narayan Rac
 THIS LAND

tain the dry forests, striking at least

once every twenty to forty years

irning Woods
(large fires are becoming less fre-
quent, however, because of increased
control). The characteristic species
are fire tolerant, usually surviving be-
cause they have extensive under-
Small variations in elevation create the strange habitats ground root or rhizome systems. In
one twenty-square-mile zone of
of New Jersey’s pine barrens. pitch-pine forest, the fires have
burned every ten to twenty years, and
By Robert H. Mohlenbrock the pitch pines and associated species
grow only four to ten feet tall. Such
t frequent intervals between fiable habitats. Highest are two kinds stands are known as pine plains or
135 million and five million of dry forests, one dominated by dwarf pine forests. East of Brendan T.
A years ago, the sea covered pitch pine and one dominated by Byrne State Forest, along State Route
what is now the coastal plain of New oaks. Bogs (the third habitat) and 72 just west of its junction with
Jersey, depositing clays, silts, sands, cedar swamps (the fourth) occur in County Road 539, the trees are only
and gravels. The sandy soil covering the lowlands. All four natural com- a few feet tall. Standing among them,
the plain today is acidic and low in munities appear here and there the average adult can feel like a giant.
fertility; it also retains little water, throughout the national reserve, but About seven and a half miles north
creating arid conditions that give rise large continuous acreages of the pine of the same junction is Webb’s Mill
to fires. Most plants cannot survive in barrens are also administered by the Bog, one of my favorite bogs in the
such a hostile environment, but the state: Wharton State Forest, Brendan pine barrens. It is the most accessible
ones that do make up a distinctive T. Byrne (formerly Lebanon) State because it is surrounded by a metal
forest called the pine barrens. Forest, and Belleplain State Forest. walkway. Bogs develop in low depres-
Extending as far inland as fifty Historically, fire has helped main- sions where as much as two feet of
mules, the coastal plain comprises two
sections. The wide, outer plain grad-
ually rises from the New Jersey coast
to a crest of low hills. Beyond that, a
narrower but more fertile inner plain
slopes down to the bank of the
Delaware River. The pine barrens
comprises more than 2,000 square
miles of the outer coastal plain, about
a fourth of the state. Much of it is
uninhabited, but because ofthe acid-
ity of the soil, some zones have been
cleared for raising commercial crops
of blueberries and cranberries. Here
and there towns and villages have also
been established. In 1978, concerned
that development would obliterate
the natural environment, the U.S.
Congress designated the area the
New Jersey Pinelands, the first so-
called national reserve.
The pine barrens terrain is rela-
tively flat, never rising more than 200
feet above sea level. But minor differ-
ences in elevation create four identi- Atlantic white cedars inhabit a lowland zone.

wn NATURA HIS PORY May 2003

standing water collects. stems several inches
Atlantic white cedars above the surface of the
scattered amid the other water, and the yellow
vegetation remain asphodel is spectacular
stunted as long as the in late June and early
water is deep, growing July. Here and there are
no more than four feet patches of American
tall. As a bog fills in white water lily and
with dead vegetation, Engelmann’s arrow-
including the highly head. The curly grass
acidic cedar leaves, fern can be found
however, the water be- curled up on mounds
comes increasingly of sphagnum.
acidic, discouraging the yt

growth of some plant Pitch pines, above left, withstand arid conditions. Above right: Cedar Swamp Although
species. At the same Curly grass (a fern) grows in Webb’s Mill Bog. the principal tree is
time, the area starts to Atlantic white cedar,
dry out, and the cedars begin to grow cowwheat, low frost weed, turkey the canopy also includes red maple,
straight up as high as seventy-five beard, and bracken fern. sweet bay magnolia, gray birch, and
feet, shading (and thereby stunting or black gum. Coastal sweet pepper-
killing) many of the small plants be- Oak forest Scarlet oak, white oak, bush, highbush blueberry, and
neath them. The habitat is thus trans- black oak, and chestnut oak prevail in swamp azalea are the predominant
formed into a cedar swamp. the canopy; pitch pine is a secondary shrubs. Beneath the woody plants
The pine barrens of New Jersey is species. Other trees are blackjack oak, grow netted chain fern, cinnamon
the northernmost range of 109 south- post oak, and sassafras. The shrub layer fern, sensitive fern, and various
ern plant species. Among them are includes lowbush blueberry, black sedges and rushes.
turkey beard, golden-crest, and yellow huckleberry, dangleberry, staggerbush,
asphodel. Botanists have also discov- inkberry, and sheep laurel. The forest
ered fourteen species of plants more floor is home to the same species that
common farther north that reach their grow in pitch-pine forests.
southernmost limit in the pine bar-
rens. Rarest and most unexpected of Dwarf-pine forest Pitch pine is the
those are broom crowberry, a wiry main tree, but blackjack oak, bear
shrub with crowded, quarter-inch- oak, and chestnut oak are also com-
long leaves and black berries, and mon. Shrubs include broom crow-
curly grass, a fern that has small curly berry, mountain laurel, sheep laurel,
leaves that look like immature grass. sand myrtle, golden heather, black
huckleberry, and lowbush blueberry.
Delaware Bay
HABITATS Other species include trailing arbu- ee |()
tus, bearberry, wintergreen, inkberry, miles

Hat
Pitch-pine forest Made up primarily sweet fern, flowering pixie moss, and
of pitch pine or a mixture of pitch cowwheat.
pine and shortleaf pine, this kind of For visitor information, contact:
forest often includes a few broad- Bogs Interspersed with stunted Wharton State Forest
leaved trees, particularly blackjack Atlantic white cedars are hummocks 4110 Nesco Road
oak, post oak, and chinquapin oak. bearing purple pitcher plant, three Hammonton, NJ 08037
Several low-growing shrubs, such as kinds of sundews, tuberous grasspink, 609-561-0024
lowbush blueberry and black huckle- snakemouth orchid, racemed milk- www:state.nj.us/dep/forestry/parks
berry, are common. The few non- wort, golden-crest, a pink Saint-
woody species include little John’s-wort, and two creeping spe- Robert H. Mohlenbrock is professor emeritus
bluestem, wintergreen, Virginia cies of wild cranberry. A large, ofplant biology at Southern Illinois University
tephrosia, wild indigo, tall oatgrass, yellow-flowered bladderwort sends in Carbondale.

May 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 59

 REVIEW i
4

Hydro Dynamics
Forget oil. Sharing freshwater equitably poses political conundrums
as explosive and far-reaching as global climate change.
By Sandra Postel

Imost all the water on our people come along to mine it or move the Euphrates from flowing into Syria
planet—more than 97 per- it. Water flows naturally across na- and Iraq for a month in order to fill
cent—is undrinkably salty. tional and other political boundaries, the reservoir behind the Ataturk Dam,
Of the remainder, more than two- creating unique political problems. the centerpiece ofa massive irrigation
thirds is locked up in glaciers and ice Those problems are only going to in- and hydropower scheme in Turkey’s
caps. Only a minute share of Earth’s crease. By 2025 some three billion impoverished southeastern region.
water, less than one-hundredth of people will live in places where it will Turkey had warned its downstream
1 percent, is both fresh and renewed be difficult or impossible to get neighbors the preceding November
each year—a total of 110,300 cubic enough freshwater to satisfy all of their that it would soon start filling the
kilometers of freshwater that circu- peabeial sh h reservoir, and offered to increase river
lates annually among the sea, air, and flows for several weeks so that the two
Water from Heaven: The Story
land in an endless cycle, driven by the countries could store additional sup-
of Water from the Big Bang
Sun. After it falls as rain or snow, plies beforehand. Instead, Syria and
to the Rise of Civilization,
much of this water returns to the at- Iraq protested the river stoppage.
and Beyond
mosphere through evaporation, or by Turgut Ozal, then president of
by Robert Kandel
transpiration from plants. Only a bit Turkey, promised his neighbors that
Columbia University Press, 2003;
more than a third of the total, about his nation would never use its control
2279oD)
40,700 cubic kilometers a year, runs of the river to “coerce or threaten
back to the sea via rivers, streams, and them,” an assurance that undoubtedly
Water Wars: Drought, Flood,
underground aquifers. rang hollow, given his government’s
Folly, and the Politics of Thirst
That portion of a portion 1s all the veiled threat just a few months earlier
by Diana Raines Ward
runoff available for irrigating crops, to cut the Euphrates’ flow because of
powering turbines, supporting indus- Riverhead Books, 2002; $24.95 Syria’s support of Kurdish insurgents.
(ee
ee ee eee
tries, and quenching people’s thirst. It (In fact, the perpetual lack of agree-
also sustains fish and other aquatic industrial, food, and household needs. ment between the two nations on
life, dilutes pollution, moves sediment In their different ways, the new books water was reported to be part of
to deltas, delivers nutrients to produc- by Robert Kandel and Diane Raines Syria’s motive for helping the Kurdish
tive coastal estuaries, and performs a Ward each offer a useful perspective separatists in the first place.)
host of other ecological jobs collec- on this fact of life in the twenty-first The Ataturk Dam was just the be-
tively worth hundreds of billions of century: the world is entering an un- ginning. Turkey’s $32 billion South-
dollars a year. Freshwater is therefore precedented period of water stress. _ eastern Anatolia Project includes
much more than a strategic resource twenty-two dams on the Euphrates
such as oil or uranium; it is a funda- he Tigris-Euphrates river basin, and Tigris Rivers, the irrigation of 4.2
mental life support, and the part of it that all-too-familiar geopolitical million acres of land (an area larger
that people can sustainably access is hot spot, gives a hint of things to than the state of Connecticut), and
much smaller than all the blue on a come. The Euphrates River origi- the generation of 27 billion kilowatt-
world map would suggest. nates, like the Tigris, in the mountains hours of electricity annually. At full
In fact, freshwater is a uniquely im- of eastern Turkey; it then flows south- scale the project could reduce the Eu-
portant resource because, for most of ward through Syria and Iraq before phrates’ flow into Syria by 35 percent
its uses, it 1s not replaceable by any emptying into the Persian Gulf. In in normal years and by substantially
other substance. And, unlike most re- January 1990 Turkey flexed its water more in dry ones—not to mention
sources, it does not stand still until muscle in a big new way: it stopped polluting the river downstream with

60 JATURAL HIS PORY May 2003

 David Goldes, Collecting water from table, 2002

salts and chemicals. Iraq, third in line trolled by Homo sapiens, not by nature. terfowl, and other river-dependent
for Euphrates water, would see a drop A river has a distinctive pattern of species. Yet with our dams, reservoirs,
as well. Those two rivers, the fluid high and low flows, a flow signature and diversion canals, we human be-
backbone of the ancient Sumerian, that reflects the climate, geology, ings have dramatically altered the
Assyrian, and Babylonian civilizations, vegetation, and other natural features quantity and timing of natural river
are in for a colossal change—and so of its watershed. Through the seasons flows. It will take the best of science,
are the region’s politics. of the year and over the decades, those technology, management, and ethical
The same unfolding story line is natural variations have created the awareness to figure out how to meet
being played out, with different actors habitat conditions to which the life the water and food needs of the bur-
and at different intensities, in many within that river system has adapted. geoning human population while
5
other parts of the world—including Floods cue fish to spawn, for instance, eaving enough for nature's needs,
the U.S. Southwest, southern Africa, and trigger certain insects to begin a
the basin of Central Asia’s Aral Sea, new phase in their life cycles. Floods I: Water from Heaven, Kandel, a se-
and the Nile and Jordan river basins, also bring seasons of life to a river's Anior scientist with the French Na-
to name a few. Most of the planet’s floodplain, creating habitats crucial to tional Scientific Research Agency,
large rivers, in fact, are already con- the breeding and feeding of fish, wa- begins
oS
at the beginning. He takes us

; |
May 2003 NATURAL HISTORY i
 all the way back to the big bang and cycles. Instead, we take it all for
through the creation of our solar sys- granted. For the past several thousand
tem. He explains in fascinating detail years people have altered those cycles
the origins of water on planet Earth in innumerable ways to satisfy their
and how the molecules of water have needs and wants.
circulated throughout time.
Liquid water has been on our planet he earliest to do so on a substan-
for at least three billion years. Nowa- tial scale were probably the
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Some water molecules are trapped
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suddenly into the atmosphere through their fields, giving rise to the world’s
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62] NATURAL HISTORY May 2003
built two large dams a day, every day, relatively little space is devoted to the Arab-Israeli wars, Israel controls
for the past half century. water wars in the conventional sense of the lion’s share of the water in the
that term. Both Ward and Kandel con- Jordan basin, including important re-
hat monumental scale of water fine their discussions of modern hy- serves of groundwater under the West
development and the drudgery dropolitics largely to the Jordan, Nile, Bank. Because Israel’s per capita water
and disease suffered daily by the 1.1 and Tigris-Euphrates river basins. use far exceeds that of its neighbors
billion people who still lack safe drink- Perhaps, though, they have good (even in the occupied territories, Is-
ing water are what preoccupy Diane reason to limit and so sharpen their raeli settlers consume about five times
Raines Ward, a writer based in New focus: in none of these hot spots of more water per capita than the Pales-
York City. Ward’s interest in water pol- water dispute 1s there yet a basin-wide tinians do), any hope for lasting peace
itics stems from interviews she con- treaty that clearly and fairly allocates in the region will have to include a
ducted for the international edition of the available water among all the par- more equitable apportionment.
Newsweek in the late 1980s in Turkey, ties. Thanks to lands acquired during As for the Euphrates, Syria and Iraq
where she first learned about the
Southeastern Anatolia Project. In
Water Wars she takes the reader on a THE NATURE OF CULTURE
whirlwind tour of big-dam projects,
large irrigation schemes, and potential VIETNAM
Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit
flashpoints of water tensions around
Edited by Nguyen Van Huy and Laurel Kendall
the world. Her superb storytelling, en-
This fascinating new book offers an informed and
riched by scores of fascinating inter- engaging journey into the social and ritual life of con-
views, more than makes up for what temporary Vietnam. The
the book lacks in analytical exactitude. text is complemented by
Ward illuminates the promise and a rich collection of pho-
pitfalls of large-scale water develop- tographs and illustra- UU

ment with stories from Australia, tions that capture the

Brazil, China, India, Pakistan, Turkey, complexity and nuance
Pat
ofdaily life.
and the United States. She describes eo > KARL AMMANN
Copublished with the
in some detail the Tennessee Valley American Museum of Natural
Authority (TVA), which carried out History and the Vietnam
EATING APES
one of the earliest big-dam develop- Museum of Ethnology by Dale Peterson
ment schemes and became a model $39.95 paperback Afterword and Photographs by
$65.00 hardcover Karl Ammann, Foreword by
for many that came later. Even today,
Janet K. Museveni, First Lady
engineers in India and Pakistan of Uganda
proudly state that the vast engineer- “Beautiful prose exposes the
ing works of the Indus River basin, THE SUNFLOWER FOREST
Ecological Restoration and the New Communion enormity and complexity of
which include the largest contiguous this conservation crisis. It
with Nature
irrigation scheme in the world, drew by William R. Jordan III took great courage to gather
on the TVA’s approach. and present this information.
“In this remarkable book, Bill Jordan, the preeminent
Yet the unsustainability of many of philosopher of ecological restoration, essays nothing
You must read this book.”
those large schemes is increasingly ap- —Jane Goodall
less than mooting the dis-
$24.95 hardcover
parent. In the Indus basin, heavy di- tinction between nature and
versions of river water, overpumping culture. An argument so bril-
SINGING THE
of groundwater, and, most important, liant that it’s a work of art.”
TURTLES TO SEA
soil salinization pose serious threats to —Stephanie Mills, author of
The Comcaac (Seri) Art and
farm productivity in the coming In Service of the Wild
$27.50 hardcover
Science of Reptiles
decades. The morphing of techno- by Gary Paul Nabhan
logical accomplishment into unthink- si Foreword by Harry W. Greene
able potential disaster is a recurring “A wonderful mixture of nat-
theme of Ward’s account: “We began ural history, culture, marine
the mighty engineering works of the biology, and herpetology—
twentieth century in environmental Nabhan at his best!”
—Mark Plotkin, President,
ignorance,” she writes, “and ended
Amazon Conservation Team
the century in environmental crisis.” At bookstores or order $34.95 hardcover
In spite of the title of Ward’s book, (800) 822-6657 « www.ucpress.edu
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
 =
DERSERVIC
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 Own the have had an agreement since 1990 to cases, water shortages could spark the
share the flow that crosses the Turk- flight of ecological refugees, or cause
Last U.S. 90% ish-Syrian border; so far, that has similar humanitarian disasters.
River basins to watch include the
amounted to about half the average
Silver Coins annual natural flow of the river.
Turkey, however, has only a tempo-
Mekong and Salween in Southeast
Asia; the Kura-Araks in western Asia;
Issued for rary agreement with Syria, and has
had no serious negotiations with Iraq
and six basins in southern Africa, in-
cluding the Incomati, Okavango, and

Commerce for more than a decade—eftectively

ignoring the two downstream na-
Zambezi. Although countries in
some of those basins are building
tions’ calls for a final settlement of stronger institutions to promote co-
| TAY VLE RY Te their water dispute. Turkey was just operation over their shared waters,
Quarter and Half Dollar one of three countries (along with most of them have a long way to go.
China and Burundi) to vote against a
1997 United Nations convention that s if sharing water with each other
established two key principles to will not be arduous enough, we
guide international water-sharing: must also share water with nature.
first, the idea of “equitable and rea- The same fixed supply supports hun-
sonable use” and, second, the obliga- dreds of thousands of other species, as
tion not to cause “significant harm” well as the ecosystems on which our
to one’s neighbors. economies depend—a theme neither
Turkey apparently has different Kandel’s book nor Ward’s adequately
ideas about water-sharing. In response addresses. Meeting that challenge is
to Syria’s 1992 requests for more Eu- likely to dominate water management
phrates River water, Suleyman in this century just as much as the
3-Coin Set | Demirel, then Turkey’s prime minis- problem of climate change.
ter, reportedly remarked, “We don’t In the past decade investigators
AN a say we share their oil resources. They
can’t say they share our water
have amassed a large body of evi-

resources.” Turkey does, how-

Brilliant Vativculoted ever, want to sell some of its Water shortages could spark
Struck for U.S. circulation
water. There is a plan to ex- the flight of ecological
port water from another river,
almost 40 years ago — then
the Manavgat, to Israel—an refugees, or cause similar
quickly retired when the U.S.
Mint ceased to issue solid silver
idea the Israeli government humanitarian disasters.
has recently warmed to.
coins for commerce after 1964. In the years ahead tensions
They ended a 170-year U.S. over water may flare in regions outside dence that the modification of river
tradition. Now get a terrific intro- the Middle East as well. Worldwide, flows is driving many species to ex-
ductory price on pristine Brilliant there are 261 rivers shared by two or tinction and disrupting natural cycles
Uncirculated quality. You’d pay a more countries, yet in most of those of great value to human activities. At
total of $23.60 in a competitor’s river basins there is no treaty that di- least 20 percent of the Earth’s 10,000
catalog. Set: $9.95 (#38328). vides the water equitably among all freshwater fish species are now en-
Limit 3 sets. Add a total of the parties. In more than twenty -of dangered, threatened with extinc-
$2 for postage and handling. them, disputes could erupt or inten- tion, or already extinct. The pros-
30-Day No-Risk Home sify in the next decade, as nations de- pects for the estimated 100,000
Examination: Money-Back cide unilaterally to begin constructing species of invertebrates and the thou-
Guarantee. To order by credit large dams and water projects—just as sands of species of algae, bacteria, and
card, call the toll-free number Egypt, Israel, and Turkey have done in protozoa that live in freshwater sedi-
below. Or send a check or money their respective basins. Countries ments are uncertain, but biologists
order to: whose water flows are disrupted have no doubt that these organisms
International Coins & Currency would end up suffering from reduced are extremely sensitive to shifting
62 Ridge St., Dept. 4355 agricultural potential, urban and in- water levels, flow magnitudes, and
Montpelier, VT 05602 dustrial water shortages, and environ- other hydrologic alterations.
1-800-451-4463 mental degradation; in the worst Each species plays a role in the web
Order atwww.iccoin.net
(many more great deals) | 4355
of life that keeps the biosphere func-
tioning. Through Kandel’s long lens
of geologic time, the loss of species
and changes in natural cycles may not
nature.net
Se
ee
So want to explore the descriptions of
water resources presented in the
“Ground Water Atlas of the United
be particularly consequential, but
they matter a great deal on the www-dot-H,O States” (go to capp.water.usgs.gov/
gwa and click on “Archive’’).
human time scales that affect us and For the global perspective, try
our descendants. Restoring some of By Robert Anderson UNESCO’s “Water” site (www.
the natural flow of rivers—by operat- unesco.org/water/). Click on “WWAP”
ing dams differently and even by tak- reshwater doesn’t always flow on the list at the left of the page to
ing some down—is crucial to the freely (and free of charge) from find out what events are planned
harmonization of human needs with a tap, and it’s probably worth through the rest of 2003 to cele-
nature’s requirements. knowing, in these days of uncer- brate the “International Year of
tainty, just where it comes from Freshwater.” Those interested in
Be Kandel and Ward devote and how precious it is. The Web water issues in hot spots such as the
only limited space to those is- site, Water: Science for) Schools’ Middle East—where allotment be-
sues, and both books (particularly (ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/) is a great comes increasingly contentious as
Ward’s) could have done a better job place to start, Although the US; populations expand—can access
of analyzing and setting priorities for Geological Survey (USGS), which the list’s “Water Links” to browse
the proposed solutions. Reducing the monitors the nation’s water re- by geographic region [see also
human pressures on the Earth’s finite sources, created the site for class- “Hydro Dynamics,” by Sandra Postel,
water supplies will require much room use, anyone with a general page 60]. And for more insight into
stronger efforts to conserve and recy- question about water will find it conflicts and tensions over water
cle water and to use it more effi- answered here.
ciently. For example, by irrigating More intrepid web surfers should
with drip methods that deliver water click on the site’s “Water” link
directly to the roots of plants, farmers (click on “Links,” then, in the list-
can double or triple their crop yields ings of “Organizations involved
per unit of water consumed. Personal with water,’ click on ‘Water,’ or
choices make a difference too: it takes go to www.sbu.ac.uk/water/index)
twice as much water to provide the for a look at Martin Chaplin’s
food for the average American’s diet “Water structure and behavior.” A
as it does to produce a nutritious veg- professor of applied science at Lon-
etarian diet. don’s South Bank University,
Ultimately, though, it may take a Chaplin offers his own eclectic col-
deeper respect for the beauty and lection of “Water related links.”
mystery of natural water cycles to pre- Another (USGS ‘site’ (“Water
vent us from further manipulating Watch,” at water.usgs.gov/water
them—to inspire us instead to use our watch/) enables you to check the
scientific knowledge and technical conditions of current water re-
know-how to live more in harmony sources around the country. Play
David Goldes, Vortex #1, 1995
with nature, just as our earthly com- around with the options on the
panions do. The story of water on drop-down menus at the top of the use worldwide, go to “The World’s
Earth will flow on, with us or with- page: you can learn where droughts Water” (worldwater.org) and click
out us. But unless we assimilate a big- are developing (click on “Drought on “Water Conflict Chronology.” I
ger dose of ecological wisdom, the Watch’); view a map showing learned there that in 1924 my own
human chapter of that story is un- stream flows in real time (click on water supply, the Los Angeles Val-
likely to have a happy ending. “Real-Time Streamflow”); watch ley aqueduct, was the target of
map animations of changing water bombings by a group opposed to
Sandra Postel directs the Global Water Policy
flow over the course of a month (use the diversion of water from Owens
Project in Amherst, Massachusetts. She is the
author of Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation the second menu to click on “Map Valley.
Miracle Last? (WW. Norton 1999) and Animation—Day of the Year’). If
coauthor of Rivers for Life: Managing your community draws its water Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer
Water for People and Nature, which will be from under the ground, you may living in Los Angeles.
published by Island Press this summer.

May 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 67

 BOOKSHELF By Laurence A. Marschall
RNC ARO A
rocketing off stony chutes, launching licks outside of Yellowstone (where
themselves into space like kids jumping hunters take potshots at the elk in ex-
Hawks Rest: A Season in the
off their swings. change for a hefty fee to the outfitters
Remote Heart of Yellowstone
by Gary Ferguson Surprisingly, though, for a book about who plant the licks to lure the game)?
National Geographic Adventure
the farthest and the wildest, Hawks Ferguson leans “green” on these is-
Press, 2003; $15.00 Rest is mostly about people. sues, a view quite different from that of
To Ferguson’s bemusement, Hawks the gun-toting outfitters and ranchers
Rest (the place) is plenty trammeled. who derive both income and identity
NAGS by its distance from It’s a kind of Grand Central Station of from the wilderness. He tries to be
roads, the Bridger Wilderness, the U.S. outback, a crossroads for all evenhanded, but it’s easy to see where
just southeast of Yellowstone Na- kinds of unlikely characters. Some are his sympathies lie—and if you’re well
tional Park, is one of the most remote eccentrics, #jsuchmtas Loner skagie disposed to his engaging and elucidat-
spots in the lower forty-eight states. It Woman, who hikes the woods every ing prose, it’s not hard to go along with
was there, in a small two-room cabin summer, communing with the beasts him. Soif you favor color-coordinated
called Hawks Rest, that nature writer and the trees. Some are trail-worn Gore-Tex and carry an internal-frame
Gary Ferguson spent an eventful twenty-somethings from the Forest backpack, you'll love this book. But if
eleven weeks last year, enjoying the Service, who turn up to dig out a your gear tends toward canvas and
views of Bridger Lake and the sound rockslide, cut back a deadfall, or res- “camo,” you'll find Ferguson abit irri-
of the Yellowstone River rushing cue a stranded hiker. Rangers from tating. In any case, you will get a sharp
neighboring cabin outposts and ironic sense of what it’s like to live
stop by, eager to swap sto- in the American outback, twenty-
ries of close encounters first-century style.
with grizzlies or—arguably
more dangerous—run-ins
Voyages of Delusion: The Quest
with poachers and angry
for the Northwest Passage
hunters.
by Glyn Williams
Many in the _ passing
Yale University Press, 2003;
crowd are professional out-
fitters, heavy pistols on $29.95
Thomas Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872 their belts, wrangling their
parties of Eastern dudes n this age of technical marvels,
nearby. [hemUs.srorest. Service, who view the out-of-doors as a com- when satellite images of the globe
which hired Ferguson and a friend bination adventure ride-cum-shop- are only a mouse click away (see, for
named LaVoy Tolbert to patch up the ping mall for trophy heads. The only instance, terraserver.microsoft.com), it
place, wound up at the end of the times Ferguson and LaVoy are truly comes as a shock to see how sketchy
summer with renovated living space, alone are when they hike away from are the outlines of continents on maps
a repaired water supply, and a neatly Hawks Rest, up to some windswept of the 1700s. More than two centuries
fenced meadow. More important, mountain vista far from the steady had passed since Columbus’s voyages,
lovers of outdoor writing wound up traffic of backcountry life. but so little of the world had been
with a rousing and evocative look at charted that geography was more a
the charms and trials of life in the \X There there are people, there is matter of speculation than of science.
way-out-of-doors. politics—though politics in the Western sailors knew about just a few
But Hawks Rest is not your usual wild usually centers on the relations islands in the Pacific, had a passing
idyll about the beauty of untrammeled between people (who make policy) idea of the location of Australia, and
wilderness. Sure, there are plenty of and animals (who don’t). Often it only half-believed the rumors of a
passages that make you want to head comes down to the question, Who giant continent in the remote south
for places such as Fall Creek: gets to shoot what and when? So, are and an ice-free ocean around the
the grizzlies treasures or menaces? North Pole (only one of which, of
Dropping 5,000 feet in about five miles. . . .
the creek [is] a series of nearly vertical
Have the wolves reintroduced into course, turned out to be true).
drops broken by icy blue-green pools. Yellowstone enhanced its wildness and As for the New World itself, a
The south wall of the canyon is hung its balance of predator and prey, or do vast northwestern quadrant remained
with thin waterfalls dropping off the lips they pose too great a threat to game unexplored. Some maps—if they
of volcanic ledges, while on the north animals? Should the Forest Service showed anything at all west of the
side the streams are more substantial, vigorously discourage the use of salt Great Lakes—placéd the: “Isle of

68 | NATURAL HISTORY May 2003

|
California” off the western coast of command of Christopher Middleton,
North America. Others charted Alaska set sail in early June 1741. With an op-
as the largest island in the Aleutian timism typical of the age, they carried
Islands chain. orders not only to find the passage but
The speculative European and also to negotiate treaties with the
American geography of the eight- “populous Nations” of the Pacific.
Middleton’s expedition, and all
others to Hudson Bay in the
decades that followed, came to
naught. Promising inlets always
ended abruptly, ships got stuck in
the ice, and men froze, starved,
and died of scurvy. It was no bet-
ter for explorers who, trying a Inside, you'll find over 300 products
different tack, sought the outlet for camping, hiking, cycling, paddling
of the Northwest Passage on the and more. All of our products feature
great prices, outstanding quality and
ay Pacific side. James Cook, on his
L.L.Bean’s 100% satisfaction guarantee.
Boat with corpses of Franklin Expedition, c. 1900 last voyage around the world, fol- Get your FREE Catalog today.
lowed numerous fjords into the
eenth century, according to maritime deeply indented Alaskan coast, meet- Shop online at IIbean.com
historian Glyn Williams, was guided ing nothing but frustration. or call 1-800-246-4290 for a
by a seductive assumption: an easy, FREE Outdoors Catalog. —
ice-free passage connected the At- illiams’s history stops in the
lantic and Pacific Oceans. But the ev- 1790s, but, as he notes in his
idence was scanty; the vastness of the final pages, the disastrous Arctic voy-
North American continent hindered ages continued for another hundred
overland exploration, and ice seemed years. During that time, however, all
to block all the sea routes around the the poking and prodding had some ef-
continent to the north. fect on geographic knowledge. When
One exception seemed to be Hud- Lewis and Clark set out to explore the
son Bay, accessible from the Atlantic Louisiana Territory in 1803, the true
Ocean bya strait that, in a good year, extent of the North American mono-
remained open throughout July and lith was beginning to appear on maps,
August. There was tantalizing evi- and the hope of the mercantile world
dence that beyond the bay was a pas- for a shortcut through the continent
sage to the Pacific Ocean. Whales, had faded. The dream of an open
earnestly believed to have swum from polar sea replaced the dream of a
the Pacific, had been sighted along channel through the continent.
the bay’s western shores, and some re- It was not until 1906, by drifting for
ports of the height and direction of its four years among crushing pack ice,
tides seemed to indicate its connec- that the Norwegian polar explorer
tion to a larger body of water. Roald Amundsen managed to navi-
If you read those signs optimistically, gate an arduous northern route from
as did the Irish legislator Arthur Dobbs the Atlantic to the Pacific. By then,
(an ardent advocate of a Northwest Arctic travel was regarded as an expen-
Passage), all you needed was persis- sive and heroic stunt, and the search
tence. Follow the indented western for a Northwest Passage had become a
shoreline of Hudson Bay and an inlet lesson in the folly of wishful thinking.
would soon be found that led, after at
For your freeOuter ere Travel Guide
most a few hundred miles, into the Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Su- and Getaway Card, call 1-877-298-4373,
balmy Pacific. Dobbs, who never came pernova Story, is the WK. Sahm professor or visit www.outerbanks.org
anywhere near Hudson Bay, managed of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylva-
to persuade the British government nia, and director of Project CLEA, which pro-
that his fantasy was a worthwhile en- duces widely used simulation software for edu-
terprise, and two small ships, under the cation in astronomy.

Orie eau ater s fern yeni OPNTIGef ete

Nags Héad * ene Island | ‘Hatteras Island ©
 OUT,
cc TALERE
That glow has steadily faded and
cooled ever since, diffusing through
ever-expanding space. The tempera-

Sharper Focus ture of the space-filling radiation

(about 3,000 degrees Celsius
light and matter separated) has by
now cooled to a frosty 2.7 degrees
when

above absolute zero. And to say the

Resolving the details of the cosmic microwave background radiation cooled 1s just another way of
has brought new precision to our picture of the cosmos. saying that the average wavelength of
the radiation is no longer fairly short,
like the glow of a blast furnace, but
much longer, about the same length
By Charles Liu as the microwaves picked up by an or-
dinary radio. Astronomers call that ra-
diation the cosmic microwave back-
or the first third of a million extricated themselves from their mu- ground, or CMB. In fact, if you tune
years or so after the big bang, tual grip. By the end of that process, your radio between two AM stations,
matter and energy in the uni- matter could move and coalesce on its about 10 percent of the static you
verse moved in lockstep. Wherever own, forming planets and stars, as well hear is the hiss of the CMB.
matter was relatively dense, so was en- as galaxies, clusters, and superclusters. In spite of the expansion of the
ergy. Then, as space expanded enough Light, on the other hand, simply radi- CMB, it has remained otherwise un-
to accommodate the independent mo- ated outward in its original configura- changed. By contrast, the structure of
tions of material particles and of pho- tion, permeating the expanding uni- the matter in the universe has
tons of light energy, the two gradually verse with a warm, omnipresent glow. changed dramatically. The CMB,
then, is essentially a partial picture of
the universe in its infancy. Not sur-
prisingly, we astronomers have been
mapping it for decades, as precisely as
our technology allows, hoping to un-
cover the secrets it has preserved for
nearly all of cosmic time.
The results of our latest effort—by
the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy
Probe (WMAP)—made headlines
this past February, when cosmologists
unveiled the most detailed picture of
the CMB ever made. Among all the
discoveries reported, one number
stood out. WMAP had enabled cos-
mologists to measure the present age
of the universe with unprecedented
precision: 13,700,000,000 years.
But what the news reports didn’t
emphasize was that—though astron-
omers obviously care how old the
universe might be—arriving merely at
that number would not have justified
Ae
all the time, effort, and resources that
Two maps of the cosmic microwave background, which permeates went into WMAP. Increasingly accu-
space in all directions, highlight recent improvements in the resolution rate observational and theoretical ef-
of satellite observatories that enable astronomers to peer ever more
clearly into the origins and fate of the universe. The map by the Cosmic
forts to measure and deduce the age of
Background Explorer (top), the state-of-the-art observatory just a few the universe have been going on for a
years ago, is now far surpassed in detail by the more recent map by the long, long time; one more measure-
Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (bottom). ment is, at this point, just one more

70 |NATURAL HISTORY May 2003

measurement. What’s really exciting 1s was between 11 billion and 15 bil- And ironically, that’s what many of
that the cosmic microwave. back- lion years old. Now, we're pretty my colleagues feel is WMAP’s main
ground hides, within its fossilized pat- sure that the universe is between contribution: it has confirmed most
terns of light and dark, evidence of 13.4 billion and 13.9 billion years of what we already suspected about
many of the fundamental parameters old. The increased accuracy of the the cosmos, and has lent more preci-
of the universe—its matter density, its result is certainly welcome: it’s a sion to what has been a rather inex-
energy density, its rate of expansion, strong, independent confirmation of act science. So, in a way, the really
and more. From those parameters, as- previous measurements, and it sinks exciting part of this discovery may
tronomers can infer key details about another strong pillar into the foun- be that it’s hardly exciting at all.
the earliest moments of the cosmos, dation—or is it the firmament?—of
and derive a wealth of other proper- modern cosmology. But the mea- Charles Liu is an astrophysicist at the Hayden
ties, including its present age, as well surement doesn't really change any Planetarium and a research scientist at
as its geometric curvature and its most basic scientific conclusions. Barnard College in New York City.
likely final fate.

he methods for mapping the

CMB were as impressive and so-
THE FINAL BOOK FROM THE MAN WHO
phisticated as one would expect of a “REINVENTED THE ART OF WRITING ON SCIENCE’’*
multi-year, multimillion-dollar pro-
ject. The WMAP results were an-
nounced February 11, and on that
day alone, thirteen papers describing n his last book, Stephen Jay Gould
the mission were submitted for publi-
offers a surprising and nuanced take on
cation. Six of those are primarily de-
voted to the technical details of data the complex relationship between our
extraction. In a nutshell, WMAP two great ways of knowing: science and the
scans the sky continuously from the The Fox,
humanities. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the
vantage of one of the Earth’s La- Magisters Pox shows why the common
grange points [see “The Five Points of
assumption of an inescapable conflict
Lagrange,” by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the Magister's : ane ;
April 2002], mapping patterns of hot re between science and the humanities is false
La eesae Noe a ee
and cold in the CMB across the en- pee ee eee and explains why the pursuit of knowledge
tire sky twice each year. That is no
mean feat: the hottest and coldest
STL twen ae must always operate upon the bedrock of
nature’ randomness.
parts of the CMB differ in tempera- De ee
ture by roughly four ten-thousandths
of a degree. (That’s like measuring Praise for Stephen Jay Gould
sand-size bumps on a perfectly flat
living-room floor.) “A poet of Darwinism...
To achieve that level of precision,
WMAP simultaneously measures the brilliant and controversial.”
CMB temperature of two widely sep- —Chicago Tribune*
arated patches of sky, then subtracts
one from the other. The process en- “Gould charms you through science’s dark wood.
ables the satellite to cancel out any He’s a responsible writer, a methodical thinker, and a contagiously
contaminating background signals enthusiastic fan of science’s counterintuitive surprises.”
and to map the sizes and shapes of the —The Nation
CMB’s hot and cold patches with the
highest possible contrast. The ulti- NOW IN PAPERBACK—/ Have Landed, the final collection of
mate goal is to determine the direct Stephen Jay Gould’s essays from Natural History magazine.
imprint of the structure of the nascent
universe on the CMB. “The reader will find . . . joy in abundance.”
So what’s the bottom line? Before —New York Times Book Review
the WMAP results, the general scien-
tific consensus was that the universe Wherever books are sold. ———s

A member of The Crown Heelers aytate Group, waa

aaa eeCO
CrownPublishing.com Peas}
 THE. Siky IN MAY By Joe Rao

ee “three- jected on the card or screen. Your ob- the total phase (from 11:14 P.M. until
star” events serving site should have a low hori- 12:07 A.M.) the Moon should not
draw the eye to the zon just to the north of due east. disappear, but should instead glow
sky this month: a Check the Sun’s rising point a day or with an eerie, coppery hue.
transit of Mercury two beforehand to make sure no trees The umbra appears to slide com-
and a total eclipse or buildings block your view. pletely off the Moon by 1:18 A.M.,
of the Moon. When the Sun rises in North and the last vestige of any shadow will
At sunrise on America, the planet has already begun probably disappear by 1:30 A.M., leav-
the 7th, properly its passage across the solar disk. As the ing the full Moon to shine brightly
equipped viewers duo creeps above the horizon, Mer- for the rest of the night (and perhaps
in parts of the eastern United States cury should be recognizable near the give poets the light to work by).
and. Canadavican "catch themtinal Sun’s upper right limb as a small black
minutes of the transit of Mercury— dot. The dot will reach the edge of \ Jain.Venus rises in the east about
astronomical lingo for the apparent the Sun at 6:29:45 a.o., then take an- an hour before the Sun, as it has
movement of a planet across the solar other four and a half minutes to move all spring. But the lengthening morn-
disk. The event is essentially a solar completely off the Sun’s disk. ing twilight of late spring reduces the
“eclipse” by a body (either Mercury planet’s visibility this month.
or Venus) too far from the Earth to The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured
blot out the Sun’s light. —Shakespeare (Sonnet 107) Mars rises in the southeast at about
A transit of Mercury was once asci- n the night of May 15-16 a total 2:00 A.M. local daylight time on the
entific event of the first magnitude— lunar eclipse is visible from start Ist, shining at zero magnitude. By the
to astronomers, literally worth a trip to finish from eastern North America end of the month its rise comes more
to the ends of the Earth. Careful ob- and from all of South America. In than an hour earlier, bringing it close
servations and timing of the transits most of central Canada and the United to the meridian at sunrise. Its bright-
helped confirm Einstein’s general the- States the eclipse is already under way ness at that point is —0.7.
ory of relativity. Transits of Mercury when the Moon rises; over the Pacific
are pretty rare, too: only fourteen of Northwest and some parts of western Jupiter, crabby or not, is in the constel-
them will take place this century. Canada, the Moon rises entirely in the lation Cancer, the crab. The brightest
Watching this one from the US., Earth’s shadow. Observers in western evening “‘star,’ it appears toward the
though, isn’t the best option. You Europe can see much of the event be- west at sunset, fairly high in the sky,
wont see it at all unless you're east ofa fore moonset and dawn on May 16. and sets in the west-northwest after
line running from roughly Sault Ste. The Moon begins to enter the midnight.
Marie, Michigan, to Charleston, Earth’s outer shadow, or penumbra,
South Carolina—and even if you are, at 9:06 P.M. But the penumbra is so Saturn clings to the horizon in May.
you'll catch only the closing stages of faint that it cannot be recognized The planet remains low in the west-
the event. If you want a better look at until just before the Moon enters the northwest at dusk early in the month;
the entire show—lasting five hours, Earth’s dark central shadow, the ultimately, evening twilight renders it
nineteen minutes—you should plan umbra. By 9:55 pM. the Moon ap- invisible. Saturn crosses Orion’s club
on more serious travel: to central and pears distinctly smudged or soiled on at midmonth.
western Asia, the Arctic, central and its lower left edge, even to the most
eastern Africa, or Europe (save for casual observer. The Moon is new on the Ist at 8:15
Portugal and western Spain, where The umbra begins to nibble at the A.M. It waxes to first quarter on the
the transit is under way at sunrise). Moon’s lower left-hand edge at 10:03 9th at 7:53 A.M., reaches full on the
Transits of Mercury cannot be seen P.M., then slowly engulfs our satellite. 15th at 11:36 PM., and wanes to last
with the naked eye. You'll need at During the total phase the Moon quarter on the 22nd at 8:31 PM. The
least a fifty-power telescope to bring does not usually disappear from view. Moon becomes new again on the
out the “dark dot” of Mercury sil- Although the Earth blocks out all di- 31st at 12:20 A.M. On the same day a
houetted against the Sun’s disk. Eye rect sunlight, Earth’s atmosphere re- ring-shaped, or annular, eclipse of the
safety is always a prime concern when fracts some of the Sun’s rays into the Sun will be visible from central
dealing with the Sun. Never look di- shadow. The blue light of the day- Greenland and from Iceland and
rectly at the Sun through a telescope! time sky is scattered, but the red light northern Scotland.
Rather, hold a white card or screen of sunrise and sunset is more pene-
behind the eyepiece, and you'll see an trating and thus can still shine on the Unless otherwise noted, all times are given
enlarged image of the Sun’s disk pro- eclipsed Moon. As a result, during in Eastern Daylight Time.

AZ NATURAL HISTORY May 2003

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 NATURALIST AT LARGE
PT
RO BE ETN

(Continued from page 26) Then, a routine observation that we Thus, we hypothesize, termite agri-
with nutrient. Both the large hyphae overlooked at first suddenly stirred culture preceded termite cities. The
and the three-celled spores that bud much more of our interest. We antecedents to higher termites and
from the hyphal ends seem well suited checked again several times by remov- their termitaria were protist-infested
to being eaten, but not to dispersal. ing more hindguts. Our Heterotermes’ lower termites fighting off heavy rains
swollen intestines always held wood- and encroaching fungi. This defense
ie spite of their large, conspicuous digesting protists and myriad bacteria, prompted the growth of palatable
shape, the spores were a mystery to but we also spotted three-celled Delor- dots—masses of fungal hyphae and
us; none of our reference books on tia spores. Just to be sure, in the labo- their spores—on the surface of their
fungi were any help in identifying ratory we transferred translucent fun- resident logs. The activity of H. tenuis
them. We sent our information and gal dots to a medium of cellulose-rich now makes it clear that termites devel-
observations to Kris A. Pirozynski, a palm-tree extract. The spores that de- oped the techniques of fungal culture
mycologist who is now retired from veloped on those fungal hyphae were before mound building evolved. And
the Canadian Museum of Nature in also those of Delortia. over time, fungi-tending termites lost
Ottawa. When Pirozynski got our let- Not only had the termites found a their ability to host wood-eating pro-
ter, he called us excitedly. The spores way to control the spread of dangerous tists. Eventually, some of those be-
were Delortia palmicola, he said, but fungi in their nests; apparently, the in- came, as the African Macrotermes have,
sects had also discovered that those fat completely dependent on their fungi
fungal spores could be used as food. for food.
Today’s H. tenuis may not be on
[ is easy to imagine what gave rise the road to becoming aprotist-free,
to such a state of affairs. Fungi and city-dwelling higher termite. Evolu-
rain were an ever-present threat to the tion, after all, is unpredictable in de-
rainforest ancestors of our population tail. But the insect’s behavior in the
of H. tenuis. Only those ancestral ter- face of flooding and luxuriant fungal
mites that could cope with inadver- growth must be remarkably similar to
tently eating the fungal intruder that of its Mesozoic ancestors, which
would have survived. Perhaps the did take such a route. Whether the
Heterotermes ancestors even derived Ecuadorean termites are only analo-
some benefit from the fungus. Delor- gous, or genuinely homologous, to
tia might harbor cellulase, an enzyme the lower termites that were the an-
that breaks down the cellulose in cestors of the mound builders, we
Three-celled spores of Delortia palmicola wood. If so, a Heterotermes termite that have no idea. But with the discovery
ate Delortia would get from the fungus of incipient farming in severely
what kind of tree had the wood come both food—consumable nitrogen, threatened H. tenuis, one pathway
from? Could the tree have been a carbon, and other nutrients—and from lower to higher has been hap-
palm? Several times, he told us, he had cellulases, to help digest wood. pily inferred.
spotted dried and shriveled remnants of Yet there is no question that, de-
Delortia on dead palm trees in East spite the option for casual fungus Jessie Gunnard, a candidate for her Master’s
Africa. The fungus, he felt sure, was as- farming, H. tenuis is a lower termite. degree in the Department of Geosciences at the
sociated with insects, but he had never The presence of certain species of University of Massachusetts in Amherst, hopes
found any insect associations himself. wood-digesting, swimming protists to study next fall in the science writing
Our observations, together with inside H. tenuis is a sure sign that the diploma program at the University of Califor-
Pirozynski’s identification, began to protists digest wood that the termite nia, Santa Cruz. Andrew Wier, a doctoral
make sense. The Tiputini collection eats. No doubt, like all of its many candidate at the University of Wisconsin—
site was thick with palm trees, so our Heterotermes relatives, our Ecuadorean Milwaukee, collects and studies a variety oflive
termites’ log was probably from such a population can rely entirely on the bacteria near hot spring vents in Yellowstone
plant (unfortunately, the rotten log nutrients digested by the protists. Het- Lake. This summer he will dive again in Yel-
lowstone National Park. Lynn Margulis is
had been beyond identification ever erotermes termites are not related di-
Distinguished University Professor at the Uni-
since Wier first encountered it). The rectly to any of the Old World ter- versity of Massachusetts in Amherst, where she
remnants of D. palmicola that Pirozyn- mutes that depend on fungus farming continues to work out her ideas on the evolu-
ski had included in his East African for their food. Evolutionarily speak- tion of nucleated cells by symbiosis nearly forty
fungal survey had probably been eaten ing, the association between fungus years after she first presented itto fellow biolo-
by termites, too, even though the in- and termite in Ecuador must have gists and geologists. She is a member of the
sects had done so out of his sight. begun quite recently. National Academy of Sciences.

74 NATURAL HISTORY May 2003

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 AMERICAN MUSEUM 6 NATURAL HISTORY ro

Irma and Paul Milstein Family

Model of Hall of Ocean Life Reopens
an
MICKENS/AMNH
R. octopus

ne of New York City’s grand- that will transport visitors further into low the ocean level and above, a per-
est spaces, the Museum’s the heart of the ocean realm. spective not possible in nature.
beloved Hall of Ocean Life, The classic dioramas on the lower The mezzanine level of the hall now
reopens this May after a major renova- level have been cleaned and restored, features new exhibits on the major
tion, its first in over 30 years. Current with new lighting brightening areas for- ocean ecosystems, including estuar-
scientific research and cutting-edge merly obscured. In some cases, new ies, mangrove forests, the polar seas,
exhibition technology have been com- backgrounds have been painted from continental shelves, coral reefs, kelp
bined with the restored Beaux-Arts sketches made in the field by exhibi- forests, the deep water column, and
elegance. =
the deep-sea floor. High-
The 29,000-square- =
= definition video of the
Zz

9
foot hall is still domi- 5
S
ecosystems shot on loca-
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nated by the famous

<=
=5 tion around the world
combines with explana-
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blue whale, one of the S
oe
ee

<
Museum’s star attrac- tory text and newly hand-
tions, which now floats crafted models alongside
in a “virtual ocean” historical models to de-
created through dra- pict the tremendous di-
matic lighting, video, versity of the Earth’s seas
and sound effects that and the life therein.
include whale songs. Two new “Spectrum of
The 94-foot female— Life” walls flank the en-
the largest model of trance to the hall. They re-
the largest animal on inforce the idea that all life
Earth—has been mod- is connected through an
ified to reflect current intricate web of evolution-
scientific knowledge of ary and ecological rela-
living blue whales. Above the whale, tion staff. New exhibit text reflects the tionships. One wall depicts vertebrate
skylights gently illuminated by shim- latest information about the elephant life including fishes, reptiles, and am-
mering blue lights contribute to the seals on Guadalupe Island, a school phibians (and even a human), while the
illusion of being submerged in the of leaping dolphins, and northern sea other showcases a profusion of inverte-
depths of the sea. lions from Alaska’s Pribiloff Island, to brates and plants. Interactive computer
Exhibition designers have _ fabri- name just a few. stations in front of each wall provide de-
cated over 600 new models, ranging In particular, the spectacular Andros tails about the biology and taxonomy of
from tiny green bubble algae to a 14- Coral Reef diorama, the only two-level the organisms represented on the wall,
foot-long whale shark to computerized diorama in North America, underwent a as well as information about their
bioluminescent fishes and inverte- complete overhaul to enhance its visibil- “place” in the ocean.
brates. Joining the renovated ocean ity. The diorama’s upper level, covered Three of the Museum’s classic diora-
dioramas created in the 1930s and for the last 30 years, depicts life above mas depicting life in the oceans of the
1960s will be an 18 x 8-foot wall the coral reef. It has been opened for Ordovician, Permian, and Cretaceous
of video combining high-definition display, repaired and restored, and now periods—from 450 to 70 million years
footage of undersea life, animations, offers visitors a breathtaking complete ago—have been meticulously restored
graphics, and an evocative soundtrack view of the coral reef system be- to highlight the history of life in the pri-

THE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HISTORY BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
 mordial oceans. The exhibit features an
ancient seafloor slab from the Jurassic
Period containing the fossilized remains
Milsteins’ Gift Makes
of a horseshoe crab and the tracks of New Hall a Reality
its last journey. Special panels will
showcase several fossil specimens, in- S dedicated supporters of educa- the blue whale—in its newly beautified
cluding cyanobacteria, the first-known tional initiatives throughout New home,” said Irma Milstein. According
life form to emerge in the sea 3.5 billion York City, Irma and Paul Milstein have to Museum President Ellen V. Futter,
years ago. been involved with the American Mu- “With the help of Irma and Paul Mil-
Life on Earth emerged in the oceans seum of Natural History for over a dec- stein, the Museum was able to bring
and much of it stayed there—scientists ade, with Irma joining the Museum's out the best in one of our most beloved
estimate that 80 percent of all living or- Board of Trustees in 1995. Together, treasures, enlivening the hall for mil-
ganisms may live under water. Over 70 they have generously and enthusiasti- lions of visitors today and for genera-
percent of the Earth is covered with cally supported a number of
water and yet very little is known about the Museum's special projects
ae complexity and diversity of life in and campaigns as lead bene-
the oceans. What is known, however, is factors, including the Milstein FINNIN/AMNH
D.

that the oceans play a vital role in sup- Hall of Advanced Mammals;
‘porting life on Earth. The aim of the the Milstein Family Vertebrate
renovation of the Milstein Family Hall Paleontology Moveable Mu-
_of Ocean Life is to open a window onto seum, which some 80,000 chil-
‘the spectacular ocean ecosystems, dren have visited since its
to bring current scientific knowledge launch in 1999; and most re-
about the oceans to the public, and to cently, the Irma and Paul Mil-
Irma and Paul Milstein (second from left and second from
reveal the mysteries and diversity of stein Family Hall of Ocean Life.
right) join Museum President Ellen V. Futter (center) and
this, Earth’s final frontier. The Milsteins appreciate Vice Presidents David Harvey and Barbara Gunn in the hall.
The Milstein Family Hall of Ocean the importance of educating
Life was designed, developed, and people of all ages about the wonders, tions to come. The new Milstein Family
produced by the Museum’s Exhibition mysteries, and threats to our planet's Hall of Ocean Life places a spotlight
Department. The lead curator is oceans. “It has been a wonderfully sat- on the critical role of ocean ecosys-
Melanie L. J. Stiassny, Axelrod Re- istying experience for the whole family tems in maintaining the balance of life
search Curator, Division of Vertebrate to be associated with the Museum, on Earth, and educates the public
Zoology, working with a team of co- which we believe is one of New York about the last great frontier on Earth—
curators including Mark Siddall, As- City’s most fabulous educational re- the marine world. We are so very grate-
‘sociate Curator, Division of Inverte- sources for children and adults. Paul, ful to the Milsteins for enabling us to
brate Zoology; Paula M. Mikkelsen, our 4 children, our 11 grandchildren, share the beauty, the science, and the
Assistant Curator, Division of Inverte- and | look forward to the Hall of Ocean majesty of our ‘blue planet,’ and for
brate Zoology; Neil H. Landman, Cu- Life’s reopening and to seeing our providing such a magnificent model for
rator, Division of Paleontology; and planet's largest creature of all time— others who love the Museum.”
Robert S. Voss, Associate Curator,
Division of Vertebrate Zoology. A project of this magnitude would not have tan in the realization of this project.
= been possible without an extraordinary public- The Museum deeply appreciates major sup-
Zz
=
=
=~
private partnership. The American Museum port from Edwin Thorne and from Swiss Re.
a
aZz
se of Natural History wishes to acknowledge the Significant support also has been provided
ogS
= following donors for enabling us to undertake by The Mare Haas Foundation, Ruth Unter-
oe
the magnificent restoration and rejuvenation berg, MetLife Foundation, and Mikimoto.
of the Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life. Additional generous funding was provided
We are enormously grateful to lead bene- by Jennifer Smith Huntley, Patricia Stryker
factors Irma and Paul Milstein, long-standing Joseph, William H. Kearns Foundation, Denise
friends and patrons of the Museum, whose R. Sobel and Norman K. Keller, Mrs. Frits
spirited passion for education and our world’s Markus, Jane and James Moore, David Netto,
oceans launched this historic project. Mrs. John Ungar, and the Bristol-Myers Squibb
The Museum gratefully acknowledges the Foundation, Inc.
important public support that has been pro- We are also grateful for the funding of edu-
A vided by the City of New York, the New York cational programs provided by The Atlantic
Models of powderblue surgeonfish in the City Council, the Department of Cultural Af- Philanthropies, The Bodman Foundation, and
Coral Reef ecosystem exhibit fairs, and the Borough President of Manhat- The Louis Calder Foundation.
 MUSEUM EVENTS
EXHIBITIONS Einstein The Fate of the Mammoth:
Vietnam: Through August 10, 2003 Fossils, Myth, and History
Journeys of Body, Mind & Spirit Gallery 4, fourth floor Tuesday, 5/13, 7:00 p.m.
Through January 4, 2004 This exhibition profiles this extraordi- Claudine Cohen considers the history
Gallery 77, first floor nary scientific genius, whose of paleontology through the study
This comprehensive exhibition pre- achievements were so substantial of the mammoth.
sents Vietnamese culture in the early and groundbreaking that his name is
21st century. The visitor is invited to virtually synonymous with science in Vietnam: War and Memory
“walk in Vietnamese shoes” and the public mind. Wednesday, 5/14, 7:00 p.m.
explore daily life among Vietnam’s Organized by the American Museum of Panelists share their memories and
more than 50 ethnic groups. Natural History, New York; The Hebrew examine the ways in which the Viet-
z
= University of Jerusalem; and the Skirball nam War drives their current efforts.
a
=
d Cultural Center, Los Angeles. Einstein is
os
ny made possible through the generous support
a
G= Einstein Papers Project
GS of Jack and Susan Rudin and the Skirball
Foundation, and of the Corporate Tour Monday, 5/19, 7:30 p.m.
Sponsor, TIAA-CREF. A panel discussion on one of the most
important scholastic achievements of
The Butterfly Conservatory
the 20th century, the publication of
Paper votive goods like these are burned Through May 26, 2003
Albert Einstein’s collected papers.
for use by the dead. More than 500 live butterflies fly freely
in an enclosed tropical habitat where
Organized by the American Museum of Vietnamese American Contempo-
visitors can mingle with them.
Natural History, New York, and the Vietnam rary Arts Roundtable
Museum of Ethnology, Hanoi. This exhibition The Butterfly Conservatory is made possible Monday, 5/19, 7:00 p.m.
and related programs are made possible by through the generous support of Bernard and
the philanthropic leadership of the Freeman Anne Spitzer and Con Edison.
Artists present their work and discuss
Foundation. Additional generous funding pro- how their experiences as Vietnamese
vided by the Ford Foundation for the collabora- Americans have affected it.
LECTURES AND DISCUSSIONS
tion between the American Museum of Natural
James Watson
History and the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology. Exposing the Deep: Technology and
Also supported by the Asian Cultural Council. on the Double Helix
Thursday, 5/1, 7:00 p.m.
the Art of Underwater Photography
Planning grant provided by the National
Thursday, 5/29, 7:00 p.m.
Endowment for the Humanities. Watson will speak about Francis
Crick, the Human Genome Project, Spectacular 3-D photographs of un-
Discovering Vietnam’s Biodiversity derwater scenes.
and the direction of current research
Through January 4, 2004 on DNA.
Akeley Gallery, second floor
This exhibition of photographs high- Experience the sights
lights Vietnam’s remarkable diversity and sounds of a bustling
of plants and animals.

/AMNH Vietnamese
Marketplace
a
Se
oe
z
wve

at the Museum, throughout

the run of the Vietnam exhibition.
Sample traditional foods
Gold-throated barbet, Ngoc Linh, and take home a
Vietnam
one-of-a-kind handicraft.
This exhibition is made possible by the
77TH STREET LOBBY, FIRST FLOOR
Arthur Ross Foundation and by the National
Science Foundation

OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HisTORY BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
FILM SCREENING Fly Me to the Moon LARGE-FORMAT FILMS
The Deserted Valley Sunday, 5/18, 2:30-4:00 p.m. In the Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak
Saturday, 5/10, 2:00 p.m. (Ages 4-6, each child with one adult) IMAX” Theater
(In Vietnamese with English subtitles)
Stunning cinematography paired with Coral Reef Adventure
minimal dialogue eloquently depicts A fantastic underwater journey to doc-
this universal story set in a remote vil- ument some of the world’s largest and
lage in Vietnam's highlands. Post- most beautiful—and most threat-
screening discussion. ened—reefs.
Astronaut Susan J.
PERFORMANCES Helms aboard the Inter-
Pulse: a STOMP Odyssey
national Space Station
Starry Nights Take a rhythmic voyage of discovery
Friday, 5/2, 5:30 and 7:00 p.m. Humans in Space around the world of percussion and
ave Stryker and Blue to the Bone Saturday, 5/24, 1:00-3:00 p.m. movement.
(Ages 10-12)
rtSynergy: Finding Connections INFORMATION
hrough Music Space Explorers Call 212-769-5100 or visit
aturday, 5/3, 7:00 p.m. Eclipses of the Sun and Moon www.amnh.org.
New works from Kimo Williams and Tuesday, 5/13, 4:30-5:45 p.m.
Nguyen Van Nam, followed by a dis- (Ages 12 and up) TICKETS AND REGISTRATION
ussion. Call 212-769-5200, Monday-Friday,
HAYDEN PLANETARIUM 8:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m., and Saturday,
Nguyen Dinh Nghia and Family PROGRAMS 10:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m., or visit www.
Sunday, 5/11, 1:30 or 3:30 p.m. Mapping the Universe amnh.org. A service charge may apply.
Traditional Vietnamese music. Monday, 5/12, 7:30 p.m.
With Brent Tully, Institute for Astron- All programs are subject to change.
SPECIAL PROGRAM omy, University of Hawaii.
Whale Watch 2003
Become a Member
Friday—Sunday, 5/16-18 Celestial Highlights
of the American Museum
A weekend expedition with naturalists Tuesday, 5/27, 6:30-7:30 p.m.
of Natural History
and educators. Find out what’s happening in the June
sky.
As a Museum Member you will be
CHILDREN’S PROGRAMS among the first to embark on new
Paper-Making Workshop SPACE SHOWS journeys to explore the natural =
Saturday, 5/10, 12:00 or 3:30 p.m. The Search for Life: Are We Alone? world and the cultures of humanity.
(Ages 8 and up) Narrated by Harrison Ford You'll enjoy:

Journey through the Solar System Passport to the Universe ¢ Unlimited free general
Sunday, 5/11, 12:00—1:30 or Narrated by Tom Hanks admission to the Museum
2:30-4:00 p.m. and special exhibitions, and
(Ages 4-6, each child with one adult) Look Up! discounts on the Space Shows
Saturday and Sunday, 10:15 a.m. and IMAX* films
Solar System Adventures (Recommended for children ages 6 ¢ Discounts in the Museum
aturday, 5/17, 1:00-2:30 p.m. and under) Shop, restaurants, and on
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¢ Free subscription to Natural
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unday, 5/18, 10:30—11:30 a.m. Shop Online Rotunda, our newsletter
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including crafts, books, jewelry, special events, parties, and
| Want to Be an Astronaut scientific instruments, and exhibition previews
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(Ages 4-6, each child with one adult) online at www.amnh.org. 769-5606 or visit www.amnh.org.
i
 Of Mice and Masai
By Richard Milner

fter several pairs of house mice determined “Yes, sir, but we have come on an urgent mis-
that my Manhattan flat was a suitable place sion, to show you how to live with your mice.”
to raise their families, they gleefully moved “First ofall, they’re not my mice,” I replied testily.
in. Rather than scurry furtively along baseboards or “T did not invite them. They disturb my sleep, they
hide out until the dead of night, they chased one invade my space, they even defecate near my food.
another in afternoon courtship on my kitchen Disgusting. IfI don’t stop them, they will continue
floor, then brazenly danced up to the table to for- to propagate, carry in fleas and disease, and displace
age for crumbs. I thought of hantavirus and the me from my home.”
Black Plague, yet my first inclinations were kindly: *Rafiki,” said the other one. “We come as friends.
I bought “humane” box Your people have been visit-
traps to capture and relo- ing Africa for years, teaching
cate my unwanted guests. us that we must live with
The next day I found that our wild animals, that killing
the mice had taken my them is not always the cor-
bait but had managed not rect answer.
to get humanely caught. “Now we are returning
Inevitably, though, the the favor. If you are both-
squeals and pitter-patter of ered by squeaks and footfalls
the burgeoning rodent fam- in the night, remember that
ilies increased, and I gave my family must listen to
in. Reluctantly, I purchased hungry lions roaring nearby
some deadly spring traps at midnight. And believe
“baited” with yellow bits of me, sir, you don’t know
perforated plastic. None of what it is to have your food
my little roommates fell soiled until an elephant has
for the faux Swiss cheese; relieved himself on your
the mice went on dancing, vegetable garden.”
dancing, dancing. . . . Suddenly, he pulled a
Next I bought glue Game board, circa 1885 small video camera from
traps, resolving to conk the the wide pocket of his robe.
critters as soon as they were caught. (A slow death in “Do you mind, sir, ifI place a bit of cheese on
a glue trap, I earnestly believe, should disturb any the counter, so I can try to get a sequence of your
thinking, feeling person.) I thought of Tom and Jerry, mice? Most folks back home have never seen the
Mickey Mouse, Stuart Little, and Robert Burns’s line New York City rodents, which are world famous,
about “the best laid schemes 0’ mice and men.” so I’m making a documentary.”
Guiltily, I set out the dreadful glue traps, along with a “Look, Otwani,” said the other excitedly, point-
few spring traps for good measure, and went to bed. ing to the window. “It’s a rock dove, what the locals
call a pigeon, just there on that ledge.”
Lae that night I was awakened by a knock on The two of them rushed to the window. “My
the door. Two Masai gentlemen stood at my gosh,” one shrieked, “I don’t believe it—squirrels!”
threshold, dressed in their traditional robes. And with that, both ran out of the place, slamming
“Jambo,” said one. “Hello. We beg your pardon the door behind them. WHAM!
for the intrusion, sir, but we understand that you I woke up. One of the traps had sprung.
are killing animals here.”
Richard Milner is an associate in anthropology at the Ameri-
“What business is that of yours?” I bristled. “You can Museum of Natural History and a contributing editor of
lin world away.” this magazine.

oO
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 JEUINIES 270)073, VOR UIMIE 12 NUMBER
5

pea
eU Re EAS

42 LOST TIME
Damage control
after the pillaging
ofIraqi antiquities
DAVID KEYS
JOHN MALCOLM
RUSSELL

COVER STORY
34 PATTERNS IN NATURE
The new focus on self-organizing
processes links such diverse phenomena 52 PEERING AT
as a zebra’s stripes and a mound THE EDGE OF TIME
of termites.
In search of the black hole
SCOTT CAMAZINE at the center of our galaxy
FULVIO MELIA

COVER
Ron van Dongen,
Cryptanthus
zonatus, 1999

STORY BEGINS
ON PAGE 34

46 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
Mountain gorillas and chimpanzees share
the wealth of Uganda’s “impenetrable forest.” Visit our Web site at
CRAIG STANFORD www.nhmag.com
 EPA
Rot M:EtNeiesS

THE NATURAL MOMENT

Pretty in Pink
Photograph and text by Gary Noel Ross
UP FRONT
From the Editor

10 CONTRIBUTORS

12 LETTERS

14 SAMPLINGS
Stéphan Reebs
18 UNIVERSE
The Rise and Fall of Planet X
Neil deGrasse Tyson
22 NATURALIST AT LARGE
Impostor in the Nest
Robert Dunn

28 FINDINGS
The Owl That Hunts by Light
Christoph Rohner
SZ BIOMECHANICS
Monitor Marathons
Adam Summers 58 THIS LAND
Ages of Aquarius
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
60 REVIEW
Voyage of the Barnacle
Richard Milner
63 BOOKSHELF
Laurence A. Marschall

70 nature.net
Robert Anderson

72 OUT THERE
Ironing Out the Solar System
Charles Liu
73 THE SKY IN JUNE
Joe Rao

74 AT THE MUSEUM

78 ENDPAPER
Damsels in Distress
Gwen Mergian

PICTURE CREDITS: Page 10

Some people see a brilliant star reasserting his dominan
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Noel Ross
A

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 UiRae RO Noi
THE NATURAL MOMENT
TEE
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~« See preceding pages

Front-Page News
F or more than a decade I’ve been pointing out to anyone who would listen
that science and nature are big news. Disease organisms are news—think of
AIDS, or anthrax, or SARS. Space exploration is news. The crisis in biodiversity
[i ike most other katydid species, is news. Environmental degradation, earthquake prediction, energy resources,
the western round-winged the Iceman, and genetically modified crops are all news. You can’t be current on
katydid (Amblycorypha parvipennis) the events of the day without being on top of what’s happening in science.
is normally green. But throughout Seldom have we at Natural History more keenly felt this observation than
its range, from South Dakota to we have this month. In Baghdad looters rushed into the National Museum,
central Texas, both pink and yel- plundering priceless archaeological artifacts. We decided to cover the disaster
low variants occasionally pop up. primarily by showing some of the artifacts—and leaving the reader to con-
My pink lady—for this was a fe- template the fact that some of them may never be seen again. We also invited
male—was still a wingless juvenile David Keys, a freelance reporter who specializes in archaeology, to pull to-
when I came across her one early gether the main threads of the story so far. Finally, John Malcolm Russell, an
June morning in western Mis- expert in Near East archaeology who wrote “Robbing the Archaeological
souris Wah’ Kon-Tah Prairie. To Cradle” for the February 2001 issue of Natural History, has graciously allowed
get better acquainted with this rar- us to reprint excerpts from his still all-too-relevant article. All three elements
ity, I placed her in a terrarium. are collected under the title “Lost Time” (page 42).
Then I began to worry—the As we go to press, another breaking news story has touched us closely. We
insect wouldn't feed on the greens have learned to our dismay that Subhankar Banerjee, the photographer of
I offered her, all prairie grasses and “Arctic Covenant” in our April 2003 issue, has become caught in the continu-
leaves that should have appealed to ing political cross fire over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
a katydid. But then, observing that (ANWR). Banerjee’s photographs documented the wildlife and flora of the
her color was well matched by the refuge against the stunning backdrop of mountains and floodplain.
pale purple coneflower, I offered On March 19 Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, held up
her a bloom. She immediately Banerjee’s book—from which our portfolio was excerpted—on the floor of the
began to nibble on the petals. US. Senate. Advocates of drilling, particularly Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican
After a few days I tried an exper- from Alaska, had portrayed the region as a barren land, devoid of wildlife for all
iment to see if she got her pink pig- but a few months a year. Boxer challenged that view, citing the book.
ment from the flowers: I started her The reaction was virtually immediate. According to The New York Times,
on a diet of yellow blooms. But Banerjee’s photographs, which were scheduled for display in the main-level
even though she feasted on yellow rotunda at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in
for the rest of her two-month con- Washington, D.C., were moved toa far less prominent gallery there. Captions for
finement, I found no hint of jaun- the photographs were shortened from discursive to telegraphic. A letter from
dice. Apparently the color was in Lawrence M. Small, the head of the Smithsonian, responding to a request for an
her nature, not her nurture. Ongo- explanation by Illinois Democratic Senator Richard J. Durbin, maintained that
ing research on related species, by the earlier captions “might have been construed as advocacy” for ANWR, and
David A. Nickle, an entomologist were therefore excluded as a matter of Smithsonian policy.
with the USDA’s Agricultural Re- The entire episode reflects the personalizing and retributive nature of con-
search Service, and others, is un- temporary political discourse. According to the Times, Stevens had told his
tangling how katydid color varia- Senate colleagues: “People who vote against [the drilling] are voting against
tion 1s genetically determined. me. I will not forget it.” Stevens serves on the Senate oversight subcommittee
Why a pink (or yellow) katydid? for the Smithsonian, as does Durbin, and so the Smithsonian can hardly be
My guess is that the variants, blamed for fretting about its political support. Stevens’s office denies putting
adapted to feeding on diverse kinds any pressure on the museum. But self-censorship—if that’s what it is—is still a
of flowers, help a katydid species slap in the face of free expression, and a repugnant consequence of the strug-
enlarge its niche. The color camou- gle to survive ina climate of intimidation. —PETER BROWN
flage is simply a tool the insects
Natural History (ISSN 0028-0712) is published monthly, except for combined issues in July/August and December/January, by Natural History Magazine, Inc., at the American
need to survive. Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, NY 10024. E-mail: nhmag@amnh.org. Natural History Magazine, Inc., is solely responsible for edito-
rial content and publishing practices. Subscriptions: $30,00 a year; for Canada and all other countries: $40,00 a year. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and at additional
—Gary Noel Ross mailing offices. Copyright © 2003 by Natural History Magazine, Inc, All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without written consent of Natural His-
tory. Send subscription orders and undeliverable copies to the address below. For subscription information, call (800) 234-5252 or, from outside U.S., (515) 247-7631, Postmaster:
Send address changes to Natural History, P.O, Box 5000, Harlan, IA 51537-5000, Printed in the U.S.A

TURAL HISTORY June 2003

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 Gary Noe Ross (“The Natural Moment,” page 6) was
cataloging the butterflies in Missouri’: Wah’ Kon-Tah Prairie
when he flushed out a katydid whose color seemed as out-
landish as the Pink Panther’s. Although based in Baton
PETER BROWN Editor-in-Chief
Rouge, Louisiana, Ross was then serving as “lepidopterist in
™ residence” at the 7.5-square-mile prairie. Formerly a profes- Mary Beth Aberlin Elizabeth Meryman
Managing Editor Art Director
a sor of biology at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Ross
Board of Editors
is Scar of butterfly festivals for the North American Butterfly Association. T. J. Kelleher, Avis Lang, Vittorio Maestro
Michel DeMatteis Associate Managing Editor
To learn more about the complexity of nature, SCOTT
Lynette Johnson Associate Managing Editor
CAMAZINE (“Patterns in Nature,” page 34) became a bi-
Thomas Rosinski Associate Art Director
ologist, a physician, and a photographer. His recent re-
Erin M. Espelie Special Projects Editor
search has largely been devoted to the study of honey bee
Graciela Flores Editorial Associate
societies. Camazine was fascinated by the natural world as a
child, and eventually became obsessed with the question Richard Milner Contributing Editor
of how complex patterns emerge and are maintained in
nature, the subject of his article in this month’s issue. (See
his home page at http://www.scottcamazine.com/.) He is a co-author of Self Organi- Mark A. FURLONG Publisher
zation in Biological Systems, published in 2001 by Princeton University Press. Gale Page Consumer Marketing Director
Maria Volpe Promotion Director
Having spent several years observing the hunting behavior Edgar L. Harrison National Advertising Manager
of chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, Sonia W. Paratore Senior Account Manager

CRAIG STANFORD (“Close Encounters,” page 46) decided Donna M. Lemmon Production Manager _

to study the relations between chimpanzees and gorillas in Michael Shectman Fulfillment Manager

Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Initiated in Jennifer Evans Business Administrator

1996, his Bwindi Impenetrable Great Ape Project (www-rcf. Advertising Sales Representatives
usc.edu/~stanford/bigape.html) examines how much the New York—Metrocorp Marketing, 212-972- 1157, sy
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Astronomer FULVIO MELIA (“Peering at the Edge of Time,’

page 52), an Australian expatriate living in Arizona, wants to Topp Harper Vice President, Science Education
put Einstein’s general theory of relativity to the ultimate test—
by exposing it to the intense gravity of our galaxy’s central, su- NATURAL HisTORY MAGAZINE, INC. |
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Journal Letters, Melia also brings his love for the beauty of the Juby BULLER General Manager :
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PICTURE CREDITS Cover and p. 41: ©Ron van Dongen; p. 12: ©Charles Almon; p. 14 (top): NASA/JPL; (bottom): OW. Savary(SAN-DO); p. 16 (top): photo ©Kate McCulloh; (bottom): ©jim
Brandenburg/Minden Pictures; p. 19: ©Olivia Parker and Robert Klein Gallery, Boston; pp. 22, 25, and 26,: ©Carl W. Rettenmeyer; p. 24: ©Christian Ziegler; p. 28: OR obert P. Carr/Bruce Coleman
Inc.; p. 29: ©PaulJ. Fusco/Photo Researchers, Inc.; p. 30: ©joe McDonald/Animals Animals/Earth Scenes; p. 31: ©Michael Quinton/Minden Pictures; pp. 34-35: ©MichaelJ.Minardi/Peter Arnold; p.
36(bottom), p. 39(left), p. 40(top): ©Scott Camazine; p. 37 (top): Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind ofSaence (p. 52); (bottom): ©Vivian M. Peevers/Peter Arnold; p. 38: (left): © Ed Reschke/Peter Arnold;
(right, and p. 40 middle): © Dee Breger/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; p.39(right): Matt Meadows/Peter Arnold; p. 40 (bottom): David Scharf/Peter Arnold; p. 42(right): Werner Forman/Art Re-
source, NY; p. 42: (left), p. 43:(top right, middle right, bottom); p. 44 (top); p. 45 (middle and right): Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY; p. 42(top), p. 43(middle), p. 44(left, right, bottom), p. 45(bottom), pp.
44-45(top): Scala/Art Resource, NY; p. 46: QOSF/PLUMTRE, A./Animals Animals/Earth Scenes; p. 47 and 50: courtesy the author; p. 48: maps by Patricia J. Wynne; p. 49: ©Stevebloom.com; p.51:
©Lisa Hoffer; pp. 52-57: courtesy the author; pp. 58-59: © Jack Dykinga; p. 59: map by Joe Lemonnier; p. 61 and 62: courtesy Rebecca Stott; p. 61: photo Jackie Beckett/AMNH; p. 63: ©Archivo Icono-
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p. 73: Fanny Brennan, Galaxy, 1997, Estate of Fanny B rennan, courtesy Salander O'Reilly Galleries, NY; p. 78: Art Resource, NY; ©2003 Estate of Alexander Calder/ARS, NY.

AL HISTORY June 2003

A TRAVELING EXHIBITION ABOUT OUR BEST FRIENDS
Produced ygre

NATURAL
HISTORY
MUSEUM
OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY

NO a me UC a
Lal aL aesees er hae Mihai TE.
 LERLERS

A Long Jump standing long jump, but shoulders and hands, ath- only in Vietnam but also
The first literary mention probably not for the com- letes probably would have throughout Southeast Asia.
of the ancient Greek ath- petitive event. Several liter- used them as dumbbells are In Thailand—where, accord-
letic event known as the ary sources recount long used today—as training ing to the English entomolo-
long jump, whose biome- jumps exceeding fifty feet. weights. gist William S. Bristowe,
chanics are discussed in The first Olympic victor David Gilman Romano writing in 1932, “it reaches
Adam Summers’s column in the long jump was University of Pennsylvania the tables ofprinces in
“Throwing Yourself into Lampis of Sparta, who in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Bangkok’ —1t is known as
It” [4/03], is in book VII 708 B.C. won the pen- malaeng da na, Although
of the Odyssey. Homer tathlon—a contest consist- ADAM SUMMERS REPLIES: artificial bug flavoring 1s
presents it as an after- ing of five separate events, Both standing and running now available, the Thais
dinner contest performed including the long jump. long jumps may have been still prefer the real thing.
for Odysseus, but makes The earliest vase paintings ancient Olympic events. More information about
no mention of the use of that depict jumping with The jump shown on many this delectable insect is
halteres, or weights, by the weights date from the sixth vases certainly appears to available in chapters 24
jumpers. century, and the oldest sur- be a standing long jump, and 25 of my online book
Mr. Summers asserts viving weights from about because the arms are mov- “The Human Use of
that the competitive long 600 B.c. So one might ask ing together. In a running Insects as a Food Resource”
jump was a standing event; whether and how Lampis long jump the arms are out (www.food-insects.com).
on the contrary, it seems to and other early long of phase, one behind and Gene R. DeFoliart
have been a running jump. jumpers actually used the other in front. It’s diffi- University of Wisconsin—
That interpretation arises in weights. Philostratos, a cult to envision a biome- Madison
part from the fact that an- third-century A.D. sophist, chanical benefit for halteres Madison, Wisconsin
in that kind of jump.
In reference to the fifty- Surf and Turf
plus-foot jumps, some I read with great interest
scholars believe those fig- Robert S. Semeniuk’s arti-
ures result from combining cle “How Bears Feed
the outcomes of several Salmon to the Forest”
standing long jumps. [4/03], on the work of
Thomas E. Reimchen in
Biologists have adopted the investigating marine-
term “halteres” to refer to derived nutrients in forest
the rear vestigial “wings,” ecosystems. Fisheries biolo-
or balancers, in dipterans gists have long regarded
(two-winged flies, mosqui- Pacific salmon as “keystone
toes, gnats, and so on). species” because of their
Curiously, in the fruit fly, a ability to transport vast
single gene mutation is ca- amounts of oceanic nutri-
pable of making the halteres ents far inland during
revert to a second set of spawning migrations.
wings, thus anatomically Reimchen’s research adds
removing the mutated flies complexity to the existing
from the order Diptera. paradigm by delineating the
“So, what do ornithologists do to relax?” Frank Sturtevant second stage of the “nutri-
Sarasota, Florida ent pump”: large carnivores
cient Greek has words for tells us that halteres—a transporting huge numbers
the jumper’s takeoff board “sure guide for the hands Entomophilia of salmon carcasses into the
(bater) and his earthen land- and for bringing the feet I enjoyed Le Anh Tu terrestrial environment.
ing pit (skamma), neither of cleanly to the ground”— Packard’s article about the Marine-derived nutrients
which should have been were invented by the pen- giant water bug known in thus get distributed over a
necessary for a standing tathletes themselves; judg- Vietnam as the ca cuong far greater area than they
jump. Halteres may have ing by his comment that (“Bug Juice,” 3/03]. The would be otherwise. Hence
been used at times for the halteres were good for the insect 1s a food delicacy not bears, being an integral part

12 | NATURAI HISTORY June 2003

of the nutrient pump, are and Egyptian pharaohs the pragmatic concerns of Roman Dial
critical to the health of the responsible for the wonders the vast majority. Alaska Pacific University
Pacific Northwest’s coastal of past ages: they were all Robert E. Becker Anchorage, Alaska
ecosystems. autocrats who did not Grand Rapids, Michigan
Kenneth I. Ashley require the permission of MARTHA HURLEY REPLIES:
University of British Columbia their governed to launch Picture Imperfect The caption should have
Vancouver, British Columbia their initiatives. On page 58 of the article specified that for a mature
Today, however, propo- “Vietnam’s Secret Life,” by tree to bear both needles
Democracy in Space nents of space exploration Eleanor J. Sterling, Martha and scales on the same branch
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s co- must persuade not just one M. Hurley, and Raoul H. is highly unusual; in fact,
gent essay “Reaching for monarch (and perhaps a Bain [3/03], is a photo- this trait characterizes all
the Stars” [4/03] correctly few influential advisors) to graph ofa single branch of cypresses, and is one way to
identifies what might be implement a stupendous the golden Vietnamese cy- identify them.
called the “categorical dream. The United States is press, showing both needles Redwoods do bear both
imperatives” that have uni- a democracy, in which an and scales. The caption says kinds of foliage simultane-
versally governed human entire population, or at least that it is highly unusual for ously on the same tree,
forays into the immense and their hundreds of elected a mature tree to “bear both though not on the same
the unknown: defense, representatives, must be needles and scales.” Yet branch; in addition, a num-
commerce, and spiritual or persuaded. Advocates of nearly all mature redwoods ber of related species un-
temporal power. But he space exploration must (Sequoia sempervirens) have dergo a transition between
doesn’t explicitly mention a show that it is directly per- needles on their low foliage the two foliage forms as the
pertinent feature of the his- tinent in the near term not and scales on their upper plants mature.
tory of grandiose projects, a merely to the parochial in- foliage, reflecting the hu-
feature common to Chinese terests of a select sliver of midity gradients found in Natural History’s e-mail
emperors, Iberian royalty, the populace, but also to tall forests. address is nhmag@amnh.org.

orests and o

3 ae environment, visit urPorebsit Or beer yet, pack a

EARTHJUSTICE picnic and take a hike through one of our magnificent legal
Because theearth needs aed lawyer
victories iin your neck of the wood
:
 .MPLINGS
ERE EE BLE
By Stéphan Reebs

UN-SOLID GROUND Most people prob- HOME, SWEET HOME On Earth, where
ably don't give much thought to the two there's water, there’s usually life. But few
faint, ever-shifting double bulges that are people would expect to find life in an iso-
continuously sliding across the surface of lated reservoir of 4,300-year-old seawater
our planet. Those bulges are called solid- locked inside the basalt crust that forms
body tides; the larger of the two is caused the bottom of the world’s oceans. The
by the Moon (the other by the Sun), and it's water is hot—a sweltering 149 degrees
pretty subtle: about one foot high at its Fahrenheit—and almost entirely isolated
maximum. But if the Earth had a solid core by hundreds of feet of impermeable sedi-
instead of one whose outer 94 percent is liq- ment (the exceptions to total isolation may
uid, the bulges would be some 30 to 40 per- be a few scattered, rocky seamounts that
cent smaller. The effect is the result of two pierce the sediment blanket). But a team
phenomena: the gravitational pull of the of scientists led by James P. Cowen of the
Moon or the Sun, coupled with the relative University of Hawaii in Honolulu decided
elasticity of a planet with a partly liquid core. Inside Mars to check it out for life anyway.
Now Charles F. Yoder, a planetary scien- First they had to obtain water from the
tist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in years’ worth of radio signals from NASAs crustal reservoir without contaminating it—
Pasadena, California, and his colleagues Mars Global Surveyor and tracked the quite a feat in itself. In the mid-1990s the
have measured solid-body tides else- spacecraft's orbit around Mars, their data international research partnership known
where in the solar system. Not only have showed a slight but continuous change in as the Ocean Drilling Program bored a
they done it with remarkable precision, the tilt of Surveyors orbit: a shift of about hole in the Juan de Fuca Ridge, in the
but, intriguingly, they've also determined 0.001 degree a month. Early in the study, northeastern Pacific. The drilling, in 8,530
that the solid-body tides on Mars—caused the investigators realized only a liquid core feet of water, went down through 810 feet
by the Sun, not by a Martian satellite—are could give rise to a tidal bulge capable of of sediment and then an additional 157
large enough to indicate that at least part having the observed gravitational effect on feet of seamount crust. Pressures at the
of that planet's core is liquid. the spacecraft. And how much bulge is bottom of the ocean are enormous, but
Until recently, planetary geologists had that? About a third of an inch. (“Fluid core they're even greater within the crust’s high
no direct evidence that Mars had a solid size of Mars from detection of the solar points, and so crustal water gets pushed all
core. But after Yoder's team analyzed three tide," Science 300:299-303, April 11, 2003) the way up to the seafloor at the top of the
drill-hole. Cowen and his team took advan-
tage of a clever collection device, recently
COLD PASSAGE Several Novembers least 6,000 miles at depths of at least installed, that captures the fluid before
ago, off the coast of Greenland, the 1,600 feet; closer to the surface, tempera- bringing it to the surface. Samples can thus
captain of a fishing vessel was puzzled tures in the tropics would have been lethal be examined for any micro-denizens of the
by one of the fish caught in the boat's to such a cold-water specialist. deep that might reside there.
gill nets. He decided to put it on ice and The only other explanation for the find- What did the team find? In the water
ask experts to identify it. Peter Rask ing would be the previously unrecognized were swarms of bacteria and archaea (an-
Maller, a zoologist at the University of existence of a resident northern popula- cient microorganisms that often thrive in
Copenhagen, and his colleagues have tion. But that seems unlikely: two decades tough places), as many as a few million per
now pronounced the six-foot-long, 155- of intensive deep-sea fishing in the North ounce—perhaps not as crowded as pond
pound beast to be a Patagonian tooth- Atlantic have turned up only that lone scum, but similar to the density near the
fish, Dissostichus eleginoides. toothfish. Yet some marine creatures do seafloor. Some of the microorganisms are
The surprising word here is “Patagon- exist in separate northern and southern genetically similar to the heat-loving bacte-
ian." D. eleginoides, an overfished spe- populations. The wandering toothfish ria that live in the sulfurous hot springs of
cies marketed in the United States as suggests deepwater migration might have Yellowstone National Park. And some of
"Chilean sea bass,” had never before led to those discontinuous distributions. the critters get their energy from nitrates,
been sighted in the Atlantic Ocean north ("Fish migration: Patagonian toothfish rendering the water around them rich with
of Uruguay. To reach Greenland, the found off Greenland,” Na- ammonia. However uninviting to most of
hardy traveler had to swim at ture 421:599, Febru- Earth’s inhabitants, the reservoir is further
ary 6, 2003) proof that even in what most life-forms
would regard as noxious quarters, an
empty niche is hard to find. (“Fluids from
aging ocean crust that support microbial
life,” Science 299:120-23, January 3, 2003)
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 IN THE SAME VEIN The network of support the plant, undercutting
blood vessels in a human being is not only the rationale for trying to apply
extensive, it's also finely engineered. the law. A team of biologists at
Some anatomists say that, placed end to the University of Utah in Salt Lake
end the vessels would stretch 60,000 City, however, noted that some
miles. As for the engineering, the British vascular conduits in plants pro-
biologist Cecil D. Murray calculated the vide little structural support. So
optimum size and number of each kind of they anticipated that the vessels
conduit in 1926—assuming that nature in vines and in compound leaves
would invest as little as possible in con- such as those of the box elder—
struction materials without jeopardizing as well as in “ring-porous” trees
the smooth flow of blood. Subsequent re- such as ash, which make one ring
search showed that Murray's simplifying of nonsupporting conduits every Es

assumptions predicted the patterns of ani- year to transport water from roots Cross section of a box elder leaf’s petiole
mal circulatory systems fairly well. In a to leaves—might well conform
precise, quantifiable way, the conduits with Murray's law. duits with the help of image-analysis soft-
increase in both number and total cross- One of the biologists, Katherine A. Mc- ware. Her results bore out Murray's law: like
sectional area as they get farther from the Culloh, spent two years slicing thin cross us, plants have optimally efficient plumbing
source of the fluid they carry. sections of leaves, stems, and branches systems. Blood may be thicker than water,
Until recently, though, “Murray's law” from local trees and vines; photographing but the pipes that carry both of them follow
had never been seriously tested in plants. the thin sections under the microscope; the same rules of design. ("Water transport
One reason may be that many conduits in and measuring the diameters of nearly in plants obeys Murray's law,” ”" Nature
plants not only transport water but also 100,000 of the plants’ water-bearing con- 421:939-42, February 27, 2003)

_ EXPERIMENT OF THE MONTH Use it or lose it: that’s a rule But that raises a question: What about hibernating bears?
' that governs employee vacation days—and bones. In every Are their bones compromised by five to seven months’ rest? To
bone there's a steady turnover of material, a continuous bal- find out, Seth W. Donahue, a biomedical engineer at Michigan
ancing act between bone formation and the resorption of bone Technological University in Houghton, along with several col-
tissue into the bloodstream. Those two processes are kept in leagues, analyzed blood from seventeen wild black bears.
healthy equilibrium by the near-constant compression and ten- (Blood samples are easier to get and less invasive than bone
sion exerted on working bones. But if bones are not put to samples, and levels of certain protein fragments in the blood re-
work, tissue formation slows down and resorption speeds up, flect the rates of bone formation as well as resorption.) First,
and the bone structure weakens. Bedridden patients—and however, Michael R. Vaughan of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg had
weightless astronauts in space—are prone to fractures simply to fit the bears with radio collars so that the investigators could
because their bones aren't being used. locate the animals in summer and in winter, dart them with an
anesthetic (even during hibernation bears can move with rea-
sonable alacrity), and collect a few drops of blood.
The blood samples, as expected, showed substantial bone re-
sorption, but surprisingly, bone formation had not slowed. Fur-
thermore, the investigators detected a spurt of bone formation
in early summer—greater than the bone growth measured in any
other healthy adult mammal—that canceled out the net bone
loss caused by a winter of inactivity. The result offers some long-
term hope for people who suffer from osteoporosis or other
bone diseases: bears could serve as a useful animal model in the
search for effective treatments. (“Serum markers of bone metab-
olism show bone loss in hibernating bears,” Clinical Or-
thopaedics and Related Research 408:295-301, March 2003)
Stéphan Reebs is a professor of biology at the University of Moncton in
New Brunswick, Canada, and the author of Fish Behavior in the Aquar-
ium and in the Wild (Cornell University Press).

Zu
 AWorld of Adventure
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THE WONDERS OF THE UNIVERSE AT YOUR FINGERTIPS
 UNIVERSE

The Ruse and Fall of Planet X

Neptune and Pluto were supposed to x” the weird orbit OL

of Uranus. Now, it seems, the orbit wasn’t “broke.”

By Neil deGrasse Tyson

eard about Planet X lately? French astronomer Pierre Charles Newton’s laws might be invalid at
Probably not. It’s dead—no Lemonnier did not discover Uranus such large distances from the Sun.
matter what anybody has six times! When Herschel finally That wasn’t as crazy as it sounds—
told you. Astrophysicists no longer noted that the mysterious object under new or extreme conditions the
need to postulate the existence of an moved, astronomers were able to cal- behavior of matter can and does de-
“undiscovered” planet to explain the culate an orbit with good precision viate from the predictions of the
motions of the other planets in our because of the availability of nearly a known laws of physics. But only if
solar system. century’ worth of “prediscovery” Newton’s theory of gravity had been
The rise of Planet X begins with data on its position in the sky. Their nascent and untested would there
the German-born English astrono- calculations showed that the object’s have been good reason to doubt it.
mer Sir William Herschel, who By the time Herschel discovered
more or less accidentally discov- Uranus, however, Newton's laws
ered the planet Uranus on had had a hundred-year run of
March 13, 1781. That episode successful predictions. The most
Was an exciting moment in famous of them was Edmond
eighteenth-century astronomy. Halley’s prediction of the 1758
Nobody in recorded history had return of the comet that would
ever discovered a planet. Mer- be named in his honor.
cury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and The simplest conclusion?
Saturn can each be seen relatively eas- orderly, near-circular path, far from Something else had to be out there,
ily with the naked eye, and all were the Sun, had nothing in common something yet undiscovered, whose
known to the ancients. So strong was with the eccentric trajectories of all gravity had not been accounted for in
the bias against finding additional known comets. At that point, you the predicted orbital path of Uranus.
planets that Herschel, even in the would have had to be both blind and
face of contrary evidence, assumed he boneheaded to resist calling the new LI: the life cycle of a physical
had discovered a comet. Other eigh- object a planet. theory, a scientist first makes a
teenth-century star watchers were in testable prediction about the world.
denial as well. Charles Messier, the Be all was not orderly in the Then a skeptical colleague runs a few
French astronomer and consummate solar system. Uranus was behav- actual experiments to see how well
comet hunter, noted, “I am con- ing badly. The new planet was not the prediction stands up to reality.
stantly astonished at this comet, moving through space the way as- The arithmetic differences between
which has none of the distinctive tronomers expected it to. Its trajec- the theory’s predictions and the ex-
characters of comets.” tory around the Sun was not follow- perimenter’s data are sensibly called
Archival records of star positions ing the path Newton’s law of gravity “residual errors” —‘ residuals” tar
show that several observers had seen would have it take. The historical short—and they’re the measure of a
Uranus before Herschel did, but each observations fitted one orbit; the theory’s success. Small residuals are
one had mistakenly classified the post-1780s telescopic observations good; big residuals are bad. If the
planet as a star. In an embarrassing fitted another. theory describes nature accurately,
example from January of 1769, the Some astronomers suggested that and the experiment is well designed,

18 ATURAL HISTORY June 2003

 Olivia Parker, Weighing the Planets, 1984

the residuals are not only small, but the actual positions along the object’s proached Sir George Airy, Britain’s
they fluctuate between positive and trajectory would be gigantic, and astronomer royal, with a request that
negative values from one measure- would not average to zero. he search a specific patch of sky for an
ment to the next, yielding an average eighth planet. But neither looking for
close to zero. If the average is any- n the late eighteenth century the planets nor following the leads of
thing other than zero, one can French mathematician Pierre- spunky young mathematicians was
rightly say that crucial differences Simon de Laplace invented perturba- part of the astronomer royal’s job
exist between the predictions and tion theory [see “Going Ballistic,” by description, so Adams’s request was
the measurements. Neil deGrasse Tyson, November 2002], dismissed. The next year, the French
When that happens, it’s not easy to giving astronomers an indispensable astronomer Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le
assign blame. Maybe the theory needs tool for analyzing the small gravita- Verrier independently derived a simi-
to be modified, or maybe somebody tional effects of an otherwise unde- lar prediction. On September 23,
blundered when the measurements tected celestial object. Encouraged by 1846, he communicated his predic-
were taken, or both. If your theory the expansion of their arsenal, mathe- tion to Johann Gottfried Galle, who
of gravity predicted that an object maticians and astronomers across Eu- was then assistant director of the
should fall upward when released, the rope continued to investigate what Berlin Observatory. Searching the sky
theory would require significant might be perturbing Uranus. In 1845 that very night, Galle found the new
modification, because the residuals a young, unknown English mathe- planet, soon to be named Neptune,
between the predicted positions and matician, John Couch Adams, ap- within a single degree of the spot Le

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 1 97

 Verrier had predicted. It took him for Planet X, the blink comparator
only an hour to locate it. minimized many sources of human
error, including spurious measure-
2 ut once again, all was not orderly ments made by sleepy astronomers 1n
Jin the solar system. Uranus was the middle of the night.
still behaving badly. Its orbital residu-
als got smaller, but they didn’t go \ t about four in the afternoon on
away, even with the gravity of Nep- [ 4 February 18, 1930, a twenty-
tune accounted for. And Neptune’s four-year-old amateur astronomer
orbit had some residuals of its own. named Clyde W. Tombaugh discov-
Could yet another planet be waiting ered Planet X. He had been hired the
to be discovered? year before by the Lowell Observa-
In 1894 Percival Lowell, an inde- tory to continue the arduous search.
pendently wealthy American astron- (Lowell ‘himself had died in 1916.)
omer, built the eponymous Lowell The young fellow was looking at a
Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. pair of photographic plates he had
Lowell indulged a
fanatical fascination
with Mars, claiming ser
.4 54
that intelligent civi- “I
lizations were in res- Aa Cray
1SCOVE
4

What a great time to observe idence there, but he

wildlife. Explore thousands of devoted most of the
miles of rivers, marshes and rest of his life to the
lagoons. Visit Maya villages and search for the object he called Planet taken on January 23 and 29 of the
ancient temple sites. Seek out the X (“X” for the algebraic unknown)— region around the star Delta Gemino-
the mysterious body in the outer solar rum. Tombaugh became the third
elusive Jaguar, if you can. Snorkel’
system that continued to perturb and last person ever to discover a
on the largest barrier reef in the
Uranus and Neptune. planet in our very own solar system.
Mv)eee (lenl
cyone ew lee) One way to look for a planet is to On March 13 the observatory an-
relaxing, peaceful country where make two photographs of the same nounced the news.
the people are as warm and patch of sky through a telescope, sev- In Tombaugh’s day many people
friendly as the climate. Experience eral days (or years) apart. But the associated the name given to the
the diversity of Belize, your ; next step is the rub: nobody wants to ninth planet with Pluto Water, a
English-speaking neighbor on the
pore over images of the sky made up widely used laxative bottled on the
of countless millions of dots, hoping grounds of the palatial French Lick
» Caribbean coast of
to spot the one that moved between Springs Hotel in Indiana, about fifty
Central America, one photo and the next. Fortunately, miles south of Bloomington. Other
only 2 hours an ingenious mechanical-optical de- suggestions for names included
a from the U.S. vice known as a “blink comparator” Artemis, Atlas, Bacchus, Constance,
would come to the rescue. This con- Lowell, Minerva, Zeus, and Zymal.
Call 1-800-624-0686 ‘or visit our traption, an early-twentieth-century But “Pluto” eventually triumphed
website: www.travelbelize.org innovation, exploits the remarkable because Pluto is, after all, the god of
ability of the eye to detect change or the underworld, the realm of dark-
motion amid an otherwise unchang- ness—and what else, if not darkness,
ing field. First you place the two prevails four billion miles from the
photographic images side by side in Sun? And because Jupiter and Nep-
precise alignment. Next, you flash tune are Pluto’s mythological broth-
the two images back and forth in ers, the name also maintains a happy
rapid succession. Against the back- family. Finally (and perhaps fortu-
ground star field, any speck on the itously), the first two letters of
two photographs that brightens, “Pluto” are the initials of Percival
dims, or shifts position from one Lowell, who instigated the search in
photograph to the other becomes the first place. [See “Pluto’s Honor,” by
immediately apparent. In the search Neil deGrasse Tyson, February 1999.|

20 | NATURAL HISTORY June 2003

 n any well-designed, well-con- could be completely explained within exhibits on the solar system. Not only
ducted survey, you don’t stop just the framework of the presently known was Pluto not Planet X; now poor
because you've discovered something. solar system. In even plainer English: Pluto wasn’t even a planet
By completing the survey, you might Planet X was dead. But was it buried? In a further insult to Pluto’s ego,
discover much more. So for the next Caltech astrophysicists recently dis-
thirteen years Tombaugh searched everal years ago, shortly after covered Quaoar, an icy world in the
more than 30,000 square degrees of Clyde Tombaugh died at the age outer solar system that (like Charon)
sky (out of a total of 41,253 square of ninety, Pluto’s planethood was checks in at about half the diameter
degrees). He found no more planets thrown into question. Seven moons of Pluto. It’s made of the same stuff,
with a brightness equal to or greater in the solar system are bigger. More but Quaoar orbits in a near-perfect
than that of little Pluto. But his time than half its volume is ice, as is the circle, something Pluto can only
wasn't wasted. The survey revealed case for comets. For a twenty-year dream about.
hundreds of asteroids, six new star stretch of Pluto’s 248-year journey If you are sentimental, and want to
clusters, and a comet. around the Sun, its elongated orbit preserve Pluto’s planetary rank, then
But was Pluto the Planet X of takes it closer to the Sun than Nep- in all fairness you must add Quaoar to
everybody’s suspicions? Nope. Over tune gets. And Pluto’s moon, Charon, the club—as well as any other yet-to-
the decades, as the measurements of is massive enough to cause the center be-discovered orb that out-planets
Pluto’s mass became more and more of gravity of the Pluto-Charon system Pluto. And no, those objects won’t be
accurate, astronomers learned how to lie outside Pluto itself. Each of Planet X either. Like Pluto, they are
little the place really is. Turned out it’s these distinctions has no counterpart all too small for their gravity to
far too small to account for the resid- among the other planets. Yet the bother anybody but each other.
uals of Uranus and Neptune. So Rose Center for Earth and Space in
Planet X still had to be lurking, New York City got into big trouble Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the
undiscovered, in the outer limits of with the national press and with third Frederick P Rose Director of the Hayden
the solar system. graders for being the first major pub- Planetarium in New York City and a visiting
That, at least, was the prevailing lic institution to demote Pluto in its research scientist at Princeton University.
belief suntil <May 1993) when.
Myles Standish Jr. of the Jet Propul-
sion Laboratory in Pasadena, Cali-
fornia, published a paper in the
Astronomical Journal titled “Planet X:
No Dynamical Evidence in the Op-
tical Observations.” Standish used
the updated mass estimates of Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune that
had become available from the Voy-
ager flybys; in the case of Neptune,
the mass difference amounted to Our small ships in Alaska get close
nearly 0.5 percent—dquite large by
enough to see bears on a shoreline,
today’s standards.
Assuming that the masses derived ALASKA & THE BERING SEA and the barnacles on a humpback's
from the Voyager missions were accu- BRITISH COLUMBIA tail. Explore more of Alaska’s
rate (a wise move), and discounting a COLUMBIA & SNAKE RIVERS wilderness waterways, from the
single set of suspicious measurements CALIFORNIA WINE COUNTRY Inside Passage to Prince William
made at the U.S. Naval Observatory Mexico’s SEA OF CORTES
between 1895 and 1905 (another wise
Sound, even the remote wildlife
Costa RICA & PANAMA preserves of the Bering Sea.
move), Standish recalculated all the
orbital parameters. The result? The
Brochures & Availability
large systematic trends in the residuals
of Uranus and Neptune disappeared, 800-798-5028
and the remaining small residuals were www.cruisewest.com
consistent with the observational un-
certainties of the modern data.—In
plain English: the apparent anomalies
in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune
 NATURALIST AT LARGE

Impostor in the Nest

A beetle disguised as an army ant eludes capture by ants as well as entomologists.

By Robert Dunn

In the center of the image, a beetle (Ecitosius robustus) moves among its host ants, Neiva-
myrmex sumichrasti, as the assemblage investigates a grasshopper femur. E. robustus is one of
several beetle species that have been found as guests only among N. sumichrasti army ants.

hen most people think natural historians who headed for the now few when I get into the field as a
about the explorers and hills to chase a new species of beetle, biologist, with no more tangled pur-
adventurers of the past, or snare a new bird, or climb a hollow pose than to find and observe rare spe-
figures such as Captain James Cook tree to capture a new snake. As an en- cies. Darwin had a ship that carried
or Sir Edmund Hillary come to mind: tomologist working in the tropics, I him to biologically unexplored ter-
heroic individuals who explored the see these collectors as my sometimes rain. My colleagues and I are preoccu-
world’s greatest oceans or climbed the humbling, sometimes fumbling pre- pied with committee meetings, stu-
world’s highest mountains. My own decessors. When I kneel in the forest dent cheaters, and asbestos abatement.
heroes were another group of explor- and turn over rocks, I feel some of the So when Carl W. Rettenmeyer, a
ers, who set out with more modest awe my predecessors must have felt. biologist and an emeritus professor
conquests in mind. They were the Unfortunately, though, the days are at the University of Connecticut,

99 .
hohe ATURAI HISTORY June 2003
bumped into me in the hallway in the miles long, two miles wide—ants, but most are neutral: just there. Many
fall of 2002 and asked whether I would nothing but ants!” such interlopers are so well adapted to
join him on an expedition to the cloud Real army ants are both more inter- life in the ant’s special world that they
forests of Costa Rica, I started packing. esting and more complex than those can survive nowhere else. A single
Our mission: To look for a mysterious of story or myth. Real army ants don’t colony of army ants might host dozens
army ant and a rarely seen but look- kill people; most of them don’t even of species ofbeetles, tens of species of
alike beetle that lives in its midst. forage above ground. A typical army mites, and a variety of silverfish and
ant species lives in nests underground flies. That diversity and beauty has
he team that left for Costa Rica that are built out of the living bodies fueled Rettenmeyer’s lifelong passion
included Carl and his wife Mar- of its workers. It migrates en masse for army ant guests. One of his fa-
ian; Charlene and Adam Fuller, pho- from place to place as it feeds on the vorite guests, and the focal point of
tographers, collectors, general natural soft brood of other social insects. our mission, was a beetle that’s been
historians, and veterans of the Ret- The army ant we were looking for, collected so far by only one scientific
tenmeyer army-ant expeditions; and Neivamyrmex sumichrasti, was first doc- expedition (Rettenmeyer and Akre’s
David Lubertazzi and me, graduate umented by the French naturalist ios tripyiOx Costar Rica)=—a slinile
student volunteers and all-
around grunts. As our plane
veered south from Hartford
Airport, we left behind
the frozen forests of New
England for forests where
insects, particularly ants, run the show Francois Sumichrast, working at the creature named _ Ecitosius robustus,
year-round. For mammal watchers, time in Mexico. Sumichrast wrote of which, roughly translated, means “the
the tropics can bring disappointment; the ant that would later bear his name: robust army ant beetle.”
large vertebrates are as scarce there as E. robustus 1s, by all accounts, a re-
All the researches that I have made up to
anywhere else. But the bugs, oh the markable beetle, though any creature
this time to discover the formicarium [nest]
bugs! Insects overflow in the tropics, able to coexist with army ants would
... have been fruitless, and I cannot ob-
both in number and kind. To an en- tain any information from the natives seem to qualify as remarkable. All ant
tomologist, the tropical forests are where these insects are common. guests have to avoid being eaten by
more than rich: they are overwhelm- their hosts. Most groups of beetles
ing. Turn over a log, and one of the He observed and collected N. sumi- that live with army ants have evolved
hundred or so small animals that chrasti from Mexico, but the species one of two body types that enable
scurry away 1s likely to be a new spe- ranges throughout the highlands of them to survive among the ants: a flat-
cies of insect. Mexico and Central America. tened, horseshoe-crab-like shape—
Many of the first explorers in the Sumichrast’s sketchy text was one the better to hunker down when the
New World wrote home about army of the only published accounts of the ants attack them—or the form of the
ants, as have more contemporary ant, until Carl Rettenmeyer and his ants themselves, to more easily avoid
writers, natural historians, and the student Roger D. Akre found the ant detection by the ants’ probing anten-
like. Army ants, particularly the spe- again in Monteverde, Costa Rica, in nae. Many guests even smell like their
cies that raid above ground, are dra- 1963. Rettenmeyer studied the spe- hosts—and because most army ants
matic, abundant, and hard to miss. cies long enough to become fasci- are virtually blind, odor camouflage
Some of the early or popular accounts nated by the odd tagalong guests that can be protection enough.
of army ants are accurate, but most of live with it. In the years that followed, The robust army ant beetle, how-
them owe more to fantasizing than to he often thought about returning to ever, has gone one step further. Many
observation. The army ants of myth Costa Rica to study N. sumichrasti and ant guests have evolved to superficially
eat everything in their path—chil- its guests more completely. Last win- resemble their hosts, but E. robustus is
dren, tapirs, entire villages. They are ter, almost forty years after that initial unique in being nearly physically in-
monsters, to be sure, but predictable encounter, he finally got the chance. distinguishable from its host ant. The
ones, scary and inexorable automatons beetle’s waist is drawn in to look like
conjured by our collective imagina- Ms ants cohabitate with guests, the ant’s waist. The beetle’s antennae
tions. In Carl Stephenson’s short story animals that live in or around are stubby, like the ant’s antennae. The
“Leiningen versus the Ants,” a Brazil- the colony and depend on the ants for beetle’s body is dimpled, like the ant’s
ian official says of army ants: “Theyre food, shelter, protection, transport, or body. Even under the microscope it is
not creatures you can fight—they’re some combination thereof. Some hard to tell the two species apart. Ret-
an elemental—an ‘act of God’! Ten guests are welcome, others are not, tenmeyer was keen to find the beetles

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 23

ain, to take their photographs, to
watch their behavior—in short, to un-
derstand how and why they came to
be such exquisite mMmM11Cs.

But first we had to find the ants.

At days after we arrived at the

biological station of the Mon-
teverde Cloud Forest Reserve, we
found two colonies ofa species of army
ant and brought a few of the ants back
to Rettenmeyer in a flask. He raised
the ant flask to his nose, took a sniff,
and said, “Well, smells like burchelli.”
Each army ant has a particular smell;
some are fruity, some are musky. Eciton
burchelli smells of a combination of
tangerine and body odor—unforget-
table, once you’ve experienced it a few A segment ofa nest of Eciton burchelli in a Panamanian rainforest. Unlike most
times. E. burchelli is famous for raiding army ants, E. burchelli often site their nests above ground. The light dots
homes with swarms meters wide, and scattered among the blacker forms are the heads of the ants. Within the
literally cleaning house—of roaches, bivouac, their guests mill about, climbing from ant to ant. Note the two ants
at left, linked by their legs.
crickets, millipedes, and many other
arthropods. Because of its predilection
for most insect pests, it is welcomed cockroaches, earwigs, isopods, and enough or patient enough (or both),
by many people living in neotropical other small arthropods ran to escape we would find colonies in their mi-
forests, as the forest version of the the advancing waves of ants. Even if gratory phases. And what moves is an
exterminator. they managed to avoid the ants, they entire ecosystem, all of whose dark
Whenever we encountered forag- were usually caught by something parts periodically disassemble them-
ing columns of E. burchelli or of other else. Small flies laid their eggs in the selves, only to reassemble again far-
army ants, we would try to trace the bodies of the escaping insects; ther down the trail. The ants leave
columns back to the colony’s nest, a antbirds grabbed most of the bugs the first, and then their motley crew of
transient structure that the ants form flies didn’t claim. The dry leaves guests. Some of the beetles and most
from their own bodies. Extending crackled with movement. If someone of the mites hitch a ride on or under
the military metaphor, entomologists led you blindfolded through the for- the ants. If you look carefully, you
call them bivouacs. Each worker ant est, you would still be able to smell might see a beetle hoist itself up, grab
grabs the legs of the next one, cling- the musk-sweet odor of an E. burchelli hold of an ant running past, and flip
a onto the ant’s back like a miniature
cowboy. Other guests run on their
If you look carefully, you might see a beetl i;
4,
own, using their antennae to follow
the chemical trails laid down by the
flip onto an ant’s back like a miniature
ang at?
cow boy.F; re
a5
ants. Fifty or a hundred yards farther
Gc i Cre
on, the worker ants form a new nest,
ing tightly until an edifice of ants 1s raid and to hear it unfold in the flutter and the colony files into place, rapidly
formed. The queen stands in the of birds, the tap of the ants’ claws on at first and then more slowly as the
middle of the cluster with her atten- the leaves, and the hum of thousands last guests stumble in.
dants. The workers hold their posi- of tiny flies. In 1963, when Rettenmeyer first
tions for hours or even days, guarding saw N. sumichrasti in Costa Rica, he
their queen and so protecting the fu- A™ ant colonies have distinct saw it “behind the cheese factory.”
ture of their own genes. phases of activity. For weeks at a Amazingly, the cheese factory is still
After finding a colony’s bivouac, time the colony simply forages out- in the same place. Unfortunately, we
my companions and I would sit and ward from a single site. Then, when didn’t know whether the elevation
inspect everything going in or out, some internal alarm bell rings, the marked the top of the range for this
filming the ants and searching their colony begins moving nightly from species, the bottom of the range, or
columns for guests. As we watched, site to site. When we were lucky somewhere in between. We didn’t
 even know if N. sumichrasti was still ex- | sually you can sit beside the trails sign of an ant colony or a nest—except
tant. After days of unsuccessful search- of army ants and watch for that we now had a few smail flasks of
ing, we began to fear that the ant had guests as the line goes by. But the bee- N. sumichrasti. We returned to the same
gone extinct. Deforestation in the low- tles that live with N. sumichrasti look so site the next day and for days after that
lands of Costa Rica has caused the much like N. sumichrasti that it is but we never found the ants again.
country’s cloud forests to become nearly impossible to recognize them Meanwhile, at the research station,
drier, essentially shifting the climatic in the field. We would have to collect Carl and Marian were filming and
zones uphill. Many species at middle all the “ants’” we saw and hope that photographing the ants we had col-
elevations have moved higher up, some of them were beetles. When lected. For hours they watched and
where the forest is still wet. Many Dave first saw the ants, he had marked took pictures as the ants ran around a
high-elevation species have become re- their trail with red-and-white striped circular aquarium. Carl saw one bee-
stricted to progressively smaller bands strings. Now Dave and I went to work tle, so he made more photographs,
of suitable habitat at the tops of moun- beneath the strings, collecting as many hoping to catch it on film. Afterward,
tains, or, like the golden toad, have individuals as we could. We slowly he pulled the critters out of the aquar-
gone extinct. N. sumichrasti, as far as we filled our empty flasks with ants. ium, put them in alcohol, and exam-
knew, was a high-elevation species. Glancing downhill at the research ined them under a microscope. But
Then one afternoon Dave Luber- station, visible through the canopy the beetle we had collected was not E.
tazzi came stumbling into the kitchen, oftrees, we imagined Carl and Marian robustus (not antlike enough). Instead
sweating and smiling. He held a flask Rettenmeyer inside, smiling. it turned out to be an interesting
out to Rettenmeyer and said, “Who Unfortunately, every time we took a mimic and a new species at that. We
does this smell like?” Rettenmeyer step we crushed ants or obliterated crossed our fingers that the beetle we
sniffed and said simply, “Sumichrasti. their chemical trail. After a few hours, sought would eventually show up in
Go back up that hill’? Dave and | the ants disappeared. We had no way of the vials or in Carl’s photographs, and
grabbed some dinner and then. ran knowing where they had gone. We had went on with our search.
back up the trail into the forest, our not been able to track them well With only a few days left in our
pockets and backpacks clanging with enough to find their nest. We were trip, we had collected and filmed a
empty flasks. back where we started—without any great deal (including a scene in which

Two N. sumichrasti individuals traverse a stick covered in leafy liverwort. Foragers of this species
typically travel single file while searching out such small prey as the brood of other ants.

June 2003 NATURAI HISTORY

a colony of army ants crawled over a to make sure that it did not emigrate. rolled a log over to look underneath.
resting boa constrictor), but we had In the morning, we would all go up An earwig scampered, a humming-
found little more than a single forag- together and examine the colony and bird squeaked, but not an ant stirred.
ing trail of N. sumichrasti. As Adam its bivouac. It would probably be the Either the colony had gone, or what
and Charlene went to search for new first bivouac of N. sumichrasti ever seen. we had seen had not been the colony.
colonies, Dave and I went back up So that night, Dave and I went back To make sure, we flipped a log over
the hill to the spot where he had up the hill with more jelly and jelly and dug some more. Frantically, we
found the trail, hoping it would lead sandwiches and sat in near-darkness, searched the hill.
us to the queen and her bivouac. We observing the colony. The moon was But we didn’t find the ants again.
crisscrossed the slope, walking up and wonderful. We made up constellations We never saw an N. sumichrasti queen,
down, swearing and mumbling at and imagined how many strange ant or an E. robustus beetle. No E. robus-
each other. We scanned the ground guests we would find inside the nest tus beetles were found in our vials or
for anything that moved. when we dug it up. We watched ants photographs; other beetles showed
After a few hours I gave up, but going in and out of a hole and imag- up, but none as unique as E. robustus.
Dave kept looking. I sat on a root to ined the million ants inside, grasping The queen had led her small army
eat a jelly and jelly sandwich (a bit of a one another, guarding their single, away, and we would have to wait for
misunderstanding with the cook). On bloated queen. After several hours, the another expedition to see her. As we
the ground in front of me, I noticed colony stopped moving. The ants had left the forest for our flight back to
some small black ants that looked a called it a night. We walked back Connecticut, N. sumichrasti foragers
great deal like N. sumichrasti, Looking down the hill in the faint moonlight carried their prey down tunnels, back
closer, I saw that they were N. and went to sleep. to nests full of creatures no one has
sumichrasti. | shouted to Dave. We had ever seen.
found them again! We dug and col- n the morning, our team trudged
Robert Dunn is a graduate student completing
lected, and then radioed to Carl, back up the hill with shovels, buck-
the final stages of his doctorate at the Univer-
whereupon the six of us spent the next ets, bags, and cameras. We found the sity of Connecticut, Storrs. His upcoming post-
hour figuring out what to do. After spot where the colony had been, and doctoral project, at the Curtin University of
some excited debate, we decided that stopped. There was nothing there. I Technology in southwest Australia, will exam-
Dave and I would watch the colony poked the dirt. Nothing. I stuck a ine various aspects of the relation between ants
until it stopped foraging for the night, spade into the mud. Nothing. Adam and the seeds they disperse.

PO oid

An N. sumichrasti ant (right) tugs at the leg of its guest beetle E. robustus. Note the similarity of
the beetle’s texture, antennae, legs, head, and general shape to those of the ant. The biology of
both the guest and the host species remains poorly understood; no one has ever seen the queen
of N. sumichrasti or the larvae or eggs of E. robustus. This photograph and the one on page 22
were taken by Carl Rettenmeyer and Roger Akre in Costa Rica in 1963.

ATURAL HIS rORY June 2003

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FINDINGS

The Owl That Hunts by Light

After years ofobserving in the Yukon, the author has shown that the North American
hawk owl is a more versatile predator than its better known European cousin.

By Christoph Rohner

y first encounter with a

northern hawk owl came
early in my career, on a
cold day in mid-May. Fresh, wet snow
weighed down the tree branches, re-
minding even optimistic souls that
spring in the North can be tardy, al-
most shy. I had arrived that same day,
after a week of travel to reach the re-
mote Kluane—Saint Ellas mountains, in
Canada’s Yukon Territory. It was a
magnificent setting for a research pro-
ject on the ecology of the boreal forest,
the vast evergreen woods of the north.
As I was taking in the view of
snow-laden trees, massive peaks, and
Kluane Lake—the largest lake in the
Yukon—I spotted the silhouette of a
bird perched high in a bare tree. The
northern hawk owl, a rare sight in the
wild, pinned its yellow eyes on me |
and let out a sibilant screech that |
nearly made the hair stand up on the ‘
back of my neck. That episode 1s now ,
long past, and I have since spent years
studying owls of the northern forests.
But I often think back to that mo-
ment as the beginning, when I first
took notice of one of the least studied
birds in North America, and gained a
direction for my work.
Later on, as I read the literature on
hawk owls, I found that most of the
information in textbooks and field
guides originated in Scandinavia,
where the species has long been stud-
ied. But I wondered: did it make sense
to assume that hawk owls in the New
World have the same lifestyle as their
cousins in the Old? Aside from some — Unlike other owls, hawk owls depend more on vision than hearing
anecdotal reports, few nests in North — when they hunt.

1ISTORY June 2003

America had been described. The locked in a gaze with a female
most extensive work had been on her nest.
done in the mid-1980s by Ken- After that I began spending as
neth Kertell, now a senior scien- many as twenty hours a day in
tist at SWCA Environmental continuous watch and was re-
Consultants in Tucson, Arizona. warded with intimate glimpses of
Kertell had studied hawk owl be- the pair’s family life. I was trans-
havior at six nest sites in Alaska’s fixed: One day a grizzly walked
Denali National Park. by about sixty feet away, but we
My colleagues and I carried ignored each other. Bands of
out field investigations for the mosquitoes buzzed on the netting
Kluane Boreal Forest Ecosystem around my face. A yellow-rumped
Project from 1987 through 1993. warbler grew so accustomed to
In the course of our work, we me that he started to peck insects
were able to expand the story of from my wool pants. I became
New World hawk owls. We now part of the forest.
know that these owls diverge The male owl hunted fairly
from their Eurasian counterparts close to the nest. Every few
not only in aspects of their breed- hours he returned to a low perch
ing biology, but also in their be- with a dead vole or mouse,
havior, which reflects certain called out, then decapitated the
basic differences in the ecology of prey before presenting the re-
their boreal homes. mains to the female. He usually
dismembered heavier prey at the
orthern hawk owls are un- Securing a vole in its talons, a hawk owl pauses before site of the kill, then delivered
dismembering the prey. When readily available, voles
like most owls, and, as the morsels directly to the nest. Oc-
account for most of the hawk owl's diet.
name “hawk” suggests, act in casionally he tucked food rem-
some ways like diurnal birds of nants into tree holes and crannies
prey. They hunt in broad daylight and depending on the relative abundance for safekeeping. When | reached into
rely on their long tails—shaped more of their small mammalian prey. And one hiding place where the male had
like falcons’ tails than owls—to ma- in winter, they sometimes irrupt, or cached some meat, I grabbed the
neuver in rapid flight. Hawk owls move south of their more usual hind part of a juvenile hare.
lack the comblike structures along the range in large numbers. The North Hawk owl eggs, like the two in this
outer edge of their primary feathers American subspecies, Surnia ulula ca- nest, hatch after about thirty days of
that give most owls silent flight. Their
sense of hearing is only so-so for a
bird of prey; the keen ability to per-
Bands of mosquitoes buzzed on the netting around my
ceive sound that enables other owls to face. A yellow-rumped warbler grew so accustomed to
pounce accurately on prey in the dark
is absent in hawk owls. me that he started to peck insects from my wool pants.
They are, however, truly hawk-
eyed. In a tag-and-release program in paroch, makes occasional winter ap- incubation. The parents cater to the
Alberta, Canada, field ornithologists pearances on farmland as far south as owlets in the nest for another three or
“reel in” owls, using a fake mouse at- southern Canada and the northern- four weeks. When the owlets fledge,
tached to a fishing line. Hawk owls most regions of the contiguous they exercise their new ability to fly
are routinely attracted to the small United States. by leaving the immediate nest area,
lure from nearly a mile away. but the parents continue to supply
The “northern” in the owls’ name hortly after my arrival at Kluane | them with food for a few more weeks.
denotes their range. Hawk owls live again spotted the bird that had In Scandinavia and Russia, hawk
and nest in the taiga, the subarctic caught my eye on that first day. I owls (subspecies Surnia ulula ulula) are
band of forests that circle the north- watched as it made its screeching call, classic specialists: in the breeding sea-
ern reaches of the globe from Alaska and then I heard a second, responding son 95 percent or more of their diet is
to eastern Canada and from Scandi- hiss. When I raised my binoculars to a made up of small rodents such as
navia to Siberia. They are nomadic, snag, or jagged top, of a broken, mice, lemmings, and in particular,
readily shifting to new nesting areas burned-out tree, I found myself voles. In Denali National Park, Kertell

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY }29

 had discovered that voles made up four years. The biomass, or total or- their dietary mix had matched the den-
only 70 percent of their diet; young ganic weight, of those mammals is sities of the available prey. But the diets
snowshoe hares and squirrels made up substantial. And as that biomass cycles of Yukon hawk owls are buffered by
the balance. He suspected that the
population of hares influenced the
Denali owls’ diet. Having held in my
Hawk owls were considered vole specialists, but when
hand the bloody evidence that the I reached into the tree hole where a male had cached
nesting birds in Kluane were also
feeding on hares, I was eager to find
some meat, I grabbed the hindquarters of a hare.
out more about the link between
hawk owls and hares. between boom and bust, it accounts the availability of other prey. When we
for more population change through- began observing nesting hawk owls in
ortunately, my enthusiasm for out the ecosystem than do the biomass Kluane, both vole and hare populations
hawk owls spread to my col- cycles of any other vertebrate animals were rapidly increasing. Later, when
leagues in the long-term ecosystem in the system. the vole population crashed but the
project. Some of them took censuses In North America, however, the hare population continued to grow, the
of the prey animals in the re- hawk owls remained in the nest-
gion, and their data on how ing area. Voles did drop to about
the densities of voles, hares, 30 percent of the hawk owl diet
lemmings, and squirrels varied by biomass, and young hares and
from year to year proved to squirrels rose to about 50 percent.
be the key to part of the In a peak year for hares, the hares
hawk owl story. With the edged out the voles as a source of
help of some volunteers, we meat for both adult owls and
found nine nests, the most their owlets. But the shift in the
ever included in a single hawk owls’ diets from voles to hares
owl study. We systematically didn’t hurt breeding.
recorded all our observations In Scandinavia, hawk owls
of hawk owls, and collected usually breed only during bursts
and dissected their pellets in the population of voles and
(small bundles of the regurgi- lemmings. The average nest
tated hair and bones of prey). holds six or seven young, but at
The boom and bust cycle of times even larger broods seem
the populations of small mam- to be common. (The record is
mals is a phenomenon of the thirteen, but how many young
taiga and tundra regions of the in that megabrood survived is
north. For some still undeter- unknown.) Although investiga-
mined reason, the numbers of tors have not located as many
voles, lemmings, and hares soar if nests in North America as they
in some years and plummet in White on white: a snowshoe hare in its winter coat. have in Scandinavia, hawk owls
But in winter, even adult hares in camouflage are
others. Snowshoe hares peak in the Yukon consistently rear
not immune to attack by hawk owls.
about every ten years. When smaller broods than do Euro-
they were most numerous, so many population cycles of prey animals are pean hawk owls, between three and
hares would be hopping along and different. At the peak of their ten-year five nestlings.
across the Alaska Highway that I cycle, snowshoe hares, in terms of bio- No matter where hawk owls raise
would have to slow my car way mass, “outweigh” all other vertebrate their young, breeding coincides with
down, to avoid a mass slaughter. In species. Vole populations also peak and the availability of prey. Owlets fledge in
contrast, at the low end of a hare crash in North America, but do so late May or June, just when the boreal
cycle, I could walk in the woods for more irregularly than those of hares. forest is teeming with inexperienced
hours and see hardly any hares. young prey animals. At Kluane the
But not all boreal-forest ecosystems le the Yukon, as in Eurasia, hawk hares brought to the nests by parent
are the same: in Scandinavia the pop- owls seem to prefer voles to other hawk owls were, on average, only
ulations of small rodents, including prey. Our statistical analysis showed twenty-two-days old.
various species of voles and lemmings, that they fed on voles significantly Hawk owls are also thought to scav-
peak together roughly every three to more often than they would have if enge the remains of adult snowshoe

an
30 | YATURAL HISTORY June 2003
hares in winter. But we discov-
ered, to our surprise, that these
owls, weighing less than a
pound, also attacked and killed
live adult hares four times their
body weight. The hares might
have been weakened individu-
als; even so, the performance
speaks to the ferocity and dar-
ing of North American hawk
owls. The hawk owls of Alaska
and Canada are about 6 per-
cent larger than Scandinavian
birds. Perhaps their size is an
adaptation that increases their
success in capturing larger prey.

rT seems odd that the hawk

owl should emerge as a vole
specialist at all, given the owl’s
strong physical resemblance to
birds that prey on other birds.
Similarly shaped raptors, such
as peregrine falcons and gos-
hawks, are adept at the agile
pursuit and rapid capture of
birds in flight. But hawk owls,
perhaps descended from bird
hunters, are skilled aerial
predators in their own right.
In Scandinavia, during harsh
winters when voles are scarce
or inaccessible under thick
snow, most of a hawk owl’s
diet can be made up of birds.
During winters, our research
team in Kluane saw hawk owls
kill spruce grouse roughly as
big as the owls themselves.
The ability to take advan-
tage of a range ofprey animals
may give all hawk owls the
flexibility they need to survive
in harsh and variable northern
An intent female tends her triplets, and in the process displays her distinctively long tail.
climates. Compared with the
Scandinavian birds, North
American hawk owls turn out to be a wildlife photographer, and his field as- the duck in flight and riding it to the
bit larger, to have fewer young per sistant Julia Burger witnessed an ex- ground. Opportunity, even for an un-
clutch, and to be less specialized. As ample of hawk ow! predation that had usual meal of waterfowl, had quickly
investigators gain a better understand- never previously been reported. They brought out the aerial hunter. The
ing of the species across the entire were walking to a hawk owl nest near hawk owl, its mate, and their young
northern forest, it’s becoming clear Chip Lake, Alberta, when they flushed feasted on duck for days.
that this small, fierce, and versatile an American wigeon. One of the
owl may have been underestimated. hawk owl pair, perched in a snag above Christoph Rohner is a zoologist and writer
Recently, Wayne Lynch, a Canadian the nest, immediately attacked, hitting who lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

June 2003 NATURAL HIS TORY 31

 BIOMECHANICS
AAAS
oeEE

Monitor Marathons
How one group of lizards turns a gasp into a gulp.

By Adam Summers ~ Illustration by Patricia J. Wynne

aking my way down a escape under a shady bush. The diaphragm, a dome-shaped muscle
trail through rosemary sprint was impressive, particularly between the lungs and the liver,
scrub in Florida’s central for a lizard less than a foot long, but powers the second system. It works by
sandhills, I surprised a six-lined what was even more amazing was pulling the lung cavity rearwards,
racerunner (Cnemidophorus sexlinea- that the lizard had to make its dash toward the tail. The diaphragm is a
tus, so named for the lines that run without taking a breath. The mammalian innovation. Crocodiles and
the length of its body) basking in a racerunner’s mechanical systems for alligators have independently evolved a
wheel rut. I gave chase and the breathing and running are linked in muscle that pulls the liver
lizard streaked off—easily keeping such a way that the lizard can do backwards, also
ahead of my stumbling run. For one or the other, but not both. effectively
thirty yards the lizard churned
through loose sand, before
managing a
darting

(1) Gular cavity relaxed

ungs in any animal are, of inflating the lungs. But lizards and
Hyobranchial
apparatus course, the site of oxygen and snakes lack any analogue to the dia-
carbon dioxide exchange. But phragm, and so they rely on their rib
lungs themselves cannot draw air muscles alone to inflate their lungs.
into an animal’s body; they are David Carrier, a biomechanist at
really nothing more than stretchy the University of Utah in Salt Lake
bags that bring air into close City, observed that a lizard’s rib
proximity with blood. Lungs fill muscles also play a vital role in
with air when the cavity housing locomotion: they stabilize the trunk,
Glottis them enlarges, enlarging the lungs giving the forelimbs a steady plat-
¥ (air enters here)
as well; the resultant low gas pres- form from which to operate. But
Gular cavity
sure causes outside air to rush in. any locomotion also renders the rib
Mammals have two systems for muscles nearly useless for breathing;
ventilating the lungs. The rib muscles running makes them completely so.
power one system: they expand the Studying the common green iguana
chest by lifting and rotating the long (Iguana iguana), Carrier confirmed
flat bones to which they attach. The that the rib muscles are active dur-

32 | NATURAL HISTORY June 2003

ing locomotion, and that the lizard while moving. On the contrary, the called gular pumping [see illustration
holds its breath while sprinting. animal should ventilate as often and as below]. In fact, the use of head
Now, any athlete can tell you that vigorously as a metabolically equiva- muscles rather than trunk muscles to
holding your breath while running lent mammal. But if the lizard can’t power respiration predates the
will seriously cut down on your rely on its rib muscles to breathe evolution of lungs. Fish, for ex-
endurance. So Carrier posited that while it walks, how does the monitor ample, pump water across their gills
lizards (not unlike me) are restricted spend all day walking? with their head muscles. But until
to short bursts of anaerobic exercise the work of Owerkowicz and
(less than thirty seconds), followed by he resolution to this apparent Brainerd, gular pumping had not
prolonged panting to pay back the paradox required the joint been considered an important factor
oxygen debt. (An oxygen debt efforts of physiologists and bio- for lung ventilation in reptiles.
accrues when muscles work without mechanists. Tomasz Owerkowicz To show that gular pumping is the
oxygen; the result is that lactic acid of Harvard University and Beth key to the monitor’s endurance,
accumulates, and it must be oxidized Brainerd of the University of Brainerd and Owerkowicz took a
after the work is done.) Massachusetts at Amherst trained group of treadmill-trained lizards on
Carrier’s hypothesis was controver- savannah monitors to trot on a tread- a road trip to the University of
sial, particularly among respiratory mill in front of an X-ray machine California, Irvine. There, together
physiologists. Other investigators had coupled to a video camera. The with the physiologists James W. Hicks
discovered that monitor lizards—a X-ray movies demonstrated that, as and Colleen Farmer, they custom-
distant relative of Carrier’s iguana— Carrier had predicted, when the fitted the animals with small face
have high metabolic rates. That is, animal ran relatively fast, respiration masks, which enabled the biologists to
unlike most so-called cold-blooded relying on the subatmospheric pres- measure the lizards’ oxygen consump-
animals, monitors burn a lot of sures generated by expansion of the tion while the animals ran a treadmill.
energy rapidly. A good example is the rib cage was supplanted First each lizard ran normally; then
by a different a plastic tube was
inserted into the

(2) Gular cavity extended (3) Mouth and nares closed (4) Gular cavity compressed

Most lizards are like a clumsy person who can’t walk and chew gum at the same mouth to keep the animal’s mouth
time; the lizards’ handicap, though, is that they can’t breathe and run open and prevent gular pumping. And
simultaneously. Their rib muscles, which expand the chest during each breath,
sure enough, when the gular pumping
must also brace the forelimbs during locomotion—especially running. The
peripatetic monitor lizards have evolved an alternate route to get air into their was eliminated, the monitor lizards
lungs. As an animal moves (1), muscles attached to the hyobranchial apparatus (a acted more like Carrier’s green iguanas.
collection of bones in the lizard’s throat) depress the structure, expanding its Gular pumping has turned out to
gullet (2). Air flows into the cavity created; the lizard then closes its mouth and be far more widespread in lizards than
nares (3), and constricts its throat (4), pumping the air into its lungs. physiologists had previously thought.
The monitors, though, with their
savannah monitor (Varanus exanthe- method of breathing. Long, thin high metabolic rate, rely on it more
maticus), an African monitor lizard bones below the tongue and in the than their relatives do. For most other
weighing about ten pounds, which neck seemed to be causing the lizards, the drill remains: dash and
spends most of its day patrolling its lizard’s throat and the floor of its pant, dash and pant . . . just like me.
territory for tasty insects. Its oxygen mouth to expand and contract: the
consumption is as high as that of such animal was “gulping” air on the run. Adam Summers (asummers@uci.edu) is an
mammals as the armadillo, and so the This kind of lung ventilation, well assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary
monitor can’t afford to hold its breath known in frogs and salamanders, is biology at the University of California, Irvine.

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 33

 JUNE 2003

Patterns in Nature
The new focus on self-organizing processes links such diverse
natural phenomena as a Zebra’s stripes and a mound oftermites.

By Scott Camazine

he natural world abounds in eye-catching

patterns. Consider the synchronized move-
ments of a school of fish gliding through
deep ocean waters; or the coordinated turns and
swoops of a flock of starlings whirling among tall
trees before coming to rest on a telephone wire.
How do all the individuals in the school or the flock
avoid collisions with their neighbors? How do they
orchestrate their graceful movements?
Other patterns in nature are just as dynamic, but
develop so slowly that they appear as snapshots to
the human eye: a brief, static moment in a biolog-
ical process. Think of the striking regularity of al-
ternating light and dark stripes on a zebra’s coat, or
the reticulations on the surface of the fruiting body
of a morel mushroom. Zooming in for a close-up
of a slime mold, you can observe the branching
network patterns that emerge as the mold grows.
On astill smaller scale, magnified several hundred
times, similar patterns emerge on the surface of a
pollen grain. Intricate reticulated patterns appear
in the passageways of the fungus gardens of African
termite colonies, and in the crisscrossing trails of
foraging army ants.
The living world is filled with striped and mot-
tled patterns of contrasting colors; with sculptural
equivalents of those patterns realized as surface
crests and troughs; with patterns of organization
and behavior even among individual organisms.
People have long been tempted to find some ob-
scure “intelligence” behind all these biological pat-
terns. In the early twentieth century the Belgian
Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, pon-
dering the efficient organization of bee and ter-
mite colonies, asked:

What is it that governs here? What is it that issues orders,

foresees the future, elaborates plans and preserves equi-
librium, administers, and condemns to death?
 The biblical songwriter in Proverbs marvels at may be thousands or millions of times larger than an
the same phenomenon among the ants, though, individual termite, and the construction of the edi-
more wisely than Maeterlinck, resists the tempta- fice may take longer than dozens of individual life-
tion to invoke an intelligent ant: times. It is simply inconceivable that an overseer
Go to the ant thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise,
guides all those processes. The same holds true of
Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, the flock and the school: although their movements
Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her are as elegant as the finest choreography, there is no
food in the harvest. (Prv. 6: 6-8) choreographer to direct each bird or fish. The nat-
ural world, it turns out, 1s replete with patterns and
In this instance, science agrees with the Old Tes- processes that exhibit organization without an orga-
tament. Do ants or, for that matter, termite mounds, nizer, coordination without a coordinator.
flocks of birds, or schools of fish have leaders that all For some people who come to appreciate this
the members of the group follow? The answer is, point, it then becomes tempting to attribute such
clearly, no. Imagine the kind of oversight that would complex patterns and processes to innate behav-
be needed to build a termite mound. The mound lors, instincts, or genetic information encoded

Ee-

Striped markings on the coats of zebras exhibit the kinds of patterns that occur throughout
nature, which can be described by simple mathematical tools.

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 35

 “Mechanics” of a Typical Cellular Automaton deep within the chromosomes of the organism.
RULE
But such “simple explanations” are not likely and,
in the best of cases, they merely sweep the ques-
CT
a 2 i]
aa
- ae
O
or — Lil
f aogier tion under the carpet. What then 1s the origin of
all this stunning complexity?
HOW IT WORKS

Neighbor Locus Neighbor

have always been fascinated by the natural world,
by the strange and complex creatures that inhabit
i} | Active
| | Row it. As a child, I was drawn to small animals and in-
sects and delighted in their diversity and behaviors.
[| Result
Row
Case G
re
Case F Case D
+ My curiosity took the form of carefully labeled col-
a lections of minerals, pressed flowers, feathers, and
pinned insects, each specimen with a shape and pat-
Active Row
tern all its own. I often wondered how such patterns
Result Row arose, but never found an explanation. Looking
back, I think part of the difficulty was that people
didn’t have the tools needed to explore the question.
Active Row
In the past several decades, however, a rich
Result Row convergence of insight has come from a wide
range of scientific disciplines, including biology,
chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and
physics. Out of that mix the field of complex sys-
tems emerged. I have followed the exciting devel-
opments in this field as a research biologist, physi-
cian and photographer.
In the years since my childhood, those who
study complex systems have learned that many
natural patterns share a similar mechanism of for-
mation called self-organization. Self-organization
refers to a wide range of processes in both living
Operation of a cellular automaton is easiest to demonstrate in its and nonliving systems. Those processes are charac-
one-dimensional form. From a given initial state (row of white or terized by simple “rules” that depend solely on
black squares at time 0), a rule specifies how the color of each cell
local interactions among the subunits of the sys-
for each of an indefinite number of subsequent ticks of a clock
depends only on the colors of a fixed group of neighboring cells; tem. Yet despite their simplicity and the local
the rule simply itemizes the possibilities. If each step in the evolution range of their immediate effects, the rules and their
is portrayed as a new row of cells, the result, which depends both actions on the subunits give rise to the sponta-
on the rule and the initial state of the line of cells, is a two- neous emergence of pattern, order, and structure
dimensional grid that can simulate a wide range of patterns in
on a global, system-wide scale.

I
nature. The intricate, nested pattern at the bottom of the diagram is
the result of applying the rule over the course of twenty-three steps.
To put the matter a slightly different way, in a self-
organizing system order is not imposed from the
outside, by external influences. No
architect or foreman holds the blue-
print or has a preconceived idea
about what patterns will evolve. The
patterns that arise are emergent
properties, properties that cannot be
predicted simply by examining the
subunits in isolation. To understand
them, the dynamic and often remark-
ably complex interactions among the
subunits must be taken into account.
Zebra skin markings are simulated here by a two-dimensional cellular automaton,
from an initial, random distribution of black and white cells (far left). Even with the
Think about the concentric pat-
first tick of the clock a pattern begins to appear (second from left). At the tenth tern of honey, pollen, and brood
tick of the clock, a stable pattern emerges (third from left), which is quite similar to that arises on the honey combs ofa
an actual zebra coat (far right). beehive. Thousands of bees contin-

36 NATUR AL HISTORY June 2003

|
 corner with the square occupied by the original
cell. A clock ticks the time, and with each tick, the
state of each cell on the entire grid evolves to its
next state in accord with four simple rules:
1. A live cell surrounded by two or three live cells at
time ft will also be alive at the next clock tick, time
t + 1 (at survives).
2. A live cell with no live neighbors or only one live
neighbor at time t will be dead at time ¢ + 1 (it dies of
Lea iat
faseeapna
ET pce ee fespap peat
ow eee
loneliness).
7
C]
ne 3. A live cell with four or more live neighbors at time ¢
é Ect om

Entirely different and unpredictable pattern arises as a result

of applying a different rule (top of diagram) to the same initial
state used in the upper illustration on the opposite page.

ually and simultaneously contribute to the emerg-

ing pattern: workers from the field bring in honey
and pollen throughout the day; other workers
consume the honey and pollen and feed it to the
brood; the queen wanders over the combs looking
for cells in which to place her eggs; the eggs
hatch, become larvae, and finally vacate the cells
when they pupate and develop into adults. My re-
search has shown that the bees do not have special
“designated” places to put the honey, pollen, and
eggs. Instead, they conform to a simple set of
what we call rules that guide their behaviors.
Nevertheless, the dynamic interactions among all
the bees result in the spontaneous emergence of a
consistent, stable pattern.
Unfortunately the human mind is poor at pre-
dicting what happens when hundreds or thousands
of “things” interact with one another, even if the
interactions themselves are quite simple. Comput-
ers, however, are ideally suited to such a task. One
tool for simulating self-organized pattern forma-
tion is readily implemented with computer soft-
ware; the tool is called a cellular automaton, and
the patterns that emerge, even from what seem to
be the most trivial rules, make a highly convincing
rationale for exploring the properties of automata.

() ne of the first cellular automata to be studied

in any depth was the so-called game of life,
devised by the mathematician John Horton Con-
way, now of Princeton University, and popularized
by the writer Martin Gardner is his “Mathematical
Games” column for Scientific American magazine 1n
October 1970.
To understand how the game of life works,
imagine a huge grid of squares, entirely covered by Wide range of patterns in nature can be simulated by surprisingly
checkers, or cells, that are either black or white, simple rules. Here and on succeeding pages is a gallery of
“alive” or “dead.” Each cell is surrounded by eight photographs suggesting the variety. Above, wind-blown ripples
neighboring cells whose squares share an edge or a develop on the surface of the sand in the Gobi desert, in Mongolia.

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY oi.

 | be dead at time ¢ + 1 (it dies of overcrowding). as successive horizontal rows, the “successor” pat-
4. A dead cell surrounded by three live cells at time t will tern just under its predecessor. The pattern that re-
ye alive at time f + 1 (at will be born); otherwise, a sults is a two-dimensional grid of cells that portrays
dead cell remains dead. the evolution of the top row throughout all the
ticks of the clock.
When the rules are applied to some initial con- Suppose the initial row of cells has a single black
figuration of live and dead cells (at, say, time ¢ = 0), cell in the center. When the rule I just defined 1s
the pattern that arises at time tf = 1 can be quite applied to that row—the active row—and then to
unexpected. Moreover, if the same rules are ap- the subsequent rows, a complex pattern develops
plied to the new patterns of live and dead cells that that is shown at the bottom of the illustration. Ap-
result at times f= 1) f—=2. 2 = 3, and so forth, the plying another rule to the same initial pattern
patterns that evolve over time can be entirely would give rise to an entirely different set of suc-
unpredictable. In other words, for some initial cessive rows [see upper illustration on preceding page}.
patterns, the only way to determine how they It is difficult to convey the intricacy and dy-
evolve under the rules is to watch them. namism of even the simplest cellular automaton
with a verbal description or even with static dia-
‘o better understand how such a program works, grams. Curious readers can visit Web sites where
consider an even simpler version of a cellular they will be able to watch “home movies” of cel-
automaton. This one begins not with an entire lular automata as they evolve:

S
SS S SSS
Yellow morel, black morel, and half-free more! Scales on the wing ofa painted lady butterfly, x400

checkerboard of cells (a “two-dimensional” cellular www.radicaleye.com/lifepage

automaton), but instead with just a single row (a www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html
“one-dimensional” automaton). In other words, start To see bird flocking simulations visit
with a horizontal row of square cells that extends www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/
indefinitely far to the left and right. As in the game Also visit StarLogo at these three sites:
of life, each cell is colored either black or white. education.mit.edu/starlogo/
The neighborhood of each cell in the row includes www.kasprzyk.demon.co.uk/www/ALHome.htm|
Just the two adjoining cells, one to its left and one to lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/alife.htm!
its right. And again, as in the game of life, with each As with all self-organizing patterns, the main
tick of a clock, the color, or state, of each cell in the feature of cellular automata is that they are based
row changes according to some simple rule. ona simple set of rules, and they use only local in-
For example, one rule might be the following: a formation to determine how a particular subunit
cell becomes black on the next tick of the clock evolves. But programs such as the game of life or
whenever one or the other, but not both, of its the one-dimensional cellular automaton just de-
neighbors are black; otherwise it remains (or scribed, while suggestive, lack direct biological rel-
becomes) white |see upper illustration on page 36]. A evance. If rules are to be useful for understanding
one-dimensional cellular automaton has the ad- the patterns in real life, such as the stripes of a
vantage that successive patterns can be represented zebra’s coat, they must be different rules.
 he zebra’s coat alternates in contrasting areas of underlying physical reinforcements and inhibitions,
light and dark pigmentation. In technical jar- and switch their states appropriately. As the regions
gon, the pigmentation reflects patterns ofactivation of activator compete with one another through
and inhibition—apt terms because of the dynamic their local interactions, a regular pattern develops.
process that generates the pattern. Cells in the skin What emerges 1s a self-organizing pattern that looks
called melanocytes produce melanin pigments, very much like the skin of the zebra [see the remain-
which are passed into the growing hairs of the ing three frames of the lower illustration on page 36].
zebra. Whether or not a melanocyte produces its Similar patterns occur in the brain. As the em-
pigment appears to be determined by the presence bryonic brain develops, competing influences from
or absence of certain chemical activators in the skin the right and left eye determine where connections
during early embryonic development. Hence the are made in the back of the brain, the visual cortex.
pattern of the zebra’s coat reflects the early interac- Clusters of neurons from one eye or the other
tion of those chemicals as they diffused through the dominate portions of the cortex in a distinct pat-
embryonic skin. tern. The pattern is thought to develop because the
With a new set of rules, a two-dimensional cel- neurons from each eye compete with one another
lular automaton can readily simulate the pattern of for space. Initially, the neuronal projections coming
the coat and so shed light on the mechanism of from the left or right eye are slightly different, a dif-
pattern formation in the zebra. Return to the ference that presumably arises at random. The rules
square grid and randomly place a black cell or a of the competition have the same general form as

Wrinkle pattern formed by a coat of varnish on a wooden surface Plasmodial slime mold (Physarum polycephalum) growing on aleaf.

white cell on each square. The grid will look the rules of activation and inhibition of zebra coat
something like the leftmost frame of the lower pigment. Projections of the neurons from one eye
illustration on page 36. Assume that each black cell stimulate and encourage additional projections
represents a certain minimum level of pigment from the same eye. At the same time, those projec-
activator. Such a random array of activator or its tions inhibit the development of projections to that
absence is thought to be the starting point for the area from the other eye. This local competition for
early development of coat patterns. real estate in the brain results in a pattern of stripes
Now apply another simple rule, based on the reminiscent of those of the zebra.
following underlying physical effect: activator
molecules that are near each other strengthen and elf-organizing patterns extend to the nonliving
mutually reinforce their effect. At the same time, world as well. They appear in mineral deposits
they diminish the effect of activators that are far- between layers of sedimentary rock, in the path of a
ther away, inhibiting their ability to activate their lightning bolt as it crashes to the ground, in the un-
own nearby neighbors. dulating ripples of windblown sand on a desert dune.
In this example, as in the game of life, each cell When the forces of wind, gravity, and friction act on
can be either on or off, black or white. And again, sand dunes, the innumerable grains of sand ricochet
with each tick of the clock, the cells interact with and tumble. As one grain lands, it affects the position
one another according to a rule that reflects the of other grains, blocking the wind or occupying a

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 32

 site where another grain might have landed. De- even more melanin pigment.-Sand dunes develop
pending on the speed of the wind and the sizes and ridges when the wind deposits a chance accumula-
shapes of the grains of sand, this dynamic process tion of sand grains. One small, almost insignificant
creates a regular pattern of stripes or ripples. ridge becomes amplified because it acts as a barrier,
Similar patterns arise accidentally on painted sur- promoting the accumulation of even more grains
faces exposed to harsh of sand on the windward side of the ridge.
weather. Paints and var- But if positive feedback operated alone and
nishes are designed, of unchecked, there would be no pattern. The zebra
course, to adhere per- would be entirely black; the sand dune would have
manently and evenly to a no ridges. What comes into play is a second kind
surface. | Nevertheless, of process called negative feedback, in which more
heat, moisture, and sun- leads to less. Negative feedback puts the brakes on
light often combine to lift processes with positive feedback, shaping them so
the paint off the underly- as to create a pattern. The presence of an activator
ing surface, causing the in the zebra skin inhibits pigment production in
paint to crack or buckle. nonadjacent skin patches and the zebra ends up as
As a patch of paint begins a mixture of black and white. (A similar mecha-
to pull away from the sur- nism may also explain the uniform coat of spots in
face, a dynamic tension— a leopard, formed from islands of high activation.)
Cabbage between the forces caus- Self-organized patterns often arise in living sys-
ing the paint to buckle tems because evolutionary processes can build the
and wrinkle and the ad- patterns so economically. The location and
hesive force between the branching of each and every marking of a zebra
paint and the surface— need not be explicitly specified by the limited ge-
develops at that spot. The netic information carried by DNA. Instead, all
more paint that pulls that needs to be genetically coded are the charac-
away, the weaker the ad- teristics of the interacting molecules. Those char-
hesive force exerted by acteristics determine just how the molecules act
the paint nearby that is upon one another—what we interpreted as the
still sticking to the surface. “rules” that govern the positive and negative feed-
The result is a runaway back processes of the underlying activators that are
situation but with a coun- distributed across the embryonic zebra’s skin.
tervailing effect. At some A second economy is an explanatory one: there
point, the dynamic ten- is no need to invoke a different process to explain
Radiolarian, x120
sions begin to split the each of the many different striped and spotted pat-
paint that has already terns that occur on the surfaces of mammals, fish,
pulled away. Once that and insects. All such patterns arise through similar
happens, the tensions on developmental pathways. A particular pattern sim-
the: paint™faritrommyithe ply emerges from the ways in which certain sub-
split, still adhering to the stances activate or inhibit one another’s effects on
surface, are reduced. The the formation of pigment.
result is a pattern of buck-
ling ridges. eenonbiological physical systems, self-organized
patterns are epiphenomena that have no adap-
he runaway process tive significance. There is no driving force that
and its countervail- pushes cloud formations, mud cracks, irregularities
ing effect, so prominent in painted surfaces, or spiral waves in certain
in the example of the chemical reactions into developing the striking
Polygonum pollen grain, x900
paint, are also key parts of patterns they exhibit.
the way patterns form in In biological systems, however, natural selection
zebra fur and in sand. The runaway process is also can act to favor certain patterns. The particular
called positive feedback: just as in a snowball rolling chemicals within the skin of the developing zebra
down a hill, more leads to even more. In the zebra, diffuse and react in such a way as to consistently
an elevated level of activator in the skin leads to produce stripes. If the properties of the zebra skin,
more activation nearby, and so to the production of or the composition of the chemical activators, were

40
even slightly different from what they are, a pattern heading of nearby birds; and move toward the aver-
would not develop. But in the course of evolution, age position of nearby birds. Fishes’ rules are simi-
the specific properties that result in precisely the lar, and they suffice to describe the phenomenon.
kind of stripes that zebras possess were selected for It is not easy for human beings to intuit how
and have persisted. One advantage of this pattern of such a decentralized mode of operation can func-
disruptive coloration seems to be an effective adap- tion so efficiently, because human groups rely so
tation to the presence of biting flies. The visual heavily on hierarchical organization. Executive
system of the tsetse fly is particularly
sensitive to large blocks of contrasting
color. A large black animal on a
background of uniformly light-
brown savannah is more easily recog-
nized as a potential meal than is a pat-
tern of fine black-and-white stripes.
Zebras’ coats are just one example
of the adaptive advantage of self-
organized patterns. Such patterns
also come into play on the folded,
reticulated surface of the morel
mushroom or on the lining of the
stomach. In both those cases, the
large surface area, a consequence of
the folding, is an advantage: for pro-
ducing spores in the first case, or for
absorbing nutrients in the second.
Yet not all patterns that occur in
nature arise through self-organization.
A weaver bird uses its own body as a
template as it builds the hemispherical
egg chamber of its nest. A spider cre-
ates its sticky orb following a geneti-
cally determined recipe for laying out
the various radi and spirals of the
web. A caddisfly larva builds an intri-
cate hideaway from grains of sand or
other debris carefully fastened to-
gether with silk. In those cases, the
building of structures does indeed
involve a little architect that oversees
and imposes order and pattern. There
are no “subunits” that interact with
one another to generate a pattern;
instead, each of the animals acts like a
stonemason, measuring, fitting, and
moving pieces into place.
Windflower, Anemone coronaria
inally, what about the graceful
movements of birds and fish? Do they depend functioning, planning, and decision-making exist
on leaders, or are they, too, system subunits that at many levels of the hierarchy. Imagine a world
“follow rules” and that move gracefully despite the without supervisors, administrators, and managers,
absence of any leaders to guide the group. Coordi- and many people would imagine sheer chaos.
nated flocking appears to rely on three behavioral Nevertheless, self-organization in nature is effi-
rules for maintaining separation, alignment, and cient, economical, and ubiquitous. It is one of
cohesion of flock-mates: steer to avoid crowding or the least known, yet most powerful, devices for
colliding with nearby birds; maintain the average achieving pattern and order in the world. O

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 41

 Epitor’s Note: The looting and destruction that have befallen
ancient artifacts from the museums and archaeological sites of Iraq
are a calamity for civilization. The photographs on these four pages
depict only a handful of the glories that had been unearthed in re-
cent centuries; it is too soon to say with any certainty whether the
items pictured here are safe or missing—or whether, if missing,
they will somehow yet turn up.
In February 2001, Natural History The “Mona Lisa of
published the article “Robbing the Ar- Nimrud,” possibly Ishtar.
chaeological Cradle,’ by John Malcolm Ivory plaque of Phoenician
workmanship, found in the
Russell, a professor of art history and ar-
Assyrian palace at Nimrud.
chaeology at the Massachusetts College Late 8th century B.C.
of Art in Boston and a leading authority
on the antiquities of the Near East. Pas-
sages adapted from Russell’s article,
which provide cultural and historical
context for the artifacts, are presented
here (italic text). David Keys, a freelance
journalist based in Middlesex, England,
who specializes in archaeology, has con-
tributed a report about the looting and
the early responses to it.

Lost Time
Damage control in Iraq

Cc alled Mesopotamia by the Greeks, and

variously Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and
Assyria by its own ancient inhabitants, Iraq has an
excellent claim to be the cradle of Western civilization.
The emergence of complex communities was
accompanied by developments such as writing, the
wheel, irrigation agriculture, cities, monumental
architecture, state-sponsored warfare,
organized religion, written laws, kingship,
a wealthy class, imperialism, centrally
“organized production of hand-crafted goods,
and large-scale trade. The first eleven
Uruk (Warka) cult vase. This three-foot-high vase has
chapters of Genesis are set, by and large, in
five rows of limestone bas-reliefs depicting the
abundant fields and flocks of the city-state of Uruk,
southern Iraq, in the land of Shinar
water, corn growing from the water, sheep, men (Babylonia). Eden, the Sumerian word
bearing offerings to the temple, and the king meaning “steppe,” was the name of a
presenting them to the Goddess Inanna (Innin). district in Sumer, or southern Babylonia.
From Uruk, 5th-2nd century B.c. Mesopotamian royal gardens, notably the
Winged sphinx. lvory and Hanging
Aa
Gardens of Babylon, may have
A
gold, Sumerian, 8th-7th inspired the story of the Garden of Eden.
century B.C. —JOHN MALCOLM RUSSELL
 Aftershocks
by David Keys
round the world, the initial response to the
looting of Iraq's internationally important
museums and archaeological sites was, in the
catchphrase of the moment, shock and awe.
Early reports claimed near-total destruction of
the collections in lraq’s National Museum in
Baghdad, numbering some 170,000 ancient ar-
tifacts. Three weeks after the looting began,
paralysis continued to dog the military reaction.
Meanwhile, however, an international roster of
organizations and scholars had begun to move
toward coordinated action.
Funeral crown, a golden wreath of leaves and olives. From
Subsequent estimates put the losses at
Uruk (Warka). Hellenistic, early 3rd century.
roughly 15 percent of the collections, either
smashed, damaged, or looted. Despite the dis-
aster in the museum, virtually all 80,000 of the
institution's cuneiform tablets appear to be safe,
as do most of the precious Mesopotamian cylin-
der seals. The losses remain devastating, but
they fall far short of complete ruination. What is
more, in response to appeals by Muslim
religious leaders, some of the stolen ob-
jects are gradually being returned.
By the end of April, an alliance of lead-
ing Western museums and universities had
announced a multimillion-dollar initiative
to provide expertise and funding for the
repair and conservation efforts. But the
basic police work—sealing borders, hunt-
ing for thieves, tracking down illicit Iraqi
antiquities that reach Western art mar-
kets—had been left to governments. Cul-
PRR
RT AT OTe eer
er ere rar ae kk OE tural institutions could do little more than
2 a toe a on oe ava Nias e.2R FF
RE ROR BRAC AY RC ROS beg political leaders to devote resources
to an effective, aggressive recovery effort.
The looting of the National Museum it-
Lioness killing a man. Phoenician ivory inlaid with lapis self began on April 10 and continued spo-
lazuli. From Nimrud, 8th century B.C.
radically for several days. Successive waves
Two nude of looters broke into dozens of rooms. Tens of
females. thousands of documents, photographs, slides,
Figurative ivory and index cards were scattered over floors
handle,
throughout much of the building.
originally with
gold foil. From Some of the papers had been gathered into
Nimrud, 8th piles by vandals who, it is thought, had intended
century B.C. to turn them into bonfires to burn the building
down. But they must have been disturbed—
possibly by other gangs of thieves. Some loot-
ers came equipped with glass and metal cutters
and other tools—as well as trucks and vans for
hauling away heavy pieces of looted treasure.
The better-organized gangs ignored replicas
Gold necklace with lapis lazuli and and stole only genuine ancient treasures. And
carnelian pendants. Sumerian, 3000 B.c. with considerable organization, they manhan-

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 43

 Cylinder seals. Late Uruk, Jamdat Nasr period, 2900 8.c.

Couple embracing. From Nippur, 2600 8.c.

rior to the First World War, when the area that is now Iraq
P was part of the Ottoman Empire, excavations by foreign
archaeologists were carried out under permits issued in Istanbul.
Mid-nineteenth-century excavators were allowed to export whatever
they wished. That is how the British
Museum and the Louvre acquired the bulk iin
of their renowned Mesopotamian OY
collections. Stung by the empire’s loss of —
irreplaceable treasures, and anxious to
establish Istanbul as a center for the study
of ancient art, the Ottoman statesman
Hamdi Bey founded the Archaeological
Museum ofIstanbul in 1881. Thereafter, Tate
foreign archaeologists were obliged to share Musical instrument, gilded and inlaid,
their discoveries with the museum. with bull’s-head ornament. Found in
Afier the First World War, Iraq the Temple of Puabi at Ur, 2450 B.c.

became a separate state, initially

administered by Britain.
With the energetic guidance of
a British official, Gertrude
Bell, who advocated that
antiquities be retained by the
country of origin, the Iraq
Museum was founded in
1923 in Baghdad. A decade
later, Iraq began to take
charge of its own patrimony.
Bronze statuette of King Sulgi. A law enacted in 1936
Neo-Sumenan 2094247 8 ¢ decreed that all the country’s
antiquities more than 200
years old were the property of the state; amendments
in the 1970s eliminated the Ottoman tradition of
dividing finds with their excavators. The Iraq
Museum, in the heart of downtown Baghdad, now
Cuneiform tablets. Left: Algebraic-geometrical table of
began to accumulate the most important collection of
triangles described by a perpendicular drawn from the
Mesopotamian antiquities in the world... . right angle to the hypotenuse. Right: Algebraic-
—JOHN MALCOLM RUSSELL geometrical problem involving a rectangle whose
diagonal and area are given and whose length and width
are to be determined. From Tell Harmal, c. 1800 8.c.

44 AT ine 2003
 dled all the museum's safes into one n—pre-
sumably where they had i metal-
cutting equipment.
Looters also attacked the National Library,
the library of the Ministry us Affairs,
and the library at Baghdad University. The mu-
Dae i, seum in the northern city of Mosul—filled with
ak *
treasures from Nineveh, Nimrud, and, Hatra—
was also badly looted.
More objects have probably been damaged
than have been stolen. Many|people outside
lraq have been at a loss to € the sheer
vandalism that lragis directe heir own

cultural heritage. But as far as the poor of Bagh-

dad are concerned, that heritage had become
A the time of the 1991 Gulf War,
a surrogate for Saddam Hussein. Images of
archaeology was undergoing an
Hussein dressed as the seventh-century B.C.
extraordinary revival in Iraq. Dozens
Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar || stared
offoreign and Iraqi teams were working
down on Baghdad's population. Giant hel-
at an unprecedented rate... . When
meted heads at a presidential palace in Bagh-
Iraq invaded Kuwait in the summer of
dad depicted Hussein as the Muslim military
1990, virtually all archaeological
leader Saladin. Top Republican Guard divisions
activity ceased, and the war and
were named after ancient Mesopotamian kings.
subsequent imposition of UN sanctions
have left Iraq’s patrimony in peril. Not
here is, of course, also plenty of anger in
only is almost no money available for
Iraq that the Baghdad National Museum
the preservation of antiquities, but some
was not protected by U.S. forces when
Iraqi citizens, squeezed
they first occupied the city. Just a few days
between ruinous infla-
before the invasion, leading academics
tion and shortages of
met with officials from the Pentagon and
basic necessities, have
the State Department to discuss how best
turned to looting and
to protect Iraq's cultural artifacts, and the
selling artifacts from
National Museum was number one on the
excavated and unexca-
list. The academics warned that serious
Fluted gold beaker. From the royal vated sites and even
looting would be inevitable unless the mu-
cemetery at Ur. Sumerian, c. 2400 B.c. from museums.
seum was properly guarded.
—JOHN MALCOLM
Yet the U.S. military offered virtually no
RUSSELL
protection to the museum during the first six
days of the U.S. occupation. When the mu-
seum staff asked for help from a nearby tank
crew, the soldiers told them that they had
no orders to protect the building. Even when
Bronze or copper head
top museum officials appealed directly to se-
of King Sargon the
Great of Akkad nior military officers, no protection materialized.
(c. 2334-2279 B.C.) or The lack of a coordinated military response to
of his grandson, King what Donny George, the director of research at
Naram-Sin (2254-18 B.c.). the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Her-
Found at Nineveh.
itage, has called “the crime of the century” was
Akkadian, c. 2250 B.C.
still the rule of the day three weeks after the ini-
tial occupation of Baghdad. U.S. troops sta-
tioned at border posts were still not searching
vehicles for looted treasure, noted George, who
Mythical creature with gazelle’s head, lion's body,
personally crossed the Iraqi-Jordanian border.
and snake’s tail; enameled tile and ceramic brick.
Detail from the Ishtar Gate, Babylon. Period of “Anyone can take anything and go out of the
Nebuchadnezzar II, 7th-6th century B.C. country,” George added. “It’s a tragedy.” oO

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 45

A chimpanzee consumes figs in the Budongo Forest Reserve in western Uganda.

Close Encounters
Mountain gorillas and chimpanzees share the wealth
of Uganda’s “impenetrable forest,” perhaps offering
a window onto the early history of hominids.
By Craig Stanford

t’s a rare sunny morning in the Bwindi Impen- as part of our field studies, stand upright on thick
etrable National Park of southwestern Uganda, branches as they stuff themselves with the little
and a party of chimpanzees is feeding noisily in fruits. The group’s alpha male—we call him
an enormous fig tree. My colleague John Bosco Mboneire (“handsome” in Ruchiga, a local lan-
Nkurunungi andI sit fifty yards away on the other guage)—eats next to a female we call Martha, and
side of the small valley, surveying the scene at eye her daughter, May. Grizzled old Kushoto plucks
level through binoculars. The apes, which belong fruit nimbly with his right hand (his left was dam-
to a group Nkurunungi and I have been observing aged when it was caught in a poacher’s wire snare).
 Suddenly the branches in the forest understory is the case among Bwindi’s gorillas and chim-
begin to sway, and a large, black-haired figure pops panzees, Nkurunungi and I have had to “walk the
partly into view from the green foliage. walk” of field observation.
“Who's that big guy?” I whisper, refocusing my Our interest, though, goes beyond the apes
binoculars. “That’s not someone we’ve seen be- themselves. Anthropologists have long studied the
fore.” Judging from the size of the top of its head, behavior and ecology of the great apes—bonobo,
the new arrival looks to be the biggest chimpanzee chimpanzee, gorilla, and orangutan—to try to
I’ve ever seen. shed light on the lives of early hominids. Investiga-
Peering through his binoculars, Nkurunungi tors have looked specifically at the relations be-
straightens me out: “Craig,” he says, “that’s not a tween gorillas and chimpanzees for clues about
chimpanzee. It’s a gorilla!” how early hominid groups may have similarly
Nkurunungi and I and our assistants in the shared a habitat. And, to be sure, at certain times
Bwindi Impenetrable Great Ape Project are well and places in human prehistory, more than one
aware that in this forest the ranges of the two ape species of hominid lived in the same habitat.
species overlap. Yet this occasion, in the project’s At Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania, for in-
fifth year, is the first time we've ever witnessed an stance, Australopithecus boisei and Homo habilis (the
encounter between them. The newcomer, an adult latter an early member of our own genus) occupied
female, emerges from the foliage and sits out in the the same territory about 1.8 million years ago. Still
open on a large branch only twenty feet below the earlier, about 3.5 million years ago, both Australo-
chimpanzees. She’s much larger than any of them, pithecus afarensis, of which the famed fossil Lucy was
and displays the serene and confident demeanor a member, and the recently discovered Kenyanthro-
that gorillas always seem to possess. As we
watch, she climbs to within ten feet of the
chimpanzees, casually plucking figs along
the way. Then another gorilla shows up
below her, this one a silverback, or mature
male, that appears to weigh at least 400
pounds. He joins the female, and the two
feed amicably side by side.
For the most part the two ape species pay
no attention to each other, but after about
twenty minutes the silverback notices us
watching from across the way. As suddenly
as they appeared, the two gorillas drop out
of the tree and then disappear in the dense
undergrowth.

A a biological anthropologist, I started

the Bwindi Impenetrable Great Ape
Project (or BIGAPE, as I like to call it) in Vg ale

1996, and for seven years now, Nkurunungi, — {n Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, a female gorilla dines
a doctoral student from Makerere University — on wild celery.
in Kampala, and I have worked together in
Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (formerly, the pus platyops lived in fairly close proximity in East
Impenetrable Forest). Our goal is to understand the Africa. Anthropologists are keen to determine what
ecological relations between the chimpanzees (Pan kinds of associations such closely related species
troglodytes schweinfurthii) and the mountain gorillas forged with each other. Did they share their habitat
(Gorilla gorilla beringei) that share this rugged habitat. amicably, coming into peaceful contact on a regular
Ecological theory predicts that in order for species basis? Or did they compete—perhaps even aggres-
to co-exist over the long haul of evolution by nat- sively—for food, shelter, and other resources?
ural selection, they must avoid head-to-head com-
petition. So two closely related species living in the he most important clues to the ecological
same habitat typically diverge in some key aspects competitions of the distant past are teeth.
of their anatomy, behavior, or ecology. Diet is often Often well preserved in fossil records, teeth, their
the main point of divergence, and to find out ifthat anatomy, and their wear patterns reflect the diet of

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 47

 Gay coritas
[a cuimpanzees
[SW sonceos

Where great apes share a home: Represented in broad strokes,

above left, the ranges of the three African apes appear large,
and they do overlap. Because of habitat loss, however, the ani-
mals are largely distributed in small, scattered populations. In
Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, both gorillas and chimpanzees roam
through the same montane forest. A detail of Bwindi Park, above right, records sites
where the two species made their sleeping nests over the course of two years.

their former owner. For example, Olduvai’s H. lumbering, sedentary, terrestrial beasts. The idea
habilis possessed unimpressive molars in a modestly grew that, although their large brains were impres-
proportioned skull. We believe this hominid con- sive, gorillas were the cows—the slow-moving
sumed fruit, leaves, and some meat. In contrast, herbivores—of the ape world.
A. boisei had massive molars and a skull with a In recent years, however, the general view that
large bony crest on top, along the midline—the there is a wide ecological dichotomy between
attachment place for formidable jaw muscles. chimpanzees and gorillas has, to some extent, bro-
Those features indicate that A. boisei was adapted ken down. As other populations of gorillas have
to a diet of either tough and fibrous or hard- been studied across Africa, it has become clear
shelled foods. Fossil investigators think those di- that Fossey’s gorillas, which inhabit the cold,
etary differences made it possible for the two mountainous forest cloaking Rwanda’s Virunga
human relatives to survive alongside each other for volcanoes, lead quite different lives from those of
hundreds of thousands of years. Had they instead gorilla populations elsewhere. Recent studies
competed for the same resources, one of them show that most gorillas, like chimpanzees, actually
would probably have become quickly extinct. prefer fruit, and travel considerable distances to
Beginning with the pioneering studies of wild find it. To get other cherished foods, such as fungi
chimpanzees by the primatologist Jane Goodall and epiphytes, they climb tall trees, just as chim-
and of mountain gorillas by the primatologist Dian panzees do. And sometimes they, too, nest in
Fossey, investigators have watched apes in their trees, even near the tree nests of chimpanzees.
natural habitats for more than four decades. As the With all those parallels, how chimpanzees and go-
data accumulated, it began to seem as if the two rillas can be ecologically separated while living in
species occupied quite different ecological niches. the same habitat is not immediately clear.
In fact, aside from living in tropical forests across
equatorial Africa, the two apes were long thought windi Impenetrable National Park encompasses
to have little in common. Chimpanzees were por- some 130 square miles of wet, rugged hills cut
trayed as high-energy arboreal nomads, traveling into steep ravines by cold rushing streams. The park
miles each day to gather a high-carbohydrate diet is one of the last large tracts of montane wet forest in
of ripe fruit supplemented with leaves, insects, and eastern or central Africa. It boasts an extraordinary
mammalian prey. They ate and made their sleeping biodiversity—at least ten primate species live there,
nests in tall trees. as well as nearly 400 species of birds, including some
Gorillas, in contrast, appeared to be ground- that occur nowhere else in the region.
based foragers of wild celery and other fibrous, The population of Bwindi gorillas is about 300.
nutrient-poor foods. Fossey portrayed them as That may seem so small that the population is at
risk of vanishing, but apparently it is stable. The he Bwindi gorilla group we are following is
situation 1s more alarming in other parts of Africa, quite a cohesive one, made upof thirteen indi-
where gorillas are under much greater pressure viduals, including two silverbacks. These animals do
from forest cutting, poaching, and, most recently, not follow the lifestyle of their chimpanzee neigh-
an outbreak of Ebola virus. In the past five or ten bors, and their behavior also differs in key ways from
years alone, the total number of gorillas in Africa, that of the gorillas in the Virunga mountains. In a
believed to have been between 80,000 and break from the herbivore stereotype, from January

Using handheld Global Positioning System units, we plot every

_ observation of the two ape species, their sleeping nests, and fruit trees.
4)
7" !

Pak: f

ek
suse!
ass

100,000, may have been cut in half. We know less until July, when fruit is most plentiful, our gorillas
about the Bwindi chimpanzee population, esti- search for it far and wide. Most of the fruits they eat
mated at no more than 200, but across Africa the are the same ones eaten by the chimpanzees, but the
species faces the same perils. gorillas in both Bwindi and in the neighboring
Research in Bwindi, however, is not without forests of eastern Congo exploit a greater variety of
its drawbacks. The area has suffered several peri- fruits than do the chimpanzees in the same habitats.
ods of political instability in the past. In early From August until December, when the fruit
1999 Rwandan rebels killed a warden and kid- supply in the forest is low, the gorillas turn to
napped fourteen people from a tourist camp, and browsing leafy forest undergrowth, a salad that 1s
shortly thereafter they murdered eight of their low in calories as well as in most other nutrients,
captives. Since that tragedy, however, the Ugan- but is abundantly available. The consumption of
dan government has worked to ensure that the this fallback staple is what seems to distinguish go-
area is secure. Both ecotourism and research are rillas from chimpanzees everywhere. In the same
thriving once again.
My colleagues and I are compil-
ing a digital map, aided by Global
Positioning System technology,
which shows how the chimpanzees
and gorillas use the Bwindi land-
scape. Carrying handheld GPS
units, our research assistants plot
the coordinates of every observa-
tion of the two ape species, noting
if an observation is made at a sleep-
ing nest or at a feeding tree. They
also map sites where the animals
have nested and the position and
fruiting season of every major food
tree—including the great fig trees
that tend to fruit unpredictably. As
the mapping has proceeded over a
period of years, we have been able
to build a digital portrait of how
the two apes differ in their use of
habitat from month to month |see
illustration on opposite page|. We can pe ahs
see whether the movements and Chimpanzees in the Uganda Wildlife Education Centre in Entebbe use twigs to fish for
feeding of one species influences termites. This kind of behavior was first observed in the wild in Gombe National Park,
those of the other, and record over- Tanganyika (now Tanzania), by the primatologist Jane Goodall. Bwindi’s chimpanzees
laps in their diets. do not fish for termites, but they do use sticks to probe bee nests for honey.

June 2003 NATURAI HISTORY 49

 months that gorillas rely on leafy matter, chim- fruit trees (in fact fewer trees- of any kind) grow
panzees simply expand their search for the increas- there. Virunga gorillas often have no choice but to
ingly scarce trees with ripe fruit, traveling greater stay on the ground and eat herbs. The difference in
distances each day across Bwindi’s hills and valleys. habitat may also explain why there are no chim-
Another Gorillas in the Mist stereotype pictures all panzees living in the Virungas.
gorillas plowing slowly through cold misty mead- A third feature of gorilla behavior we expected
ows of ferns, never bothering to seek the fruits read- to confirm turned out to be just as misleading a
ily available in the upper reaches of the trees. In fact, stereotype as leaf-eating and ground-foraging. We
though, the Bwindi gorillas we observe climb with suspected at the outset of our study that the chim-

When different early hominid species lived side by side, did they share
resources amicably, or did they compete—perhaps aggressively?

agility. To see a 400-pound silverback swaying from panzees would always nest in trees and the gorillas
the uppermost tree branches as he picks figs or or- would nest on the ground. Hence nighttime would
chids and other epiphytic plants for his lunch 1s a find them ecologically separated. But at Bwindi,
truly impressive sight. Although some investigators about one-fifth of all gorilla nests are built in small
have suggested that Bwindi mountain gorillas might understory trees, which groan under the weight of
possess some genetic adaptation to tree foraging, | such massive occupants. And unlike most other
prefer a far simpler, common-sense explanation. chimpanzees that have been studied, the ones in
The mountainous terrain in Bwindi park ex- Bwindi occasionally build nests on the ground.
tends from 4,000 to 8,000 feet in elevation,
whereas Rwanda’s Virunga volcanoes, which lie @)* studies of Bwindi apes suggest that the
Just twenty-five miles to the south, rise as high as striking behavioral and ecological differences
14,700 feet. The lower altitude of Bwindi’s moun- between gorillas and chimpanzees stressed by ear-
tains makes for a warmer habitat, one that 1s much lier investigators were, in part, artifacts of the envi-
more hospitable to fruit trees. In contrast, the ronments where those early studies were done.
habitat of the Virunga gorillas is so cold that few But our close observations still confirm important
behavioral differences that others have noted be-
tween the two species of ape. Unlike the cohesive
gorillas, for instance, the Bwindi chimpanzees live
in the same fluid groups that characterize chim-
panzees everywhere. The group we study, which
ranges over at least eight square miles, is made up
of at least twenty-five chimpanzees. It includes five
adult males, plus females and their offspring. At
any given moment, however, it 1s likely to break
up into temporary subgroups, or parties.
I noted earlier that chimpanzees and gorillas di-
verge in their reliance on “fallback” foods, eaten in
times of scarcity: the gorillas turn to fibrous plants,
whereas the chimpanzees scour more territory for
fruits. Another obvious dietary difference is the
chimpanzees’ love of meat. Virtually everywhere
they have been studied—and Bwindi is no excep-
tion—chimpanzees avidly hunt and eat monkeys
and forest antelope. Although the density of these
Frodo, a male chimpanzee in Gombe National Park. Pioneering
mammals in our study area 1s fairly low, we have
work here established that members of the species fashion and use
d eat mammalian prey, and engage in other behavior
found that nearly 10 percent of chimpanzee fecal
that cou t be deduced from the observation of captive animals. samples contain the bones or hair of prey. In con-
A
primatok ts have fanned out to study additional populations, trast, gorillas do not eat meat at all, and have been
!
Variation vithin the species have begun to emerge. only rarely observed in the wild consuming in-
sects. Studies of gorillas in captivity show that their
ability to metabolize the fats and cholesterol in
meat is quite limited.
In our study area—the high elevation part of the
park—the two ape species share roughly the same
home range. But within that area the two apes use
the forest differently. Chimpanzees are long-distance
commuters, covering large parts of their range every
week. The gorillas, meanwhile, range over only
small portions of the area even in a given month,
and it may take them a year or more to fully exploit
the available resources. That difference may reduce
the ecological overlap between the two species.

WA ecological overlap is one thing. But

another goal of our study is to investigate
whether there is competition between the two apes.
That is much more difficult, because it requires
showing that one species, through its behavior, is ac-
tually reducing the food intake of the other.
The most straightforward way to demonstrate
such competition is to document encounters be-
tween chimpanzees and gorillas. We have now
recorded four such encounters, in which members
of both groups occupied the same tree. Three of
them were quite amicable: the gorillas arrived at a
tree in which chimpanzees were feeding, entered
the tree themselves, fed near their cousins, and
then departed.
But one encounter was not nearly so cordial. In
April 2002 a party of nine chimpanzees was feed-
ing in a tall Chrysophyllum gorungosanum tree (a spe-
cies of star apple). The tree was laden with the
fuzzy brown fruits with their milky-white pulp
that both chimpanzees and gorillas relish. As the A silverback—a mature male gorilla—climbs a tree in Bwindi.
chimpanzees fed, our research assistants heard The gorillas in this forest regularly seek out tree fruit and
gorillas grunting and moving about in the un- sometimes make their sleeping nests in trees.
dergrowth below the tree, apparently feeding on
fallen fruits. Then a female gorilla, followed by than the figs the apes were eating in the other en-
one of the silverbacks, began to climb up the counters we witnessed. Although it is risky to gen-
trunk. That prompted two of the male chim- eralize from this one observation, the outcome of
panzees to stop feeding and descend to the first the contest suggests that in Bwindi, chimpanzees
large fork of the trunk, where they obstructed the are dominant to gorillas when it comes to compe-
ascent of the two gorillas with a noisy, hair- tition over food.
bristling, branch-slapping display. It is tempting to imagine, too, that, millions of
The standoff continued on and off for nearly an years ago, H. habilis, a direct human ancestor,
hour. All the while, the gorillas remained on the played chimpanzee to A. boisei’s gorilla. Perhaps H.
ground or lower branches, calmly watching their habilis was the more freely ranging hominid, less
boisterous challengers. Finally, the arrival of other inclined to give in to foraging for salad when the
research assistants who had been tracking the gorillas going got tough. Perhaps H. habilis was the meat
startled the chimpanzees, which fled to an adjacent eater, smaller but more aggressive. We will never
treetop. The gorillas immediately climbed into the be certain. But we are certain that in African
Chrysophyllum tree and began to partake of the fruit. forests today, two of our closest kin are threatened
This interaction may have been confrontational with imminent extinction. They seek only to co-
because Chrysophyllum fruit is more highly prized exist—with each other, and with us. O

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 51

 eefing at the
Pi
s
a
r: r

Edge of Time
In search of the black hole at the center of our galaxy

By Fulvio Melia

The star Eta Carinae, a hundred times more massive than the Sun, survived the spectacular
outburst shown in the photograph, without becoming a supernova—for a time. Expected
to expiode soon, it may leave a black hole in its ashes.
 ake: 4 {rip not be drawn to it,
someday to teased by what it re-
the town of veals, tormented with
Port Douglas on the the desire to see more?
northeast coast of The direct observa-
Australia. There, lying tion of a black hole is
on the warm, sandy a chance to see the
beach, you will see the principles of Einstein’s
evening splendor of general theory of rela-
the Milky Way arching tivity writ large, and
from horizon to hori- the quest for that sight
zon across the cosmic is what drives astro-
vault. No doubt, as physicists like me to
you peer into the look toward the dark
starry void, the mag- behemoth within the
nificence of this glori- Milky Way. But only
ous and overpowering in recent years have
structure we humans observational methods
proudly call our galaxy attained such techno-
will overwhelm you. The galactic center lies in the constellation Sagittarius (lower right) logical virtuosity that
But perhaps even and is marked here by the cross. The diagonal represents the plane astronomers can focus
of the galaxy, and the constellation Scorpius is partly outlined to its
more alluring is an- left. The bright center and diagonal can be seen plainly in the radio
their attention on the
other realm, con- image on the left of the next page. galactic nucleus itself.
cealed deep inside this
vista and shielded from the Earth by a one-way he center of the Milky Way lies in the direc-
membrane—an event horizon—that eternally sep- tion of the constellation Sagittarius, the
arates the world within from the cosmos without. archer, close to the border with the neighboring
This isolated world at the core of our galaxy is a constellation Scorpius [see photograph above].
black hole. First proposed by the physicist J. Today astronomers tend to name celestial objects
Robert Oppenheimer in the 1930s, and named by and features after the constellation in which they
the physicist John Archibald Wheeler in 1967, a are found; the galactic center is said to lie in the
black hole is a collapsed aggregate of matter with a Sagittarius A complex, a large, radio-wave-
gravitational field so strong that the magnitude of emitting structure near the constellation. The most
the velocity for an object to escape its pull is unusual object in this region, discovered in 1974,
greater even than the speed of light. And that stands out on a radio map of the sky as a bright
means no One—not just a stargazer on an Aus- dot, and, unlike everything else stargazers have
tralian beach, not even an astronomer probing the seen in the galaxy, it orbits nothing. Rather, it
cosmos with the finest instruments known to defines the exact center of the Milky Way.
sclence—can see it, at least not directly. Astronomers call it Sagittarius A* (pronounced
But no such technicality has kept astronomers “ay-star’’), the asterisk meant to convey its unique-
from looking for it. As a species, human beings seek ness and importance.
truth and find beauty in the heart of things; the pri- The significance of Sagittarius has been un-
macy of the central realm beckons. Jules Verne felt known for most of the history of astronomy. The
it; in his novel A Journey to the Center of the Earth, reason, in large part, is the intervening dust. That
Professor Hardwigg and his fellow explorers ubiquitous and relentless vagrant of the household
encounter an assortment of strange, breathtaking is often quite an annoyance to astronomers, and
wonders as they approach Earth’s core. In early Chi- not just because they like tidy laboratories.
nese culture, art and invention were to be found The effect of dust on what astronomers see
only in the “central kingdom.” The supreme oracle depends rather directly on the color of the light
of the ancient Greek world sat at Delphi, the ompha- they are trying to sense. Imagine a gondola on the
los, or navel, of the world. The pragmatic Romans waters just off the Piazza San Marco in Venice.
echoed the sentiment, holding up their imperial The water, moving in waves, is like the light of
capital city as the center of anti-barbarism. By space, and the gondola is a grain of dust. Water
extension, the heart of something as majestic as the waves that undulate very slowly, so that crests pass
Milky Way must be special indeed, and who would by the boat at long intervals, have little influence;

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY ye)

|
 eee
The bright spot at the center of this radio image, made by the Very Sagittarius A* is inside the bright oval at the center of this image, a
Large Array radio telescope, hints at our galaxy’s central black hole, many-told enlargement of the bright region at the center of the image
called Sagittarius A*. The circular glows are supernova remnants; the at left. Above the oval, near the top, is a red giant star (light blue spot
bright spot glows with the radiation emitted by highly ionized hydro- with a comet-like tail pointing toward the top of the page); gas from
gen interacting with Sagittarius A*. the red giant is being blown away by the black hole.

the boat rides peacefully as the waves pass by. Imagine now plunging deeper into the middle
Waves whose crests pass at intervals much smaller of the bright region imaged by the radio tele-
than the size of the boat—basically ripples—also scope, to a point just one-twentieth of a light-
have little effect; they “bounce” off the gondola year from the center of our galaxy. In that
with minimal interference. But waves whose crests neighborhood such a region comprises as many as
are separated by a distance comparable to the size a million stars. Furthermore, an examination of
of the boat disturb it significantly as they pass, and the dark, or non-stellar, matter near the galactic
the gondola disrupts those waves as well. center reveals that it harbors even more material
Coincidentally, the light that our eyes are best that is yet unseen. Here is a territory where
suited to see also happens to have the wave- physical conditions become exotic, if not ex-
length—that 1s, the crest separation—for which treme. And embedded within a hot cauldron of
space dust is the greatest nuisance. Dust dims our swirling gases, lurking in the very middle of this
view toward the galactic center by a factor of at inferno, is Sagittarius A*—the deceptively unpre-
least 100 million. And so it happens that the heart tentious face ofa colossus with a mass equivalent
of the Milky Way, which would otherwise be the to 2.6 million Suns.
brightest patch of nighttime sky, is so heavily
obscured by dust that even the most powerful op- ature must surely be a chiaroscurist, a grande
tical telescopes are useless for observing it. dame of light and dark, of shadow and
But astronomers can part this dusty veil by col- contrast. On the cosmic canvas, astronomers can
lecting light whose wavelength is different from discern one of the greatest paradoxes in science—
what our eyes can sense. Instruments that detect that black holes tend to be the brightest objects in
radio waves, for example, have opened up bright the universe. And so it happens that images of the
new vistas in the heavens. Radio waves have a galactic center show not a dark spot, but rather a
crest separation of a centimeter or more, far radiant brilliance. In part, the absence ofblackness
greater than the size of space dust. Like the slowly is a consequence of our remoteness from the cen-
undulating water waves flowing past the gondola tral region. At this distance, it is hard to identify
in Venice, they bypass the dust with no discernible features as small as the black hole itself, which
effect. So by looking at the galactic center with a should be about as wide as five solar diameters.
radio telescope, astronomers see a fountain of bril- On an image such as the one at the right on this
liance instead of what is, optically, a gloomy scene page, the radius of the black hole would be small
[see images above and on opposite page]. indeed, at most one ten-thousandth the size of the
 disappearing from our universe,
the hot plasma glows like the
aurora borealis in the Earth’s
magnetic field, producing radio
waves visible to our equipment.
So far, then, our view of the
black hole has been, at best, indi-
rect. Yet, as remote as this region
Of space is, the black holes
shadow will, after all, soon be
visible against the backdrop of lu-
minous plasma.

L a series of influential papers

published in the early 1970s, a
pair of physicists, James M.
Bardeen of Yale University and
Christopher T. Cunningham of
the University of Washington in
The orange structure in this image is the galaxy’s center, glowing
Seattle, posed what seemed to be
brightly with radio waves, superposed on an image of the cosmic
dust. The black hole lies just above and to the right of the near-
a mostly esoteric question: “What
right angle formed by the orange spiral, at the exact center of would a black hole look like if we
this image. had the technology to actually be
able to see it?” To address their
central oval visible there. In fact, what blazes away own question, they had to take an indirect ap-
in the center of the Milky Way cannot be the proach; they simulated how a black hole would
black hole itself—though the nature of the black affect the appearance ofa bright object that lay be-
hole does have something to do with the bright yond the hole, from the viewpoint of an observer.
spot’s presence there. Back then, of course, the Hubble Space Tele-
What is known is that the outpouring of radia- scope was only a twinkle in the eye of Congress.
tion arises because Sagittarius A* does not exist in X-ray astronomy—also impervious to interference
isolation from the rest of the universe—even by cosmic dust—was barely getting off the ground.
though its interior is forever entombed within an Single-stage rockets had propelled only crude X-ray
unbreakable seal. Any matter or radiation that hap- detectors into the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Radio
lessly wanders nearby feels its very presence with astronomers would not be detecting a mysterious
overwhelming force. Some recently discovered stars bright radio source at the galactic center for another
swing past it, as close as several light-days, in orbits year or two. All in all, the prospects for seeing an
with periods as short as two decades. Those stars actual black-hole image like the one Bardeen and
signal the gravitational influence of the black hole Cunningham had simulated seemed rather thin.
with such accuracy that
astronomers now know not
only its mass, but also its lo-
cation relative to other ob-
jects at the galactic center.
But the stars don’t con-
tribute to the central bea-
con of radio light shining from the black hole itself. In spite of those practical difficulties, the two
Instead, that beacon is a result of Sagittarius A* physicists reasoned that their efforts to simulate the
shining by proxy, inducing the environment to visual effects ofa black hole were scientifically use-
radiate on its behalf, revealing its presence indi- ful. Knowledge of what a black hole would look
rectly. Most of the radiation that detectors sense like—if only one could peer through the dense
from Sagittarius A* is likely emitted by the glow- glowing plasma surrounding it—could help as-
ing, hot plasma—essentially a cloud of charged par- tronomers predict how the light emitted in its
ticles—that moves at near the speed of light as it vicinity might vary in response to changing condi-
falls into oblivion past the event horizon. Before tions in the surrounding medium. Armed with

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 55

 such predictions, astronomers could then look for Bromley of the University of Utah in Salt Lake
the variations. Once found, those variations would City, Heino Falcke of the Max Planck Institute for
imply the presence of a black hole. Little did Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, and Siming
Bardeen or Cunningham know that astronomers Liu of the University of Arizona, has demonstrated
would indeed find a means whereby they could the viability of carrying out an experiment to
hope to see through the hot plasma, virtually all produce an image of the black hole at the center of
the way to the event horizon of the black hole it- our galaxy.
self. Observers would after all be put in a position
to test the predictions of general relativity for any astronomers now expect that within this
uncommonly strong gravity. decade an image of Sagittarius A* resem-
bling the computer sumulation shown on the op-
Ae decades after Bardeen and Cunningham posite page will be attainable with a worldwide
published their results, astronomers realized array of radio telescopes now under development.
that Sagittarius A* is just the kind of object to Such an image would. bring a certain measure of
which those intriguing theoretical ideas might be closure to the often fitful, century-long effort to
applied. In 1994 a former U.S. marine and night- find a way of testing general relativity’s description
club performer from Arkansas by the name of of regions of very strong gravity. Specifically, the
Jack Hollywood—a nom de plume derived from image could confirm a bizarre prediction of the
his earlier persona—decided after several attempts theory: that a sufficiently condensed aggregate of
at establishing alternative careers that his true matter gives rise to an event horizon. In the image
calling was physics. He enrolled in the graduate the event horizon would be manifested as a dark,
program at the University of Arizona in Tucson roughly circular “shadow” against the background
and almost immediately chose general relativity as of glowing gas. The shadow would appear because
his field. Hollywood moved effortlessly into a light emitted by gas directly behind the hole
study of the effects of strong gravity associated doesn’t reach Earth; instead, along the way, it must
with all aspects of Sagittarius A*, including its pass into a region where gravity is so strong that it
appearance. gets permanently trapped. The process is some-
A growing sentiment at the time was that stars what analogous to a solar eclipse; the rays propa-
near the black hole were too far from it—about gating from the Sun toward the Earth are blocked
50,000 times its predicted radius—for their mo- by the Moon, and so we see the Moon’s shadow, as
well as the Sun’s visible light
all around it.
oe Pg ert bea Cie f ie a But there is an important
difference between the Moon’s
an Taine Cr aaa shadow eget capricious attenuation of the
Sun’s rays and the black hole’s
absorption of the light radi-
tions to show the general relativistic effects of the ated by the section of the plasma that lies behind
strong gravity near the hole. To this day, in fact, for it. Rays that reach the event horizon aren’t exactly
many astrophysicists, a true appreciation of a black blocked by it; instead they pass through it, never
hole’s general-relativistic character will come only again to emerge.
when astronomers can “view” it directly. Even more pronounced are the differences for
The soon-to-be-minted Dr. Hollywood and his light rays passing close to the intervening object.
colleagues published several papers outlining how Rays passing near the limb of the Moon are, in ef-
general relativity ought to influence every aspect fect, moving along straight lines. That is certainly
of what astronomers would see of Sagittarius A*— not the case for the light rays passing near Sagittar-
its radiance, the variations in its luminosity over ius A*. The gravitational pull of the black hole is
time, its environment—if only instrumentation so strong that it severely bends the light. The closer
existed to resolve it. a ray approaches the event horizon, the greater the
But no one could have foreseen how quickly curvature of its path. So even beams that do not
telescopes would improve, particularly the ones pass through the event horizon are still diverted
that can detect radiation at millimeter wavelengths. away from Earth. In consequence, the shadow of
In recent years, the work of an international col- the black hole is bigger than its event horizon.
laboration that includes Eric Agol at the California Calculations predict the shadow must be two and
Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Benjamin half times the width of the event horizon itself.

56 |
A simulation of the cloud of hot plasma surrounding Sagittarius A* shows how general relativity
predicts the light from the cloud would be bent by the black hole; the dark central region, or shadow,
would appear because light coming from regions near or opposite the hole would be either bent
away from our vantage on Earth or swallowed by the hole.

[° the early development of general relativity, the The theory of general relativity mandates a
observed bending of light was a real surprise, a unique shape and size for the region where the
major first triumph that later cascaded into several bending and capture of light are severe. Soon,
additional, successful tests of the theory. General those properties will be measurable. No physicist
relativity is almost surreal in the way it mysteri- has ever had a comparable opportunity to place,
ously compels us to accept truths about nature that the existence of black holes and their strong grav-
are hard to appreciate solely on the basis of every- ity on such a firm footing. This coming decade
day experience. No other scientific theory so daz- may finally give us a view of one of the most
zles us with its profundity. Perhaps the reason for important and intriguing scientific discoveries
its capacity to amaze is that general relativity does of our time.
something both enchanting and disquieting to Yet the theory is at risk as well. A nondetection
space and time, the two main threads of our being. of the shadow with sufficiently careful techniques
It folds them, twists and pulls them, and then would pose a major problem for physicists’ under-
weaves them into a single multifaceted unit. standing of strong gravity. The mass is undoubt-
Our. curiosity 1s piqued; of course, by the edly there, confined within a region barely the size
chance to see what severe distortions of space-time of the Earth’s orbit. But if the mass is not collapsed
can do. The discovery of another universe en- within itself, general relativity will have broken
tombed within a black hole, with an alternate down at the point where gravity is stronger than it
metric of reality, would force us to think deeply has been in any of the earlier tests. Would such a
about our own. The nature of black holes has col- failure add credence to alternate descriptions of re-
lected all those musings into one easily identifiable ality, such as string theory, in which gravity is just
unknown—that’s why they excite us, and haunt us one element in a purported theory of everything?
even more. And Sagittarius A*, because of its size No one yet knows what steps ought to be taken,
and its proximity, is our principal gateway into this should physics be faced with such an unexpected,
uncharted territory. though not unprecedented, outcome. O

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 57

THIS LAND
ea

Ages of Aquarius
In an Idaho canyon, temperate rainforest plants found refuge from ancient climate change.
By Robert H. Mohlenbrock

n 1968, when Robert Steele and flooded by the upper reaches of the mosses cloaked rocky terrain and
Frederic D. Johnson, both forest Dworshak Reservoir. The good news fallen logs.
ecologists at the University of is that six square mules of the surviv- Beginning 30 million years ago,
Idaho in Moscow, explored a remote ing rainforest fall within Idaho’s however, as a result of plate tectonic
region along Idaho’s North Fork Clearwater National Forest and were events, tumultuous volcanic erup-
Clearwater River, they found warm, designated the Aquarius Research tions uplifted the Cascade Range,
south-facing slopes, cool north-facing Natural Area in 1991. The name blocking much of the Pacific mois-
slopes, perennial springs, and moist Aquarius came from an old camp- ture. Temperatures in what is now
river terraces. They also found stands ground farther upstream, but how northern Idaho became more ex-
of forest populated with western red that site got its name no one knows. treme. Some trees, such as red alder,
cedar and Douglas fir, as well as with The fossil record indicates that were isolated from members of their
several species previously unknown in before 30 million years ago, temperate species farther west. Others, such as
Idaho, notably red alder. As they rainforests grew in what is now north- bald cypress and numerous broad-
surveyed the vegetation, they were ern Idaho. At that time, to the west leaved trees, disappeared from the
reminded of the temperate rainforests lay only shallow seas and tidal flats, region, though they survived in
along the northern Pacific Coast, making for heavy fogs, ample rainfall, eastern North America. Still other
some 300 miles away. Stranger still, and mild temperatures from the species, such as the dawn redwood
some of the plants were associated Pacific Ocean that nurtured the and ginkgo, vanished from North
with Eastern deciduous forests. habitat. The tree species included America, though they remain to this
Unfortunately, from a botanical dawn redwood, ginkgo, bald cypress, day in China.
point of view, soon thereafter a dam and relatives of present-day sassafras, Nevertheless, some temperate
was built about fifty miles down- tulip tree, and magnolia. Tall ferns rainforest plants persisted in Idaho,
stream, and two-thirds of the area was probably grew in abundance, and finding refuge in canyon bottoms
during the ice ages. One such
refugium was the canyon of the
North Fork Clearwater River. When
the last glaciation ended, however,
about 12,000 years ago, temperatures
rose and the climate became drier.
Conditions became generally unfa-
vorable for rainforest plants.
But at least along one river—as
discovered by Steele and Johnson—
some rainforest plants did survive. In
large part they owe their lives to the
5,000- to 7,000-foot-high mountains
that surround the steep-walled
canyon where the plants grow. The
mountains capture plenty of mois-
ture—as precipitation and fog—dur-
ing the growing season. In addition,
the fairly low elevation of the river
(about 1,650 feet) keeps the tempera-
ture from swinging to extremes.
 North Fork
Clearwater River

Aquarius
ie Research
“°° Dworshake~ Natural.
Reservoir.” , ~yArea 3
; oo Headquarters
C_aPworshak Dam
~e Orofine™
oo
i et

For visitor information, contact:

Clearwater National Forest
12730 Highway 12
Orofino, ID 83544
(208) 476-4541
www.fs.fed.us/r1/clearwater/

Streamside Within the Research

Natural Area flow several streams that
empty into the North Fork Clear-
water River. The adjacent habitat
usually includes red alder, black
elderberry, Scouler’s willow, black
Western red cedar and bracken fern cottonwood, red-osier dogwood,
and yellow monkey flower.

HABITATS corydalis, Constance’s bitter cress (a Robert H. Mohlenbrock is professor emeritus

lavender-flowered member of the ofplant biology at Southern Illinois University
Temperate rainforest Western red mustard family), and Idaho barren in Carbondale.
cedar is usually the dominant tree, strawberry (whose closest relative is
but Douglas fir is common on the in the eastern United States).
relatively dry slopes facing south. Aquarius Research Natural Area is
Grand fir occurs alongside both spe- particularly rich in ferns, including
cies. Western red cedar and Douglas Western polypody, spreading wood-
fir are prominent on the Pacific fern, oak fern, male fern, bracken
coast and in the western Cascades, fern, and sword fern. Huge lady ferns
but are less common in the inter- fill the understory on gentle slopes
vening territory. Other plants that and on terraces above the river. On
fit with the same disjunct pattern moist slopes above the terraces,
are clustered lady’s-slipper, white northern maidenhair replaces the
shooting-star, broadleaf starflower, lady fern, and oceanspray populates
evergreen violet, Henderson’s sedge, the shrub layer. One unusual native
and crinkle-awn fescue. species is phantom orchid, which 1s
Species of the eastern deciduous pure white. Devoid of chlorophyll, it
forest are northern maidenhair, derives all its nutrients from fungal
maidenhair spleenwort, and oak fern. associates in the soil. One-flowered
Plants that occur only in or near Indian pipe, which also grows here,
northern Idaho refugia are Clearwater pursues the same strategy. Red-osier dogwood in bloom

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 59

REVIEW

Voyage of the Barnacle

Darwin paid his dues as a scientist by exploring
a miniature universe of marine animals. By Richard Milner

s a city boy, I once supposed ground in British occupation under knew much about barnacles—and
that fossils were as rare as large the sun or moon, with a public post few cared. But young Darwin was, as
meteorites and could be en- upon it, sticking to that post was a his uncle described him, “a man of
countered only in museums. Eventu- Barnacle.” Perhaps most human activ- enlarged curiosity.’ In 1835 he col-
ally I learned that they are almost ity directed at barnacles has been de- lected a conch shell on a Chilean
everywhere: Mesozoic ammonite shells voted to that despised sailor’s task— beach and noticed that there were
from ancient oceans populate the pol- scraping them off ships’ hulls. hundreds of tiny holes in it, which in-
ished marble of skyscraper lobbies; mi- Stott begins her tale by recalling terested him more than the species of
croscopic plankton skeletons inhabit childhood visits to the seashore, where the shell itself. He suspected that
every piece of chalk; herds of fossil rhi- she first encountered cone-shaped bar- some small creature had made the
noceroses lie beneath Nebraskan farms. holes, although he could see none.
In 1811 James Parkinson, the Eng- Later, under a microscope, he spotted
Darwin and the Barnacle:
lish physician and amateur geologist The Story of One Tiny Creature the culprit: a minuscule, soft-bodied
chiefly remembered for identifying inhabitant cemented into the hole by
and History’s Most Spectacular
the disease that bears his name, mar-
Scientific Breakthrough its head and waving its jointed legs in
veled that his European contempo- the air. Anatomically it resembled an
by Rebecca Stott
raries lived literally surrounded by acorn barnacle. But that creature was
WW. Norton & Company, 2003;
fossils. In volume one of his work Or- defined by its cone-shaped shell.
$24.95
ganic Remains of a Former World, he Darwin had discovered something
noted that extinct marine organisms as yet unknown to science: a rare bur-
“have become the chief constituent nacle shells. Each one held a “bizarre rowing barnacle with no shell-house
parts of the limestone, which forms inhabitant, a cream-coloured shrimp- of its own. The questions raised by
the humble cottage of the peasant; like creature, upside down, glued to this creature’s anomalies would oc-
and of the marble which adorns the the rock by its head, fishing for plank- cupy him for years. As Stott reveals:
splendid palace of the prince.” But ton through the hole in its cone with
what Parkinson found even more as- its feathery feet.” Stott also came across Darwin will carry this Chilean barnacle on
tonishing was that no one seemed to the stalked barnacles that cluster on a journey around the world, from the
share his intense curiosity about how driftwood, which some consider a South American beach back to London,
preserved in a jar of wine spirits. When he
and when those organisms had found seafood delicacy. She began to won-
has finished finding homes for all the
their way into the building materials der: Just what kind of critters are bar-
1,529 species he has collected . . . on the
of hovels and mansions alike. nacles? Are they mollusks? Crus- Beagle, he will return to the puzzle that the
Billions of primitive marine animals taceans? How many kinds are there? creature’s strange anatomy presents; and
sll share the planet with us today. Where did they come from? How far then he will write this Chilean barnacle’s
One of the more ubiquitous of them back can one trace their ancestry? By evolutionary biography—a puzzle that will
is the barnacle—the small invertebrate the time she summoned the courage take him eight years to think through.
that clings to whales as well as to dock to order barnacles in a seafood restau-
pilings and shoreline rocks. In her en- rant, she associated them with Charles Eight years, from 1846 until 1854,
trancing book Darwin and the Barnacle, Darwin, whom she realized was ob- devoted entirely to barnacles? By
Rebecca Stott, a professor of English sessed with the odd creatures. 1842 Darwin had already sketched
at the University of Cambridge, out his theory of evolution by natural
quotes Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit ie 1831, when twenty-two-year- selection. But he pushed it all aside,
on this creature’s omnipresence: old Darwin set sail as a fledgling squirreling it away to work on the
“Wherever there was a square yard of naturalist on HMS Beagle, no one barnacle riddle. What was so com-

June 2003
pelling about these invertebrates that Erasmus Darwin—Charles’s grand- millions of years, from common an-
Darwin chose to postpone the com- father and, by some accounts, the first cestors. Grandfather Erasmus—who
pletion of his major work—Origin of European naturalist to publish a the- died before Charles was born—
Species—for their sake? ory of evolution—had believed that would have been pleased.
Hundreds of books have touched on all living things were descended from In the 1830s and 1840s marine in-
diverse aspects of Darwin’s discoveries: microscopic sea creatures. (Erasmus vertebrates were enjoying a scientific
his encounters with finches on the had even designed a Darwin family vogue, and papers about them domi-
Galapagos Islands; his elucidation of crest with the motto ex omnia conchis, nated the zoology section at meetings
sexual selection, orchid pollination, “all from shells.’) His grandson of the British Association for the Ad-
and the formation of coral reefs; his Charles was awarded the Royal Medal vancement of Science. Among the
treatise on the evolution of leading lights of invertebrate
emotional expression. Barnacle research were Thomas Huxley,
anatomy and © classification, the naturalist who had devoted
however, is an arcane technical himself to crayfish, squid, and
field that most Darwin scholars Jellyfish, and the zoologist and
have treated only superficially. botanist Edward Forbes, who
Now, at last, Rebecca Stott, al- had worked on starfish and
beit a nonspecialist in barnacles, medusae. Puzzling over the
has had the courage and tenacity origin of life, they noted the
to make Darwin’s barnacles— similarities of form between
and their importance—accessi- those marine invertebrates and
ble to the rest of us. the early stages of vertebrate
embryos. In studies with a mi-
ines Darwin’s work, these croscope, Forbes had shown
seemingly insignificant in- that hydroid jellyfish known as
vertebrates were as little known naked-eyed medusae_ repro-
to Victorian science as were the duce not only by spewing eggs,
tribes from Tierra del Fuego but also by asexual budding,
that Darwin encountered on his which he found marvelous to
Beagle voyage. Stott describes behold:
the naturalist’s quiet excitement What strange and wondrous
as he explores the world of the changes! Fancy an elephant with
barnacle on his tabletop, his eye a number of little elephants
glued to a microscope day after sprouting from his shoulders and
day, his large hands manipulat- thighs, bunches of tusked mon-
ing little pins for tearing apart sters hanging epaulette-fashion
pickled creatures in order to from his flanks in every stage of
“daily see some more beautiful advancement! . . . It is true that
structures.” [naked-eyed medusae] are minute,
but wonders are not the less
She also weaves some of
BALANDS TINTINNARUD LEM.
Swrge Jowerdy
wonderful for being packed into
Darwin’s personal traumas into small compass.
the narrative: the heartbreaking An illustration of barnacle shells from Darwin's
loss of his beloved ten-year-old 1854 work A Monograph of the Sub-Class Bes were at one
daughter Annie to tuberculosis; Cirripedia, with figures of all the Species time grouped with mol-
his own battles with a myster1- lusks, but by the 1830s zoolo-
ous malady while under the care of a of the Royal Society in 1854 for his gists had shown that the adults, which
quack. Both episodes took place dur- work on barnacles—in effect, carry- spend their lives fastened to one spot,
ing his so-called “barnacle years.” So ing on a family tradition. Charles not develop from free-swimming young,
protracted was his barnacle study that only described thousands of living making them more similar to crus-
his children assumed it was the normal exemplars, but also compared them taceans. Zoology textbooks of the
occupation of every father: When one with fossil specimens. The result was an time also recited a second misconcep-
of Darwin’s young sons visits a neigh- evolutionary classification—published tion: that all barnacles are hermaphro-
bor’s home, he asks his friend there, well before Origin of Species—that dites. Darwin was finding otherwise.
“Where does your father work on his showed how hundreds of variously Still carefully dissecting them piece by
barnacles?” adapted species branched out, over piece, he was discovering that al-

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 61

though barnacles do indeed lead one of the stalked rather than
bizarre sexual lives, hermaphrodism coned barnacles, seemed to be
wasn’t always part of the mix. The made up solely of females. Dar-
males of one species (Cryptophialus win soon discovered, however,
minutus), Stott tells us, had “quite the that not only were some Ibla
largest genitalia [Darwin] had ever specimens hermaphroditic, but
seen in the barnacle world.’ In one of that in a related species with
Darwin’s descriptions of a Cryp- distinct sexes, what he had
tophialus penis, he characterizes 1t as taken to be parasites on the fe-
males were actually minute
wonderfully developed . . . when fully males—lttle more than tubes =o
extended, it must equal between eight
TALUARLE ADDITION TO THE AQUAR!
we (me RE aN A rer CHAU Na? PreyeysemeeReon SSH 4 ries TOE Sreccarp! 1 Tak Carts Tan {Oda eer,
containing sperm—clinging to
and nine times the entire length of the John Swain, Valuable Addition to the
the female bodies. Although
animal! . . . [The barnacle] has an orifice Aquarium, Punch, London 1860
at its upper end, and within it there lies the male larvae were free-
coiled up, like a great worm, the pro- swimming, he wrote: he had chosen to study, Cryptophialus
bosciformed penis . . . there is no mouth, (the group that included his burrow-
at the instant they cease being locomo-
no stomach, no thorax, no abdomen, and ing barnacle), would turn out to be
tive[,] larvae become parasitic within the
no appendages or limbs of any kind.
sack of the female, & thus fixed & half em-
the very epitome of mutability, reveal-
bedded in the flesh of their wives they pass ing the astounding variability of or-
This burrowing barnacle group their whole lives & can never move again. ganisms in nature.
from Chile (which Darwin had at first
affectionately named Mr. Arthrobal- Those findings led Darwin to be- arwin’s friend, the botanist
anus but later christened Cryptophialus) lieve he could demonstrate a series of Joseph Hooker, had warned
seemed at first to be comprised en- evolutionary sequences from her- him that “no one has the right to ex-
tirely of males, whereas the genus Jbla, maphrodite to separate-sex species. amine the question of species who
The wide range of sexuality he had has not minutely described many.”
seen among sea creatures was so im- The barnacles won Darwin that right.
“If you want to find out about a probable and fantastic that he won- Through his intense labor with them,
mammal, then here is the place to
dered whether anyone would believe he developed an extensive network of
look.”—New York Times
him. “You will think me a Baron correspondents in the scientific com-
Miinchausen amongst Naturalists,’ he munity who would later greet his
once warned a botanist friend, allud- Origin with respectful attention. Clas-
ing to the eighteenth-century figure sifying the barnacles gave Darwin
known for his impossible adventures. new skills as a dissector, a micros-
Other scientists investigating this copist, an observer, a classifier, and a
miniature marine universe were simi- theoretician. Moreover, he had satis-
larly astonished; the spectacular spec- fied himself that nature produced no
trum of sexuality they discovered was sharp lines of demarcation between
shocking to Victorians. For the scien- varieties and species.
tists’ wives and lady friends, Stott “My life goes on like Clockwork,”
imagines, “hushed parlour conversa- he wrote his old captain, Robert
tions about undersea reproduction, FitzRoy, during the barnacle years,
the slime and tentacles of marine “and I am fixed on the spot where I
courtship, were doubtless piquant, shall end it.” Stott sums up his forty
grotesque, and erotic.” years at Down House, his country es-
Darwin had been aware since 1837, tate in Kent, with an apt metaphor:
From the giant bottlenosed whale and when he began the notebooks for his The larval Darwin has metamorphosed.
the West Indian manatee to the Origin, that the creationist doctrine of He has found his rock. Anchored to it, he
crabeater seal and hourglass dolphin, fixed species would crumble if only will stay here like the adult barnacle, for the
from the pygmy sperm whale to the he could find extreme mutability rest of his days, reproducing himself, fishing
spotted-necked otter, this is a within one species. “Once grant that with his feet as the tide comes and goes.
comprehensive guide to a fascinating And his life . . . as regular as the tides.”
species . . . [of] one genus may pass
and varied order of mammals.
336 pp., 145 illus., $22.95 paperback
into each other,’ he wrote, “& whole Richard Milner is an associate in anthropology at
fabric [of fixity of species] totters & the American Museum of Natural History and a
The Johns Hopkins University Press
falls.’ As it happened, the first genus contributing editor ofthis magazine.
1-800-537-5487 * www.jhupbooks.com
BOOKSHELF By Laurence A. Marschall

At a military medical research lab, alive inside other animals by hooking

Stiff: The Curious Lives other grisly scenes unfold: cadavers them up to the circulatory system.
of Human Cadavers are dangled, marionette-like, over (The idea, as I understand it, is that
by Mary Roach armed land mines to test the effective- people with terminal illnesses might
ness of protective shoes. If the corpses have their heads swapped with those
WW. Norton & Company, 2003;
were blocks of gelatin rather than for- of brain-dead patients—effectively
$23.95
merly living muscle and blood, no providing a whole-body transplant to
one would give it a second thought. needy multimillionaires.) She travels
arning: Do not read Stiff lying Roach, in fact, also witnesses ersatz to Sweden to visit a company that
down. First of all, it’s a trifle thighs (made of gelatin) being shot full markets a high-tech body composter
unsettling to eyeball its dust jacket of holes to determine the stopping as an alternative to crematoriums. (I
while supine; the toe-tagged soles on power of bullets, and learns that a imagined dinner at a friend’s organic
the cover make you feel as if you are “tweaked version of Knox dessert farm: “My late husband’s in the
the body lying in a morgue. Second, gelatin” is a good substitute for tomatoes and the spinach. I hope you
if you share your bed with a dozing human flesh, though not vice versa. find him tasty.’)
partner, you may endanger your rela- A dense Latin title, something like And in one of the most hilarious
tionship by laughing yourself silly. In
her own edgy way, Mary Roach is an
extremely funny science writer.
Roach doesn’t flinch when con-
fronted with the no-longer-living, be-
cause she finds the macabre so fre-
quently absurd. When she visits a
face-lift workshop at a university
medical school, for instance, she dis-
covers that a disembodied human
head is included in each participant’s
price of admission. Walking between
the tables, she confronts rows of these
dissection specimens from donated ca-
davers, each neatly arrayed ina roast-
ing pan. It’s a bit less unsettling, she
thinks, to imagine the lab as a rubber-
mask factory, and the surgeons as
sculptors—which, in a way, they are.
The absurdity of “cadaverology,”
you realize, lies in the mixture of the
mundane and the bizarre one en-
counters in the world of corpses.
;"Feteraz an ffl Cade fs
Dll
SeeaE [Sufi flcommefontfeffomae
Working with dead bodies, we all Bartolome |'Anglais, Dissection ofa Cadaver, fifteenth century
dimly acknowledge, has many practi-
cal uses—yet, like sausage-making, it’s De cadaveribus male olentibus, (“on scenes in the book, the intrepid inves-
best not to know too much about foul-smelling dead bodies”), for in- tigator flies to the Chinese island of
how it’s done. Roach gets a guided stance, might have suited Roach’s Hainan to verify a 1991 Reuters arti-
tour of the “body farm” at the Uni- book better. She crams it with stories cle. Two brothers, according to the
versity of Tennessee, where cadavers from so many sources that it resem- wire service, had been caught stealing
are set out to rot, and forensic scien- bles a medieval traveler’s tale, indis- the buttocks and thighs of cadavers
tists study them in varying states of criminately conflating fact and awaiting cremation and turning them
putrefaction to learn how to deter- rumor. To her credit, though, Roach into “Sichuan-style dumplings,” a
mine the time of death. Near the end has tracked many a weird tale to its popular mainstay of the local White
of the visit she learns that, after three source. She interviews the neurosur- Temple Restaurant. Roach later dis-
weeks, a body’s internal organs _re- geon Robert White, for instance, covers that the whole story is a
semble chicken soup. “So,” says her who experimented with keeping the hoax—neither the brothers nor the
guide in all seriousness, “lunch?” isolated brains of dogs and monkeys restaurant exists—but not before she

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 63

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 ynfronts the six-foot-tall director of the liberating philosophy of the East. Japan, where he~became one of the
local crematorium, where one of But in fact, that discovery had been principal agents of modernization; he
the brothers allegedly worked, and is made a century earlier. In the years served as a go-between when Perry
treated to a ten-minute harangue. following the “opening” of Japan by visited Yokohama, translated a semi-
That some of Roach’s stories are Commodore Matthew Perry in the nal work on navigation from English
the stuff of urban legend comes as no 1850s, a group of intellectuals cen- into Japanese, and introduced such
surprise. That many of them are true, tered in New England had turned to Western innovations as photography
however, is what makes the guilty Japan as a source of spiritual renewal. and telegraphy to the islands.
pleasure of reading her “book of the They viewed the austere aestheticism Melville, who crossed the Pacific in
dead” so worthwhile. of Japanese culture as an antidote to the other direction at almost the same
the decorative excess of the Victorian time, never knew Manjiro, though
era, and as a palliative for the spiritual they had acquaintances in Honolulu
| The Great Wave: Gilded Age agony of the Civil War. Ironically, at in common. Unlike Manjiro, who in-
Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, that same moment Japan was opening terpreted the material ingenuity of
and the Opening of Old Japan its doors to the West and, driven by the West as a way to a better life,
by Christopher Benfey an impulse toward modernization, Melville was searching for moral re-
Random House, 2003; $25.95 moving away from the ceremonial newal, and he associated that quest
formalism of feudal society. The Old with the mysterious culture of Japan.
Japan of the samurai and the Zen The climactic scenes in Moby Dick,
Mx of my college friends spent master was disappearing just as the set near the Japanese coast, epito-
the early 1960s dreaming of West was coming to know it. mized the yearning of the famous au-
smoke-filled San Francisco cafes Christopher Benfey, a professor of thor and his contemporaries for what
where poets such as Lawrence Fer- English at Mount Holyoke College, he described as “unknown Archipela-
linghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary has written a series of perceptive bio- goes, and impenetrable Japans.”

he cultural dichotomy is reflected

in the lives of the remarkable fig-
ures who appear in Benfey’s book:
Henry Adams, chronicler of fin-de-
siecle angst, was a pilgrim to the East;
Percival Lowell, known today as the
astronomer who thought Mars was
inhabited, made his reputation by
writing several books on life in out-
of-the-way corners of Japan; Edward
Sylvester Morse, who made the first
archaeological digs in Japan, amassed
immense collections that formed the
core of museums on both sides of the
Pacific; Isabella Gardner, Boston pa-
tron of the arts, had a love affair with
the East that included Japanese intel-
Yoshitoshi Tsukioku, Commodore Perry arrives in Japan 7/8/1853, c.1880
lectual Kakuzo Okakura, whose writ-
ings introduced Western socialites to
Snyder would intone the deep wisdom graphical essays that illustrate what the romance of the tea ceremony.
of the Orient. Snyder, perhaps because happens when two such literate and The dawn of the twentieth century,
he had disappeared from the scene for disparate cultures begin to intermix. the point at which Benfey concludes
a while, was the most alluring. After a His opening essay cleverly contrasts his book, was of course only the be-
prolonged Zen pilgrimage to Japan, he the careers of the Japanese intellectual ginning of cultural interchange be-
had returned with epigrammatic John Manjiro and the American au- tween East and West. In the clean
mantras extolling nature and the quest thor Herman Melville. Manjiro was lines of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses,
for unity with the cosmos. It was ex- adopted in the 1840s by a New Eng- in the Japanese design of energy-effi-
hilarating to feel that our Western cul- land sea captain, who rescued him cient automobiles, and in the idealized
ture, its soul having been wasted by in- from a Pacific island after a ship- orientalism of New Age culture, one
dustrialization, was at last discovering wreck. He eventually returned to can see elements of the same process

ORY June 2003

 BSi. a,
Hl
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late 1800s. Benfey calls it “the great one could work back to the date of
wave,” an expression of the power and fiat lux. The details varied from Re-
precariousness portrayed in Katsushika naissance writer to Renaissance
Hokusai’s famous woodblock print. writer, but the conventional wisdom
The ripples of that great wave are still was that the Earth had been around
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 and deposited by water. Subsequent
events may have tilted or folded these consult the page choices on the left
nature.net
layers, or eroded them over time, but PRA
Re for both general and practical infor-
they originally had been laid down mation about SARS—everything
horizontally, with the oldest layers at from “What Everyone Should
the bottom. SARS Know” to travel advisories and fact
sheets on quarantines.
uch ideas, of course, are the funda- By Robert Anderson To find out what the enemy looks
Sean principles of the sciences like, go to www.rkm.com.au/VIRUS/
now called sedimentology and stratigra- CORONAVIRUS/index.html. In the
phy. By accepting Steno’s principles, n February 11 authorities in artist’s image of a single virion, you
one had also to accept, by implication, a China’s Guangdong Province can see the “crown” of clublike pro-
world millions or even billions of years issued their first report of what they jections for which the group of
old, for the mills of deposition—which called an “atypical pneumonia.” A viruses was named. Click on any one
can be observed in every river bottom global network of scientists began ur- of the drawings on the main page
and on every seashore—grind exceed- gently exchanging news and findings and scroll down: the illustrations are
ingly slow. By mapping sediment layers via the Internet. Just two months accompanied by information about
and by noting similar strata, bearing later, they had positively identified viral replication and disease transmis-
similar fossils, one could put together a sion, and there are also links to other
time line of geological history, chroni- sites. At the link “Coronaviruses and
cling the changing populations of plants SARS,” for example, Alan Cann, a vi-
and animals and the corresponding al- rologist at the University of Leicester
terations in topography. Steno’s insight, in England, has synthesized what is
in short, implied a profound revolution known about the disease to date.
in science, so it is notable that, though Cann’‘s site is a good place to look for
many books deal with the astronomical up-to-date, though fairly technical,
revolution of Copernicus, Kepler, and information on infectious diseases in
Galileo, Alan Cutler’s short book is the general. (You can access the site di-
first popular English-language treat- rectly at www-micro.msb.le.ac.uk/
ment of Steno’s life. 3035/coronaviruses.html.)
Steno died piously, fighting, through Other viruses, many quite beauti-
Memento Mori, Roman,
his example, what he considered a fifth century
ful to look at, are depicted and de-
venal Catholic church bureaucracy. scribed at the “Big Picture Book
The great polymath Gottfried Wil- the virus that causes severe acute res- of Viruses” (virology.net/Big_Virology/
helm Leibniz, one of Steno’s ardent ad- piratory syndrome (SARS). And, BVHomePage.html), and at the Uni-
muirers, lamented that “from being a more remarkably, in those same few versity of Wisconsin-Madison’s
great physicist he became a mediocre weeks two separate teams had se- Institute for Molecular Virology
theologian.” But Steno’s scientific life, quenced its genome—all of its ap- (virology.wisc.edu/IMV/).
though tragically short, inspired many proximately 30,000 nucleotides. What Finally, in a short article posted
other pioneering students of the made it all possible was the Internet. by the University of California at
Earth’s history: not only Leibniz but To learn how investigators responded Los Angeles (www.college.ucla.edu/
James Hutton, Charles Lyell, and, so rapidly, visit the World Health Orga- webproject/micro12/m12webnotes/
eventually, Darwin. Cutler’s smart and nization’s Web page (www.who.int/en) viralevolution.htm), you can learn
readable biography puts Steno right at and click on the “SARS” box. Under about viral evolution and its role in
the forefront of the geological revolu- “For More Information,’ click on the epidemics of the past century.
tion. Clearly, he had joined the pan- “WHO Collaborative Networks,’ Some, like the influenza virus, are
theon of science long before the and follow the Web trail there. occasionally transmitted to people
church beatified him in 1988, officially The SARS bug 1s a member ofa via contact with birds or other ani-
setting him on the road to sainthood. group known as the coronaviruses, mals harboring new strains. That,
one or more of which are responsi- incidentally, may well be the trans-
Laurence A, Marschall, author of The Su-
ble for some common colds. At a mission path of the SARS virus.
pernova Story, is the WK.T: Sahm professor site provided by the Centers for
of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylva- Disease Control and Prevention Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer
nia, and director of Project CLEA, which pro- (www.cde.gov/ncidod/sars/) you can living in Los Angeles.
duces software for education in astronomy.

TORY June 2003

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 U TORE ERE

[roning Out the Solar System

A long-extinct radioactive species sheds light on Earth’s origins.

By Charles Liu

ur Sun formed a little of neutrons in their nuclei, but

more than four and a are named by adding the num-
half billion years ago. bers of neutrons and protons
Like every other star in the together: thus, iron-56, iron-
universe, 1t was born swaddled 58, and so on.
in a cloud of gas made almost Those four iron isotopes
entirely of hydrogen and he- are all radioactively stable.
lum. But the scattered debris Other isotopes of iron can
of exploded stars—a fine cos- exist, but they aren’t stable.
mic dust made of heavier With time, atoms that make
elements including carbon, up the unstable isotopes spon-
oxygen, aluminum, calcium, taneously eject subatomic par-
and iron—was also sprinkled ticles from their nuclei. That
throughout the cloud. Those process (known as nuclear
%,
dust particles, far smaller than decay) changes the number
Moving the Ahnighito (“Tent”) meteorite into the American Mu-
the ones that gather on a win- of protons or neutrons in
seum of Natural History, August 14, 1907. This meteorite and oth-
dowsill, served as collection ers provide important data on the early history of the solar system. the nuclei, giving rise to other
points in the solar nebula: isotopes, or even to other ele-
other matter, including ice and frozen same way plant and animal fossils ments. Eventually any given supply
carbon dioxide, aggregated around record the story of life on Earth. of an unstable isotope disappears.
them. And so the aggregates grew Sometimes it’s possible to use them to The rate of such radioactive decay
larger, becoming pebble-size, then examine the origin of the solar system can serve as a clock for pinpointing
rock-size, then boulder-size masses. itself. A new study conducted by important dates in the history of the
Within a few million years, trillions Shogo Tachibana and Gary Huss at Earth and the solar system. Measuring
upon trillions of icy, stony, or metallic Arizona State University in Tempe the ratio of a particular radioactive
bodies swarmed around our infant does just that; by looking for radioac- isotope to its stable decay products in
Sun. During the next quarter-billion tive iron—or, rather, its ghosts—in some object makes it possible, at least
years, many of those objects contin- two of the oldest known meteorites, in principle, to deduce how much
ued to coalesce, forming the major they’ve taken an important step to- time has passed since the object was
planets, moons, asteroids, and Kuiper ward identifying the event that trig- last enriched with that particular ra-
Belt objects [see my column “Tightening gered the birth of the Sun. dioactive species.
Our Kuiper Belt,” February 2003]. Because each radioactive isotope
Smaller objects are still out there or- ron on Earth isn’t radioactive—at decays at its own constant rate, the
biting the Sun, scarcely changed since least not anymore. More than 90 decay rate can be expressed as a half-
their formation so long ago. percent of the iron atoms in everyday life, which is defined as the amount of
Occasionally, one of those leftover life, whether in buildings, brussels time it takes for half ofa sample of the
chunks of protoplanetary matter sprouts, or blood, contain twenty-six isotope to decay. Measurements of
strikes Earth’s surface. When it does, protons and thirty neutrons. Such short-lived isotopes such as carbon-
it becomes a meteorite. Souvenir col- atoms are known as iron-56. The re- 14, whose half-life is about 5,700
lectors prize meteorites for their nov- maining atoms contain either twenty- years, can date archaeological finds
elty, but we astronomers value them eight, thirty-one, or thirty-two neu- from early human cultures; measure-
for their history. Such bodies record trons. The varieties, or isotopes, of an ments of longer-lived isotopes such as
the story of the early solar system, the element are diagnosed by the number uranium-238, with a half-life of

rURA RY June 2003

nearly 4.5 billion years, can date the formed within a few million years of BAG es know that the Sun
formation of rocks, planets, and stars. the Sun’s birth. Any iron-60 that was was created in an interstellar gas
Iron-60, a radioactive isotope with a incorporated into the two chondrites cloud. We also know that something
half-life of just under 1.5 million years, is long gone; it all decayed into ra- happened to induce part of that cloud
can be readily produced only by high- dioactive cobalt-60, which in turn to reach a critically dense state, which
mass stars just before they self-destruct decayed into a stable atom, nickel-60. caused it to collapse inward and even-
in supernova explosions. That unique Examining microscopic mineral tually to form the solar nebula. What
origin is a useful property when it grains embedded in the meteorites, was that triggering event?
comes to reconstructing cosmic Tachibana and Huss measured a sig- A model proposed long ago suggests
events. If there was any iron-60 in the nificant excess of nickel-60, indicat- that the blast wave of a supernova was
original solar nebula, it was probably ing that iron-60 was once present. the culprit. The concentration ofiron-
all there right off the bat, inherited Using other elements and isotopes as 60 in the two ancient meteorites lends
from the molecular cloud that gave reference clocks, they then back- new support to this idea. The expand-
birth to the Sun. That gives a solid tracked through the decay history of ing shell of stellar material, infused
starting point from which to calibrate iron-60 and found that the solar neb- with iron-60 from the supernova
any aging processes that the clocklike ula was originally made up of about explosion, may have seeded the pre-
decay of iron-60 can measure. 300 atoms of iron-60 for every solar nebula with this radioactive-iron
Tachibana and Huss examined the billion (10’) atoms of stable iron-56. clock. At the same time, it would have
isotopic composition of about a That might seem like a minuscule provided just the kick needed to begin
dozen small samples from two ancient figure, but it’s ten times the typical the formation of the Sun, the solar
meteorites. The two objects, called ratio present in the interstellar gas of system, and, ultimately, the Earth.
Bishunpur and Krymka after the our Milky Way galaxy today. And
places where they were discovered (in that additional iron-60 in the early Charles Liu is an astrophysicist at the Hayden
India and Ukraine, respectively), are solar system speaks volumes about Planetarium and a research scientist at Barnard
chondrites—a class of objects that our cosmic origins. College in New York City.

reso KY INeJUNE By Joe Rao

Mercury reaches its greatest western Even though Jupiter is on the far side of the Sun and
elongation on the 3rd—24 degrees about as small as it ever appears, it is still the brightest
from the Sun on the dome of the sky— evening “star,” and in a telescope it still shows the largest
but skywatchers will still have to strug- disk of any planet. It sets progressively earlier all month
gle to glimpse the reticent planet. In the long: at about 12:30 A.M. at the start of June, and about
first three weeks of the month, Mer- 10:45 pM. by the end. On the 4th, Jupiter shines to the
cury scarcely surmounts the east-north- right of the waxing crescent Moon.
eastern horizon at mid-twilight. With
good binoculars you might detect it as Saturn may be visible during the first week of June. On
sunrise draws near; nearby Venus can the 1st it sets less than ninety minutes after the Sun. As
serve as a guide. Early in the month Mercury shines just 4 darkness falls, the planet hovers below and to the left of
degrees to the right of Venus and draws to within half a the slender sliver of a crescent Moon, close to the west-
degree by the 21st, to Venus’s lower right. A few days there- northwestern horizon. A week or so later, Saturn disap-
after, Mercury disappears into the dawn glow. pears into the evening twilight glow; it reaches conjunc-
tion with the Sun on the 24th.
Venus rises an hour before sunrise for yet one more month.
You'll find it very low, just above the east-northeastern The Moon waxes to first quarter on the 7th at 4:28 p.M., and
horizon, about twenty to thirty minutes later. waxes full on the 14th at 7:16 A.M. It wanes to last quarter
on the 21st at 10:45 a.m., and cycles back to new on the
Mars rises at about 1 A.M. local daylight time at the start of Zot at 2:39PM.
June and before midnight by month’s end. Look for it
above the east-southeastern horizon. Mars outshines every The solstice takes place on the 21st at 3:10 PM. Summer
other starlike object except its consort, Venus. As the dis- begins in the Northern Hemisphere, and winter in the
tance between Mars and Earth decreases from 71 million Southern.
miles to 53 million miles during June, the planet’s appar-
ent brightness doubles, from magnitude —0.7 to 1.4. Unless otherwise noted, all times are given in Eastern Daylight Time.

June 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 73

 AT THE MUSEUM
AMERICAN MUSEUM 6 NATURAL HISTORY 1)

The Lure of Chocolate

200zO
OSIGOLOHd

hocolate has en- The sections that follow

chanted humanity document chocolate’s ex-
for centuries with Its tensive reach, beginning
tempting taste. The Maya with the Spanish conquest
had a glyph for it and at of the Americas and the
one time there were nearly ensuing European quest
2,000 chocolate cafés in for cacao. Exhibits will il-
London alone. Now here is lustrate that while wealthy
a chance to look at the sci- consumers frequented
ence behind the seduction. the most elite chocolate
Starting June 14, the Amer- houses in Europe during
ican Museum of Natural the 17th, 18th, and 19th
History will feature Choco- centuries, thousands of
late, an exhibition devoted slaves toiled on sugar and
to the ecology, anthropol- cacao plantations to keep
ogy, history, and econom- up with demand. Visitors
ics of this treat. The ex- will also learn about the
hibition will be on view in Sweet chocolate candy is a rather recent invention. It made its debut important role chocolate
Gallery 3 through Septem- in 1847. manufacturing played in
ber 7, 2003. the industrial revolution
Chocolate begins by luring visitors and the fascinating relationships
into a tropical rain forest where they among growing, selling, and con-
can examine a replica of a Theobroma
CHOCOLATE suming cacao in the modern global
cacao tree, which produces the seeds June 14—September 7 market.
that are used to make the sublime Gallery 3 Chocolate concludes with the
substance. This section explores the cacao bean’s role in the world today.
complex ecosystem that supports the Visitors will learn how it is harvested
tree, the insects that pollinate it, and seeds of the cacao into a spicy bever- and prepared; what farmers are
the birds that nest in its limbs. age used in ceremonies and trade. doing to earn an income while pre-
The exhibition goes on to consider An interactive Aztec marketplace will serving the rain forest; the role of
the role of chocolate in the lives of demonstrate the power of choco- chocolate in different world cultures;
ancient indigenous civilizations. On late—its use as a luxury libation for and the myths and realities of choco-
view will be carved vessels, cacao the elite, an offering to the gods, pay- late’s effect on health.
seeds in dishes, and chemical resi- ment to rulers, and money in the mar-
Chocolate and its national tour were devel-
dues in pots that helped scientists ket. Visitors will also find out what oped by The Field Museum, Chicago. This
trace the roots of chocolate to the treasures Cortés discovered in Mon- project was supported, in part, by the Na-
ancient Maya, the first to turn the bitter tezuma’s storerooms. tional Science Foundation.

THE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HiSTORY BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
 Art(ifacts) and Science of Chocolate
en celebrated chocolatiers and pastry chefs have professor of chemistry and a syndicated columnist for
been invited to sculpt signature pieces in chocolate The Washington Post, will discuss the chemical and
inspired by the Museum's collections. Several of the physical processes that enable chocolate to be molded
pieces will be on exhibit at the Museum in early June into art. Don’t miss this fun and fascinating event! For
and the remaining pieces will be unveiled on July 17 more information, call 212-769-5200.
when, at 7:00 p.m., some of the participants will gather Chocolate for this project has been donated by Felchlin, Valrhona,
to discuss the creation of their pieces. Robert Wolke, the Guittard Chocolate Company, and Dairyland.

a
CONFERENCE FAMILY PROGRAM
The Science of Chocolate: The ABCs of Chocolate
Recent Discoveries Saturday, 6/28, 2:00-3:30 p.m. Chocolate
Tuesday, 6/17, 1:00-5:00 p.m. (Ages 7 and up, each child
Botanists, archaeologists, and with one adult) Tastings
chemists come together to discuss Discover the delectable world of
CHOCOLATE SHOP,
the cutting edge of research into fine chocolate in this hands-on
THIRD FLOOR
chocolate. Scientists will consider the experience. Learn how cacao is
ritual uses of chocolate among the grown and processed, and roll your Most weekends during the run
Maya, the recent discovery of the old- own chocolate truffle. Not recom- of the exhibition Chocolate, you
est-known chocolate, the medicinal mended for children with food allergies. can sample fine chocolate in the
qualities of the substance, and more. ©
2002
SIGYOO
retail shop outside the exhibition.
ADULT WORKSHOP Chocolatiers will be on hand
LECTURE Chocolate Appreciation to discuss the characteristics
Can Chocolate Save the Rain Forest? Sunday, 6/29, 11:00 a.m.—12:30 p.m., of their distinctive products
Tuesday, 6/17, 7:00-9:00 p.m. or 2:00-3:30 p.m. and the luxurious treats will be
Chris Bright and Radhika Sarin of the In this intensive class designed for available for purchase.
World Watch Institute discuss the future beginners as well as those with more Visit www.amnh.org or call 212-
of “forest-friendly” chocolate agriculture experienced palates, renowned pas- 769-5100 for the complete
in Brazil and the Ivory Coast with Meg try chef Steve KIc will teach you how schedule of tastings,
Domroese of the Museum's Center for to recognize the characteristics of book signings, and other events.
Biodiversity and Conservation. fine chocolate and how to shop for it.

SIHHO
LHDIY8

die
2.2
A cacao tree on an organic farm in Bahia, Brazil.
 MUSEUM EVENTS
EXHIBITIONS Einstein SUNSET CRUISES
| Vietnam: Through July 27, 2003 Sunset Cruise up the Hudson River
Journeys of Body, Mind & Spirit Gallery 4, fourth floor Tuesday, 6/10, 6:00-9:00 p.m.
Through January 4, 2004 This exhibition profiles this extraordi- Survey the geological features of the
Gallery 77, first floor nary scientific genius, whose river and the Palisades, and learn
This comprehensive exhibition pre- achievements were so substantial about the environmental concerns
sents Vietnamese culture in the early and groundbreaking that his name is facing this important waterway today.
21st century. The visitor is invited to virtually synonymous with science in
“walk in Vietnamese shoes” and ex- the public mind. The Nooks and Crannies
plore daily life among Vietnam's more of Eastern New York Harbor
than 50 ethnic groups. Organized by the American Museum of Nat- Tuesday, 6/17, 6:00-9:00 p.m.
ural History, New York; The Hebrew University Follow the East River into Newtown
QO of Jerusalem; and the Skirball Cultural Center,
Q Creek and then head to the Brooklyn
se
m Los Angeles. Einstein is made possible
on
m
az through the generous support of Jack and Navy Yard, the South Street Seaport,
>
<
Zz Susan Rudin and the Skirball Foundation, and and Buttermilk Channel.
ia
of the Corporate Tour Sponsor, TIAA-CREF.
FAMILY PROGRAM
ADULT WORKSHOPS The Underwater World
Genomics Laboratory Workshops of Sampson the Frogfish
Tuesday, 6/10, 7:00-9:00 p.m., Saturday, 6/14, 2:00 p.m.
or Tuesday, 6/17, 7:00-9:00 p.m. Close-up 3-D photography brings to
An introduction to genomics, followed life the beautiful world of coral reef
by isolating and sequencing your habitats.
own DNA.
CHILDREN’S WORKSHOPS
Drawing and Painting African
A life-sized votive horse made
of paper and bamboo. Mammals
Sunday, 6/8, 10:30 a.m.—1:30 p.m.
Organized by the American Museum of Nat- (Ages 9 and 10)
ural History, New York, and the Vietnam Mu-
seum of Ethnology, Hanol. This exhibition and
Yikes! Your Body Up Close
related programs are made possible by the
philanthropic leadership of the Freeman Sunday, 6/8, 10:30 a.m.—1:30 p.m.
Foundation. Additional generous funding (Ages 7 and 8)
‘ANVdOS
OINVDOLdAYO
ANVLOS
£002
provided by the Ford Foundation for the col-
laboration between the American Museum
of Natural History and the Vietnam Mu-
seum of Ethnology. Also supported by the
Asian Cultural Council. Planning grant pro- Ulva lactuca, pressed seaweed
vided by the National Endowment for the specimen Experience the sights
Humanities and sounds of a bustling
The Artistry of Algae
Discovering Vietnam’s Biodiversity Saturday, 6/28, 10:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m., Vietnamese
Through January 4, 2004 and Sunday, 6/29, 1:00-5:00 p.m.
Akeley Gallery, second floor This two-day workshop combines sci- Marketplace
This exhibition of photographs high- ence and art. With Alex Frost, Director
lights Vietnam's remarkable diversity of the Cryptogamic Botany Company. and sample traditional
of plants and animals.
foods at Café Pho.
Through January 4, 2004
bition is made possible by the
77TH STREET LOBBY, FIRST FLOOR
Ross Foundation and by the National
Foundation

THE Cot ITENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HISTORY BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
Fly Me to the Moon Look Up!
Saturday, 6/14, 12:00—1:30 p.m., or Saturday and Sunday, 10:15 a.m.
Museum Shop |
2:30-4:00 p.m. (Recommended for children ages 6
(Ages 4-6, each child with one adult) and under) to Carry
Mikimoto Pearls
Dinosaur Expedition LARGE-FORMAT FILMS
Sunday, 6/15, 10:30 a.m.—1:30 p.m. In the Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak n celebration of the opening of
(Ages 9 and 10) IMAX® Theater the Irma and Paul Milstein
Family Hall of Ocean Life, the
Crime Lab Investigation Coral Reef Adventure Museum Shop is proud to
Sunday, 6/22, 10:30 a.m.—1:30 p.m. A fantastic underwater journey to introduce Mikimoto pearls as
(Ages 8 and 9) document some of the world’s largest part of its collection of fine
and most beautiful—and most threat- jewelry. Mikimoto is considered
The Sun and Its Energy: ened—reefs. the world’s finest brand of pearls
A Summer Solstice Celebration @ and is available exclusively at
Sunday, 6/22 Ss
>
9 top jewelers. The Museum is
@
12:00-1:30 p.m. (Ages 7-9) 2
= proud to be one of the select
2:30-4:00 p.m. (Ages 10-12) a>
es
=
retailers to carry this fine brand.
aD
jaa
ian} Stop by the Museum Shop today
>Ss
Astronomy across Cultures Zz to check out the Museum’s
a
Tuesday—Thursday, 6/24-26, ce
=
n Mikimoto collection.
2:00-3:30 p.m.
(Ages 10-12)
Scene from Coral Reef Adventure

HAYDEN PLANETARIUM
PROGRAMS Pulse: a STOMP Odyssey
Virtual Universe: Take a rhythmic voyage of discovery Become a Member
The Solar Neighborhood around the world of percussion and of the American Museum
Tuesday, 6/3, 6:30-7:30 p.m. movement. of Natural History
Celestial Highlights: INFORMATION As a Museum Member you will be
Carnivores in the Sky Call 212-769-5100 or visit among the first to embark on new
Tuesday, 6/24, 6:30-7:30 p.m. www.amnh.org. journeys to explore the natural
world and the cultures of humanity.
TICKETS AND REGISTRATION You'll enjoy:
SPACE SHOWS Call 212-769-5200, Monday-Friday,
The Search for Life: 8:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m., and Saturday, ¢ Unlimited free general
Are We Alone? 10:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m., or visit admission to the Museum
Narrated by Harrison Ford www.amnh.org. A service charge and special exhibitions, and
may apply. discounts on the Space Shows
Passport to the Universe and IMAX® films
Narrated by Tom Hanks All programs are subject to change. ¢ Discounts in the Museum
Shop, restaurants, and on
program tickets
e Free subscription to Natural
Starry Nights: Live Jazz History magazine and to
Friday, 6/6, 5:30 and 7:00 p.m. Rotunda, our newsletter
Rose Center for Earth and Space ¢ Invitations to Members-only
David Sanchez special events, parties, and
This performance will be broadcast live on exhibition previews
WBGO Jazz 88.3 FM.
For further information call 212-
Starry Nights is made possible by Lead Sponsor Verizon and 769-5606 or visit www.amnh.org.
Associate Sponsors CenterCare Health Plan and WNBC-TV.
 ENDPAPER
LOPE SERIE

Damsels
Cause Distress
By Gwen Mergian

fter wafHing for years, my husband took

the plunge and purchased a large saltwater Alexander Calder, Fish Bowl, 1929

aquarium for his office. That he did so

while I was out of town at a conference may have tack. After a while, Tuffy adopted a second approach:
shown a certain lack of confidence that I would she would pick up a snail with her mouth, swim to a
react favorably, but he needn’t have worried: I was patch of jagged rocks, hover over them, and drop the
hooked right from the start. snail down on them. The merciless assault went on
The tropical fish tank came fully equipped: for hours and resumed the following day.
pumps, filters, hoses, light fixtures, coral arrange- I hardly slept that night.
ments, and a small cadre of lively black-and-white- The next morning, I tiptoed up to the tank, only
striped damselfish, also called demoiselles. These to discover a strange and curious sight. The two snails
gals, however, were no ladies-in-waiting. Like many were anchored to the glass at the front of the aquar-
coral-reef species, damselfish are aggressive and ium and had formed a barrier that effectively blocked
highly competitive. As we soon discovered, even the only entrance to Tuffy’s favorite retreat—a bar-
small fish can display some mighty big attitude. nacle-like structure, centrally located, that she used as
Take our alpha female, a fish that quickly earned her personal palace. Tuffy dive-bombed the pair, try-
the name Tuffy. This one-inch wonder ruled every ing to break their hold, but it was useless: the snails,
inch of the tank, demanding—and getting—the one clinging to the top of the other, had wedged
most food, the best hiding place, the last word in themselves perfectly between the barnacle and the
everything. What’s more, the dominant demoiselle glass. She tried to squeeze past them—first going for-
seemed to flaunt her power, chasing her underlings ward, then sideways, finally backward. But the snails’
and pinning them into corners of the aquarium. adjoined, triangular shells held fast; there was simply
Sometimes Tuffy kept them trapped for hours before no way for Tuffy to get past.
allowing them to escape. As I watched these daily And the snails were in no great hurry to leave.
shenanigans, | was compelled to note the similarities They steadfastly maintained their position for three
between the world of fish and the world of business. days. Only on the fourth day of the standoff did
I had run into quite a few Tuffys in my time. they finally move on, returning to the usual business
Soon after the aquarium arrived, my husband de- of being snails. I breathed a sigh of relief: Is there
cided to add two small snails to the system, hoping anything that a few good friends, working together,
to control the growth of algae. When he popped cannot accomplish?
them into the water, the pair went to work, slowly Life in the tank is calmer these days. Tuffy 1s still
scouring the gravel at the bottom of the tank with taunting her companions into daily acts of submis-
their little antennae. “Ah, another fish-tank phe- sion, but she mostly ignores the two snails. And the
nomenon to marvel at,’ I thought. snails are quite content to roam around in their
But Tuffy thought otherwise. Within minutes of deliberate, gentle way. My husband is happy too,
the snails’ arrival the hostilities commenced. Tuffy because he’s got the algae growth under control at
began the assault by dive-bombing the newcomers, last. And Tuffy is back in her favorite place, peering
swimuning first to the top of the tank to gather mo- out with satisfaction over her dominion.
mentum, then crashing straight into them at full
force. The snails scattered under the fury of the at- Gwen Mergian and her saltwater friends live in upstate New York.
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 ATLANTIC os

AMERICAN Mus EUM

OCEAN

She Plmericas
2003
d {ilPhotos: ATLANTIC
a

UNH OCEAN —

d Irchives

@ The Making of America Aboard C/pper

@ The Legacy of Lewis & Clark ‘Adventurer — September 7-21, 2003
August 20-30, 2003 @ Swiss ee to Budapest Aboard Amadeus
@ The Great Lakes Aboard Le Levant Glassre September 8-22, 2003
* 4
August 22-30, 2003 OcTOBER
@ Lemur Conservation: Tattersall’s Madagascar @ Village Life Along the Dalmatian Coast f
August 24—September 8, 2003 Aboard Monet — October 7-15, 2003 ;
SEPTEMBER @ AMNH in Patagonia — October 15-28, 2003,
@ North Pacific Odyssey: Aleutian Islands, Burma’s Great Irrawaddy River Aboard
Kamchatka Peninsula & Kuril Islands Aboard Fandaw2 — October 16—November 1, 2003
Bremen — September 2-19, 2003
@ Polar Bear Watch on Canada’s Hudson Bay —
@ Conservation in Action: South Africa, Namibia October 17-22 & October 24-29, 2003
7 oh & Botswana — September 2-20, 2003
Circumnavigating Sicily Aboard Harmony G
vembly of A @ Daily Life in Morocco — September 6-20, 2003 October 25—November 3, 2003
“Rveled

OOO :
|
JANUARY @ The Food & Wine of Northern California
Aboard Yorktown Clipper 4
@ The Galapagos Islands Aboard /yabella IT @ Safari Sketching Workshop in South Africa &
@ Egypt Aboard Sunboat II Namibia fe
Exploring Antarctica, the Falkland Islands &
South Georgia Aboard Peregrine Voyager MAY
@ The Sea of Cortes: Baja Whale Watching Aboard
Spirit of Endeavour @ Istanbul to Vienna Aboard Amadeus Classte
@ Ireland & Scotland Aboard Polar Star
Abnighito meteorite: FEBRUARY @ Springtime in Japan Aboard Clipper Odyssey —
arrwing at AMINE, . 907 @ The Legacy of Buddhism in Tibet & Mongolia
- @ New Zealand Aboard Clipper Odyssey @ Southern Africa's Great Rail Journey |
@ Marine Ecology of Andros Island, Bahamas
@ Early Man: Lisbon to Bordeaux Aboard f
@ Astronomy & Volcanology Seminar in Hawaii
Clipper Adventurer i
@ Lands of the Maya Aboard Nantucket Clipper @ D-Day Remembered: A Special Invitation fror
@ Thailand Cultural Festival Smithsonian Institution ;
@ The Kingdom of the Monarchs
JUNE ;
MARCH
@ North Pole Aboard Yamal i
- idermy
@ The Amazon
: Aboard La Amatista
f @ Montana by Rail
fiiing Akeley’ gaps @ Mysteries of Southeast Asia @ Family China
rechnig 1954 @ Family Costa Rica @ Ancient Rituals by Private Jet ai

@ Archaeology of the Ancient Olympics: .

Whee/;
‘;. ae 4 Matlodon NeeE
RUL
AP Senna
eee : The Greek Isles Aboard Harmony G
VOligh Z ar,
‘a LUN hall, 1907 @ The Great Markets of the World by Private Jet @ Alaska Aboard Empress of the North
a @ The Golden Age of Natural History: @ Iceland & Greenland Aboard Peregrine Mariner
An AMNH & Oxford University Seminar @ Artists of Russia's Golden Ring Aboard Borodii
@ Australian Outback by Private DC-3
 aA bate Osborn Expedition;

NATU RAL HISTORY

Egypt, 1907

Fossilized
Otnosaur tracks;
Texas, 1959

In the Wake of Moors & Mariners: Spain, @ Exploring the South Pacific Aboard
Morocco & the Canary Islands Aboard Sea Cloud Clipper OBysse »y — November 13-28, 2003
October 27—November 9, 2003
DECEMBER
Festivals of India: Featuring the Pushkar Camel Stet Oe De OR nA eed
Fair
& Palace on Wheels Ci eae ber 9-19, 2003
October 28—November 13, 2003 fa ob ea mth cere eae
@ Christmas in Quebec
Bhutan: The Dragon Kingdom re
October 30—November 14,2003 December 10-15, 2003
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A WALK ON THE BEACH THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS
For years, Betsy Colie has walked along the beach That started a chain reaction, eventually bringing
near her home in the small town of Mantoloking, the artifact to the attention of the producers of the
New Jersey, looking for seashells or bits of new PBS series ‘History Detectives.” The series
polished glass left behind by the waves. follows four detectives—a sociologist, a historian of
Usually that’s all she finds. But one afternoon, architecture, and two appraisers—as they search for
not long after the nor’easter of 1992 brought history behind what may seem to be ordinary objects.
near-record-size waves crashing onto beaches all Elyse Luray, a professional appraiser, took
along the Jersey shore, a round stone the color of charge of the investigation, consulting with
baked clay caught her eye. experts on the geology and indigenous cultures of
“It looked a little unusual,” Colie says. North America at each step along the way.
“Definitely not your everyday stone on the beach!” John Kraft was one of the experts. As an
So she slipped it into her pocket, took it home, and archaeologist who specializes in the Lenape, the
placed it on her windowsill with the rest of native people of New Jersey, he knew better than
her collection. anyone whether the face was a local product.
“When I first saw a picture of it, it intrigued
A STARTLING DISCOVERY
me,” says Kraft. “I thought, possibly it could be
Only later did she make a startling discovery. On Lenape.’’ But only a closer look, using more sophis-
one side of the stone were two eyes, a nose and ticated techniques, would be able to identify the
mouth—the makings of a face. Who had made it, artifact definitively.
and how had it ended up on the Jersey shore? Petrographic analysis, for example. By examining
Her first attempt to find out didn’t go well. A a paper-thin section of rock or clay under a micro-
friend took it to a museum in Newark, but no one scope, geologists can identify a mineral “finger-
seemed interested. print” that can then be used to trace a rock back
She could have given up then, and the rock would to its source.
have remained an artifact without a history—just an Would petrographic analysis tie the artifact
unusual piece of beach debris to decorate her window. to New Jersey, or to somewhere much further
But instead she mentioned it to a local historian, away? Would Luray find that it was the product
Kent Mountford, who offered to take it to experts of an ancient American civilization, or just a
at the Smithsonian Institution. modern trinket?

To find out the surprising answer, tune in July 14 at 8 PM ET/PT

for the debut of “History Detectives” on PBS. PBS
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 JULY/AUGUST 2003 VOLUME 112 NUMBER
6

FEATURES

36 THE CHOCOLATE TREE

Growing cacao in the forest
ROBERT A. RICE AND
RUSSELL GREENBERG

COVER STORY
28 THE BIRTH OF WAR
An archaeological survey concludes that warfare
has not always been part of the human condition.
R. BRIAN FERGUSON

COVER
Spearhead from
the Aegean island
of Amorgos, Early
Cycladic Il,
2700-2300 B.c.
STORY BEGINS

44 SUMMER FLINGS ON PAGE 28

Firefly courtship, sex, and death Visit our Web site at
t
SARA LEWIS AND JAMES E. LLOYD www.nhmag.com
DEPARTMENTS Sy

THE NATURAL MOMENT

Turf War
Photograph by Constantinos Petrinos
EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

10 CONTRIBUTORS

12 LET EIRS

16 SAMPLINGS
Stéphan Reebs
20 NATURALIST AT LARGE
Earth, Wind, and Fire
Scott C. Pedersen

26 BIOMECHANICS
Extreme Forestry
Adam Summers

50 THIS LAND
Valley High
Robert H. Mohlenbrock

52 REVIEW
The Mismeasure of Science
Michael Ruse

58 BOOKSHELF
Mad Cows, Butterflies, Oxygen
Laurence A. Marschall

62 nature.net
Robert Anderson

64 OUT THERE
Hazy, Hot, and Hidden
Charles Liu

THE SKY IN JULY AND AUGUST

Joe Rao
AT THE MUSEUM

ENDPAPER
On Hostile Ground
Oliver L. Gilbert

PICTURE CREDITS: Page 14

 F

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The
LiwyfDaevi0d Attenborough
by
Hosted

Available at amazon.com
and you'
re done:
or where
Turt War
Photograph by Constantinos Petrinos
caaesh
CLoe
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THE NATURAL MOMENT EDITOR SUNOTEBOOK
y RODE |
Loe AEM
EEER ETA
saab GP SO AE NS RTOS DS
~ See preceding pages

iacks* om wat

fter the disastrous looting of archaeological artifacts in Iraq,

reported by our correspondent David Keys in our June
taking out the boundaries of issue, any positive news sounds virtually miraculous. So it
Se spread can be a heedless was a relief to learn that many of the antiquities that had been on
act: In a Gary Larson cartoon a public display in Baghdad’s National Museum had been hidden
man points out a chirping sparrow away by museum staff members before the war, sometimes in their
to his son—emphasizing that own homes. Yet though some of the signature artifacts are safe,
territorial behavior occurs only Keys still puts the number of stolen items in the thousands. Outside
among “lower” animals—while he the Iraqi capital, where there are literally thousands of ancient sites,
stands amid a maze of picket fences security remains patchy, and widespread looting, driven by the black
in suburbia. But the male man- market in antiquities, is continuing as we go to press.
darin fish (Synchiropus splendidus) 1s For a broad perspective on warfare in this time of war, Natural
anything but heedless about assert- History asked the anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson to describe his
ing its property rights. Every ongoing survey of the evidence for conflict at prehistoric archaeo-
evening for about fifteen minutes logical sites around the world (see “The Birth of War,” page 28). In
the largest males—a whopping a sense, his findings so far are encouraging: no unequivocal evi-
two inches long—among them dence of warfare appears at any site before sometime between
the two fish pictured, fight their 12,000 and 10,000 years ago—suggesting that war is by no means
ongoing turf wars. an inevitable feature of the human condition. Yet if warfare is a “re-
Alone by day, the psychedeli- cent” invention, its present near-universal reach makes it one of the
cally patterned mandarins graze most “successful” inventions ever made.
on minute crustaceans—cope-
pods—in the Indo-Pacific Ocean, eldom has scientific nomenclature been so aptly applied as in the
hardly bothering to notice one botanical name for the genus of the cacao tree: Theobroma,
another. But when the Sun begins “food of the gods” (see “The Chocolate Tree,’ by Robert A. Rice
to set, the focus turns to sex, and and Russell Greenberg, page 36). As an unrepentant chocoholic,
the large alpha males conspicu- I’ve accumulated enough T-shirts on chocolate themes to have a de-
ously secure a two- or three- cent collection of the genre. My favorite is the “Will Rogers” ver-
square-foot plot of coral rubble sion: on the front it says, “I never met a piece of chocolate I didn’t
for courting. Some nights, a like,” and on the back it has a large hole made by the bite of what
harem of females joins a successful must have been a partly literate (but very confused) dog.
male that leads them one by one You won't find that shirt in the gift shop for the “Chocolate” ex-
to the surface to spawn. hibition, which just opened in New York City at the American
Photographer Constantinos Museum of Natural History. But you will see plenty of other offer-
Petrinos found a meeting site ings—and a lot of botanical and cultural artifacts on display as well.
for mandarins in the Lembeh
Strait, off the northern tip of
the island of Sulawesi, Indone- Readers who don’t want to miss a single one of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s
sia. He watched the alpha males columns should not panic over this month’s table of contents. Neil is
seen here erect their spiky dorsal taking a much-deserved vacation this month; his column “Universe”
fins—a characteristic display of will return in the next (September) issue of Natural History.
dominance—and was astonished —PETER BROWN
when the mandarin on the left
sank its teeth into its rival’s neck.
“They swirled for a few seconds,” Natural History (ISSN 0028-0712) is published monthly, except for combined issues in July/August and December/January, by Natural History Magazine,
Inc., at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, NY 10024, E-mail; nhmag@amnh.org. Natural History
Petrinos reported, “until the loser Magazine, Ine., is solely responsible for editorial content and publishing practices. Subscriptions; $30.00 a year; for Canada and all other countries: $40.00 a
year, Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and at additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2003 by Natural History Magazine, Inc. All rights reserved,
fled to seek new territory.” No part of this periodical may be reproduced without written consent of Natural History. If you would like to contact us regarding your subscription or to
enter a new subscription, please write to us at Natural History, RO, Box 5000, Harlan, [A 51593-0257. Postmaster: Send address changes to Natural History,
Erin Espelie P.O. Box 5000, Harlan, [A 51537-5000, Printed in the U.S.A

ATURAL HISTORY July/August 2003

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 ONTRIBUTORS

Soon after graduating from Dartmouth College with an

MBA, CONSTANTINOS PETRINOS (“The Natural Moment,”
page 6) decided to trade in his business suits for diving gear.
Based in Athens, Greece, Petrinos produced both text and
photographs for the book Realm ofthe Pygmy Seahorse: An Un-
derwater Photography Adventure (see www.petrinos.gr). His pho-
tograph of mandarin fish was particularly hard won, he says,
PETER BROWN Editor-in-Chief
Be ause the fish were small, fast, and swimming among sharp coral.
Mary Beth Aberlin Elizabeth Meryman
Whether surveying the archaeological evidence of humanity’s Managing Editor Art Director
first armed conflicts, or evaluating biological theories about
aggression in chimpanzees and in humans, R. BRIAN FERGU- Board ofEditors
T. J. Kelleher, Avis Lang, Vittorio Maestro
SON (“The Birth of War,” page 28) keeps one goal in mind: to
help address current crises by expanding anthropological the- Michel DeMatteis Associate Managing Editor

ory and linking it with other disciplines. A professor of an- Lynette Johnson Associate Managing Editor
thropology at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, Thomas Rosinski Associate Art Director
Ferguson directs the Working Group on Political Violence, : Erin M. Espelie Special Projects Editor
War and Peace at the university’s Center for Global Change and Governance. He
Graciela Flores Editorial Associate
recently edited a collection of case studies of modern violence, The State, Identity
and Violence: Political Disintegration in the Post-Cold War World (Routledge, 2002). Richard Milner Contributing Editor
Sarah L. Zielinski Intern
ROBERT A. RICE (“The Chocolate Tree,’
page 36) (far left) works predominantly on
issues of tropical agriculture and land Mark A. FURLONG Publisher
management. A geographer and policy Gale Page Consumer Marketing Director
researcher at the Smithsonian Migratory Maria Volpe Promotion Director
Bird Center in Washington, D.C., Ruce Edgar L. Harrison National Advertising Manager
helped organize the Smithsonian’s ‘first
Sonia W. Paratore Senior Account Manager
workshop on sustainable cacao produc-
Donna M. Lemmon Production Manager
tion. His cooeaoe the ornithologist RUSSELL GREENBERG, investigates the
ecology of the migrant birds that winter in Latin America’s human-dominated Michael Shectman Fulfillment Manager

landscapes, such as coffee farms, cacao farms, and cattle pastures. Associated with Jennifer Evans Business Administrator
the Smithsonian Institution for nearly thirty years, and director of the Smithson- Advertising Sales Representatives
ian Migratory Bird Center since 1992, Greenberg helped launch conservation New York—Metrocorp Marketing, 212-972-1157,
initiatives such as the Smithsonian’s bird-friendly coffee program. Duke International Media, 212-598-4820
Detroit—Joe McHugh, Breakthrough Media, 586-380-3980
Minneapolis—Rickert Media, Inc., 612-920-0080
Since her early years as a graduate student
West Coast—SD Media, 310-264-7575,
at Duke University in Durham, North Parris & Co., 415-641-5767
Carolina, evolutionary ecologist SARA ‘Toronto—American Publishers
Lewis (“Summer Flings” page 44) (near Representatives Ltd., 416-363-1388
Atlanta and Miami—Rickles and Co., 770-664-4567
right) has been fascinated by fireflies. She
National Direct Response—Smyth Media Group,
is NOW an associate professor ofbiology at 646-638-4985
Tufts University in Medford, Massachu-
setts. In addition to inhaling countless
Topp Happer Vice President, Science Education
mosquitoes while investigating firefly nuptial gifts, she ed her dolla mady
sexual selection in flour beetles and seahorses. Coauthor JAMES E. LLoyp,
perhaps the foremost expert on firefly taxonomy in the world, is a professor of NATURAL HistoRY MAGAZINE, INC.
CHARLES E. HARRIS President, Chief Executive Officer
entomology and nematology at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Lloyd,
CHARLES LALANNE Chief Financial Officer
who has been investigating firefly ecology and behavior since 1962, is at work Juby BULLER General Manager
on a taxonomic monograph about Photuris fireflies, a genus whose deceptive CHARLES RODIN Publishing Advisor
signaling—the females rely on tricking other fireflies into becoming dinner—
For subscription information, call (800) 234-5252
has provided much of the material for his work. In the guise of the “Firefly (within U.S.) or (515) 247-7631 (from outside U.S.).
Doc,” Lloyd is also the editor of The Fireflyer Companion & Letter, available at For advertising information, call (212) 769-5555.
ty fly.ifas.ufl.edu

ATU Ly July/August 2003

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Water for All up to all the parties involved rassment,” and regulates it the whales for my educa-
In her review of two books (perhaps with help from an the same way it regulates re- tional work without dis-
about Earth’s supply of outside mediator) to ham- search. Because humpback rupting their normal activi-
freshwater, Sandra Postel mer out atreaty that all will whales are an endangered ties. (I do presentations for
(“Hydro Dynamics,” 5/03] sign. Sometimes that may species, additional regula- the Whale and Dolphin
writes of the need for a pro- entail sharing the benefits of tions established in 2001 Conservation Society.) I
gram that “fairly allocates the river (irrigated crops, make it unlawful for anyone think the sea would be a far
the available water among hydroelectric power) rather to come within less than better place for all creatures
all the parties.” She speaks than fairly allocating the 100 yards of these animals if more people followed
of a lasting Mideast peace water per se. unless authorized to do so. this approach.
depending on a “more eq- Ideally, water treaties will Jennifer Burns
uitable apportionment” of be resilient. A good example University of Alaska Wondrous Strange
water between Israel and its is the treaty signed by India Anchorage, Alaska - Adam Summers has cleared
neighbors; cites a UN con- and Pakistan in 1960 to the air about a memorable
vention calling for “equi- share the Indus Raver. The DUNCAN MURRELL encounter I’ve wondered
table and reasonable use”; treaty took twelve years to REPLIES: It is unfortunate about for decades
and warns that for most of negotiate (facilitated in the that the law does not dis- [““Biomechanics: Serpents
the world’s 261 rivers shared final nine years by Eugene tinguish between low-im- in the Air,” 5/03]. Walking
by two or more countries, R. Black, then president of pact kayaks and massive alone along a jungle path
“there is no treaty that di- the World Bank). But de- cruise ships, and that the on the Philippine island of
vides the water equitably spite two subsequent wars whales are not conversant Bongao, I spotted, coming
among all the parties.” and ongoing tensions be- with the regulations and from the high green
But what is fair and tween the signatories, the persist in approaching me canopy, a snake gliding to-
equitable in the distribution treaty has survived. closer than 100 yards. The ward me. I felt more awe
of water? The same amount encounter described was a than fear, and quickly
per capita, regardless of a Too Close? freak incident, the result of eluded the snake, which,
country’s total population? Although outstanding, the animal’s approach with- upon landing, darted
The same amount per Duncan Murrell’s photo- out warning. rapidly up a tree nearby,
country, regardless of the graph of a feeding hump- In my twenty years of tongue flicking, seemingly
number of users? Should back whale in Alaskan wa- kayaking in the presence of ready to try again.
distribution be proportional
to surface area, or should
the country where the “In my twenty years of kayaking [with] humpback a K
headwaters lie receive a
greater share? Once set,
whales, ... I have never [seen it lead to] any perceivable —ia 1)
a

should allocations stand for change in their behavior.” —DUNCAN M URRELL |

all time, or should they be *E ?

renegotiated as population
and other factors change? ters [“The Natural humpback whales in Knowing I would not be
John Tanton Moment: Bubble Feast,’ Alaska, I have never wit- believed, I told no one. Mr.
Petoskey, Michigan 5/03] troubled me. The nessed any perceivable Summers has at last assured
image and its accompanying change in their behavior me that the experience had
SANDRA POSTEL REPLIES: text suggest it is acceptable patterns. That is in sharp a mechanical explanation.
There is no magic formula to closely approach whales contrast to the way I’ve Richard Sutherland
for achieving an equitable and other marine mammals. seen them respond to mo- Metchosin, British Columbia
apportionment of water That is not the case. torized vessels—even if
among users of a shared The Marine Mammal those boats remain outside Magnificent Monitors
river or aquifer. Many con- Protection Act of 1972 re- the regulation distance and Adam Summers’s essay on
ditions must be factored into quires those who “take” or even if the people on board how monitor lizards can ef-
the calculations, such as cli- “harass” marine mammals in have research permits. fectively breathe while run-
mate, hydrology, population, US. waters to have a permit I stopped using boats ning (“Biomechanics:
existing and potential uses of for doing so. The act treats with engines many years Monitor Marathons,’ 6/03)
the water, and the availabil- commercial and educational ago because I wanted to could have discussed other
ity of alternative sources. It’s photography as “level B ha- observe and photograph unusual, but related, biologi-

A RAL HISTORY July/August 2003

cal features of these most ad- lived on other continents. sole food source. sometimes farmed by ter-
vanced of all lizards. Many People were probably But the behavior of H. mites and is also closely re-
monitor lizards are top among these monitors’ vic- tenuis is not unique: many lated to Termitomyces. This is
predators in their communi- tims; curiously, though, nonfarming termite species not the case: D. palmicola (of
ties. They are more active fierce, giant man-eating feed on fungus-infested the phylum Ascomycota) is
and much more intelligent lizards don’t appear in the wood. Because H. tenuis (of as distantly related to
than other lizards, and their Dreamtime stories of the family Rhinotermi- Termitomyces (of the phylum
greater stamina enables them Australian Aborigines. tidae) 1s not a direct ances- Basidiomycota) as human
to search widely for food. Eric R. Pianka tor of the Macrotermitinae, beings are to protozoa.
Savannah monitors, living in University of Texas the “incipient farming” in Duur K. Aanen
Africa, range several miles a Austin, Texas H. tenuis 1s analogous, University of Copenhagen
day in search of prey. rather than homologous, to Copenhagen, Denmark
The exceedingly success- Small Farmers the elaborate fungus farm-
ful body plan of varanid Jessie Gunnard, Andrew ing in the Macrotermitinae By colonizing wood, fungi
lizards and their close rela- Wier, and Lynn Margulis (a possibility the authors “precondition” it, making
tives has been around at least (“Mycological Maestros,” themselves raise). it palatable to lower ter-
since the days of a creature 5/03], having discovered Moreover, a “missing mites. No surprise, then, if
that lived in what is now that some populations of link” position for the South fungal parts can be found in
Mongolia, 80 million years the termite Heterotermes American H. tenuis 1s at the guts of those termites.
ago. Most monitors are tenuis consume spores of odds with the supposedly But the Macrotermitinae—
larger than most other the fungus Delortia palmi- African origin of fungus the Old World subfamily of
lizards. Indonesian Komodo | cola, suggest the termite farming in termites. higher termites that engage
dragons (Varanus komodoensis) might be a “missing link” Likewise, for the fungi a in rather advanced fungus
attain lengths of ten feet or to the higher termites that true “missing link” would growing—feed predomi-
more and can weigh as farm Termitomyces as their have to be a fungus that is nantly on dry or freshly
much as 350 pounds.
Komodo monitors, how-
ever, are themselves dwarfed
by the closely related—
though, unfortunately, now
extinct—Australian monitor
Varanus priscus. The latter
species (formerly known as
Megalania prisca) reached
more than twenty feet long
and weighed more than half
a ton. Fossils of this giant are
estimated at between 19,000
and 26,000 years old.
Varanid teeth are serrated
along the rear edge, which
helps the animals cut and
tear the skin and flesh of OTC edeu Is MICe OCa CTU emuur WPAcea MTUr st)
their prey as they pull back PUM UUMC Qui Teuieea ieCite inpLU a UII CeiCURRO(ove Wy ei
on their bite. That is how Marco Polo offers five thrilling expeditions from December through February. In less than
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dead organic materials, only after the termite colony David Bignell and Paul ments of clearly identifiable
which contain few fungi. has abandoned the mound Eggleton assert that “the plant xylem harboring pro-
The Termitomyces fungus and stopped farming the fungus found the termite tists and their adhering bac-
farmed and ingested by fungus’s mycelium. Those and not vice versa.” But teria. We find termite mus-
those termites is therefore mushrooms, avidly sought whether the fungus found cle tissue, the cell nuclei and
the first microorganism to by local residents, have a de- the termite or the termite cell walls of wood, and even
attack the forage. Many spe- licious, meatlike taste and discovered the fungus is sci- molecules of intestinal gas,
cies of Macrotermitinae de- texture strongly resembling entifically indistinguishable. such as methane and carbon
grade cellulose internally, that of the best commercial Waind-blown spores became dioxide. Similar success can
with assistance from the portobello mushrooms. delicious, fattening pin- be predicted with African
fungus; in other species the My own Zimbabwe re- heads because of hungry elephant material.
fungus breaks down the search focused on the for- insects. That’s coevolution.
plants’ xylan and lignin. AMENDMENTS: The letter by
The overall picture is one Maxwell Manes [“‘Letters,”
of an evolving diversity of Could cellulose-digesting protists 5/03] concerning phi, the
mutualisms. Fungal nodules golden ratio, included aslip
pass rapidly through the gut live in the guts of elephants — of the pen. The square of
and germinate. Not enough as well as termites? — phi (not, as stated, phi) plus
are consumed to fully sup- the reciprocal of phi is equal
port the colony nutritionally; to two times phi.
most termites feed on the aging habits of African ele- Joseph Dudley astutely Because of editing errors,
fungus’s more general fungal phants. I found strong suggests that elephants be two captions in last month’s
threads, which are richer in ecological linkages between examined for cellulose-di- issue (6/03) made mistaken
nitrogen than primary forage elephants and termites in gesting protists living in identifications. In “This
is. Thus the fungus is a com- woodland and savanna their guts. In fact, the search Land: Ages of Aquarius,”
poster, making energetically habitats in Africa: termites for cellulose-degrading mi- the plant shown in bloom
expensive nitrogen fixation are the principal recyclers croorganisms in elephants, in the bottom photograph
unnecessary. of elephant dung during as well as in beavers, pandas, on page 59 is mock orange
In spite of the complex- the dry season. and other mammals that (Philadelphus lewisii). In
ity of the Macrotermitinae’s Because both elephants feed on woody materials, “Peering at the Edge of
mound constructions, the and termites rely on mi- promises rich rewards, par- Time,” by Fulvio Melia,
latest phylogenetic evidence crobial gut symbionts for ticularly when the studies the caption on page 53
places that subfamily in a digestion and nutrition, incorporate observations of switched the identifications
basal position within higher and because termites in the fossil record. With the of the two constellations
termites, where the broadly Africa and Asia are inti- electron microscope, my Scorpius and Sagittarius.
dominant habit is the use of mately associated with ele- colleagues and I have ob-
soil as a building material phant dung, it would be served, in 20-million-year- Natural History’s e-mail ad-
and/or as a food. We think exceedingly interesting to old Miocene amber, frag- dress is nhmag@amnh.org
the fungus found the ter- determine whether any
mite and not vice versa. species of cellulose-digest- PICTURE CREDITS Cover: Louvre, Paris, France/Art Resource, NY/Erich Lessing; p.
6: ©Constantinos Petrinos/ Nature Picture Library; p. 16 (top): ©Erhard Strohm; (bottom):
David Bignell ing protists live not only in Guy M. Narbonne and James G. Gehling; p. 18 (top): ODr. Wesley Niewoehner, Califor-
University of London termites but also in the nia State University at San Bernardino; (bottom): ©Peter Chadwick/Science Photo Li-
brary; pp. 20-21: ©Michael Wilhelm; p. 20: ©Father Alejandro J. Sanchez Munoz; p. 22:
London, England guts of elephants. ©Christian Ziegler; p.,23 (top): OMichael R. Gannon; (bottom): courtesy the author; pp.
Joseph P. Dudley 28-29: ©Pierre Colombel/CORBIS; p. 30 (top): Peking University; (bottom and p. 33):
H. Obermaier; p. 31: National Museum of Denmark; p. 32: ©Werner Forman/Art Re-
Paul Eggleton The Pentagon source, NY; p. 34: A.A.&A. Ancient Art & Architecture Collection Library; p. 35:
The Natural History Museum Washington, D.C. ©Stocknet/CORBIS; p. 36: Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, France/Bridgeman Art Li-
London, England brary; p. 37: ©James V. Elmore/Peter Arnold, Inc.; p. 38: illustration by PatriciaJ.Wynne;
p. 39: ©Paul K. Donahue; p. 40: ©Walter H. Hodge/Peter Arnold, Inc.; p. 41 (top and
LYNN MARGULIS REPLIES: bottom): ©Maricel Presilla, The New Taste of Chocolate: A Natural and Cultural History of
After reading “Mycological Duur Aanen is correct. The Cacao with Recipes; Ten Speed Press, 2001; p. 43; The Art Archive/Museo de America,
Madrid/Dagli Orti; pp. 4445: courtesy the artist and PPOW, NY; pp. 46,48, and 49:
Maestros,” I finally know behavior of the South courtesy the authors; p. 47: ©Bill Beatty; p. 50 (top): ©Carl Piesch; (middle and bottom):
why the huge mushrooms I American H. tenuis stimu- ©Don Eastman; p. 51 (top): © Jessie M. Harris; (bottom): map by Joe LeMonnier; p. 53:
Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library; p. 54: courtesy George Adams Gallery, NY; p.
once (and only once) col-’ lates us to imagine the lives 58: Musée Pasteur, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France/Bridgeman Art Library; p. 60: courtesy
lected from a big termite of the 200-million-year-old Nancy Hoffman Gallery, NY; p. 64: courtesy the artist; p. 66: Fanny Brennan, Galaxy,
mound in Zimbabwe are so African ancestors of today’s 1997, Estate of Fanny Brennan, courtesy Salander O'Reilly Galleries, NY; p. 72: ©2002-
2003 Niall Benvie/Nature Picture Library. All rights reserved.
rare: mushrooms appear fungal gardeners.

NATURAL HISTORY July/August 2003

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SAMPLINGS By Stéphan Reebs

Little Engines energy: the mitochondria

within every working cell.
That Could Specifically, they looked
t's hardly news that for many species, at the folded membranes
raising offspring takes a lot of energy. Add on the insides of the mi-
to that the wide variations among individ- tochondria in the bee-
uals, and you might well ask, What ac- wolves’ flight muscles.
counts for differences in energy, and do Why? The denser the mi-
they affect reproductive success? tochondria’s inner mem-
Consider an extreme case: the Euro- branes, the faster the
pean beewolf, a species of wasp. To pro- production of energy.
vision her young, the female stings and Strohm and Daniels
paralyzes honeybees that each weigh orchestrated mating,
more than she does. Then she lofts the breeding, and honey-
bees one at a time back to her nest-in- bee-hunting opportuni-
progress. During her lifetime a laid-back ties for a group of fe-
mama beewolf might hunt down five bees male beewolves. Each
and lay five eggs, giving each of her off- wasp was then killed, its
spring just one bee to see it through the weight and fat reserves
larval stage. But a supermom might hunt (good determinants of
four fat bees for each of as many as thirty- reproductive success in Beewolf hauling dinner to her nest
four eggs, more than twenty times the other species) were mea-
workload of her laid-back counterpart. sured, its age recorded, and the mito- more likely it was to survive. In beewolves,
The biologists Erhard Strohm of the chondrial density and mitochondrial- at least, being a supermom pays off. (“UI-
University of Wurzburg and Wiltrud membrane density of its flight muscles trastructure meets reproductive success:
Daniels of the University of Bayreuth, both examined at high magnification. Performance of a sphecid wasp is corre-
in Germany, decided that the beewolf was The only factor that correlated with the lated with the fine structure of the flight-
just the critter they needed to prove a beewolves’ rate of bee killing was the muscle mitochondria,” Proceedings of the
direct connection between reproductive membrane density. And the more bees a Royal Society of London B 270:749-54,
success and the ultimate source of animal developing larva had to munch on, the April 7, 2003)

_ Ocean Dwellers of Avalon C. wardi grew to as much as six feet long but less than three”
inches wide, with slender, plantlike fronds branching off a mid-
Paleontologists once thought the shells and bones left by the line. The organism was discovered, along with a less slender,
organisms that emerged from the Cambrian explosion, some equally ancient, and better-known cousin, C. masoni, in a rock
545 million years ago, were remnants of Earth's earliest complex formation 575 million years old. Guy M. Narbonne and James
life-forms. But then fossils of earlier, soft-bodied creatures, now G. Gehling, both geologists at Queen’s University in Kingston,
called Ediacarans, began to come to light. Recently the oldest Ontario, note that the creatures’ fossil fronds lie parallel to one
such fossils in the world were discovered, on the Avalon penin- another, suggesting the Charnia were attached to the seafloor,
sula at the southeastern tip of Newfoundland. Among them was and were reclining in a strong current before being covered by
a new species, Charnia wardi. volcanic ash.
The fossils’ age places them right on the heels—
geologically speaking—of the last planetwide
glaciation, 580 or so million years ago. Perhaps the
aftermath of the freeze created the conditions for
the rapid evolution of multicellular life [see “The
Longest Winter,” by Gabrielle Walker, April 2003}.
Another possibility is that the Ediacarans evolved
just before the glaciation and managed to live
through it. (“Life after snowball: The oldest complex
Ediacaran fossils," Geology 31:27-30, January 2003)

July/August 2003
S
PER AMPLINGS
a

grip tools securely—perhaps contributing

Experiment to the species’ extinction. But Wesley A.
Niewoehner of California State University
of the Month in San Bernardino disagrees.
Chances are that the birds breeding in Niewoehner and a team of colleagues
your backyard this summer are the made a computerized model of a crucial
same individuals that did so last year. part of the hand by doing laser scans of
Some might have traveled thousands epoxy casts of the thumb and index-finger
of miles to return to the red maple next bones of the adult male found at La Fer-
to your rosebushes. But how could you rassie. Then they conservatively estimated
prove your suspicion that the long-term Computer simulation ofa Neanderthal'’s the bending and straightening capabilities
memory of migrants is any better than thumb and index finger of each joint. The digital data, along with
that of nonmigrants? the estimates, were then fed into the same
Claudia Mettke-Hofmann and Eber- animation program that created special ef-
Bones of Contention
hard Gwinner of the Max Planck Re- fects for The Lord of the Rings and Spider-
search Center for Ornithology in An- In 1856 two quarrymen found an ancient Man. The crucial test of manual dexterity
dechs, Germany, had an idea. They cranium in the limestone-rich Neander was, Could the tip of the index finger be
hand-raised seventy-six garden war- Valley near Dusseldorf, Germany. Anthro- made to touch the tip of the thumb?
blers—a species that breeds in Europe pologists have been arguing about Nean- Pressing “enter,” the modelers watched
and overwinters south of the Sahara— derthals ever since. the two Neanderthal digits on their com-
and fitty-five Sardinian warblers, a close One controversy centers on the utility puter screen slowly but surely form afine
relative that stays put around the of the Neanderthal thumb. Well-pre- A-OK sign.
Mediterranean. The investigators then served, 60,000- to 70,000-year-old re- Conclusion? The Neanderthals’ demise
gave all 131 birds two adjacent, identi- mains from the La Ferrassie rock-shelter in couldn't have been caused by a physical
cal-size rooms to explore for a few south-central France show that Nean- inability to make and handle the tools of
hours, one decorated with fake ivy, the derthal thumb bones weren’t propor- the time. Their hands worked much the
other with fake geraniums. Only one tioned like their modern counterparts. same way as those of modern humans.
room (sometimes the ivy room, some- Hence some physical anthropologists (“Manual dexterity in Neanderthals,”
times the geranium room) contained have argued that Neanderthals couldn't Nature 422:395, March 27, 2003)
food. On several subsequent occa-
sions, the ornithologists offered groups
of migrants and of nonmigrants the
Up in Smoke
same choice of rooms—minus the Grassland fires are often de-
food. Each bird was tested just once. liberately set by ranchers to
One month later the homebody Sar- remove dead, unwanted veg-
dinian warblers showed no preference etation. Richard W.S. Fynn, a
in rooms, presumably having forgotten soil scientist at the University
where the benefits lay. But even a year of Natal, and his colleagues
after the initial exposure, the migratory can now reassure ranchers
garden warblers spent significantly that for the most valued na-
more time in whichever room—ivy- or tive grasses, regular annual
geranium-laden—had initially provided burning doesn’t have much
lunch. A migratory lifestyle thus seems of a downside. Burning grassland, Royal Natal National Park, South Africa
to go hand in hand with a good memory. A fifty-two-year study at a
And that kind of memory might not be research farm in South Africa shows that produced. (“Burning causes long-term
innate: the part of the brain that's crucial burning leads to denser roots and more mi- changes in soil organic matter content of a
for processing environmental informa- crobial activity, and springtime fires don’t South African grassland,” Soil Biology and
tion is relatively larger in adult migrants reduce the soil’s organic carbon content. Biochemistry 35:677-87, May 2003)
than it is in untraveled juveniles. (“Long- Burning does indeed deplete the topsoil of
term memory for a life on the move,” nitrogen, converting it to a gas, but native Stéphan Reebs is a professor of biology at the
Proceedings of the National Academy of grasses don’t need much soil nitrogen. And University of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada,
Sciences 100:5863-66, May 13, 2003) other studies at the same farm show no and the author of Fish Behavior in the Aquarium
long-term reduction in the amount of grass and in the Wild (Cornell University Press).

RAL HI ORY July/August 2003

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 5gRALIST AT LARGE

The fruit bats of Montserrat have had to

contend with most of nature’s torments.

By Scott C. Pedersen

t was July 1997, and a long night, swallow my other boot. I suddenly
which had followed a long day, felt the need for a very cold beer.
was finally nearing its end. A vol-
cano was grumbling, and rain had just he pathetic bat and I were in
begun . . . again. My right boot was _ the British crown colony of
quickly filling with water and sinking Montserrat, a rugged, forty-square-
deeper into cold mud, and a large, mile tropical island in the north-
muscular pig-nosed fruit bat (Brachy- ern Lesser Antilles, some 250 miles
phylla cavernarum) had latched its southeast of Puerto Rico. Although
mouth firmly onto the flesh of my Columbus never bothered to land on
thumb. I had been careless taking the the island, he named it, in 1493, after a
bat out of one of my mist-nets—a Spanish monastery near Barcelona, fa-
finely spun net—and the bat was im- mous for its wooden statue of the Vir-
pressing this fact on me. gin and child. The British colonized
For once, though, the truth didn’t the island in 1632, and a succession of
hurt. Typically a bite from this species sugar cane, cotton, and lime planta-
would have left me trying to stifle a tions dominated the local economy.
string of colorful exple- Montserrat lies in the
tives, but this animal middle of the Atlantic
didn’t have a tooth left Ocean’s “hurricane belt,’ plates, so if the hurricanes don’t get
insits bead. The rather a highway of sorts for the you, the earthquakes and volcanic
soggy-looking, unfortu- storms heading north eruptions might. Major temblors hit
nate animal was also from the Tropics. At the island in three periods: 1898—
just about entirely bald. least thirty hurricanes 1900, 1933-36, and 1966-67. Seismae
Things were getting a bit have battered Montserrat activity in the Soufriere Hills volcano,
surreal: a hairless, tooth- in the past 360 years; beginning in 1992, resulted in an ex-
less bat was gumming twelve have been severe, plosive eruption in July 1995, fol-
my thumb as I stood on and Hurricane Hugo, in lowed by a series of pyroclastic mud-
the flanks of an active 1989, was the most de- flows that destroyed and buried most
volcano; large, glowing structive in recent his- of Plymouth, the island’s capital, by
rocks were rolling down tory. Montserrat also lies 1998. Subsequent eruptions have re-
the slope in my general near the convergence of duced much of the southern half of
ind | now the The pig-nosed fruit bat, the North American the island to a wasteland. (Although
mud was beginning to Brachyphylla cavernarum and Caribbean tectonic the volcano’ activity has decreased for
 tea,
ce

The Soufriere Hills volcano on Montserrat simmers with clouds of ash and steam. The volcano
erupted explosively in July 1995, and subsequent eruptions have covered a large part of the
island with hot ash and rock.

the moment, it is too soon to tell put on hold until the volcano settled and one carnivore that specializes in
whether the current cycle of erup- down and the islanders could begin capturing small fish with its hind feet),
tions is at an end.) to rebuild the island’s infrastructure. covering the good times as well as the
It is hard to convey the scope of In the midst of all this suffering, it periods marred by the overlapping ef-
the human tragedy the recent erup- might seem crass to worry about wild- fects of de stating natural disasters.
tions have visited on this small life. But even before the eruption,
island community. Casualty reports Montserrat—a small but lush island— | Roe Hugo was the first
vary widely, but officially, at least had been getting a great deal of atten- such disaster under our watch;
twenty-one Montserratians were tion from biologists interested in island it smashed directly into Montserrat,
killed. Between 1997 and 1998, biogeography. Bat biologists had been careened into Puerto Rico, and even-
thousands were forced to emigrate, at work there since 1978; I arrived in tually hit the eastern seaboard of the
to neighboring islands, Canada, Eng- 1993. Since our studies began, my co- U.S. For the fruit bats on the two is-
land, or the United States. Many workers and I have compiled a reason- lands, survival in the aftermath of the
families were separated, and a vibrant ably complete natural history of ten bat storm was a matter of size—the is-
and unique culture was temporarily species (six fruit bats, three insectivores, lands’ size. On Puerto Rico, fruit bat

July/August 2003 NATURAL H

The fishing bat, Noctilio leporinus, swoops low over water, hunting with its feet.
Volcanic eruptions destroyed the bat’s only known habitat on Montserrat.

populations could abandon hurri- I fully expected to spend many years smaller trees over, destroying roost
cane-damaged forests and disperse monitoring the post-Hugo recovery of sites for tree-roosting species of bats.
across a larger landmass into un- Montserrat’s bat populations, with a Volcanoes are another matter. Ex-
scathed areas. On Montserrat, Hugo special focus on the cave-dwelling plosive eruptions result in pyroclastic
was a crushing blow for tree-roosting colony of pig-nosed fruit bats. The flows—landslides of superheated gas,
and other highly specialized bat spe- 1995 eruption of the Soufriere Hills rock, and clouds of volcanic ash that
cies; their numbers fell twentyfold.
Many fruit bat populations suffered
primarily because there was nowhere
for them to go. Their roosts and food
sources—much of the island’s forests,
really—had simply been blown out
into the Caribbean.
Not all the island’s bat populations volcano, however, dramatically redi- typically move faster than fifty miles
crashed in Hugo’s wake. A large rected my research program. an hour and reach temperatures of
colony of pig-nosed fruit bats roosts in between 200 and 700 degrees Celsius.
a series of relatively hurricane-proof urricanes and volcanic activity They incinerate, suffocate, or bury
caves at the northern end of the island. differ fundamentally in both everything in their paths. Unconsoli-
The animal also enjoys a catholic their immediate and long-term effects dated deposits of ash may eventually
menu of flowers, fruits, insects, leaves, on ecosystems. The tremendous wind mix with water to become massive,
tar, and even immature legumes. speeds of hurricanes typically strip fo- quick-moving mudflows, called la-
Such Omnivory proves to bea power- liage and most of the trees’ fruit crop. hars, that can fill in small valleys.
survival strategy when disasters Large hurricanes such as Hugo also Lahars have buried entire towns and
t the availability of particular foods. strip bark from large trees and knock villages on Montserrat. Together, the
pyroclastic flows and the lahars have
devastated the southern half of the is-
land, burying many river drainages
under tens of feet of sterile volcanic
ash. On many parts of the island, ash
smothered all vegetation; the weight
of the ashfall stripped limbs from trees
and toppled smaller plants, such as ba-
nana and heliconia. The destruction
turned several of my old sample
sites—once deep, lush valleys, replete
with streams, pools, luxuriant vegeta-
tion, and huge trees—into nightmar-
ish visions of the surface of the moon.
For example, large mudflows and a
number of small pyroclastic flows Palates of two female pig-
from the Soufriere Hills volcano par- nosed fruit bats on
Montserrat demonstrate the
tially destroyed the Belham River and
effect of volcanic ash on their
obliterated a quirky thirteen-hole golf teeth. The 1994 individual
course that had meandered across the (far left) is healthy, but ash
river’s bottomlands. Although the has worn away the enamel
episode was clearly a setback for the of the 1998 individual (near
Montserratian golfing community, the left). The wear exposes the
underlying pulp cavity, which
flows were catastrophic to a unique then becomes impacted with
ecosystem that was also the island’s fruit. The acids in the fruit
only known habitat for the fishing bat etch the rest of the tooth, —
(Noctilio leporinus). causing abscess and,
Fishing bats are large, yellow- eventually, loss.
orange, and rather pungent creatures
that can hawk large flying insects or
snag small ocean fish from the surf. roost on the flanks of the Soufriere resources. In fact, though, it may have
But they much prefer to take min- Hills volcano and another in one of had more to do with escaping roosts
nows from the surface of freshwater the caves at the northern end of the is- that had become heavily contami-
streams and ponds—exactly what the land. For several weeks at a time, each nated by blood-sucking ectoparasites.
course of the Belham River afforded. location served as the regional shelter; Ever since the fruit bats have been
The fishing bats had survived Hugo from there the entire colony would forced to take permanent residence in
as well as two years of volcanic erup- fan out to mob the fruiting trees in one location, the walls of that north-
tions. But with the loss of the river, the vicinity. (Archaeological evidence ern cave have been literally crawling
they have not been seen on Montser- suggests that Amerindian populations with parasitic insects and their larvae.
rat since mid-1997. as long ago as A.D. 200 took culinary So what explains the bald, toothless
advantage of this predictable cluster- bat that was clamped onto my thumb
he pervasive destruction of for- ing of large fruit bats.) But by 1996 in 1997? Before the onset of volcanic
aging and roosting habitat across the eruption had destroyed the south- activity two years earlier, less than 1
the southern portion of Montserrat ern roost, leaving only the northern percent of the fruit bats examined by
forced the fruit bats (as well as the cave as a home for the colony. biologists on Montserrat showed any
people) remaining on the island to re- Since that time the fruit-bat popu- sign of tooth wear or hair loss. The
locate to its northern half. Predictably, lation has rebounded and stabilized, bats that did were elderly animals with
the initial competition within the bat but not without complications. Ex- other obvious signs of age: scarring,
colony for limited food and shelter ternal parasites on the bats are signifi- broken bones that had healed, arthritic
there was intense. cantly more numerous than anyone joints. Yet between 1995 and 1999 the
The survival struggles of Montser- had ever previously recorded, either teeth of nearly half of the fruit bats we
rat’s large population of pig-nosed on Montserrat or on any of the captured were worn at least half way to
fruit bats became a lesson in the effects nearby islands. I had interpreted the the gum line, and a quarter of all the
of overcrowding. Before 1995 the bats’ alternation of roost sites as a bats had lost 50 percent of their hair.
colony would alternate between a means to better exploit regional food Excessive dental wear is caused by

July/August 2003 NATURAI HISTORY 123

 the fine, abrasive ash that blankets ists—the fishing bats, yellow-shoul- the bat population jeopardizes the
everything after a pyroclastic erup- dered bats (Sturnira thomasi), and forests’ recovery. Our plan is to docu-
tion. It is next to impossible for a fruit white-lined ‘bats (Chiroderma improvi- ment the excursions of fruit bats into
bat to avoid the grit, which adheres to sum)—had been locally extirpated. marginal areas, tracking the dispersal of
the sticky fruit it eats as well as to the That is not to say they might not seeds into heavily damaged regions
animal itself; even as a bat grooms it- return. Tropical storms and hurri- and the beginnings ofa recovery that
self, it gets a mouthful of the ash. For canes regularly transport insects, will take many human lifetimes.
now, since the volcanic activity has at birds, and bats from one island to an-
least temporarily decreased, we are other throughout the Caribbean. n spite of the “inconveniences” of
finding progressively fewer bats with Once a storm drops flying animals being blown out to sea by hurri-
tooth wear. The ones that do have such as bats on an island, they tend to canes or endangered by pyroclastic
worn-out teeth are older animals, stay put. They have no way of know- flows, the fruit bats of Montserrat have
veterans of earlier exposures to ash. ing what is out there, and a fruit bat soldiered on. Their tenacity has given
For our 2002 census it was easy to tell that ventures out over the empty sea me a unique opportunity to study how
old bats from younger ones simply by runs a big risk, given what seem to animal populations respond to a vari-
offering them an exposed thumb. be the species’ limited navigational ety of natural disasters. And the news is
What about the loss of fur? One abilities over long distances. finally taking a turn for the better. My
might expect to find some kind of Two bat species that lived briefly 2002 census of Montserrat’s fruit bats
skin inflammation or skin infection on Montserrat in small transient pop- followed the wettest spring since 1995.
associated with the loss, but not one ulations—the yellow-shouldered bat Several varieties of fig trees were heavy
with fruit for the first time since 1995.
And we were able to capture nearly
Tropical storms and hurricanes regularly transport three and a half times more fruit bats
last summer than we had during the
insects, birds, and bats from one island to another peak of volcanic activity in 1997. The
throughout the Caribbean. oe rain, the dramatic rejuvenation of
Montserrat’s remaining forested areas,
and a great increase in fruit bat popula-
of the hundreds of bald fruit bats we and the white-lined bat—had previ- tions are all most welcome.
have examined has shown either. ously been known only from Guade- In fact the entire island—tts resilient
There are several other possibilities loupe. It 1s likely that large storms will people, forests, and wildlife—seems
under active study: Perhaps in re- eventually return those and other spe- well on its way to recovery from a
sponse to external parasites such as cies to Montserrat. Fishing bats are very long volcanic nightmare. Who
streblid batflies, the bats simply strong fliers, and could return to knows what the future will bring to
groom themselves until their hair falls Montserrat on their own, probably the people and bats of Montserrat?
out. Perhaps the hair loss is caused by from the neighboring islands of An- Before I returned to the vast wind-
mineral imbalances associated with tigua or Barbuda. Similar extirpations blown expanses of South Dakota
the ingestion of ash. Or perhaps the and reintroductions occur throughout (where my alter ego is that of univer-
bats, deprived of their preferred fruits the “hurricane belt” with some regu- sity professor), I treated myself to one
by the pyroclastic flows, are reduced larity, changes that are of great inter- last night in the small village of Cud-
to eating foods they normally shun. est to those of us who study the bio- joehead. There I was immediately
The false tamarind (Leucaena leuco- geography of bats in the West Indies. struck by a strong sense of déja vu: the
cephala), for instance, contains nox- We now have genetic data that also beer was cold, the town throbbed
1ous chemical compounds such as mi- support this rare but consistent storm- with reggae music that pushed its way
mosine, which induces hair loss. blown reintroduction of new animals. along the narrow streets, the warm
The cycle suggests that the biogeog- tropical breeze that blew overhead was
s forested land on Montserrat raphy of the West Indies is far more once again full of large fruit bats—the
has been lost to the volcano, dynamic and changeable than ecolo- way Montserrat used to be.
both the number of species and the gists had previously suspected.
Scott C. Pedersen is a professor in the Depart-
number of animals on the island have Fruit bats are critical to the rejuve- ment of Biology and Microbiology at South
declined. Ten bat species lived on nation of the forests destroyed by Dakota State University in Brookings. Under
Montserrat before Hurricane Hugo Montserrat’s volcano, primarily be- the moniker “Bathead,” he maintains a Web
struck in 1989. By 2002 three species cause they play such a crucial role in stte—biomicro.sdstate.edu/pederses/links.html
that either had persisted as marginal dispersing seeds and nutrients. Hence —with extensive links to bat research and the use
populations or were habitat special- the dramatic loss of biodiversity within ofbat images in the military.

24 PORY July/August 2003

 hind itll AHO \w
90 %

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Si OMECHANICS
2 TRS

Extreme Forestry
What does bungee jumping say about parasitic vines?

Story by Adam Summers ~ Illustration by Mick Ellison

t is May, time for naghol—a cen- vines. But how can woody vines har material properties of
turies-old fertility ritual practiced stretch like oversize rubber bands? To woody vines. They are work-
on Pentecost Island in Vanuatu, in answer that question, let’s go to the ing to find out what makes the
the South Pacific. The participants— other side of the world: to the structure of lianas different
the island’s young men—perform land forests of French from that of trees and
dives to obtain a blessing for their Guiana on the north- /““S«*
people’s crops. As a crowd of islanders ern coast of South i
watches, each young participant scales America, where a
a rickety scaffold of branches toa plat- German investigator,
form some seventy feet above the tilled Thomas Speck, gin-
earth. The diver pauses for a moment, gerly tests the strength of shrubs—hence
then leans forward and plunges head- a kind of liana called what makes lianas usable as elastic,
first off the platform, trailing vines tied monkey ladder (Bauhinia weight-bearing rope.
to his ankles. If he has chosen the guianensis). Satisfied that
vines well, they will pull taut and the vine is sound, he hoists ood is a composite material
stretch like a natural bungee cord, just himself off the ground made of two principal sub-
enough to gently arrest his fall. If he and swings back and stances: cellulose, a complex carbohy-
has chosen poorly, he may slam into forth on the vine drate that is the chief structural part of
the ground or be yanked back against like Tarzan of the most plant-cell walls; and lignin,
the platform. apes. Speck and his which binds the components of cell
The success of such derring-do colleague Benedikt walls together. The same kind of pair-
evidently de- Hoffmann, both ing shows up in familiar man-made
“4 pends on the biomechanicists at the products: in the modern tennis racket,
“material proper- University of Freiburg for instance, carbon fibers are mixed
ties of lianas, in Germany, ana- together with epoxy. The fibers pro-
lyze the pecu- vide tensile stiffness and strength,
while the epoxy keeps the fibers prop-
erly oriented and binds them together.
Although composite materials can
be made artificially, the properties of
wood cannot be duplicated. Osage
orange wood, not fiberglass, still gives
the best power and feel for archers’
bows; old-growth spruce adds vi-
brancy and color to the tones of the
finest violins; and many major-league
baseball players, long accustomed to
bats made from ash, now swear that

Monkey ladder (Bauhinia guianensis)

 run more ata slant [see illustration
below]. In the slanted orientation the
fibers can rearrange themselves as the
sugar maple is the finest for swatting are pre- wood stretches; the energy absorbed as
one out to the center-field bleachers. sumably filled the fibers shift is either dissipated as
Lianas are woody vines that para- with water and become most springy. frictional heat or stored as potential
sitize trees for structural support. A energy in the wood’ elastic tissue.
liana climbs its host tree, called a trellis, ccording to Speck’s work on Either way, the vine does not break.
by laying down a network of tendrils, South American lianas, ifa land Now that Speck and his colleagues
spikes, and hooks. Thus, it reaches the diver were attached to a fifty-foot- are getting to the root, so to speak,
light of the upper canopy without long vine of shrub wood, it would of the changes in vines as they shift
having to invest in building up enough stretch only five more feet. That from shrub to creeper, the next step
wood in its stem to support its weight. would leave the diver far short of the is to understand the genes that drive
In American tropical forests, lianas ground (recall that the towers in the the changes. That understanding
may account for nearly half the leaf naghol ceremony are seventy feet might one day make it possible to
productivity, yet they amount to less high). But perhaps more important to fine-tune the properties of wood to
than 5 percent of the biomass. the diver, the vine’s arrest of his fall
But a liana does not begin life as a would be so abrupt that he would
parasite. It grows on its own until it risk injury to both ankles (assuming
finds a tree to cling to. Monkey ladder the sudden loading didn’t simply
can reach a height of nearly six feet as break the vine).
a freestanding shrub. But when it fi- How do lianas make the transition
nally finds a trellis, the vine begins to from shrub to creeper? Speck and
grow rapidly, the stem cross section Hoffmann have shown that both
becomes thicker and rectangular, and monkey ladder and an unrelated South
the material properties of the stem American liana, Condylocarpon guia-
change radically. nense, undergo a marked drop in the
The wood ofa self-supporting cellulose, or fiber, content of the
monkey ladder shrub can be as stiff wood. (The amount of lignin—the
and dense as the hard, heavy wood of epoxy analogue—remains the same in An artist's conception of the parasitic liana
black locust trees that commonly both kinds of liana.) But in all its stages Condylocarpon guianense shows the wood both
of life Condylocarpon contains between unloaded (left) and under load. The cellulose fibers
occur in North American deciduous
in the wood, shown in white, shift their orientation
forests. The wood developed by the 10 and 20 percent less cellulose than toward the vertical as the monkey pulls on the vine.
vine during the climbing, parasitic does the monkey ladder, and is about a As it stretches, the vine becomes thinner and as
phase is less dense—the vessels in the third as stiff. Those data suggest that much as 30 percent longer.
wood that conduct water up the stem cellulose content is critical to stiffness.
become much larger, and the wood it- A second change that occurs in the our liking. And what’s next? High-
self absorbs more water. The increased parasitic phase is the arrangement of tech tennis rackets and affordable
water content makes the mature mon- the fibers, at least in Condylocarpon. In Stradivarius-like violins that, quite
key ladder vine as much as three times its self-supporting, shrub phase, the literally, grow on trees?
more elastic than the shrub. So it’s not wood fibers of Condylocarpon are ori-
surprising that the land-diving cere= ented longitudinally, nearly parallel to Adam Summers (asummers@uci.edu) is an
mony on Pentecost Island is held just the stem’s long axis. In contrast, when assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary
after the wet season, when the vines the plant becomes a creeper, the fibers biology at the University of California, Irvine.

July/August 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 27

 JULY/AUGUST 2003

Vag hirty years ago all the anthro-

pologists studying war would
have fit into one small room.
Granted—and guaranteed—that room
would frequently erupt in heated de-
bate, but few outside would notice or
care. Tribal warfare? Exotic, maybe,
but so what? Anthropologists see war
as potentially lethal violence between
two groups, no matter how small the
groups or how few the casualties. But
how much light could such a broad
definition of conflict, or cases of pre-
civilized human strife, shed on mod-
ern warfare, the struggles that have
flared in Iraq, Kosovo, Rwanda, Viet-
nam, Korea—and on and on?
How times have changed! The an-
thropological study of war has ex-
panded and matured. Ideas from aca-
demic debates are finding their way
into foreign policy journals and, yes,
the mass media. The questions raised
by anthropologists and the once-aca-
demic disputes within the discipline
have become important public issues, to
be debated by pundits and politicians.
To appreciate how much things have
changed, consider how the under-
standing of one famous ethnographic
case has been transformed: that of the
Yanomami of Venezuela and Brazil.
Following the publication of Napoleon
A. Chagnon’s study Yanomamé: The
Fierce People, in 1968, the book began
to appear frequently and prominently
on lists of readings for college students
in introductory anthropology—often
the only anthropology they would ever |E B IR’ |
learn. And what an object lesson! En-
gaged in endless wars over women, sta-
tus, and revenge, the Yanomami were
supposed to exemplify the natural
human condition of eons past. Some OF \X/AR
people took Chagnon’s work to imply
that aggression is in our genes—dis-
turbing news if true.
In 1974 the anthropologist Marvin
Harris offered a different view. Yano-
mami warfare, Harris argued, was an
adaptive response from a population

|
28 | NATURAL HISTORY July/August 2003
 stressed by limited food resources,
specifically game animals. But detailed
examination of Yanomami ecology
failed to support Harris’s hypothesis.
In 1995, in Yanomami Warfare: A
Political History, 1 described how the
Yanomami have been coping with
European intrusions since the 1700s.
As I read the evidence, Yanomami
wars were tightly linked to changes
in the European presence. Recent
wars, including the ones described
by Chagnon, seemed to have been
fought over access to steel tools and
other goods distributed by Western-
ers. Yet despite such basic disagree-
ments within anthropology, the dis-
cussion of the Yanomami remained
confined to academic circles.

hen came a media frenzy. In the

fall of 2000, Patrick Tierney, a
journalist, published Darkness in El
Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists
Devastated the Amazon. The book es-
sentially blamed Chagnon himself for
instigating war. Now it was the an-
thropologists’ turn to be fierce. Op-
ponents and defenders of Chagnon
exchanged bitter broadsides. Not a
few anthropologists felt that the resi- ~
dent missionaries, for all their good
A rock painting in Tassili n’Ajjer, a Saharan plateau in southeastern Algeria, intentions, were more at fault than
illustrates a battle between two prehistoric groups. Armed mostly with bows any anthropologists. One outcome of
and arrows, the group at right braces in firing position for an assault by the
the episode, though, is that no one
group at the left. The scene was created sometime between 6,000 and 4,500
years ago, perhaps by nomadic cattle herders. paying attention to this controversy
still claims that Yanomami wars can be
understood without taking into ac-
} count the tribe’s highly disrupted his-
An archaeological survey concludes torical circumstances.
6 ‘ ‘ What is more, studies that go far be-
jal ivarjare,.despiedis malionant Hold. i... vanomami.arequesioning
on mo dern life, h as not alw ays been the idea that war has always been part
of the human condition. It looks as if,
pat of the human condition. all around the world, what has been
called primitive or indigenous warfare
was generally transformed, frequently
intensified, and sometimes precipitated
r by Western contact. A collection of
historical studies that I edited in 1992
By R. Brian Ferguson with Neil L. Whitehead, an anthropol-

July/August 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 29

 ogist at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, con-
cludes that such changes often took place in far-
flung “tribal zones,” even before literate observers
arrived on the scene. Indigenous warfare recorded
in recent centuries cannot be taken as typical of pre-
historic tribal peoples (see War in the Tribal Zone:
Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare). We need
archaeology to tell us about ancient war.
In 1996 the issue took a new turn with Lawrence
H. Keeley’s book War before Civilization. Keeley, an
archaeologist at the University ofIllinois at Chicago,
compiled archaeological cases of some of the worst
violence known, thereby creating the impression
that these examples were typical, that humans have
always made war. As he told the journal Science,
“War is something like trade or exchange. It is
something that all humans do.” Here I must un-
Five layers of human skeletons, some decapitated and some
equivocally disagree: in my view the global archae- showing signs of struggle that suggest the victims were
ological record contradicts the idea that war was thrown in alive, fill the bottom ofa water well excavated at
always a feature of human existence; instead, the the site of Chien-kou, near Handan, about 250 miles
record shows that warfare is largely a development southwest of Beijing. The site, belonging to China’s Longshan
of the past 10,000 years. culture and dating from about 4,400 years ago, provides
strong evidence of warfare between communities.

{Fe the new book Constant Battles: The Myth of

the Peaceful, Noble Savage (written with the comes from collections of skeletons, which can still
writer Katherine E. Register), Steven A. LeBlanc, bear witness to the violence of war: the embedded
an archaeologist at Harvard University, confi- points of spears, arrows, or other weapons [see pho-
dently asserts that wherever good archaeological tograph on opposite page|, depression fractures or scalp
evidence exists, there is “almost always” evidence marks on skulls, “parry fractures” of forearms, and
of warfare, that “everyone had warfare in all time solitary skulls or bodies missing skulls (strongly sug-
periods.” LeBlanc has a theory for his sweeping gesting that war trophies were taken). Mass burials
conclusion. Contrary to a commonly held view, or the absence of burial, as well as disproportion-
ately few battle-age men in cemeteries,
are also signs of war. Of course, such
finds, particularly if the evidence is a
single skeleton, could represent a mur-
der, an execution, or an accident—
hence a “false positive” as a piece of
evidence about early tribal warfare.
But nothing like tribal warfare could
be going on without leaving some
signs in a good collection of skeletons.
If the collection comprises multiple
An execution appears to be the subject of this painting in Remigia cave, in examples of such evidence, it pretty
the eastern Spanish province of Castellon. Such depictions caution
archaeologists that when they find a single skeleton with an embedded
conclusively demonstrates war.
arrow point, it may not be a sign of warfare. The original painted image, Settlement patterns—such things as
from which this reproduction was made, may be 7,000 years old. defensive walls and defendable loca-
tions or nucleated populations with
he argues, pre-state peoples were never “true con- empty buffer zones—also provide significant evi-
servationists.” They degraded their resources, and dence of warfare. Violent destruction of a settle-
as their numbers grew, they suffered food scarcity ment is a telling clue. Specialized war weapons may
and were drawn into war. Basically, it’s Malthus be lacking—after all, war can be fought with such
with ethnographic detail. ordinary tools as adzes or hunting spears. But im-
But what kind of archaeological evidence could plements such as maces and daggers are usually for
show that war was waged? Lots. The best evidence killing people, and when found, they are fairly de-

|
a) MP HI LORY July/August 2003
finitive. Paintings or carvings on walls can provide less background. Extensive remains have been found
graphic evidence of combat. Many peoples did not of the Natufian hunter-gatherers, who lived be-
leave recoverable representations of human beings, tween about 12,800 and 10,500 years ago in what
but if such depictions are preserved, they can make are now Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon,
a persuasive case. In short, when and where the ar- and Syria. Careful analysis of 370 skeletons has
chaeological recovery is good, with many settle- turned up only two that show any signs of trauma,
ments and many skeletons, war can usually be de- and nothing to suggest military action. The first
tected—not in every single case, certainly, but in a walls of Jericho (dating from between 10,500 and
good number of them. That is the basis for suppos- 9,300 years ago) were once taken as conclusive evi-
ing that archaeology can contribute to some of our dence of war, but they are now understood to have
most basic questions about war. been built for flood control, not defense.

Iam midway through a global survey of such

early evidence. What does the record show?
Many hominid remains once thought to estab-
lish the most ancient evidence of homicide or
cannibalism were actually gnawed by predators
or just suffered postmortem breakage [see “The
Scavenging of ‘Peking Man,’” by Noel T’ Boaz and
Russell L. Ciochon, March 2001]. Some cases of
ancient cannibalism have been confirmed, but
there is nothing to tell us that the remains in
question were casualties of war.
The earliest persuasive evidence of warfare
uncovered so far comes from a graveyard along
the Nile River in Sudan. Brought to light dur-
ing an expedition in the mid-1960s led by
Fred Wendorf, an archaeologist at Southern
Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, this
graveyard, known as Site 117, has been
roughly estimated at between 12,000 and
14,000 years old. It contained fifty-nine well-
preserved skeletons, twenty-four of which
were found in close association with pieces of
stone that were interpreted as parts of projec-
tiles. Notably, the people of Site 117 were liv-
ing in a time of ecological crisis. Increased
rainfall had made the Nile waters run wild, and
the river dug its way deeply into a gorge. The
adjacent flood plain was left high and dry, de-
priving the inhabitants of the catfish and other
marshland staples of their diet. Apart from Site
117, only about a dozen Homo sapiens skeletons
10,000 years old or older, out of hundreds of
similar antiquity examined to date, show clear _ pierced by a bone arrowhead, the skull ofa thirty-five-year-old man
indications of interpersonal violence. was discovered in eastern Denmark. Another arrowhead pierced the
In northern Australia, rock art depicts what man’s breastbone. Was this death, 5,000 years ago, that ofa warrior,
appear to be duels between two ora few indi- 4 <timinal, or perhaps a sacrificial victim? Although the violent death
is apparent, its interpretation is uncertain.
viduals as early as 10,000 years ago. Large
group confrontations—war—appear by 6,000
years ago. Climate change was a factor here too, as here is a certain ironic logic, given recent
rising sea levels gradually submerged a vast plain events, that the regular practice of warfare that
that once connected Australia and New Guinea. has continued without interruption down to the
The ancient Middle East provides some of the present began about 10,000 years ago in what 1s
best evidence for the emergence of war from a war- now northern Iraq. Evidence from three early farm-

July/August 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 31

 ing sites, the earliest from Qermez Dere, includes were dug around villages, some accompanied by
maces, arrowheads found associated with skeletons, palisades. Elsewhere in China, except for a single
defendable locations, and village defensive walls. skeleton with a point embedded in its thigh, there
That’s war—the true “mother of all battles.” are no hints of war until at least 4,600 years ago.
Signs of war appear beginning 8,000 years ago Then, rammed earthen walls and other signs of
along mountain routes through southern Turkey. war occur throughout the core areas of historical
Along the southern Anatolian coast, a specialized China. One village well contained layers of scalped
fort—not just a walled village—has been un- and decapitated skeletons.
earthed at Icel; the fort was built around 6,300 In Japan, intensive agriculture came in with mi-
years ago, then destroyed and later resettled by a grants from the mainland about 2,300 years ago. Ar-
different culture. The early record along the Nile chaeologists have excavated some 5,000 skeletons
in what is now Egypt was wiped out by the river’s that predate the intrusion, and of those only ten
erosion, but when the record picks up again, show signs of violent death. In contrast, out of
about 1,000 postmigration exca-
vated skeletons, more than a hun-
dred show such signs.

E vidence from Europe offers

a clear window into pre-
agricultural practices. There is no
firm evidence of war for thou-
sands of years during Paleolithic
times—though some scholars see
suggestive indications in a few
places. After 10,500 years ago,
however, as the population of
foragers became larger and more
settled, several sites show individ-
ual violence, and others show the
more collective casualties that
signal war. Still, the evidence of
violence is present at only a small
minority of all excavated sites.
Beginning around 6,500 years
es
ago, however, fortifications, em-
Two Bronze Age figures raise their axes on a rock outcropping in Sweden known as
the Fossum panel. Whether the scene, carved about 900 8.c., represents a battle, a
bedded points, and even clear
ritual, or a dance, by this time war had become a cultural preoccupation all across signs of village slaughters become
Europe. The paint that highlights the carving is a recent addition. common. By the Bronze Age,
2,000 years later, war and
about 6,300 years ago, maces similar to those weaponry had become averitable cult.
found in Mesopotamia are present. Far upriver, North America presents a highly complex and
near Khartoum, what may have been maces show regionally divergent picture. Kennewick Man, a
up 2,000 years earlier, even before agriculture skeleton unearthed in Washington state and consid-
began 1n that area. ered between 7,500 and 9,200 years old, contains an
In Central Asia, east of the Caspian Sea, the re- embedded stone point. But because the skeleton is
mains of settled hunter-gatherers and early farmers an isolated find, the injury is difficult to interpret.
show no signs of war, but war was clearly going On the coast of the Pacific Northwest, skeletal
strong by 5,000 years ago. In the high country of trauma and other signs of conflict begin to appear
what is now Pakistan, farmers began to put up walls about 4,200 years ago in the northern regions, but
at least 6,000 years ago. show up farther south only many centuries later.
The archaeological record in China shows that Many of the excavated skeletons from the ancient
though millet was under cultivation at least 8,000 eastern woodlands show signs of violence. In a few
years ago, no signs of war appeared for more than a cases multiple individuals were involved, including
thousand years after that. Starting 7,000 years ago, one site in Florida dating from more than 7,000
in one Neolithic cultural tradition, deep ditches years ago. Still, such cases remained extremely un-

32 NATURAL HISTORY July/August 2003

usual until 5,000 years Pa was often associated with
ago. In the southern Great a severe climatic change
Plains, out of 173 skele- that broke down the sub-
tons reported from before sistence base.
A.D. 500, only one indi- Raymond C. Kelly, an
cates homicide, a woman anthropolgist at the Uni-
killed by two blows to the versity of Michigan in Ann

ae
head. The first clear evi- / Arbor, in his book Warless
dence of warfare in the —sS4 Societies and the Origin of
Southwest dates from less Cerra War, has detected what

ee
than 2,000 years ago, and may be another important
it is quite dramatic. At
ana pattern in the origins of
least two-thirds and per-
haps all of the ninety-odd Pas war. In examining the
ethnographic literature to

ae
individuals interred in a compare hunter-gatherers
cave 1n southern Utah who make war with those
were killed. who do not, he finds a
Roughly speaking, that Archers clash in a cave painting from Morella la Vella in pattern: Among the few
eastern Spain. The composition, perhaps 7,000 years old,
is where my survey leaves seems to depict a flanking maneuver by the figure on top. known cases of warless so-
off. But my preliminary This image is a tracing ofa photograph. cieties of hunter-gatherers,
work leads me to expect social organizations do not
no major surprises from Africa, Mesoamerica, extend beyond family anda loose, flexible network
Oceania, or South America. In sum, if warfare of kin. In contrast, hunter-gatherer societies that
were prevalent in early prehistoric times, the abun- make war have larger and more defined groupings
dant materials in the archaeological record would such as clans. The existence of bounded groups
be rich with the evidence of warfare. But the signs makes for a sense of collective injury and desire for
are not there; here it is not the case that “the collective retaliation.
absence of evidence 1s not evidence of absence.” Over the millennia, tribal warfare became more
the rule than the exception. As the preconditions
S: how did peaceful tribal peoples of the distant for warfare (permanent settlements, population
past turn into the war-prone societies observed growth, greater social hierarchy, increased trade,
in recent centuries? Specific causes are elusive, but I and climatic crises) became more common, more
see five preconditions that, in varying combinations, tribal peoples in more areas adopted the practice.
contributed to the onset of warfare in prehistoric That development in itself spread warmaking to
times. One was a shift from a nomadic existence to other groups. Once ancient states arose, they em-
a sedentary one, commonly though not necessarily ployed “barbarians” on their peripheries to expand
‘ i

;- Maces, skeletons with arrowheads, and village defensive walls

__havebeen discovered in Iraq, all signs of the true “mother of all
battles,’ 10,000 years ago.
tied to agriculture. With a vested interest in their their empires and secure their extensive trade net-
lands, food stores, or especially rich fishing sites, works. Finally, the European expansion after 1492
people no longer could walk away from trouble. set native against native to capture territory and
Another precondition was a growing regional slaves and to fight imperial rivalries. Refugee
population and probably, in consequence, more groups were forced into others’ lands, manufac-
competition for resources. Third was the develop- tured goods were introduced and fought over (as
ment of social hierarchy, an elite, perhaps with its with the Yanomami), and the spread of European
own interests and rivalries. Fourth was an increas- weapons made fighting ever more lethal.
ing long-distance trade, particularly in prestige When I began studying war in the mid-1970s, I
goods: something else worth fighting over. Finally, was trained in an approach called cultural ecology,
the first appearance or later intensification of war which argued along the lines that Steven LeBlanc

|
July/August 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 33
 does today. Population pressure on food re- the civil wars in the Balkans. Case studies of mod-
sources—land, game, herd animals—was seen as ern-day conflicts show that a broad range of factors
the usual cause of indigenous warfare. In some cases may be interacting, including subsistence needs
the theory did work. Among the peoples of the Pa- and local ecological relations, but also political
cific Northwest Coast prior to the depopulation of struggles over the government, trends in globaliza-
the nineteenth century, groups fought to gain ac- tion, and culturally specific beliefs and symbols.
cess to prime resource locations, such as estuaries Moreover, when hard times come, they are experi-
with good salmon streams. But in far more cases enced differently by different kinds of people.
around the world, such as that of the Yanomami, Who you are usually determines how you’re doing
wartare could not be linked to food competition. and where your interests lie: identity and interest
are fused. Once a conflict gets boiling and the
eres under the rubric “environmental secu- killing starts, all middle grounds get swept away,
rity,’ many nonanthropologists who work on and a person’s fate can depend on such simple la-
issues of international security embrace that eco- bels as ethnic, religious, or tribal identity. The
logical view. Recent outbreaks of violence, they slaughter of Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide of
argue, may be rooted in scarcities of subsistence 1994 is only one of the latest examples of that hor-
goods, fueled by growing populations and de- rific effect. But such differences are not the cause
graded resources (such as too little and eroded of the conflict.
cropland). But when you examine the cases for
which that interpretation seems superficially plau- ME view is that in most cases—not every sin-
sible—the conflicts of the past several years in Chi- gle one—the decision to wage war involves
apas, Mexico, for instance, or in Rwanda—they the pursuit of practical self-interest by those who
fail to confirm the “ecological” theory. actually make the decision. The struggle can be
joined over basic subsistence re-
sources, but it can just as easily erupt
over goods available only to elites.
The decision involves weighing the
costs of war against other potential
hazards to life and well-being. And
most definitely, it depends on one’s
position in the internal political hi-
erarchy: from New Guinean “big
men” to kings and presidents, lead-
ers often favor war because war
favors leaders.
Of course, those who push toward
war do not make their case in terms
of their own selfish interests. Around
Amazonian campfires and within
modern councils of state, their argu-
A chariot with warriors is among the trappings of warfare included on ments invoke collective dangers and
the so-called Standard of Ur, a Sumerian object dating from about 2500 B.c. benefits. But even more, those advo-
By that time, war was a normal practice between rival city-states. cating war always define it in terms of
the highest applicable values, whether
We anthropologists are just beginning to bring that involves the need to retaliate against witchcraft,
our experience to bear in the environmental defend the one true religion, or promote democ-
security debate. What we find is that ifa peasant racy. That is the way to sway the undecided and
population is suffering for lack of basic resources, build emotional commitment. And always, it is the
the main cause of that scarcity is an unequal dis- other side that somehow brought war on.
tribution of resources within the society, a matter Such drumbeating is not only, or even primarily,
of politics and economics, rather than the twin cynical manipulation. Perhaps owing to a basic
bugbears of too many people and not enough to human need for self-justification, those who start
go around. wars usually seem to believe in the righteousness of
Anthropology can offer an alternative view on their chosen course. It is that capability that makes
such terrible disasters as the Rwandan genocide or human beings such a dangerous species. O

\TURAI HISTORY July/August 2003

The White House ruins in Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona: Archaeological
investigation shows that this particular cliff dwelling—although seemingly designed for defensive
purposes—was a ceremonially significant complex built between 4.D. 1050 and 1150, a century
before deteriorating climatic conditions in the Southwest led to intense warfare.

July/August 2003 NATURAL HISTORY |35

 7 Sy
A 3 ULLO

Charles Plumier, Cacao, from a manuscript on plants and civilization in the Antilles, c. 1686

rORY July/August 2003

The Chocolate Tree
Growing cacao in the forest can provide a living
to small farmers and a habitat to diverse creatures.

By Robert A. Rice and Russell Greenberg

o most North Americans Ghana, Indonesia, and Nige-

the word “chocolate” ria together produce about 33
probably conjures visions percent, Brazil less than 5 per-
of a fragrant, nut-studded brown cent. But though well-heeled
slab, or a box full of small but norteamericanos may be laying
elaborate variations on gooey- down a ten-dollar bill to pay
ness, or one of those outrageous for half a dozen hand-crafted
dark desserts with names such as chocolate delights, the world’s
“mud pie” or “death by choco- average rate for cacao beans in
late”’ Few of us who savor and 2002 was not much more
consume such delights think than eighty cents a pound,
about moist, lush foliage, the and many farmers who grew
shrieks of toucans and parrots, or the beans were paid far less.
a Maya ruler from the seventh Yet a look at the biology,
century A.D. sipping chili-spiked history, ecology, and econom-
cocoa froth. ics of the cacao tree—and the
But perhaps we should. Theo- Cacao beans in a pod, Grenada industry that has sprung up
broma cacao—the tree whose around it—shows that unlike
giant pods contain the seeds that, when roasted many products of the developing world that the de-
and then ground, become the powder that is the veloped world enjoys, cacao can bearelatively be-
basis of chocolate—is an evolutionary product of nign crop. It can be grown economically on small
the vast tropical rainforests of the New World. In- farms, bringing individual farmers into the world’s
digenous peoples domesticated the tree in the cash economy without destroying their indepen-
northern Amazon basin and seemingly indepen- dence and self-determination. As a shade-tolerant
dently somewhere in what is now southern Mex- tree, it can also be cultivated under a canopy of
ico, Guatemala, or Belize (recent genetic work, larger trees already living in the tropical forest;
however, suggests that the Mesoamerican domesti- clear-cutting is actually detrimental to a sustained
cated stock originated in South America). To crop yield. That means that cacao growing, albeit
those fortunate people, the cocoa drink made from not entirely without harm to the forest ecosystem,
cacao was, as reflected in the genus name, indeed is far less destructive than most other forms of cul-
the “food of the gods.” tivation. Preserving the canopy, in turn, helps in
Today, however, this forest tree is cultivated far maintaining populations of indigenous birds and
from its birthplace. In 2002 more than 40 percent other forest animals, and in pulling carbon dioxide
of the world’s cacao came from Cote d’Ivoire. out of the air. Inside the wrapper of this food we

July/August 2003 NATURAL HIST¢ RY

 have come to take for granted is a complex web of The native cacao tree also depends on minuscule
interrelating factors that ecologists are only begin- flies, attracted by the overripe pods that fall to the
ning to understand. ground and rot around its base. The flies require
large pieces of moist tropical detritus (such as rot-
he cacao tree grows naturally in the shaded, ting cacao pods) to carry on their own life cycle;
humid understory of lowland tropical forest, while thus occupied, they pollinate the tree’s small
reaching heights of some twenty feet. Twenty or flowers, which develop into the next generation of
thirty large, gently fluted pods grow directly from pods. Because of that natural history, cacao is
the tree’s trunk and branches, dangling like holiday much more likely to be pollinated in a forest with
ornaments. Each pod is between six and twelve a moist, messy understory than in a commercial
inches long, its hue orange or reddish orange by the plot cleared or raked by human tools.
time it matures. Inside the pod are two or three Cacao has been cultivated for hundreds if not
dozen seeds—the cacao beans—surrounded by a thousands of years, and so has been subjected to
sweet, milky-white gelatinous pulp that is the main plenty of ad hoc horticultural experimentation.
ingredient for a South American drink. Even before European contact, cacao trees had been
The cacao beans themselves, which are dull planted far from their natural origins, and
brown on the outside and a striking purple within, their beans were a treasured Mesoamerican re-
source. By the time of con-
tact, according to the early
sixteenth-century Spanish
chronicler Gonzalo Fer-
nandez Oviedo y Valdés,
the beans had become so
widely cultivated that they
were used as money: to ac-
quire “gold, slaves, clothing,
things to eat and everything
else,’ Valdés wrote. Between
the late seventeenth and the
late nineteenth centuries,
the heyday of Europe’s colo-
nial empires in the tropics,
cacao joined coffee and rub-
ber as crops transplanted to
distant shores.
All three of those trans-
plants proved highly success-
Cross section of forest in a small West African cacao farm includes trees at three distinct lev- ful. They benefited, at least
els. Among the tallest are such plants as (left to right) oil palm, Terminalia (a source of tim- initially, from the enforced
ber), and rubber, At the second level are trees that offer the cacao farmer a further hedge separation between the plant
against fluctuations in the price of cacao: depicted here (left to right) are guava, avocado, and its coevolved insect pests
mango, orange, and coconut. At the lowest level are the cacao trees (the three trees in the
and diseases. Coffee, native
foreground with reddish pods), which thrive in the shade. The planted, mixed forest, known
as polycultural farming, maintains a level of biodiversity much greater than does plantation
to tropical Africa, is now
cultivation of cacao as a single crop. grown for export in Brazil,
Colombia, and Vietnam;
are an unlikely resource for the dessert-hungry rubber, native to South America, is cultivated in
people of the world. A mere brush against the Malaysia. For cacao, the heavy-hitting region for
tongue imparts a strong and bitter flavor. The pods production quickly became West Africa.
and their beans probably evolved as they did by tak-
ing advantage of the cravings of nonhuman primates. |e its sister crop coffee, cacao is still commonly
The sweet pulp is an attractive food, encouraging the grown in a forest or forestlike setting called an
animals to remove the pods. The beans, or seeds, agroforest, where shade trees tower over cacao
however, are enriched with distasteful alkaloids, and plants that have been pruned to harvestable height.
thus are discarded wherever the pulp is consumed. Botanists classify such agroforests (at least for cacao
The combination virtually guarantees seed dispersal. or coffee) according to the stature and diversity of

AT
( R Al HIS TORY July/August 2003
the shade-tree canopy. In “rustic” cacao farms, large seem well suited to cope with such risks. Part of
canopy trees in the original tropical forest are their success comes from diversification: the multi-
thinned out, to enable more light to penetrate to layered forest yields not only cacao beans but also a
lower heights. Cacao trees are simply cultivated be- cornucopia of other products. Farmers can harvest
neath the remaining shade trees. This is in consider- avocados, bananas, breadfruits, mangoes, and or-
able contrast to the large, technologized “zero- anges, as well as medicinal plants, rubber, and tim-
shade” cacao plantations, which apply generous ber. Harvesting wood fromatraditional cacao farm

amounts of highly toxic herbicides, such as para- has the added benefit of protecting other extant
quat, and potent insecticides such as endosulfan. forests from the ax. And when cacao bean prices
But most cacao today is grown on so-called poly- are low, a farm’s noncacao products can still supple-
cultural farms, under planted shade—a somewhat ment the household diet and generate cash at
more managed environment than the rustic farms, nearby markets. Finally, polycultural cacao farms
but still far more biodiversity-friendly than the zero- that are abandoned when world cacao prices fall or
shade plantations. In a polycultural system the disease attacks the trees may devolve into patches of
farmer selects and manages much of the canopy, or secondary forest, a habitat that remains conducive
even all of it. A single species, usually a fast-growing to preserving biodiversity.
legume, supplies most of the shade. Trees that yield Today some 17 million acres worldwide are
fruit for human consumption often form a second, planted in cacao, an increase of 60 percent since
intermediate canopy. Beneath’ it all are the low- the early 1960s—when the North American dessert
growing cacao trees [see illustration on opposite page].
To be fruitful, a cacao tree must get individual at-
tention—something the family farm and the small
farmer are best suited to provide. Less than a third of
the cacao flowers become fruit—in other words,
pods—and the careful cultivator will remove defec-
tive pods throughout the growing season. Not sur-
prisingly, hired hands on huge plantations are spar-
ing with such tender loving care. Furthermore,
large areas planted with a single crop give rise to se-
rious agronomic problems of their own. The typical
smallholder’s practice of growing cacao along with
an array of shade trees reduces such difficulties.

mall and medium farms of all kinds are often

more productive—in terms of total useful
product per unit area of land—and cacao farms are
no exception. There is no big secret about what
makes that so. Small peasant producers simply must
work harder and smarter if they are to survive.
Tied to the land, with only the occasional chance
to supplement their agricultural earnings with
gainful off-farm labor, small farmers are highly
motivated to anticipate (and, as much as possible,
to mitigate) the risks of farming: natural forces
such as weather, insect infestations, and disease, x MG.
and human (but still uncontrollable) factors such as The pink-legged graveteiro, first recorded scientifically in
export-price fluctuations and societal upheavals. 1996, forages in canopy trees that shade cocoa plantations
Traditional rustic and polycultural cacao systems on Brazil’s Atlantic coast. A juvenile is at left, an adult at right.

July/August 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 39

choice was far more likely and West Africa, have con-
to be cherry pie a la mode sistently found greater di-
than chocolate mousse. versity of species in the
Production of cacao beans agroforests than we can
approached three million document on other kinds of
metric tons in 2002. On a agricultural lands. Agro-
global scale, about 90 per- forests still harbor such for-
cent of all cacao farmers are est species as bats, canopy
‘“small”—defined as hold- birds, and migratory birds.
ing less than twenty-five Compared with natural
acres. In some nations, such forest, of course, even agro-
as Ghana and Cameroon, forest lands are generally
ex small” almost certainly depauperate. The main ca-
refers to a farm of less than " sualties are tree species char-
half that area. Plantation acteristic of old-growth
farming was particularly forests. Such trees appear
popular in Malaysia, where doomed to vanish because
in the early 1990s total regeneration is unlikely
cacao acreage soared to wherever the understory has
750,000. But large-scale been highly altered. With
farming proved unsuccess- their disappearance comes
ful, and so most of the the disappearance of the co-
country’s 125,000 acres evolved fauna: large mam-
of cacao today are small- mals and understory birds
scale farms. A fruiting cacao tree, Belize: Cultivated trees are native to pristine forests are
pruned so that the pods are at a convenient height absent in the agroforest. For
Ir 1996 ornithologists an- _ for harvesting. that reason, the rustic cacao
nounced the discovery of farm is probably not an eco-
a new species of Neotropical ovenbird, the pink- logically stable system. But the findings of the bio-
legged graveteiro (Acrobatornis fonsecai), within the diversity surveys suggest that even some of the
rustic cacao farms of the state of Bahia, Brazil. An small-scale polycultural cacao farms offer shelter to
endangered monkey, the golden-headed lion many otherwise doomed forest organisms. Perhaps
tamarin, had already been spotted in the same habi- the best hope for the future is a polycultural system

After jebdles oFlooking topradeet ae jon

preserve biod versit
biologists are noticing theee value = agen settings.

tat. Those sightings were turning points for conser- developed out of a combination of traditional
vation biologists. After decades of focusing on pris- practices and modern research, planted with shade
tine habitats, the biologists began to pay increasing trees that are valuable to wildlife as well as people.
attention to agricultural settings. Part of the shift
came from their realization that, in many areas, a the past decade, those of us at the Smithson-
agroforests and forest fragments are all that remain of ian Migratory Bird Center have been survey-
the original, vast forestlands. Cacao farms quickly ing the composition and diversity of birds in
came to be regarded as preservers of biodiversity. southeastern Mexico, both in natural and human-
Surveys of the flora and fauna of rustic cacao created systems. Two quite different kinds of cacao
farms in West Africa have been conducted since the farms are included in the survey. The first are
1950s, but the recent sightings of rare birds have small, rustic farms in a “buffer zone’”—a belt of
brought new energy to the fieldwork. We and our well-forested but still partly cultivated land—sur-
colleagues at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Cen- rounding the completely uncultivated 1,300-
ter, as well as other groups working in Brazil, Cen- square-mile Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve in
tral America, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, the Selva Lacandona, a huge lowland tropical forest

ORY July/August 2003

in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The second are
small, polycultural, planted-shade farms in the
lowlands of the state of Tabasco, on the coast of the
Gulf of Mexico. The diversity of bird species we
measured on the Selva Lacandona farms is more
similar to what it is in pristine forests, or at least in
forests that have been only slightly altered from
their pristine state. Moreover, that diversity is be-
tween one and a half and seven times as great as it
is in pastoral, open, or other more traditional agri-
cultural habitats. A quarter of the most common
species—mostly forest-breeding birds, both resi-
dent and migratory—occur both in the Lacandona
agroforest and in undisturbed tropical forest.
In contrast, unfortunately, Tabasco’s polycultural
farms support substantially fewer bird species than
do the rustic farms—eighty-four compared with
142. We found virtually no forest-breeding species
on the polycultural farms.
We and our colleagues have also conducted ex- Cacao seeds and pulp are collected for
carrying and weighing.
tensive surveys on the cacao farms in the Apuri-
mac valley of south-central Peru, an area known The Apurimac valley had been notable for both
for its production of alkaloidal crops: coffee, the diversity and uniqueness of its bird popula-
cacao, and coca (the last grown for both legal and tions. We were disheartened, therefore, to sight
illicit markets). Several decades ago, much of the only ninety-three species of birds (a low figure by
low-elevation, shade-grown coffee land was con- Peruvian standards), all of which are commonplace
verted to cacao production and then, in an at- even in disturbed habitats. Presumably even
tempt to control a fungal disease known as though our study area encompassed small frag-
monilia pod rot, the shade canopy was removed. ments of forest and was only a few miles from
Years of civil war involving the Shining Path guer- more continuous stretches of woods, the many
rilla movement left much of the zero-shade cacao years of zero-shade cultivation had rendered the
abandoned. Today the area is dominated by tall habitat inhospitable to the endemic birds. They
scrub, particularly cacao, much of which is being may never return.
brought back into production.
f cacao—appropriately grown—can do good
things for biodiversity, what can biodiversity do
for cacao? Both planned and unplanned diver-
sity—what farmers put in place, as well as what
just shows up—contribute to the crop’s successful
cultivation, often in ways biologists don’t yet un-
derstand. Recent experiments with shade-grown
coffee have shown that birds remove more than 70
percent of the arthropod population both from
the canopy and from the understory crop plants.
That number includes at least half the herbivorous
insects. Ants play a complex and less well under-
stood role: they are major predators on other
arthropods, including many herbivores, but they
also protect scale insects, which harm plants by
living off plant juices.
Biodiversity on a cacao farm also includes tow-
ering shade trees, whose leaf litter slowly releases
nutrients back into the soil, and offers an attractive
A harvester empties cacao pods of their habitat to a host of organisms that may be critical
seeds and pulp. in the breakdown and recycling of the nutrients. If

July/August 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 41

 the shade trees include legumes, as is the case in It is true that, in global terms, cacao accounts for
many polycultural cacao farms, bacteria that live a small fraction of forest degradation and clearing
symbiotically in their roots supply the soil with at any given moment. Yet the impact of such pro-
usable nitrogen. The shade canopy also shields un- duction methods in particular areas, such as West
derstory plants from the relentless tropical sun, as Africa and the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, can
well as from the physical impact of driving tropical be substantial, and where clearing targets forest
rains, thus reducing soil erosion. The diversity of that harbors endemic species, the threat to biodi-
species that follows from the presence of shade versity can be great. Furthermore, if production
trees undoubtedly helps control certain pests and continues to be concentrated in particular frontier
pathogens as well; taken together, the elements of regions, the crop becomes increasingly vulnerable
the system embody the ecological mantra that di- to new fungal diseases. Geographical diversifica-
versity enhances stability. It is also worth noting tion can help maintain the supply, but eventually a
that crops grown under a range of shade-tree spe- long-term vision 1s needed.
cles support substantially greater local diversity Some large companies have accepted responsi-
than do those grown under a single such species. bility for taking that long view, and have begun to
There is an even broader benefit from the mas- fund research on natural agents that could control
sive shade trees that are an integral part of a rustic some of the diseases that plague cacao trees. There
or polycultural cacao farm. They effectively se- is a growing realization that maintaining cacao as
quester, or capture, carbon—acting as carbon an environmentally and economically sustainable
crop is inextricably linked
with the well-being of the
hundreds of thousands of
small farmers who tend the
crop—and hold the key to
future supply. And for small
growers, biological methods
of controlling disease are far
more affordable—and far
“sinks” that shunt atmospheric carbon dioxide safer—than the expensive, environmentally detri-
into fixed sites. That helps alleviate the buildup of mental chemicals so often applied by the owners
the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are of monocultural plantations.
causing global climate change. Along with the recognition of the importance of
the small farmer, a consensus is emerging among
Hien” cacao itself has been a vagabond ecologists, economists, experts in economic devel-
crop. Production levels have always been opment, and industry-based investigators that
maintained largely by exploiting new forest fron- agroforestry, employing a diverse shade canopy, is
tiers worldwide. According to the botanist the cornerstone of sustainable cacao farming. In
Francois Ruf of CIRAD, a French organization Brazil’s cacao zones, recent planting schemes have
devoted to agricultural research for developing been incorporating multiple species of shade trees,
countries, the cycle begins as new forest is cleared. native forest species, and hardwoods or other eco-
Seedlings are then planted that can take advantage nomically valuable crops such as palms or bananas,
of the cost-free nutrients in the soil of the newly all of which can increase the cacao farmer’s income
cleared plot of land. With time, though, the cacao and diversify the farmer’s product.
yields decline, until eventually the plot is aban-
doned. Then the “cocoa cycle” begins once again, Cone enduring problems have relatively
on another patch of untouched forest. simple solutions. In Indonesia, for instance,
In that way, as the worldwide craving for choco- the early harvest of the pods has reduced losses
late has grown, the unfettered forces of production from a moth pest. Other initiatives are more com-
have continued taking huge bites out of tropical plex. In Peru, treating the trees with certain plant-
forests around the globe. With no national guide- dwelling microorganisms, as well as with eco-
lines—much less a global, or at least industrywide, logically benign fungi that parasitize other fungi,
policy—to address the hungry advance of cacao has cut infestations of the witches’-broom fungus
into natural forests, some of the very forests that by 50 percent, and yields have increased by 20
have served as raw material for cacao production in percent (those programs, funded by Mars, Inc., of
the past 200 years will soon disappear. Hackettstown, New Jersey, draw on the resources

\TURAL HISTORY July/August 2003

and expertise of the U.S. Department of Agricul-
ture). Scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Re-
search Institute have begun to identify some fun-
gal endophytes—species that grow within plant
tissues—that when present in cacao leaves and
fruits may serve as natural biological controls
against other fungi, such as those that cause the
devastating disease known as black pod. Private
chocolate interests have sponsored projects that
link grower groups with disease experts and are
funding research whose findings will be published
in scientific journals.
But the economic factors that affect cacao farm-
ers are less easily controlled. Cacao is a poor
farmer’s crop, and the pluck and perseverance of
the growers who migrate to remote areas to carve
out a livelihood are rarely rewarded with fair
prices. No matter how well they anticipate adver-
sity, they are constantly buffeted by market fluctu-
ations in the price of cacao beans, driven by forces
far away from the farm. A good example is last
fall’s surge in world cacao prices to eighteen-year
highs, about $2,500 per metric ton, caused in part
by civil turmoil in Cote d’Ivoire. Yet at the same
time in neighboring Ghana, where the govern-
ment sets the price growers receive, farmers had to
settle for just $763 a metric ton—70 percent less
than the market rate.
Thus the fundamental issue of what the grower
gets paid remains unsolved. Activists in the “fair
trade” movement have convinced some of the
major players in the chocolate industry that price
has to cover the true costs of production by the
small farmer and provide a living wage to the farm
family. Several industry giants are now buying
cacao at a higher-than-market price from associa-
tions of small growers; part of the money then
goes toward community development and the im-
plementation of sustainable production tech-
niques. And several smaller but quite upscale
companies are working directly with producers to
showcase their cacao beans in certified organic
chocolate products.

S? the next time you order chocolate mousse,

topped by a few shavings of bitter chocolate
and a dab of whipped cream, think of it the way
you might think of homemade strawberry jam, or
hand-rolled sushi, or a top-flight French wine—
something that’s worth paying extra for. Choco-
late, too, at least at the grower’s end of the produc-
tion chain, remains a cottage industry: the work of
many hands, by people who have to pay their own Mexican Indian woman is pictured as she prepares a
bills. And then, because you truly enjoy it, savor chocolate-flavored drink, in this facsimile ofa page
their work. from the Codex Tudela (1553).

July/August 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 43

 Summer Flings
Firefly courtship, sex, and death

By Sara Lewis and James E. Lloyd

The fireflies, twinkling among leaves,

/make the stars wonder.
—Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

s light slips from the summer sky, an army of

male fireflies awakens from its daytime slumber.
One by one, the insects march up blades of
grass, waiting until dusk to lift off like miniature heli-
copters into the night. Yet these fliers aren’t bent on mil-
itary conquest; their goal is simple evolutionary survival.
The fireflies we study—bioluminescent members of the
genus Photinus—devote every night of their short adult
lives to courtship, first broadcasting their amorous inten-
tions with flashing light signals, then seeking to mate
with responding females.
Few insects are considered charismatic, but fireflies are a
clear exception. All over the world their spectacular
courtship displays have long delighted children and in-
spired poets. On long summer evenings throughout the
United States countless children chase fireflies through
fields and backyards. In Japan, where a broad respect for
nature is both traditional and deeply felt, fireflies—
hotaru—are particularly revered. School graduation cere-
monies feature the song “Hotaru no Hikari,’ which
means “‘fireflies’ light,’ and many cities celebrate commu-
nal firefly watching with annual festivals known as hotaru
matsuri (‘“fireflies’ festival”). In the popular Japanese car-
toon Sailor Moon, the heroine is Tomoe Hotaru, a name
that means “firefly of earth.’ And in Japanese poetry the
firefly serves as a metaphor for silent yet passionate love.
As biologists, the two of us still fall under the spell of
fireflies. In particular, it is their single-minded focus on
procreation that has inspired us, as students of the evolu-
tionary process of sexual selection, to spend countless
nights for the past several decades observing their drama
of love and death. We, along with our colleagues, have
been keen to learn what makes certain individual fire-
flies more likely than others to find mates and insure that
their genes are passed on to future generations. And our
observations, both in the wild and in the laboratory,
have led to new insights into how fireflies (and other Bo Bartlett, Firefly, 1994

LAL HISTORY July/August 2003

species as well) play the game of evolutionary sur- elytra, the hardened front wings that form a pro-
vival—how they live, love, and die. tective sheath above the hind wings; it is the latter
that are used for flight. Most of the fireflies in the
et are not flies at all, but beetles, belonging three genera have black elytra edged with yellow,
to the family Lampyridae. To date, entomolo- and a shieldlike head covering, typically with red
gists have formally described some 2,000 firefly markings. Subtle morphological differences sepa-
species worldwide. The family includes some non- rate the genera; within each genus, entomologists
luminescent (and often diurnal) species that rely on distinguish species by differences in coloration, in
pheromones to locate mates, as well as some species the shape of male genitalia, and in flash behavior.
that merely glow rather than flash. In North Amer- Fireflies themselves generally have no trouble de-
ica the flashing fireflies fall into three main genera: termining whether another firefly belongs to their
Photinus, Photuris, and Pyractomena. own species, or to their own sex for that matter. To
To the uninitiated, the adults of the three genera do so, they rely solely on species-specific flash pat-
look almost identical. Like all beetles, they have terns—one or more short pulses of light. To iden-

July/August 2003 NATURAL HISTORY |45

 tify males of their own species Photinus females key begin their courtship. The roving males fly slowly,
in on several flash characteristics, including pulse between three and six feet above the grass, advertis-
rate, duration, and the number of pulses in the ing their availability with a flash pattern of one, two,
overall flash pattern. Photinus males, in turn, usu- or several short light pulses, repeated at regular in-
ally focus on the length of the time delay before a tervals [see diagram at bottom ofopposite page|.
female responds with a flash of her own. Females, meanwhile, remain perched low in the
By mimicking the signals of each sex with a vegetation; in Photinus species the females rarely
penlight, you, too, can attract males and get re- fly. Females respond to male advertisements with a
sponses from females. With one in hand, you can single pulse (or in a few species, multiple pulses).
distinguish males from females by the size of the After a male sees a female response, he drops out of
light-producing lantern on the underside of the the air to continue his search “on foot.” The flash
abdomen. In the Photinus male, the lantern takes dialogues continue, often lasting more than an
up the entire last two abdominal segments. In the hour, and the ongoing conversation acts as a mag-
female, the lantern is much smaller, restricted to net for other males. By the time courtship flight
the middle of the penultimate segment. ends, several males can often be found scrambling
up and down blades of grass, searching for
the stationary female.

iologists have long pondered how fire-

flies generate their precisely timed
flashes. Work done recently by an interdis-
ciplinary team of cell biologists, physiolo-
gists, and ecologists from Tufts University
and Harvard Medical School has provided a
key piece to the puzzle.
In fireflies light is produced in a chemi-
cal reaction, which can occur only in the
presence of oxygen, between the com-
pound luciferin and the enzyme luciferase.
In the firefly lantern, thousands of special-
ized cells called photocytes sequester lu-
Fatal attraction: after luring a small Photinus male firefly with false ciferin and luciferase deep within their
signals, the large Photuris female firefly devours him. interiors. Densely packed around the pho-
tocyte margins are mitochondria, the oxy-
H owever conspicuous it is, the adult stage of gen-consuming power plants that occur in nearly
the firefly makes up only a small fraction of all eukaryotic cells. The team found that the firefly
the life cycle. In North American fireflies the adult nervous system does not control the photocytes di-
stage lasts at most a few weeks. The life cycle be- rectly; instead, the flash-triggering nerve impulse
gins when the female lays her eggs in moist soil or arrives in the lantern at nonluminescent cells adja-
moss. After about two weeks the eggs hatch, and cent to the photocytes.
minute, carnivorous larvae emerge. Firefly larvae The nerve signals trigger the production of ni-
live underground or beneath leaf litter, feeding on tric oxide (NO). That discovery offered significant
earthworms, snails, slugs, and soft-bodied insect insight into firefly flash control. The NO molecule
larvae. In the northern United States fireflies prob- is a ubiquitous intercellular messenger that has an
ably spend between one and three years as larvae; astonishing array of biological functions. In
farther south they can complete their development people, it controls blood pressure, regulates penile
within a few months of hatching. Firefly larvae pu- erection, and mediates learning and memory. In
pate in late spring within an igloo-shaped under- the firefly lantern, NO switches the flash on by
ground chamber. They emerge a few weeks later, temporarily shutting down the oxygen consump-
having assumed their familiar adult form. tion of the photocyte’s mitochondria. Oxygen can
Once fireflies reach adulthood, the race for re- then diffuse farther into the interior of the photo-
production is on. Photinus fireflies devote their en- cyte, where it triggers the light-producing reaction
tire adult lives to reproduction; most of them do not between luciferin and luciferase. The flash turns
eat after they become adults. Triggered by dusk’s off as NO quickly degrades and mitochondrial
fading daylight, male fireflies lift off into the air and oxygen consumption is restored.

rTURAI H STORY July/August 2003

 he highly visible court- supplementary nourishment
ship signals among fire- for the female’s eggs. Radio-
flies, and their short adult tracer studies found proteins
lifespans, make fireflies partic- derived from the spermato-
ularly amenable to studies phore in the developing eggs.
of sexual selection. Darwin Females, too, may benefit
coined the term “sexual selec- from male nuptial gifts: Photi-
tion” to refer to differences nus females that have mated
among a species’ males and with three different males can
how successful they are at produce nearly twice as many
gaining access to females. Ac- maturing firefly larva attacks a hapless slug. offspring in their lifetimes as
cording to Darwin, the repro- can females with only one
ductive advantage goes to males that can prevail mate. Cratsley’s studies also show that the longer
over rivals or that can more effectively attract fe- the duration of the courtship flash of P ignitus
males. Later biologists have realized that mere males, the bigger the male’s spermatophore. Hence
copulation is not sufficient to ensure a male’s re- male courtship flashes might signal to females the
productive success; in many animals females mate size of the male’s intended nuptial gift. If so, the fe-
with multiple males, and both male sperm com- male preference for longer male flashes in this spe-
petition and female sperm choice can create dif- cies should allow her to produce more offspring.
ferences among mating males in the number of
offspring they sire. In fireflies, a male’s reproduc- Be even after his gift is accepted, the male’s
tive success depends not only on his courtship quest to propagate his genes has not necessarily
ability, but also on his postcopulatory ability to succeeded. In most Photinus species each female
fertilize his mate’s eggs. typically mates with many different males, yet the
Sexual selection in fireflies begins during court- mating males are not all equally likely to fertilize
ship. Recent studies show that female Photinus fire- her eggs. Only the females of the species Photinus
flies discriminate between potential mates by evalu- collustrans, studied by Steven R. Wing at the Uni-
ating their flash patterns. The flash pattern of versity of Florida in Gainesville, are known to mate
Photinus consimilis males is made up of four to twelve just once before death. In most Photinus species the
rapid pulses. Marc A. Branham, now of Ohio State sperm of several males compete.
University in Columbus, and Michael D. Greenfield A glimpse into the male firefly’s struggle for pa-
of the University of Kansas in Lawrence found that ternity comes from doctoral work done by Jennifer
among P consimilis fireflies, the faster the male’s Rooney at Tufts. She discovered that males provid-
pulse rate, the more frequently the female responds. ing larger spermatophores also sired a greater frac-
Yet males of many other Photinus species emit singly tion ofa female’s offspring. But such success 1s not
pulsed courtship flash patterns. For example, without cost; a male’s spermatophore size declines
Christopher K. Cratsley, now at Fitchburg State steadily with each additional mating.
College in Massachusetts, found that in P ignitus, The traditional theory of sexual selection holds
the longer the male’s courtship flashes, the more that males, whose gametes are relatively small and
likely the female is to respond. As one might expect,
getting a female to respond is crucial to a male’s PHOTINUS MALE FLASH SIGNAL - (e)
SPECIES & FEMALE RESPONSE (®)
mating success. Field studies show that firefly males (seconds)
that elicit more female responses during courtship
are most likely to succeed in mating. 3 4
The light show is over when copulation begins. marginellus
In Photinus fireflies, copulations generally last sev-
feel
eral hours, a practice that limits both males and fe-
males to a single mating each night. One reason collustrans
for such prolonged mating is that the males are ignitus
busy transferring a “nuptial gift” to their mates.
consanguineus
The nuptial gift of the firefly is an elegant, spirally
coiled sperm-containing package called a sper- macdermotti
matophore [see photomicrograph on next page]. consimilis
SAR
BS
mane
on
Pg
Parra
tg
anh
SEES
oe]CTE
a
I

Because Photinus fireflies do not feed as adults,

male nuptial gifts may be particularly important as

July/August 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 47

 energetically inexpensive to produce, will mate as turbed, migration to nearby areas is unlikely, and
often as opportunity allows. Females, in contrast, local extinction is almost certain.
whose gametes are large and costly, will be much Bounty hunters, too, may have been contributing
more selective than the males about their mates. to declining firefly populations. For about forty
For at least some of the Photinus firefly mating sea- years the Sigma-Aldrich Corporation in St. Louis,
son, that pattern seems to hold. Early on, males seeking luciferin and luciferase, sponsored a firefly-
compete for access to females, whereas females re- collecting club. The company paid a network of
spond to flashes only if they’re impressed. collectors nationwide a penny afirefly (with quan-
But because Photinus fireflies don’t eat once they tity bonuses that total $600 for 200,000 fireflies).
become adults, the males can produce only a lim- Millions were collected. Although a few firefly spe-
ited number of spermatophores in their lifetimes. cies might be abundant enough to support such har-
As the availability of spermatophores dwindles, the vesting, many less-abundant species (and species are
males become increasingly selective about which collected indiscriminately) could readily be snuffed
female they mate. out. Fortunately, there is no longer any reason to
collect fireflies from the wild. Synthetic luciferin has
irefly flashes may be a natural form of poetry, long been available, and the firefly luciferase gene
but they are also highly visible signals that make has been cloned. Sigma-Aldrich ended the collect-
courtship a risky business. ing club a few years ago.
Flashes are readily inter-
cepted by predators. As pro- |ese have been at risk
tection, Photinus species and even in Japan, where
some other fireflies contain they are so revered. Japanese
noxious, extremely bitter firefly larvae live in water,
compounds known as luci- and by the 1960s industrial
bufagins, which deter many pollution and residential de-
potential predators such as velopment had so damaged
spiders, primarily, as well as the rivers that larval survival
birds, lizards, and ants. rates had dropped precipi-
But not even noxious tously. Many communities
chemicals can protect Photi- Firefly spermatophore delivers both the sperm of responded by setting up river
nus fireflies from their arch- the male (here still bundled into rings) and restoration projects aimed at
enemies, the larger, quicker sustenance for the eggs of the female. The image reviving local firefly popula-
Photuris fireflies. Female shown is magnified approximately 100 diameters. tions. The projects were
Photuris fireflies are leading largely successful and, com-
ladies among the insect world’s infamous troupe of bined with citizen efforts to rear firefly eggs into
femmes fatales. Photuris females are highly special- healthy larvae that could be released into the rivers,
ized predators that spy on Photinus courtships, then they have transformed fireflies into a national sym-
imitate the flash responses normally given by Phot- bol for environmental conservation in Japan.
inus females. Those false signals lure unsuspecting “Photopollution” too endangers fireflies. The
Photinus males into the clutches (and guts) of their insects depend on low-light backgrounds for their
predators. The Photuris female is a voracious preda- courtship signals to be seen. But bright streetlights
tor that can devour several Photinus fireflies each and floodlights may overwhelm firefly courtship
night. And, in the process, she gets much more flashes, and so reduce breeding populations. Yet
than just a nutritious meal. The ecologist Thomas simple remedies, such as shades and timers, can
Eisner and the chemist Jerrold Meinwald, both of minimize such disruptions.
Cornell University, discovered that Photuris females As biologists continue to learn about firefly be-
can co-opt the bitter chemical deterrents produced havior, this knowledge—how courtship signals are
by their Photinus prey to deter their own predators. generated, how nuptial gifts affect mating behavior,
In addition to such natural hazards, human activ- how a male’s success at mating is related to his suc-
ities pose problems for fireflies. Pesticide use takes a cess at fertilizing eggs—may help biologists clarify
toll, and urban sprawl increasingly threatens the and strengthen the understanding of life in general.
open fields and woodlands inhabited by various And we hope that the enhanced understanding of
firefly species. Fireflies tend to be highly site-spe- firefly ecology will help ensure that fireflies con-
cific, gathering and mating year after year in the tinue to thrive on Earth, to inspire wonder in our
same spot. If a population’s breeding site is dis- children—and in the stars. O

rORY July/August 2003

 ite ae

During mating a Photinus ma le firefly (|9 S o La <9)® ® aso as1)Oo = © =® Ww Liv} e 5 Oz ~Xo aD = 29 © @ =Ss © 2
 rHIS LAND
eh I RE

Valley Hig
A California forest harbors
cobra plants and other treats
for plant lovers willing
to get their feet wet.

By Robert H. Mohlenbrock

Oxeye daisies, originally introduced from Europe, bloom on private

land along Butterfly Creek.

hen I first read about Roughly midway, near the commu- the deepest body of water in the
Butterfly Valley in an issue nity of Keddie, we found the un- botanical area, thanks to a dam con-
of Fremontia, the journal posted turnoff onto County Road structed there around the turn of the
of the California Native Plant Society, 417, a narrow asphalt road that turns twentieth century. This pond and its
I knew I had to see it. The valley’s to gravel after about a mile and a half. muddy borders support additional
boggy areas, seeps, and ponderosa-pine Continuing another mile on the communities of plants. I noticed that
forests are home to more than 500 gravel we took a left turn onto a most of the aquatic species I could
kinds of plants. Among Forest Service road identify are also familiar in the
them are large concentra- that led southward Midwest and eastern United States.
tions of the insect-eating through the botanical As a matter of fact, aquatic plants
cobra plant (whose area. At first all we saw generally do have broad geographical
hoodlike leaf bears what were woods dominated ranges, which botanists attribute to
looks like a forked by ponderosa and sugar the relative uniformity of their wa-
tongue); four other pines. Then we sighted tery environment, compared with
species of insectivorous our first cobra plants, the variability of soil and other con-
plants (two sundews and growing in standing ditions on dry land.
two bladderworts); and water along with Proceeding along the road to the
twelve kinds of wild or- sedges, rushes, and south end of the botanical area, we
chids. Butterfly Valley, other wetland plants. came upon a moist, heavily shaded
through which runs This boggy habitat, area known as Fern
Butterfly Creek, lies in Green-leaf manzanita best termed a fen be- Glen. True to its
the northern Sierra cause it is fed by water name, it was home to
Nevada mountains and is named for its seepage from the bottom of the adja- an assortment of
overall shape, discernible when viewed cent hillside, parallels the road for a gorgeous ferns,
from mountain heights. A 500-acre hundred feet or so. which grew amidst
portion of the valley, part of Less than a quarter-mile farther numerous wildflow-
California’s Plumas National Forest, is down the road, we came to Sweet- ers. Exploring on
designated a Botanical Area, which water Marsh, ten acres of open land foot, we also found a
protects it from wildflower picking surrounded by a narrow border of small zone domi-
and commercial logging. alders. The continuous cover of vege- nated by bear grass, a
On a pleasant morning in August tation obscures a very wet terrain, huge plant with long,
my wife Beverly and I set out on which I deemed it best not to enter. narrow, grasslike
California Highway 70, which crosses A short distance past Sweetwater leaves that is actually White-flowered
east-west through the national forest. Marsh we came to Pond Reservoir, a member of the lily bog orchid

URAL HISTORY July/August 2003

family. It produces a large spike well as arrowhead, water
of white flowers in August. plantain, water smart eed, blis-
From there we continued ter sedge, marsh cinquefoil, two
south and east, and the road buttercups, water-shield, a pond-
eventually turned into the weed, watercress, and the tiny
paved Blackhawk Creek Road water starwort. Common in the
and connected directly with surrounding mudflats are a vari-
California Highway 70 (the ety of sedges and rushes, north-
Forest Service prefers visitors ern bog violet, water purslane,
to enter as well as leave the and primrose monkey flower.
botanical area using this route).
On the way the road crosses Glen Sierra water fern, lady fern,
Big Blackhawk Creek and par- and California grape fern grow
allels Little Blackhawk Creek, in Fern Glen beneath a canopy
which like Butterfly Creek are mostly of ponderosa pine. One
lined with dense thickets of attractive shrub is the Sierra cur-
willows, alders, and red osier rant. Wildflowers include wild
dogwoods. The waters of all ginger, two species of woodland-
three eventually travel south- stars, Mt. Lassen fleabane, broad-
ward down the Feather River, leaved aster, red larkspur, false
all the way to San Francisco. Solomon’s-seal, fawn lily,
twisted-stalk, and Kelley’s lily.
HABITATS
Glade Growing with the bear
Mixed conifer forest Ponderosa grass in Beargrass Glade are
pine, locally often called yellow Washington lily, Oregon white-
pine, grows with other tall topped aster, pearly everlasting
conifers—sugar pine, white fir, (whose white, paperlike flower
Douglas fir, and incense cedar. The cobra plant, or California pitcher plant, heads persist for weeks), and a
Deciduous trees, such as traps and digests insects. shrub known as Sierra laurel.
California black oak, Pacific
dogwood, and big-leaf maple, are tofieldia, beavertail grass, and Robert H. Mohlenbrock is professor emeritus
much less common. The most plenti- Hastingsia alba. Some other wildflow- ofplant biology at Southern Illinois University
ful shrubs are green-leaf manzanita ers are white-flowered bog orchid, in Carbondale.
(with thick, leathery leaves and a red California grass-of-Parnassus, Sierra For visitor information, contact:
trunk) and white-leaf manzanita gentian, Plumas alpine aster, western Plumas National Forest
(with its pale leaves). Two wildflowers sneezeweed, and the highly toxic 159 Lawrence Street
that are striking because of their western water hemlock. Quincy, California 95971
white-striped leaves are giant rat- (530) 283-2050
tlesnake plantain and white-veined Marsh The vegetation in Sweetwater www.fs.fed.us/r5/plumas/
wintergreen. Other species include Marsh is made up mainly of
purple fritillary, Sierra iris, crimson grasses, sedges, and rushes, but PLUMAS
NATIONAL B utterflyValley,
columbine, slim larkspur, two kinds here also grow cobra plants, Botanical Area (70)
of lupines, mosquito-bills, and woolly two sundews, including the FOREST
“ns ee

mule ears. round-leaved one common in

the fen, and various wildflow-
Cobra plant fen The cobra plant ers—among them wild hy-
(Darlingtonia californica, also known as acinth, bog saxifrage, yellow
California pitcher plant) lives mostly monkey flower, Parish’s yam-
among sedges and rushes. There are pah, sheep parsnip, and a spe-
also round-leaved sundews, some cies of Saint-John’s-wort.
shrubs of Labrador tea and bog bil-
berry, and various colorful wildflow- Pond Standing water in Pond
ers, including four members of the Reservoir harbors two bladderworts
lily family—bog asphodel, western (which trap small aquatic insects), as
REVIEW

The Mismeasure of Science

In his last book Stephen Jay Gould argues it is a mistake to judge
the “magisterium” of science for its failure to engage ethical questions.
By Michael Ruse

y most vivid memories of they could never teach Genesis as bi- Steve felt it was his public duty, and
Stephen Jay Gould date ology, no matter what their religious he never gave it another thought.
back to December 1981. beliefs. (As I remember the episode, Second, that he could fight a good
The place was Little Rock, Arkansas, all of them were Christians.) fight. Guess who had just roughed up
and the scene was a courtroom where That evening all the ACLU sup- the lawyers for the state? Guess who
evolution was under attack by so- porters—lawyers, expert witnesses, had just given them a science lesson
called scientific creationists. The two- hangers-on—were relaxing in one that they must remember to this day?
year interregnum in Bill Clinton’s of the superb restaurants of Little Third, that he acted as part ofa com-
five-term gubernatorial leadership Rock. A lot of wine was drunk. Then munity, willing to share in the group’s
was at its midpoint, and had left the the singing began—instigated by tensions as well as its triumphs. And
state with a governor whose surprise some rather angelic-looking law clerk. fourth, that he could, and would,
at gaining office was matched only by The only songs most of us knew in sing. Steve was well-known for his
his inadequacy for the post. The cre- common were the Christian hymns of love of oratorio, and appreciated its
ationists had managed to get the power to move people’s hearts.
Arkansas house and senate to pass a Personally, Steve had no time for
The Hedgehog, the Fox,
bill mandating the teaching of both creationism, or for evangelical religion
evolution and Genesis in publicly and the Magister’s Pox: generally, but he understood why oth-
funded school biology classes, and
Mending the Gap between Science ers Were attracted to it. He was a ge-
the governor had signed it into law. and the Humanities nius, tremendously creative, and, to
The American Civil Liberties Union
by Stephen Jay Gould
the regret of those of us who knew
Harmony Books, 2003; $25.95
(ACLU) immediately sprang into ac- him, terribly arrogant at times. Yet
tion to have the law declared uncon- ironically, one of his strengths lay in
stitutional, arguing an unwarranted our childhood, so that was the way we his capacity to empathize with regular
breach of the separation of church went. And I'll never forget Steve folk, because he was regular folk—he
and state. Steve and I served as expert Gould—Harvard professor, secular was a born and bred New Yorker
witnesses, testifying that evolution is Jew, eminent evolutionist—belting whose daddy had been a court re-
genuine science and that creationism out “Amazing Grace,” especially those porter, who loved baseball, whose
is old-time religion. lines about being in heaven and prais- aged relatives could never understand
In the end the ACLU won the case ing God’s grace for the first ten thou- why he hadn’t become a “real” doc-
handily, but at first things were tense. sand years, at which point: “We've no tor. Those things stayed with him.
The state’s attorney-general ham- less days to sing God’s praise /Than Stephen Jay Gould is gone now.
mered away at the pro-evolution wit- when we'd first begun.” Those of us who knew him, and many
nesses and, as happens in these cases, who didn’t, are pained by the thought
a certain amount of mud was thrown, he me those recollections epito- that he died too young, and yet in-
and some of it stuck. But by the end mize what Stephen Jay Gould was spired by the example of his personal
of the third day it was clear that we all about: First, that he was there at courage: twenty years ago (shortly
were starting to come out on top. all—many other prominent figures, after the Arkansas trial), he fought
The Arkansas schoolteachers proved beginning with Carl Sagan, had been back a particularly vile form of cancer
to be the most impressive witnesses too busy to take time out to go to the and then continued writing, teaching,
of all, simply by demonstrating why South and fight the creationists. But and lecturing for another two decades.

rURAL HISTORY July/August 2003

Ne we have Gould’s final book remember the hedgehog-fox theme tures, and they don’t talk to each
on science, published posthu- he started with, but only somewhat other—to the particular detriment of
mously. The title—The Hedgehog, The guiltily, at the ends of chapters. No the humanities. The average scholar
Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending doubt much of this textual confusion of a subject such as English literature
the Gap between Science and the Human- would have been addressed in a final knows nothing of quantum mechan-
ities—is a bit misleading. Frankly, | rewriting, but Gould died before ics, and the world and its governance
am still unsure how “the magister’s there was time for that. Because the are the poorer for it.
pox” fits in. But “the hedgehog” and publisher has seen fit to issue the Snow was attacked—brutally—by
etienrox, «Gouldvtells us referto book anyway, the text as it now stands British humanists when his essay was
some lines attributed to the seventh- demands a more interpretative read- published. But Gould, though un-
century B.C. Greek poet Archilochus: ing than one would ordinarily expect comfortable with some of Snow's
“The fox devises many strategies; the to accord it. more venomous critics, is by no
hedgehog knows one great and effec- Recognizing this practicality and its means content to toe the “scientist”
tive strategy.’ The sentiment might pitfalls, I see Gould posing and tack- party line in defending Snow. Snow’s
lead you to think Gould chose his ling three interrelated questions: First, complaint that humanists are ignorant
title to differentiate between science is there a divide between science and of basic science, Gould charges, was

wn
=I
eI

2=
Z

re oS < ae ——

The Natural Sciences in the Presence of Philosophy, engraving attributed to Hans Holbein
the Younger, 1497-1543

on the one hand (perhaps foxlike in the humanities? If there is, what is its grossly exaggerated, overgeneralized
its many ways of going at things) and nature and how did it come about? Fi- to the entire Western world on the
the humanities on the other (hedge- nally, what, if anything, should people basis of the highly limited form of ed-
hoglike in sticking to one theme or do about it? ucation Snow was familiar with in
topic). But that reading doesn’t hold mid-twentieth-century England. (I
up for long: foxlike behavior and @). the first question Gould is can personally attest, though, that
hedgehoglike behavior, Gould says surprisingly ambivalent. He Snow was right about England: one
later on, characterize both fields, and properly focuses on the essay “The began specializing at the age of fifteen,
neither approach can be considered Two Cultures,’ written in the late effectively ignoring everything that
entirely right or entirely wrong. 1950s by the English novelist and was not related to one’s chosen field.)
Not that the distinction matters physicist C.P. Snow. The scientists More important, Gould seems re-
terribly much. In several passages and the humanists, Snow argued, are luctant to embrace Snow’s contention
throughout the book Gould seems to practitioners of the two distinct cul- that such a divide exists in England,

July/August 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 53

 or that it goes very deep. And even if saint is the French critic and philoso- ould’s second question in The
it does, Gould acknowledges, the pher Michel Foucault, who believed Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magis-
English cannot be held responsible for that true objectivity is as untenable in ter’s Pox is, What is the divide between
single-handedly keeping science sepa- science as it is anywhere else. science and the humanities all about,
rate from the humanities. The so- In that rancorous debate Gould the and how did it come to be? Given his
called science wars between scientists scientist seems to be at war with insightful earlier work, I do not find
and humanists in the past decade Gould the historian. On the one him as helpful on that topic in this
demonstrate that the divide exists in hand, he clearly thought that science book as one might have hoped. As I
North America as well. makes it possible for people to dis- understand it from my reading of his
On one side of those wars are sci- cover truths about reality. He would 1999 book Rocks ofAges, his position is
entists who remain convinced that have claimed that punctuated equilib- that, because science and the humani-
they are objectively mapping real- rium—a theory he developed in 1972 ties deal with different kinds of issues
ity—in the immortal words of with the evolutionary biologist Niles and topics, neither their methodolo-
gies nor their conclusions
can be the same.
Take the paired concepts
of science and morality, or
science and religion. Moral-
ity and religion—two con-
cepts Gould often runs to-
gether—seem to belong to
one domain and science to
another (Gould calls these
domains Magisteria). They
are two world systems that
cannot intercept each other,
both because they ask dif-
ferent questions of different
things and because the an-
swers appropriate to one
system are not the ones ap-
propriate to the other. Al-
though they can exist to-
gether (and, one hopes, in
harmony) they cannot, by
their nature, conflict.
Several times in The
Hedgehog, the Fox, and the
Cie
2s ‘

Ps v a
Magister’s Pox Gould makes
James Barsness, The World All Around, 1998
approving reference to the
philosopher David Hume’s
division of things into mat-
Howard Cosell, they “tell it like it is.” Eldredge of the American Museum ters of fact and matters of obligation:
Their patron saint is Sir Karl Popper, of Natural History, to explain the “IT have this,’ as opposed to, “It is
the Austrian-born English philoso- jerky nature of the fossil record— right and proper that I have this.’
pher who spoke of science as “knowl- genuinely says something about the Gould also agrees with Hume’s asser-
edge without a knower,’ meaning real world. On the other hand, Gould tion that, logically, there is no way to
that it rises above the individual and the historian—for instance, in his ac- get from one to the other. He goes on
his or her culture. On the other side count of the sorry history of I.Q. test- to argue (though with less force than
of the science wars are historians and ing, in his book The Mismeasure of he does in Rocks of Ages) that science
sociologists of science and various Man—was at the forefront of those answers factual questions, whereas re-
others, particularly in departments of showing that people can be as creative ligion deals with matters of feeling,
English and cultural studies, who about finding “objective” support for sentiment, and obligation. Again, the
think that science is as subjective as their positions as their pernicious ide- two cannot conflict. I think this is
religion or philosophy. Their patron ology demands. Gould’s position, but I’m not sure it’s

54 | NATURAL HISTORY July/August 2003

as conciliatory toward religious points and philosopher of science, William one more diatribe against Wilson. But
of view as Gould, with his avowed Whewell (pronounced “Hule”). In in another way, that’s not such a bad
ecumenical spirit, might have hoped. speaking of Newtonian mechanics, thing. As Gould stresses, the differ-
Certainly history suggests that con- Whewell praised it for bringing so ences are intellectual, not personal. At
flict between science and religion in much under so few hypotheses, and stake is the choice—an important
particular, and science and the human- spoke of it as a “‘consilience of induc- choice—between two quite different
ities in general, is nothing new. The tions.” Wilson, too, wants a con- visions of the way people think and, in
breakdown began during and immedi- silence, not just of all knowledge but consequence, of the direction research
ately after the scientific revolution, in especially of all knowledge about hu- should take. Gould airs the two visions
the sixteenth and early seventeenth mans. He wants it all brought under, and once again defends his own
centuries. I suspect, however, that and explained by, evolution, particu- stance—on balance, an excellent way
much of the present divide can be larly the part of evolution that pertains to finish offa glorious career.
traced to the epochal nineteenth-cen- to brain science. For him, Hume’s dis-
tury battles between scientists and hu- tinction between is and ought is some- confess that my own inclinations are
manists, the latter often associated with thing to be brushed away as irrelevant. with Wilson. Science really does
powerful religious groups. A good ex- What people ought to do is no more matter; and it matters to everything,
ample is the debate that erupted soon and no less than what our brains tell not excepting emotions and concepts,
after the publication of Origin of Species us, and what our brains tell us is what the most significant of human aspects
between Thomas Henry Huxley, Dar- our genes, as naturally selected, dictate. and activities. Without going to the
win’s bulldog, and Samuel Wilber- To Gould, that conclusion is anath- extreme ofembracing the position ofa
force, Bishop of Oxford. Such con- ema. It is false as science, fallacious as philosopher such as Daniel C. Den-
flicts generated great tension on both philosophy, and foolish as religion. nett—who thinks that once you know
sides of the science-humanities divide: Life is more than biology. Right and all about the brain, you know all about
to a large extent, we are still living wrong, love and hate, beauty and ugli- the mind—I just do not see how one
with the legacy of the Huxley-Wilber- ness, happiness and misery, and so can think seriously about the mind
force debate, and of similar hostile en- much more may owe their existence without paying at least some attention
counters. Would that I could sit down to genes, but they also transcend to the brain, to the physical. And that
for an evening with Gould and argue them. To adopt Gould’s most famous includes asking biological questions
the issue.

f Gould is less than Gould the scientist would argue that science says something
forthcoming on
the first two ques- about reality; but Gould the historian would say that people can
tions, he is eloquent | find “objective” support for whatever their ideologies demand.
and articulate about
how people ought to
respond to the divide. Science and metaphor (referring in its literal sense about how and why natural selection
the humanities will always remain sep- to the triangular, often ornamented gave rise to the human brain.
arate, he says, because they belong to space on the exterior curve of an arch, The paradox is that, in major re-
separate Magisteria, and any attempt to sometimes seen atop columns in me- spects, Gould seems to agree with this
combine them is doomed to fail. His dieval churches), such emotions and position. He writes movingly of his
motto is: Separate but Equal, with concepts are, biologically speaking, older son, who is autistic, and about
Respect. But what about those who “spandrels,’ things that seem to have a what a relief it is for parents to find
don’t agree with this opinion? Gould purpose but do not. As Gould argued that the cause of their child’s affliction
concludes his book with an extensive, at length in his 2002 book The Struc- is biological, not bad parenting. At
two-chapter critique of the position ture of Evolutionary Theory, culture in some level, Gould allows that biology
taken by his colleague at Harvard, the some sense takes off on its own, and to does something important with the
entomologist and sociobiologist Ed- pretend otherwise is to commit the sin mind, and that if biology is not work-
ward O. Wilson. (just about the greatest sin, in Gould’s ing properly, the mind does not work
Wilson wants to combine every- book) of reductionism. properly. The question is: How much
thing—science, politics, religion, As Gould acknowledges in a lengthy further would Gould have been pre-
ethics, you name it—within one mas- footnote, he and Wilson were at odds pared to go?
sive framework. To capture his vision, for many years. So in a way, it is a little Even though, as I mentioned, my
Wilson borrows a word from the unfortunate, and somewhat petty, that inclinations are with Wilson, I think
nineteenth-century English historian Gould should have gone out with yet Gould is right in staying onside with

July/August 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 55

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REVIEW BOLO
MS HE LE By Laurence A. Marschall

(Continued from page 55) an extremely rare disease among

Hume—I think one is always right in How the Cows Turned Mad people aged forty to sixty, but the
staying onside with Hume!—and ar- by Maxime Schwartz average age of these newest victims
suing that Wilson is mistaken in University of California Press, 2003; was twenty-nine, and autopsies of
claiming that ethics is simply a conse- 24,95 their brains revealed lesions similar
quence of biology. At least Gould 1s to the ones in diseased cattle. Just
right in maintaining that biology over a hundred deaths were reported
does not justify ethics—or, more Bes farmers first sounded the from the new variant of CJD by
pointedly, ethical lapses. What has alarm in April 1985, when oth- 2001, and the evidence clearly sug-
evolved is not necessarily what 1s erwise healthy cattle started acting gests that the most likely cause is the
right and good. As Katharine Hep- edgy, showing random fear and ag- consumption of beef.
burn says to Humphrey Bogart in the gression, and kicking their handlers. Maxime Schwartz, a molecular bi-
movie The African Queen: “Nature, The afflicted animals also wavered as ologist and now a professor at the Pas-
Mr. Allnut, is what we were put in they walked, then lost their ability to teur Institute in Paris (which he
this world to rise above.” stand, to lift their heads, and, eventu- headed for a decade, from 1988 until
So I find myself attracted to a posi- ally, to breathe. Postmortem inspec- 1999), has written a lucid and grip-
tion somewhere between Gould’s and tion of their brains exposed a tangle ping account of these events in the
Wilson’s: Wilson is right in thinking of lesions that had turned once-solid context of the latest scientific research.
that biology can explain the origin gray matter into a spongelike mass. “The Disease,” as he prefers to call it,
and continued existence of ethics. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is actually one of several maladies sim-
Gould is right in thinking that biol- ilar in both cause and effect. In the
ogy does not justify ethics. And both mid-1700s, when it was first recog-
are wrong in thinking that there is nized in sheep, The Disease was
nothing more to be said on the mat- called scrapie, because suffering
ter. My philosophical instinct accords animals tended to rub their
with Hume’s: there can be no ulti- skins raw. By the 1900s scrapie
mate justification, whether it is pro- was recognized as infectious,
vided (Wilson-style) by evolution or but unlike viral or bacterial
(Gould-style) by something other diseases, it seemed to pro-
than evolution. Ethics just is. duce neither a fever nor an
immune-system response.
B’ this point both Gould and Wil- Moreover, healthy sheep
son would be after my hide, so inoculated with tissue from
this is a good point to draw to a close. animals with scrapie took
The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magis- years to develop symptoms,
ter’s Pox is not one of Gould’s greatest far longer than for any other
books. In science, that honor belongs known infection.
to Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Among
essay collections, I would still opt for i the 1950s a similar disease was
one of Gould’s first books, Ever Since A caricature of cowpox doing battle with the recognized in people: kuru, a wast-
Darwin. Of his monographs, Wonder- medical profession, glazed ceramic, c. 1800 ing of the brain found among the
ful Life is way ahead of the others, and Fore people of New Guinea, ap-
for me wins the prize as the best book or BSE, was its official name, but to a peared to be transmitted by their
overall. But in everything Stephen Jay frightened, beef-loving public it be- traditional habit of eating deceased
Gould wrote there was always an came “mad cow disease.” (and diseased) family members. Like
abundance—to read, to reflect on, to The threat of mad cow disease, scrapie, it was slow to manifest itself,
learn from. I mourn his passing. I give however, goes deeper than its mon- and also like scrapie, it led to no im-
thanks for his life. And I rejoice in strous effects on livestock or its eco- mune response. Its symptoms resem-
how he enriched all of our lives. nomic impact on farmers. About a bled those of Creutzfeldt-Jakob dis-
decade after the first cows went mad, ease, but since no CJD sufferers were
Michael Ruse is a professor of philosophy at ten cases of a new form of the ritual cannibals, the connection be-
Florida State University. His most recent book degenerative brain disorder known as tween kuru and CJD was unclear.
is Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) Around the time the mad cows first
Have a Purpose? turned up in the U.K. CJD had been staggered onto the scene, Stanley

| NATURAL HISTORY July/August 2003

 THE MASS IS B
Prusiner, a microbiologist at the Uni-
versity of California, San Francisco,
suggested that both diseases were
caused by a new kind of infectious
agent that was neither a virus nor a
bacterium. He named it a “prion,”
and identified it with a nondescript
protein that normally occurs in
many mammals, including people.
Although prion molecules do not
incorporate DNA, and thus cannot
reproduce by conventional means,
mutant forms do have a primitive
ability to induce identical imperfec-
tions 1n healthy prions. Schwartz calls
it the molecular “kiss of death.’ The
process leads to a growing accumula-
tion of bad prions that eventually
destroy nerve cells in the brain. At
first Prusiner’s idea was controversial,
MMe mE) Cea wa mela
but biologists have gradually come to With new music composed and conducted
accept it, and in 1997 Prusiner won a by Thomas G. McFaul
Nobel Prize for his work.
featuring soloists from
Thanks to vigorous public-health
The Metropolitan Opera and the New York City Opera
measures, including a ban on feeding
animal tissue to livestock, mad cow “Tom McFaul’s Mass in C minor is a profoundly moving homage
disease seems to be on the wane. But to the Baroque. It is filled with resplendent choruses, brilliant
prion disease remains frightening. virtuoso counterpoint, and deeply felt emotion...”
Because it takes years for its symptons - MAURY YESTON, Tony-winning composer of Titanic
to develop, Schwartz cautions, the
extent of cow-induced infection in “,..Baroque-like in its musical style...original with colors of textual
people may not be known for another interpretation and turns of phrases...inspirational and refreshing
generation. Nor can we assume that ..the great texts come alive thanks to beautiful orchestral
BSE is the ultimate prion infection. playing and glorious singing.”
Suppose “The Disease” morphs into - ROBERT DUERR, conductor, Orchestra of St. Lukes
a form that causes few symptoms in
animals but moves much more readily
“Tom McFaul’s Mass in C minor is a gorgeous piece of work;
than BSE from livestock to people? beautifully conceived and impeccably executed”
Then even Ronald McDonald might _ - PAUL SHAFFER
decide to become a vegetarian. “From an exceptionally lovely opening, McFaul has created a
beautiful, otherworldly mood -. it’s just fabulous... The entire
production, the music, the singing, the entire piece is excellently
An Obsession with Butterflies: performed and certainly worthy of composer McFaul’s inspired
Our Long Love Affair work. ...Music infused with ineluctable spirituality.”
with a Singular Insect - HUGO FIORATO, principal conductor,
by Sharman Apt Russell The New York i) er
Perseus Publishing, 2003; $24.00
Listen to FREE samples ele
www.tommecfaul.com
Se as nature writer Shar-
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 ew and yet we scarcely notice them. Obsessive butterfly collectors, the provide camouflage among leaves and
She’s right. I can distinguish a robin subject of her title essay, can take this flowers, of course, but they can also
rom a blue jay, a crow from a sparrow pleasure to extremes. Take
(and even, like Hamlet, “a hawk from Lord Walter Rothschild, a
a handsaw’’), but I couldn’t identify a quintessential Victorian ec-
single one of the ninety-three com- centric: Over a lifetime of
mon species of butterflies Russell lists collecting, with the help of
in the preface to this slender collec- professional collectors, he
tion of essays. If my experience is any amassed 2.25 million speci-
measure, many people probably re- mens. Rothschild’s collec-
gard butterflies as elements of the tion resides in the Natural
landscape, flashes of color no more History Museum in Lon-
distinctive than a dropping leaf or a don, along with six million
flower petal floating on the wind. other butterflies and moths
From a butterfly’s point of view, collectors have added over
that is all to the good; a typical mem- the years. Or take Vladimir
ber of the order Lepidoptera devotes Nabokov, the most famous Gregory Halili, Butterfly Collection (Fabrics) #2, 2002
its brief life to being neither noticed of the bunch: not only did
nor eaten before it mates and pro- he insert allusions to butterflies divert a predator’s eye toward the but-
duces its young. To Russell, however, throughout his fiction, he also wrote terfly’s tail, where a little bite won't
that is a pity. An acute awareness of twenty-two scientific papers on mem- matter as much as a chomp on the
butterflies, which she developed after bers of the order, and discovered sev- head. Some markings mimic the eyes
a brief encounter with a swallowtail eral new species. of creatures frightening to predators;
in New Mexico, has convinced her other markings, common among
that butterflies add a luminous di- eee obsession is more be- “sweet-tasting”’ species, mimic the
mension to one’s life. nign: she collects facts and sto- patterns of unrelated butterflies that
ries about butterflies and then writes birds know to be “bitter.”
about them with grace and good Overall, however, Russell’s lyrical
humor. Did you know that most but- stories appeal to our aesthetic, rather
terflies have taste buds on their feet, than to our moral, sensibilities. We
and “eyes”—light-sensitive cells—on don’t ask what lessons we learn from a
their genitalia? That the caterpillars of Mozart concerto; nor should we ask
the Panamanian metalmark butterfly more of butterflies. Better to enjoy
secrete an intoxicating fluid they ex- them, not for their utility, but for
change with ants in return for protec- their quirkiness and their beauty. She
tion from wasps? Can you appreciate quotes Miriam Rothschild, niece of
the endurance of the male and female the great Victorian collector, who
queen butterflies, which are locked in viewed them, not with the eyes of a
coitus for as long as eight hours at a professional entomologist (which she
time (a sizable fraction of their active was) but as “dream flowers—child-
=~ Bean's Gore-Tex® lifespan)? Does it seem amazing that, hood dreams—which have broken
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Many of the oddities of butterfly life
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Colorful bands on a butterfly’s wing phere. Although oxygen is a rela-

URAL HISTORY July/August 2003

tively common element in the uni- ide, and water vapor. But sometime the presence of atmospheric oxygen
verse, its atoms are so reactive that around 2 billion years ago the oxygen has risen to its present level over time.
they never float around by them- presence began to increase, soon Alternating layers of red- and black-
selves. Pump an atmosphere full of reaching levels of between 5 and 18 banded ironstone, as well as coal beds,
monatomic oxygen, chemists will tell percent of what we have today. The provide some benchmarks, because
you, and every unattached oxygen evolution of life, of course, was what the rusting of iron and the fossiliza-
atom will immediately rush off to made that possible. Photosynthetic tion of coal depend on how much
find a mate, combining with iron to organisms, using chlorophyll and oxygen 1s present in the air. Pockets
form rust, with carbon to form car- other pigments to capture sunlight, of “ancient atmosphere,” trapped in
bon dioxide, with hydrogen to form were turning carbon dioxide and 100-muillion-year-old amber, may add
water. Even the diatomic molecule water into molecular oxygen. As direct evidence: in the mid-1980s
(O,) that occurs in the air we breathe those new forms of life flourished, geochemists using a quadrupole mass
is reactive enough to form ferric and oxygen began to be pumped ever spectrometer measured the oxygen in
carbonate compounds. Those com- faster into the atmosphere. Earth amber samples from various geologic
pounds should be abundant on a blossomed with life, the composition periods and reported that atmos-
planet, but pure oxygen, whether of its atmosphere closely coupled to pheric O, levels had been higher than
monatomic or molecular, should be the evolutionary process that was tak- 30 percent during the Cretaceous Pe-
vanishingly scarce—as it is, in fact, ing place in its seas and on its conti- riod, nearly twice what they are
on Mars and Venus. nents. With every breath we take, we today. (According to Lane, however,
When Earth’s atmosphere formed benefit from that momentous chain the controversy is still raging within
4 billion years ago, pure oxygen was of events. the scientific community about
probably rare here, too. Hyperactive Nick Lane, an English biochemist, whether the air inside amber has been
volcanoes, more common during has written a meticulously detailed hermetically sealed since the time it
Earth’s early years than they are now, history of oxygen on our planet, or- solidified from drops of tree sap.) And
cloaked the primordial planet with ganized around two major themes. the size of fossilized insects provides
nitrogen, sulfur dioxide, carbon diox- The first is the tricky problem of how tantalizing, albeit indirect, clues that

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 the atmospheric oxygen level may
ve been much higher during the nature.net go to “Environmental Defense”
age of the dinosaurs. (www.edf.org) and click on “Oceans.”
Only with such high levels of You can also select “Marine Pro-
oxygen, Lane argues, could a Car-
boniferous dragonfly called Mega-
Big-Fish Drought tected Areas” and “Sustainable Fish-
ing” from the drop-down menu at
neura, Which had a wingspan of al- the right. Or consult “American
most a yard, have been able to fly.
By Robert Anderson Oceans Campaign” for a long list of
(The largest modern dragonflies, by multiuse fish links (americanoceans.
comparison, are no more than four Cy a recent deep-sea fishing org/fish/link.htm). Finally, to view the
inches across.) In the end, such high trip—my first—off the coast results of an unusual effort by pri-
oxygen levels may have been low- of southern California, the yel- vate citizens to protect the Gulf of
ered by a worldwide firestorm that lowfin tuna were nowhere in sight. California (also known as the Sea
ended the age of the dinosaurs 65 We were surrounded instead by of Cortez), take a look at www.
million years ago. According to this scores of other boats, all equally seawatch.org. Be sure to scroll to the
scenario, the highly oxygenated at- idle, and the only fish I saw all day bottom of the page to read the bad
mosphere was sparked by an incom- were the silvery small fry used for news firsthand from a series of in-
ing asteroid, and the forests lit up as bait, swimming in tight circles in terviews with Mexican fishermen.
if they were tissue paper. their holding tank. The rapid decline of “big game”
That same week, as it happened, fish in the last few decades has not
[ee then jumps to a second major the journal Nature published a star- gone unnoticed among sport fishers.
theme: the role of oxygen in tling report on the rapid decline of To get some idea of how it used to
health.and longevity. Fragments of large ocean species all over the be, go to www.antiquefishingreels.com
molecules containing oxygen, called globe: populations of fishes such as and click on “Classic Fishing” in the
free radicals, form during the natural cod, halibut, marlin, shark, sword- tool bar at the left: you’ll find vin-
process of respiration. Free radicals fish, and tuna have sunk to about 10 tage photos of Ernest Hemingway
can chemically alter the normal func- percent of their pre-industrial levels. and Zane Grey, among others, with
tioning of cells. According to a grow- Not only are big fish disappearing at their prize trophies. Then go to a
ing body of evidence, the accumu- an alarming rate, but the top preda- site maintained by consultants for
lated damage plays an important role tors are also only about a fifth to a private-sector clients trying to pro-
in aging. Oxygen,win “effect, asa half the size they once were. You tect marine fisheries and habitats
highly reactive fuel; the cell, in rely- can access recent news stories about (Chambers-Associates.org/Big-Marine-
ing on oxygen to promote life, courts these and other, related findings Fish/home.html). Click on “Daily
death and, sooner or later, succumbs. at www.seaweb.org. To view graphs ‘Kill-o-Meter’” to learn how the
Lane’s book ranges widely over a host and charts that summarize the de- ongoing decimation of big fish is
of topics, from the usefulness of an- pletions, go to ram.biology.dal.ca/ tied to the phases of the moon.
tioxidants such as vitamin C in curing depletion and scroll down the page. (Commercial longliners fish hardest
colds, to the potential for prolonging The importance of large marine on bright nights when swordfish—
human life with enzymes that repair fishes, of course, goes far beyond their primary targets—feed most ac-
damaged DNA. And it turns out that sport; they are vital to the health of tively and closest to the surface;
the jump from the geologic theme in marine ecosystems. At “Oceana” many other large species are killed
the first part of the book to the med- (www.oceana.org) click on “Empty incidentally.)
ical theme in the second is not as Oceans—Where Are the Fish?” to As consumers, we are all affecting
great as it seems. A unifying thread of learn how large-fish species and the ocean’s ecosystem every time we
Lane’s narrative, fascinating in its other marine animals become casual- choose a fish to buy. At the Mon-
irony, binds it all together: oxygen, ties, or “bycatch,” of such industrial terey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood
essential element of life, is also an fishing gear as pelagic (oceanic) long- Watch Web page (mbayaq.org/cr/
agent of death. lines, gill nets, and shrimp trawls. seafoodwatch.asp), type in your fa-
Rational management of large- vorite fish to find out if its catch 1s
Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Su-
fish populations, moreover, would putting additional pressure on one of
pernova Story, is the WK.'T’ Sahm professor have enormous economic benefits the world’s critically low fisheries.
ofphysics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylva- worldwide. To bone up on current
nia, and director of Project CLEA, which pro- policies and proposals for restoring Robert Anderson is a_freelance science writer
duces widely used simulation software for edu- and safeguarding fish populations, living in Los Angeles.
cation in astronomy.

452 | NATURAL HISTORY July/August 2003

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OUT. THERE
Pas

Hazy, Hot, and Hidden

Dust-laden clouds at the centers of some galaxies may enshroud
titanic starbursts or baby quasars.
By Charles Liu

alaxiesilumi- dust. Now, in a recently

natethe uni- published study, Aaron S.
Verses and not Evans, an astronomer at
just with visible light. Stony Brook University
Think, for a moment, in New York State, and
about an incandescent his collaborators have
light bulb—it’s not only focused on the riddle
bright, it’s hot, too; and of the total output en-
the heat we feel comes ergy. They haven’t iden-
mostly from infrared tified the energy source
radiation emitted by the churning inside LIRGs—
bulb’s filament. Similarly, mainly because of an ob-
stars in galaxies pour out scuring cloud of dusty
visible light, as well as gas—but they have of-
plenty of radiation at fered new insight on
wavelengths beyond the how LIRGs might be
visible, such as infrared put together.
and ultraviolet. A typical Russell Mills, Between Two Lights, 1994-95
galaxy (or more pre- Agta to recent
cisely, its constituent stars) emits that energy as infrared radiation; the measurements, about
invisible radiation much the way the brightest ULIRGs generate a hun- half of the background light generated
light bulb does: roughly proportional dred times more infrared energy than in the universe today (not including
to the amount of visible light it the total energy output of the Milky the cosmic background radiation left
emits. Our Milky Way, with its sev- Way—at all wavelengths combined. over from the big bang) originates
eral hundred billion stars, is a fine Those findings were more than from LIRGs. LIRGs typically radiate
example of a galaxy that emits light puzzling. No normal population of more energy in just a few seconds
broadly over the range of the electro- stars can produce so much infrared than our Sun does in millennia. It is
magnetic spectrum. energy without generating a corre- also known that the energy from
There are, of course, some spectac- sponding amount of visible light. LIRGs originates from compact re-
ular exceptions. In the 1980s surveys Something else in those galaxies must gions near their galactic centers.
by NASA’s Infrared Astronomical be converting most of the visible light So what is the likely source of such
Satellite revealed an entire class of into infrared light. For that matter, energy? Think about how stars arise
galaxies shining far more intensely in the total energy output, whatever the [see “Universe: Dust to Dust,” by Neil
infrared light than they did in visible wavelength, was (and remains) a mys- deGrasse Tyson, May 2003]. Deep
light. We astronomers, straightfor- tery. Whatever generates the observed within interstellar clouds of gas and
ward as always, named the group “lu- energies streaming out of a LIRG dust, dense clumps form and collapse
minous infrared galaxies’—LIRGs must be far more powerful than any under their own weight. Eventually
for short—and the brightest among collection of stars known. the collapsed matter becomes so
them, “ultra-luminous infrared galax- In the past twenty years astrono- dense and hot that nuclear fusion be-
ies” (ULIRGs). Some of the LIR Gs mers have learned that the “infrared gins, and the clumps become fledg-
emit more than 90 percent of their converter” is a cloud of intervening ling stars. Millions of years later, the
stars’ radiation ionizes the clouds still straight beams of light into a criss-
surrounding them and pushes the crossing mishmash of unfocused glare.
clouds away, unveiling the bright And because the cloud itself is aglow
new stars to the rest of the universe. in infrared light—also an effect of
But while the stars are being formed, dust—seeing inside it is all the harder.
all that’s visible from the outside is Ironically, it turns out that to peer
the dust and gas surrounding them. through the haze, we need to look
The clouds that enshroud the cen- for emissions from the interior en-
ter ofa LIRG are thousands of times
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rHE SKY IN JULY AND AUGUST By Joe Rao

Mercury makes an Earth closes from 52 million to spot it as it sinks deep into the glow of
evening appear- within 39 million miles, the planet sunset. On the evening of July 2 a
ance, albeit a poor brightens from magnitude —1.4 to three-day-old crescent Moon passes
one, during late —2.3. The waning gibbous Moon four degrees north of Jupiter. Later in
July and early passes exceedingly close and to the July Jupiter pairs off with Mercury, as
| August. The little south of Mars during the predawn I noted earlier. In August Jupiter is
planet shines above hours of July 17—in fact, Floridians unobservable; it reaches conjunction
the west-north- living south of a line running with the Sun on the 22nd.
western horizon roughly from Fort Myers to Vero
about forty-five Beach will see the Moon occult, or Saturn, too, is lost in the solar glare as
minutes after sunset, then follows hide, the planet at around 4:14 A.M. July begins. It emerges into view by
the Sun behind the horizon fifteen Mars’s disk, readily visible through a the 15th; look above the east-north-
minutes later. Otherwise it’s not visi- telescope, expands throughout July, eastern horizon about an hour before
ble. Two conjunctions are of note: On making surface features easier to see. sunrise. By month’s end it’s coming
the evening of July 25 Jupiter slips less During August Mars rises about up about two-and-a-half hours before
than one-half a degree to the south of four minutes earlier each night and the Sun. By August Saturn has moved
Mercury, but the king of the gods is becomes simply dazzling, shining at into the constellation Gemini, and its
four times brighter than the gods’ magnitude —2.9 from August 22 until visibility in the morning sky im-
messenger. On the evening of the 30th proves; the planet is well above the
Mercury passes a fraction of a degree eastern horizon as dawn breaks. On
north of the blue star Regulus; in this In late August Mars will the morning of the 23rd Saturn can
instance, the gods’ messenger is four
times brighter than the little king
be closer to Earth than be found near the crescent
shining at magnitude 0.2.
Moon,

(which is what “regulus” means). it has been in nearly

The Moon in July reaches first quar-
Binoculars, a “severe-clear”
an open view to the horizon are prac-
sky, and
60,000 years. ter on the 6th at 10:32 PM. It waxes
tically musts to catch these events. full-on the 13th at. 3:21-2Mi and
Mercury vanishes into the blaze of September 3. During this apparition wanes to last quarter on the 21st at
sunset around the middle of August. Mars 1s the closest it has been to Earth 3:01 A.M. The Moon is new on the
in nearly 60,000 years. 29th at 2:53 a.M. In August the
Venus lingers in the dawn sky and is Anyone who has a telescope will Moon reaches first quarter on the
still detectable in early July roughly want to find out what it can do when 5th at 3:28 A.M. and becomes full on
thirty minutes before sunrise; look it’s trained on Mars this August. the 12th at 12:48 a.m. It wanes to
for it just two degrees above the east- What’s to be seen there? By now (it’s last quarter on the 19th at 8:48 PM.
northeastern horizon. The planet’s mid-spring on southern Mars) the and returns to new on the 27th at
proximity to dawn’s rosy fingers south polar cap should have shrunk 1:26 PM.
makes it hard to see. Binoculars to a small white speck. White clouds
certainly help; with such aid Venus may highlight the disk elsewhere. The Perseid meteor shower, on the
may actually appear quite brilliant The largest dark markings should be night of August 12-13, is spoiled this
despite the bright morning twilight. fairly easy to see with almost any year by the light ofa full Moon. Per-
Venus passes behind the Sun on Au- telescope at 100-power and greater, seids are typically fast and bright, and
gust 18, leaving the night sky until but the finer details are always hard-to they frequently leave long-enduring
late September. resolve. Mars comes closest to the trails; the best hope for seeing them is
Earth on the morning of August 27 to look in a direction of the sky away
Mars gets top billing throughout July at 5:51 A.M. The distance between from the Moon.
and August. Rising in the east- the two planets, measured from cen-
southeastern sky, the yellowish- ter to center, will be just 34,646,418 Earth reaches aphelion—its farthest
orange “star” looms ever brighter as miles. The next day Mars reaches op- point from the Sun—on July 4 at 2:00
it approaches its rendezvous with position to the Sun. A.M. Our star is 94,510,793 miles
Earth in late August. It rises about away.
three hours after sunset on July 1, Jupiter begins July as the brightest
but less than two hours after sunset “star” in the evening sky, but by mid- Unless otherwise noted all times are given
by the 31st. As its distance from the month you may need binoculars to in Eastern Daylight Time.

NATURAL HISTORY July/August 2003

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AMERICAN MUSEUM 6 NATURAL HISTORY ro)

YOUNG NATURALIST AWARDS 2003

Scientific discovery begins with expeditions.

() ver the past 134 years, American Museum of Natural History scientists “Now that | have completed my first
have mounted thousands of expeditions to observe, gather, and analyze year of observations...| feel that |
data to further our understanding of the natural world and human cul- know our land better and the animals
ture. Now in its sixth year, the Museum's National Center for Science Literacy, that live there, too....1 am glad | can
Education and Technology's Young Naturalist Awards program challenges stu- enjoy the early-morning call counts.”
dents in grades 7 through 12 to embark on their own scientific expeditions, ex-
ploring and reporting on a question in biology, Earth science, or astronomy. Aspen Island, by Elspeth Iralu (Home
These expeditions need not involve specialized equipment or travel to dis- School, Gallup, New Mexico; Grade 10)
tant lands. Science can begin with a keen eye and a backyard. From a park in While hiking with her family, Elspeth
Brooklyn to the rain forest of Hawaii, from a home aquarium to the coastal wa- came upon an aspen grove in a valley
ters of Nova Scotia, this year's Young Naturalists met their challenge with a where aspens are scarce. Her investi-
passion for inquiry, a recognition of the interdependence of life, and a con- gation centered on the environmental
cern for the human impact on the environment.
The winning entries (chosen from nearly 800) are summarized here. To
read the complete essays on the Museum's Web site, which also features
a brief profile of and interview with each winner, visit www.amnh.org/
youngnaturalistawards.
Entries are already being accepted for the 2004 Young Naturalist Awards
and will continue to be accepted until January 9, 2004.
The Young Naturalist Awards are made possible by a generous grant from
The J.P. Morgan Chase Foundation.

Oscawana: A Dying Lake?, by Sarah Bobwhite Quail Decline in Texas, by

Beganskas (Woodland Middle School, Donald Capra (Branch and Leaf
East Meadow, New York: Grade 7) Academy Home School, Abilene,
While on vacation in upstate New Texas: Grade 11)
York, Sarah decided to find out why the Concerned that bobwhite quail
once crystal clear waters of Lake Os- might be on their way toward extinc-
cawana were turning a murky green. tion, Donald volunteered for the Texas
Not only did she discover the causes of Quail Index. As a member of the TQI,
the lake’s problems, she also discov- Donald examined the factors that Aspen grove near Lost Lake, New Mexico
ered what local residents are doing to affect quail populations on his family’s
save the lake. ranch. He conducted surveys which characteristics that favored aspen
“| hope that the lake will improve so he hopes to use to develop a man- growth in this location. She compared
that my children and grandchildren can agement plan that the aspen grove with a control area,
enjoy its beauty and recreational will help to reverse examining factors such as elevation,
uses, aS my great-grandfather the trend in quail humidity, and temperature.
envisioned. By doing this pro- gam é decline. “From where | stand, | can’t see the
ject, | have discovered more gutiees Bobwhites roost
emerging patterns in my life. | only re-
about the lake | have known in a circle for member moments and short sea-
and enjoyed my entire life.” protection. sons. But aspens look back 10,000

THE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HISTORY BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
years and see what has changed. | ditions, | got a glimpse of an under-
am dwarfed by tall trees with long ground world located just across the
memories.” street from where | live.”

Exploring the Mystique of the Mush- Survival in the Northeast Wilderness,

room, by Yushan Kim (Athens High by Seth Levin (Moses Brown School,
School, Troy, Michigan; Grade 12) Providence, Rhode Island; Grade 9)
Yushan ventured into her back- After watching some news stories
yard—trich in biological activity due to of hikers being lost in the woods, Seth
a large amount of decaying wood. theorized that a lost individual could
Having never seen a mushroom there survive on what he or she found in the A butterfly seen along the stream in Pumice
before, she was surprised when she forest. After several expeditions to a Plains, Washington
found one cluster and then another. In local nature reserve, Seth compiled a
her investigation, Yushan examined long list of edibles and concluded that they are providing the basic require-
the connection between these organ- nKe ments for salmon, and to ensure that
uy
isms and their environment, generat- xr
Ee
my findings are not coincidental.”
ing informative illustrated charts, field
m
s
Z
sketches, and photographs. Arsenic and Zinc Distributions in
“Natural wonders awaiting our dis- Streams near Park City, Utah, by Doug
covery teem all around us, even in the Naftz (Park City High School, Park
tiniest of environments. Discovering City, Utah; Grade 10)
them for myself has been a wonder- After learning that his city’s drink-
fully fulfilling experience.” ing water supply contained elevated
levels of zinc and arsenic—both toxic
Worms in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, by to humans—Doug built a miniature
Linda Lam (Gladstone H. Atwall The parasol mushroom permeable reactive barrier chamber
Middle School 61, Brooklyn, New (Leucocoprinus procera) to see if he could remove arsenic
York; Grade 8) from water he collected. His experi-
While looking for worms for a fishing the forest was a virtual smorgasbord ment was a success. He concluded
trip, Linda became intrigued: why were of nutritious and tasty berries, nuts, that if PRBs are installed in the main
worms found in some locations and not leaves, and fungi. tunnel that supplies water, then
in others? She investigated three loca- “Until now, | hadn’t realized the im- enough arsenic could be removed to
tions in her local park to determine portance of these local plants, trees, lower the concentration to accept-
what environmental factors contribute and mushrooms, many of which | had able levels.
seen while walking in the woods “After identifying that there was a
around my home.” serious problem concerning arsenic
Wv1VONIT in the streams and possibly in the
Comparing Streams in Southwest drinking water of Park City, | decided
Washington to Determine the Needs of to see if there was a natural and cost-
Salmon, by Kristen Marini (Maple effective way to remove it.”
Grove Middle School, Battle Ground,
Washington; Grade 8) Surviving against All Odds: Investigat-
Kristen focused on a question: why ing the Adaptability of the Common
hasn't there been a large salmon run Periwinkle, by Natalie Parks (Halifax
in Salmon Creek since the early West High School, Halifax, Nova Sco-
1990s? She compared local streams tia; Grade 12)
in southwest Washington, some of Natalie decided to investigate the
Spiders prey on earthworms, contributing which have healthy salmon runs, to biological implications of a polluted
‘0 low population densities. determine what environmental factors environment using periwinkles. She
are beneficial to salmon. She discov- collected periwinkles from the North
‘0 varying worm populations. ered that some parts of Salmon Creek West Arm area of Halifax and also
“Completing these field expeditions are polluted and the probable cause from a pristine environment and com-
has given me greater insight into how for the lack of salmon runs. pared them. She concluded that
scientists observe and study the “! would like to travel to other chemical changes alone in its envi-
world around them. During my expe- creeks...and examine them to see if ronment will not eradicate the periwin-
 kle as it will always find ways to adapt. Saguaro Cactus: From Life to Death,
“Examining this species has given by Kyle Sheets (Doolen Middle
me insight into the ability of creatures School, Tucson, Arizona; Grade 7)
to adapt to even the most hostile of Kyle wanted to see if he could find
environments...! have a greater ap- examples of each stage of a
preciation for the survival abilities of saguaro’s life. He made several trips EXHIBITIONS
all creatures.” to the Sonoran desert where he docu- Chocolate,
mented, in words and images, the life June 14-September 7
cycle of this monumental plant. Gallery 3, third floor
“After spending all this time with the The delicious story of chocolate
FAH
SJASHS
saguaro cactus, | felt as if | had spans more than two thousand
gained another friend....! learned that years. This fascinating exhibition will
being a scientist is a lot of work, but explore the legends, history, ecology,
also a lot of fun.” economics, and enduring allure of
this delectable phenomenon.
A Comparison of Native Tree Seedling Chocolate and its national tour were devel-
Growth on Fallen Hapu’u Ferns and oped by The Field Museum, Chicago. This
the Adjacent Forest Floor in Volcano, project was supported, in part, by the Na-
Hawaii, by Kolea Zimmerman tional Science Foundation.
(Waiakea High School, Hilo, Hawaii;
Grade 11)
Venturing into the rain forest just Chocolate lastings
behind his house, Kolea noticed an
abundance of tree seedlings grow-
and More
ing on the fallen logs of the hapu’u Weekends during the run of
tree fern. He hypothesized that the Chocolate, you can sample fine
fallen hapu’u logs served as “nurs- chocolate in the retail shop out-
ery logs” for the development and side the exhibition or in the Food
growth of certain species. To test his Court and purchase luxurious
hypothesis, he compared the num- treats. Visit www.amnh.org for a
ber of seedlings and saplings on ha- schedule of events.
pu'u logs to the number of seedlings
eS : a =
and saplings on an equal area next
This 25-foot-tall saguaro is estimated to be to the logs. Vietnam:
100 years old. Journeys of Body, Mind & Spirit
Through January 4, 2004
Aquarium: An Ecosystem in Miniature, Gallery 77, first floor
by Charlotte Seid (Thomas Jefferson This comprehensive exhibition pre-
High School for Science and Technol- V310ysents Vietnamese culture in the early
NVWYAWWIZ

ogy, Alexandria, Virginia; Grade 9) 21* century. The visitor is invited to

A tropical fish enthusiast, Char- “walk in Vietnamese shoes” and ex-
lotte decided to examine the aquatic plore daily life among Vietnam's
community she had created in an more than 50 ethnic groups.
aquarium in her home. During her
Organized by the American Museum of
expedition she examined how each
Natural History, New York, and the Vietnam
fish species adapted to the aquar- Museum of Ethnology, Hanoi. This exhibi-
ium environment, and observed how tion and related programs are made pos-
fish that never meet in nature inter- sible by the philanthropic leadership of the
The endangered oha’ grows in the Hawaiian
acted. rain forest. Freeman Foundation. Additional generous
“Through observing, sketching, funding provided by the Ford Foundation
for the collaboration between the American
and ultimately becoming more famil- “Fond childhood memories always
Museum of Natural History and the Vietnam
iar with my aquarium and its piscean included being respectful of all the Museum of Ethnology. Also supported by
inhabitants, | realized how natural native plants. We were taught from a the Asian Cultural Council. Planning grant
an
ann
a
forces and behaviors are prevalent very young age to respect the hapu’u provided by the National Endowment for
even in an artificial setting.” and other native plants of our forest.” the Humanities.
Discovering Vietnam’s Biodiversity The Indigenous Peoples INFORMATION
Through January 4, 2004 of Guyana Call 212-769-5100 or visit
Akeley Gallery, second floor Saturday, 8/9, 1:00-2:00 p.m. WWwW.amnh.org.
This exhibition of photographs high- Lal Balkaran discusses indigenous
lights Vietnam's remarkable diversity Guyanese cultures. TICKETS AND REGISTRATION
of plants and animals. Call 212-769-5200, Monday-Friday,
This exhibition is made possible by the Africa: Facing the Challenges of 8:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m., and Saturday,
Arthur Ross Foundation and by the National Globalization 10:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m., or visit
Science Foundation. Sunday, 8/10, 2:30-4:00 p.m. www.amnh.org. A service charge
This panel examines how multi- may apply.
DEMONSTRATION national partnerships affect the local
Traditional Mexican Chocolate economies and peoples of Africa. All programs are subject to change.
Preparation
Saturday, 7/26, 3:30-4:30 p.m. PERFORMANCES
With Zarela Martinez, restaurateur Passing on Traditions:
and cookbook author. Aztec Music and Dance
Saturday, 8/9, 2:15-3:15 p.m.
s
Nm
The ancient music and dance
A
SE
m of Mexico.
a
mn
iC
Oo
=
iS
D
Kotchegna Dance Company
amo
AS
= Sunday, 8/10, 1:15-2:15
4m
D
m
or 4:15-5:15 p.m.
o
>
F<
Stories from the lvory Coast.
cS
D
>x<
Starry Nights: Live Jazz
Friday, 7/4, 5:30 and 7:00 p.m.
ASALYNOO
GWLO
Norman Hedman’s Tropique
Molinillos are used to blend and
froth chocolate. Friday, 8/1, 5:30 and 7:00 p.m.
Visit www.amnh.org for lineup.
LECTURES
Art(ifacts) and Science The 5:30 performance on
of Chocolate 8/1 will be broadcast live on
Thursday, 7/17, 7:00-9:00 p.m. WBGO Jazz 88.
Museum-inspired chocolate sculptures
will be showcased and discussed.

Pre-Columbian History of Chocolate

Become a Member
Saturday, 7/26, 2:15-3:15 p.m. Kotchegna Dance Company
of the American Museum
With Michael D. Coe, author of of Natural History
The True History of Chocolate. HAYDEN PLANETARIUM to enjoy:
PROGRAMS
Experience the sights Virtual Universe e Free admission
and sounds of a bustling The Structure of Our Galaxy ¢ Discounts on purchases
Tuesday, 7/1, 6:30-7:30 p.m. and program tickets
Vietnamese Our Place in the Universe ¢ Subscriptions to Natural
Tuesday, 8/5, 6:30-7:30 p.m. History and Rotunda
Marketplace e Members-only special events
and sample traditional Celestial Highlights e And more!
foods at Café Pho. Stars of Summer
For further information call 212-
Through January 4, 2004 Tuesday, 7/29, 6:30-7:30 p.m.
769-5606 or visit www.amnh.org.
77TH STREET LOBBY, FIRST FLOOR
Here’s Mars!
Tuesday, 8/26, 6:30-7:30 p.m.

THE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HISTORY BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
 ENDPAPER
SAAS TEU A.

On Hostile order plants, but it opens up a niche to swards oftiny

lichens belonging to little known species.
Not only are such “pylon lichens” rare, but their

Ground
biology is unusual in other respects as well. Instead of
being slow growing, like most lichens, they can com-
plete their life cycle in less than a year. Their natural
habitat is the spoil heaps of heavy-metal mines. I
By Oliver L. Gilbert spent one holiday following pylon lines across the
countryside before turning to a similar niche—the
ground under the galvanized crash barriers beside the
British motorways. Word soon spread, and it wasn’t
nly once have I been seriously embarrassed long before my North American colleagues were
while searching for lichens. The incident recording similar species along the interstates and
took place in 1999, a more innocent time, around other American analogues to the British sites.
before it became pretty much unthinkable to “wan- Lichens can grow in such stressed places because
der onto” a military installation. I was poking they are made up of fungi and algae living together
around the perimeter of a military symbiotically: the algae supply the
airfield in Cornwall, England, the fungi with carbohydrates, and the
inside of which, even then, was fungi supply the algae with minerals
strictly “off limits.” But there was no and much-needed shade. When
one around, and the control tower they team up that way, they can live
was just a smudge on the horizon. I closer to the poles, higher up in the
crawled through a hole in the fence mountains, and farther out in the
and started my survey. deserts than other organisms can.
Why would I take such a risk? What is more, they can live in
Lichens have been intensively stud- places that didn’t even exist in the
ied in Great Britain by an army of earliest days of lichen-hunting—
amateur naturalists since about industrial wasteland, concrete struc-
1750. In the beginning they came tures, tarmacs, railway lines, aban-
from the leisured class of doctors, doned cars. All have proved fruitful.
clergymen, and the landed gentry.
But soon they were joined by he day I crawled through the
members of all classes: schoolteach- fence around the airfield, it was
ers, gardeners, coal miners, ped- high summer, and the air was still
dlers, even a Scottish umbrella enough for me to hear the sound of
maker. In short, thousands of bees droning. I was also aware of—
lichenophiles have been crisscross- though, as usual, indifferent to—the
ing the countryside for more than human activity around me, the oc-
250 years. casional helicopter flying overhead.
That long history of study has cre- But a pilot must have spotted a
ated a dilemma for modern British r furtive figure walking, stooping,
lichenologists: how can one make sometimes lying prone. Before long
Lichen community (mixed species),
one’s mark in such a well-tilled field? Golspie, Sutherland, Scotland a Land Rover full of armed guards
An ability to think laterally helps. in riot gear pulled up beside me, no
But true devotees recognize that the key to discovery doubt wary of the hammer and chisel I was clutch-
lies in new habitats that are emerging all the time in ing. I pleaded that I was just a harmless “nature
unlikely places, many virtually unexplored. watcher,” pursuing my hobby. But the station com-
The first neglected habitat I discovered was associ- mander was not amused. He gave me a dressing
ated with the pylon towers that support high-voltage down, and sent me packing.
lines. The pylons are coated with zinc, and so the
ground underneath them gets a highly toxic drip Oliver L. Gilbert is a retired lecturer from Sheffield University,
during rain. That keeps out most of the higher- England. He has been interested in botany since an early age.

N
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FEATURES

36 TERRIBLE LIZARDS OF THE SEA

When dinosaurs ruled the land,
other giant reptiles stalked the deep.
RICHARD ELLIS

COVER STORY
28 BOLTS FROM BEYOND
Some “shooting stars” come to earth
bearing secrets from other planets.
DONALD GOLDSMITH
46 MOONSTRUCK
Giant impacts, cataclysmic
bombardments, oceans of
magma: no wonder the
lunar landscape inspires
such fascination.
G. JEFFREY TAYLOR

42 SPLENDID ISOLATION COVER

The lonely Socotra archipelago is Be Nineteenth-century
a refuge to the old anda B lithograph of a
meteor shower
birthplace for the new. Visit our Web site at
STORY BEGINS
DICCON ALEXANDER @ ON PAGE 28 www.nhmag.com
DEPARTMENTS

6 THE NATURAL MOMENT

Cold Fire of the Night
Photograph by Art Wolfe
8 UP FRONT
Editor’s Notebook

10 CONTRIBUTORS

IZLE PLeRS

14 SAMPLINGS
Stéphan Reebs
18 UNIVERSE
In the Beginning
Neil deGrasse Tyson
22 FINDINGS
The Pleasure (and Pain)
of “Maybe”
Robert M. Sapolsky
26 BIOMECHANICS
Squeeze Play
Adam Summers

54 REVIEW
The Varieties
of Mathematical Experience
James Vv Rauff
60 BOOKSHELF
Laurence A. Marschall

63 nature.net
Robert Anderson

64 OUT THERE
The Quest for the Golden Lens
Charles Liu
65 THE SKY IN SEPTEMBER
Joe Rao
68 AT THE MUSEUM

72 ENDPAPER
Private Choices
Dru Clarke

PICTURE CREDITS: Page 10

 CRUISING WITH A PURPOSE
Extraordinary Voyages, Distinguished Lecturers
As one of the most experienced designers of custom-made travel/learning
programs, we specialize in relaxed voyages aboard small, elegant ships.
We travel to the heart of each region we visit, the places that are essential
to a region’s character and identity. To guide us, we call on the knowledge
of experts whose engaging lectures comprise the natural history, geology,
anthropology, archaeology and culture of the destination. This complete
package fosters a sense a camaraderie and a spirit of exploration...
making us a leader in our field for over 30 years.

Antarctica Sicily: Crossroads of The Great Lakes

Penguin expert Julia Clarke leads this extraor- Mediterranean Civilizations Discover all five of the Great Lakes on this fas-
dinary expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula With its treasures from throughout the cinating journey through the American heart-
aboard the new expedition ship Orion. ages, Sicily is a virtual living museum. On land. Highlights include the scenic Thousand
Exploring via ship and Zodiac landing craft, this unique circumnavigation you'll see Islands of Lake Ontario; Whitefish Point Bird
youll visit busy penguin rookeries, encounter some of the most important remains from Observatory; beautiful Mackinac Island,
whales and seals, and witness an ever-chang- the Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Niagara Falls, and a traditional Native
ing panorama of tabular icebergs and snow- Renaissance periods. American powwow.
capped mountains. June I - 11, 2004 July 17 - 25, 2004
January 29 - February 11, 2004 Study Leader: TBA Study Leader: Al Duba, AMNH
Study Leader: Dr. Julia Clarke, AMNH September 2 -10, 2004
The Circumnavigation of Study Leaders: Alan and MJ. Brush,
Antarctica, South Georgia, Newfoundland AMNH
and the Falklands Naturalists Alan and M.J. Brush team up
Explore the natural and geological wonders of
Greenland and the
with whale expert Pierre Beland on this
Antarctica with geologist Malcolm McKenna in-depth exploration of Newfoundland.
Canadian Arctic
and Trevor Potts, an expert on Polar explorer Excursions include Witless Bay Ecological Experience the abundant wildlife and the
Ernest Shackleton. In addition to Antarctica captivating landscapes of the Far North on
Reserve; Terra Nova National Park;
youll visit Elephant Island, where Shackleton’s this study voyage along the rugged coasts of
Twillingate Island; Gros Morne National Greenland and northern Canada. You'll also
crew took refuge; the remote Falkland Islands; Park; and the ancient Viking settlement at witness the fascinating art and culture of the
and spectacular South Georgia. Lanse Aux Meadows. native Inuit people.
- February 18 - March 11, 2004 June 11 - 19, 2004 July 24 - August 6, 2004
Study Leaders: Dr. Malcolm McKenna, Study Leaders: Alan and MJ. Brush, Study Leader: Francois Vuilleumier, AMNH
AMNH emeritus, and Trevor Potts AMNG, and Pierre Beland, August 20 - September 2, 2004
The Mighty Amazon St. Lawrence National Institute of Study Leader: Robert Rockwell, AMNH
Join ornithologists Francois Vuilleumier and Ecotoxicology
Journey of Odysseus
Paul Sweet on an extraordinary 2,000-mile Treasures of the Adriatic Sea Journey into the realm of gods, nymphs, and
journey along this storied river. Cruising via Discover the extraordinary art and archi- monsters on this voyage that traces the epic
ship and Zodiac landing craft, you'll venture tecture that can be found in the string of travels of Odysseus. Excursions include Troy,
into a labyrinth of narrow tributaries, disem- unspoiled cities lining the Adriatic. The where Odysseus’ journey began; Mycenae, the
bark for treks through the rain forest, and visit itinerary includes Venice, Split, Mostar, kingdom of Agamemnon; Malta, home of
isolated river villages, everywhere encountering Dubrovnik, Kotor, Ravenna, and the Calypso; Sicily; and Ithaca, the hero's long-
the region’s remarkable wildlife. unusual hilltop Trulli villages. sought home.
March 30 - April 17, 2004 June 26 - July 6, 2004 October 7 - 21, 2004
Study Leader: Francois Vuilleumier, AMNH Study Leader: Anne-Marie Bouché, Study Leader: Daniel Mendelsohn,
April 15 - May 2, 2004 Princeton University Princeton University
Study Leader: Paul Sweet, AMNH

To learn more about our distinctive expeditions call

Bug
Travel Dynamics International
(800) 257-5767 or visit us on the Web at
132 East 7Oth Street, NY, New York 10021
www. Itavel DynamicsInternational.com
info@ TravelDynamicsInternational. com
 THE NATURAL MOMENT UP FRONT
we ars
NEO
US REE
~« See preceding pages

Hard Rain
very year about this time, when the night skies are clear, and
when standing still under the stars for half an hour doesn’t
call for a parka, I like to go outside and take in the show. It’s
pretty simple astronomy: orient to a few constellations, vaguely fa-
miliar from the same splendid viewing last year; check out Joe Rao’s
latest almanac of the Moon and planets (see “The Sky in
Ase was the radiant Ro- September,” page 65); and, with any luck, “catch a falling star.”
man goddess of dawn, a Most meteors are nothing fancy: a fleeting streak, often not very
charioteer who could light up bright. A friend to say, “Hey, look!” is nice, because if you glance in
the night sky. Her namesakes, the the wrong direction, it’s gone. But if rocks from the sky seem a
aurora borealis and aurora aus- small thing, no more consequential than the fireflies of July and
tralis, are similarly un-Earthly: August, take a look at the Moon. Turn to page 46 for the gallery
electrons and protons pour out of of lunar photographs that accompany G. Jeftrey Taylor’ article,
the Sun and speed through space “Moonstruck.” Make a mental note of the chaotic surface. And the
until they hit a region rich in next time youre looking at the real Moon, imagine that you're a time
gases—the atmospheres of most traveler, gazing at the Earth as it appeared, say, four billion years ago.
planets and of a few moons do
nicely. As the particles collide fe easy to forget that the Moon records the history of our own cos-
with different gases, they trigger mic neighborhood. The Earth, too, was once subjected to an in-
colored light-works: red or green conceivably violent rain of rock—and without water or an atmos-
from oxygen, for instance, or phere, our planet, too, might still look like the wasted battlefield of an
blue or violet from nitrogen. epic war. The story of meteorites, as Donald Goldsmith tells it in his
If Earth had no magnetism, like “Bolts from Beyond” (page 28), is a tumultuous one, but it is also a
Venus, the light show would be story with great scientific promise: a few dozen meteorites have been
erratic. If Earth were magnetized identified from the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid Vesta, serendipitous
closer to its equator, as Neptune gifts from the cosmos that carry vital clues about our planetary origins.
is, Mexico City would be prime To most people, though, the most noteworthy meteorite of the
for viewing. As it is, auroras on Earth’s past was the one that killed the dinosaurs. That, too, was
Earth follow magnetic lines of probably a lucky accident—for us. It’s hard to imagine how we
force that converge at the north mammals could have so thoroughly covered the Earth had the killer
and south magnetic poles. They asteroid not knocked off some big reptiles and opened up some turf.
can be seen year-round; check the In his article “Terrible Lizards of the Sea” (page 36), Richard Ellis
Internet for readily available au- describes one of the more successful families of prehistoric creatures
rora “weather” forecasts. with large teeth that ever roamed—or at least swam—the Earth: the
Eager to capture the lights, mosasaurs. Mosasaurs had flourished for a long time, 25 million
photographer Art Wolfe took the years, and there is no reason to think they were on their way out
frozen Dalton Highway, which when they were abruptly extinguished. We may owe our very exis-
stretches 414 miles from Fair- tence to a big, fast-moving rock.
banks to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.
He watched the aurora reel and his month the newly renovated Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites
dance in pale greens for two reopens at the American Museum of Natural History. Anyone
hours above the Brooks Range. fortunate enough to visit will find plenty more reasons there, as our
What he found most mystical columnist Neil deGrasse Tyson (“Universe,” page 18) puts it, to
was that “when the film was de- “keep looking up.” —PETER BROWN
veloped, there were lovely reds
that had been there, but just Natural History (ISSN 0028-0712) is published monthly, except for combined issues in July/August and December/ January, by Natural History Magazine,
Inc., at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, NY 10024, E-mail: nhmag@)naturalhistorymag.com,
couldn’t be picked up by the Natural History Magazine, Ine., is solely responsible for editorial content and publishing practices. Subscriptions; $30.00 a year; for Canada and all other
countries: $40.00 a year, Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and at additonal mailing offices. Canada Publications Mail No. 40030827, Copy-
naked eye.” right © 2003 by Natural History Magazine, Inc, All rights reserved, No part of this periodical may be reproduced without written consent of Natural His-
tory. If you would like to contact us regarding your subscription or to enter a new subscription, please write to us at Natural History, P.O. Box 5000, Har-
—Erin M. Espelie lan, [A 51593-0257. Postmaster: Send address changes to Natural History, P.O, Box 5000, Harlan, [A 51537-5000, Printed in the U.S.A

8 NATURAL FISTORY September 2003

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 ONTRIBUTORS

In his twenty-five-year career Seattle-based photographer ART

Wore (“The Natural Moment,” page 6) estimates he has
taken a million photographs (see his Web site at www.art
wolfe.com). His latest book, Edge of the Earth, Corner of the Sky,
showcases Wolfe’s landscape photography, with essays by Art
Davidson. Wolfe made his photograph of the northern lights in
PETER BROWN Editor-in-Chief
Alaska under the midnight light of a half moon in March.
Mary Beth Aberlin Elizabeth Meryman
Trained as both a research astronomer and an attorney, DONALD GOLDSMITH Managing Editor Art Director

(“Bolts from Beyond,” page 28) devoted himself to popularizing astronomy

Board of Editors
thirty years ago. Since then he has written more than twenty T. J. Kelleher, Avis Lang, Vittorio Maestro
books and collaborated on many PBS television programs
Michel DeMatteis Associate Managing Editor
on astronomy, including the 1991 series The Astronomers. In
1995 he was awarded the American Astronomical Society’s Lynette Johnson Associate Managing Editor
Annenberg Foundation Prize for outstanding contribu- Thomas Rosinski Associate Art Director
tions to science education through astronomy. He lives in Erin M. Espelie Special Projects Editor
Berkeley, California. Graciela Flores Editorial Associate

Richard Milner Contributing Editor

“T’ve always been interested in life in the sea—past, present,
and future,” says naturalist, author, and artist RICHARD ELLIS Sarah L. Zielinski Intern

(“Terrible Lizards of the Sea,” page 36). His story in this issue = J
on mosasaurs, a formidable group of extinct marine lizards, is od

adapted from his new book, Sea Dragons: Predators of the Pre- Pig ~ BRENDAN BANAHAN Publisher
historic Oceans (University Press of Kansas). His other recent « Gale Page Consumer Marketing Director i
books include The Empty Ocean and Aquagenesis: The Origin Maria Volpe Promotion Director a
and Evolution of Life in the Sea. Ellis is a research associate in paleontology at the _ Edgar L. Harrison National Advertising Manager
=

a ‘
American Museum of Natural History in New York. Sonia W. Paratore Senior Account Manager
*
a4
Donna M. Lemmon Production Manager
Photographer and botanist DICCON ALEXANDER (“Splendid %
Michael Shectman Fulfillment Manager
Isolation,’ page 42) is a scientific associate in the botany de-
aes Jennifer Evans Business Administrator
partment of the Natural History Museum in London. Since
1994 he has done extensive work with a team from the Royal cor :
Advertising Sales Representatives
a
Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, Scotland, documenting the New York—Metrocorp Marketing, 212-972-1157,
unique flora of the Socotra archipelago. _ Duke International Media, 212-598-4820 |

Detroit—Joe McHugh, Breakthrough Media, 586-360-3980

Minneapolis—R ickertMedia, Inc., 612-920-0080 are
G. JEFFREY TAYLOR (“Moonstruck,” page 46) is a research professor in the _ West Coast—SD Media, 310-264-7575, a
Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at the University of Hawai‘i ©) Parris & Co., 415-641-5767,
in Honolulu. His primary interest is planetary evolution, focusing on the role ‘Toronto—American Publishers a
Representatives Ltd., 416-363-1388 ae
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Mars, Mercury, and the asteroids, as well as on the role of National Direct Response—Smyth Media Group, 4
aqueous alteration processes on Mars. He is the author of 646-638-4985
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more than 140 refereed articles. He and Linda Martel, an “
associate at the institute, also publish an online popular a’
Topp HAaApPER Vice President, ScienceEducation i
science magazine, Planetary Science Research Discoveries
}
(www.psrd.hawaii.edu). 2’ et

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NATURAL HISTORY September 2003

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LETTERS

Who Minds the Store? Iraqi lives it would have and is prohibited by the April 16. Did the military
The two discussions of the been worth losing to safe- 1954 Hague Convention consider protection of the
looting and destruction of guard the museums and for the Protection of museum to be a high prior-
[raq’s precious ancient their artifacts. Cultural Property in the ity it could not safely fulfill
artifacts—‘“Lost Time,” by If we had used our Event of Armed Conflict. prior to April 16? Or was it
John Malcolm Russell, and limited resources to protect Art is not necessarily safer in unconcerned about the
“Aftershocks,” by David the cultural assets of Iraq, first-world countries: major museum until the media
Keys [6/03]—are a wake- what else might have been paintings in Germany were and Secretary of State Colin
up call about the folly of destroyed? Certainly the destroyed during the Second Powell compelled it to take
retaining world-class antiq- destruction was a tragedy, World War, and several hun- action? Only an indepen-
uities in their third-world but to blame the military dred works by the sculptor dent investigation can
countries of origin. Only for the results of civil dis- Auguste Rodin were lost provide answers to such
in the great museums and order is unreasonable. when the offices of Cantor - questions.
universities of the first Much of the looting Fitzgerald were destroyed
world can irreplaceable seems to have been well during the 9/11 attack. Strategic Waters
As an alternative to I found the review by
expropriation, the former Sandra Postel [“Hydro
Ottoman practice of Dynamics,’ 5/03] of Robert
dividing excavated finds Kandel’s and Diana Raines
between the host country Ward’s books on the nature
and the foreign institution and scarcity of freshwater to
sponsoring the excavations be extremely poignant. At
reduces the risks associated the moment I am sitting
with having all your eggs in beside the Shatt al Hillah, a
one basket. Host countries river within just miles of the
might consider reinstituting Euphrates. The importance
such a practice—with the of freshwater in this region 1s
understanding that divi- impossible to miss.
sions could be negotiated as Today’s decisions on the
open-ended loans rather distribution and use of water
than as gifts—but only if will ripple through decades,
“T can’t understand why he has collectors and certain if not centuries, of human
to go ashore to look for bugs.” museums in the first world interaction. The availability
stop financing the plunder of water in the Middle East
antiquities be properly planned and executed. of archaeological sites. is a particularly thorny
conserved and studied. Why didn’t the Iraqis do Mr. Everhart correctly problem. Constructing one
Expropriation of anti- more to protect their trea- blames the looting on the or two state-of-the-art
quities from a place like sures? And shouldn't they looters, but it is unrealistic desalination plants on the
Iraq, where the population take at least some responsi- to eliminate a police force Mediterranean along the
has been subjected to bility for the lawlessness? and then hope that crimi- Gaza Strip would lessen the
despotism and has no con- Michael J. Everhart nals will no longer commit Palestinians’ reliance on
nection with the ancient Derby, Kansas crimes. No one argues that Israeli-controlled water.
culture under its feet, is the anybody should have been Large plants might even
most suitable solution. JOHN MALCOLM RUSSELL placed in mortal jeopardy provide the Palestinians with
John B. Bute REPLIES: Both letters raise to protect the museum, but a marketable product. For
El Lago, Texas issues that have been the would guarding it have the Palestinians to have the
subject of much debate. been that dangerous? Major capacity to sell water in
David Keys seems to blame Although the tradition armed resistance around the excess of their needs, partic-
the damage done to Iraq’s of the victor expropriating museum ended on April 9, ularly to Israel, would estab-
archaeological heritage on the art of the vanquished— the museum was looted on lish a commodity exchange
the lack of military inter- a tradition Mr. Bute seems April 10-11, the staff began far more valuable than the
vention. As both a veteran to advocate—goes back to returning on April 12, and cheap labor that now daily
and ascientist, I’d like to Mesopotamia, this practice the United States posted crosses the borders.
ask how many American or is no longer fashionable, guards at the building on Given the political will,

2
NATURAL HISTORY September 2003
the U. S. could negotiate ‘impressive knowledge of southern Mexico while can still be integrated into
donations from the many the subject but also her dining on those same basic a respectable professional
Arab countries that masterful writing style— jelly sandwiches Mr. Dunn career by any youngster
bemoan the plight of the referring to Earth’s earliest was eating in Costa Rica living today.
Palestinian people yet offer organisms as “cottage (mine, however, were made Gary Noel Ross
little in the way of long- industries,” for instance, or with peanut butter as well). Baton Rouge, Louisiana
term economic solutions. describing volcanoes as I was moved by his
Helping to build a viable being “perfectly happy to description of his fieldwork, AMENDMENT: The first
Palestinian economy erupt under ice.” as well as by the sense of paragraph of Martha
through the manufacture Perhaps Princeton adventure that he portrayed Hurley’s reply to an
of this “artificial” natural should ask her to teach in so well. Our techno-savvy, enquiry concerning a
resource would do positive the English department dot-com culture, with its photograph of the golden
things for everyone rather than the geosciences “reality-based” nightly Vietnamese cypress
concerned. department. television offerings, makes [‘““Letters,’ 6/03] was in-
Lt. Col. Mark L. Kimmey Robert M. Martin Jr. many people forget that the tended to refer to cypresses
U.S. Army Reserve Dallas, Texas vast majority of living things in general. Preferable word-
Humanitarian Assistance on our planet still reside in ing would have been: “The
Coordination Center The Joys of Fieldwork remote places, awaiting our caption should have speci-
Al Hillah, Iraq Robert Dunn’s story about discovery and study. fied that for a mature cy-
army ants and their beetle The same passion for press to bear both needles
Ode to the Earth “ouests” [“Impostor in the discovery and adventure and scaly leaves on the same
Gabrielle Walker’s article Nest,” 6/03] brought forth that inspired the early branch is highly unusual.”
on the geological epoch personal waves of nostalgia. icons of natural history
known as “snowball Earth” As a field entomologist, I (Captain James Cook, Natural History’ e-mail
[“The Longest Winter,” have vivid memories of Charles Darwin, Alfred address is nhmag@natural
4/03] shows not only her pursuing butterflies in Russel Wallace, and so on) historymag.com

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Blowin’ in the Wind Drugs from Seaweed?

imagine finding marine plankton drifting Plants have no immune systems. Chemical
through thin air at 30,000 feet. That's warfare is their way of fighting pathogens
the surprise that greeted Kenneth Sassen and parasites: they manufacture com-
of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and pounds that prevent the growth of specific
his colleagues when they examined ice disease-causing microorganisms. And
crystals collected by a research aircraft sometimes those compounds are effective
that had flown through cirrus clouds over against human pathogens as well—the
Oklahoma in September 1997. A recent basis for much pharmacological research as
paper by Sassen and his co-authors shows well as traditional medicine, and many ex-
numerous images of variously shaped hortations to preserve biodiversity.
crystals with cell-like structures embed- Julia Kubanek, a biochemist at the
ded in them. Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta,
The clouds were remnants of Hurricane and her colleagues at the Scripps Institu-
The alga Lobophora variegata (greenish
Nora, which had originated in the Pacific tion of Oceanography in La Jolla, Califor-
ruffles): apothecary of the sea?
Ocean, swept up Mexico's Baja Peninsula, nia, suggest that seaweed could be simi-
and slowed to a tropical storm over the larly tapped for future drugs. Marine growth of two marine fungi that cause dis-
U.S. Southwest. The investigators think plants literally live in a sea of bacteria, ar- ease in marine plants.
Nora’s high winds whipped up droplets of chaea, viruses, and fungi—some of which Nevertheless, lobophorolide had no ef-
seawater and then lofted the droplets, are bound to be pathogenic—yet they sel- fect on a pathogenic bacterium, and did
along with their resident plankton, to the dom get sick. Surprisingly little is known not repel herbivorous fishes. Kubanek and
top of the troposphere. From there the about seaweed’s chemical defenses, but her team think other compounds may pick
plankton blew far overland to the east, all Kubanek and her team have begun to up where this one leaves off. Algae may
the while serving as nucleation points for remedy that deficiency. turn out to be underwater pharmacies, de-
some of the ice crystals that formed in the From the brown alga Lobophora varie- ploying a variety of medicines, each aimed
clouds. (“Midlatitude cirrus clouds de- gata—a tropical seaweed especially domi- at a different affliction. (“Seaweed resis-
rived from Hurricane Nora: A case study nant in the Cariblbean—the investigators tance to microbial attack: A targeted
with implications for ice crystal nucleation have isolated a potent new compound chemical defense against marine fungi,”
and shape,” Journal of the Atmospheric they call lobophorolide. In laboratory Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 60:873-91, April 1, 2003) tests, small quantities of it stunted the Sciences 100:6916—21, June 10, 2003)

The Fruits of Prehistory

Agriculture began in Mesopotamia, the “cradle of civilization,” right?
True, but it also seems to have arisen independently in several other
places as well, including China and Mesoamerica. In the 1970s some
archaeologists asserted that New Guinea was one of those places.
Their evidence at the time was equivocal, but now Tim Denham of
Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and his colleagues have col-
lected enough strong-evidence to show that bananas were first
farmed in the highlands of New Guinea at least 7,000 years ago.
What did they find? Numerous fossilized remains—plant crystals
(of taro as well as bananas) and pollen—that complement the well-
dated remains of ancient cultivation mounds and ditches. Nowadays
there are hundreds of varieties of bananas; collectively they've be-
come one of the world’s most important food crops. Strange to re-
late, however, fruit lovers in the United States have been munching
on bananas only since the nineteenth century. (“Origins of agricul-
ture at Kuk Swamp in the highlands of New Guinea,” Science
301:189-93, July 11, 2003)

RAL HISTORY September 2003

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Experiment of the Month

|
| It isn't easy being an archaeologist. The ancient artifacts you work
with are often battered and fragmentary, and you have to base a
“lot of your interpretations on the stratum where you find the arti-
facts. Given the many species of burrowing animals—which seem
pretty cavalier about the effects of their excavations on scientific
evidence—it seems perilous indeed to put much stock in the dis-
covery stratum. Animals might have displaced your crucial arti-
‘facts many times before you unearthed them.
Knowing what a burrower the armadillo is—and how little at- Six-banded armadillo (Euphractus sexcinctus),
the archaeologist's helper?
tention had been paid to it—the Brazilian archaeologists Astolfo
G. Mello Araujo of the University of Sdo Paulo and José Carlos thoroughly mucked-up earth. The effects were easy to see: blue
Marcelino of Sao Paulo's Department of Historical Patrimony de- objects pushed many inches up to the yellow ones, yellows —
/ cided to study the animal’s effects on an experimental “dig” at pushed down among the blues, big and small items both dis-
the Sao Paulo Zoo. They spray-painted four groups of ersatz ar- lodged. Fortunately, though, the concentration of objects from
tifacts (actually ceramic shards and stone flakes) in four distinct a given stratum still peaked near their original level. P
colors and sprinkled them into four separate | layers in the One possible benefit of this kind of “noise” in the archaeo-
ground. The result was a two-foot-deep “layer cake,” whose top logical signal is that by bringing artifacts to the surface, armadil- am
layer of artifacts was open tothe air and whose other layers werelos can help archaeologists locate promising sites for their onan
| separated from one another by eight inches ofearth. more systematic digging. (“The role of armadillos in the move- :
Then alone female armadillo was turned loose at thesite for ‘ment of archaeological materials: An experimental “approach,”
almost two months,afterwhichthearchaeologists surveyed the _Geoarchaeology 18: eRe PAE) : a yz a“_
fe ms oy =

Love and Death usually sooner—his heart stops, even

when the female is prevented (by experi-
In North America, if you see a classic spi- menters) from molesting him. A further bit
derweb with a dense, zigzag thread of proof that death occurs without female
through its center, the web could well complicity: one male, after inserting his
have been spun by Argiope aurantia. Even first pedipalp in the normal place, moved
more striking than the web, though, is the elsewhere on the female’s web and inex-
species’ sexual politics: for the male, cop- plicably inserted his second pedipalp into
ulation is suicide. a nearby dead mealworm. He died in-
Other male spiders die during mating, stantly—and not of shame at his mistake.
but that’s because the females kill and eat What could be the evolutionary advan-
them. Evolutionary biologists Matthias W. tage of dying just after mating? Foellmer
Foellmer of Concordia University in Mon- and Fairbairn speculate that, because most
treal and Daphne J. Fairbairn of the Uni- mating is opportunistically imposed on de-
versity of California, Riverside, have now fenseless juvenile females, the dead male
determined that in A. aurantia the males may act as a “mating plug”—a kind of tem-
themselves are programmed to undergo porary, organic chastity belt—to prevent
sudden death—attacked or not. other males from having their turn. (“Spon-
Whether his partner is a defenseless, taneous male death during copulation in an
molting juvenile or a consenting though orb-weaving spider,” Proceedings of the
potentially aggressive adult, the male Royal Society of London B (Suppl.), DO! 10.
goes into his death throes within moments 1098/rsbl.2003.0042, 2003)
of inserting the second of his two pedi-
palps (mating appendages) inside the sec- Stéphan Reebs is a professor of biology at the
ond of the female's two genital apertures. University of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada,
Once that pedipalp inflates, it’s curtains Object of desire: A female yellow garden and the author of Fish Behavior in the Aquarium
for the guy. Within fifteen minutes—and spider (Argiope aurantia) and in the Wild (Cornell University Press).

NATURAL HISTORY September 2003

 AWorld of Adventure
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THE WONDERS OF NATURE AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

 UNIVERSE
2 Deere

[In the Beginning

Back in the olden days—the first trillionth
ofa second after the big bang—energy was
matter, matter was energy, and E=mc’ ruled.

By Neil deGrasse Tyson

hysics describes the behavior ine arriving at the office, walking into
of matter, energy, space, and an overheated conference room for an
time, and how the forces of important 10 A.M. meeting—and
nature enable their interplay. From suddenly losing all your electrons. Or
what scientists have been able to de- worse yet, having every atom of your
termine, all biological, chemical, and body fly apart. Or suppose you're sit-
physical phenomena emerge from ting in your office trying to get some
how four, and only four, forces push work done by the light of your desk
and pull the contents of the universe. lamp, and somebody flicks on the
But is that all there is? overhead light, causing your body to
In almost any area of scientific in- ricochet from wall to wall until you’re
quiry—but particularly in physics— jack-in-the-boxed out the window.
the frontiers of discovery live at the Or what if you go to a sumo wres-
extremes of measurement. At the ex- tling match after work and see the
tremes of matter, such as the neigh- two spherical gentlemen collide, dis-
borhood of a black hole, you find appear, then spontaneously become relativity, the concepts advanced in
gravity (one of the four forces) badly two beams of light? that paper forever changed the under-
warping the surrounding fabric of If that kind of scene played itself out standing of space and time. Einstein,
space-time. At the extremes of en- daily, modern physics wouldn’t look then just twenty-six years old, offered
ergy, you sustain thermonuclear fu- so bizarre, knowledge of its founda- further details about his tidy equation
sion in the ten-million-degree cores tions would flow naturally from life in a separate, remarkably short paper
of stars (where the attraction of the experience, and our loved ones prob- published later that year: “Does the
strong nuclear force overwhelms the ably would never let us go to work. Inertia ofa Body Depend on Its En-
repulsion of the electromagnetic But back in the early minutes of the ergy-Content?” To save you the ef-
force). And at every extreme imagin- universe, those antics happened all the fort of digging up the original article,
able, you get the outrageously hot, time. To envision that era, and under- designing an experiment, and testing
outrageously dense conditions that stand it, one has no choice but to es- the theory, the answer is “Yes.” As
prevailed during the first few mo- tablish a new form of common sense, Einstein wrote,
ments of the universe. an altered intuition about how physi-
Daily life, I’m happy to report, is cal laws apply at the extremes of tem- If a body gives off the energy E in the
entirely devoid of extreme physics. perature, density, and pressure. form of radiation, its mass diminishes by
E/c’.... The mass ofa body is a measure
On a normal morning, you get out of Enter the world of E=mc’.
of its energy-content; if the energy
bed, wander around the house, eat
changes by E, the mass changes in the
something, dash out the front door. instein first published a version of same sense... .
And by day’s end, your loved ones his famous equation in 1905, ina
fully expect you to look no different seminal research paper titled “On the Sensibly cautious about the truth of
than you did when you left, and to Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” his statement (it was a theoretical pre-
return home in one piece. But imag- Better known as the special theory of diction, after all), he then suggested:

18| NATURAL HISTORY September 2003

 tons once again. And yes, matter
turns back into energy. It all happens
according to E=mc’.
Increase the gamma rays’ energy by
a factor of another 2,000, and you still
have gamma rays—but now with
enough energy to turn susceptible
people into the Hulk. Furthermore,
pairs of these potent photons now
have enough energy to spontaneously
create much more massive particles:
neutrons, protons, and their antimat-
ter partners.
The cosmological significance of
particles and photons transmuting into
each other is staggering. The back-
ground temperature of our expanding
universe, calculated from measure-
ments of the microwave bath of light
that pervades all of space, is a very
chilly 2.73 degrees Kelvin—455 de-
grees below zero Fahrenheit. Yester-
day, though, the universe was a little
bit hotter, and a little bit smaller, than
it is today. The day before, it was hot-
ter and smaller still. Roll the clocks
backward some more—-say, 13.7 bil-
lion years—and you land squarely in
the primordial soup of the big bang.

Gregory Gioiosa, Tri-Composition of Existential Time, 1995 he way space, time, matter, and
energy interacted as the universe
It is not impossible that with bodies E=mce? every day? The energy of visi- expanded and cooled from the begin-
whose energy-content is variable to a ble-light photons is far less than the ning is one of the greatest stories ever
high degree (e.g. with radium salts) the amount of energy that is equivalent to told. But to explain what.went on in
theory may be successfully put to the test. the mass of the least massive sub- that cosmic crucible, you must find a
atomic particles. There is nothing else way to merge the four forces of na-
There it is: the algebraic recipe for those photons can become, and so ture into one. That challenge includes
all occasions when you want to con- they live happy, though boring, lives. finding a way to reconcile two in-
vert matter into energy or energy Want a little action? Start hanging compatible branches of physics: quan-
into matter. In those simple sentences around gamma-ray photons that have tum mechanics (the science of the
Einstein unwittingly gave astrophysi- some real energy—at least 200,000 small) and general relativity (the sci-
cists a computational tool, E=mc’, times more than that of visible pho- ence onthe large):
that extends their reach from the uni- tons. You'll quickly get sick and die Although physics hasn’t yet reached
verse as 1t now is, all the way back to of cancer, but before that happens, that finish line, physicists know ex-
infinitesimal fractions of a second you'll see something truly weird. actly where the stumbling blocks are:
after its birth. Matter-antimatter pairs of elec- they all pile up during the “Planck
trons—one of the many dynamic era ——so; named for the German
he most familiar form of energy duos in the particle universe—pop physicist Max Planck, who fathered
is the photon, a massless, irre- into existence where photons once quantum mechanics in 1900. The
ducible particle of light. You are for- roamed. Yes, energy turns into mat- Planck era began with the big bang
ever bathed in photons: from the Sun, ter. Then, as you watch, you'll see and ended 10 second later (that’s
the Moon, and the stars, to your some of the matter-antimatter pairs one ten-million-trillion-trillion-tril-
stove, your chandelier, and your night of electrons collide, annihilating each lionth of a second); in that unimagin-
light. So why don’t you experience other and creating gamma-ray pho- ably short time the universe grew to

September 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 19

 i0°* meter (one hundred-billion-tril- vey the various forces. None of the being collectively bound, they moved
lion-trillionth ofa meter) across. particles belonging to these families freely among themselves, like ingredi-
Not to worry, though. The clash is thought to be divisible into any- ents in a quark soup.
between gravity and quantum me- thing smaller or more basic.
chanics poses no practical problem for Fundamental though they are, each S trong theoretical evidence suggests
the contemporary universe. Astro- family of particles comprises several that an episode in the very early
physicists apply the tenets and tools of species. The boson family includes universe, perhaps during one of the
general relativity to problems very the ordinary visible-light photon. force splits, endowed the universe
different from the ones normally en- The most familiar leptons (to the with a slight but remarkable asymme-
countered in quantum me- try: for every billion and one
chanics. But in the begin- particles of matter, there
ning, during the Planck era, were a billion particles of an-
the known universe was a timatter. That small differ-
lot smaller than an atomic ence hardly got noticed amid
nucleus, and so there must the continuous creation, an-
have been a kind of shotgun nihilation, and re-creation of
wedding between the large quarks and antiquarks, elec-
and the small. Alas, the vows ex- nonphysicist, anyway) are the electron trons and antielectrons (better known
changed during that ceremony con- and perhaps the neutrino. And the as positrons), and neutrinos and anti-
tinue to elude us all; no known laws most tarmiliar quarks vareg. 0 well; neutrinos. The odd man out always
of physics describe the universe with there are no familiar quarks. Each had plenty of chances to find someone
any confidence during what was species has been given an abstract to annihilate with.
surely the briefest marriage in history. name that serves no real philological, But not for much longer.
At the end of the Planck era, grav- philosophical, or pedagogical purpose As the cosmos continued to expand
ity wriggled loose from the other, except to distinguish it from the oth- and cool, it grew to the size of the solar
still-unified forces of nature, taking ers: up and down, strange and charm, system, and its temperature dropped
on its familiar independent identity. and top and bottom. below a trillion degrees Kelvin. A mil-
As the universe aged by a factor ofa Quarks are quirky beasts. Unlike lionth of a second had passed since
hundred million to the venerable age the more familiar proton, which has the beginning.
of 10 second, it continued to ex- an electric charge of plus-one, or the That “tepid” universe was no longer
pand and cool. What remained of the electron, which has a charge of hot enough or dense enough to cook
unified forces split into the elec- minus-one, quarks have fractional quark soup, and so the quarks all
troweak and the strong nuclear forces. electric charges that come in thirds. grabbed dance partners, creating a per-
Later still, the electroweak force split And you'll never catch a quark all by manent new family of heavy particles
into the electromagnetic and the itself; it will always be clutching on to called hadrons. Among the hadrons
weak nuclear forces, laying bare the other quarks nearby. In fact, the force were protons and neutrons as well as
four distinct forces we have come to that keeps two or more of them to- other, less familar heavy particles, all
know and love. Today the weak force gether actually grows stronger the made up of various combinations of
controls some kinds of radioactive more you try to pull them apart—as if quarks. The slight matter-antimatter
decay, the strong force holds the nu- they were connected by some kind of asymmetry afflicting quarks and lep-
cleus together, the electromagnetic subatomic rubber band. If you pull a tons now got passed to the hadrons,
force binds molecules, and gravity couple of quarks far enough apart, the but with extraordinary consequences.
operates on bulk matter. And all those rubber band snaps and the stored en- As the universe continued to cool,
forces had established their indepen- ergy summons E=rc to create a new ambient photons could no longer in-
dence by the time the universe was a quark on each end of the break, leav- voke E=mc> to manufacture hadron-
mere trillionth (10 '°) ofa second old. ing you with quark pairs once again. antihadron pairs. Not only that, when
But during the era of seething hadrons and antihadrons met and
ll the while, the interplay of quarks and leptons the universe was annihilated, the energy of the result-
matter and energy was inces- so dense, and the average separation ing photons diminished in the ever-
sant. Shortly before, during, and after between quarks was so small, that it expanding universe, dropping below
the strong and electroweak forces doesn’t make any sense to say whether the threshold required to create new
parted company, the material uni- quark pairs were attached or not. hadron-antihadron pairs. For every
verse was a seething ocean of quarks, Under those conditions, an allegiance billion annihilations—leaving a bil-
leptons, their antimatter siblings, and between adjacent quarks could not be lion photons in their wake—a single
bosons, which are particles that con- unambiguously established. In spite of hadron survived. Those loners would

20 | NATURAL HISTORY September 2003

ultimately get to have all the fun: find an indelible fingerprint of 2.73- I’ll grant that such replies satisfy
serving as the building blocks of degree microwave photons, whose nobody. Nevertheless, they remind us
galaxies, stars, planets, and people. pattern on the sky retains the memory that ignorance is the natural state of
Without the bilion-and-one-to-a of the distribution of matter just before mind for a research scientist on the
billion imbalance between matter and atoms formed. From that, cosmolo- ever-advancing frontier. People who
antimatter, all mass in the universe gists can deduce many things, includ- believe they are ignorant of nothing
would have annihilated, leaving a cos- ing the age and shape of the universe. have neither looked for, nor stumbled
mos made of photons and nothing upon, the boundary between what is
else—giving fresh meaning to the ut what happened before all known and unknown in the cosmos.
phrase) bet there be light” this? What happened before the And therein les a fascinating di-
beginning? chotomy. cc “The universe always was”
y now, one second has passed Astrophysicists have no idea. Or, seldom gets recognized as a legitimate
since the beginning of time. rather, our most creative ideas have answer to “What was around before
The universe has grown to a few little or no grounding in experimen- the beginning?”—even though for
light-years across. At a billion degrees, tal science. Yet I have found that many religious people, the statement
it’s still plenty hot—and still able to many religious people tend to assert, “God always was” is the obvious and
cook up electrons and positrons, with a tinge of smugness, that some- pleasing answer to “What was around
which continue to pop in and out of thing must have started it all: a force before God?”
existence. But in the expanding, cool- greater than all others, a prime
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the
ing universe, their days (seconds, re- mover. In the mind of such a person,
Frederick P Rose Director ofthe Hayden Plan-
ally) are numbered. What was true for that something is, of course, God. etarium in New York City. Videotapes of a
hadrons is true for electrons: the ex- But what if the universe was always dozen of his lectures, under the title “My Fa-
pansion makes annihilation a one-way there, in a state or condition we have vorite Universe,” were recently released by the
trip, and eventually only one electron yet to identify—a multiverse, for in- Teaching Company (www.techco.com). All
in a billion survives. stance? Or what if the universe, like its twelve are based on essays that have appeared
When the cosmic temperature particles, just popped into existence? in Natural History.
drops below a hundred million de-
grees, protons and neutrons fuse to
form atomic nuclei, of which 90 per- BMW Adaptive Headlights |Light reaches places it never did a etice
cent are hydrogen, and 10 percent are
helium and trace amounts of deu-
terium, tritium, and lithium.
Two minutes have passed since the
beginning.
Not for another 380,000 years does
much happen to the primordial soup.
Throughout those millennia the tem-
perature remains hot enough for elec-
trons to roam free among the atomic
nuclei, batting them to and fro. But all
this freedom comes to an abrupt end
when the temperature of the universe
falls below 3,000 degrees Kelvin G
(about half the temperature of the =5
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The Pleasure (and Pain
of “Maybe’ ?

Both tease and terrorist exert control by fostering uncertainty in their targets.

By Robert M. Sapolsky

hen there was the summer mate. What he was willing to settle her. Once she even groomed him
Jonathan spent unsuccessfully for was a chance to groom her. But back for a few distracted seconds,
wooing Rebecca. Both were Rebecca was having none of it; she leaving him in baboonish ecstasy.
savanna baboons living in the Seren- hardly acknowledged his existence. And that was all it took. Aglow
geti Plains in East Africa, part of a Whenever she’d sit down in the from these crumbs of attention, poor
troop I’ve been studying intermittently shade, or hang out with some friends, Jonathan would redouble his efforts
for twenty-five years. Jonathan was a there was Jonathan, eager to groom for the next few days.
gangly juvenile that had recently her—and almost invariably getting The whole soap opera frustrated
joined the troop; Rebecca was the the cold, fur-covered shoulder. me enormously. I was working alone
confident young daughter of one of By all logic, such spectacular lack of out in the middle of nowhere, prob-
the highest-ranking matriarchs. Jona- success should have made Jonathan ably badly in need of some “social
than had taken one look at Rebecca give up, or, as a psychologist might grooming” myself, and clearly identi-
fying with Jonathan. I sublimated
Jonathan’s predicament into grand
orations in my head: “Here are the
primate roots of our magnificent
human capacity for gratification post-
ponement. Here, in this pathetic dork
of a baboon and his willingness to
keep trying again and again despite a
pitiful success rate, is the key to
human greatness. Here is the suitor
who keeps up a fifty-year courtship,
the obsessive who spends a decade
constructing a life-size replica of Elvis
out of bottle caps. Here’s all of us
who forwent immediate pleasure in
order to get good grades in order to
get into a good college in order to get
a good job in order to get into the
nursing home of our choice.”
What is it that gives us the power to
Olivia Parker, Wheel of Uncertainty, 1995 do the harder thing, to be disciplined
and opt for delayed gratification? And
and developed a god-awful male ba- put it, should have caused “the be- why is the rare, intermittent reward,
boon crush that had him loping havior to extinguish.” But eventually the hint that you might win the lot-
around after her wherever she went. Rebecca became alittle less resistant, tery, so compelling? Two recent stud-
What he was probably after was to and then, every so often, perhaps 1eS one published in the journal
get her to groom him, or maybe even once a week, she gave in to his Nature, the other in the journal Sc-
oax her into something more inti- dogged devotion and let him groom ence—go a long way toward explaining
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 these mysteries. But before consider- So when is dopamine released? For show that if you know your appetites
ing those reports, it’s worth taking a a long time the answer seemed obvi- are eventually going to be sated, pleas-
brief tour through some parts of the ous: right after getting something ure is more about the appetite than
brain that play a key role in the story. highly desirable, a reward. Suppose about the sating. I am reminded of the
you've implanted electrodes in a cynical observation of a classmate in
1S starting point of the tour is the monkey’s brain that enable you to college, a person with a long string of
frontal cortex, a region that takes monitor when the dopamine pathway disastrous relationships. “A relation-
up a much larger proportion of the gets activated. Sure enough, if you ship,” he used to say, “is the price you
primate brain than it does in other an- give the monkey some great reward pay for the anticipation of it.”
imals. The frontal cortex plays a big from out of nowhere, you'll see a Well, how about that? We’ve just
role in executive control, delayed grat- burst of activity: dopamine bathing sorted out the neurochemistry of
ification, and long-term planning. It the monkey’s frontal cortex. putting up with thirty-year mort-
does so by keeping the limbic system gages. All you need to do 1s train for
in check, primarily through neural ie in a series of studies in the longer arid longer intervals between
projections that can release an in- mid-1990s, Wolfram Schultz, a light and reward, and those anticipa-
hibitory neurotransmitter into that neuroscientist then at the University tory bursts of dopamine will fuel in-
deeper, more ancient brain system of Fribourg in Switzerland, did some creasing amounts of lever pressing, or
that specializes in emotion and impul- critical studies that threw that simple monthly payments.
sivity. Furthermore, the frontal cortex picture into disarray. Schultz trained
excels at resisting stimulating inputs monkeys to perform simple tasks to ne of the two recent studies I al-
from the limbic system: “Screw study- gain a reward. For example, if an ani-luded to earlier fills in a critical
ing for the exam; run amok instead.” mal pressed the correct lever, after a gap in this story. Writing in the 10
People with tight, regimented, few seconds’ delay it would get a bit April 2003 issue of Nature, Paul E. M.
“repressive” personalities have ele- of some desirable food. There was one Phillips and his colleagues from the
vated metabolic rates in the frontal special condition: a light would come University of North Carolina, Chapel
cortex, whereas sociopaths Hill, tell how they have mea-
have lower-than-normal sured bursts of dopamine in
ones. If a person’s frontal ‘CA relationship,” a cynicalfriend rats down to the millisecond.
cortex is accidentally de- They have shown that the
stroyed, he or she becomes a
used to say, “is the price oy pay burst comes just before the
“frontal” patient—sexually -for ae cnc a it.” behavior. And here’s the
disinhibited, hyperaggres- clincher: when they artificially
sive, socially inappropriate. stimulated the dopamine re-
With all that going for it, the frontal on, signaling to the monkey that it lease (rather than letting the light cue
cortex is the closest thing we have to could now begin its task. One might trigger it), the rat suddenly started
a neural basis for the superego. predict that the dopaminergic path- pressing the lever. The dopamine fuels
But just what is it that gives the way would be activated after that food the behavior.
frontal cortex the backbone to ignore reward was received. But that’s not How might these findings apply to
the siren call of the limbic system? what happened. The activity peaked the savanna soap opera of Jonathan
There has long been evidence that a right after the light came on, before and Rebecca? There he sits, dozing in
projection or conduit into the frontal the monkey performed its task. the equatorial sun. Rebecca appears
cortex from a brain region called the In this context, the pleasurable in the distance (dramatic entrance at
ventral tegmentum plays a major role. dopamine isn’t about reward. It’s about the other end of the field, wind-swept
This conduit serves as a Doctor Feel- anticipating the reward. It’s about mas- fur, the whole deal). Jonathan’s appe-
good, dispensing doses of dopamine, tery and expectation and confidence. titive light goes on, and his ventral
a neurotransmitter closely associated (“I know what that light means; I tegmentum gets all hyperactive and
with pleasure. Drugs such as cocaine know the rules: ifI press the lever, then releases dopamine like mad. This gives
increase the dopamine signal along I’m going to get some food. Hey, ’'m his frontal cortex the impetus to do
this pathway, which is one reason all over this. This is going to be great.”) the harder thing, to resist the easy out
they are so popular. Animals rigged Psychologists refer to the period of of just sitting there in his midday tor-
up to get an electrical charge through anticipation, of expectation, of work- por. Instead, he gets up and walks
the ventral tegmentum will work like ing for reward as the “appetitive” across that endless field, powered by
maniacs, pressing levers, forgoing stage; the stage afterward, which com- the anticipatory certainty (Wagner
every earthly pleasure offered to mences with reward, they call the con- now in the background) that she is
them, in order to get the stimulus. summatory stage. Schultz’s findings going to let him groom her.

24 | NATURAL HI TORY September 2003

|
 But logically, Jonathan should react his finding explains why inter-
this way only ifthere’s a tightly ‘coupled mittent rewards can be so pro-
if-then clause guiding his relationship foundly reinforcing. And the experi-
with Rebecca. (IfI show certain be- mental findings dovetail nicely with
havior, then I will get a reward.) But the literature in the physiology of
there isn’t any such certainty. There’s stress, which reveals the dark side of
an if-maybe. Jonathan pursues Rebecca, maybe: a punishment with a fair
but it only works some of the time. chance of occurring can be vastly
And yet that is enough to keep him re- more stressful than a predictable one.
inforced, or motivated. Why does Re- When the infliction of punishment is
becca’s coyness work? Why does “in- unpredictable, stress-hormone levels
termittent reinforcement” seem so and blood pressure are likely to rise,
much more enticing than a sure thing? and the risk of stress-related disease
rises, too. Joan Silk, a primatologist at
L: the second paper, published in the University of California, Los An-
the 21 March 2003 issue of Science, geles, has presented evidence that one
the neuroscientist Christopher D. Fio- of the skills honed by alpha-male ba-
rillo of the University of Cambridge boons to keep the competition off kil-
and his colleagues (one of whom is ter is to be brutally aggressive at times
Schultz) addressed that question with in utterly random, unpredictable
a brilliant experiment, once again ways. The corrosive core of terrorism,
with monkeys. Back to the laboratory too, is the orange-alert world of never
setup: Light comes on, press lever, get knowing where or when. Dive the longest barrier reef
the reward a few seconds later. Now The research by Fiorillo and his in the Western Hemisphere.
add the Jonathan-Rebecca compo- colleagues may also help explain why And when you surface, explore
nent, maybe: Light comes on, press the chance ofa huge reward, even the Maya temples, listen to exotic
lever, get the reward—but only, on most ludicrously remote maybe of a Garifuna music. Discover
average, 50 percent of the time. Right chance, can be so addictive, spiraling Tu ETOH lee ea lly ly
on the fulcrum of uncertainty, maybe wild-eyed gamblers into squandering
and even Mennonite villages.
yes, maybe no. Now what happens to the kids’ food money at the casino.
And at day's end, you'll discover
the dopamine activity? That gleaming calculator of a cortex
Remarkably, it increases. And even sits there marinating in all sorts of that the people are as warm
more remarkable is the way it does so: frothy, hormonal, affective influences, and friendly as the climate.
Light comes on, and there’s the usual which can make so-called rational as- 1 ota (ule A oleli aol
dopamine rise, fueling the lever press- sessments end up as pretty irrational. Belize, your English-speaking
ing. Then, lever pressing completed, That’s why, if the lottery payoff is big neighbor on the Caribbean
a second phase of dopamine release enough, we become convinced—no coast of Central America,
begins, gradually increasing until it matter what the odds against it—that | only 2 hours
peaks right around the time the re- we've got the lucky number and that
from the U.S.
ward would normally occur. we're soon going to be in social-
Suppose the experimenters de- grooming heaven.
crease the degree of uncertainty, of And Jonathan and Rebecca? Well,
unpredictability: Light comes on, she remained more interested in the
lever is pressed, but now there’s only a high-ranking, prime-age guys, and he Call: 1-800-624-0686 or visit our
website: www.travelbelize.org
25 percent chance of reward. Or eventually got over his crush. A few
make it 75 percent. Of course, 25 years later, though, they had one wild
percent and 75 percent are opposite twenty-four-hour fling, on a day that eral ees
trends in the chances of reward, but she was at the peak of her ovulatory ree = CBN oho eae
they do have one thing in common: cycle. But that’s another story. i bs |

they carry less ofa maybe than the 50

percent scenario. What happens? The Robert M. Sapolsky is a professor of biological
secondary rise in dopaminergic activ- sciences and neurology at Stanford University.
ity takes place, but to a smaller extent. His most recent book is A Primate’s Mem-
The most dopamine is released when oir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional
the uncertainty is greatest. Life among the Baboons.
 ,;OMECHANICS
eae

Squeeze Play
Brobdingnagian earthmoving “worms” dig their tunnels with a hydraulic ram.

By Adam Summers ~ Illustration by Roberto Osti

hen I first saw a live cae- of other burrowing vertebrates, such would push against the soil as hard as
cilian, I was convinced as the caecilians. Those animals have it could, seeking to escape the alien
that I was looking at an abandoned limbs altogether in favor environment of the artificial burrow.
earthworm large enough to strike fear of slicing through the earth with And as hard as it could push, it turns
in the heart of an Alabama large- their narrow bodies. out, was much harder than what
mouth bass. The animal squirming Like digging, studying the me- O’Reilly had expected.
through the sphagnum moss was chanics of burrowing 1s also tough, D. mexicanus burrows by straighten-
Dermophis mexicanus, a Central because, well, it happens under- ing its vertebral column and ramming
American species of amphibian that ground. Nevertheless, James C. its head into the dirt. (The action is
reaches two feet in length and 1s as fat O’Reilly, a biomechanist at the not unlike pushing a tent peg into the
around as the most decadent Cuban University of Miami in Florida, has ground.) Large bundles of muscle that
cigar. Like common earthworms, managed the task, and in the process can move the vertebral column line
caecilians’ brown-gray bodies sport has discovered that caecilians such as both sides of the caecilian’s spine. The
closely spaced, circumferential D. mexicanus not only look like muscles obviously contribute to bur-
grooves; the animals’ blunt heads bear worms, they move like them. rowing, but their cross-sectional area
a striking resemblance to their tails, can account for only about a quarter
their eyes are quite small, and they Aces faces one primary con- of the pushing force. (As regular read-
lack arms and legs. If you were to straint as it burrows through the ers of this column may recall, the po-
grasp one in your hand, it would ground: the hardness of the soil. So if tential force a muscle can generate de-
squirm like a healthy night crawler you want to understand how fast and pends directly on its cross-sectional
trying to escape the hook. through what kinds of soil a caecilian area. A muscle with a cross section of
But such a scene 1s about as likely can move, the critical factor to mea- a square centimeter can exert about
as latching onto afifty-pound bass. sure 1s how forcefully the animal can enough force to hold up a ten-
Caecilians so seldom have contact manage to ram the earth. To under- pound weight.) The mis- eee
with people that most species have no stand the mechanics of burrowing match between
common name. Although they are O’Reilly designed an experiment that force
amphibians, caecilians are denizens of took advantage of the species’ poor
the terrestrial underworld. (One odd eyesight. Laboratory ani-
species, the atypically aquatic mals were fooled into
Typhlonectes natans, can be bought in “burrowing” into a clear
pet stores, albeit under the misleading acrylic tube with a
name “rubber eel.”) Anyone hoping ninety-degree bend.
to find one should bring a shovel to Beyond the bend, a sec-
the world’s humid tropics. ond tube, filled with soil
As you dig, however, you'll and connected to a sen-
quickly be reminded that burrowing sitive force gauge, was
is tough. The short, stout arm bones set inside the first.
of moles and armadillos reflect the When a caecilian en-
extreme demands of tunnel excava- countered the soil-
tion, as do the thick, reinforced skulls filled tube, the animal

26 NATUR HISTORY September 2003

and cross-sectional area implied either wall to provide friction, surgeons, O’Reilly
that caecilians possess a different kind can then draw its tail and his colleagues,
of muscle tissue than do other verte- forward by relaxing the David Carrier of the
brates, or that the animals possess an- same muscles and University of Utah in
other source of pushing power. bringing up its spine. Salt Lake City and
The sequence is just Dale Rutter at Brown
ls turns out that caecilian muscle is like a worm’s squirm. University in Provi-
much like yours and mine. The But worms don’t have dence, Rhode Island,
extra power comes, somewhat spinal cords, and caecil- implanted miniature
obliquely, from another group of mus- ians do; the spine has to pressure gauges,
cles. Just under its skin lies a coiled go somewhere when smaller than a grain of
layer of connective tissue that wraps its the animal is short, rice, into the body
insides from head to tail. That tissue plump, and at rest. cavities of several cae-
in turn surrounds and joins to several Unlike most vertebrates, cilians. The pressure
thin layers of muscle, laterally lining caecilians can kink their peaked, they discov-
the animal’s body. When these mus- vertebral column up in- ered, at the same time
cles contract, they don’t directly push side their body, for as the forward force
the head forward. But the contraction which they possess a did, confirming their
does increase the pressure in the cae- very lax set of connec- hydrostatic-motion hy-
cilian’s body, which, now thinner, tions between the skin pothesis. Thus what a
must become longer if its volume is to and the spine. The caecilian does while
remain constant. spinal nerves, for in- burrowing is more like
By anchoring the rear half of its stance, are set in S- driving a steam piston
body against the inner walls of the bur- bends at rest, leaving into the ground than
row, the animal can direct virtually all plenty of slack for the pounding a tent stake.
the force of the muscular compression short-and-fat, then Furthermore, when
toward the head, much like a hydraulic long-and-thin sequence the animal was pre-
ram. The head shoots forward with the during locomotion. vented from sealing its
extra force measured during O’Reilly’s Borrowing single lung—thus pre-
experiment [see illustration at right]. The technology from venting the pressure of
mechanism is known as hydrostatic heart aii the muscles from being
motion. Once extended, the animal, transmitted through-
kinking its body near its out the rest of the
head against the body—the caecilian’s
burrow burrowing force
dropped considerably.

iomechanists
have known for
some time that the earthworm (a
caecilian’s favorite meal) also ad-
vances by pressurizing its body and
In this recreation of the work of squeezing its head forward. So there
James O'Reilly and his colleagues, a two-foot- is a certain symmetry to this story:
long burrowing amphibian known as a caecilian (Der- the only known vertebrate to move
mophis mexicanus, here shown approximately 75 percent actual by hydrostatic locomotion happens
size) has moved along a clear plastic tube and encountered soil. To move un-
derground, the caecilian relies on two complementary groups of muscles, in three dif-
to prey on an invertebrate that relies
ferent ways. One group controls the simple battering action of its vertebral column. The second on the same mechanism. What
group is connected to spirals of tendons just under the skin. When the latter muscles contract, would it feel like to bait a hook with
the animal becomes thinner; because the caecilian’s volume is constant, the now-squeezed ani- one of these animals, and reel in a
mal must become longer. By anchoring itself with S-shaped kinks, the animal can apply this fifty-pound largemouth?
lengthening force in a forward direction. At the same time, the tendons (not shown), which are
arranged much like the material in a “Chinese” finger trap, push on the skull, providing a third
source of force. A burrowing caecilian can thereby generate more than twenty pounds of for- Adam Summers (asummers@uci.edu) is an
ward force. (The contracted, elongated state of the animal is outlined in red; its diameter, but assistant professor ofecology and evolutionary
not its length, is exaggerated here for clarity.) biology at the University of California, Irvine.

September 2003 NATURAL HISTORY N Ty

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Some “shooting stars” come to Earth bearing secrets

from other planets, as well as clues about the makeup
of the solar system before the planets formed.

By Donald Goldsmith

A bolide, or particularly bright meteor, hurtles across the sky, leaving a trail that lasts for a few
sconds. This lithograph appeared in 1868, in Amédée Guillemin’s book The Heavens.

22 , | ( September
 or two centuries, astronomers and geologists mile-wide hole known as the Barringer Meteorite
have recognized that the Earth is continually Crater. Several much larger, though highly eroded,
bombarded by small extraterrestrial objects terrestrial impact craters have also been discovered,
called meteoroids. Each piece of this cosmic debris stark reminders that an object many miles in
has its own orbit around the Sun. Because some of diameter strikes the Earth every 50 million to 100
those orbits cross the Earth’s, our planet and cer- million years.
tain bits of the debris inevitably reach the same Sixty-five million years ago the best-known of
point at the same time and collide. those supermassive impactors blasted a crater more
Every day, in fact, about a hundred tons of ex- than a hundred miles across, centered near what is
traterrestrial material rain onto our planet, most in now the town of Chicxulub on the northwest coast
the form of grains of dust that float gently down- of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The incoming ob-
ward and land undetected. Some of that dust has ject raised an immense cloud of grit and dust that
been captured by collectors mounted on high-fly- rose high above the atmosphere, spread around the
ing aircraft, but the great hope for obtaining sig- globe like syrup on ice cream, and took months to
nificant amounts of it resides with the spacecraft settle back down. Because the geologic record
Stardust, launched in 1999 and now on the other shows that the Chicxulub impact coincided with
side of the Sun from Earth. Early in the extinction of the dinosaurs (as well as with that
2006 Stardust will return to Earth with of many other earthly species), most paleontologists
samples of the interplanetary medium. regard it as the cause of the dinosaurs’ demise. Their
It is probably natural to think of extinction made room for the subsequent radiation
meteorites—as the meteoroids that of mammals into newly vacant ecological niches.
fall to Earth are called—as threatening, Yet meteorites also play a much less sinister role.
even dangerous, phenomena. The best- Sizable meteorites offer astronomers and geologists
known meteorites, not surprisingly, are extraterrestrial fragments, free for the finding—
the ones that strike something impor- “the poor man’s space probes.” In spite of the ex-
tant, perhaps one of us. Despite the im- tensive alteration of their exteriors by their passage
pression left by Hollywood movies, through Earth’s atmosphere, those fragments
however, people have been hit by mete- nonetheless provide highly valuable samples of the
orites only once or twice in recorded early matter in the solar system.
history, and those impacts led to only In recent years it has also become clear that the
minor injuries. The only verified mam- incoming rain of meteoroids has a flip side: the
malian fatality from a meteorite impact much smaller, but potentially immensely signifi-
in the past century was a dog unlucky cant, outflow of debris kicked into space by large
enough to occupy the exact spot near impacts. A monster meteorite that strikes the
Alexandria, Egypt, where a meteorite Earth can shoot fragments of itself, along with ter-
from Mars struck on a June day in restrial matter loosened by the impact, far out into
1911. Closer to home (and more typi- space, adding to the swarm of meteoritic grit that
cal), on October 9, 1992, a large mete- already orbits the Sun. Even more important, the
orite that passed over the eastern same process takes place on other worlds as well:
United States in a mere forty seconds the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid Vesta have all
reached its ground zero in Peekskill, lost identifiable chunks that have made their way
New York, where it demolished the to Earth. Although the mass of that debris is an
rear end of.an aged Chevrolet [see insignificant part of the total mass of incoming
“nature.net,” by Robert Anderson, page 63}. meteoroids, the recognition that matter can, and
Truly large meteorites, such as the does, travel from planet to planet raises the stun-
thirty-four-ton iron monster that the ning possibility that life itself, encapsulated within
Arctic explorer Robert Edwin Peary those bits of rock, might also pass between worlds.
brought from Cape York, Greenland, to
New York’s American Museum of Nat- oe before their nature was understood, mete-
ural History in 1897, rank among the oroids no larger than a small pebble continually
scarcest, and scariest, objects on Earth. attracted attention. Earth’s atmosphere protects us
Fifty thousand years ago, a meteorite well, however, so we have nothing to fear from col-
the size ofa house and the weight of a liding with a pebble. But the fact that each colliding
destroyer struck near what is now the meteoroid has an enormous velocity with respect to
town of Winslow, Arizona, excavating a the Earth, typically between ten and forty miles per

September 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 29

 second, has noteworthy consequences. Unable to are classified into three main groups: stony, stony-
move out of the way as the meteoroid plunges to- iron, and iron. Each group embodies, in the details
ward Earth, atmospheric gases pile up ahead of it, of its chemical composition, the history of its for-
just as they do at the front of the space shuttle as it mation far from the Earth. The oldest meteorites
re-enters our atmosphere. The pressure exerted by are the stony ones, and within that group the old-
the swiftly accumulating head of atmospheric gas est of all are the chondrites, so named for their
heats the meteoroid (and the shuttle) to 3,000 de- rounded, glassy inclusions called chondrules.
grees Fahrenheit or higher. Even a pebble-size me- Henry Clifton Sorby, a nineteenth-century
teoroid heats enough of the surrounding gas, as well meteorite enthusiast, described chondrules as
as itself, to create a bright “shooting star’—the “droplets of fiery rain.” Dating of the chondrules,
transitory visible object astronomers call a meteor. based primarily on the radioactive uranium they
Although a typical shooting star may appear to contain, has identified chondrites as old as 4.6
land over the next hill, it actually flames out be- billion years, far older than any other rocks on the
Earth or the Moon. This age
dates the oldest chondrites
to the epoch when the Sun
and its planets began to
form within a diffuse cloud
of gas and dust. Within a few
million years, many of those
pieces had joined together
to form the large objects that
now orbit the Sun: the four
inner, rocky planets; the
Earth’s moon; and the solid
cores and large moons of the
four gas-giant planets.

S ome material from the pri-

mordial solar system, how-
ever, never became part of a
planet or a large moon. In-
stead, that debris continued to
orbit the Sun, most of it be-
tween the orbits of Mars and
Jupiter, a region known as the
asteroid belt. Asteroids are just
The Willamette Meteorite, which weighs almost sixteen tons, was discovered near meteoroids large enough to be
Oregon City, Oregon, on November 9, 1906. It is now in the collection of the American identified with a telescope as
Museum of Natural History in New York City. individual objects; the asteroid
belt comprises not only thou-
tween twenty-five and eighty miles above the ob- sands of asteroids but also millions of smaller objects.
server. During the meteoroid’s roaring trip Today, more than four and a half billion years
through the atmosphere, most of its mass sloughs after the: Sun and its planets formed, most of the
off as tiny shards of matter. To survive such a vio- leftover debris continues to orbit outside the orbit
lent passage, and thus to reach Earth’s surface as of Mars. But gravitational forces from the other
even a small remnant meteorite, the original mete- planets continually divert some of the debris into
oroid must be larger than a chair. Most meteors smaller orbits that cross the Earth’s. When our
never end up as meteorites. When they do, they planet encounters a region particularly rich in de-
can be identified soon after their fall by their still- bris, most notably in mid-August and in mid-No-
warm surfaces. Identifying older meteorites on the vember, everyone in the world gets the chance to
ground usually takes a practiced eye and a good see a “meteor shower.” On every clear night of the
deal of luck. On rare occasions a fall of hundreds of year, though, dozens of meteors can be seen by
meteorites spreads over a few square miles. anyone with decent vision (or a good pair of
On the basis of their composition, meteorites glasses) and the patience to gaze steadily at the sky.

LI rORY September 2003

 And of all the meteoroids that of every terrestrial rock. The
_reach the Earth’s surface, the chemical profiles of the mete-
vast majority are, in effect, orites match those of rocks
minute asteroids. sampled on Mars and on the
Moon several decades ago [see
B ut what of the mete- “Moonstruck,” by G. Jeffrey
oroids that come from Taylor, page 46]. Strangely, no
other large objects in the solar meteorites from Venus have
system? To escape from Venus yet been identified, though
or the Earth, matter must be some of them should have
ejected at a velocity of at least reached™ the» Earth: “and
seven miles a second; on chemical analysis of the Venu-
Mars, three miles a second sian surface has been available
will suffice. No modest im- for a..quarter century. The
pact can ping matter off a sur- luck of the cosmic draw may
face at such speeds; the im- have led to that negative re-
pactor must be more than 300 sult; better meteorite searches
Leonid meteor shower of November 12, 1799,
feet across, substantially larger may soon change it.
as seen off the southeast coast of Florida
than the one that excavated By examining Martian me-
the Barringer crater. teorites for the effects of impacts from cosmic
Once blasted into space, a typical fragment traces rays—fast-moving, highly energetic atomic nu-
an elongated trajectory around the Sun. On every clei that permeate space—physicists have deter-
orbit, it makes a close approach to the planet it mined that they spent between 12 million and 17
came from, and the gravity of that planet either re- million years in interplanetary transit before col-
captures it or deflects it into a new orbit. If the new liding with the Earth. All but one of those mete-
orbit becomes so elongated that it crosses the orbit orites are less than 1.3 billion years old. The lone
of another planet, the second planet’s gravitational exception is a meteorite designated ALH 84001,
field may pull the fragment into its embrace. In so named because it was the first meteorite dis-
some cases that second planet is Jupiter—by far the covered in the Allan Hills of Antarctica in 1984.
most massive planet, whose gravitational force can
either capture the fragment or launch it entirely out n 1996, however, ALH 84001 became the most
of the solar system. But a sizable fraction of the ma- famous meteorite on the planet. An interdisci-
terial ejected from either Mars, Venus, or the plinary team of scientists announced that this rock
Earth—more than one-third— from Mars bore intriguing
actually ends up on the surface clues that life had once flour-
of one of the other two planets. ished on another planet. More-
Of course, finding such inter- over, the radioactive decay of
planetary messengers depends a minerals within the meteorite
great deal on where they fall. showed that the rock had
Most of them, given the ratio of formed 4.5 billion years ago, a
water to land on the Earth’s sur- time early in the history of the
face, plunge unseen into the solar system. In that distant
oceans. But on the slowly flow- epoch the surface of Mars ap-
ing ice fields of Antarctica, where parently had abundant running
other rocks are scarce, meteorites water, and thus a far greater po-
are ripe for the plucking. Of tential than it does today for
the several-score meteorites that harboring life on its surface.
have been securely identified as What were the signs of life
hailing from the Moon or from within ALH 84001? First, it
Mars, two dozen or so have been contained compounds that
antarctic finds. often occur in organisms on
The chemical composition of Earth. Second, it included tiny,
every meteorite identified as magnetized grains of iron oxide
lunar or Martian differs, subtly A dazzling bolide streaked across and iron sulfide much like the
but surely, from the composition midwestern skies on February 12, 1875. ones that certain bacteria pro-

|
September 2003 NATURAL HISTORY |31
|
 duce to orient themselves in the Earth’s magnetic Apparently they could have. Calculations of the
field (Mars, too, must once have had a substantial blast-off process, together with experiments on
magnetic field). Finally, it held within it a number such hardy bacteria as Bacillus subtilis and Deinococcus
of submicroscopic ovoid shapes, similar in form to radiodurans (the latter notable for surviving doses of
various tiny fossils on Earth but much smaller than radiation a few thousand times the lethal dose for a
any of them. human being), imply that microorganisms can sur-
For a few months many investigators hoped vive not only the shock of impacts like the ones re-
ALH 84001 would demonstrate that ancient life on quired to eject matter into interplanetary space, but
Mars had been brought to Earth by two cosmic also millions of subsequent years of orbiting in the
collisions: one that blasted the rock loose from cold. Microorganisms in space can be protected
Mars in the first place, and a second, 15 million against interplanetary ultraviolet radiation by a few
years later, that slammed it into our planet. Alas, microns of shielding, which even a small rock can
the verdict has largely gone against the believers provide. (Protection against cosmic-ray particles
(though there are still holdouts). Some earthbound might require several feet of solid material, imply-
organisms may have contaminated the meteorite. ing that only relatively large ejected rocks could
The resemblance between ferry life safely through space.) Some forms of life
its mineral inclusions and can remain dormant for many centuries, and possi-
the magnetic grains made bly even for the thousands of millennia it takes for a
by bacteria is apparently meteoroid to travel from planet to planet.
just happenstance. And the Passing through a planet’s atmosphere, even one
ovoids, too small to hold as thin as the veil surrounding Mars, substantially
the molecules needed to slows down a meteoroid before it lands. During
carry out the chemical re- that ten- or twenty-second passage, as its surface
actions of life, are just becomes red-hot, much of the meteoroid breaks
chance deposits with in- apart or flakes off. But the passage happens so
teresting shapes. quickly that the interior of any sizable meteoroid
Nevertheless, ALH 84001 fragment, including any microorganisms along for
is a striking reminder that the ride, could remain cool. H. Jay Melosh of the
whenever a giant impact University of Arizona in Tucson, the leading ex-
dislodges a life-bearing pert on the exchange of matter between planets,
fragment from an inhab- puts it this way: “Earth’s atmosphere—and Mars’s
ited world, life from that to some extent—couldn’t have been better de-
world could travel to an- signed to let organisms down gently.”
Meteor storms are rare, but this portrayal ofa other. In principle, since How can one estimate the probability that life-
spectacular storm on the night of November Jupiter’s gravity expels forms do travel from world to world, as Arrhenius
12-13, 1833, is not fanciful. Witnesses in some meandering mete- envisioned? One conclusion seems rock-solid: The
eastern North America reported sighting oroids from the solar sys- distances between the planets within our solar sys-
tens of thousands of meteors, and a
tem, life might even be tem (or within other planetary systems) make such
succession of brilliant fireballs.
able to cross interstellar a transfer billions of times more likely within a single
distances millions of times greater than the distance planetary system than between planetary systems.
between Earth and Mars, eventually to find its way Thirty years ago Carl Sagan concluded that prob-
onto worlds that belong to other planetary systems. ably not a single meteorite from another planetary
system could ever reach the surface of the Earth.
Pp anspermia, the concept that all life in the uni- Earlier this year Melosh undertook detailed calcula-
verse had a common origin and has been car- tions to demonstrate systematically that Sagan’s as-
ried from planet to planet with the passage of time, sertion remains valid. The vast distances between
sprang from the mind of the Swedish chemist the stars make the interstellar-panspermia hypothe-
Svante Arrhenius at the beginning of the twentieth sis—that life has been transferred not only within a
century. The demonstrated fact that material does planetary system but also between systems—math-
travel from one planet to another lends credence to ematically almost impossible, no matter how well a
the hypothesis. But could any life-forms have sur- life-form could survive an interstellar voyage.
vived the shock of the blastoff, the long, harsh cold But for travel between the planets within a par-
and exposure to radiation in space, and the final ticular system, panspermia seems entirely possible.
trauma of passing through a planet’s atmosphere The Martian meteorites demonstrate that much al-
and colliding with its surface? ready. Life on Earth may yet prove to be descended

Ww | HISTORY September 2003

A bright shooting star blazes a trail of hot gases as it burns up in the topmost reaches of the
atmosphere, between twenty-five and eighty miles above the ground. If you're in the right place
at the right time, you may witness such an event any clear night of the year. The U.S. astronomer
Edwin Emerson Barnard captured this meteor in a wide-field photograph in December 1916.

September 2003 NATURAL HISTORY

 from ancient life on Mars—and any ancient life on hafnium tends to end up in rocks outside the core.
Mars may in turn have come from Earth. The ratio of tungsten-182 (which came from
hafnium) to total tungsten in the Martian mete-
Bf ven if meteorites turn out not to have brought orites turned out to be relatively high, signaling
life to Earth from other planets (or vice versa), that the region from which they originated had
they still arrive here loaded with useful information. been part of the early crust.
Geologists have noted, for instance, that every me- Furthermore, Lee and Halliday concluded, Mars
teorite from Mars contains carbon-oxygen com- must have differentiated itself into core, mantle,
pounds, sulfur-oxygen compounds, and minerals and crust within a few tens of millions of years
common in terrestrial clay—all of which signal that after it formed. Thereafter it has remained geolog-
water was present at the time they were formed. ically quiet, its crust relatively intact for almost the
Perhaps even more amazing is what geologists entire history of the planet. If, during the past four
have deduced about the geologic history of Mars billion years, Mars had instead undergone plate-
from what might seem meager evidence in eight tectonic activity similar to that on Earth, more ma-
Martian meteorites. The key to the deduction lies terial from the core would have found its way into
in what can be inferred from the measured ratios of the crust. In that case, the ratio of tungsten-182 to
various isotopes in various rocks. (A chemical ele- tungsten-184 would have been lower, because
ment can occur in nature in several varieties called much more tungsten-184 from the original core
isotopes. The isotopes of any one element are iden- would have been mixed into the crust.

ee gh ae sae ey pa ie A :

tical in their chemical properties, but they differ in his December the European Space Agency’s
mass as well as in stability against radioactive decay.) Mars Express lander Beagle 2 is scheduled to
Geologists Der-Chuen Lee of the Academia touch down on the Martian surface. The following
Sinica in Taiwan and Alexander N. Halliday of the month NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Mission
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich will put two robot rovers on opposite sides of the
measured the proportions of various isotopes of red planet to scrutinize the surface for signs of water
tungsten in the eight meteorites from Mars. Tung- and provocative rocks. Someday within the next
sten-182, a rare isotope, arises from the radioactive decade or two, Martian materials may be brought to
decay of hafnium-182. The measured quantity of Earth for analysis. A detailed examination of them
tungsten-182 in a meteorite therefore shows how should yield geologic conclusions even more star-
much hafnium-182 was present in the rock when tling and fine-grained than the ones derived from
it formed. From that measurement, it was straight- the tungsten isotopes. For example, if sedimentary
forward to calculate how much hafnium of all iso- rocks exist on Mars, they may contain fossil evi-
topes was present in the original rock. dence of life from the era when liquid water flowed
Lee and Halliday then measured the total on the planet’s surface.
amount of tungsten in the meteorites, almost all of Someday, too, well before this century ends, ge-
which is tungsten-184. All tungsten combines ologists will walk on Mars; one of their number has
readily with iron-rich material, which, because of already walked on the Moon. Their explorations
its high density, tends to concentrate in the core of will enhance the findings of the robot investigators
a planet. Hence tungsten, too, became concen- that preceded them. Perhaps they will find rocks
trated in the core. As a consequence, the rocks that containing evidence of life—or possibly life itself—
did not contain much iron became relatively de- hidden beneath the Martian surface. Until then, we
pleted in tungsten. Those rocks were the ones that earthlings can continue to look for microscopic vis-
came to form the Martian crust and mantle. itors, or their fossil remnants, that might reside in
In contrast with tungsten, hafnium does not in- meteorites from Mars or from other worlds. The
teract readily with iron-rich material, but it does full implications of those interplanetary transfers,|
combine readily with the elements in rocks lacking which depend on a more complete knowledge of
in iron. Hence when a planet differentiates into an what those visitors from other worlds have carried
iron-rich core and an iron-poor crust and mantle, to Earth, will be intriguing to sort out. O

Ww September 2003
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‘TERRIBLE
LIZARDS
OF THE SEA
When dinosaurs ruled the land, other giant reptiles
stalked the deep. Some may have borne more than
a passing resemblance to sea serpents.
By Richard Ellis

n 1780 in Maastricht, Netherlands, workers in lizards, and thus only dis-

a limestone mine ninety feet deep discovered tantly related to their terres-
the huge jaws and part of the skull of an un- trial counterparts, the dino-
known fossil creature. An army surgeon named C. saurs [see illustration at the top
K. Hoffmann directed the quarrymen to bring the of page 39]. Although almost
entire rock containing the find to the surface, but certainly descended from
soon lost possession of it. The prize was claimed by terrestrial forebears, mosa-
the landowner, a clergyman named Goddin, who saurs adapted well to the
in turn had to watch helplessly as it was carried off open seas, and some species
by Napoleon’s army in 1795. It is now on view at reached enormous size. In
the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. the ocean they achieved a
What was this rockbound monster? Pieter commanding position as
Camper, a renowned Dutch anatomist of the day, predators that would not be
believed the jaw, which measured more than five matched until whales and
feet long, belonged to a toothed whale. One of dolphins appeared on the
Camper’s contemporaries, the French naturalist scene 30 million years later.
Barthelemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, likened it to a
crocodile. Unswayed by the creature’s size, Camper’s he proliferation of the mosasaurs followed a
son Adriaan Gilles Camper correctly pointed out its dramatic rise in worldwide sea levels, when
resemblance to lizards of the family Varanidae, such shallow seas covered much of Europe and North
as the monitor lizard. In 1822 the animal was ac- America. Sea levels eventually fell once again,
corded a genus name, when the English geologist rendering the remains of the mosasaurs accessible,
and clergyman William Daniel Conybeare called it and the discovery of gigantic sea lizards in the
Mosasaurus, from Mosa, the Latin name of the Maas badlands of the American West captured the pub-
(Meuse) River near Maastricht, and saurus, for lic’s imagination in a way exceeded only by the
“lizard.” Later, the hapless surgeon Hoffmann was unearthing of the dinosaurs themselves. In a chap-
honored in the species name, hoffmanni. ter titled “Wonder of the Kansas Plains,” in his
That first specimen gave its name, in more gen- 1887 book Sea and Land: An Illustrated History of
eral form, to all its relatives that followed it into the the Wonderful and Curious Things of Nature Existing
limelight of paleontology. A diverse group of before and since the Deluge, James W. Buel expressed
aquatic reptiles, the mosasaurs arose about 90 mil- the public’s amazement:
lion years ago, in the middle of the Cretaceous Pe-
riod, and flourished for 25 million years. All were The fabulous monsters that were believed in in the

ORY September 2003

Mosasaurs, a diverse group of aquatic reptiles, arose about 90 million years ago and coexisted with the
terrestrial dinosaurs until both groups were wiped out when the Earth collided with an asteroid, 65 mil-
lion years ago. Tylosaurus proriger, the mosasaur envisioned in this 1899 painting by Charles R. Knight,
preyed on fish, shellfish, and probably certain large aquatic birds, as well as on other small mosasaurs
and plesiosaurs. The species could grow as long as fifty feet and weigh as much as eleven tons.

olden times, the dragons, serpents, etc., are thrown in Coincidentally, M. hoffmanni, the first mo
the shade by these truly ancient monsters that once species to be recognized, still holds the record for
swam in the ocean that finally became land-locked, and size: Theagarten Lingham-Soliar, a paleontologist
the bottom of which is now raised high above the water at the University of Durban-Westville in Kwazulu-
level. The shore line of that old ocean is distinctly
Natal, South Africa, estimates that in life the Maas-
marked. Imagine the water between New York and
tricht specimen was fifty-eight feet long and
London a dry plain, its whales and fishes stranded in the
mud, on the sides of the great hills, and on the plateaus weighed between twenty and twenty-two tons. He
that we know exist, and an idea can be formed of the thinks the creature may have lived in nearshore wa-
mauvaise terres. [Yale paleontologist O. C.] Marsh says ters that were perhaps between 130 and 165 feet
that in one place he counted from his horse the remains deep. Other species took to the sen ocean, and
of five huge monsters spread upon the plain. may have dived deeply for prey. Still others lurked

September 2 NATURAL TORY Sy

 in the shallows, ready to ambush anything that hap- or warm-blooded. In any case, mosasaurs were ac-
pened by, or developed heavy, rounded teeth that tive predators. The lower jaws, which were only
enabled them to crush the thick shells of bivalves. loosely connected at the front, each had a hinge
All of them vanished, however, around the same joint in the middle, enabling the animals to swal-
time the last of the terrestrial dinosaurs and air- low large prey. A system of continual tooth re-
borne pterosaurs met their doom. placement ensured an ever-sharp battery of teeth.
Or did they? According to one theory, the In addition, in most species the pterygoid bones
snakes—a group whose origins remain shrouded that made up the hard palate on the roof of the
in mystery—share such a close kinship with the mouth were equipped with teeth that kept slippery
extinct mosasaurs that they almost could be con- fish, squid, or other prey from wriggling free after
sidered the surviving branch of the lineage. they had been grabbed bythe jaw teeth.
Mosasaurs were not the only reptilian predators
he immediate ancestors of mosasaurs have not in the seas; others were well established by the time
been identified, but they probably looked a lot they appeared, notably the plesiosaurs (with four
like aigialosaurs, usually considered shore-living, flippers and, often, elongated necks), the crocodil-
semiaquatic lizards. Aigialosaurs were three or lans, some gigantic sea turtles, and the ichthyosaurs
more feet long, with a tail as long as the head and (which were shaped somewhat like dolphins but
had a sharklike, vertical tail fin). By the
time of the mosasaurs, however, the
ichthyosaurs were heading toward ex-
tinction, though they had been around
for nearly 150 million years. As a group
they had started out as ambush preda-
tors, but they had evolved into species
that caught their prey by pursuit. Un-
fortunately for the ichthyosaurs, fish
were getting harder to catch. As Ling-
ham-Soliar has observed, the fast,
highly evasive bony fishes were thriving
at the time and spreading around the
globe, and so the energy costs of catch-
ing prey by pursuit were becoming in-
creasingly untenable for marine reptiles.

Fossilized jaws and partial skull of Mosasaurus hoffmanni are removed from osasaurs excelled instead as am-
the limestone mine in the Netherlands where they were discovered in 1780. bush predators. Judy A. Massare,
The fossil was the first, and remains the largest, mosasaur ever found. a paleontologist at the State University
of New York College at Brockport, has
body combined, not unlike today’s monitor lizards. analyzed their swimming capabilities, and she con-
Anatomically, they could well pass for mosasaur an- cludes that mosasaurs could accelerate rapidly to
cestors. But no fossils of them have been found that capture prey. The long, thin shape of the animal,
are older than those of the mosasaurs themselves, so she notes, enabled it to cut through the water with
it 1s safer to regard them as a sister group. Once minimal resistance while using its large body sur-
mosasaurs began to evolve in the sea, however, they face for propulsion. Moreover, she explains, the
quickly traded their feet for flippers, and their tails end of the creature’s long tail would have gener-
lengthened and became vertically flattened, like ated extra thrust, particularly in species that had an
those of eels and crocodiles. Whereas their ances- expanded end to the tail.
tors had laid eggs on land, mosasaurs developed the In many of the earliest descriptions of swimming
ability to deliver young alive in the water. mosasaurs, scholars speculated that the reptiles un-
Mosasaurs may have been ectothermic, or cold- dulated their entire bodies, like snakes or eels. In
blooded, as are all living reptiles; the shallow seas 1991, however, Lingham-Soliar concluded from a
and coastal waters where many species lived would study of mosasaur vertebrae that only the rear two-
have been relatively warm. But some species ap- thirds of the animal’s body undulated when it
pear to have dived deeply or frequented cooler swam; the forward third was stiffened. The mo-
depths, so perhaps they were partly endothermic, tion, he said, was similar to that of a swimming

ORY September 2003

cod, an American alligator, or a Galapagos
iMatine iguana. Then,’ just “avyear later, &
Lingham-Soliar proposed that one large OMe
sv SiSS OT Oe 6
mosasaur, Plioplatecarpus marshi, essentially xO O COM COINS) Cre de
. . S id Peek &
“flew” underwater, like a penguin or a Cal- 9 Q Or ONEON ESS «>
ifornia sea lion, using its flippers in up-and-
down movements instead ofa forward-and-
back rowing motion.
The idea of underwater flight in mosa-
saurs has sparked spirited debate among pa-
leontologists. Elizabeth L. Nicholls of the
University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada,
and Stephen J. Godfrey of the Calvert Ma-
rine Museum in Solomons, Maryland, note
that in penguins and similar underwater
fliers, the tail is much smaller than it is in
nonfliers. But, they maintain, there is no
reason to think that the tail was unusually
short in this species. They also contend that
the animal’s huge flippers would not have
been particularly effective as “wings,” and Mosasaur
that the species’ powerful pectoral girdle—
the skeletal arch that supported its forward Family Ties
fins—could have served other functions.
Certain sharks, for instance, shake their prey COu= Common ancestor
violently to dismember it into edible
chunks, and they have similarly well-devel- Genealogical family tree of reptiles and mammals (a) shows that lizards—
including mosasaurs—are no more closely related to dinosaurs than they
oped pectoral girdles that support the
are to several other major reptile groups. Within the lizard group, both
“sharp movements of [their] pectoral fins.” mosasaurs and snakes are considered closely related to lizards of the fam-
ily Varanidae, whose living representatives include the monitor lizards. A
‘(Gs of the most formidable of the common view (b) is that snakes and mosasaurs are fairly distant relatives,
mosasaurs was Tylosaurus proriger, a but according to a more recent suggestion (c), snakes and mosasaurs
species that could grow as long as fifty feet share a close common ancestor.
and weigh as much as eleven tons. It had a slim fast-moving prey. The genus Glo-
body, huge jaws, and heavy, sharp, cone-like teeth. bidens had rounded teeth instead Extinct Marine
Its trademark feature, though, was the elongated of the more typical conical spikes. Reptiles
tip of its muzzle, which projected eight inches be- Those teeth were adapted not for
yond the frontmost teeth in the upper jaw. The gripping prey, but for crushing shell-
protuberance may have acted as a ram that could fish, probably ammonites. Such
stun prey, defend against sharks and other preda- round-toothed species were also the
tors, or battle rivals of its own species. only mosasaurs that did not have
Tylosaurus inhabited the shallow Niobrara Sea, palatal teeth: crushed shellfish did not
which once covered what is now the Great Plains have to be “walked” to the throat the
of North America. The animal preyed on fish, way struggling vertebrates did.
shellfish, and probably certain large aquatic birds, Specimens of mosasaurs that have
as well as on small mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. That been excavated are about ten times as
description of its diet is not just guesswork. In plentiful as dinosaur fossils are. Yet
1987 James E. Martin and Philip R. Bjork, both of despite the large body of evidence,
the Museum of Geology at the South Dakota some questions about them have
School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, been difficult to answer. For a long
described the stomach contents ofa South Dakota time, for instance, no one knew how
fossil of Tylosaurus. The stomach included the rem- they were born. Mosasaurs seem ill
nants of the diving bird Hesperornis, a bony fish, a equipped to have laid eggs on land,
shark, and a small mosasaur. as sea turtles do. But if they gave Mosasaur
Not all mosasaurs ambushed or chased down birth to live young, one would ex-

September 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 39

 pect to find embryonic bones preserved with some saurs belonging to those two genera were deep-
of the adult skeletons. water specialists that may have dived too often and
It was not until the 1990s that Gorden L. Bell of gone too deep. The episodes of the bends, the
the Museum of Geology at the South Dakota investigators speculate, may have resulted from
School of Mines and Technology discovered the crises such as the need to escape predators, or the
bones of two prenatal mosasaur embryos, along reckless pursuit of prey. They also report that in
with the fragmentary remains of the mosasaur Plio- South Dakota, skeletons
platecarpus primaevus. The bones were disarticulated, of large mosasaurs oc-
but that seemed to have been caused by scavenging cur in the same area as
dogfish sharks, whose teeth were abundantly pre- the remains of giant ex-
served in the immediate vicinity. Further support tinct squids. “It is pos-
for a live-birth life cycle came in 2001, when sible,’ they write, “that
Michael W. Caldwell of the University of Alberta Tylosaurus may have
in Edmonton, Canada, and Michael S. Y. Lee of dived to great depths to -
the University of Adelaide in Australia published a capture squid, as the *
description of a fossilized aigialosaur with at least modern sperm whale °
four well-developed embryos. The orientation of does now.”
the embryos suggested birth was tail first, which For some paleontolo-
would have reduced the possibility of drowning. gists, however, the jury
is still out on deep div-
pA matter of contention has been whether ing. Amy Sheldon of
any mosasaurs were deep divers. Bruce M. Oklahoma Panhandle
Rothschild and Larry D. Martin, both from the State University in Goodwell, for instance, dis-
University of Kansas Natural History Museum in agrees about the deep-diving ability of Platecarpus.
Lawrence, examined the fossilized vertebrae of The animal had relatively dense, heavy bones, she
some North American mosasaurs for evidence of a notes, which would have tended to keep it sub-
bone disease called avascular necrosis. The disease merged. Present-day sea cows, she continues, have
was present in nearly every skeleton they examined dense bones, and they inhabit only shallow waters.
of Tylosaurus and Platecarpus, two of the most com- In contrast, dolphins, some whales, ichthyosaurs,
mon mosasaur genera. Avascular necrosis occurs and some turtles have porous, light bones, and
when the blood supply to the bones is cut off. It is many dive (or dove) deeply.
the telltale sign of an episode of decompression sick-
ness, commonly known as “the bends,’ which is erhaps the greatest mystery about the
caused by the formation of nitrogen bubbles in the mosasaurs is their disappearance. For at least 25
bloodstream as an animal ascends after a deep dive. mullion years they prospered, spreading throughout
Rothschild and Martin conclude that the mosa- the major oceans of the world. It seems unlikely
that they had reached anything like their evolu-
tionary potential at the time they vanished. Yet
vanish they did, 65 million years ago.
Few would doubt that their demise was linked
to the same asteroid impact and disruption of the
food chain that wiped out the pterosaurs and the
terrestrial dinosaurs. The plesiosaurs also disap-
peared at the same time (unless one insists on the
existence of the fabled Loch Ness monster). Of the
large marine reptiles, only crocodiles and sea tur-
tles somehow survived.
But did all mosasaurs really disappear? In recent
years many paleontologists have embraced the
view that birds are descended from one group of
dinosaurs, and so birds must be considered dino-
saurs, too. If so, the familiar claim that dinosaurs
Pachyophis woodwardi, dating from about 95 million years
ago, is one of the earliest known snakes. To some investigators became extinct is no longer tenable. No one yet is
its relatively heavy ribs suggest it was a marine species, and demanding quite such a radical shift in paleonto-
perhaps a close relative of the mosasaurs. logical thinking about mosasaurs. But Caldwell,

RAL HISTORY September 2003

Lee, and others are now ruffling some paleonto- ered in a limestone quarry some twelve miles
logical feathers, so to speak, *by maintaining that north of Jerusalem, it is nearly four feet long. It
snakes and mosasaurs are more closely related to had small hind legs—including femur, tibia,
each other than either group is to any other group fibula, and tarsals—as well as other characteristics
of lizards. In support of that view, they point out, that, they argued, support the idea that snakes are
for instance, that snakes, like mosasaurs, possess closely related to mosasaurs.

Fossilized skeleton of a thirty-foot-long Tylosaurus proriger shows that the animal was a formi-
dable predator. The flattened tail provided strong propulsion for ambushing prey. The project-
ing tipofits skull, a trademark feature of this and similar species of mosasaurs, may have acted
as a ram for stunning prey, defending against sharks, or battling rivals.

palatal teeth as well as flexible lower jaws that en- he same limestone quarry from which P prob-
able them to swallow large prey. lematicus was excavated has yielded another
It has generally been thought that the first snakes 95-million-year-old fossil snake species, Haasiophis
were terrestrial, and that their ancestors were ter- terrasanctus. But as often happens in paleontology, a
restrial lizards similar to the ones belonging to the newly unearthed fossil can confuse more than it
family Varanidae—the same family that is regarded clarifies. Analysis of the specimen by the late pale-
as close to the mosasaurs. But in the newly pro- ontologist Eitan Tchernov and his colleagues led to
posed scenario, the mosasaurs, together with the another interpretation. H. terrasanctus was about
earliest snakes and certain lizards such as the three feet long and also had legs, but its jaw struc-
aigialosaurs—all of them aquatic—evolved from ture appears more closely related to the larger, liv-
a common aquatic or semiaquatic ancestor [see ing snakes of today than the jaw of P problematicus
illustration at top of page 39]. The earliest terrestrial does. Hence it could be, as Tchernov and his
snakes then descended from their aquatic forebears, coworkers suggested, that both P problematicus and
and, as herpetologists have long maintained, the H. terrasanctus were advanced snakes that had re-
aquatic snakes that exist today descended even later evolved legs from vestigial structures.
from the terrestrial snakes. The descent of snakes is a contentious topic in
Where, however, is the fossil evidence that ma- vertebrate biology and is not likely to be settled
rine snakes preceded terrestrial ones? Terrestrial without more hard evidence. Unfortunately, the
snakes were indisputably present about 100 mil- bones of small snakes are delicate and their fossils are
lion years ago, and perhaps somewhat earlier. That hard to come by. Nevertheless, Caldwell and Lee
date sets the bar for finding early marine snakes. have stimulated some new thinking. In their 1998
One early candidate, Pachyophis woodwardi, dating book The Evolution Revolution, Kenneth J. McNa- This article was
mara and John Long, both of the Western Australian adapted from
from about 95 million years ago, was originally Richard Ellis’s
described as a snake in 1923 [see photograph on op- Museum in Perth, welcomed the mosasaur connec- forthcoming book,
posite page|. Lee and his colleagues have reevalu- tion, giving it a down-under perspective: Sea Dragons:
Predators of the
ated that fossil; its relatively heavy ribs suggest to When you are next out snorkeling and are startled by a Prehistoric
them that the species was marine, but the evi- sea snake, it may not only be some highly derived snake Oceans, which is
dence is equivocal. Another fossil-snake of about being published by
that you are frantically paddling away from, but all that the University
the same antiquity, Pachyrhachis problematicus, was remains of a great radiation of aquatic reptiles that once Press of Kansas
described by Caldwell and Lee in 1997. Discov- dominated the seas. O in October.

September 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 41

The dragon's blood tree (Dracaena cinnabari; seen close up, above, and in its habitat at right) grows by sending out branches
that bifurcate in a predictable, simple, self-similar manner. According to Friedrich E. Beyhl, a botanist in Kelkheim, Germany,
the branching can be modeled as a fractal, a mathematical object that branches repeatedly according to a simple rule.
Of more interest to the people of Socotra (and beyond) is the tree's resin. Pliny, the Roman natural historian, called it
cinnabaris for its red color, and reported that the red liquid was pressed from a dragon's body by a dying elephant.
Gladiators would smear the resin on their bodies before combat, both for its ferocious, intimidating red color and for its
disinfectant properties in treating wounds. Dragon’s blood appears in the Nordic saga of Sigurd in the same role. The
Arabic word for the resin is dam al-akhawein, “the blood of the two brethren,” which alludes to the legendary twins Castor
and Pollux. (The Greek name for the islands, Dioscorida, alludes to those twins, too.) It was a common ingredient in
varnishes of the past; Socotrans today decorate pottery with the dark resin.
One of the closest relatives to D. cinnabari today grows on the Canary Islands in the Atlantic; evidence from fossil pollen
suggests that some 20 million years ago the tree and its relatives spanned the length of the arid southern shore of the
Tethys Sea, the remnant of which we know today as the Mediterranean.

Y September 200.
 With several hundred endemic plant species,
the lonely Socotra archipelago is a refuge
to the old and abirthplace for the new.

Photographs by Diccon Alexander

qT? the Indian Ocean, south of Yemen and east of the Horn of
§ Africa, lies the Socotra archipelago—an ark of endemism com-
parable to the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific, or to Lake
Malawi on the mainland of Africa. But it is the flora, not the fauna,
of these islands that strikes the mind and dazzles the eye—no
finches are here, to set the biologist’s mind to wondering.
Roughly a third of the 900 plant species on the archipelago’s is-
lands live nowhere else. The dry climate has turned members of fa-
muiliar groups, such as the cucumbers, into desert-adapted oddities
e no one would recognize in a vegetable garden. The islands, which
# am ck became isolated from the African-Arabian plate some ten million
AL hy Va} “: years ago, give refuge to an array of living fossils as well as to so-
shes called disjunct taxa: species whose closest relatives occur thousands
of miles away.
This unique ecosystem seemed threatened by modern develop-
ment as the twentieth century drew to a close. Although the is-
lands have long been inhabited (some 50,000 people live on them
today) and have long been known to the outside world (2,000
years ago a Greek or Roman sailor would have called the main is-
land Dioscorida, considering it part of frankin-
cense country), the United Nations and the gov-
ernment of a reunified Yemen (which controls
most of the archipelago) became concerned that
the inevitable encroachment of industrialized so-
ciety would destroy Socotra’s unique flora. The
first step in preservation was to identify and study
the species, so an international team of botanists
and other biologists headed to the islands: the
first time such research had been initiated in a
hundred years. One of the investigators, Diccon
Alexander of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edin-
burgh, Scotland, captured some of the plants on
film. A sampling of his photographs is shown on
these four pages. —THE EDITORS

September 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 43

 In 1887, when Western naturalists first described Dendrosicyos socotrana, the
cucumber tree, it grew in Djibouti (then known as French Somaliland) as well as on
the islands of the Socotra archipelago. Today the tree, which stores water in its
succulent trunk, occurs only on Socotra’s dry, limestone plateaus and plains. The
cucumber tree is the only arborescent member of the family Cucurbitaceae (the
gourds), which also includes lianas and other vines.
The cucumber tree is an extreme example of island gigantism; until 10 million years
ago, when the Socotra islands were still part of the African mainland, no broad-trunked
trees could have flourished side by side with such large herbivores as elephants and
rhinoceroses. When the islands broke away from continental Africa, the absence of such
herbivores left a new ecological niche into which the trees could grow. . . and grow.

cording to the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a

/ 2,000 years ac yo by an
=r, Socotra came under the
rankincense country. It was
species pictured here,
12 oF seven frankine ense
Euphorbia abdelkuri occupies, along with some other
members of its genus, a niche similar to the cacti of the
Americas; it has a succulent stem in which to store water.
These cactus-like plants grow in the region known as
Macaronesia (principally, the Azores, Madeira, the Canary
Islands, and the Cape Verde Islands) as well as in southern
and eastern Africa and on the islands of the Socotra
archipelago. E. abdelkuri grows on the chain's island of Abd
al-Kuri. Unlike many of its relatives, it lacks defensive spines
and protects itself instead with a sap that irritates the eyes
and skin, no doubt to discourage herbivores seeking a
succulent feast on such a desert island.

Taxonomists place Dirachma socotrana in a family,

Dirachmaceae, with only one other species (the
latter occurs in Somalia). The plant is no herb;
the flowers seen here are precursors of the ones
that will adorn a sweet-smelling tree. On the
basis of molecular data and seed morphology,
Dirachmaceae belongs to the order Rosales
(best known for the roses).

The Socotran desert rose (Adenium obesum sokotranum), a barrel-

shaped succulent, belongs to a species that occurs throughout southern
Arabia; probably little more than geographical isolation separates these
plants from the main species, A. obesum. Socotran fishermen use its
poisonous bark to kill small fish for bait, and pastoralists tie strips of the
bark around the necks of their grazing livestock to keep wild cats—the
island's only significant carnivores—at bay.

September 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 4 cc

>
 Moonstruck
Giant impacts, cataclysmic bombardments, oceans of magma
hundreds of miles deep: no wonder the lunar landscape
inspires such fascination.

By G. Jeffrey Taylor

he lunar surface 1s gray, powdery, and life- drous Apollo missions returned to Earth with
less. There, no grassy meadows or forests nearly 840 pounds of rock and dirt between July
grow; there, no microorganisms abide to 1969 and December 1972. Those samples were
break down the nonexistent traces of any former supplemented with a few ounces of soil brought
life. No brooks babble or rivers rage, no lakes or to Earth between 1970 and 1976 by the Soviet
oceans are swayed by the Earth’s tidal pull. There is Union’s Luna missions. Because the provenance of
no atmosphere (and so no wind). No volcanoes each rock and each bag of soil was carefully docu-
erupt; no tectonic plates move. So little happens mented, the lunar samples have provided the
on the Moon that the Apollo astronauts’ footprints “ground truth” against which to measure and cali-
will last for millions of years. Only a constant rain brate the data gathered through remote sensing.
of meteoroids slowly reshapes the surface. Perhaps the greatest irony of going all the way to
The lunar landscape might sound boring, but its the Moon to collect samples of its rock is that, after
lack of geologic action makes the Moon an excit- the fact, it became obvious that lunar rock was pre-
ing place to those of us who want to understand sent here on Earth all along. It had come in the
the early history of the solar system. The Moon’s form of meteorites, blasted off the Moon by the
cratered surface records an ancient chapter in the shattering force of other, incoming meteoroids and
evolution of our own planet, one largely erased on preserved in the ice fields of Antarctica or on the
Earth. We share a history of bombardment by an- hot deserts of northern Africa. The chemical com-
cient meteoroids, but information preserved on positions of those rocks, the relative abundances of
the Moon about the size, frequency, and duration the oxygen isotopes locked up in their molecules,
of that early bombardment 1s long lost on Earth. their mineralogy, and their textures all betrayed their
When we lunar scientists analyze moon rocks lunar heritage. About twenty-five separate lunar
from the Apollo collection, returned to Earth by meteorite falls have been identified. Although no
the astronauts, or when we map the distribution one knows exactly where they came from on the
of minerals and elements on the Moon, we be- Moon, the lunar meteorites have provided valuable
come time travelers. We can still find on the data about the composition of the lunar crust.
Moon remnants of the process that separated a In 1976, after the Apollo and Luna programs
once-molten orb into crust, mantle, and metallic had ended, attention shifted away from the Moon,
core. From the evidence found on the Moon, and spacecraft were sent to places in the solar sys-
geophysicists can extrapolate a picture of the early tem where no robot had gone before. Lunar ex-
history of the four terrestrial planets. ploration remained on hold until 1990. In that
Yet when President John F Kennedy proclaimed year the Galileo spacecraft zipped past the Earth
in 1961 that Americans would reach the Moon by and the Moon on its way to Jupiter. Along the
the end of the 1960s, he was far more interested in way, it collected lunar data. Four years later the
outdoing the Soviet Union than he was in science. Clementine spacecraft orbited the Moon, and
But the Cold War game of “gotcha” did yield NASA’s Lunar Prospector mission followed in
groundbreaking scientific dividends. The won- 1998. Those three missions carried a battery of re-

ial atabn' x
TialomeliUiw olcla a eM VM Uae)
lunar highlands, the remnants of
the Moon's original crust. —
Anorthosite, a rock made up pri-
marily of the mineral plagioclase
feldspar, is the main constituent
-of the highlands. Fairly light in
weight, anorthosite, precipitating
from the’slowly cooling ocean of
magma that covered the early
Moon to depths of hundreds of
miles, floated to the top. The
anorthosite rock then cooled to
form a solid crust above the hot,
liquid mantle. The crusts of the
solar system's inner, rocky planets,
including Earth, may have formed
in a similar way. The photograph
was made by the astronaut Alfred
Worden during the Apollo 15 mis-
sion in the summer of 1971.
 cation served lunar scientists well for a long
time. He asserted that the highlands and
maria are made upof different kinds of rock,
and the Apollo samples seemed to confirm
that. Anorthosite, a rock made almost en-
tirely (more than 90 percent) of one mineral,
plagioclase feldspar, seemed abundant in the
highlands, whereas dark, solidified flows of
basalt lava were the bedrock of the “seas.”
But studies by Bradley L. Jolliff and his
colleagues at Washington University in St.
Louis, which integrate the latest data from
orbiting sensors with the data from lunar
samples, reveal a far more complicated
Moon. Morphology and color do not tell
the entire story of the surface composition.
The concentrations of iron and thorium,
for instance, have proved useful in distin-
guishing rock types from one another and
in monitoring geochemical processes.
Those and other chemical data partition
the Moon into several distinctive chemical
provinces. The basalt making up the maria is
rich in iron. A large swath ofthe near side of
the Moon incorporates high concentrations
of thorium. Most of the Moon’s iron-rich
basalt maria occur on the near side as well,
where they alternate with highlands having
The far side of the Moon preserves largely intact a stark record of an only moderate concentrations of iron. But a
intense bombardment of meteoroids that rained down on all the large region of rugged highlands on the far
rocky planets of the inner solar system more than 3.8 billion years side, as well as heavily cratered patches on
ago. Crater King, in the center of the photograph, is identifiable by the near side, are poor in both iron and tho-
its lobster-claw-shape central peak, which was also a by-product of
the collision that created the hole. The photograph, which shows a
rium. Those regions are battered portions of
200-mile-wide swath of the terrain, was made by the astronauts John the ancient lunar crust, and they have been a
W. Young and Charles M. Duke Jr. during the Apollo 16 mission in key focus of the most recent efforts to un-
April 1972, as their lunar module returned to space from its landing derstand the early history of the Moon.
site on the Moon. One striking area is a huge impact crater
on the far side, the South Pole—Aitken
mote-sensing instruments that made it possible to basin (SPA). It measures some 1,550 miles across,
map the chemical composition, magnetic field, and its floor is eight miles lower than the sur-
mineralogy, and topography of the Moon—in rounding highlands. SPA has a markedly different
short, to portray the Moon in an entirely new and composition from the rest of the far side of the
far more detailed perspective. Moon. It is particularly rich in iron and thorium,
which, because SPA is so deep, might reflect the
he first astronomer to observe the Moon composition of the Moon’s interior.
A. through a telescope was Galileo, and it was he
who divided the lunar surface into two major ter- he new data from space probes and lunar me-
rains. These are generally referred to as the terrae, or teorites have helped planetary scientists refine
“continents,” and the maria, or “seas.” The terrae, their understanding of the Moon’s origin and geo-
usually called highlands, are more heavily cratered, logic history. A successful theory of lunar origin
lighter in color, and higher than the maria; the must explain two key facts. One is all the spinning
heavier cratering of the highlands also implies that of the Earth and the Moon. The Earth rotates on
they are older than the maria. Although the maria its axis, and the Moon traces a circular path around
are not seas, and the terrae are not continents, as the Earth, rotating once with each orbit.
they are known on Earth, Galileo’s initial classifi- The second fact to explain is the puny size of
the metallic iron core of the Moon. The Earth’s Kona, Hawai'i. The seeds of the idea had been
core takes up about an eighth of our planet’s vol- planted a decade earlier by William K. Hartmann
ume. In contrast, as Lon L. Hood of the University and Donald R. Davis of the Planetary Science In-
of Arizona in Tucson and his colleagues have stitute in Tucson, and independently by Alastair
shown with magnetic data from the Lunar G. W. Cameron of the Smithsonian Astrophysical
Prospector mission, the core of the Moon accounts Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and
for less than 1 percent of the Moon’s volume. William Ward of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
None of the traditional theories of how the Pasadena, California. The bold, new idea imag-
Moon formed can explain those two observations ines a dramatic and violent birth for the Moon
in a straightforward way. According to the fission during a collision between Earth and an object
hypothesis, the primitive Earth was once spinning about the size of Mars.
so fast (a day would have lasted just five hours) That so-called giant-impact hypothesis does
that a blob of it spun off, forming the Moon. But explain the two key observations about the
it takes extreme assumptions to get the Earth Earth-Moon system. To get the right amount of
spinning that fast, and then to slow the Earth- angular momentum into the system you need a
Moon system down. No reasonable explanation big, off-center whack. The giant impact could
has been forthcoming. have provided that whack. The hypothesis also
Other hypotheses are similarly flawed. Accord- explains why the Moon has such a small core.
ing to the capture hypothesis, the Earth’s gravity Computer simulations of the giant impact, made
simply caught the Moon as it drifted too near. But both by Cameron and independently by H. Jay
planetary scientists have always viewed such a cap- Melosh of the University of Arizona and his col-
ture as implausible because it’s so tricky to do dy- leagues, show that both bodies would melt in the
namically. And, in any event, it does not readily impact and the dense core of the impactor would
explain why the captured Moon has such a small fall as blobs of melt into the similarly liquefied
metallic core. In yet another scenario, the so-called iron core of the Earth. The ejected material—
binary planet, or co-accretion, hypothesis, the the proto-Moon—would be nearly (though not
Earth and the Moon all formed at the same time quite completely) devoid of metallic iron, and so
by the accretion of small bodies. But that scenario, it would form primarily out of the rocky mantle
too, requires a particular and somewhat unlikely materials surrounding the cores of the impactor
balancing of forces to make it happen, and it, too, and the budding Earth.
does not explain why metallic iron is so much less The giant-impact hypothesis has become the
abundant in the Moon than it is in the Earth. reigning favorite among planetary scientists. Com-
puter models by John E. Chambers, now at the
he flaws in the traditional hypotheses led NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field,
planetary scientists to seek other explanations California, suggest that the Earth formed from
for the Moon’s origin. A new idea blossomed in smaller objects in a relatively narrow, ring-shaped
1984, at a scientific conference held in Kailua zone centered at the present Earth-Sun distance.

Near Side Far Side Concentrations of the elements iron (in the
form of iron oxide) and thorium are useful
>20 indicators of the geochemical “provinces” of
the Moon. Both elements are far more
15 Iron oxide common in the maria—the lunar “seas” that
#10 (percentage represent the outflow of the magma onto the
5 by weight) satellite's surface—than they are in the rocky,
mountainous regions known as terrae. The
0 maria are readily visible in the two false-color
maps of the near side of the Moon. The maps
of the far side have far less of both of those
>12 elements; the highlands there are made up
10 chiefly ofa calcium-rich feldspar. One glaring
8 Thorium exception to that general rule appears around
6 (parts per the south pole on the Moon's far side: the
4 million) South Pole—-Aitken basin. The high levels of
2 iron and thorium there suggest to geologists
0 that the deep interior of the Moon is rich in
both elements.

|
September 2003 NATURAL HISTORY |49
 Che giant impactor would have formed in the same
region, giving it a similar chemical composition.
Any further differences between the Earth and the
Moon can be accounted for by the giant impact.
For example, chemical reactions would have cre-
ated new lunar compounds during the event, and
the hot blob of molten matter would have evapo-
rated the Earth’s most volatile elements into space.

12 spite of the success of the giant-impact theory

and the insights it gives about what the Moon 1s
made of, the bulk composition of the Moon re-
mains uncertain. The thickness of the lunar crust,
the composition of the lower crust, and the com-
position of the mantle beneath it are all blanks.
Most of the rock fragments in the first soil sam-
ples returned from the Moon by Apollo 11 in
1969 were pieces of basalt from the lava flows un-
derlying Mare Tranquillitatis (the Sea of Tranquil-
ity). The dark soil included some small, whitish
fragments of anorthosite. Studying those samples
John A. Wood of the Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory made three bold and imaginative in-
ferences from the white bits of rock. First, he de-
cided they had nothing to do with the underlying
basalt; instead, he maintained, they came from the
highlands, which, he guessed, were dominated by
anorthosite’s main mineral component, plagioclase feldspar floated to give rise to the anorthosites.
feldspar. (The Apollo missions had not yet ven- The complementary chemistry then arose as the
tured to the highlands.) magma differentiated according to the density of
Wood’s second audacious—and completely un- its crystalline components. Taken together, this
substantiated—claim was that all the lunar high- line of thinking had an astonishing implication:
lands were made of the rock anorthosite. How, he because the mare basalts formed at depths of hun-
wondered, could that have happened? He thought dreds of miles, the magma ocean must have been
about how magma slowly cools beneath the Earth’s hundreds of miles deep.
surface, about how the minerals in the magma can The most basic piece of confirming evidence for
separate from each other according to their densi- Wood’s theory, however, was still lacking: proof
ties, just as oil floats on vinegar in salad dressing. that the ancient highlands are made of anorthosite
That line of thinking led Wood to the third of his rock. In 1994 the Clementine mission and Paul G.
suggestions: that plagioclase feldspar floated to the Lucey, my colleague at the University of Hawai‘1,
surface ofa Moon-encircling ocean of magma to solved that problem. The orbiting Clementine
form the initial rocks of the lunar crust. spacecraft photographed the entire lunar surface.
Evidence in favor of Wood’s speculations soon Lucey then calibrated the photographs against the
began to accumulate. Anorthosite rocks were “ground ‘truth” from the Apollo landing sites and
found in abundance in 1972 at the Apollo 16 land- the returned soils, and so figured out how to con-
ing site, in the lunar highlands. Geochemists noted vert the intensity of light reflected by a particular
that some chemical characteristics of mare basalt patch of ground into a measure of the concentra-
lavas were complementary to the chemistry of tion of iron present there.
highland anorthosites. For example, the mare But what could measuring iron concentrations
basalts were depleted in aluminum and europium, have to do with finding anorthosite in the lunar
whereas the anorthosites were loaded with alu- highlands? None of the minerals known as
minum and enriched in europium. Those findings feldspars contain iron. But when plagioclase
suggested that the magma in the deep interior re- feldspar accumulated in the initial melt to form
gions of the Moon, where the basalt lavas formed, anorthosite rock, small concentrations of iron-
were part of the same magma in which plagioclase bearing minerals could also be frozen into the

50 STORY September 2003

 The astronaut and geologist Harrison Schmitt (standing next to the lunar rover at the left)
photographs the 360-foot-wide Shorty Crater, as he and the crater are in turn photographed by his
crewmate Eugene Cernan. The crater and the mission's landing site both lie on the eastern edge of
the Sea of Serenity, which appears on the upper-right face of the Moon when seen from the northern
hemisphere of Earth. At the Shorty Crater the two astronauts discovered orange soil, colored by
beads of glass created during volcanic activity some 3.7 billion years ago. Cernan made the
photograph during the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972, thefinal Apollo mission to the Moon.

rock. Hence anorthosite could contain a few per- deformed or are part of complex fragmental mix-
cent iron by weight. The maps derived from the tures of rock called breccias.
Clementine data show huge regions of the high- When did that massive pummeling take place? It
lands, particularly on the far side, that are between must have happened before the visible maria
1 and 4 percent iron by weight, with an average of formed, because they are not covered or scoured
about 3 percent. The finding confirmed a central by the materials ejected from the huge craters.
tenet of the magma-ocean hypothesis: the original Samples indicate that the oldest maria are slightly
crust of the Moon was anorthosite rock formed less than 3.8 billion years old, so the bombardment
out of plagioclase feldspar floating in a dense occurred between 4.5 billion years ago (about the
global magma. age of the Earth and Moon) and 3.8 billion years
ago. Before the Apollo samples became available,
he lunar highlands are a cratered mess; piles of many planetary scientists had favored an early, in-
rubble are heaped around thousands of tense bombardment associated with the late stages
craters, as wide as hundreds of miles across, that lie in the accretion of the planets. The bombardment
one right next to another in silent testimony to an would have decreased rapidly after the Moon
ancient bombardment of the Moon. About forty- formed, as Earth, the Moon, and the rocky planets
five craters are huge circular basins at least 200 swept up the smaller chunks of material still orbit-
miles across, the low centers surrounded by con- ing the Sun. By 3.9 billion years ago a relatively
centric mountain ranges. These mountain ranges clement period would have prevailed.
attest to the violence of meteoroids; almost all the But studies of the lunar samples pointed toward
samples brought back from them are either greatly an alternative scenario, first put forward in 1975.

September 2003 NAT!

 Fouad Tera and Gerald Wasserburg of Caltech ra- ings were all reworked by the immense impact that
diometrically dated rocks from the lunar highlands. created the Imbrium basin. Mare Imbrium, which
The data led them to suggest that the impact rate makes up the right eye of the man-in-the-Moon, is
declined rapidly soon after the Moon formed, but 725 miles across. Its formation would have drasti-
then returned to spectacularly high levels around cally altered the lunar surface. Thus, people skepti-
3.9 billion years ago. Such a deluge would have af- cal about the cataclysm argue that the age measure-
fected the Moon and perhaps the rest of the solar ments of basins that cluster close to the same time
system, or at least its inner region, between Mer- period actually reflect that one event: the formation
cury and Mars. The dramatic increase in impact of one relatively young basin stopped and reset the
rate 3.9 billion years ago became known as the cat- geological clocks that record the ages of the other
aclysm. There was a brief flurry of interest in the basins allegedly created in the cataclysm.
idea, but then it was essentially dropped until 1990, One difficulty with the skeptical argument is
when the late Graham Ryder of the Lunar and that there are subtle, but significant, compositional
Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston revived it. and age differences among impact melts. To be
Impact craters or basins can be dated only by ex- certain, geochemists need samples from basins that
amining the materials melted during the impact. were clearly not affected by the Imbrium event.
(The resulting rocks are known as impact-melt One possible source of such untainted data are
breccias, or impact melts for short.) Ryder and oth- Earth’s lunar meteorites. The ones originating in
ers identified groups of impact melts by their chem- the lunar highlands could be identified by their
ical compositions and showed that different groups chemical makeup. Barbara A. Cohen (now at the
had different ages. By associating specific groups of University of New Mexico in Albuquerque) and
her colleagues at the University of Ari-
zona extracted pieces of impact melt
A rock collected from one lunar basin from several lunar meteorites and mea-
could test the cataclysm hypothesis. sured their ages. These meteorites most
likely come from regions of the far-side
highlands far from Imbrium, and so are
impact melts with specific basins and applying the untainted by Imbrium debris. None of the samples
principles of stratigraphy, lunar scientists determined was older than 3.9 billion years, a result consistent
that several basins were formed later than 3.9 billion with a spike in the impact rate 3.9 billion years ago.
years ago, in the ensuing 100 million years. In short, Stull, it is scientifically preferable to collect sam-
the newly analyzed data showed that these basins ples of the melt that formed during the creation of a
could have been formed in the cataclysm. specific lunar impact basin. A prime candidate for a
There has been no lack of imagination in devising collection site is the South Pole—Aitken basin,
models that might explain the cataclysm. Perhaps a which lies virtually opposite Mare Imbrium—
large asteroid, say the size of the asteroid Ceres, 600 hence as far from Imbrium’s contaminating influ-
miles across, was blown apart in a collision, and its ence as possible. SPA is the oldest basin on the
fragments showered the inner solar system. Or per- Moon, and determining the ages of impact melts
haps a passing star perturbed the orbits of comets in from SPA could test the cataclysm hypothesis. If
the Oort cloud (a swarm of trillions of comets that SPA is much older than 3.9 billion years—say, 4.3
surrounds our solar system), and several comets billion years old—the cataclysm hypothesis becomes
came crashing into the inner solar system. Or per- less compelling. Basins would have formed between
haps objects from the Kuiper belt were the culprits, 4.3 billion and 3.8 billion years ago, not in the rela-
the rocky bodies—of which Pluto is an example— tively short time hypothesized for the cataclysm. In
that circle the sun outside the orbit of Neptune. contrast, if SPA is 3.9 billion or perhaps even 4 bil-
Uranus and Neptune might have formed at about lion years old, the cataclysm hypothesis gains favor.
the time of the suspected cataclysm, and maybe they
dragged Kuiper belt objects into collision courses \ X Je time travelers have pieced together an in-
with the other members of the solar system. triguing story about the Moon, a story with
great umplications for our understanding of the for-
ae cataclysm has clearly become an important mation and geologic histories of the rocky planets—
concept. The rub is that not everyone agrees what happened to the Moon most likely happened
the idea that several huge basins formed in one to all the rest. But planetary scientists also tell many
re ly narrow, 100-million-year interval. Some variations on the story. To settle on one version,
ere ‘sts argue that the sites of the Apollo land- people will have to return to the Moon.

52 NATURAL HISTORY Septer r 2003

 The maria of the moon's near side give way to the heavily cratered highlands of the far side.
The large dark area near the lunar horizon at roughly eleven o'clock in the photograph is the
Sea of Crises. Nearer the center, at roughly 10:30, is the Sea of Margins; at roughly 9:30 is
Smith's Sea. The two seas lie along the longitude line demarcating the “light” and “dark”
sides. The photograph was made from roughly 1,000 miles above the lunar surface by the
astronaut Kenneth Mattingly, during the Apollo 16 mission.

The world’s space agencies are not unaware of and lunar origin; provide more details of how im-
the opportunities: China, Europe, India, and Japan pacts excavate huge holes on planetary surfaces;
all have plans to send robotic scientific missions to and shed light on the bombardment history of the
the Moon. An extensive study by the U.S. Na- solar system. In short, it would help answer the
tional Academy of Sciences placed the highest pri- question: How did the universe give rise to us? O
ority on bringing samples back from the South
The lunar photographs accompanying this article were taken during the
Pole—Aitken basin. Analyses of these samples NASA Apollo missions and were reproduced by photographer Michael
would help determine the bulk chemical composi- Light. They are on permanent exhibit at the Rose Center of the American
tion of the Moon; test ideas for planet formation Museum of Natural History in New York City.

eptember 2003 NATURAI HISTORY

al
Ww
 The quipu served as a kind of database among the Incas. The knots, colors, and lengths of the
cords encoded information about people, land, and crops. This quipu is from the Chancay
culture, which flourished in a coastal valley of Peru from the thirteenth until the fifteenth centuries.

The Varieties
of Mathematical Experience
Ethnomathematics is a powerful tool for understanding other cultures.
By James V. Rauff

he Incan quipu is an unusual the cords, and the number and type New York, and her husband Robert
object, an assemblage of slen- of knots tied into each cord, all held Ascher were instrumental in deci-
der, knotted cords tied along significance. A quipu might include phering the code of the quipu (their
a thicker, main cord. The cords are as many as 2,000 cords, in some fifty book Code of the Quipu: A Study in
dyed a variety of colors: when it’s or sixty different colors. I won’t ven- Media, Mathematics, and Culture was
bundled up, a quipu looks like a mul- ture to estimate the storage capacity published in 1981). Since then Marcia
ticolored mop; when it’s spread out, it of a quipu in bits or bytes, but the sys- Ascher has focused her considerable
resembles a long rope necklace or a tem was, in its unique way, a pre- analytic skills on a whole range of
grass skirt. The quipus of the ancient Columbian database for the Andes— similar mathematical artifacts and
Incas of Peru encoded a wide range an artifact ofa mathematical tradition concepts outside mainstream Western
of data about people, land, and crops that developed entirely outside West- culture. Her latest offering, Mathemat-
for the government bureaucracy. The ern models. ics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas
code was efficient and compact: the Marcia Ascher, emerita professor of across Cultures, is a collection of essays
color, number, and relative spacing of mathematics at Ithaca College in on mathematical concepts in use by

am NATURAL HISTORY September 2003

small-scale, traditional societies: a se- around the world. The Brazilian seeds before him, each containing ei-
ries of reports from an explorer “in mathematician Ubiratan D’Ambro- ther one or two seeds, arranged in
the field’”’ Ascher both examines the slo, emeritus professor of mathemat- four columns.
nature of the mathematics put into ics at Brazil’s State University of The diviner then applies a single
practice by individual societies and Campinas, who is generally credited rule to selected pairs of the sixteen
considers how those non-Western with defining the field, has called it a piles. If both piles in a pair are the
mathematical concepts fit into and “research program in the historical same size, he makes a new two-seed
express the ethos of the cultures that and epistemological foundations of pile. If the two piles have different
gave rise to them. mathematics with pedagogical impli- sizes, the diviner makes a new one-
cations.” That entails, in part, chart- seed pile. He then applies the same
ae: book is at once a schol- ing the diversity among groups of rule to certain pairs among the new
arly progress report and an intro- people in the realm of mathematics: piles he has just created. In the end,
duction for the curious general reader the ways numbers are understood he constructs what Ascher calls a
to a relatively new area of study and conceived, the methods of rea- tableau of sixteen columns, with four
known as ethnomathematics. The soning, and the systems people adopt piles of seeds in each one. The tableau
field, which has emerged in the past is then “read” by the diviner—
two decades, lies at the intersection of “where the logical algebra leaves off
anthropology, education, and mathe- Mathematics Elsewhere:
and the attribution of meaning be-
matics. For the ethnomathematician, An Exploration of Ideas gins,’ as Ascher notes.
all signs of counting, measuring, de- across Cultures
The rule for combining pairs of
signing, patterning, modeling, sort- by Marcia Ascher piles, as Ascher points out, is identical
ing, or reasoning are evidence for the Princeton University Press, 2002;
with the XOR (“exclusive or”) oper-
existence of mathematical ideas. Such $24.95 ation familiar to computer scientists.
ideas, whether implicit or explicit, (The name comes from the logical
past or present, and no matter what to model and find patterns in their operation of combining two state-
the cultural setting, are grist for the own social and natural environments. ments into one with a prescribed
ethnomathematician. D’Ambrosio’s program aims at com- meaning of the word “or”; by con-
Among the Iqwaye people of piling a universal history of mathe- vention, the resulting combined state-
Papua New Guinea, for instance, fin- matics that includes contributions ment is said to be true if one and only
gers, toes, and the spaces between from every culture on the planet. one of the original statements is true.
toes are tools for counting to numbers If both statements are true, or both are
much higher than 10 or 20 or 28; in- M athematics Elsewhere fits squarely false, the combined statement is con-
stead, they form the basis of a sophis- into D’Ambrosio’s program, sidered false.) Ascher also explains in
ticated numbering system that can and she organizes the bounty of cases great detail that by combining the
count to numbers of indefinitely large she cites around the themes of divina- pairs in the particular order he fol-
size. Among the Cayuga of New tion, time, maps, relationships, and lows, the diviner incorporates the
York state, the rules of a game of art. From Madagascar, for instance, procedure known in Western mathe-
chance called dish, which were docu- she describes a divination practice that matics as even-parity checking, which
mented in the late nineteenth cen- has endured for four centuries, in es- helps ensure that no calculating mis-
tury, clearly demonstrate that the sentially the same form, among mem- takes are made along the way.
players understood the laws of proba- bers of the island’s diverse ethnic and Ascher’s approach to the sikidy sys-
bility. The assigned point values for sociopolitical groupings. Madagascans tem is typical of many ethnomathe-
each possible outcome of the game seeking advice and guidance consult matical studies. A particular cultural
closely corresponded to their associ- an expert, known as an ombiasy, in a artifact is shown to have mathematical
ated probabilities—at least as clearly as divination system called sikidy. The di- properties related to mathematical sys-
the rule in poker that four-of-a-kind viner grabsa fistful of the seeds from a tems in the West (in this case, to some
beats a full house. local tree out of a bag and makes a of the ideas associated with computers
In the brief history of ethnomathe- column of four random piles. He then and cryptography). But her purpose is
matics, two international conferences removes the seeds from the piles two not to compare the diviner to a com-
on the topic have already been con- at a time, until each pile is reduced to puter scientist; rather, her aim is to
vened, the first in Granada, Spain, in either one or two seeds. He then re- demonstrate that the mathematical
1998, and the second one last year, in peats the process three more times, techniques we in the West think of as
Ouro Preto, Brazil. The Interna- each time placing the new column of modern and advanced can arise inde-
tional Study Group on Ethnomathe- piles to the left of the preceding col- pendently of Western influence, and
matics claims membership from umn. In the end he has sixteen piles of in unexpected places. Such a demon-

September 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 55

 -
DERSERVIC
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 ‘tion is of obvious interest and rele- ethnomathematics in their own work. her tour de force on “the logic of div-
nce to historians of mathematics, One study group, for instance, which ination,’ Ascher turns her attention to
but its scope has a much wider appeal. calls itself the Ciulistet, invites elders some of the fascinating ways people
Ascher offers a new way of under- from the Yupik people of western have developed of keeping track of
standing the customs and traditions of Alaska to collaborate with native time. Calendars have long been asta-
non-Western people, adding the lens teachers and University of Alaska ple of ethnomathematical research,
ot mathematics to those of literature, professors on, among other things, but Mathematics Elsewhere offers some
anthropology, and sociology. When the design of educational materials for fresh twists. Most appealing is the case
one views cultural practices from a Yup’ik children. One outcome of of the Rato Nale (“priest of the sea
mathematical perspective, understand- their work has been to present count- worms”), the highest-ranking priest
ing is deepened, vague descriptions ing to the children in accord with the of the Kodi people, who live on the
are clarified, and the sophisticated way Yupik culture itself visualizes the island of Sumba in Indonesia. The sea
conceptual underpinnings of those operation. Another educational inno- worm in question is a marine annelid
practices are revealed. vation spurred by ethnomathematics (Leodice viridis) that spawns only once
a year. The Rato Nale is charged with
predicting the event, which marks the
beginning of a series of local festivals
whose observance must also corre-
spond to a lunar-solar calendar. As-
cher explains how the priest, who is
responsible for the yearly calendar
arrangements, draws both on astron-
omy and seasonal environmental clues
to mark time in a way that is also
faithful to the cycles of the Sun and
the Moon. Her description provides
an intriguing case study in how tradi-
tional customs select, define, and rein-
Latticework “stick charts,” such as the one pictured above, represented ocean force the interactions between nature,
movements and, sometimes, the position of islands. They were used as culture, and time.
navigational aids by Marshall islanders and others throughout Micronesia. On the Indonesian island of Bali,
Ascher focuses on the so-called Ja-
Itis worth emphasizing that in tradi- is the “dancing numbers” project, led vanese-Balinese ritual calendar (also
tional systems such as the ones As- by James Barta, an associate professor known as the Pakuwon) and its mag-
cher describes, there is no distinction of early childhood education at Utah ical and dizzying sequences. Numer-
between pure and applied mathemat- State University in Logan, Utah. ous cultures use calendars that mark
ics. Ethnomathematicians therefore Among other projects, Barta is work- off multiple cycles, she notes, but the
find it useful to contrast “global,” or ing with elders of the Ute people in Pakuwon calendar, with its ten con-
Western, mathematics with the Colorado and Utah on methods of current cycles, is uniquely intricate.
“local” mathematical knowledge of teaching symmetry and basic arith- Somewhat confusingly (to Western
individual cultures. Local mathematics metic through beadwork patterns. ears) the cycles are known as
can be detected, for instance, in the Numerous similar projects for “weeks.” The Pakuwon calendar as-
work of artisans and craftsmen, as well teaching Western mathematics in signs each day of the year to “weeks”
as in the lives of farmers, fishermen, traditional settings are under way made up of ten days, nine days, eight
healers, storytellers, and street mer- from Papua New Guinea to the days, and so on, all the way down to
chants. It manifests itself in beadwork, inner cities of the United States. All a one-day “week.” In other words,
games, hairstyles, maps, painted de- recognize that an understanding of every day has ten names in the Paku-
signs, songs, and woven goods. Local local mathematical knowledge can won calendar, one for its position in
mathematics cannot be separated from both validate a child’s native culture each of the ten “weeks.”
its social setting; it functions as a part and provide a bridge to modern One reason for all this cycling is
of the total cultural picture. Western mathematics. that many important Balinese events
That emphasis on the total cultural fall on particular days of certain kinds
perspective has led mathematics edu- As proves adept at illuminat- of “weeks”: for example, the three-
cators working in non-Western set- ing the connections between day week determines the market
tings to recognize the importance of local and global mathematics. After schedule. Spiritual matters are also re-

September 2003
flected in the calendar; a son or scher’s next stop is the Marshall pelago or particular atolls within it;
daughter’s date of birth within the Islands, in the western Pacific and meddos, which are maps of smaller
eight-day week, for instance, suggests Ocean, where she explores the map- regions. Both kinds of maps highlight
the child’s identity in a previous in- making genius ofits seafaring people. the culturally salient features of the
carnation. A year in this calendar—a Western navigators are accustomed to Marshallese seascape—which, from a
“full supercycle” of all the weeks, as finding landmasses by their shapes and Western perspective, represent a truly
Ascher explains—is 210 days long. positions on maps overlaid with a grid unique way of modeling the world.
The period is a kind of mathematical system: latitude and longitude. We Another example of an unusual way
compromise: it is the shortest period read maps of the sea that incorporate of modeling the world—in this case,
that includes an integral, or whole, symbols for prevailing winds, currents, the interactions within a commu-
number of weeks of one, two, three, and depths—characteristics we regard nity—emerges among Basque villagers
mvewestx, “seven, and!iten ‘daysavdn as essential to navigation. But the of the Sainte-Engrace region, in the
terms familiar to Western high school Marshall islanders take little interest in French Pyrenees. Here, on Ascher’s
students, the least common multiple those factors—what count instead are account, social relations are conceptu-
Ore, 35, 7, andl 0us210)) the shapes and orientations of the alized according to a circular model
But of course “weeks” of four, ocean swells that break around islands. known as bardin-bardina, or “equal-
eight, or nine days do not fit evenly Ascher begins her account of Mar- equal.” One might think the concept
into such a “full supercycle”; that shallese “wave piloting” by describing of equality, one of the most basic of
would require a supercycle twelve the use of the mattang, a stick-chart mathematical relations, would be im-
times as long as 210 days, or nearly training device for prospective navi- pervious to cultural variation, but As-
seven “solar” years—an unwieldy gators that represents the general pat- cher soon puts that notion to rest.
length of time for a calendar. Instead, tern of how ocean swells break Among the villagers, a community
to ensure that even the weeks of four, around an atoll. She then explains the is understood as, literally, a circle of
eight, and nine days are all complete kinds of stick-chart maps that show households. From the center of that
cycles, special adjustments are made. real ocean-swell patterns: rebbeliths, conceptual circle, each household has
For example, two additional “sev- which chart either the entire archi- a “left” neighbor and a “right” neigh-
enth” days are added to the twenty-
six complete eight-day cycles to en-
able them to fit evenly into the year.
This wonderfully complex calendar Their Byes
can be pictorially represented on a
seven-row, thirty-column fika, a col-
orful calendric object that can be e1-
ther painted or carved on wood or
printed on paper. Ascher explains
how visualizing their calendar as a tika
enables the Balinese to solve, in their
heads, complicated questions about Our Bear Our small ships in Alaska get close
the occurrence of specific calendar enough to see bears on a shoreline,
days. One point she emphasizes is ALASKA & THE BERING SEA and the barnacles on a humpback's
particularly useful: the Pakuwon’s cy-
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a creative expression of abstract math-
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nese culture. Cro Oar are
Oar ost aeRTelia! tase;
we VieEW BOOKSHELF By Laurence A. Marschall
Pa 2

Che concept of equality is realized give his readers some feeling for what
concretely, in a system of tasks that Monster of God: it means to be part of the food chain,
rotate among the households, and The Man-Eating Predator in an “awareness of being meat.” Most
.ccomplish the community’s sheep- the Jungles of History and the Mind people nowadays are city dwellers, to
herding and cheese-making work. by David Quammen whom meat is a substance between
The sheep-herding tasks, for instance, WW. Norton & Company, 2003; two halves ofa sesame-seed bun, and
are explicitly ranked according to their $2 5595 for whom predatory animals are just
prestige and authority. The rotation curiosities to be exhibited or pests to
then ensures that no status hierarchy is | Quammen likes to visit be exterminated. But to the residents
permanent, and that every household places on the wave crests of eco- of Arnhem Land, Gir, Brasov, and
undertakes every task, from highest to logical
oD
change.
Oo
One of his Bikin, predators are animals that hunt
previous
lowest in status, at some point in the books on natural history, The Song of people—and sometimes eat them. Life
process. Equality in this system, Asher the Dodo, dealt with island biogeogra- for such folks, one imagines, is not the
argues, is “a dynamic process of inter- phy and endangered species. Monster of predictable routine of a nine-to-five
action involving rotation, serial re- God, his latest environmental travel- commuter, but rather a regimen of
placement, and alternation.” ogue, is filled with place names that vigilance punctuated with moments of
few readers will recognize: Garrangal1, sheer terror, like a continuous rerun of
athematics Elsewhere is a chal- a swampy expanse in Arnhem Land, Jaws with real blood and no popcorn.
lenging book for nonspecialists, on the remote northern coast of Needless to say, Quammen has dug
with a high proportion of its content Australia, where a complex network up some teeth-clenching stories and
devoted to traditional mathematics. of channels and underground tunnels met some memorable characters. A
Part of what makes the volume ac- provides a unique breeding ground for few, such as Val Plumwood, an
cessible to the general reader, though, Australian philosophy
is Ascher’s evident love for her subject. professor, know first-
The mathematics she includes clearly hand what it’s like to
serves a larger purpose: to enhance be prey. In) 19355
and illuminate the anecdotes that are crocodile “somewhere
the foundation of genuine cultural between eight and
understanding. Ascher never loses twelve feet” snatched
sight of the people who have created her from her canoe
the artifacts and ideas she explores. and flung her about
And, as she frequently reminds the Ina) SErlés3.Olame
reader, she is bound by her own cul- frenzied “death rolls”
ture and her own audience to use with which crocs try
Western mathematical terminology to to drown and dis-
describe the mathematics of others. Tiger mauling a British officer; wooden sculpture, India, c. 1790 member their prey
She is at pains to remain as true as pos- before swallowing the
sible both to the mathematics and to saltwater crocodiles; the Gir forest in pieces. Plumwood managed to disen-
the anthropology. India’s Gujarat state, northwest of gage from the jaws of the croc, drag
The great value and contribution Bombay, whose cattle-herding inhabi- herself to shore, hike several hours to
of ethnomathematics is that it shows tants, the Maldharis, maintain an un- reach civilization and rescue, and
mathematics as a human endeavor, easy truce with the last remaining eventually convey her experience in
arising from peoples’ needs and de- lions on the Indian subcontinent; several academic articles, in one of
sires to understand and find patterns Brasov, in the rugged Carpathian which she relates the “total terror,
in their physical, social, and spiritual Mountains of southeastern Romania, total helplessness, total certainty, ex-
worlds. Ethnomathematics asks all of where Ursos arctos, the European equi- perienced with undivided mind and
us to recognize the diversity in those valent ofa grizzly, is one of two major body, ofa terrible death,’ which many
patterns, and in the ways people un- predators (the other is the human less fortunate victims must have faced.
derstand their world. In short, ethno- sports hunter); and the Bikin Valley, in Most of Quammen’s informants,
mathematics asks us to see the mathe- the foothills of the snowy Sikhote- however, are naturalists, hunters, farm-
matics elsewhere. Alin Mountains of far eastern Russia, ers, and herders, who can offer more
where the Amur tiger considers trap- evenhanded opinions on predators and
James Ve Rauff is a professor of mathematics at pers’ dogs a sublime delicacy. their possible peaceful co-existence
Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, Quammen’s stated purpose is to with humankind.

September 2003
 Both the bear and the crocodile pop-
ulations seem to be hanging on for
now, in part, ironically, because some
balance has been reached between pro-
tecting them and cultivating them for
sport, meat, and leather. Romania’s
one-time dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu,
for instance, ordered bears to be pro-
tected so that he could shoot them
himself, which he did by the dozen.
There’s some evidence, Quammen
notes, that predators thrive under
despotic social regimes, though not be-
cause tyrants are environmentally aware.
The most endangered predators
Quammen meets are Indian lions,
which were once protected by Indian
nabobs but now threaten local live-
stock and compete with the populace
for scarce resources. Yet residents of
the Gir forest respect the creatures
that endanger but also enrich their
lives: “I’ve spent so many hours of
my life thinking about lions,’ Quam-
men describes one villager telling See!
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that this landscape belongs to the
lions if it belongs to anyone. ‘And if
they can’t stay here, where will they
go?” One hopes—for all these lions,
tigers, bears, and crocs—not the way
of the dodo.

Meteorites, Ice, and Antarctica:

A Personal Account
by William A. Cassidy
Cambridge University Press, 2003;
$30.00

le a cruising car on a buggy

summer night, the Earth, as it
orbits the Sun, continually collides
with small flying objects. The inter-
planetary debris is made up of frag-
ments of disintegrated comets and
shards of shattered asteroids, ranging
from gnat-size specks of dust to
house-size rocks and larger. Meteor Featuring: ‘Mose Allison, ee felicia Shr e eros
watchers see the objects fleetingly as To} Birla es ieoan Spearhead, rele Hammon

they enter the atmosphere, heating Willie Nelson, The Neville Brothers, “Kar
the air around them to incan- Ry Cooder, Siete ete, pean atey Lea a
descence before, in most cases, they
are reduced to airborne ash. Out of
an estimated hundred tons of mete-

io meloel lad
feet
 oroids that collide daily with the tures are cold enough to freeze your
Earth, only a minuscule fraction are spit before it hits the ground.
large enough to make it to the But Cassidy’s book is also full of au-
ground before they burn up entirely. thoritative science. Nearly all Antarctic
And of those, most fall unseen into meteorites, he notes, are splinters
the oceans or bury themselves in the ejected from collisions between aster-
ground, where they rapidly weather oids—those miniature worlds that
and become indistinguishable from have accumulated mostly between the
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served in ice fields is still a young more spectacular events of its kind.
science. So many specimens have ac-
cumulated so rapidly that analysis has Hit Parade Recorded in 1992, the fireball first
appeared over West Virginia and
yet to catch up with the available evi- broke up as it traveled. A sizable
dence. Yet Cassidy makes an excellent By Robert Anderson chunk of it crashed into a parked red
case for continuing the hunt for evi- Chevrolet Malibu coupe in the town
dence. Ifa research enterprise can be Nee ees are no longer the of Peekskill, New York. You can see
measured by the excitement and rare objects I once imagined a piece of the famous specimen at
beauty of its fieldwork, by the unique them to be. The realization came to “The R.A. Langheinrich Museum of
value of its data, and by the insights it me soon after I began searching Meteorites” (nyrockman.com/museum.
yields into “big questions’—What the Internet for information about htm). A link there will even take
are we made of? Where did we come them, and found Bill Arnett’s “The you to several photographs of the
from?—the study of Antarctic mete- Nine Planets” (www.nineplanets. impacted Malibu.
orites will remain a hot topic for org). Under the heading “Small You'll find an impressive list of
many decades to come. Bodies,” click on “Meteors, Mete- links to sites that highlight comets
orites and Impacts” for a quick run- and the asteroid belt—the source
down on the subject and a great list of most of the meteoroids that enter
The Land of Naked People: of links. At the link www.solarviews. Earth’s atmosphere—at NASA’s
Encounters with Stone Age com/eng/edu/micromet.htm, I was “National Space Science Data Cen-
Islanders surprised to learn how easy it is to ter” (go to nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/
by Madhusree Mukerjee collect these extraterrestrial visitors planetary/planets/. and click on
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003; by the hundreds. “Asteroids and Comets”). Such giant
$24.00 I immediately went outside my asteroids as Vesta—the only asteroid
home with a ladder and scooped up from which terrestrial meteorites
lobal technology, for better or some of the fine silt that accumulates have been identified to date—are
for worse, has made it possible in my roof’s rain gutters. My son featured there
for Lapland caribou herders and helped me extract the iron bits from In spite of Hollywood’s disaster-
Amazon hunter-gatherers to watch the dirt with a magnet, and voila! movie infatuation five years ago with
reruns of The Simpsons with the cul- We soon had a tiny pile of metallic colossal comet and asteroid impacts,
tural savoir faire of Los Angeles sub- particles to examine under a micro- public interest in the theme has
urbanites. So it comes as a bit of a scope lens. We discovered a number waned. Unfortunately, the danger
shock to read about the near-total of good candidates for micromete- hasn’t. But at another NASA Web
isolation of the inhabitants of North orites—primordial space dust that site (go to impact.arc.nasa.gov/ and
Sentinel Island, a smallish member of literally rains down on our roof. An- click on “OECD Report on NEO
the Andaman Islands chain, which other site, “Micrometeorite Web- Hazard”), you'll find a report noting
lies some 750 miles south of Calcutta quest” (staff.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/ that an impact might be averted,
in the Bay of Bengal. The island’s ~gcorder/mm_main.html), explains given early enough warning. A
hundred or so inhabitants—the only how to collect the celestial specimens complete guide for close-encounter
remaining group of Andamanese still directly from rainwater. Click on the paranoids can be found at NASA’s
untouched by modern civilization— hypertext “images” to get some idea “Near-Earth Object Program”
may still, like their fellow islanders a of the size and shape of the objects (neo.jpl.nasa.gov), an excellent fount
century ago, live as hunter-gatherers my son and I were looking for. of NEO information of all kinds.
who wear no clothes, do not plant Not surprisingly, meteoroids that Click on “Close Approaches” in the
crops, and have only minimal use of create fireballs as they plunge list on the left to see exactly how
fire (they cannot make it, but preserve through the atmosphere are more near the Earth some NEOs will ap-
hot embers to transport from place to exciting to most people. Scroll all proach in the future, and how close
place). They may even still be oblivi- the way down the meteor page at some have come in the recent past—
ous to the connection between inter- “The Nine Planets,’ cited above, a sobering experience.
course and conception—just as they and under the heading “Impacts,”
were in the nineteenth century, when click on “The Peekskill Fireball” Robert Anderson is afreelance science writer
travelers found that the Andamanese (starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/ living in Los Angeles.
(Continued on page 66)

September 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 63

 UT Ree
EEO

The Quest for the Golden Lens

A perfect alignment of massive objects would offer clues to the rate of cosmic expansion.

By Charles Liu

EK instein’s general theory of relativ-

ity—the unification of space,
time, and gravity—predicts the exis-
tence of gravitational lenses, including
golden ones. Massive objects bend
space-time around them, creating a
dimple in space-time akin to the de-
Va pression made by a bowling ball on a
y aS
rT alat
trampoline. Any light passing through
3 A a such a dimple follows a curved path.
Now imagine a massive object that
lies between a shining beacon and an
observer. The massive object bends
the light streaming at it from the bea-
con; if the alignment is right, the bent
light can focus or magnify the original
image of the beacon for the observer,
Pol Bury, Fountain, 1985
perhaps to many times its original
brightness. Hence the intervening ob-
ong ago, Greek bards sang of quest for something golden. The ob- ject acts as a lens—not because it’s
Jason; ay prince™ denied ? his ject we seek, of course, is no fanciful made of glass or plastic, but because its
throne unless he could provide animal skin, but the rarest of cosmic gravity bends light.
his usurper with the Golden Fleece. coincidences: a “golden lens.” Such a Astronomers love gravitational
Accompanied by a crew ofyoung he- lens, created by the interaction of a lenses. They are sheer cosmic seren-
roes, Jason set off on the great ship quasar and a galaxy perfectly aligned dipity, but they provide us, free of
Argo to find this mysterious treasure, with Earth, would enable astronomers charge, with a powerful telescope. Of
known to be in the land of Colchis, at to deduce one of the holy grails of as- course, you get what you pay for. First,
the far eastern end of the Black Sea. tronomy: the Hubble constant, or the they're quite rare; the Earth, the lens,
The ancient Greeks immortalized expansion rate of the universe. and the light source have to line up
their heroes 1n the stars, and many of Among the cosmic mariners seek- just about exactly to give rise to a mea-
the names that still designate stars and ing that prize is Somak Raychaud- surable lensing effect. If they deviate
constellations today bring to mind hury, an astronomer at the University from a straight line by less than a thou-
Jason’s mythical voyage: Carina, Pup- of Birmingham in England. Observ- sandth of a degree of arc—about the
pis, and Vela represent the keel, stern, ing in the X-ray part of the spec- width ofa penny 3,000 feet away—the
and sail of the Argo; Castor and Pol- trum, he and his collaborators have lens splits the magnified image into
lux, who accompanied Jason, became been studying one promising celestial two or more irregularly spaced patches
Gemini; and Hercules was one of candidate, known as B1422+231. of differing brightness.
Jason’s mates. Despite its unglamorous name, the A second, and worse, problem with
Few, if any, modern astronomers object would surely be elevated to gravitational lenses is their blotchi-
lead the adventurous lives of Jason and the stuff of legend if, indeed, its lens ness—they aren’t created by smooth,
his Argonauts, yet many of us are on a were golden. regular massive objects, but rather by

64 HISTORY September 2003

complex, asymmetric ones such as quasar [see photograph on next page]. ject wasn’t a single galaxy, but rather an
galaxies and clusters, with scattered Furthermore, other astronomers had entire group of galaxies, whose distri-
dense and sparse spots. Such a lens recently reported measuring a time bution of mass was relatively smooth
distorts as well as magnifies the light delay in the brightening of two of and uncomplicated—one key require-
that comes through, sometimes creat- those images. ment for a golden lens. Raychaudhury
ing multiple, twisted images of the With the orbiting Chandra X-ray created 300 possible models of the
objects behind it. It’s more like look- Observatory, Raychaudhury and his shape of the lens, and simulated the
ing through the thick glass bottom of colleagues found that the lensing ob- lensing properties of each model.
a bottle of lemon soda than through a
good magnifying lens.
THE SKY IN SEPTEMBER By Joe Rao
|B a such lemon bottles, though,
astronomers have mixed excellent Often elusive, (as seen from midnorthern latitudes),
lemonade. The distortions themselves fleet Mercury where its apparition is sharpest. Mars
carry information about the universe. appears low in seems to follow the nearly full Moon
Imagine what happens if the light the eastern sky across the sky during the night of
source changes its appearance—if, say, at dawn begin- September 8-9.
a quasar suddenly brightens with a ning around
new burst of energy. Each distorted September 20. Jupiter emerges from the Sun’s glare
multiple image of the quasar represents Rausing about during the second week of Septem-
a different path taken by light through ninety minutes ber. At magnitude —1.7, the planet
the dimpled space-time surrounding before sunup, it reaches its greatest shines low in the east about an hour
the lens, and some of those paths are elongation, or angular separation before sunup at midmonth. By the
longer than others. So first one image from the Sun (18 degrees west of our end of the month it’s already up by
brightens—the one with the shortest star), on the morning of the 27th. By 4:30 A.M. local daylight time. On
path—then the one with the next- early October the innermost planet the morning of the 24th, Jupiter
shortest path, and so on. The time be- returns to the obscurity of the Sun’s rises above and to the right of a slen-
tween brightenings, it turns out, de- glow. On the morning of the 24th, der crescent Moon, and about 7.5
pends on two factors: the structure of look low toward the east for a broad degrees above Mercury.
the lens and the expansion rate of the triangle outlined by Mercury,
universe—the Hubble constant. So all Jupiter, and the Moon; Mercury is Saturn rises progressively earlier this
we need for a solid measurement of below and to the right of the Moon. month, appearing after 1:30 A.M.
the Hubble constant, independent of local daylight time on the 1st and
the usual redshift of receding galaxies, By month’s end Venus graces the coming up before midnight by the
is to identify a gravitationally lensed evening, appearing just above the 27th. It shines in the constellation
image of a flickering source with a western horizon. Use binoculars to Gemini. The rings of the yellowish
near-perfect alignment, a readily mea- look for it between fifteen and zero-magnitude planet tip about 25
surable time delay, and a smooth, un- twenty minutes after sunset. degrees toward Earth.
complicated intervening mass. That’s
what gilds a gravitational lens. Mars, just past its opposition of Au- The Moon waxes to first quarter on
With such stringent requirements, gust 28, dominates the night sky. September 3 at 8:34 A.M. and to full
it’s little wonder that Raychaudhury The orange-tinged planet is depart- on the 10th at 12:36 PM. Because
and his colleagues could have em- ing Earth’s vicinity as rapidly as it ar- this full moon is the one nearest to
barked on a quest that others had en- rived last month. As the distance be- the autumnal equinox, it is desig-
visioned many years before their time tween our home and Mars increases nated the harvest moon. The Moon
but left still unfulfilled. Within a from 35 to 42 million miles this wanes to last quarter on September
few years of looking, though, they month, the planet fades from magni- 18 at 3:03 PM., and it becomes new
thought they’d found a good candi- tude —2:9 to —2.1. Yet at the same on the 25th at 11:09 PM.
date golden lens. The lght from time, viewing Mars becomes more
quasar B1422+231, which lies some convenient. The planet culminates at The autumnal equinox occurs at 6:47
11 billion light-years from Earth, 12:55 A.M. local daylight time on the A.M. on September 23.
passes throughalens created by an in- 1st, and at around 10:30 P.M. on the
tervening mass about three billion 30th. At those times the planet is Unless otherwise noted all times are
light-years from Earth. The lens gives about 33 degrees above the horizon given in Eastern Daylight Time.
rise to four detectable images of the

September 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 65

 BOOKS HECE
EARSOE
From the simulations he calculated the resettle a flood of refugees from
me delays that would result.
(Continued from page 63) Bangladesh.
Unfortunately, the simulations all believed that women get pregnant
showed that only two of the four 1m- through certain spirit-laden foods. INAS Mukerjee, a former
ages would yield measurable time de- Geopolitically, the Andamans seem editor at Scientific American, has
lays. Moreover, one of those two im- an unlikely place for such an aborigi- been coming to the islands since the
nal stronghold. They lie smack in the mid-1990s to document the condi-
middle of major trade routes that tion of the native population that re-
connect India, Singapore, and the Far mains: about 500 individuals of vari-
East; native islanders must have long ous tribes and dispositions. Many of
been accustomed to seeing sailing them occupy a strange limbo between
ships from the great mercantile em- traditional and modern, living part-
pires pass within hailing distance. time in government housing but
Yet for centuries hailing was about carrying on old ways whenever they
all that happened—the islanders had a can. Most Jarawa tribespeople still
reputation for being fiercely hostile dwell in forested areas of the largest
False-color image of the gravitational lens people who resembled African pyg- island, where they are openly hostile
system B1422+231. Each of the four brightest mies. Indeed, for two centuries the na- to settlement and to settlers. And
points of light represents a single quasar some tives (the name “Andaman” has been then there are the Sentinelese, pro-
11 billion light-years from Earth; the multiple im- linked with a Sanskrit word for “naked tected from any contact with the out-
ages are caused by the bending of the quasars
light as it passes near an intervening system of
man”) met most approaches by for- side by government edict and by their
galaxies some 3billion light-years from Earth. eigners with arrows and stones. (That isolated location, to the west of the is-
attitude was perhaps warranted by the land chain.
ages 1s too faint for its brightening to fact that when ships did enter the is- The story is a distressing one, and
be feasibly measured with current land’s precincts, they had a habit of ab- ironic in that the Indians, once
technology. The conclusion: B1422+ ducting stray natives and selling them British subjects, are now colonizers
231 is indeed a fascinating gravitational as slaves or curiosities.) With their themselves. “We have to teach them
lens system, but it’s not quite golden. dense jungles and fearsome popula- some morals,’ the local secretary of
tion, the islands held little attraction tribal welfare tells Mukerjee, in a
A: with most quests, Jason’s jour- for permanent settlements until 1858, voice that echoes Queen Victoria’s
ney was much more interesting when British colonists from India es- provincial governors. But the forces at
than the reward at its end. “What be- tablished a penal colony at a harbor on work here are too impersonal and too
came of the fleece afterwards,’ wrote South Andaman, calling it Port Blair. relentless for either blame or hope. To
the nineteenth-century American The arrival of Westerners led to the be sure, the North Sentinelese are still
writer Thomas Bulfinch, in his classic dissolution and demoralization that more or less untouched, but one
Mythology, “we do not know, but per- has befallen so many other groups of senses that they, too, will not remain
haps it was found after all, like many indigenous peoples: a once impene- that way for long. At the end of her
other golden prizes, not worth the trable society began to slowly come tale, Mukerjee comes close enough to
trouble it had cost to procure it.” apart. The British brought unfamiliar their island to see them, then retreats
Rest assured, though, that if a diseases that drove one native tribe at the last minute as if she were carry-
golden lens is found, it will retain its of Andamanese nearly to extinction ing a contagion—as, in a way, she is.
value. We astronomers will monitor by the end of the nineteenth century. There’s little she can do for the An-
its flickering year after year until it Japanese invaders in the 1940s cleared damanese, other than give us a
yields a firm, independent measure- swaths of island land for airstrips and glimpse of indigenous people still
ment of the Hubble constant. And we military installations. An Indian gov- reeling from their first encounters
won't stop at one such lens; we’ll ernment replaced the British after the with global civilization, seen through
study every golden lens we can find, war, and the islands became a prime the eyes of one who wonders what it
to cross-check our results. The Arg- target for development to accommo- all means, both for them and for us.
onauts’ odyssey ended long ago, but date the subcontinent’s refugee popu-
this cosmological golden quest has lation. By the 1970s the remaining Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Su-
only just begun. members of the Onge tribespeople, pernova Story, is the WK.T: Sahm professor
living on the southernmost island, ofphysics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylva-
Charles Liu is an astrophysicist at the Hayden Little Andaman, had been forced into nia, and director of Project CLEA, which pro-
Planetarium and a research scientist at settlements after seeing their forests duces widely used simulation software for edu-
Barnard College in New York City. bulldozed so that authorities could cation in astronomy,

HISTORY September 2003

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AMERICAN MUSEUM 6 NATURAL HISTORY 1)

Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites Reopens September 20

Interview with Curator Denton Ebel

Denton Ebel is curator of form and, in particular, teorites tell us about the origins of our
meteorites in the Mu- why is the Earth here, solar system, about the formation of
seum's Division of Physi- how do the elements the planets and planetary processes,
cal Sciences and curator necessary for life get dis- and finally about how meteorites and
of the reconceptualiza- tributed in a solar sys- the dynamic solar system interact with
tion and rebuilding of the tem among the planets, planets, particularly through impacts.
Arthur Ross Hall of Mete- and then, of course, what The Meteor Crater of Arizona will be
orites, which reopens makes some zones of highly featured in the hall with a scale
September 20, 2003. He the solar system habit- model in a diorama. This is the best-
spoke with us about me- able. Where might there preserved meteorite impact crater on —
teorites, the new hall, and be life? This is something the surface of the Earth, and it’s 50,000
the likelihood of a mete- that humans are _ inter- years old. It’s in the Arizona desert so
orite falling near you. ested in. i's really very accessible, and we're
Denton Ebel holds the collaborating with the people at the
Johnstown meteorite which
Q: What is a meteorite? Q: What will be new in the Meteor Crater Visitor's Center to create
fell in Colorado in 1924. It
It's a rock from space. is thought to be a piece of Ross Hall of Meteorites? a really first-class model of it. It will
It's a piece of a shooting Vesta, one of the largest of Well, the architecture, for have a cutaway section so you can see
star that falls to Earth. It’s the asteroids which orbit one thing, will be new. how the crater was originally shaped
a meteor when it’s in the Sun beyond Mars. The ceiling will be raised because it’s got a lot of silt and infill in
the sky; when it hits the to its full height, which it—50,000 years is a long time.
Earth it’s a meteorite. Most meteorites gives you a sense of space since
are pieces of asteroids. A very few these are rocks from space. When you Q: Can you describe how the hall will tie
are comets. go into the halls of Gems and Minerals to some of the other Museum halls?
next door, you enter a cave-like kind of In the Museum there are several halls
Q: What do meteorites tell us? room, which is reminiscent of where that deal with the physical sciences:
Meteorites record the history of our those rocks come from. the Cullman Hall of the Universe and
solar system. When we look at disks When you enter the hall, you will be the Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth in
where young stars are being formed invited to ascend a 16-inch platform, the Rose Center and the Morgan
today, the same processes are taking which will exhibit the basic concepts. Memorial Hall of Gems and the Gug-
place that we think occurred when our This is the introductory section. The genheim Hall of Minerals. And the
Sun was born, 4% billion years ago. raised platform will surround the cen- Ross Hall of Meteorites really fits be-
But here we have the actual leftovers tral object, which is Ahnighito, the tween the Hall of the Universe and the
of that process so we can deduce how largest meteorite “in captivity,” part of Hall of Planet Earth. The universe is
our solar system originated. If you the Cape York meteorite. There is only the setting in which our solar system
could cool the Sun into a rock you one larger meteorite—in Africa, which formed. In the Hall of Meteorites, we
could hold it in your hand, it would is where it fell in Namibia—the Hoba focus on the origin of our solar system,
have the same chemical composition meteorite. Two other pieces of the the formation of planets, and the
as some meteorites. Because it’s a Cape York meteorite are also dis- chemistry that underlies all of this, all
universal process, we are by exten- played in our new hall. through the meteorite specimens.
sion learning about all the other solar The hall surrounding Ahnighito has This, in turn, provides the setting to
systems out there and how they might three sections addressing what me- explore the mysteries of planet Earth.

THE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HISTORY BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
 been doing is some work on tomo-
graphy. This is CAT-scanning, three-di-
mensional imaging of meteorites, and
is very new. We're just beginning to
learn how to extract information this
way. We intend to include a “fly-
through” of a meteorite sample in a
new production for the theater in the
new hall.

Q: What are the real chances of a large-

scale meteorite impact?
Well, we're not going to have a mete-
orite the size of Texas. First of all, any-
_ thing that big we already have seen,
we already know about. There’s never
in human history been an impact any-
where near the kind that wiped out so
many of the dinosaurs. But here it’s
important to learn about the composi-
Meteor Crater, Arizona
tion of asteroids that pass near Earth.
Our hall is very different from an absorb light, like sunlight. Because If you have an object that is made of
older school of meteorites display, one of the ways we understand the lots of smaller objects, like a pile of
which would look at meteorites with a chemistry of, say, an asteroid is to dust and stones, do you want to
classification or nomenclature kind of look at all the wavelengths of light that break it up or do you want to try to
approach as simply rocks that have it reflects from the Sun and then com- push it away?
different properties. The new _ hall pare that to what we can measure in If you jump into a swimming pool,
will be much more focused on the the laboratory on a known specimen. its no problem. If you jump off the
processes and what they tell us about So if you have meteorites A, B, and C, George Washington Bridge, it’s like
the larger scenario. So it’s more like a you can measure what their spec- , hitting a brick wall. Same thing for
hall of meteorites and planetary ori- tra look like in ultraviolet or the in- 4% meteorites flying through space at
gins, much in the same way that a hall frared or visible light ranges. Fé huge speeds. They hit the Earth's
of vertebrate evolution differs from a And then with our satellites 4 atmosphere and at first it just
hall of fossils. and our spacecraft and our ¢ makes alot of friction, but there's
Earth-based telescopes a thicker layer which we live
Q: Can you sayalittle about your own we can do the same in. We need to have oxygen to
research? measurements of remote go to the top of Mt. Everest.
My research has largely been in the objects and we can say Well, that’s very high up.
chemistry of how the particular com- it looks like A or it , Around that height, a little
ponents of chondrites, very primitive looks like B or C. And higher actually, most mete-
meteorites, actually formed in the in that way, if it 3 orites hit this wall of air and
solar nebula. Chondrites are really looks like a duck, ge they shatter or even vapor-
sedimentary rocks made up of dust and it quacks 4 ize. There are meteorites
and then chondrules, these round like a duck...we the size of your fist landing
droplets that were once molten and 7 daily somewhere on Earth.
now are little beads, many containing degree what as- But most meteorites land in
glass, which were present in the early teroids far away the ocean, because it’s by far
solar system. look like and what the largest target.
I’m also working in collaboration they might be. The restoration of the Arthur Ross Hall of Me-
with other scientists in looking at me- Another cool teorites is made possible through the generos-
teorites to see how they reflect and thing that I’ve — Huckitta meteorite ity of the Arthur Ross Foundation.

aaa
SISHO
 0
A Certain Curve of Horn
a
Z Tuesday, 9/16, 7:00 p.m.
=
<
> John Frederick Walker weaves the
s
Zz
a fascinating story of the survival of the
giant sable antelope, found only in
Angola, with politics, colonialism, and
revolution.
A 2
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me
>
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Bo
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Porcelain statues of the spirit mandarins of the Mother Goddess religion

Vietnam: philanthropic leadership of the Freeman

Yo:
Foundation. Additional generous funding Sable antelope bull in the Luando
Journeys of Body, Mind & Spirit Reserve, Angola
Through January 4, 2004 provided by the Ford Foundation for the col-
laboration between the American Museum of
Gallery 77, first floor Prehistoric Art:
Natural History and the Vietnam Museum of
This comprehensive exhibition pre-
Ethnology. Also supported by the Asian Cul-
The Symbolic Journey
sents Vietnamese culture in the early tural Council. Planning grant provided by the Thursday, 9/25, 7:00 p.m.
21st century. The visitor is invited to National Endowment for the Humanities. Anthropologist Randall White surveys
“walk in Vietnamese shoes” and ex- the history of creative expression.
plore daily life among Vietnam’s more
than 50 ethnic groups.
Fall Bird Walks in Central Park
Organized by the American Museum of Nat-
Eight-week sessions start
ural History, New York, and the Vietnam Mu-
seum of Ethnology, Hanoi. This exhibition and on September 2, 3 & 4.
OSO-HNWV/ASYS
NIASM

related programs are made possible by the

Experience the sights Stories of the Sky

EL i a
and sounds of a bustling Golden-throated barbet, Ngoc Linh, Vietnam Saturday, 9/20, 12:30-2:00 p.m.
(Ages 4-6, each child with one adult)
Vietnamese Discovering Vietnam’s Biodiversity
Through September 28 Einstein for Everyone:
Marketplace Akeley Gallery, second floor Adventures in Light!
and sample traditional This exhibition of photographs high- Sunday, 9/21, 12:30-2:00 p.m.
foods at Café Pho. lights Vietnam's remarkable diversity (Ages 4-6, each child with one adult)
Through January 4, 2004 of plants and animals.
This exhibition is made possible by the | Want to Be an Astronaut
77TH STREET LOBBY, FIRST FLOOR Tuesday, 9/23, 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Arthur Ross Foundation and by the National
L — Science Foundation. (Ages 4-6, each child with one adult)

THE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HISTORY BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
Fly Me to the Moon Choosing a Telescope
Thursday, 9/25, 4:00-5:30 p.m. Three Mondays, 9/15-29
(Ages 4-6, each child with one adult) A practical introduction to the seem-
oO
ingly endless choice of telescopes
Ee
>
iD
available to the amateur astronomer.
m
a
=
fe
=
Photons to Photos: Spying on
BeA
m
Stars with Spectroscopy
Four Tuesdays, 9/23-10/14 NVOIHSWY
OISNW
TWNOLIVNYSLNI
ASSLENOO
NVd

> This course addresses the methods

astronomers use to deduce the
history of stars and galaxies from
the colors of the light they emit.
Lunar Roving Vehicle

Space Explorers: The Planets (and SPACE SHOWS

Meteorites) of Our Solar System The Search for Life:
Tuesday, 9/9, 4:30-5:45 p.m. Are We Alone? Starry Nights: Live Jazz
(Ages 10 and up) In the Hayden Narrated by Harrison Ford
Planetarium Space Theater Friday, 9/5, 5:30 and 7:00 p.m.
Passport to the Universe Rose Center for Earth and Space
HAYDEN PLANETARIUM Narrated by Tom Hanks Ray Baretto and His Band
PROGRAMS
Starry Nights is made possible by
Virtual Universe: Look Up!
Lead Sponsor Verizon and
Stellar Dynamics Saturday and Sunday, 10:15 a.m.
Associate Sponsors CenterCare
Tuesday, 9/2, 6:30-7:30 p.m. (Recommended for children ages Health Plan and WNBC-TV.
Redefine your sense of “home” on this 5 and under)
monthly tour through charted space.
LARGE-FORMAT FILMS
Celestial Highlights: In the Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak Become a Member of the
Stars of Autumn IMAX® Theater American Museum
Tuesday, 9/30, 6:30-7:30 p.m. of Natural History
Find out what’s up in the October sky. Coral Reef Adventure
A fantastic underwater journey to As a Museum Member you will be
among the first to embark on new
Motion and Matter document some of the world’s largest
Journeys to explore the natural
14 Wednesdays, 9/3-12/10 and most beautiful—and most threat-
world and the cultures of
College-level introduction to ened—reefs.
humanity. You'll enjoy:
space science.
Pulse: a STOMP Odyssey
e Unlimited free general admission
VSVN Take a rhythmic voyage of discovery
to the Museum and special
around the world of percussion and
exhibitions, and discounts on
movement.
Space Shows and IMAX® films
e Discounts in the Museum Shop,
INFORMATION
restaurants, and on program
Call 212-769-5100 or visit
tickets
www.amnh.org. * Free subscription to Natural
History magazine and to
TICKETS AND REGISTRATION Rotunda, our newsletter
Call 212-769-5200, Monday-Friday, e Invitations to Members-only
9:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m., or visit special events, parties, and
www.amnh.org. A service charge exhibition previews
may apply.
For further information, call 212-
All programs are subject to change. 769-5606 or visit www.amnh.org.
 ENDPAPER

preserve them as specimens for the school’s refer-

Private ence collection. Sometimes we have to make tough

choices. I dumped the contents of the ice-cube
trays into a jar and screwed on the lid.

Choices
Later that afternoon I deposited the jar in the re-
frigerator of the education department office. But
the fridge wasn’t working properly, and when I re-
turned to retrieve the jar several days later, the
water—and everything in it—was frozen solid. I
By Dru Clarke
thrust it quickly into a nearby microwave oven,
then began delicately separating the lifeless inverte-
he kick screen was weighed down with a brates and tweezing them into individual specimen
slime of wet, fallen leaves and hairy algae. jars filled with alcohol and water.
The children hauled it from the creek bed Suddenly a gliding movement in the bottom of
onto a level place along the bank. There they eagerly the collection jar caught my eye. The leech was alive!
knelt beside it and, with forceps, began to grasp Somehow the creature had survived the freezing and
anything that moved, transferring their finds to thawing unscathed. I dumped the contents of the jar
white plastic ice-cube trays filled with creek water. into a pie pan, and there the leech continued its ex-
The fourth-graders, from the town of Saint George ploratory behavior, alternately squeeze-boxing its
in northeastern Kansas, were finely segmented body into a
See:
taking part in a project tight ball and expanding to a
called Streamshot, and our full inch and a half.
purpose was to measure I was amazed and hum-
the environmental health bled by its grit. I put the an-
of Blackjack Creek. Our imal in my palm and felt a
assessment would be simply slightly pleasant sensation as
an index of its macroinver- it crept along my “life line.”
tebrates, a sampling of small Its personal specimen jar was
but not microscopic animals labeled and waiting. I hesi-
widely used as indicators of tated, then dumped the al-
freshwater quality. cohol mixture from the
The children’s trays began specimen jar, rinsed it, and
to fill with mayfly nymphs, filled it with the thawed
aquatic sow bugs, and the creek water. I tweezed the
larvae of blackflies, caddis now frantically squirming
flies, and bloodred midges. leech into the container, put
And clinging to the slippery it into a shoebox with the
underside of the very last leaf was a leech. Teased rest of the collection, and headed for home.
from its tenuous hold, the leech slid into one of the After dinner I peeked into the shoebox: the leech
tray’s compartments and immediately sensed a had climbed to the top of its jar and was huddled in-
change in its surroundings. Suctioning itself to the side the lid. “Enough of this,’ I thought. Shoving
bottom of the tray, it accordioned its way around the the jar into my coat pocket, I rummaged for my car
confines of the strange white room, then reared up keys and drove to the banks of Blackjack Creek,
like a rising periscope to take a look around. parking at the spot where we had collected our sam-
The kids shrieked with joy, awe, and horror. ples. After tossing the jar’s contents into the dark
“Watch out! It'll suck your blood!” water, I watched the flowing creek in the beams of
[ assured them that this was a vegetarian leech. my headlights for a few more minutes. Nothing
“How do you know?” stirred on the surface. The leech was home free.
“Well, it was on a leaf, wasn’t it?” Sometimes our choices become epiphanies.
Finally they calmed down to watch its sinuous
movements with fascination. Dru Clarke taught marine science and ecology in secondary
I usually released our captured “‘macros” at the school for thirty-one years. She lives in the Flint Hills ofnorth-
1 of o urveys, but on that day I had agreed to eastern Kansas.

G2
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January 29 - February 11, 2004 June 1 - 11, 2004 July 17 - 25, 2004
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The Circumnavigation of
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FEATURES

44 PROMISED LAND
Several million years ago tectonic forces began
to create an edenic corridor that led early
humans out of Africa and into the Near East.
ZVI BEN-AVRAHAM AND SUSAN HOUGH

COVER STORY
40 PORTAL TO PETRA
Hewn out of sandstone cliffs, the hidden
capital of the ancient Nabataeans became a
great urban center some 2,300 years ago.
MARTHA SHARP JOUKOWSKY

COVER
Petra: View
from within the
Urn Tomb.
STORY BEGINS
ON PAGE 40

50 SUNBATHING
SEALS OF eS
ANTARCTICA datay
The puzzle is: How do
they keep cool? Visit our Web site at
TERRIE M. WILLIAMS www.nhmag.com
 6 THE NATURAL MOMENT
What Life Looks Like on Mars?
Photograph by Dave E. Bunnell
8 UP FRONT
Editor’s Notebook

10 CONTRIBUTORS

(ZC ETRERS

16 SAMPLINGS
Stéphan Reebs

18 UNIVERSE
Let There be Light
Neil deGrasse Tyson
20 NATURALIST AT LARGE
Something to Howl About
Katharine Milton
36 BIOMECHANICS
Evolutionary Anthems
Adam Summers

56 THIS LAND
Fern Relations
Robert H. Mohlenbrock

58 REVIEW
Crop Circles
MarcJ. Cohen
64 BOOKSHELF
Laurence A. Marschall

68 nature.net
Robert Anderson

74 AT THE MUSEUM

78 OUT THERE
The Salt Not of the Earth
Charles Liu

79 THE SKY IN OCTOBER

Joe Rao
80 ENDPAPER
Pees & Cues
Ryan C. Taylor

PICTURE CREDITS: Page 10

 Acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns presents his newest film, the lighthearted H
produced with Dayton Duncan, and his masterpiece THE WEST, produced with Stephen Ives, now on DVD.

and sometimes hilarious tale that

bound to fuel your imagination!
New to DVD and videocassette.
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Now for the first time on DVD!

Also Available
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Available at:

Kec youremertatnreot : © 2003 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved. PBS HOME VIDEO:
ya

oe
 THE NATURAL
NY kA RI
MOMENT UPaBk ONT
~< See preceding pages

Desert Secrets
It is impossible to conceive any thing more aweful or sublime than such an ap-
proach [to the ancient city]: the width [of the desert canyon] is not more than just
sufficient for the passage of two horsemen abreast; the sides are in all parts perpen-
dicular, varying from 400 to 700feet in height; . . . and there ts little more light
BAe of tramping for miles
than in a cavern... . We followed this half subterranean passage for the space of
underground and _ sleeping
nearly two miles, the sides increasing in height as the path continually descended.
in limestone catacombs tunneled —Charles Leonard Irby and James Mangles, Travels in Egypt and
out by sulfuric acid is not every- Nubia, Syria and the Holy Land (London, 1868), quoted in
one’s idea of happy camping. But Petra: A Tiavellers’ Guide, by Rosalyn Maqsood
Dave E. Bunnell—photographer
and cave aficionado—r1s not every- nce, 2,300 years ago, the ghost town at the end ofthe
one. He was thrilled to be among path—which you can still visit along the passage dramati-
a small party of cavers allowed to cally described above—was a bustling metropolis carved
map an arm of Lechuguilla Cave into the sandstone cliffs, its Broadway already excavated by a long-
in southern New Mexico, the vanished stream. Petra, in what is now southern Jordan, was the
deepest cave in the continental Washington and New York City of the Nabataeans, the capital city
United States. A few days in, after and cultural center of a powerful nation built on the spice trade.
dozens of “squeezes” and lengthy When Steven Spielberg sought locations for his movie Indiana Jones
rope climbs, Bunnell and his team and the Last Crusade, Petra was the site that shouted, “hidden treasure
stumbled across the area of orange in the desert,
calcite growths in the photograph, On October 18 a new exhibition, “Petra: Lost City of Stone,”
measuring several feet across. opens at the American Museum of Natural History in New York
This stunning cave is populated City. Some 200 objects will be on display through July 6, 2004. The
by a spectacular array of microor- exhibition then moves to the Cincinnati Art Museum, the co-orga-
ganisms. For despite the lack of nizer of the show, and thereafter to several other venues. “‘Portal to
light and nutrients, bacteria have Petra,’ our gallery of pictures with text and captions by longtime
adapted to Lechuguilla, some by Petra scholar Martha Sharp Joukowsky, begins on page 40.
absorbing metals such as man-
ganese and iron. A number of in-
vestigators, among them Leslie [peers forces uplifted the sandstone in which Petra was
Melim of Western Llinois Uni- carved, and those same forces created the deep, flattened de-
versity in Macomb and Diana pression, immediately to the west, known as the Dead Sea valley.
Northup of the University of Now investigators from a broad range of disciplines have made it
New Mexico in Albuquerque, clear that those geological events directly affected the course of
are studying how the bacteria can human history. Between 2 million and 3 million years ago tectonic-
build up calcified assemblages in plate movements opened a corridor linking northeastern Africa
caves—adding to the decor. with the Near East. In those days, as Zvi Ben-Avraham and Susan
Melim and Northup believe Hough tell the story in “Promised Land” (page 44), the climate was
that bacteria may have helped much milder and wetter than it is today—so gentle and inviting, in
form the icicle-like extensions, fact, that it lured a rich flora and fauna, including early humans, out
known as “pool fingers,’ which of Africa along the new land route. Stone tools discovered in the
point downward in Bunnell’s pic- corridor, bearing a striking resemblance to tools unearthed in
ture. “Our working model is that Africa, have been dated to 1.4 million years ago—a date that makes
bacterial slime is replaced or Petra’s heyday seem as recent as yesterday’s newspaper.
coated by calcite,’ says Melim. —PETER BROWN
Such work in “extreme” environ-
ments is helping redefine where Natural History (ISSN 0028-0712) is published monthly, except for combined issues in July/August and December/January, by Natural History Magazine,
Inc., at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, NY 10024, E-mail: nhmag@amnh.org, Natural History
biologists search for life or its re- Magazine, Inc., is solely responsible for editorial content and publishing practices. Subscriptions; $30.00 a year; for Canada and all other countries; $40.00 a
year, Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and at additional mailing offices, Canada Publications Mail No. 40030827. Copyright © 2003 by Natural
mains: think extraterrestrial. History Magazine, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without written consent of Natural History. If you would like to
contact us regarding your subscription or to enter a new subscription, please write to us at Natural History, RO, Box 5000, Harlan, [A 51593-0257. Post-
—Erin M. Espelie master: Send address changes to Natural History, P.O. Box 5000, Harlan, IA 51537-5000. Printed in the U.S.A.

8 NATURAL HISTORY October 2003

 in Every IsstIe
Natural History takes you to the ends of the un aethe oe oftheuniverse o 7
answer common questions with uncommon insight. From astronomy to zoology, thebig
bang to microscopic organisms, the depths of the sea to distant stars, Natural Hist a
spans He spectrum of science, nature and history. —

Siibsenbe now and receive:

THE WONDERS OFN

 iITRIBUTORS
Da eS

ice 1996, caver and photographer DAVE E. BUNNELL

he Natural Moment,” page 6) has been the editor of NSS
News, the magazine of the National Speleological Society.
His photograph of orange flowstone was made in the western
branch of Lechuguilla Cave, near Carlsbad Caverns in New
Mexico, during a mapping expedition at the site (see his Web
site at www.goodearthgraphics.com/virtcave).
PETER BROWN Editor-in-Chief
MARTHA SHARP JOUKOWSKY (“Portal to Petra,” page 40) is a professor with eat Aietilk Meae
a dual appointment at Brown University in Providence, eee Ear “Ape Dea
Rhode Island: at the Center for Old World Archaeology and
Board of Editors
Art and in the department of anthropology. Since 1992 she T. J. Kelleher, Avis Lang, Vittorio Maestro
has served as the director of the Brown University Petra Michel DeMatteis Associate Managing Editor
Great Temple Excavations. She is the author of six books and Lynette Johnson Associate Managing Editor 4
more than fifty scholarly articles, and has served as president Thomas Rosinski Associate Art Director
of the Archaeological Institute of America. Erin M. Espelie Special Projects Editor
7m ie 3 3 Graciela Flores Editorial Associate %
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r of Words about War History who want to be too numerous for this brief tween human capabilities
R. Brian Ferguson (“The usefully informed about the response—almost every and what people actually
Birth of War,’ 7/03-8/03) causes and history of war- generalization he makes do, all humans are capable
has long believed the past fare should also read newly about when and why war- of understanding archaeol-
was peaceful and has stead- formulated sources, such as fare began is contradicted ogy, logic, and arithmetic.
fastly ignored the archaeol- Lawrence Keeley’s book by archaeological facts. But, just as with making
ogy refuting that myth. War Before Civilization and Let one example suffice, war, not all of them do so
What he fails to realize is my own Constant Battles: the assertion that warfare all of the time.
that most archaeologists The Myth of the Peaceful, began when people settled Lawrence H. Keeley
have also fallen prey to the Noble Savage. down and began farming. University ofIllinois at Chicago
same myth and that, conse- My goal in my book Wrong. The Natufians of
quently, the research he re- Constant Battles was to syn- the Near East, still as for- I suggest that the underlying
lies on itself misreads the thesize the considerable agers, were the first people motive for conflict is inter-
past as sublimely peaceful. body of information on in the world to live in per- nal to societies and cultures,
Although he is now willing past warfare and ecology. manent villages—stone- not external. War and the
walled houses, house mice, preparation for war enables
and so on. Yet they were people with certain abilities
quite peaceful, at least com to acquire greater power
pared with recent tribal and more resources, not pri-
people. The equally seden- marily from their enemies,
tary Pre-Pottery Neolithic but in relation to others
people who followed were within their own society.
the world’s first farmers, Suppose I am an engi-
and they, too, were peace- neer skilled at building
ful. Meanwhile, their con- walls. Because I will do well
temporaries, the mobile in times of war, my behay-
foragers of the Nile Valley, ior will subtly favor a cul-
were very violent. Similarly, ture of war, thereby gaining
in the American Midwest, me higher standing in my
OY
GEE war deaths were common society and a larger share of
among Late Archaic for- its wealth. True, if there are
“We request low bail, Your Honor. My client is no flight risk.” agers (3800-1500 B.c.); rare warlike people in a nearby
during the later semi-agri- group, we ourselves must
to see some warfare in the The evidence is over- cultural, sedentary Middle be warlike. But in a sense,
past—essentially only in the whelming that warfare and Woodland period (1500 those who stand to benefit
past 10,000 years—Mr. ecological balance have B.C.-A.D. 900); and became from conflict within each
Ferguson continues to be- been linked for millennia. common again among the group are partners 1n main-
lieve the myth that people Warfare in the past is pat- later Mississippian farmers taining the dynamic.
have lived in ecological bal- terned and explainable. (900-1450). Alan Silverman
ance throughout most of Most important, warfare Note too that during the Stone Ridge, New York
human history, and as a re- was Just as intense and three-day Civil War battle
sult uses outdated interpre- deadly in the deep past as it of Gettysburg, only 3 or 4 R. Brian Ferguson suggests
tations in an attempt to sal- was in the more recent past. percent of those actively that the scarcity of evidence
vage his own politically Steven A. LeBlanc engaged were killed. Thus, is particularly telling in the
correct interpretations. Peabody Museum of many of the “peaceful” case of prehistoric warfare.
Why people engage in Archaeology and Ethnology prehistoric people Mr. Yet I am sure that a survey
warfare is an important Harvard University Ferguson mentions lived in of burials in the United
topic, and archaeology and Cambridge, Massachusetts circumstances, in many States in the twentieth cen-
ethnology provide essential cases lasting for genera- tury would show that the
information about it. R. Brian Ferguson discusses tions, that were as murder- vast majority of skeletal re-
Public policy derives ulti- prehistoric evidence as ous, or more murderous, mains show no evidence of
C I from \ hat we col- poorly as one might expect than one of the bloodiest battle injuries, even though
ly think about this from a non-archaeologist. modern battles. the U.S. has been at war for
sue. Readers of Natural His omissions and errors are As for the difference be- twenty-two out of the past

V2 JATURAL HISTORY
hundred years and has been .that the first Bush Admin- fare: in the contemporary involve group violence
involved in militarized dis- istration’s desire to gain Middle East, democracy is rather than, say, murder.
putes off and on during political power from the in short supply. Furthermore, the smaller
most of the years of so- Gulf War was satisfied only Erik Gartzke the group, the less able it is
called peace. Indeed, most a hundred hours after the Columbia University to tolerate the loss of mul-
burials in U.S. military land invasion began. New York City tiple individuals.
cemeteries in recent One remarkable finding Ken Morgan
decades would indicate a about warfare, now widely R. Brian Ferguson cites a Williston Park, New York
death by natural causes. accepted by students of in- finding by the anthropolo-
Fatalities in warfare are rare, ternational relations, is that gist Raymond C. Kelly that My heartfelt thanks to R.
even in an era when war- states with liberal political hunter-gatherers whose so- Brian Ferguson for three
fare is ubiquitous. If warfare systems—democracies—are cial organization only sentences that express
is intended to test relative much less likely than are loosely extends beyond clearly why I have so much
capability and resolve, and if other political systems to family are warless, whereas trouble believing the
prehistoric combat man- engage each other through war is more common rhetoric that relentlessly
aged to do so with few ca- combat. If the first inklings among those with larger bombards us: (1) “My view
sualties, then warfare could of civilization led to war- and more defined group- is that inmost casesm s thie
have been more common fare, it may be, paradoxi- ings, such as clans. But sim- decision to wage war in-
than the archaeological evi- cally, that the most sophis- ple numbers might explain volves the pursuit of practi-
dence suggests. ticated political structures that difference better than cal self-interest by those
Mr. Ferguson writes that yet developed can ofter the type of social organization. who actually make the de-
“the decision to wage war promise of less war 1n the Larger numbers increase cision.” (2) “Those advo-
involves the pursuit of future. This rumination 1s the chances that a griev- cating war always define it
practical self-interest by germane both to the cradle ance could spark a conflict, in terms of the highest ap-
those who actually make of civilization, and to war- and that the conflict would plicable values.” And (3)
the decision.” It is not
clear how this observation
squares with his argument
that war is an innovation BMWA Cnl sant:
of human prehistory. If
war is relatively recent, so
too must be its causes. But
surely the pursuit of prac-
tical self-interest is not a
recent human innovation.
In any case, wars are
episodic, with beginnings
and ends. Like a light
switch, a cause of war
must be switched on and
then switched off as the
conflict proceeds. Yet if a

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 art wars usu explanations of war, having velop. My article specifi- interest lead to war became
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cno- having “been there, done tural people who made war 10,000 years. I do not see
COU! se. that” with ecological an- and agriculturalists who did war as switched off and on
| agree emphatically, but thropologists more than a not. Some of the details like a light. I agree that
unhappily, that our skill at dozen years ago, I am Mr. Keeley mentions, such how wars end needs much
rationalizing our choices aware of the limitations of as the sequences in Eastern more study, but I doubt
confirms his ending state- these kinds of explanations. North America, I could that many of them end be-
ment: “It is that capability By all means, interested not include because space cause the conditions that
that makes human beings readers should read War was limited. While we're at started them are somehow
such a dangerous species.” Before Civilization and it, the violent, at least reversed. I also am inter-
LaVerne C. McGee Constant Battles. When they partly sedentary foragers of ested, even encouraged, by
Anderson, South Carolina do, they should it a the Nile Valley (Site 117, in findings in the literature on
“democratic peace.’ More
R. BRIAN FERGUSON
Where iribal warfareexists, ee aes democracy may put a brake
feApr

REPLIES: In spite of Steven on the unbridled power of

A. LeBlanc’s suggestion to combat may account for mor
orwe thanrae leaders—though as the past
the contrary, I have often year shows, not always. But
25percent ofadultmale deaths.
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written about prehistoric that issue was far beyond

tp TESTS.
warfare. As early as twenty my topic.
years ago I argued that the sharp eye out for how often Sudan, in my article) were I agree with Ken
Pacific Northwest Coast the authors attack a posi- not contemporary with the Morgan that numbers are
potlatch was, in part, a re- tion without providing any Pre-Pottery Neolithic important. As for
sponse to a pattern of specific citation showing people, but lived 2,000 to Raymond C. Kelly’s find-
deadly warfare, which I as- that someone has actually 4,000 years earlier. ings, which Mr. Morgan
serted went back at least taken that position. I agree with Alan mentions, I would note
3,000 years. For another Readers would also do well Silverman that motives for that Kelly does not address
instance, in a 1992 article to note how few archaeo- conflict should be sought what makes formal group-
in Scientific American I logical cases (as opposed to within war-making soci- ings such as clans and lin-
wrote: “Even in the ab- ethnographic cases) the au- eties, but not to the exclu- eages emerge. There is a
sence of any state, archaeol- thors actually describe in sion of external incentives. good deal of support for
ogy provides unmistakable support of their sweeping Erik Gartzke raises sev- the idea that among the
evidence of war among conclusions about the pre- eral interesting points. On forces behind the emer-
sedentary village peoples, historic record. Even Mr. the paucity of skeletal gence of clans are growing
sometimes going back LeBlanc’s crucial discussion trauma, one cannot com- populations and the conse-
thousands of years.” of the European site Dolni pare tribal war to modern quent competition for re-
Nothing I have ever Vestonice, I am prepared to war without qualifications. sources. It could be, as Mr.
written suggests that pre- argue, bears almost no re- Here I am in line with Mr. Morgan suggests, that small
historic people lived in semblance to the actual Keeley in War Before hunting bands place a
some Eden-like idyll of findings there. Civilization. In tribal com- higher value on individual
natural conservation, the Lawrence H. Keeley bat, mobilization can ex- lives, making war seem less
myth that Mr. LeBlanc at- maintains that just about ceed 40 percent of adult of an option. Some investi-
tacks. He appears to think everything I say 1s wrong, males, battles that are mere gators have also stressed
that is the only alternative but the one example he tests of resolve rather than that for small, scattered
to warfare over food re- bothers to cite is itself mis- an effort to kill are rare, and groups of big-game
sources. But a variety of guided: that I claim there combat death not infre- hunters, the logic of self-
other processes—crashes in was no war before people quently accounts for more interest works against terri-
the food supply, low life “settled down and began than 25 percent of adult torial conflict and encour-
expectancy, high infant farming.” I make no such male deaths. Imagine our ages ramifying networks of,
mortality, migration—keep claim. Agriculture 1s associ- graveyard populations if information exchange and
populations from OVEI= ated with a variety of de- such figures applied to us. movement.
whelming their available velopments that, over time, Yes, I believe humans
resources. Isn’t that the way make war more likely, but have always pursued practi- Natural History’ e-mail
yn Earth? I am it is neither necessary nor cal self-interest. But the address is nhmag@natural
1
walnst ECOLlogiIca ufficient for war to de- conditions that make self- historymag.com
 oc
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 By Stéphan Reebs

Serious Gravity
If the Earth were a uniform orb both inside
and out, its gravity—and thus your
weight—would be the same everywhere.
But our planet is flattened at the Poles; it
has deep seafloor trenches and towering
mountain ranges; the density of the rock
underfoot is far from uniform; and gradual
processes such as the melting of polar ice
and the flow of rock in the mantle redis-
tribute its mass. That makes Earth's gravity
field vary from place to place (and even
from time to time): you’d weigh slightly
Burning ground in northern Mali
more in Tokyo than you do in Tulsa.
A joint five-year U.S.-German space mis-
Hot Rocks sion—the Gravity Recovery and Climate
For centuries the nomadic Tuaregs of the dug an eight-foot-deep trench into the Experiment (GRACE)—is now bringing un-
Sahara, warned off by legends of diabolical leading edge of a smoking, migrating precedented precision to the measure-
fumes and flames, have avoided camping heat front. What they found wasn’t fiery ment and mapping of Earth’s gravity field.
in the dry lake beds around Timbuktu, lava but a layer of smoldering peat—the Since March 2002, two identical satellites
Mali. Some geologists noted similarities result of microbial decomposition of the have been following the same orbit around
between the lakes’ steaming cracks and organic residue left in the sediment when the globe, some 130 miles apart, and
the fumaroles of volcano craters—and a lake has dried out. The decomposition when they encounter minute variations in
wondered if magma might be brewing generates so much heat that the buried
there. Problem was, West Africa has no ac- peat self-ignites, roasting the ground
tive volcanoes and is tectonically stable. above it to temperatures as high as 1,400
Henrik Svensen, a geologist at the Univer- degrees Fahrenheit. (“Subsurface com-
sity of Oslo in Norway, and several col- bustion in Mali: Refutation of the active
leagues went to investigate. volcanism hypothesis in West Africa,”
The team took a direct approach: they Geology 31:581-84, July 2003)

a ie
+ > * J
> a
Reading the Leaves Bt
-
+
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ee Model shows how gravity varies slightly

When soil is poor in phosphorus, plants a role in a signaling. SQD1 gets acti=
around the Earth. Blue “valleys” represent
put a lot more effort into growing hairy vated when plants are starved ‘ofphos- relatively weak gravity fields, and red “peaks”
roots than they do into growing the parts phorus but not when they’re.‘stressed relatively strong ones. The valleys and peaks
people eat. So, to make sure crop yields by other problems. Moreover, that rem are exaggerated for clarity.
are high, farmers tend to use alot of fer- sponse takes place before the plant's
tilizer. But excess phosphorus leaches growth has been compromised bya eo ' the strength of the gravity, the distance be-
| out and eventually triggers blooms of cline in phosphorus. : /, tween them fluctuates. Because that fluctu-
algae that choke lakes and rivers; be- By welding SQD1 to another pe ation can be measured to within a tenth of
sides, cheap natural sources of phospho- one that makes a substance visible in a hair's breadth, geophysicists at NASA
rus will be exhausted in less than a cen- leaves—Hammond and his team have | and the German Aerospace Center in Pots-
tury. Wouldn't it be great if a farmer created a plant that signals its own needs. dam can now map changes in gravity with
could know, just by looking at a plant, By checking its leaves regularly, a farmer exquisite accuracy.
when it needs a hit of the stuff? could see at once whether the plant is Why should anyone trouble to measure
Biotechnology to the rescue. John P. hungry for phosphorus. (“Changes in the global gravity field? The average field
| Hammond of Horticulture Research In- gene expression in Arabidopsis shoots ultimately reveals a lot about ocean circu-
ternational in Warwickshire, England, during phosphate starvation and the po- lation and the structure of the seafloor; the
and his colleagues have pointed out tential for developing smart plants,” Plant fluctuations provide early signs of shifts in
+h
hat a gene known as SQD1 could play Physiology 132:578-96, June 2003) weather patterns and long-term climate
change. (www.csr.utexas.edu/grace)
SAMPLINGS

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Experiment oFthe Month ©

Question: How did the dung beetle cross
cr etic road? Answer: By dung beetle any space here; many other animals do that. But
moonlight. Veg "es ; 2 & ‘See when Marie Dacke, a biologist at Lund University in Sweden,
|This past March this column noted thefirst-ever evidence ofan and several colleagues shielded the rising Moon from the bee-
animal—the elephant hawkmoth—seeing color ac Now <an- tles’ direct view, the insects still moved in a straight line. Could |
‘other insect has joined the ranksof the perceptually advantaged. the beetles have been navigating by polarized moonlight—ex-
e i When a dung beetle finds apile ies manure, itselects the _ tremely feeble illumination that is scattered by minute particles
ts Sola
|choicest,| least-fibrous bits and crafts : ty » in the atmosphere—rather than by
/ theminto a large| ball thatwill supply : ~ the Moon itself? a Raine ‘
itsown dinner for daysto come or To test the idea, the biologists:,
“serve as bothshelter and ffood for its” placed a polarizing filter over moving |
“developing young. Rolling the ee _beetles. If the filter was aligned along
/away from ‘the raw, dung| heapas . E ne»sky's dominant axis of light trans-
quickly
=
and efficiently as it can_
(so that "2: mission, the tbeetles kept moving in
a
_ theballwon’
v .be stolen zand the work 2 the same straight li
line.But ifthe Giiem
wasted)vere nocturnalbeetle heads off & afeae
was.rotatedninety degrees, the bee-
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ina straight line—iftr the Moon

| i isSout,
Ol a es: too,_ suddenly veeredoff at right
Onmoonlessninights, thouah,itzigzags rey a:angles: ‘anelegantdemonstration of,
allovertheplace. i gs mh Sea me 5 an1 amazing visualability.("Insect
( ori-
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2, itself by te‘direct Sd (Scarabaeus zambesianus roll
frican dung be .“entation to
riot co moonlight,”
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A Matter of Taste
Every slab of cheese is an entire commu- less species of Staphylococcus, the usu- Stilton cheese,” Applied and Environmen-
nity of organisms, and, as with many ally unwelcome intestinal microorganism tal Microbiology 69:3540-48, June 2003)
human communities, its character may Enterococcus faecalis, and several spe- Stéphan Reebs is a professor of biology at
not be appreciated by everyone. Take cies of Lactobacillus. The investigators the University of Moncton in New Brunswick,
Stilton. Made under license by only six aren't certain whether they arrive on Canada, and the author of Fish Behavior in
dairies in the English Midlands, it’s one of the scene by surviving the milk pasteuri- the Aquarium and in the Wild (Cornell Uni-
those cheeses whose strong aroma and zation process or by being introduced versity Press).
intense flavor some find delightful and through equipment or
others find repellent. But just what makes other sources.
a Stilton a Stilton? Danilo Ercolini, a mi- All the interlopers can
crobiologist at Federico II University in serve as starter cultures in
Naples, Italy, and his colleagues at the fermented products, such
University of Nottingham in England as yogurt and salami, in
aimed to find out. which they control the
Using the latest techniques of DNA development of flavor,
analysis, the microbiologists identified color, and texture. Their
the panoply of bacteria that, along with roles in Stilton are un-
yeast and the essential Penicillium mold, known, but their presence
give Stilton its complex taste. They also or absence may help ex-
discovered that distinct regions of the plain why different batches
cheese—the blue veins (caused by pierc- of the cheese made at the
ing the ripening curd with needles to same dairy can have highly
aerate it), the creamy ivory core, and the different characteristics.
natural crust—vary in acidity and oxygen Can custom-inoculated
content and harbor different kinds of cheeses be far behind?
bacteria. Several unexpected micro- (“Bacterial community
inhabitants are worth noting: two harm- structure and location in Stilton, anyone?

October 2003 NATURAL HISTORY |17

 iet There Be Light
\pmers.
22s

Some 380,000 years after the big bang, the universal fog
lifted and the cosmic background radiation was set free.

By Neil deGrasse Tyson

|: the beginning of everything, left over from a dazzling, sizzling he temperature of the universe is
when the universe was just a frac- early universe. It’s a ubiquitous bath directly related to the size of the
tion of a second old, a ferocious of photons—massless vehicles of en- universe. It’s a physical thing. If the
trillion degrees hot, and glowing with ergy, always moving at the speed of universe grows to twice its original
an unimaginable brilliance, its main light, which act as much like waves as size, all its free-traveling photons lose
agenda was expansion. With every they do like particles. As the cosmos half their original energy. A growing
passing moment the universe got big- continued to cool, photons that had universe forces a photon’s wavelength
ger. But it also got cooler and dimmer. been born in the visible part of the to get longer, stretching along with the
And for millennia, matter and energy spectrum lost energy to the expand- spandexlike fabric of space and time.
cohabited in a kind of thick soup, in ing universe and eventually slid down A photon’s wavelength is simply the
which speedy electrons continually the spectrum, morphing into infrared separation between one wave crest
scattered photons of light to and fro. photons. As their wavelengths grew and the next—a distance you could
Back then, if your mission had in size, they became cooler, that is, measure if you had a small enough
been to see across the universe, you ruler. Because all photons move at the
couldn’t have. Any photons entering same speed, the shorter their wave-
your eye would, just nanoseconds or lengths the more wave crests have to
picoseconds earlier, have bounced off pass a given point in a given interval of
electrons right in front of your face. time. Those are the higher-frequency
You would have seen only a glowing photons. And a photon’s frequency 1s
fog in all directions, and your entire a direct measure of its energy. That
surroundings—luminous, — translu- makes sense, too: the higher its fre-
cent, reddish white in color—would quency—that is, the faster it wig-
have been nearly as bright as the sur- gles—the more energy it carries.
face of the Sun. When an object glows from being
Eventually, right around the time the less energetic, but they never stopped heated, it emits radiation in all parts of
young universe reached its 380,000th being photons. the spectrum. But that radiation al-
birthday, its temperature dropped Today, some 13.7 billion years after ways peaks somewhere. The peak en-
below 3,000 degrees. Electrons began the beginning, the photons that make ergy output of ordinary household
to slow down enough to be captured up the cosmic background have lightbulbs lies in the infrared part of
by protons, thus bringing atoms into cooled further still, shifting down the the spectrum, which people detect as
the world. With fewer unattached spectrum to become microwaves. warmth on the skin. But of course
electrons to gum up the works, the That’s how they got their modern lightbulbs also emit plenty of visible
photons could finally race around moniker: “cosmic microwave back- light, or we wouldn’t be buying them.
without bumping into anything. ground,’ or CMB for short. A hun- The peak output of the cosmic
That’s when the universe became dred billion years from now, when background has a wavelength of
transparent, the fog lifted, and a cosmic the universe has expanded and about a millimeter, which is smack-
background of visible light was set free. cooled even more, astrophysicists will dab in the microwave part of the
That cosmic background persists be writing about the cosmic radio spectrum. The static you hear on a
to this day, the remnant of the light wave background. walkie-talkie comes from an ambient
bath of microwaves, a few percent of nuclei were laid bare and all electrons within a factor of 2 was a remarkable ac-
which are from the CMB. (The rest roamed free. Under those conditions, complishment—rather like predicting
of the noise comes from the Sun, cell they hypothesized, photons would that a flying saucer 50 feet in width
phones, police radar guns, and so on.) would land on the White House lawn
not have sped uninterrupted across
and then watching one 27 feet in width
the universe, as they do today. The
actually show up.
he existence of the CMB was photons’ free ride today would have
predicted by the Ukrainian- required that the cosmos get cooler— When Gamow, Alpher, and Her-
born U.S. physicist George Gamow cool enough for the electrons to man made their predictions, physicists
and his colleagues in the 1940s, cul- combine with atomic nuclei, forming were still undecided about the begin-
minating in a 1948 paper that extrap- atoms and allowing light to move ning of the universe. In 1948, the same
olated the known laws of physics into without obstruction. year Alpher and Herman’s paper ap-
the early universe. The foundation of Although it was Gamow who sug- peared, a rival, “‘steady state” theory of
those ideas came from the 1927 work gested that the universe was once hot- the universe was proposed in two pa-
of Georges Edouard Lemaitre, a Bel- ter, and that you could know the pers published in England, one by the
gian astronomer and Jesuit priest who physics of the early universe, it was mathematician Hermann Bondi and
is generally recognized as the father of Alpher and Herman who calculated its the astrophysicist Thomas Gold, the
big bang cosmology. But it was two temperature: five degrees Kelvin (five other by the cosmologist Fred Hoyle.
US. physicists, Ralph A. Alpher and degrees above absolute zero). Yes, they The steady state theory required that

Hiroshi Sugito, The Drive, 2002

Robert C. Herman, both of whom got it wrong—the CMB is actually 2.7 the universe, though expanding, had
had worked with Gamow, who esti- degrees Kelvin—but together, those always looked the same. And because a
mated what the temperature of the guys made an extrapolation unlike any steady state universe could not have
cosmic background ought to be. other in the history of science. To take been any hotter or denser yesterday
In hindsight, theirs is a relatively some basic atomic physics from a slab than it is today, the Bondi-Gold-Hoyle
simple argument, one that I’ve al- in the lab, and then deduce the largest- scenario maintained, matter was con-
ready made. The fabric of space-time scale phenomenon ever measured, was stantly popping into our universe, at
was smaller yesterday than it is today, extraordinary. Discussing the feat in his just the right rate to leave the expand-
and if it was smaller, basic physics re- book Time Tiavel in Einstein’s Universe, ing cosmos with a constant average
quires it to have been hotter. So the J. Richard Gott III, an astrophysicist at density. By contrast, big bang theory
physicists turned back the clock and Princeton University, writes: requires that all matter come into exis-
imagined an epoch when the uni- tence at one instant.
verse was so hot that all its atoms were Predicting that the radiation existed and Predicting the CMB was a shot
completely ionized—when all atomic then getting its temperature correct to (Continued on page 70)

October 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 19

 ST AT LARGE
“5 NSN SARA

something to Howl About

To earn her spurs as a tropical biologist, the author decided
to study a parasite that even her colleagues wanted to avoid.

By Katharine Milton

n 1974, as a greenhorn to the

tropics, I traveled to Panama to
begin a study of the dietary be-
havior of wild howler monkeys on
Barro Colorado Island. The island was
separated from the mainland in 1912,
during the construction of the
Panama Canal: its six square miles of
forest now serve as a field station man-
aged by the Smithsonian Tropical Re-
search Institute. In my first exhausting
but exciting weeks settling into new
quarters and venturing on my own
into the forest, I noticed that many
howler monkeys had peculiar lumps
under their fur, usually around the
neck and throat but sometimes on the
chest or stomach, on the back, even
on a cheek or above an eye. The
lumps were large, and they often Juvenile howler monkey is heavily burdened with bot fly larvae on its neck.
made the monkeys appear grotesque. Each larva develops in a pocket of the monkey's skin, conspicuous for its open
Infants looked as if they had two heads breathing hole. The parasites take a toll on their hosts and can lead to death,
or a massive goiter; many adults re- particularly in immature or weakened individuals. This juvenile is only half the
size of an adult; it probably weighs between six and eight pounds.
sembled something out of B-movie
sci-fi,
Curious, I asked other biologists on quito. She grasps the insect—known blood ofa mammal—a meal required
the island about the lumps. They, too, in the trade as an egg porter—and for the insect’s own reproduction—
were fairly new to the site, but their holds it firmly in flight while she at- the bot fly embryos, by now devel-
answer was immediate: “Bot fly lar- taches rows of her eggs to its ab- oped into tiny threadlike larvae, sense
vae.” Bot fly larvae? Eek! I’d never domen with a water-insoluble glue. the heat from the mammal’s body and
heard of them, but they sounded She then releases the insect un- burst from their eggs. The larvae bur-
pretty alarming. I learned that Derma- harmed. Now, though, it is neatly row directly into the mammal’s skin,
tobia hominis, the “human” bot fly, is decorated with twenty-odd bot fly where they make themselves at home.
well known to science because of the eggs. There the bot fly embryos grow Each larva lives in what is known as
diabolically clever way it finds hosts quietly until they’re ready to hatch. a warble, a pocket or chamber that
for its offspring. A female ready to The trigger for hatching comes forms in the host’s skin. In its warble,
deposit her « blood- from a third animal species. When the which has a small breathing hole
: :
SUCKING 111SeEC r mos- egg porter makes a meal from the open to the air, the larva feeds on a

URAL HI
rich soup of tissue fluids produced by A veterinarian friend in Panama was clear that Dermatobia is a maver-
the™ hostey Uherer the larva spasses named Nathan B. Gale, the director ick. Other species in the family tend
through three more “instars,” or de- of the Veterinary Public Health Labo- to associate closely with just one
velopmental stages, growing larger all ratory, took an interest in the prob- mammalian host, typically a rodent or
the while. At the end of the third in- lem. Sick or wounded wild animals rabbit. In general, they also place
star, the larva wriggles out of its war- were occasionally brought to his their eggs not on egg porters but
ble, falls to the ground, and burrows clinic for treatment, and when a rather in areas of habitat likely to be
into the soil to pupate. Some weeks howler monkey arrived one day, he visited by the host. A rodent bot fly,
later an adult fly emerges from the soil removed its bot fly larvae, put them in for instance, might leave its eggs on
to seek a mate, and the cycle is re- a preservative, and mailed them to an grass or twigs near the trail of its spe-
peated. Because most egg porters are entomologist friend at Washington cific rodent host. When the rodent
not picky about whose blood they sip, State University in Pullman, the late passes by, the heat from its body alerts
the larvae of Dermatobia hominis can E. Paul Catts. Catts recognized that the larvae, which emerge instantly
end up on almost any warm-blooded they were larvae of an entirely differ- from their eggs and attach themselves
animal—from a squirrel to a monkey ent species, Alouattamyia baeri, the to the animal’s whiskers or fur.
to (as the name implies) a human howler-monkey bot fly. That was a In most cases the larvae enter the
being. Double Eek! big surprise, but also a big relief: the host’s body not by burrowing directly
reason only howler monkeys were af- into the skin but by passing through
y fellow scientists on the island flicted with the larvae was that the the nostrils, eyes, or mouth. Larvae
regaled me with dramatic tales bot fly is host-specific. then spend several days migrating
of intensely painful bot fly larvae Catts had written an extensive re- through internal organs and tissues,
growing in inaccessible places, in dis- view describing the members of finally coming to rest at a preferred
gusting places, in very private places. Cuterebridae, the New World family site on the host’s body. The neck re-
According to these battle-scarred vet- to which both Dermatobia and Alouat- gion is the most frequent target for
erans, the best way to get rid ofa larva tamyia belong. From Catts’s review it the howler-monkey bot fly larva, but
is to plaster a thick piece of bacon on wherever it settles, it opens a breath-
your skin above the breathing hole of ing hole and ensconces itself in its
a larva’s warble. In desperation (since warble to mature, a process that takes
bot fly larvae have to breathe), the six or seven weeks.
larva crawls out of its warble and up
into the bacon. Then you whip off S? little was known about Alouat-
the bacon with the larva trapped in- tamyia baeri, however, that I de-
side. Poor howler monkeys, up in the cided I was in an ideal place to study
trees with no bacon, nor even with its life cycle. My first task was to find
the manual dexterity to force larvae out what the adult fly looked like. No
out of the warbles by hand—my heart one in Panama, including me, actu-
went out to them! ally knew. The thing to do was to
I went on with my field study, and collect some larvae and wait for them
months went by. Thankfully, I ac- to mature.
quired no bot fly larvae, and neither Collection was easy enough. The
did anyone else on the island. In fact, larvae were plentiful on recently dead
none of the other monkey species on howler monkeys in the forest or
the island—capuchins, spider mon- howler monkeys temporarily captured
keys, tamarins—were infested with bot for marking or weighing. When fully
fly larvae either, even though during developed, the larvae were black and
some months virtually every howler heavily corrugated, resembling minia-
monkey I saw bore multiple warbles. ture hand grenades [see upper photo-
Howler-monkey bot fly larvae (upper
The other biologists noticed the same photograph) are pictured at the third-instar graph on this page|.
thing. As it turned out, none of these stage, the last stage before pupation. Starting But getting the larvae to mature
scientist-raconteurs had ever gotten a out cream colored (left), the third instar puts on was less straightforward. I set up two
Dermatobia larva on Barro Colorado additional weight and darkens (right). A fully screened enclosures where they
developed larva is nearly an inch long and can could pupate, one in the forest and
Island; all their exciting stories were weigh more than a tenth of an ounce. Male
based on experiences elsewhere in the another in a well-aired room. All |
howler-monkey bot fly (lower photograph) has
neotropics. Perhaps these larvae were a distinguishing stripe on each eye. The insect had to do, I assumed, was check
not that same notorious pest after all. is about seven-eighths of an inch long. them each day and collect my adult

October 2003 NATURAL HISTO! 24

 bout a year later I began a re-
search collaboration with Dou-
glas D. Colwell, a bot fly expert at the
Lethbridge Research Centre in Al-
berta, Canada. In Panama Colwell
and I collected more than fifty third-
instar larvae, and he took them back
with him to his lab in Canada. Col-
well proved to be a deft hand at rais-
ing flies. Ultimately he was blessed
with fifteen males and nine females.
The female flies were noticeably
larger, and their eyes spaced more
widely apart. The live male bot flies
had a red vertical stripe on each eye—
a striking characteristic that fades and
disappears after death [see lower photo-
graph on preceding page]. (Lucille lacked
this distinction, by the way, confirm-
ing that she was a female, and thus
correctly named.)
Bot flies at Lethbridge were willing
to mate, and each female deposited,
on average, 1,400 black, ridged eggs,
in rows of about 250 each. The fe-
males preferred to lay their eggs in the
creases of moist paper towels. (For the
laboratory bot flies that was the end;
no monkeys were used in these ex-
periments.) We have still not found
the bot flies’ site of choice for egg lay-
ing in the natural environment,
though our prime suspects are tree
leaves and branches.
No one has seen Alouattamyia mate
in the wild, but males in the Cutere-
bridae family typically develop more
Howler monkey rests in a Cecropia tree, whose young leaves as well as flowers quickly than females do, and then
and fruits are an important source of food. gather in trees or other high places.
Again, no one knows why, but per-
flies as they emerged from pupation. come and see this amazing fly. I haps males in a group can attract
But day after day the enclosures re- named her Lucille. more females per male, on average,
mained empty. After nearly five The life of “Lucille, the Famous than a single male could acting alone.
weeks of waiting, I was almost posi- Fly,” as she became known to every- That would improve each male’s
tive that humidity and fungi had one on Barro Colorado Island, may chances of mating, despite the com-
killed all the pupae. Then on the have been a happy one, but it was petition. In any case, unmated females
forty-eighth day, when I went to not long. Flies of the Cuterebridae that fly near the group appear to have
check the screened enclosure in family emerge from their pupal some way of advertising their virgin
the room, I found a large fly buzz- cases, mate, and die in just a few status, and the waiting males pursue
ing around inside. My captive was days. Just three and a half days after them. When a male succeeds in clasp-
more than half an inch long, covered Lucille first appeared, I witnessed her ing a virgin female, the pair alights to
with short, dense, velvety black hair, death throes. The cause was old age. complete copulation.
and had transparent, amber-brown It was asad moment. Her pinned re- Although the details of bot fly life
wings. My joyful cries ale 1 every- mains still occupy a place of honor in history fascinated me, I particularly
ith11] \ Y Stance Veo my office in Berkeley. wanted to understand the interactions
Felt but
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 of howler-monkey bot flies and their supply. Were the high death rates
hosts. Received entomological wis- caused by a food shortage, or by the
dom holds that a “prudent” parasite cool, wet, cloudy weather? Perhaps
does not kill its host. Such restraint those factors played a role, but, by
might seem particularly important for themselves, they probably weren’t
a host-specific parasite such as Alouat- sufficient: I found no overt signs of
tamyia. After all, if the parasite elimi- starvation or illness in the population.
nates its natural host, it has nowhere But I did note that bot fly larva infes-
to raise its larvae. tations peaked at the same time.
Yet many of the dead howler mon- A more complete account of the
keys I found in the forest still bore a higher death rates probably goes
large number of bot fly larvae—ten or something like this: The immune sys-
more. Because one third-instar larva tem of a howler monkey in good
Whether it’s Bergen’s old-world can weigh more than a tenth of an physical condition appears able to
charm or Oslo’s impressive museums, ounce, ten larvae would be a heavy limit the number of larvae that can
Norway’s diversity will delight you. metabolic load, particularly for an im- establish themselves at any one time.
mature monkey. My census of howler But howler monkeys in poor condi-
And SAS can get you there every day
monkeys, about 1,200 individuals, tion seem in jeopardy. Repeated at-
from New York (non-stop 3 days a also showed the proportion of juve- tacks by bot fly larvae may exhaust
week), Washington, DC, Seattle, and niles was suspiciously low. Although the howler monkeys’ fat reserves,
Chicago. Call 1-800-221-2350 for about 300 infants were born each which would normally carry them
more information and flight times. year, I estimated that there were only through the annual food shortages.
about 150 juveniles in the population. Immature or fat-depleted hosts would
www.visitnorway.com/us.

so
Perhaps, at times, “prudent’”’ parasites be particularly at risk; combined with
weren't being quite prudent enough. the stresses of cool, wet weather and
For the next five years I kept a low-quality food, many such mon-
SAS —s Norway monthly record of the number of bot keys would die.
Coastal Voyage
A Pure Escape fly larvae present in a representative
Scandinavian Airlines

sample of howler monkeys. I found a ee data on infestation and mor-

few afflicted monkeys in every tality, as well as similar accounts
: signed To Cruis month of the year, but the infesta-
tions seemed to peak two or three
of other bot fly—host interactions, sug-
gest that populations of howler mon-
Priced To Fly.
4

times a year, both in the number of keys and their bot flies swing up and
monkeys afflicted and in the average down like many other populations of
number of bot fly larvae present on predators and their prey. When the
each monkey. The peaks came dur- howler monkeys increase in number,
ing the rainy season, which lasts from all else being equal, the density of the
May through November, though the howler-monkey bot flies increases as
largest of them usually did not take well. At times, though, the bot flies es-
place until July or later. calate their numbers out of proportion
Throughout that same five-year to their hosts. That leads to the deaths
Bean’s Acadia Cruiser: $279. period I also kept track of howler- of so many howler monkeys that their
$499 for two.
monkey deaths. Scientists and visitors population drops. But here the bot
Designed for comfort with shock-
absorbing suspension, adjustable
on the island alerted me or my assis- flies pay for their violation of the “pru-
fit, supersoft saddle and 21 hill-
tants whenever a monkey was found dent parasite” rule. They die off for
conquering gears. Lightweight, dead, and we collected the remains. lack of hosts. Hence the infestation
affordably priced and delivered to Although the procedure couldn't give rate drops, and the howler monkey
your door. Order two and save. us a complete tally of deaths, it did population gradually recovers.
Shop online at llbean.com or call
enable me to chart the pattern of an-
Katharine Milton is a professor in the Depart-
nual mortality. The death rate was
1-800-246-4352 for a FREE ment of Environmental Science, Policy and
highest in July through November— Management, Division of Insect Biology, at
Outdoors Catalog.
the mid- to late-rainy season. At that the University of California, Berkeley. She
time of year the energy-rich fruits has been studying the ecology and population
and protein-rich young leaves the dynamics of howler monkeys on Barro Col-
monkeys prefer to eat are in short orado Island for thirty years.

24] NATURAL HISTORY October 2003

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 Bermuda’s most famous bird, the Bermuda
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Birders in the know are finding their way to
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CAYMAN BRAC, A SMALL ISLAND IN THE Cayman Brac. After months of child-rearing duties
western Caribbean Sea, is one of the least explored at the nest, the pairs emerge to teach their off-
birding destinations in the West Indies, but it is a spring the do’s and don’ts of life in the forest. They
birders’ delight: miles of trails through tropical forests fly from one fruiting tree to another; favorites
and coastal woodlands, good roadside viewing, and include red birch, pepper cinnamon, wild fig, man-
lots and lots of birds. In fact, 180 of the Cayman goes and papaya. Because they are creatures of
Islands’ 224 bird species are found on the Brac. habit, the parrots can be seen at regular sites as they
One of the best times to visit the Brac is fly to and from their breeding and roosting sites.
between August and May, when large numbers of ‘To see the five species of land birds that occur
migrants flock to the island, joining resident together on the Brac—Caribbean _elaenia, vitelline
seabirds, wetland species, and an interesting com- warbler, thick-billed vireo, red-legged thrush, and
bination of endemics. Don’t miss Amazona leuco- Brac parrot—would otherwise require visits to the
cephala hesterna, the Brac parrot, the smallest mem- Swan Islands, coastal Central America, Cuba, and
ber of the green Amazon parrot family. This par- the Bahamas. The thrush is sartorially elegant in
rot’s size, coloring, call, and habits make it very dif- gray and black, with red legs and bill. It is usually
ferent from its cousins on Grand Cayman, Cuba, noisy and bossy, but from November to January it
and the Bahamas, so much so that if studies on its becomes silent and disappears into the forest.
genetic makeup confirm that its genes are as dis- In between birding outings, try a little snor-
tinctive as the rest of its attributes, it will become a keling or diving on the Russian wreck. You might
new species. Look for this near-threatened parrot go fly- and deep-sea fishing; photograph iguanas,
the forests of the Parrot Reserve, established by orchids, and butterflies; or visit historic houses,
\Jat
ational |
Irust. caves, and the museum. And then there are the
In the fall, parrots are seen everywhere on sunsets!
 Coeur ccs ee Cone ee |
2 UT Ca Se

And while you're here, be sure to

visit our two Sister Islands. Hike along
Cayman Brac’s spectacular 140-ft bluff.
where you'll find over 200 species of
birds, including the rare Cayman Brac
Parrot. On Little Cayman, treat yourself
to more than a dozen secluded beaches
countless untouched lagoons, salt ponds
and tropical forests strewn with orchids.

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 /

Korean National Tourism Organization

[
VOUNLY
res

LOOKING FOR A BIRDING VACATION LOVELY AND HISTORIC QUEEN GARRETT COUNTY, the western-
off the beaten path? Why not visit Anne’s County, a gateway to Chesapeake most county in Maryland, boasts
Korea, with some 400 bird species and Country, is also a fine site for birding. extensive and exceptional birding hot
fantastic opportunities to see some of Start your visit in picturesque Kent spots. This frontier region’s state
East Asia’s greatest birds? Island, established in 1631. Across from parks and forests are ablaze with beau-
Birdwatchers have discovered that the island, in Grasonville, you'll find tiful foliage, crashing waterfalls, and
Korea’s extensive tidal flats, along with the Horsehead Wetlands Center. clear lakes.
one of the world’s steepest tidal ranges, Operated by the Wildfowl Trust, Because of its geographical location
make it a fantastic place to watch shore- this 500-acre sanctuary has. trails and topography, Garrett attracts many
birds. Add good roads with English signs, around six waterfowl ponds, each rep- birds not usually found at this latitude:
excellent public transportation, anda net- resenting a different wetland habitat. Garrett is the only place south of the
work of ecotourism groups, and you have Yow’re likely to come across red fox, Mason-Dixon Line where you can see
a first-class birdwatching destination. river otter, geese, and swans. Native birds usually seen in Canada, the
At the bird sanctuary on Bamseom waterfowl include northern shovelers, Great Lakes, and the Northeastern
Islet, high-powered binoculars allow redheads, wood ducks, and tundra states. Discover the hermit thrush in
glimpses of many species of ducks and swans. The ponds also attract black shady maple and hemlock groves,
raptors. Seosan Reclamation Lakes/ ducks, canvasbacks, American wigeons, bobolinks in golden hay fields, north-
Cheonsuman Bay is probably Korea’s lesser and greater scaups, green- and ern water thrush in swamplands, and
best site for wildfowl. In winter, it’s blue-winged teal, cinnamon teal, and hawks migrating in autumn.
easy to see raptors, Oriental white herons. Migratory birds traveling north Spring and fall bring swarms of
stork, and white spoonbills. Large and south on the Atlantic Flyway also migrant flocks. The seven local lakes are
flocks of waterfowl—peaking at stop here. a stopover point for thousands of feed-
300,000 birds in November—soar over Don’t skip the visitor center, where ing, migrating waterfowl, while the
the site’s two main lakes. The Iron a powerful scope overlooks a waterfowl forests are filled with migrant songbirds.
Triangle Battlefield, in Cheorwon, pond. The center also boasts an aquar- With more than 140 species of
Gangwon-do, is a paradise for migra- ium with critters from the Chesapeake breeding birds, including 28 species of
tory birds. Located within the DMZ, Bay. Other must-see sites include breeding warblers, Garrett County is
and uninhabited by humans in the last Terrapin Beach Nature Park, with a indeed a birder’s paradise. ‘Io get the
50 years, this site is a popular stopover one-mile nature trail, a pond, and two Birds of Garrett County brochure, stop
for ash cranes and eag! observation blinds. Look for birds of by the Garrett County Visitors
For more information on birding prey, migratory birds, and breeding Center. And ask about the many state
om. waterfowl. parks that conduct birding programs.
 special advertising section

THE ONLY OCEAN-FRONT COUNTY

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In the Pocomoke State Forest, the
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lining the river and a host of waders
along the shoreline. The Pocomoke | ' —
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cycling or meandering takes you...along pristine gateway to historic Southern Maryland,
waterways aud scenic roadways to the essence of
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Come surround yourself than an hour from Washington D.C. and
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Among birders, Charles County is

known for its large population of bald
eagles, along with 321 other species. You
can spot the eagles along winding
Nanjemoy Creek, whose high banks pro-
tect their nesting sites. The creek also is
NYCg home to ospreys and great blue herons.
ag For 50 years, 2,500 herons have returned
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ing back and forth to one another. And the
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near Mattawoman Creek, harbors rare
species such as the Louisiana thrush.
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home to more than twenty species of
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Stroll along Cambridge’s historic
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nineteenth-century homes grace brick-
paved, tree-lined High Street. Let a his-
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 one
CHANICS
Ph AAI eR

Evolutionary
Anthems
The songs of Darwin’s finches might be
responsible for the group’s rapid speciation.

By Adam Summers ~ Illustration by Mick Ellison

n Santa Cruz Island, in the Imagine that an earthquake upends Thirty years of fieldwork, molecular
eastern Pacific Ocean, the enough rock to create rapids in a for- biology research, and morphological
morning sounds of song- merly sluggish stream (a common study have led to a good understand-
birds foraging and courting are reas- event in South America). The new ing of the evolutionary history of
suringly familiar in the otherwise stretch of rapids could keep fish up- Darwin’s finches, particularly the link
outlandish landscape of the Galapagos stream of the rocks from mating with between their food habits and the
Islands. The dry washes here partly their downstream counterparts. shapes of their beaks. Today’s birds de-
conceal tortoises the size of refrigera- Inevitably, over the generations, the scend from a generalist ancestral finch
tors; iguanas as long as your arm two groups will have to contend that invaded the islands from mainland
sprawl in the baking sun. Darwin’s with differences between the two Ecuador. Galapagos species now in-
finches, one of the best-studied ex- habitats—whether in dissolved oxy- habit a variety of ecological niches,
amples of rapid speciation, are the gen levels, water temperature, food and each species has a beak suited to
source of the early morning’s whistles availability, or the presence of para- finding food in its niche: insect-eating
and trills. But the birds are far more sites. Those selection pressures—as species, for example, have narrow,
than mere pleasant diversions that re- well as the simple accumulation of warbler-style beaks, useful for nabbing
mind homesick biologists of their diverse mutations—may be enough insects from leaves and bark; seedeaters
own territorial origins. Rather, al- to genetically isolate the upstream have robust bills, tough enough and
ready famous as the subjects of long- from the downstream population. strong enough to crack the hard seeds
term studies on feeding adaptations Speciation without physical separa- they favor. Now the variations among
and the origins of species, the birds tion, however, is a trickier concept. Darwin’s finches have enabled Jeffrey
are proving to biomechanists that Species arising by such a process are ° Podos, a behavioral ecologist at the
their calls represent a mechanical link known as “sympatric,” a term whose University of Massachusetts in
between foraging abilities and song Greek roots mean “of the same Amherst, and colleagues at Duke
production. The co-variation of song country.” The finches of the Gala- University to prove that a bird’s beak is
and beak size may have been the pagos present a textbook example of as vital to its song as to its supper.
driving force behind the rapid evolu- sympatric speciation. One common
tionary development of finch species ancestor gave rise to fourteen distinct he clear tones of birdsong
in the small island chain, a process species, even though members of the emerge from internal air sacs
hat took Jess than 3 million years. ancestral population were within easy that can inflate and deflate, much like
»peciation—how species gives flight of one another—in other a bagpipe’s bladder. Muscles sur-
ther-—1i t to grasp for words, even though there was no ge- rounding the sacs force air through a
that beco lated. ographical barrier to interbreeding. part of the bird’s respiratory tract
called the syrinx, a thin-walled region lated birds with varying beak shapes tory data. The heavy-billed birds had
of muscle and cartilage roughly anal- and sizes. simpler calls, presumably because the
ogous to human vocal chords. As it Mechanical systems usually have bill, more suited for closing force-
passes through the syrinx, air vibrates to sacrifice force for speed. That fully on a tough seed, was not able
at several dominant frequencies and constraint is particularly telling in bi- to move as rapidly as the more deli-
many overtones, blatting as though it ological mechanical systems—where, cate beak of the insect eaters.
were blown through the mouthpiece for instance, jaws that can move
ofa trumpet. And, just as in a trum- rapidly cannot close with a lot of @)s of the chief roles ofcalls
pet, the tone of the sound is pro- force. Podos realized that among among songbirds is to find
foundly affected by the length and Darwin’s finches, the varieties of this mates, and that takes me back to the
shape of the resonating chamber trade-off and the natural variability topic of sympatric speciation. When
“downstream” of the original vibra- of beak shape could enable him to that first population of generalist
tions. In the bird’s case, the vocal tract test whether a bird’s song could indi- finches invaded the Galapagos, natural
acts as a long, fleshy resonating cham- cate the bird’s ability to eat hard variation in beak size among individu-
ber, damping out many of the over- seeds. With Joel Southall, also at the als would have made the tougher seeds
tones. By rapidly opening and closing University of Massachusetts, and an accessible food item for some of the
its beak a bird can alter the damping Marcos R. Rossi-Santos of Projeto animals but not for others. Because
characteristics of the vocal tract. Baleia Jubarte in Caravelas, Brazil, song pitch and beak strength are inter-
Podos and his colleagues demon- Podos filmed the calls of seven spe- related, those birds would also have
strated in the laboratory that when cies of Galapagos finches. The birds sung a slightly simpler, deeper song
sparrows sing, their beaks partly de- ranged from the warbler finch than their smaller-beaked brethren.
termine the tone of their call. The (Certhidea olivacea), with a pointy, Many female birds prefer males with a
slower the beaks move, the simpler 1s narrow beak [see illustration on oppo- familiar call—their own—and so
the melody of the call, both in tonal site page| to the large ground finch heavy-beaked females would have pre-
range and rhythm. The next step was (Geospiza magnirostris), with a broad, ferred the song of heavy-beaked males.
to study birdsong in the field, focus- heavy bill [see illustration below]. The The link between song and food
ing on several species of closely re- results meshed well with the labora- could thereby lead to segregated mat-
ing within a population, even though
all the individuals in the population
could freely mix.
Ah, the sweet sound of evolution
in action!
Adam Summers (asummers@uci.edu) is
an assistant professor of ecology and
evolutionary biology at the Uni-
versity of California, Irvine.

A bird's song is determined by the interplay of its vocal tract

and its beak. The songs of Darwin’s finches, whose vocal
tracts are basically identical, differ mostly because of the
birds’ beaks. At the same time, the beaks largely determine
the finches’ diets. Jeffrey Podos demonstrated that a finch’s
song could predict the hardness of the seeds the bird could
eat. The thin, fast-moving beak of the warbler finch
(Certhidea olivacea) [see illustration on opposite page]
pitches the bird's song as high as nearly 8,000 hertz—al-
most three octaves above a soprano’s high C—whereas the
robust beak ofthe large ground finch (Geospiza mag-
nirostris) [see illustration at right] limits the bird to a less
variable melody that rarely breaches 2,000 hertz. The sound
spectrograms next to the birds are not musical scores;
rather, they portray, from left to right, how the frequencies
of the birds’ songs, in thousands of hertz, change with time.

October 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 37

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Hewn out ofsandstone cliffs, the hidden capital of the ancient
Nabataeans became a center for spice traders, artisans,
7d urbane sophisticates 2,300 years ago.

By Martha Sharp Joukowsky

 owering high above the Wadi al-‘Arabah, a seasonal
streambed that runs between the Dead Sea and the Gulf
of ‘Aqabah, in southwestern Jordan, majestic cliffs strike
the eye with their patterns of russet and gold. Yet tucked*inside
the sandstone cliffs is a site even more thrilling to travelers, ad-
venturers, and archaeologists: the “Rose-Red City,’ Petra.
Beginning in perhaps the seventh or sixth century B.C., no-
madic Arabs from as far away as the southern reaches of the Ara-
bian Peninsula threw up temporary shelters against the mountain
walls around the site of what would become the city. According
to a fourth-century B.C. Greek account reported by the first-cen-
tury B.C. historian Diodorus of Sicily, the earliest Petrans, or
Nabataeans, as the people were then called, did not plant grain,
fruit trees, or vines. But they did raise camels, which provided
them with milk, cheese, and meat, as well as hides for tents.
Sometime in the second century B.c. the Nabataeans and their
camel caravans attained wide-ranging economic success through
their control of the spice trade routes. The Nabataean dominance
extended over the southern routes through the Arabian Penin-
sula, to Amman and Damascus to the northeast, and through the
Negev desert and into the Sinai to the west, as far as the western
edge of the Nile delta.
Petra was the capital of the
Nabataeans’ independent king-
dom, and as Greek and Roman
demand for such exotic goods as IN Sy 7
cassia, cinnamon, frankincense,
and myrrh increased, so did the
prosperity of the Nabataeans.
They excavated the cliffs to build
some 800 tombs as well as nu-
merous extraordinary freestand-
-t
ing structures. Their hydraulic isgOmiies

engineers dammed nearby water

sources and built massive cisterns for retaining the infrequent
rains. With a reliable water supply, they irrigated crops and
sustained a growing population, estimated at its peak to have
Iridescent as a ribbon of silk fluttering in the air, the Silk been between 20,000 and 30,000 people.
Tomb (above) of the ancient city of Petra (see map at right), As their trade expanded, the Nabataeans borrowed artistic
is named for the iron oxide striations in the sandstone
monument. The Silk Tomb, which dates to the first century
styles from Hellenistic, Parthian, and Roman cultures, adapting
B.C., actually housed several burials and is one of the most them to their own eclectic style. They so prized foreign goods
distinctively colored rock-cut monuments of the Nabataean that, according to the ancient Greek geographer Strabo, “they
culture that made Petra its capital city. conferred honors on anyone who increased them” (though
Strabo adds, in wonder, “they have only a few slaves”).
An earthquake in A.D. 363, one of several that was to strike
Petra, may have precipitated the city’s demise. By that time,
trade no longer centered on Petra, and its population had de-
clined. Christianity flourished in the waning days of the city,
which survived well into the sixth century. In the eighth cen-
tury, another earthquake struck, but by that time the city had
been abandoned. oO

October 2003 NATURAL HISTORY

Urn carved out of the rock wall decorates the top of the Dayr, or
“monastery,” Petra’s largest rock-cut monument. From this high
perch, some 150 feet above the valley floor, visitors can take in
the site of Petra and its vast surrounding landscape.

Nabataean plate displays typical decorative

motifs of the culture, including figs, olives,
and palm leaves. The Nabataeans were
renowned for their extraordinary ultrafine
pottery bowls and plates, decorated with
designs unique to the Nabataean culture.

Terra-cotta plaque from the first century A.D.

depicts a male pipe player accompanied by
to the first century B.C., depicts a a pair of female musicians. The Nabataeans
represent one of the great often had large gatherings at mealtime,
r the god is indicated by and one ancient writer commented that it
s around the edge. The was common to have two female singers at
nN of Nybat. is each banquet.
Mosaic roundel, from the floor of
the sixth-century Church of Petra,
may depict a camel, the backbone
f the Nabataeans’ successful trade
in exotic spices. Alternatively, it may
depict a “camelopard,” the name
the Greeks and Romans gave to the
giratfe, which they described as a
camel with the spots of a leopard.

the top) is one o

Nabataean rock-cut mo uments.
Architects first removed a large
section of the hillside to create a
seventy-foot courtyard in front of
the tomb. The central niche, seen
below the pediment, may have
been the tomb of King Malik II,
who ruled from A.D. 40 to 70.

October 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 43

Several million years ago tectonic forces began to create an edenic
corridor that led early humans out of Africa and into the Near East.

By Zvi Ben-Avraham and Susan Hough

 traddling the border between Israel and Jor- the Levantine Corridor [see map on next page|. From
dan, deep within a region torn by decades of that distant time until what was, geologically speak-
political strife, is the stark, desolate, intensely ing, yesterday, the Dead Sea valley became the main
saline Dead Sea. Virtually barren of life, and im- land route out of Africa for both flora and fauna.
bued with a stillness that bespeaks extreme antiq- Among the fauna, of course, were some of our ear-
uity, the Dead Sea, in geologic terms, is actually lest hominid ancestors. And as the geologic story
quite young—a mere several million years of age. of the Levantine Corridor has come into focus, an
Both the sea itself and the entire Dead Sea valley in intriguing plotline has emerged: for perhaps the
which it lies are the result of north-south motion first time, investigators have shown that large-scale
at the boundary between two tectonic plates—two geologic processes have helped shape the course of
parcels of the Earth’s rocky crust. human history.
Continents might appear to be indestructible, but
when tectonic forces pull blocks of crust in different ie ike so much else in nature, the topography of
directions, eventually even a continent will break. the Earth eschews straight lines. When a
Until 20 million to 30 million years ago the African markedly linear feature does emerge, say from a
and Arabian plates were a single massive block of our subtle topographic trend discernible only in a
planet’s lithosphere. But then the floor of what soon satellite photograph, the trained eye ofa geologist
became the Red Sea began to spread—launching invariably sees an active fault—a feature along
the Arabian plate to the which earthquakes persistently recur. But you
north-northeast, toward don’t have to be a geologist to see the Dead Sea
Eurasia; breaking the small fault zone. Viewed from high above, its linear
Sinai subplate away from morphology, running up the middle of the Lev-
the African plate; and ant, is a dramatic—and decidedly unsubtle—indi-
tearing up Earth’s crust cator of its geologic character [see illustration at left
along the way. on page 47].
Nowadays the Arabian The tectonic forces on the Arabian plate and the
plate is diverging from the Sinai subplate are pulling in slightly different direc-
Sinai subplate at a rate of tions, and at different rates, creating what geolo-
about four millimeters a gists call a transform fault [see diagram at right on
year. That’s slow even by page 47]. From the Dead Sea the fault extends al-
geologic standards (and a most due south to the Red Sea, and almost due
dozen times slower than north along the Jordan River and up into
human fingernails grow), Lebanon, eventually wending its way into south-
but given enough time, ern Turkey. Flanked by margins as high as 7,000
even a slight but continual feet above its floor, the rift valley created by the
movement of a tectonic Dead Sea fault is one of the deepest and most
plate can cause inexorable, abrupt depressions on Earth.
prodigious changes. In the Investigators can point to compelling evidence
past 20 million years or so, for ancient, damaging earthquakes in the anthro-
the Red Sea has opened, pologically and archaeologically crucial area bor-
the Arabian Peninsula has dering the Jordan River. The first-century A.D.
taken shape, and the east- Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, writing of the
ern flank of the Dead Sea destructive earthquake of 31 B.c., describes “an
fault has shifted about earthquake in Judea, such as had not occurred be-
sixty miles northward fore, which killed many cattle. . And about
with respect to the west- thirty thousand persons also perished in the ruins
ern side—enough to of their houses.” Characteristically toppled and
sculpt the Dead Sea valley, fractured blocks of limestone that were once
a long, prominent path columns are evident among the ruins of early Jeri-
through the landscape of cho and elsewhere. And the sediments in the Dead

Dead Sea valley, a once-verdant corridor that runs through the region just east of the
Mediterranean Sea, was the land route taken by hominids emigrating from East Africa, beginning
about 2 million years ago. Today the valley is arid and thinly populated, and the Dead Sea, which
lies at its heart, is inhospitable to most forms of life.

October 2003 NATURAL HISTORY |}

 Sea basin incorporate evidence of a good deal of fore about 5 million years ago the entire Dead Sea
seismic upheaval during the past 70,000 years. fault zone was relatively flat, but that in the past 2
For now, however, the Dead Sea rift valley offers million to 3 million years, accelerating tectonic
geologists a nearly unparalleled opportunity to see processes have strongly uplifted its flanks.
and investigate continental breakup in action. Nat- There is further evidence of rapid change in the
ural processes can be studied here without impedi- Wadi ‘Araba, or Arava Valley, the southern part of
ment, because the area is both sparsely populated the Dead Sea valley, which reaches from the south-
and largely free of vegetation. The shores of the ern end of the Dead Sea to the Gulf of “Aqaba. In
Dead Sea itself are the lowest dry land on Earth, the past 2 million years the Wadi ‘Araba subsided,
and among the Dead Sea valley’s unique character- as the neighboring Negev region to the west—as
istics is that, even though it has sunk to hundreds well as the Trans-Jordanian plateau to the east—
of feet below sea level, much of it 1s not sub- was uplifted and tilted. Here, as elsewhere, seem-
merged. Rock formations are thus well exposed. ingly gradual geologic motion has led to dramatic
Tens of millions of years ago, before the Arabian cumulative changes. In the blink of a geologic eye
plate set off on its Eurasian journey, the Mediter- the Dead Sea transform fault carved up enough of
ranean Sea was far bigger than it is today, and cov- the landscape to reconfigure the patterns of river
ered much of the Levant. Later activity at the drainage in the Negev desert. As a result, within
boundary between the Sinai just the past 2 to 3 million
subplate and the Arabian plate years sizable freshwater lakes
caused major upheavals of the formed in newly created de-
seabed; between the two pressions in the Wadi ‘Araba.
plates a block of crust sank, “SKHUL CAVE
forming a valley known as a ‘UBELDLYA he appearance of large
graben. As the huge, salty bodies of freshwater in an
Mediterranean evaporated and otherwise arid zone invariably
receded, that graben retained gives rise to a wetter, more
some of the water. Eventually temperate local climate. The
the large body of salty water air becomes more humid be-
that occupied most of the cause of evaporation from the
Dead Sea valley shrank be- lakes, and large bodies of water
cause of evaporation. Several also tend to buffer the extremes
lakes subsequently appeared of hot and cold, making the re-
and disappeared in the rift val- gion altogether more inviting
ley;) the present Dead Sea, and hospitable to terrestrial life.
comprising two sub-basins, In the southern Levant the
was left behind about 10,000 new lakes would have beck-
years ago. Its northern sub- oned to flora and fauna alike,
basin was, and remains, by far Just as in more recent times in
the deeper: it now holds less North America, trailer parks
than a thousand feet of water, and its bottom lies have sprung up near new bodies of water such as
about 2,350 feet below sea level. The much shal- southeastern California’s Salton Sea (suddenly cre-
lower, southern sub-basin is now dry. ated as a result of an engineering gaffe combined
with major flooding on the Colorado River in
(Sores have devised a number of clever ways 1905). Of course Airstreams and RVs were hard to
to reconstruct the past movements of tectonic come by during the Pliocene and Pleistocene
plates. One important clue comes from estimating Epochs, but the migrating creatures of Africa, in-
the rate at which sediments were deposited. Investi- cluding early modern humans, gradually made
gators have found that the upper, hence later, layers their own kinds of living arrangements near the
of sediment in the Dead Sea valley built up more lakes that appeared in the rift valley. Thus did the
quickly than the lower, earlier layers. Hence the Dead Sea fault carve the land route out ofAfrica: a
water that carried the sediments from higher land to navigable, habitable corridor flanked by raw,
the flat valley oor must have flowed more quickly rugged rock.
as the millennia passed. That implies the surround- We Homo sapiens are descended from bipedal
ing landscape was becoming increasingly mountain- primates—usually called hominids—that first ap-
ous. Accordingly, geologists have inferred that be- peared in Africa some 5 million years ago. The

rORY October 2003

 Dead Sea valley about sixty miles north of the
Dead Sea—at the extensive site of ‘Ubeidiya, a
vanished lake just south of what was once the
biblical Sea of Galilee, now variously called Lake
Tiberias or Lake Kinneret.
Excavations at “‘Ubeidiya have uncovered the best
available hard evidence for the migration of early
homunids [see “Down in the Valley,” next page|. Since
1960 some thirty archaeological layers, showing
multiple distinct periods of occupation, have been
exposed. On the basis ofseveral kinds of converging
evidence—magnetic characteristics of the rock lay-
ers, changes in sedimentation, ecological changes
reflected in pollen grains, and deposits of bones,
boulders, fossils, and tools—investigators have been
able to date the occupations with confidence. Later
sites elsewhere in the Dead Sea fault zone have
yielded a wealth of additional evidence of hominid
and human occupation, such as uncracked, hard-

boundary between the Arabian plate and the Sinai subplate, is

clearly visible in the topographical relief model (above). For 20
million years the floor of the Red Sea has been spreading apart
and the Arabian plate has been pivoting northward with
respect to the Sinai subplate and its parent, the African plate
(right). By 2 million to 3 million years ago the movement along
the fault had created a deep, lush, navigable valley.

earliest hominid remains have been unearthed in

East Africa—that is, in present-day Ethiopia,
Kenya, and Tanzania. The earliest hominid tools
that appear to be part of a standardized tool-
making tradition were discovered in the same
region: hand axes related to the Acheulean
culture. Such axes were a Paleolithic inven-
tion—rounded at one end to fit in the palm,
pointed at the other end, chipped and fractured
to a cutting edge along the perimeter.
Early Acheulean axes, about 1.4 million years shelled pistachios, acorns, and water chestnuts, ac-
old, were found at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, companied by pitted stone hammers and anvils.
the site made famous by the findings of the ar- The earliest known raisins and olives have been
chaeologists Louis and Mary Leakey. Outside found in this region. And, tellingly, within natural
Africa the earliest hand axes whose dating is un- _ oases are trees of Sudanese origin: emigrants from
contested are also Acheulean and also about 1.4 the southwest.
million years old. They were unearthed in the A million years ago, in Pleistocene times, when

October 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 47

 -shwater was far more abundant than it is today, mus, rhinoceros, wart hog. Life arrived and blos-
the Dead Sea rift valley would have been lush, somed once tectonic movements had pried the
erdant, and full of things for the indigenous region’s blocks of crust apart and tilted them to
fauna to eat. And the paleontological record form mountains, providing the water from which
clearly shows that the splendid new corridor at- all else flowed.
tracted a remarkable influx of species—birds, Today, unfortunately, that land of milk and honey
mamiunals, invertebrates, plants—between 2 mil- is no more. The freshwater lakes that once dotted the
lion and 3 million years ago. Arriving in step with Wadi ‘Araba are permanently dry. The Dead Sea it-
East African flora were the creatures of the East self is nearly lifeless. Almost 35 percent (by weight)
African savannas: gazelle, giant deer, hippopota- of its “water” is made up of dissolved solids—not

Down in the Valley

By JohnJ. Shea
‘Ge the outskirts of Jericho, beside the road Remains discovered west of Lake Tiberias at
to Jerusalem, is a sign welcoming visitors Skhul Cave and Qafzeh Cave indicate that early
to “the world’s oldest town.” “Oldest” hardly be- modern humans—probably either descendants
gins to say it. At least 1.8 million years ago—long or near relatives of the recently discovered,
before 12,500-year-old Jericho became the con- 160,000-year-old H. sapiens fossils from Herto,
tinuous habitation on which the sign stakes its Ethiopia—were present in the Jordan River val-
claam—some of the first hominids ever to ven- ley between 80,000 and 130,000 years ago.
ture out of Africa probably walked through Jeri- Some 70,000 years ago Neanderthals arrived in
cho and drank water from its spring. The lakes the area, perhaps driven southward by the abrupt
that filled the valley of the Jordan River between onset of glacial conditions; they probably com-
2 million and 3 million years ago formed a bio- peted with modern humans for caves and other
geographic corridor connecting hominid habi- habitats. Within 40,000 years Neanderthals had
tats in East Africa with the southern foothills of become extinct throughout Europe. The Jordan
the Alpine-Himalaya mountain belt. valley is one of the first places where modern hu-
The earliest evidence for a mans developed strategies for
human presence in the Jordan displacing rival species and es-
valley comes from the site of tablishing dominion.
‘Ubeidiya, just south of Lake With the waning of the Ice
Tiberias (the Sea of Galilee) in Age some 12,000 years ago,
northern Israel. There, stone hunter-gatherers living in the
tools and the fossils of large Dead Sea rift zone made some
mammals occur together in crucial innovations in the col-
remnants of a muddy shore- lecting of plant foods. The
line about 1.4 million years earliest levels of excavation in
old. Hand axes similar to the Jericho show that they gath-
ones discovered at ‘Ubeidiya ered the seeds of cereal grasses
Acheulean hand axes from ‘Ubeidiya in Israel
occur throughout southern (left) and Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania (right) from the rocky crags flanking
Eurasia, suggesting that the site the valley and planted them in
records the passage of one of Africa’s earliest emi- fertile alluvial soil. The result: domesticated
grants, Homo erectus, (Earlier hominids, such as H. plants, followed centuries later by domesticated
habilis, may have passed through the region en cattle, goats, and sheep, and the expansion of
route to sites such as Dmanisi, in today’s Repub- human settlements.
lic of Georgia, but they left no trace of their so-
JohnJ. Shea, a specialist in stone-tool analysis and in the
journ in the valley.) Paleolithic period of the Near East and Africa, is a profes-
Stone hand axes, fashioned according to sor of anthropology at Stony Brook University in New
African techniques and found at asite just north York State. During the 1990s he codirected excavations at
‘ Lake Tiberias, suggest another round of emi- ‘Ubeidiya, Israel; he is now codirecting excavations at
gration out of Africa about 780,000 years ago. Omo Kibish, Ethiopia.
Dead Sea, the lowest, saltiest lake on Earth, was originally left behind in a deepening valley as the
vast Mediterranean Sea retreated from the Levant between 5 million and 6 million years ago. The
water level at the shoreline is about 1,360 feet below sea level, and it continues to fall because of
evaporation, laying bare the saline, mineral-rich sediments visible in the photograph.

only sodium chloride but also potassium, bromine, tionary biology, anthropology, geology, and cos-
and magnesium salts—giving it the highest salinity of mology have generally (except for the occasional
any lake on Earth. With each passing year, evapora- natural catastrophe) fused with the unchanging
tion further drops its level and raises the salinity of background against which the real action takes
the remaining fluid. Since 1929, when hydrologists place. Increasingly, though, physical scientists and
began keeping records, the Dead Sea has dropped by historians are seeing connections. The physiolo-
more than seventy feet. Only highly specialized gist and evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond of
communities of salt-tolerant microorganisms make the University of California, Los Angeles, for in-
their home in it today. stance, has advanced the thesis in his notable book
Guns, Germs, and Steel that the exigencies of geog-
cholars tend to seek meaning along sharply dif- raphy, if not geology, have played a critical role in
ferent timescales. A historian typically searches shaping the development of cultures.
across decades or centuries for the written word. In the study of the Dead Sea fault zone, one can
An evolutionary biologist may study a species extend the connections further still. Creakingly
across hundreds of thousands of years. A physical slow geologic forces opened up the corridor for
anthropologist considers the few million years that humanity’s earliest ancestors to take their first steps
hominids have walked the Earth. The frame of ref- out of Africa and into the world beyond. That ex-
erence for a terrestrial geologist may be longer odus was probably inevitable, but the ming and
still—as long as Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history. The direction of the migration were determined by
longest timescale of all is the cosmologist’s 13.7- plate tectonics. Perhaps it behooves our species,
billion-year age of the universe. now poised to shape the planet in dramatic and
Yet rarely, it seems, have the disciplines met. For potentially disastrous ways, to realize how funda-
the historian, the questions addressed by evolu- mentally the planet has shaped us. O

October 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 49

 unbathing Seals
of Aritarcica
Infrared image ofa Weddell seal pup reveals
the insulating efficiency ofits lanugo, or baby The puzzle 1c: How do they keep cool?
fur. In the false-color image, shades of blue
and green represent relatively low tempera-
tures on the animal's surface; shades of yellow
and red represent relatively high ones. The
image shows that only the face and flippers By Terrie M. Williams
radiate heat.

ithin an hour of the passing of a late year-round on and under the sea ice, without shiv-
October blizzard, there is little evi- ering and without the long, thick fur characteristic
dence of the storm on a vacant Antarc- of cold-adapted terrestrial mammals such as Arctic
tic beach. The bright Sun shines in a cloudless sky, foxes and musk oxen. (The coarse, half-inch-long
and alight breeze riffles the clear waters of an open hairs of the Weddell seal pelt provide little in the
pool in the sea ice of McMurdo Sound. Weddell way of insulation.) By any standard, that is an extra-
seals, spurred by the improved weather, haul them- ordinary thermal feat. Yet the very effectiveness of
selves out of the water onto the icy edges of the the insulation raises a puzzling question: How can a
pool. Each one, whether burly male, young female, sunbathing seal in the Antarctic avoid overheating?
or mother with youngsters in tow, claims an accus- The answer depends on an even more remarkable,
tomed spot on the frozen shoreline. They settle on if somewhat counterintuitive, physiological feat.
their backs into grooves in the ice that fit their Weddell seals have evolved a temperature-regulat-
bodies like familiar chairs. The adults soon doze ing system that enables them to keep warm in the
soundly except for the occasional relaxed snore, coldest climate on Earth, yet remain cool enough
while the energetic youngsters continue to play, to lollygag about in the summer air without even
popping in and out of the water. Finally exhausted, breaking into a sweat.
they crawl next to their mothers to sleep, their
rounded bellies pointed directly toward the Sun. ur research team in Antarctica includes eight
For six years my colleagues and I have witnessed biologists who travel south every austral sum-
the spectacle of the sunbathing seals during the mer to study Weddell seals as they hunt beneath the
beginning of the austral summer, but never once sea ice. With the support of the National Science
have we considered joining them. After all, we are Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs, we explore
just 840 miles from the South Pole. As inviting as the the seals’ navigational abilities, predatory tactics,
pool appears, the “beach” where we are standing has and diving capabilities. As the team’s exercise phys-
been carved out of frozen sea ice by the constant iologist, | am charged, among other things, with
summer sunlight and the movements of the Erebus finding out how the seals maintain their relatively
Glacier ice tongue, near McMurdo Station. The Sun constant, hot internal temperature while they hunt
may never set, but air temperatures can plummet to and rest in water that would render a person hypo-
—4 degrees Fahrenheit, and blinding snowstorms thermic in minutes. As one might expect, the an-
appear without warning. Sunbathing here can be swer begins with fatty tissue: blubber.
risky business: even huddled in our parkas and In 2002 my graduate student Matthew R.
boots, the members of our expedition live under Rutishauser and I arrived in Antarctica with several
‘onstant threat of frostbite and hypothermia. pieces of specialized equipment from my laboratory
narkably, Weddell seals manage to thrive at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The first
Weddell seal pups such as the one in this photograph wear their fluffy lanugo fur coats for
insulation until they reach about four weeks old. Thereafter they rely, as their parents do, on
blubber to keep them warm in the water.

October 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 51

 fatty blubber was at keeping that
heat from escaping into the ice
and frigid Antarctic air.
The first seal I examined
was a male that had recently
emerged from a hole in the ice.
At first the camera didn’t even
distinguish the wet animal from
its frozen surroundings; the en-
tire image was dark blue. As-
suming the camera was work-
ing, the seal’s skin temperature
was the same as that of the ice—
otherwise the batteries in the
camera had failed in the cold.
Then the seal turned his head
toward me and yawned; his hot
Adult seal, bleeding from the left foreflipper, may be sunbathing to recuperate from
its wounds. The Sun’s heat may stimulate an increased flow of blood, heat, and
open mouth glowed bright red
oxygen to wounded tissues, thereby promoting healing. in the image. Subtle surface
temperatures soon became ap-
parent. Hot nostrils intermittently popped into the
picture each time he breathed. The skin around his
eyes glowed as well, suggesting that surface blood
vessels prevent the eyes from freezing as he hunts
for fish in the chilly waters beneath the ice. The
rest of the seal’s thermal image was a ghostly blue,
a testament to the quality of his blubber insulation.

LE mid-October the Antarctic Sun sets for the last

time for nearly four months. Throughout that
period of uninterrupted daylight, Weddell seals haul
their massive bodies through cracks in the sea ice or
Numerous thermal “windows,” which radiate excess heat, are in the growing pools of meltwater, and onto frozen
apparent in this thermal image ofa sunbathing seal. The animal beds of ice. Too rotund to shake out the water
can jettison excess heat though its face, foreflippers, and hind
flippers. The hot spots along the body are bite wounds in the pelt.
quickly freezing onto their fur, the animals roll
around in the soft snow, to “towel” themselves dry.
Once settled, they lounge in the sunlight for hours,
was a portable ultrasound machine, originally de- which sometimes dissolve into days. The Weddells
signed for monitoring human pregnancies, that en- often stay so long in one position that they melt into
abled us to view and measure the thickness of the the ice, leaving telltale bathtub-size, seal-shaped im-
blubber layer just below the skin of adult seals and prints scattered across the frozen surface. Rather
their pups. The ultrasound scans showed arelatively than avoid the intense solar radiation, the seals seem
uniform layer of blubber running virtually the entire to revel in the sunlight. Only when temperatures
length of the body, and ranging between 1.6 and 2.4 dip below —4 degrees Fahrenheit, winds whip up
inches thick, in adults that weigh between 900 and above fifteen knots, or snowstorms blow across the
1,100 pounds. Even in one-month-old pups, which ice, are the seals driven back into the water, where
are the size of mature Saint Bernards, the blubber the environment is far more stable.
layer is between 1.2 and 1.6 inches thick. But if the blubber layer enables the seals to meet
Our second piece of equipment was an infrared the thermal challenge of living in the frigid water
thermal camera, which shows differences in tem- under the ice, it also poses a double peril for their
perature across the surface of an animal as a false- well-being. In the first place, we estimated it would
color image. We knew from earlier investigations take only a few hours of lying in the intense
that diving Weddell seals have a core body tempera- Antarctic Sun for Weddell seals to cook in their
ture that hovers around 97.7 degrees Fahrenheit. own skins. The second problem is that overheating
The camera would show us just how effective the would threaten reproduction, particularly the via-

52 |
bility of sperm. So the seals must get rid of the ex-
cess heat, but how? After all, they cannot shed their
blubber, the way Matt and I take off our parkas
when we get too warm. As it turned out, the solu-
tion to the puzzle of keeping sperm cool was the
first step in figuring out how blubbery Weddell
seals can spend days soaking up sunlight.
For a male mammal to produce viable sperm, the
temperature of the testes must be precisely con-
trolled; typically, it is several degrees cooler than the
core body temperature. In land mammals, the testes A mother and pup glow brightly in the infrared image. To
remain cool because they reside in external scrotal sunbathe without becoming dangerously overheated, the
animals cannot rely on thermal windows alone. Instead, their
sacs. For a mammal that lives in water, however—
entire bodies act as radiators. Networks of arteries and veins
not to mention icy Antarctic waters—the same close while the animals are underwater, but open to shed excess
body plan would be a liability. A scrotal sac would heat within an hour after a seal hauls itself out of the water.
expose the testes to extreme cold, and interfere
with a sleek, hydrodynamic profile. Hence the through the hind flippers, but also through the
testes of Weddell seals, like those of other seals and mouth, eyes, and nose—seemed to us the most
cetaceans, are internalized, lying between the ab- likely areas for dissipating the seals’ excess heat.
dominal muscles and the thick insulating blubber Rutishauser and I hoped to record those windows
layer. Of course, that placement exposes sensitive with our infrared camera, expecting to see dark
organs to the risk of becoming too hot. blue insulated seal bodies punctuated with red-hot
hind flippers. A dog in its winter coat displays a
he problem is solved in seals with an elegant similar thermal pattern: seen with equipment sim-
anatomical arrangement of blood vessels, first ilar to ours, a cool, insulated body fades into hot,
described by Sentiel A. Rommel, a comparative thinly furred legs and paws.
morphologist at the Marine Mammal Patho- To our astonishment, not only did the seals’ flip-
biology Laboratory in St. Petersburg, Florida, and pers glow, but so did the rest of their bodies. And
his colleagues. The investigators
painstakingly mapped the seal’s vas-
culature, and so discovered a dense
network of veins enveloping the
seal’s testes. The network receives
blood directly from the veins of the
two hind flippers. Because the
seal’s layer of blubber does not ex-
tend to its flippers, veins in the flip-
pers lie close to the surface of the
skin, poorly insulated from the ice
and cold water. Hence the blood in
those vessels is cooled. On its re-
turn trip to the heart, the blood
passes through the testicular net,
cooling the testes.
The specialized arrangement
of blood vessels gives the seals
a thermal “window” through their
insulating blubber, keeping tem-
perature-sensitive reproductive or-
gans cool. In the males, the win-
dow safeguards sperm production.
In the females, an analogous
vascular net helps regulate the Bathtub-shape grooves in the ice, in which seals lie during sunbathing, form from the
temperature of developing fetuses. intense heat of the seals’ bodies. Their surface temperatures can rise by as much as fifteen
Thermal windows—primarily degrees Fahrenheit in the first hour they spend out of the water.

October 2003 NATURAL HISTORY |53

|
the longer the seals were out of the water, the a cool blue to a bright warm orange, as blood
warmer their bodies became. We found that the flowed through the AVAs.
stubby front flippers, the hind flippers, the nose, Weddell adults and pups alike have AVAs, but
and the eyes glowed first. But then the back and their function changes as the pups mature. New-
belly warmed, too. Obviously, the entire body sur- born Weddell seals lack a substantial blubber layer,
face of a sunbathing Weddell seal was acting as a and so they rely instead on a pajama-like coat of
radiator—which explained the seal-shape tubs that fluffy gray hair called lanugo to retain body heat.
had melted into the ice. By comparison, when | Because the ratio of the surface area to the volume
pointed our camera at Rutishauser, who was bun- of their small bodies is relatively high, they cool
dled in a parka and insulated wind pants, his ther- quickly. As a result, they have to be particularly
mal image was blue and nearly invisible against the careful to conserve body heat. In our infrared im-
blue backdrop of the ice. ages the youngest seals resembled Matt in his
Here again, in whole-body cooling, we found parka, showing blue rather than the red of their
that specialized blood vessels were the mechanism parents. The AVAs hidden beneath the lanugo ap-
for transporting heat and controlling temperature peared to be closed.
in the seals. Hair follicles throughout the pelt of As they grow fatter from nursing, the pups lose
a Weddell seal occur with a side-by-side array of their lanugo, add blubber, and acquire the sleek
highly branched arter- spotted coats of the
ies and veins known adults. But with a new
as arteriovenous anas- coat and a thick blubber
tomoses (AVAs). More layer for insulation, the
than 6,000 AVAs are pups now face the same
packed into” every dilemma as the adults,
square inch of the seal’s how to get rid of excess
skin, where they act heat. Soon the flippers
as thermal perforations of the pups are glowing
along the pelt, enabling warm, and by the time
excess heat to escape they are six weeks old,
when the seals lie in their entire body is as
the Sun. red-hot as their sun-
bathing mothers.
he distribution of Riad
Even as young pups,
the AVAs for Wed- Poking its head through a hole in the ice, a Weddell seal (top) then, Weddell seals have
dell seals was originally enjoys a long-awaited chance to breathe. While lying on the several anatomical adap-
described in 1975 by tations that enable them
surface of the water, another seal (bottom) keeps the icy waters
out by squeezing its muscular nose shut. A network of blood
G. S. Molyneux and M. to avoid overheating in
vessels surrounds the eyes to keep them from freezing, and so
M. Bryden of the Uni- they glow with heat in the thermal image. the sunlight. But why
versity of Queensland did they ever need them
in Brisbane, Australia. in the first place? After all, wouldn’t it be far
But seal AVAs differ in simpler for them to stay in the water, where it is
shape, complexity, den- cool enough to let blubber take care of their ther-
sity, and distribution mal needs? Several behaviors we observed offered
from the AVAs in ter- one explanation.
restrial mammals. The
AVAs of sheep and rab- Ape watching the sunbathing Weddells
bits, for instance, also quickly notices that many of them have nu-
regulate temperature, merous skin wounds. Flippers, armpits, backs, and
but they are densest in sparsely furred peripheral bellies are often covered with bites; some are large,
areas such as the forelimbs and ears. The density of open, and bleeding, but most are just small nicks
AVAs in Weddell seal skin is several times greater and scrapes. With a submersible camera developed
than it is in such land-based mammals, and their dis- by Randall W. Davis, a physiologist at Texas A&M
tribution is bodywide. With the infrared camera we University in Galveston, our team was able to ob-
could observe the sequential opening of the AVAs serve the underwater behavior of the seals, and
along the body and the consequent warming of the soon discovered how the wounds come about.
sunbathing seals’ skin. Slowly the seals turned from After a dive in search of a meal, seals frequently

October 2003
Breathing holes in the ice are small and scarce. When a seal returns to breathe after a long, deep
dive, it may bite any other seal blocking the way to the air. Such bites have little chance to heal
underwater, but the warm Sun may promote healing. Hence sunbathing may be the seals’
indirect response to the scarcity of breathing holes.

battle each other for access to breathing holes in the sunbathing Weddells of the Antarctic had already
ice. The fights become more intense as tempera- discovered the benefits of radiant-heat therapy. By
tures fall and ice holes and cracks freeze shut. It is hauling out in the constant sunlight, blood—and
not unusual for a seal returning from a prolonged so heat and oxygen—flows to the injured areas.
dive to resort to a quick nip on the flippers or belly That promotes healing. As the ghostly blue in-
of another seal in order to gain access to a breathing frared images of submersed seals had shown, the al-
hole. When the animals we observed hauled them- ternative is poor blood flow to the cool skin, and
selves up onto the ice, the infrared camera readily presumably little chance for wounds to heal.
highlighted the battle scars. In one case a male seal
was so badly bitten that he looked as spotted as a ‘TD ut whatever their reasons, Weddell seals young
Dalmatian dog, with red, hot wounds covering his BJ and old are drawn to one of the southernmost
entire body [see lower photograph on page 52]. sunbathing beaches on Earth. During the long days
So perhaps the sunbathing behavior of the Wed- of the Antarctic summer they sleep and yawn,
dell seals is not simply a recreational activity but, scratching their heads and bellies, their idleness in
rather, integral to the healing of their many stark contrast to the lively activity of the remarkable
wounds. In mammals, tissue repair requires the de- thermal mechanisms operating just below the skin.
velopment of a large number of blood vessels and By late April the Sun has sunk below the Royal
subsequent heating of the injured area. That com- Society mountain range for the last time, drawing
ponent of healing has recently been the focus of the animals and their icy beach into total darkness
intense medical research. Heated bandages, radi- for several months. It is hard to imagine how the
ant-heat dressings, and even laser therapy are all Weddell seals stay warm and nurse their wounds
under investigation to promote tissue repair in during those long, cold, winter nights. The sever-
human patients. It occurred to me, as I watched ity of the Antarctic winter will keep that secret
the battle-scarred seals lying in the Sun, that the hidden with the seals for now. C]

October 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 55

 CAN
ESRD ORS

rern
Relations
A patch offorest in
Massachusetts harbors
some shady characters.

By Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Bartholomew's Cobble, looking northward, with the Berkshires in the distance

ear the foot of the Berkshire exposed bedrock. Only the west- have delicate-looking, much divided,
Hills, alongside the scenic facing areas of the limestone, marble, broad, flat leaves, are common
Housatonic River in south- and quartz, which get the brunt of denizens of the forest. About forty-
western Massachusetts, is a National the afternoon sunshine, remain dry five species grow at Batholomew’s
Natural Landmark known as Bar- and nearly bare of vegetation. Cobble. Fern allies tend to be less fa-
tholomew’s Cobble. In its 329 acres Found in the shade throughout the miliar. They often differ from ferns
more than 800 plant species flourish, growing season are numerous ferns in the appearance of their sporo-
including fifty-three species of ferns and fern allies. All of them are vascu- phytes but are defined botanically ac-
and so-called fern allies, one of the lar plants that do not form seeds as cording to various details of their ga-
finest such concentrations in the part of their reproductive cycle. Like metophyte life cycle, which 1s more
United States. The “Cobble” part of many plants, their generations alter- complicated than that in ferns.
the site’s name refers to two large, ad- nate between a spore-producing Fern allies fall into five families,
Jacent outcroppings of bedrock (think form, called the sporophyte, and a three of which are represented in the
“cobblestone”’). Bartholomew is the gamete-producing form, called the landmark area. One of these is the
name ofa family that farmed the land gametophyte. In vascular plants, the Equisetaceae, members of which are
from 1833 until 1901. The Trustees of sporophyte is the plant people usually often referred to as living fossils: the
Reservations, a Massachusetts land see and recognize. It gives rise to group dominated terrestrial plant life
trust that now owns the property, ac- spores, which are haploid cells—cells when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
quired the main parcel in 1946 and that contain only one from each pair Their sporophyte has a jointed, leaf-
added to it in subsequent years of chromosomes in the parent plant. less stem containing silica, which the
through purchases and donations. The dispersed spores grow into ga- plant takes up from the soil. If the
About 70 percent of the landmark metophytes, small and obscure struc- stem is unbranched, the species is
area 1s covered in forest dominated by tures that give rise to gametes, or sex aptly (but not always) called a scour-
hemlock. Where the shade is not too cells. When two gametes unite— ing rush (American pioneers would
dense, the forest floor is brightened by restoring the double number of bind bunches of the stems together
a number of flowers, especially in chromosomes—the resulting cell can and use them to scour pots and pans).
springtime; in autumn, broadleaved give rise to a new sporophyte. (A If whorls of very slender branches ra-
trees such as northern red oak and seed is merely a dormant, embryonic diate from each joint, making for a
sugar maple stand out amid the ever- sporophyte, protected by a covering bushy-looking plant, it is more ap-
greens, adding splashes of blazing red and supplied with a store of food; propriately referred to as a horsetail.
and orange. Portions of the rock out- dispersed in this form, the sporo- Two more families of fern allies
croppings are also forested with hem- phyte can germinate and grow found in Bartholomew’s Cobble are
locks or other trees, and many plants rapidly when conditions are right.) the club mosses (Lycopodiaceae) and
tind a foothold in the crevices of the Ferns, whose sporophytes usually spike mosses (Selaginellaceae). Both

October 2003
 [ea
nar scrtefade

iassac Top
tend to have small leaves that are flat species of toothwort, trillium, and
or scalelike. Club mosses with stiff violet. A few spring wildflowers per- sohuguarsss BS Detail ie
branches and scalelike leaves are often sist, such as doll’s-eyes, Solomon’s
called ground pines. seal, and false Solomon’s seal.
Nonephemerals that bloom during
HABITATS the summer or fall are Canada lily,
false hellebore, and species of aster,
Hemlock forest American beech, goldenrod, and sunflower.
basswood, northern red oak, sugar
maple, and white pine, along with the Moist rock Ferns that grow from very
hemlock trees, create a deep shade. In moist, moss-covered patches of soil on CONNECTICUT
it grow such ferns as adder’s-tongue the rock outcroppings include berry O moma 1000
fern, bog fern, Christmas fern, crested bladder fern and brittle bladder fern feet

fern, Goldie’s fern, maidenhair fern, (also called fragile fern), both of
For visitor information, contact:
New York fern, ostrich fern, and which, in addition to forming spores, Sarah Robotham, Property Manager
spinulose woodfern. The delicately create asexual “bladders’”’—small bits Bartholomew's Cobble
branched woodland horsetail and two of tissue that can grow into a new Weatogue Road
ground pines (fan club moss and run- plant if they land in a favorable place. Ashley Falls, MA 01222
ning club moss) also grow here. Others are maidenhair spleenwort, (413) 229-8600
www.thetrustees.org
Where the woods border the two kinds of polypody, and walking
Housatonic River appear colonies of fern. Walking fern is unfernlike in ap-
large cinnamon fern, ostrich fern, and pearance because it has undivided,
royal fern, along with the somewhat narrow, lance-shaped leaves that taper
smaller sensitive fern. Joining these are to a long, drawn-out tip. Where the
three scouring rushes (common point of the leaf touches the mossy
scouring rush, variegated scouring substrate, the tip forms roots, anchor-
rush, and water horsetail) and the ing the plant on the rock face. In this
common, or field, horsetail. manner, the fern “walks” across the
Wildflowers that grow beneath the rocky surface. The delicate spring
canopy include so-called spring meadow spike moss, with nearly
ephemerals—plants that usually come transparent leaves, lies flat on moist,
up in early April, bloom no later mossy surfaces at the base of some of
than the end of May, set seeds 1n the rocks. Running club moss, a “fern ally” and one of
May or June, and disappear by July. several club mosses also commonly known as
Among them are Dutchman’s- Exposed rock Crevices in drier ground pines, produces its spores in
breeches, spring-beauty, and various bedrock harbor such ferns as purple elongated cones.

cliff-brake and two species of

Woodsia. Also found here is shining
club moss, which has membrane-like
leaves and spore cases hidden at the
base of each leaf, and the spike moss
northern selaginella, which has short,
needlelike, evergreen leaves. Another
cliff-dwelling plant is yellow honey-
suckle, whose downward arching
stems bear flowers from June through
August. Wildflowers include bishop’s-
cap, blue-stem goldenrod, buffalo
currant, hepatica, herb Robert, wild
columbine, and zigzag goldenrod.

Robert H.Mohlenbrock is professor emeritus

Walking fern—which looks nothing like a typical fern—spreads by ofplant biology at Southern Illinois Univer-
growing new plants at the tips of its long, slender leaves. sity in Carbondale.

October 2003 NATURAL HISTORY |BF

 more than 5 million preschool-age
children—a toll equivalent to the en-
tire population of Denmark. The
malnourished children who survive
face a lifetime of impaired physical
and mental development.
Yet global food production 1s rife
with paradox. Enough food is avail-
able today to provide every human
being on Earth with more than the
2,350 calories needed daily for a
healthy and active life. Even more
paradoxical than the persistence of
hunger amid plenty is that its center
of gravity occurs in rural areas. Some
75 percent of those with inadequate
access to food live in the countryside
of the developing world. It is here, in
such areas of rural poverty, that new
agricultural technology, in particular
biotechnology, may offer the greatest
Dorothea Lange, Tractored Out, Childress County, Texas, 1938 hope for improvement.

nfortunately, that hope remains

Crop Circles largely unrealized. Biotechno-

logical developments have led, how-
ever, to a bumper crop of books aimed
at popular audiences. Two of the latest
additions are Food, Inc.: Mendel to
Spin notwithstanding, can GM food still save the world? Monsanto—The Promises and Perils of
the Biotech Harvest, by the journalist
Peter Pringle, and Safe Food: Bacteria,
By Marc J. Cohen Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism, by the
nutritionist Marion Nestle.
hat good is genetically on their own. Poverty, in its turn, 1s In many ways biotechnology would
modified food? Is GM often linked to political powerless- seem made-to-order to address part of
food a savior, an essential ness, gender discrimination, poor ed- the plight of small farmers in develop-
ingredient in any program for ending ucation, and the debilitation resulting ing countries. Agricultural productiv-
world hunger? Or is it a villain, a Tro- from endemic, untreated disease. ity there remains low, which implies
jan horse that, if allowed into the Each year malnutrition in developing both high unit costs of producing food
food production and distribution sys- countries contributes to the deaths of and low farm incomes. Many factors
tem, will poison people and the envi- contribute to the low productivity:
ronment? Few aspects of everyday life losses to pests and the weather; low soil
provoke such sharp disagreement as Food, Inc.: Mendel to fertility and lack of access to fertilizers;
the emerging biotechnology of food. Monsanto—The Promises acid, salinated, or waterlogged soils.
Yet there is remarkably broad con- and Perils of the Biotech Harvest The low yields that result lead in turn
sensus that there is a crisis in world by Peter Pringle to poor nutrition and poverty on the
hunger and about the reasons for it. Simon & Schuster, 2003; $24.00 farms, as well as among the people
Almost everyone who has looked se- who depend on such farms for food.
riously at the causes of hunger agrees Safe Food: Bacteria, As the circle of poverty widens, de-
that the main factor 1s poverty. Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism mand for goods and services produced
People go hungry because they lack by Marion Nestle by poor nonagricultural rural house-
money to buy food, or they lack the University of California Press, 2003; holds decreases, and urban areas suffer
land, water, credit, and other re- 44:00 increased rates of unemployment and
sources they need to produce food underemployment.

October 2003
 Agricultural technology alone can- foundations. Public policies, more- or, occasionally, a crossing with close
not address all the complex economic, over, played a central role in encour- relatives. But the Gene Revolution,
social, political, and ecological forces aging the adoption of the technology. with the development of recombinant
that contribute to world hunger. And The fruits of the research were placed DNA technology, made it possible to
technology cannot reach its potential in the public domain. transfer genes between species, even
unless it is part of a comprehensive In contrast, the vast majority of the between plants, animals, and mi-
strategy to reduce poverty, enfranchise research in agricultural biotechnology croorganisms. Biotechnologists .have
low-income people, and protect the that is the basis for the Gene Revolu- inserted a gene from a soil bacterium
environment. Still, research that leads tion (as many have come to call it) has into corn and cotton, enabling the
to increased productivity can play an been carried out in the laboratories of plants to produce their own natural
important role in reducing hunger. private multinational “life sciences” insecticide. Rice containing genes
For example, crops could be designed corporations, based in the industrial- from daffodils and bacteria—labeled
to resist drought, pests, and diseases; ized nations. Having made huge in- GoldenRice because of its yellow
tolerate salty soil; absorb nitrogen vestments, the corporations are eager tint—may soon be available to farm-
from the air; and provide a broad for profits to recoup their costs. Ac- ers; it is high in beta carotene, which
range of added nutritional benefits. cordingly, they seek patents or other the body converts to vitamin A. In
But the potential of biotechnology forms of intellectual-property protec- developing countries, inadequate vit-
for helping reduce hunger has barely tion for both the products and the amin A leads to infectious diseases,
been tapped. Virtually all the biotech processes they develop. blindness, and death for hundreds of
crops currently on the market are The second big difference between thousands of children each year.
limited to just two traits: herbicide the Green and Gene revolutions is
tolerance and insect resistance. A big that the former was based on conven- he two volumes under review
share of the global GM harvest for tional crossbreeding among different address food biotechnology from
2002—two-thirds of which was in varieties ofa single food-crop species, quite different points of view. Peter
the hands of U.S. farmers—went into
animal feed or textile fibers. Com-
mercial soybean farmers in Argentina,
whose operations have much more in "Richard Corfield’s book
common with North American
large-scale farms than with African
is a brilliant account of
subsistence plots, accounted for an- the fascinating voyage
other big chunk of the GM harvest.
Small farmers in China, India, and of HMS Challenger and
South Africa have begun to grow her pioneering crew.
pest-resistant GM cotton. PHE SILENT LAND SCARE

It will captivate anyone

ack before anyone had heard of interested in the real life
GM foods, the great advance in
food production technology was the adventures of science
introduction of high-yield seeds, the
so-called Green Revolution, which
and exploration.”
reached its pinnacle in the the late
— Philippe Cousteau, president of the
1970s and early 1980s. The new seeds
Philippe Cousteau Foundation
boosted global cereal output, though
their use was generally accompanied
by increasing application of mineral The Silent Landscape
fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, and ir- The Scientific Voyage of HMS Challenger 272) pp S-W2exo-1/25
rigation water. Richard Corfield
ISBN 0-309-08904-2
There are two big differences, $24.95, Hardcover
though, between the Green Revolu-
tion and its modern counterpart. The wf Toorder: Call toll-free 1-888-624-7651 or browse before you buy—preview a
research and development for the fi full-text, searchable version or buy a downloadable PDF online at www.nap.edu.
Green Revolution were carried out =
From Joseph Henry Press * an imprint of The National Academies Press
almost entirely by public-sector re-
search institutions and philanthropic

October 2003 NATURAL HISTORY Do

 stakes out a middle ground in tional or organic varieties. (An organic erations and maintenance to conserve
hly polarized debate, and ex- grower whose crops become cross- plant genetic diversity.
s how the technology might be- pollinated could lose hard-won and lu- Among the strengths of Food, Inc.
ome more accessible to poor farmers crative organic certification.) are its clear explanations of the com-
in developing countries, particularly plex science of plant biotechnology, as
in Africa. Marion Nestle devotes only pee also notes a much more well as the complex history of how
about half of her book to biotechnol- troubling effect that GM food is US. patent law has evolved to cover
ogy (the rest deals with food safety in having on the tangled politics of novel plants and even genes. Unfortu-
more traditional contexts), and she fo- world hunger. European consumers nately, though, Pringle ignores the im-
cuses her discussion of biotechnology continue to voice fierce opposition to portant precedent set by India’s 2001
on the resistance by the food industry GM foods, and the European Union seed law, which seeks to balance plant
to stronger, more coherent govern- is seeking to impose strict labeling re- breeders’ rights to profit from their in-
ment safety regulations. In passing, quirements on GM products. Conse- novations with farmers’ rights to use
she, too, addresses the potential rele- quently, the leaders of some develop- the seed they harvest from the plants
vance of food biotechnology to poor ing countries are reluctant to adopt they grow. That model has great bear-
farmers and consumers in ing on how biotechnology
developing countries, but might benefit poor farmers.
her focus is mainly on the
United States. here Pringle is even-
Pringle’s book is organized handed in showing
around the flash points of how extremists have hi-
food biotechnology, the sto- jacked the debate over GM
ries that have gotten major food, Nestle is an unapolo-
media attention in the past getic partisan. As she writes
few years: the development of in her introduction, a major
GoldenRice; reports that GM theme of her book is “the
crops are harmful to monarch food industry’s promotion of
butterflies; laboratory experi- economic self-interest at the
ments on mice that raised expense of public health and
concerns about health risks; safety.’ In the case of food
and the discovery of GM aa hgh
biotechnology, she main-
corn pollen in Mexico, lead- William H. Martin, Riding a Giant Corncob to Market, 1908 tains, the industry invokes
ing to accusations that it “science” as a cover for ad-
could contaminate natural strains. GM food technology, or even accept vancing its own interests.
Pringle takes a balanced approach to food aid that might contain biotech As Nestle shows, U.S. government
his topic, criticizing both the extreme seeds. Either action, they fear, might regulators who are supposed to en-
claims of biotech companies, which compromise their nation’s ability to sure that foods do not threaten public
trumpet their seeds as the salvation of export food products to Europe. An health or the environment often bend
the starving, and the “environmental extreme case unfolded last year, when over backward to accommodate in-
ideologues” who cry “Frankenfood!” famine-stricken Zambia rejected U.S. dustry. In part, that cozy relationship
and seek to ban biotechnology alto- food aid on just such grounds. is a consequence of the “revolving
gether. He rebukes the London-based In Pringle’s view, though, GM foods door” that moves key people back
environmental group Greenpeace for are here to stay. More caution will be and forth between industry and gov-
its willingness to seize on any evidence needed in developing and deploying ernment. Another difficulty is that
of environmental or health risk, how- them; genuine risks will have to be regulatory authority is fragmented
ever inconclusive, to support calls for a properly managed. But, with those across a bewildering spectrum of gov-
ban and to justify the destruction of caveats, he thinks the technology may ernment agencies and limited by
test plots. At the same time, he con- help reduce hunger. To do so, industry long-outdated statutes. As Nestle
demns executives of the Monsanto will have to be more willing to make notes, Congress can change the laws,
Company, based in St. Louis, Mis- patented technology available to devel- but generous campaign contributions
sour, the leading purveyor of biotech oping countries. Governments of de- from industry ensure a favorable leg-
seeds, for their “arrogance.” For. ex- veloping countries will need to devote islative environment.
ample, he cites their unwillingness to a greater share of their expenditures to For Pringle, adequately funded pub-
concede that pollen from GM crops agricultural research. And seed banks lic science would be a saving grace, but
could cross-fertilize nearby conven- must receive adequate funding for op- Nestle is skeptical. The department of

ORY October 2003

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 i microbial biology at her alma ics have no choice but to demonstrate, search into the food needs of devel-
oe SL
a
vrites, the public Univer- litigate, and, on occasion, engage in oping countries.
SITY yt California, Berkeley, “auctioned provocative rhetoric, often dissemi- One encouraging model may be
elf” to the Swiss biotechnology firm nated quite effectively via the Inter- the way a GM sweet potato was de-
Novartis International AG, headquar- net. (Despite her sympathies, how- veloped in Kenya. A crippling infec-
tered in Basel. The arrangement, she ever, Nestle, like Pringle, condemns tion known as the feathery mottle
states, allowed the company to review acts of violence that opponents of virus can reduce sweet potato yields
research prior to publication and to biotech have sometimes directed by 80 percent. In Kenya, sweet pota-
negotiate licenses. against test plots and laboratories.) toes are grown mainly by poor farm-
The case of GoldenRice, engi- Nestle devotes a lot of attention to ers and eaten by poor consumers, so
neered by Ingo Potrykus, a plant bi- the globalization of food safety and the economic implications of creating
ologist at the Swiss Federal Institute biotechnology. She rightly points out a disease-resistant GM sweet potato
of Technology in Zurich, highlights that food-safety standards in industri- had little in common with, say, the
some of the pitfalls now faced even alized nations are often little more adoption of herbicide-tolerant soy-
by scientists at public institutions, than tariff barriers by another name: beans in North America. In particu-
funded through philanthropic foun- they protect domestic growers by lar, biotechnology corporations did
dations, who get caught in the intri- keeping out competing agricultural not stand to profit significantly from
cate web of corporate patents. products from developing countries. such a project. Accordingly, Monsanto
Pringle shows how the development She also explains how the debate licensed its technology free of charge
of GoldenRice, which at first seemed about labeling has gone global: the to a publicly funded institution, the
a triumph in the war against malnu- European Union, for instance, 1s seek- Kenyan Agricultural Research Insti-
trition, turned into a night- tute. That enabled Kenyan in-
mare snarl of ownership vestigators to engineer a sweet
claims covering dozens of One department at/UC Berkel potato that resists the feathery
processes andi egenes.eiie mottle virus. Critics have called
points out that the public-
Nestle writes, “auctioned tiselj Monsanto’s contribution a pub-
sector scientists were hardly to a Swiss biotechnology firm. lic-relations move. But if such
to blame for their partner- free licensing in developing
ship with the private sector: countries were more the norm,
the European Commission required ing to have biotech imports separated such criticism would carry less weight,
them to partner with a European from conventional produce, and doc- and more research relevant to hunger
company in order to get public umented as to their source. would be done.
funds. The company then obtained But Nestle’s presentation is marred
the exclusive right to market Gold- by errors and omissions. She does not le production, of course, is just
enRice in the industrialized world, discuss the formal U.S. complaint to one piece in the hunger puzzle,
in exchange for making it available the World Trade Organization— and biotechnology is only one part of
free of charge to poor farmers in de- which she repeatedly and incorrectly food production. For example, people
veloping countries. refers to as a UN agency—that the must also have access to the food pro-
Europeans are violating global com- duced—yet more than 800 million
INS is much more sympathetic mercial rules by discriminating against people, one in seven worldwide, do
than Pringle is to the critics of GM products. She also writes that an not have ready access to all the food
food biotechnology. She argues that international agreement called the they need. According to the UN Of-
they have couched their criticisms in Biosafety Protocol permits countries fice for Coordination of Humani-
the language of food safety, particu- to ban GM food imports because of tarian Affairs, that figure includes
larly in the United States, because reg- concerns about environmental safety, 56 million people (more than two-
ulatory policy has limited debate but she fails to mention that the U.S. thirds of them living in sub-Saharan
strictly to scientific questions. Social government vociferously rejects that Africa) who need food and other
and political issues—the concentrated interpretation. emergency humanitarian assistance.
corporate control over biotechnology, Like Pringle, however, Nestle does Those figures actually represent
the lack of transparency in decision not reject food biotechnology out- an improvement since 1970. Three
making, the corporate resistance to right. She, too, regards it as a tool for decades ago more people went hun-
food labeling that could make con- alleviati gry, both in absolute terms (an esti-
sumers better-informed about their cism of corporate tactics. She calls mated 959 million) and as a fraction
choices are not on the scientific upon the industry to “tithe,” donat- of the world population (more than
ag rend . Thus, Nestle maintains, crit- ing 10 percent of its profits to re- one in every four people). But the

62 RAL HISTORY October 2003

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FETED

»f progress in reducing hunger Those questions, however, don’t in-

ed in the 1990s, compared with Space, the Final Frontier? terest most people. Opponents of the
two preceding decades. Leaving by Giancarlo Genta and space program have long pointed out
aside China (where the number of Michael Rycroft that too many pressing problems re-
the hungry was reduced by 74 mil- Cambridge University Press, 2003; main on Earth to give serious atten-
lion), the number of hungry people $29.00 tion to technologies so far away, both
in the rest of the developing world in space and time.
actually rose by 50 million during the The question mark in the title of
1990s. Hunger is increasingly con- Space, the Final Frontier? might have
centrated in South Asia and sub-Sa- signaled a third point of view—a cri-
haran Africa, and in the latter region tique of the very idea of a cosmic
the number of people lacking access manifest destiny. But Giancarlo Genta
to adequate food more than doubled and Michael Rycroft fail to deliver
between 1970 and 1999. much beyond a few “on the other
Access to food is hampered by hand” comments. That’s a shame, be-
poorly developed markets, environ- cause their book serendipitously ap-
mental degradation, inadequate roads, pears at a critical moment in the space
isolationist regimes, theft, and any debate, and their discussions might
number of other factors. The social have informed the questions raised in
consequences of such failures to feed the recent report on the breakup of
hungry populations include huge Edward H. White took the first the space shuttle Columbia. The au-
stresses on already overtaxed medical U.S. spacewalk, June 3, 1965. thors of that report excoriated policy
systems, reduced productivity, stunted makers for the budget cuts and drift of
economic growth (compounding the ockets, like locomotives almost purpose that, according to their inves-
poverty), and malnourished mothers two centuries ago, are embodi- tigation, were partly responsible for
who give birth to more malnourished ments of progress, symbols of society’s the deaths of seven astronauts this past
children. Vitamin and mineral defi- technical mastery over nature, and so February. In effect, they told the gov-
ciencies, which afflict more than 2 bil- they raise a host of questions about the ernment, give NASA a compelling
lion people, likewise lead to illness, ultimate destiny of the human race. mission for sending people into
lost productivity, premature death, and Most people seem to take one of two space—and then fund it appropri-
less prosperous economies. Political general points of view on the quest ately—or else get out of the manned
instability, violence, and hunger go that rockets represent: A vocal minor- space business.
hand-in-hand. ity is certain that humanity will colo- For the most part Genta and
nize space, just as Europeans colonized Rycroft are strong on the mission but
@)® common misconception is the New World. A less vociferous ma- weak on the analysis of cost, writing
that many people still die from jority doesn’t seem to have given the optimistically about colonies on the
outright starvation, or “famine.” In subject much thought. As a result, the Moon, manned expeditions to Mars,
fact, famine per se directly kills perhaps debate, if it can be called that, tends to and eventual colonization of the stars.
no more than 200,000 people a year, be rather lopsided. Sympathetic space enthusiasts will
on average. But the consequences of Space enthusiasts, who write most enjoy the compendious coverage of
hunger, malnutrition, and related dis- of the science and science fiction on topics ranging from the prospect of
ease account for nearly 11 million the subject, take it for granted that, “terraforming” other planets into
deaths a year, a fifth of the deaths from given enough time, humanity wall carbon copies of Earth, to methods
all causes globally. The scope and com- spread throughout the galaxy. To for traveling faster than the speed of
plexity of the problem of hunger will them, the outstanding questions are light (well, maybe).
unfortunately continue to call on the largely technical: Is it easier to mine
best minds and noblest hearts among us metals from the asteroids on-site, or ow much of what Genta and
for a long time to come. is it more economical to tow them Rycroft describe is wishful
MarcJ. Cohen is Special Assistant to the Direc-
first to the Moon? Can a nuclear- thinking? They do offer an occasional
tor General ofthe International Food Policy Re- powered rocket carry enough fuel to cautionary remark about the physical,
search Institute, a publicly funded international make it to the nearest star and back economic, and ethical limitations on
agricultural research center that identifies and an- again? How can the human body and placing people in outer space. And
alyzes strategies for improving the food situation psyche be prepared to survive long they hedge their bets by avoiding spe-
in developing countries (www. ifpri.org). journeys 1n space? cific predictions for how long it will

64 | \TURAL HISTORY October 2003

take to colonize this or that planet, or his experience aboard a huge trading have energized a growing public
to travel to this or that star. But they and transport vessel during a business awareness of the need for more effec-
leave no doubt that human destiny trip on the Zaire River more than a tive regulation of the bushmeat trade.
lies in the heavens. The clear umplica- decade ago turned him abruptly from
tion is that those with reservations hotelier into environmental activist. [De Peterson, who has written
about the enterprise are, alas, quixoti- The issue was the trade in wild game, widely about primates in Africa,
cally trying to hold back the tides. or, as Africans call it, bushmeat. makes Ammann’s story the center-
Some of their argument is utili- Ammann had noshed on bits of piece of his wide-ranging account of
tarian: just as the Western frontier python in the past, but he had never the bushmeat problem. Although he
provided lebensraum for the surplus appreciated the enormous dimensions shares Ammann’s partisan views, Pe-
population of nineteenth-century of the bushmeat market, or how many terson explains why conservationists
America, so space will provide a safety species find their way to African ta- cannot simply will the end of ape-eat-
valve for a planet threatened by pollu- bles: “As. the) vessel “sailed upriver, ing through legislation. Selling ape
tion and overpopulation. And the ar- hunters paddled out from shore, ofter- meat 1s already illegal throughout most
guments put forth by some for a ing carcasses as well as live animals to of Africa. But so many people rely on
“space imperative,” the authors say, are the crew and to the professional meat bushmeat for protein, and so many re-
even more important: “space explo- merchants onboard. The boat’s meat gard it as a delicacy that connects them
ration 1s a primary duty of humankind, locker became crammed with freshly with their past and their ethnic iden-
who must not let themselves always be tity, that game wardens and police offi-
distracted by problems, even by the cers are more likely to buy bushmeat
very serious ones.” from a poacher than to arrest him.
Exhortations aside, what if there is Peterson shows, too, how Euro-
a fundamental difference between the pean logging corporations in Central
terrestrial frontiers of the fifteenth Africa are playing a key supporting
through the twentieth centuries and role in the growth of the bushmeat
the frontier of space? Consider that trade. They cut roads deep into vir-
undersea travel has been possible for gin forest, giving hunters ready access
more than a century. Yet though the to once-remote habitats. They cut
ocean bottom is far closer than the costs by feeding cheap bushmeat to
Moon, it remains a place visited only the loggers. And the truck drivers
temporarily, by expensive oceano- Chimpanzee, illustration from a 1686 volume they employ run a lucrative side busi-
graphic and military vessels. How by the Dutch geographer Olfert Dapper ness in the transport of contraband
many permanent colonies will be es- ape body parts, concealed in com-
tablished in the foothills of the mid- slaughtered lizards, monkeys, snakes, partments under their engine hoods.
Atlantic ridge? How many undersea and turtles. Live crocodiles, hogtied to The net effect is that hunting bono-
mines, mills, and Wal-Marts will be keep them fresh for market, began to bos, chimpanzees, and gorillas has
built there? Is it just a lack of will that pile up on the decks outside the mer- now become big business. And the
keeps our feet on terra firma? Or are chants’ cabins. Then one day a hunter targeted species, already endangered,
the barriers between the heavens and carrying a cheap shoulder bag came may be driven to extinction.
the Earth much higher than even a on board with the smoked carcass ofa With such strong economic and so-
pair of rocket scientists can imagine? mother chimpanzee; inside the bag cial forces in play, any argument that
was the chimpanzee’s orphaned baby. simply appeals to the repugnancy of
Ammann bought the baby, and in eating our closest cousins is bound to
Eating Apes the months that followed he searched be dismissed as ethnocentrism. If the
by Dale Peterson, with an afterword among the various African primate French eat horses, or the Vietnamese
and photographs by Karl Ammann refuges to find it a home. The experi- eat poodles, who’s to say the Africans
University of California Press, 2003; ence transformed him into a fierce ad- can’t eat apes? Peterson counters that
$24.95 vocate for change in African hunting eating apes endangers public health.
practice and diets. In the past decade He cites the work of Beatrice H.
arl Ammann, in love with Africa he has gone “underground” in several Hahn, a virologist at the University of
from an early age, 1s a Swiss citi- countries to report on the illegal mar- Alabama in Birmingham, who in
zen who has lived for the past quarter ket in apes and other large mammals. 1998 traced the AIDS virus to a virus
century in Kenya. He came to Nairobi His stark color photographs of slaugh- known as SIV, common among
as a hotel manager and gradually tered gorillas and chimpanzees (some chimpanzees. This past June, Hahn
drifted into wildlife photography. But of which are reproduced in this book), and her colleagues reported in the

October 2003 NATURAL HISTORY

 journal Science that the chimpanzees ray, one of the scientists, spent the re-
themselves may have contracted the maining decades of the century com-
virus by eating monkeys. piling a fifty-volume report on the ex-
Unlike chimpanzees, though, people pedition’s results. Challenger was the
can clean up their act. If advocates like first great oceanographic research ves-
Peterson and Ammann prevail, apes sel, and its findings were to set in mo-
may someday disappear from the mar- tion revolutions in earth science and
ket and the dinner table. With any biology for the next hundred years.
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 ut also on the per- nature.net
oirs of its naval ofticers— REED
EL, positive picture of GMFs” (go to
emorably, the candid and pre- www.monsanto.com/ and search for
unpublished diary of a young
\ip’s steward named Joseph Matkin. Thought for Food “GM Food”). So has the U.S. De-
partment of Agriculture (www.usda.
The book’s real excitement, though, gov/agencies/biotech/index.html):
; in the many technical digressions By Robert Anderson “Blue skies for agricultural biotech-
that Corfield, an earth scientist him- nology, here,” says the Scope review.
self, includes from the perspective of LS you don’t eat, you prob- But to see how abastion of spir-
modern science. Climatology, evolu- ably already have strong per- ited scientific nay-sayers is saying
tionary biology, oceanography, and sonal opinions about genetically nay, go to the “Genetic Modifica-
plate tectonics all got a jump start from modified (GM) foods |see “Crop tion” page of the London-based In-
Challenger’s results. It’s easy to under- Circles,” by MarcJ. Cohen, page 58}. dependent Science Panel (indsp.org/
stand why two great contemporary Rightly or wrongly, they call forth gm.php). There you'll find the orga-
research vessels—the Glomar Chal- many of the same health anxieties nization’s recently issued report,
lenger, the first oceanographic drilling people have about pesticides, hor- “The Case for a GM-free Sustain-
vessel, and the late and much lamented mones, and food irradiation. able World.”
space shuttle Challenger—both bore A good place to begin sorting If you're looking instead for some
the name ofa cramped and creaky sail- through the relevant information explanation of biotechnology that
ing ship of a century gone by. available on the Internet is the “GM falls in between the Bad Guys and
Food” page at “Scope” (scope.educ. the Good Guys, Colorado State
Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Su-
pernova Story, is the WK.T: Sahm professor
washington.edu/gmfood/). On the University offers an up-to-date
ofphysics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylva- “Scope Forum” menu, at the upper guide to transgenic crops. Without
nia, and director of Project CLEA, which pro- left of the screen, “Positions” will taking sides, this excellent site
duces widely used simulation software for edu- lead you to incisive responses from (www.colostate.edu/programs/lifesci
cation in astronomy. eight experts to questions about the ences/TransgenicCrops/index.html)
risks and benefits of GM foods. “Site presents the science underlying the
From the makers of the award-winning Civil War Life Series Bites,’ in the same menu, gives brief issues in substantial detail. On the
reviews of sixteen other Web sites on menu at the left, the entries on cur-
JOHNSTOWN GM food, “scoping out” the biases rent and future transgenic products
you're likely to run into at each one. (toward the bottom of the list) give —
NARRATED BY
I began with the site run by the concise overviews of specific GM
Union of Concerned Scientists. crops in use and in the pipeline.
"A fascinating look at a national
Their “Food” page (www.ucsusa. Whether or not you think the
GENER CULE LR Le org/food_and_environment/index.ctm) trend toward GM foods is leading
Video Store Magazine offers a balanced examination of into dangerous waters, you do have
'T DEVASTATED A TOWN AND GALVANIZED AMER humanity’s short experience with the right to know which of your su-
JOHNSTOWN
GM crops (click on “Biotechnol- permarket purchases have been ge-
ogy: under In’ Phiss Section”). netically engineered. GM-food la-
Under “Contents,” on the right, beling is not required yet in the
you can also click on two excellent United States, but some of the more
“Special Features” that focus on the partisan Internet sites can help you
way new technologies can threaten out. For example, at Greenpeace’s
the food supply. A good discussion “True Food Network” site (www.
of the risks of genetic engineering truefoodnow.org/) you can click on
is available under “Backgrounders,” the blue icon at the right for the
and under “Guides” you'll find a “True Food Shopping List.” There
list of altered foods currently al- you'll see which companies have
: DVD isOaneTts :
x0 avdilable on VHS lowed in U.S. markets. embraced the brave new world and
Running Time::.84 Tat ae To check out one of the principal which continue to make food the
BYRYG eae 8 tect ; players on the “upbeat” side of the old-fashioned way.
lescreen. debate, the “Site Bites” reviews
suggest Monsanto, which has “cre- Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer
OR! vand-other fine:retailers
ated an unceasingly and completely living in Los Angeles.
eae RG ;
entices www. JohnstownFlood.com
Ente inmant Company

68 | NATURAL HISTORY October 2003

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 iINIVERSE
owe
Penge AAT TA ISLAM
a background noise in the signal that away were measuring the temperature
(Continued from page 19) just didn’t go away, and they couldn’t of the cosmic background radiation
across the bow at the steady state theo- figure out how to get rid of it. It for themselves, they should get a tem-
rists. If it existed, the CMB would seemed to come from every direc- perature somewhat higher than 2.7
clearly indicate that the universe had tion, and it didn’t change. Finally degrees Kelvin, because they are living
once been different—smaller and hot- they looked inside the antenna, and in a younger, smaller, hotter universe.
ter—from the way it is today. Thus the what greeted them was a flock of Can such a mind-bending assertion
first direct observations of the CMB nesting pigeons, surrounded by lib- be tested? Yup. Turns out that a mol-
were nails in the coffin for the steady eral deposits of a white dielectric ecule called the cyanogen radical gets
state theory. Those observations were substance: pigeon poop. Could the excited by exposure to microwaves. If
made inadvertently in 1964, by Arno droppings, they wondered, be re- the microwaves are warmer than the
Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell sponsible for the background noise? ones in “our” CMB, they will excite
Telephone Laboratories—Bell Labs, The only thing that was all over their cyanogen radicals a little more than
for short—in Holmdel, New Jersey. fancy horn-shaped antenna yet did- our microwaves do. The cyanogen
Little more than a decade later, Penzias n't change was the pigeon poop. So radicals in distant, and thus younger,
and Wilson won a Nobel Prize for they cleaned it out, and sure enough, galaxies ought to be exposed to a
their persistent work (and good luck). the noise dropped a bit. But it still warmer cosmic background than the
wouldn’t go away. The paper they cyanogen radicals in our galaxy, the
BY the early 1960s physicists all published in 1965 in The Astrophysi- Milky Way. So their cyanogen radicals
knew about microwaves, but al- cal Journal refers to the persistent ought to live more excited lives than
most no one had the technology to puzzle as inexplicable “excess an- ours. And they do: the spectrum of
detect weak signals in that part of tenna temperature.” cyanogen radicals in distant galaxies
the spectrum. Back then most wireless While Penzias and Wilson were shows the microwaves to be just the
communication was done with radio scrubbing bird droppings off their an- temperature they should have been at
waves, which have longer wave- the time the radiation left the
lengths than microwaves, and so galaxies on its journey to Earth.
the existing receivers, detectors, You can’t make this stuff up.
and transmitters weren't suitable But why is the CMB inter-
tor thestask.) Yous needed a esting? The universe was
shorter-wavelength detector for opaque until 380,000 years
microwaves and asensitive an- after the big bang, so. you
tenna to capture them. And Bell couldn’t have witnessed matter
Labs had one: a king-size, horn- tenna, a team of physicists at Princeton taking shape even if you'd been sit-
shaped antenna that could focus and University, led by Robert H. Dicke, ting front-row center. You couldn’t
detect weak signals. were building a detector specifically to have identified where the galaxy
If you're going to send or receive a find the CMB. The professors, how- clusters and voids were starting to
signal, you don’t want other things ever, didn’t have the resources of Bell form. Before anybody could have
contaminating it. Penzias and Wilson Labs, so their work went a little slower. seen anything worth seeing, photons
were looking at radio emissions from The moment Dicke and his colleagues had to travel, unimpeded, across the
the Milky Way galaxy, and they heard about Penzias and Wilson’s universe.
wanted to pin down the sources of work, they knew they'd been scooped. The spot where each photon began
background interference—from the The Princeton team knew exactly its cross-cosmos journey is where it
Sun, from the center of the galaxy, what the “excess antenna tempera- smacked into the last electron that
from terrestrial sources, from what- ture” was. Everything fit: the tempera- would ever stand in its way. As more
ever. So they made an innocent mea- ture, the fact that the signal came from and more photons escaped without
surement. They weren’t cosmologists; every direction, and that it wasn’t being deflected by electrons, they
they were radio astronomers, unaware linked in time with Earth’s rotation or created an expanding shell that astro-
of the predictions by Gamow, Alpher, position around the Sun. physicists call the “surface of last scat-
and Herman. What they were decid- tering.” That shell, which formed
edly not looking for was the cosmic ecause light takes time to reach us over a period of some 120,000 years,
nicrowave background. from distant places in the uni- is where and when the first atoms in
Penzias and Wilson made their verse, we are actually looking back in the cosmos were born.
obsei ons, and corrected their time when we look into space. So if, By then, matter in large regions of
data the sources of interfer- while we were watching, the intelli- the universe had already begun to co-
ence they knew about. But there was gent inhabitants of a galaxy far, far alesce. Where matter accumulates, the

70
|0 ber 2003
strength of gravity grows, enabling mysterious pressure that counteracts
more and more matter to gather—a gravity, forcing the universe to ex-
snowball effect. Those matter-rich re- pand faster than it otherwise would.
gions seeded the formation of planets, The phrenology exam confirms that
stars, and galaxies, while other regions cosmologists understand how the Michael D. Coe
were left relatively empty. The pho- early universe behaved, but it also
tons that last scattered off electrons in demonstrates that most of the uni-
the coalescing regions developed a verse, then and now, is made of stuff
different, slightly cooler profile as they they’re clueless about.
climbed out of the strengthening
gravity field. es areas of ignorance not-

ANGKOR
withstanding, today, as never be-
hen we astrophysicists map the fore, cosmology has an anchor. The
CMB in detail [see “Sharper CMB 1s the vestige of a portal through
Focus,” by Charles Liu, May 2003], we which everything we are made of once AND THE KHMER
find that it’s not completely smooth. It passed: the surface of last scattering. CIVILIZATION
has spots that are slightly hotter or From the fascinating physical processes
slightly cooler than average, by one whose traces are imprinted on that
hundred-thousandth of a degree. We surface, a great deal can be learned
know what matter looks like today about the universe both before and
because we see galaxies, galaxy clus- after its light was set free.
ters, and galaxy superclusters. To fig- The simple discovery of the cosmic Bice gale
ltel
ure out how those systems arose, we microwave background turned cos-
probe the cosmic microwave back- mology into something more than
ground, a remarkable relic of the re- mythology. But it was the detailed Michael D. Coe draws on the
mote past. Studying its patterns 1s like mapping of the CMB that secured latest archaeological finds to
doing cosmic phrenology: feeling the cosmology’s place at the table of ex- bring to life the extraordinary
Khmer civilization of ancient
bumps on the “skull” of a youthful perimental science.
Cambodia. Long interested in
universe to infer its behavior not only Cosmologists have plenty of ego:
the comparative study of Old
as an infant but also as a senior citizen. how else could they have the audac-
and New World civilizations, _
The most detailed map of the CMB ity to deduce what brought the uni- Professor Coe has visited
ever made is the survey unveiled this verse into being? But the new era of iw BEN ati]
past February by the Wilkinson Mi- modern, observational cosmology sab UC cteteaantitem debt elele)a
crowave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). ushered in by the WMAP data may
WMAP data enable astrophysicists to call for a more modest, less free- *“A panoramic tour of Cambo-
compare, for instance, the distribution wheeling stance among its practi- TeV Micc amacr msleb(cia stil
of sizes and temperatures of the warm tioners. For each new observation, om eu Elimite om s
and cool areas. From that comparison each morsel of data, wields a double- — Ben Kiernan, author of
edged sword: it continues to build The Pol Pot Regime
the strength of gravity in the early
universe can be inferred, and thus the kind of foundation for cosmol- “Fresh and insightful portrayals
how quickly matter accumulated. ogy that so many other sciences (yet cece acral ca irtae
From that the relative amounts of or- enjoy. But it will also dispatch some Piel Jkmcuicy
lot aee
dinary matter, dark matter, and dark of the tall tales theorists dreamed up aCe aioe
energy in the universe can be calcu- before there were enough data to de- John H. Stubbs, World
lated (the percentages are 4, 23, and clare them fantasies. eV Gattntaitcy ae
73, respectively), and from those per- Yes, cosmology has come of age.
-$39.95Rol 0Hea pages
centages it’s easy to tell whether or not
the universe will expand forever.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the
Ordinary matter is what everyone
Frederick P Rose Director of the Hayden
is made of. It exerts gravity and can Planetarium in New York City. Videotapes of
absorb, emit, and otherwise interact a dozen of his lectures, under the title “My
with light. Dark matter, however, is a Favorite Universe,” were recently released by
mysterious substance that exerts grav- the Teaching Company (www.teachco.com).
ity but does not interact with light in All twelve are based on essays that have ap-
any known way. Dark energy is a peared in Natural History.
 [
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 AT THE MUSEUM
AMERICAN MUSEUM 6 NATURAL HISTORY ro

Petra: Lost City

of Stone
October 18, 2003-—
July 6, 2004

iterally carved from the red sand-

E stone cliffs in the Jordan Rift Val-
ley is the ancient city of Petra,
now mostly in ruins. Petra: Lost City of
Stone, opening at the American Mu-
seum of Natural History on October
18, 2003, tells the story of this thriving
metropolis at the crossroads of the This rare and delicate glass mosaic fragment
of a man’s head formed a part of the
ancient world’s major trade routes and
extraordinary wall mosaics that decorated
of the technological virtuosity that al- Petra’s Byzantine basilica.
lowed its founders, the Nabataeans,
to build and maintain a city in the jects on loan from collections in Jor-
harsh desert environment. Developed dan and Europe, many on view for
in collaboration with the Cincinnati Art the first time in the United States, and
Museum and presented under the pa- from collections in the United States.
tronage of Her Majesty Queen Rania Stone sculptures and reliefs, ceram-
of Jordan, Petra is the first major cul- ics, metalwork, stuccowork, ancient in-
tural collaboration between Jordan scriptions, and a selection of some 25
and the United States and the most 19th-century paintings, drawings, and
complete portrait ever mounted on prints will be displayed alongside ar-
the amazing yet enigmatic city of chitectural sections from several of For the first time since antiquity, the two
Petra and its people. Petra’s famous monuments. original halves of this important Nabataean
“With its complex intermingling of First conceived by the Cincinnati statue will be united for the exhibition Petra.
nature and culture,” said Museum Art Museum in 1994, Petra: Lost City This image, taken several years ago, shows
President Ellen V. Futter, “the fascinat- of Stone has been organized by the the authentic upper half of the statue (in the
collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum)
ing story of Petra mirrors the very work American Museum of Natural History
together with a cast of the lower portion of the
and mission of the Museum. For more and the Cincinnati Art Museum. The original, which resides in Amman, Jordan.
than 130 years, our curators have American Museum of Natural History
studied relationships between nature has been renowned for more than 130 representing many cultures and his-
and humanity. Understanding how the years as a leader in archaeological torical periods, including the most ex- —
underpinnings of other cultures flour- fieldwork and research, and has a tensive and important collection of
ish, and how they grow and spread long tradition of presenting exhibitions Nabataean artworks outside Jordan.
has perhaps never been more relevant that illuminate complex cultural and CAM’s Nabataean collection was ex-
than it is today, as we embrace the scientific issues. The Cincinnati Art cavated in 1937 at the site of Khirbet
challenges and opportunities of living Museum (CAM), one of the oldest and Tannur and was originally divided be-
in a truly global community.” most important visual arts institutions tween American and Jordanian au-
Petra: Lost City of Stone features in the United States, has an extra- thorities. This exhibition will reunite the
approximately 200 exceptional ob- ordinarily rich permanent collection two collections, which contain some

THE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HISTORY BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
of the most important works of Naba- taean goddess, resides in CAM’s dent, Dean of Science, and Curator, Di-
taean art extant. The Jordanian Min- collection, while the bottom is held at vision of Anthropology at the Museum.
istry of Tourism and the Department the National Archaeological Museum “The exhibition re-creates many as-
of Antiquities, as well as the Ameri- in Amman, Jordan. In Petra, the two pects of this impressive natural and
can Center for Oriental Research in halves of this intriguing piece will be human setting using artworks, pho-
Amman, have assisted with the devel- reunited as a complete statue for the tographs, and actual architectural ele-
opment of this project. After its pre- first time in 1,500 years. ments to tell the fascinating story of life
From the second century B.c.. in this ancient city using the eloquertt
through the second century A.D., Petra beauty of the work of its people.”
prospered—it is estimated that at its In New York, Petra: Lost City of Stone is made
height, the city was as large as lower possible by Banc of America Securities and
Manhattan, with a population of more Con Edison.
than 30,000. As the city grew to link far- The American Museum of Natural History also
flung regions of the ancient world, a gratefully acknowledges the generous support
cultural merging occurred that is ex- of Lionel |. Pincus and HRH Princess Firyal.
pressed through the unique style of art This exhibition is organized by the American
and architecture found at the site, rep- Museum of Natural History, New York, and the
resenting the heterogeneous nature of Cincinnati Art Museum, under the patronage
its society. A massive earthquake in of Her Majesty Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of the
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Air transporta-
A.D. 363, however, destroyed much of
tion generously provided by Royal Jordanian.
Petra. Although partially revived after
that, Petra was no longer the economic
powerhouse it had been. Much of the
COMPANION EXHIBITION
technological infrastructure that had
This eagle, a Nabataean symbol of celestial The Bedouin of Petra
made life in Petra possible fell into
power, sits atop a thunderbolt, an ancient October 18, 2003-July 6, 2004
disuse, and political and religious
symbol of the heavens and of the storms they Photojournalist Vivian Ronay’s
produce. changes in the ancient world led to the
evocative color photographs taken
eventual abandonment of the city in
between 1986 and 2003 document
miere at the American Museum of the seventh century A.D.
the Bdoul group of five sedentary
Natural History, Petra will travel to The city was then “lost” to Western-
Bedouin tribes living around the
other venues throughout the United ers until a series of European explor-
archaeological site of Petra in
States including CAM. ers rediscovered it. In 1812, Swiss
Jordan.
Among the highlights of Petra: Lost explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt
This exhibition is made possible by the
City of Stone will be several impor- reawakened European knowledge of
generosity of the Arthur Ross Foundation.
tant architectural pieces, such as a the site’s existence after more than
sculpted garland frieze from a major 1,000 years. The theme of European
PANEL DISCUSSION
temple at Petra, a sculpted window rediscovery of the ancient site also will
The Petra Siq
frame from a private villa, a portion of be explored through paintings, draw-
Sunday, 10/19, 2:00 p.m.
a monumental temple facade featur- ings, and prints by David Roberts,
Petra’s remarkable hydraulic sys-
ing figures from the zodiac, and a William Bartlett, Edward Lear, and
tem, designed over 2,000 years
limestone pulpit from a sixth-century Frederic Church, including Church's
ago, transformed a semi-arid land
Byzantine church. Key masterworks large-scale oil painting of the famous
into a lush environment. The same
will include a monumental limestone Treasury (1874).
conditions that challenged the
head of a Nabataean male deity, a Petra remains a source of deep fas-
Nabataeans complicate conserva-
seated sandstone cult statue of a cination for Western visitors, with its
tion efforts at the Petra site today.
storm god, a life-size cast bronze savage beauty and natural grandeur,
In this panel discussion, Aysar
statue of the goddess Artemis, and a its desolate setting, the mystery and
Akrawi and Ma’an Huneidi of the
marble head of a Roman emperor. splendor of its rock-carved architec-
Petra National Trust, and Douglas
One notable display will unite two tural ruins, and the variegated color of
C. Comer of Cultural Site Research
halves of a sculpture believed to have its cliff faces. and Management, will illustrate
been broken during an earthquake “Petra is one of the world’s most
how archaeology and satellite im-
and separated some 1,500 years ago. spectacular archaeological sites, com-
agery have influenced conserva-
The top of the sculpture, which de- bining an extraordinary natural land-
tion measures at Petra.
picts the 12 signs of the zodiac sur- scape and monumental buildings,”
rounding a bust of Tyche, a Naba- said Craig Morris, Senior Vice Presi-
UK
ASHWELL,
ARPS,
FBIPP,
GATES
JOHN
PETER
PHOTOGRAPHE
MUSEUM;
ART
CINCINNATI
©
 MUSEUM EVENTS
EXHIBITIONS LECTURES FAMILY AND CHILDREN’S
The Butterfly Conservatory Curators’ Lecture: PROGRAMS
Opens October 11 Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life It’s a Wild, Wild World
The butterflies are back! Mingle with Thursday, 10/9, 7:00 p.m. Live animal presentations and
more than 500 live, free-flying tropical Melanie Stiassny and Mark Siddall hands-on workshops.
butterflies in an enclosed tropical describe the spectacular renovation of Saturday, 10/11:
habitat. the Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life. Raptors: Birds of Prey
Saturday, 10/18:
The Butterfly Conservatory is made possible Sea Dragons: The World of Reptiles
through the generous support of Bernard and
Predators of Prehistoric Seas
Anne Spitzer.
Wednesday, 10/22, 7:00 p.m. Watch Out! Meteorites
Richard Ellis discusses the lives, on the Big Screen
Vietnam: deaths, reproductive habits, and Sunday, 10/26, 2:00-3:30 p.m.
Journeys of Body, Mind & Spirit hunting strategies of the giant marine Clips from classic science fiction
Through January 4, 2004 reptiles of the Mesozoic era. films illustrate the myths and realities
This comprehensive exhibition a
of meteorite impacts.
9
presents Vietnamese culture in the A
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early 21st century. 2> HAYDEN PLANETARIUM

D
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Q Programs
Organized by the American Museum of Virtual Universe:
Natural History, New York, and the Vietnam Orion Nebula
Museum of Ethnology, Hanoi. This exhibition
Tuesday, 10/7, 6:30-7:30 p.m.
and related programs are made possible by
Redefine your sense of “home” on
the philanthropic leadership of the Freeman
Foundation. Additional generous funding this monthly tour through charted
provided by the Ford Foundation for the space.
collaboration between the American Museum
of Natural History and the Vietnam Museum Celestial Highlights:
of Ethnology. Also supported by the Asian Another Eclipse!
Cultural Council. Planning grant provided by Richard Ellis Tuesday, 10/28, 6:30-7:30 p.m.
the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Find out what's up in the
Curator’s Lecture: November sky.
Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites
D
2 Thursday, 10/23, 7:00 p.m. Celebration of Space:
oO
2S
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PA
Denton S. Ebel will discuss 215t- Far Out: Space Probes as
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century perspectives on the oldest Landscape Photographers
rocks in the solar system. Monday, 10/20, 7:30 p.m.
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A panel of scientists, photogra-

The Extraordinary Sea Voyages phers, philosophers, and poets will
Experience the sights
of Captain James Cook discuss the role of planetary images
and sounds of a bustling Tuesday, 10/28, 7:00 p.m. on the art and politics of the human
Anthropologist Nicholas Thomas condition.
brings Captain James Cook to life.
Vietnamese
A Weather Report from
Marketplace WORKSHOP an Extrasolar Planet
Animal Drawing Monday, 10/27, 7:30 p.m.
and sample traditional
8 Thursdays, 10/2-11/20, With Dimitar Sasselov, Harvard-
foods at Café Pho.
7:00-9:00 p.m. Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Through January 4, 2004
An intensive after-hours drawing
77TH STREET LOBBY, FIRST FLOOR course among the Museum's famed
dioramas and dinosaurs.

THE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HISTORY BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
Courses The Rose Center:
Stars, Constellations,
and Legends
Envisioning the Virtual Universe
5 Tuesdays, 10/14-11/18, starry Nights:
5 Wednesdays, 10/15-11/19, 6:30-8:30 p.m. Live Jazz
6:30-8:00 p.m. Tours and hands-on control of the
Learn to locate and identify the Hayden Planetarium’s computer- Friday, 10/3, 5:30 and 7:00 p.m.
seasonal constellations. generated cosmos. Rose Center for Earth and Space
a
Using a Telescope
a
SPACE SHOWS The Paquito
4 Mondays, 10/20-11/10, The Search for Life: D’Rivera
6:30-8:30 p.m. Are We Alone? Quintet
Ideal for those who have a telescope Narrated by Harrison Ford
but are not sure how to use it, this The 5:30 perform-
course covers the basic functioning Passport to the Universe ance will be broad-
of telescopes. Narrated by Tom Hanks cast live on WBGO
Jazz 88.
Introduction to Astronomy Look Up!
6 Mondays, 10/20-11/24, Saturday and Sunday, 10:15 a.m. Starry Nights
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Designed for those with no back- 5 and under) Verizon and
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In the Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak Plan and WNBC-TV.
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6 Thursdays, 10/23-12/11,
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IMAX® Theater

Pulse: a STOMP Odyssey

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Explore single stars, binary stars, Last chance! Closes October 10.
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what the study of these objects can India: Kingdom of the Tiger Become a Member of the |
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A glorious tribute to this magnificent of Natural History
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 PHERE
DUELB LG EsVC RRL
Molecules are far more comphi-
cated than the sum of their parts. The
bonds between the individual atoms
aren't as rigid as the sticks and balls of
chemistry models suggest. Under-

of the Eart
inflated beach balls held together by
bedsprings make a better analogy;
h molecules are wobbly constructions,
constantly flopping, spinning, and
flexing. As a consequence, they can
absorb and emit radiation, just as sin-
Throughout the Egg Nebula, astrochemists have gle atoms can—and it is their radia-
detected what else?-—sodium chloride. tion-emitting property that enables
astronomers to find them.
Their structural complexity, how-
By Charles Liu ever—all that flopping, spinning, and
flexing—ends up complicating their
spectroscopic signatures, making them
hemistry, to most of us, IRC +10216, in the constellation Leo. far harder to interpret than the spectra
means test tubes, Bunsen Now, though, a team led by Jaime L. of solitary elements. On top of that,
burners, and beakers filled Highberger, an astrochemist at the when molecules “glow” in open space,
with bubbly concoctions. A select University of Arizona in Tucson, has their glow is a cold one, generally in
group of chemists, however, rarely reported the discovery of a sprinkling the microwave region of the electro-
handle flasks of foul-smelling fluids. of salt in a cloud of gas and dust magnetic spectrum, where wavelengths
Instead, telescopes are their glassware, named CRL 2688, in the constellation are thousands of times longer than they
and the stars, their crucibles. They Cygnus, the swan. Because of its are for visible light. To see them, astro-
study astrochemistry—the creation roughly oval shape and its position at chemists must focus on them with spe-
and transformation of molecules and the tail end of a constellation named cialized radio telescopes.
compounds in the universe. for a bird, the cloud has long been Figuring out how (and where) vari-
The astrochemical laboratory is the known as the Ege Nebula. ous kinds of molecules might form in
hyperrarefied, mostly weight- space is even trickier than de-
less, extreme-temperature en- tecting their presence. Free-
vironment people colloquially floating atoms in interstellar gas
call outer space. In space, atoms clouds can’t just collide and
can combine to form mole- stick together. In most cases,
cules one can’t ordinarily find such concentrations of atoms
on Earth. Conversely, many are so rarefied that the chances
compounds common on our of colliding are infinitesimal.
planet practically never occur Even if atoms do collide, they
outside a rock-iron planet with have too much kinetic energy
a thick, gaseous atmosphere. to stick. The atoms just bounce
Take ordinary table salt. A off each other and keep going.
union of a single sodium atom Instead, molecules have to
with a single chlorine atom, salt form on the surfaces of dust
(or, as chemists call the com- grains. There the collisions are
pound, sodium chloride) is likely enough, and the envi-
ubiquitous on Earth: it perme- Clouds of dust and gas that make up the Egg Nebula, visible ronment is quiet enough, for
ates our Oceans, our food, and here as roughly circular arcs, are sloughed off in a series of chemical reactions to take
our blood, not to mention the outward puffs from an aging, central star (positioned, but not place. Atoms need to land ona
massive veins of the stuff in the visible, at the center of this image) that is transforming itself grain, meet, and create a mole-
Earth. Beyond our solar system, from a red giant into a white dwarf. The colors of the image cular bond. Then, the newly
are not true colors, but instead represent various angles of
though, it had, until recently,
polarization that are imposed on the starlight as it passes
formed molecule needs to float
}
been detected eS in only
nad one
PS through the dust. Astrochemists surveying the clouds’ dust off the grain back into space.
place:in the vicinity ofa dying, and complex molecules have found ordinary table salt, NaCl, It turns out that almost all
carbon-heavy ir known as among the gaseous compounds there. the free-floating molecules in
space are extremely simple ones: ei- it. Observing with the twelve-meter One possibility is that astronomers
ther hydrogen gas or carbon monox- radio telescope at Kitt Peak in Ari- simply don’t understand gaseous salt
ide. For heavier and more complex zona, and with the thirty-meter IRAM well enough yet. Perhaps tempera-
molecules, though, aging stars, re- radio telescope at Pico Veleta, Spain, tures have to be much colder before
plete with larger atoms, are an ideal they found unmistakable evidence solid salt can form.
place to look. Stars of about the same that the Ege Nebula is salty. Highberger and her colleagues sug-
mass as our Sun (but older) go gest another scenario. As the central
through a red-giant phase before be- Pinere molecules in space has its star sheds its outer layers, they drift
coming white dwarfs. The outer lay- own rewards, but the work is outward at varying times and speeds.
ers ofa red giant slough off in a series more than just a search for curiosities. If a fast-moving layer puffs outward
of outward puffs of gas, forming a The distribution of salt in the Egg shortly after a slower-moving layer,
planetary nebula—a system of rings Nebula gives important information the newer material would ultimately
and loops of glowing gas around the about how stars recycle their contents, crash into the older stuff. The result-
star. The planetary nebula around providing raw materials to make new ing shock wave would stir up cold gas
such a star is rich in dust grains as well stars. Highberger’s observations show and reheat it. The heat would trigger
as heavy elements, and its internal that the free-floating salt occurs in a new wave of molecule formation,
heat can provide enough energy to roughly spherical layers more than a and produce the glowing gaseous salt
build compounds. But the nebula is trillion miles from the central star. At that is observed. If the model is cor-
not so hot that it breaks the delicate such distances the salt should be so rect, I'd say the Egg Nebula isn’t just
molecular bonds. cold it should all have condensed into salted; it’s scrambled and fried, too.
That’s why Highberger and her col- solid grains, which are undetectable to
leagues looked at CRL 2688, a star in astrochemists. Since the salt 1s clearly Charles Liu is an astrophysicist at the Hayden
the last stages of red gianthood—and observed, a puzzle arises: How has all Planetarium and a research scientist at Barnard
the planetary nebula forming around this vaporized salt survived? College in New York City.

THE SKY IN OCTOBER

By Joe Rao

Always hasty, Mercury makes a brief a-half hours before the Sun at the beginning of the
appearance before dawn early this month and more than four-and-a-half hours before sun-
month, rising just above the due- rise on Halloween. On the morning of the 22nd Jupiter
eastern horizon. It soon disappears is well to the right of the waning crescent Moon.
into the glare of the Sun and reaches
superior conjunction (on the other Saturn, in the constellation Gemini, rises out of the north-
side of the Sun as seen from the east about five hours after sunset at the beginning of the
Earth) on October 25th. month; by the time the hobgoblins and ghouls are out and
about on the 31st it is rising less than four hours after sun-
Venus, shining brilliantly at magnitude —3.9, chases the set. Saturn’s rings continue to be a spectacular sight, even
Sun across the sky throughout October. As seen from through a small telescope. On the night of the 16th Saturn
midnorthern latitudes, the planet sets thirty minutes after appears to hover above the Moon in the east-northeastern
the Sun on the 1st; by the 31st, because of both shorten- sky; by the 17th the Moon shifts far east of the planet.
ing days and Venus’ own movements, the planet sets about
an hour after our star. On the evening of the 26th it ap- The Moon reaches first quarter on the 2nd at 3:09 PM.
pears just to the right of a very young crescent Moon. and waxes full on the 10th at 3:27 a.M. Traditionally the
full Moon following the Harvest Moon is known as the
Mars, shining in the constellation Aquarius, crosses its Hunter’s Moon. The Moon wanes to last quarter on the
highest point in the sky about three to four hours after 18th at 8:31 A.M., and the new Moon arrives on the 25th
sunset. How it has dimmed in the past few weeks! As its at 8:50 A.M.
distance from Earth increases from 42 to 58 million miles
during October, Mars fades to less than half its early- “Ball back” in much of Canada and the United States, as
month splendor, from magnitude —2.1 to —1.2. daylight saving time ends on Sunday, the 26th; the hour
between 1 A.M. and 2 A.M. is officially repeated.
The king of the heavens meets the king of the jungle:
Jupiter is in the constellation Leo. It rises about two-and- Unless otherwise noted, all times are given in Eastern Daylight Time.

October 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 179

 & Cues
Ji eo

By Ryan C. Taylor

y academic life at the University of

Louisiana in Lafayette came to a cross-
roads the day Bryant “Buck” Buchanan
placed a squirrel treefrog (Hyla squirella) in my hand.
In the blink of an eye, the small green frog slipped
from my grip and rocketed across the lab, leaving a An amphibian charmer, Hyla squirella
puddle in my palm. Somehow, in midflight, it
latched onto some metal shelving with one foot and lightening its load, thereby increasing the distance it
hung on for dear life. In my astonishment all I could could jump? Buck and I decided to find out.
do was wipe off what was left on my hand. Our first step was to measure how much bladder
Until that moment I had been a gung ho fish guy, water squirrel treefrogs retain. By weighing adult
planning a research career in marine biology. But for males with full and then empty bladders, we found
some reason I found the treefrog experience so that bladder water makes up, on average, 14 percent
amusing that when Buck offered me the chance to of the animal’s entire body weight. To our amaze-
study the creatures with him, I accepted on the spot. ment, one treefrog was storing 59 percent of its
Our aim was to find out why treefrogs so frequently total body weight as bladder water—the equivalent
do just what my little guy had done to me: dump ofa 175-pound man whose bladder is holding more
their bladder water when they feel threatened. than twelve gallons of water.
A few days later Buck brought me into the field Our next step was to test the frogs’ jumping. We
to get me better acquainted with our research sub- weighed each frog as soon as it rehydrated, and
jects. Wading through fronds of chest-high dwarf then let the animals loose one by one inside a plas-
palmettos in the dense understory of a hardwood tic-lined “arena.” Some of the frogs—apparently
forest in St. Landry parish, we talked about the frogs those that were more skittish—dumped their blad-
and our approach to the project. I had already seen ders; others didn’t. But they all jumped, either
that they are no bigger than most car-alarm re- spontaneously or after a gentle prod. We then mea-
motes: about an inch and a quarter, on average, sured their jumps and weighed them again. Our
from snout to cloaca. Daytime conditions in their data showed that the frogs with empty bladders
native habitat in the southeastern United States are jumped nearly 20 percent farther than the frogs
warm and often baking. Hence, by day, squirrel with full ones.
treefrogs nestle into dense vegetation, pressing By the end of our study I realized that, when
themselves flat against a leaf and tucking their feet danger threatens, treefrogs face a potentially life-al-
under the body, to expose as little skin as possible to tering decision: To pee, or not to pee. By jettison-
the drying effects of the air. But, I learned, such a ing their bladder water, they gain an advantage in
water-conserving posture is not always enough to getting out of harm’s way, but at the likely cost of
prevent dehydration. That’s why the frogs take the dehydration. I also realized that, like the frogs, I,
added precaution of storing water in their bladders, too, faced a life-altering choice. I could continue
in the form of dilute urine. The bladder water is es- down the road to marine biology, or stick with my
sential to their survival. newfound amphibian friends. Let’s just say I never
Yet even in the dry season, from September to really recovered from the treefrog experience.
November, treefrogs often dump their precious
bladder water when potential predators approach— Ryan Taylor is finishing his doctoral research at the University
hat much was evident from my first treefrog expe- of Louisiana in Lafayette on the factors that influence mate
Could dumping its bladder benefit a frog by choice in squirrel treefrogs.
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 EPARTMENTS

oO THE NATURAL MOMENT

A Well-Dressed Bird
Photograph by Anup Shah
8 UP FRONT
Editor’s Notebook

10 CONTRIBUTORS

Zee Esgps

14 SAMPLINGS
Stéphan Reebs
18 UNIVERSE
Dark and Darker
Neil deGrasse Tyson
29 NATURALIST AT LARGE
Desert Dreams
Michael A. Mares

36 BIOMECHANICS
Catch and Release
Adam Summers

58 THIS LAND
Oasis in the Everglades
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
60 REVIEW
Stand and Deliver
Tan Tattersall

65 BOOKSHELF
Laurence A. Marschall

71 nature.net
Robert Anderson

74 AT THE MUSEUM

78 OUT THERE
Up the Chimney
Charles Liu

79 THE SKY IN NOVEMBER

Joe Rao
80 ENDPAPER
Captivated
Meredith FE Small

PICTURE CREDITS: Page 10

 Be We) o 1(cre= ra ri= =a
)

AMERICAN MUSEUM 6
The restoration of the Arthur BIels}sy ae ofMeteorites is alleea
 MATURAL MOMENT UPLER ONT.
NI IRLIADES TE

e preceding pages

Flushed
ust when you thought you'd become so jaded about assaults on
the natural environment that you'd heard it all, along comes a
story that manages to stir shock, depression, and outrage anew.
utting the cake, carving the Thousands of miles out to sea, in a remote region of the North
Thanksgiving turkey, or get- Pacific Ocean where even sailors seldom venture, is a vast floating
ting first crack at tearing into mass of plastic junk, stretching across an area the size of Texas. Plastic
wildebeest flesh, as the case may bleach bottles, tops of spray cans, discarded TV picture tubes,
be, is an honor usually bestowed polypropylene lines from fishing nets, plastic cigarette lighters, even
upon the senior or perhaps show1- toy “rubber duckies” have collected in a huge mass of slowly rotat-
est member of the dining party. ing seawater known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre, which—if
On the savannas of eastern Africa, you'll forgive the metaphor—has come to resemble a giant toilet
the Nubian or lappet-faced vul- bowl of swirling waste.
ture (Torgos tracheliotus) is king of Is this the secret dumping ground of some evil junkyard Mafia? In
carrion. With thick, industrial- fact, according to Charles Moore (see “Trashed,” page 46), the effect
strength beaks, Nubians are often is a natural one. Rivers of plastic objects are carried by great ocean
the only birds that can punc- currents from North America, Japan, and other lands along the
ture tough hides—which makes North Pacific rim into the gyre. There, much of the detritus, most
weaker scavengers depend on prominently the plastic, becomes trapped until it can decay—a proc-
them for access to the meat of a ess that, by some estimates, could take 500 years.
carcass. The massive vultures also Worse, this environmental disaster is not merely an eyesore and a
use their might to fend off hye- health hazard for seabirds. Japanese investigators have discovered that
nas and snap up the occasional plastics can concentrate hydrophobic chemicals a millionfold. Those
live flamingo. chemicals include such toxic substances as DDT, PCBs, and other oily
Wildlife photographer Anup poisons that have already been dispersed in the oceans. No one knows
Shah was in Kenya’s Maasai Mara how such concentrations might affect plankton, fish, or other parts of
National Park early one overcast the food web, but it seems unlikely that any good will come of it.
morning, keeping his eye on a
kill site, when the lappet-faced
vulture pictured here arrived— Ne everyone will find the face of the komodo monitor pictured
unfashionably late. Minutes ear- on this month’s cover as endearing as | do, but the creature 1s
her, two lions had brought down certainly a poster child for a group of predatory lizards so wily and
a wildebeest, and already a spotted intelligent that the epithet ““mammal-like” has become a cliché
hyena, two black-backed jackals, among herpetologists. Ecosystems don’t even harbor small monitors
and about twenty-five white- and small placental carnivores at the same time. According to Samuel
headed and Ruppell’ griffon vul- S. Sweet and Eric R. Pianka (“The Lizard Kings,” page 40), the rea-
tures were busily feasting. son may be that the two groups play such similar roles.
The Nubian, after landing close What I find particularly fascinating about small monitors is their
by, did not attract much attention, success as cold-blooded (more:aptly called ectothermic) animals.
so it opened its wings—a full nine They can move about all day, and they can strike like lightning when
feet across—to expose a puffed-up the circumstances call for it—yet they generally spend far less energy
chest and downy underfeathers. simply living than do their mammalian counterparts. The monitor
“After swaggering around in an story spotlights a basic lesson of biology: there are many ways to
exaggerated manner,’ Shah said, thrive in a threatening world. —PETER BROWN
the bird found a place among the
others and commenced its meal. In
Natural History (ISSN 0028-0712) is published monthly, except for combined issues in July/August and December/January, by Natural History Magazine,
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—Erin Espelie was incorrectly numbered 9. The correct issue number for the October 2003 issue is 8.

‘ 1
NATURAI
BON,
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ESVid
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.

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a) /

AMERICAN MuUsrUM oF NATURAL HISTORY

: 2004 WILDLIFE CALENDAR

with your
Clim cet
 RIBUTORS
ea SLL OTB AD,

A self-taught wildlife photographer, ANUP SHAH (“The Natural Moment:

page 6) was born in Kenya of Indian parentage. He credits 5,
childhood visits to NairobiNational Park with helping him
develop a powerful attachment to African fauna. Shah and his
brother Manoj have since teamed up and have been awarded
top prizes for their photographic work. Their latest collabo-
rative book, The Circle ofLife: Wildlife on the African Savannah, PETER BROWN Editor-in-Chief
will be published next month by Harry N. Abrams.
Mary Beth Aberlin Elizabeth Meryman
Managing Editor Art Director
SAMUEL S. SWEET (“The Lizard Kings,’ page 40), an associ-
Board of Editors
ate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, T. J. Kelleher, Avis Lang, Vittorio Maestro
has worked on the ecology of salamanders, snakes, and toads, Michel DeMatteis Associate Managing Editor {
as well as on the ecology and management of such endan- Lynette Johnson Associate Managing Editor
gered species as arroyo toads and California tiger salamanders. Thomas Rosinski Associate Art Director ~-
His studies of monitor lizards have led to two and half years Erin M. Espelie Special Projects Editor —
ee © of fieldwork in Australia since 1988. ERIC R. PIANKA is Graciela Flores Editorial Associate — ; Les
Denton A. Cooley Centennial Professor of Zoology at the Richard Milner Contributing Editor ‘
University of Texas at Austin. Pianka first studied the lizards
as se ~ Sarah L. Zielinski Intern Pein
of Australia during fieldwork in 1966. Together with the late
7 ae o = > ‘ ,
Dennis R. King, he is co-editor of the forthcoming Varanoid +
*
-
hy ‘i a
ee “a
*
oe
.

4 Se « = - . hei
Lizards of the World (Indiana University Press). A memoir, :
ae
BRENDAN BANAHAN Publisher)
f ¥ Ss

The Lizard Man Speaks, was published by the University of Png GalePage Consumer MarketingDirector
we
*
Texas Press in 1994. ti “Maria VolpePromotion Director <a
*
eZ le
f oe
i Edgar iu. Harrison National Advertsing Manager
A third-generation resident of Long Beach, California, er

Fae Sonia Ww.ParatoreSenior Account Mane |

CHARLES Moore (“Trashed,” page 46) is the captain of Al- A

— Donna M. Lemmon ProductionManager — oe

guita, an independent oceanographic research vessel. In 1994 .
: Fy. Michael Shectman Fuifillment Manager 2 :
he founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation By a
= JennieEvans Business Administrator i-me¥ a
(www.algalita.org/), dedicated to research, education, and ?
a
restoration of the marine environment. Since launching his Ona ay AdvertsingSales Repesentaneat Ss ee
ship in 1995, Moore, who received his captain’s license from NewYork—Metrocorp Marketing, 212-972-1157, |
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the U.S. Coast Guard, has conducted ocean and coastal sampling for plastic Duke International Media, 212- 968-6098 a
Detroit—Joe McHugh, Breakthrough Media, 586- 360-3980
fragments and debris across a wide swath of the northern Pacific Ocean. _ Minneapolis—Rickert Media, Inc., 612--920-0080 *
West Coast—SD Media, 310-264-7575, = #
Swiss-born PAUL SCHMID-HEMPEL (“Fight of the Bumblebee,’ page 2) earned i 7) = Pantis\& Co.,415-641-5767 Oia Fs)
his doctorate in zoology and ecology at the University of Toronto—American Publishers sali oa +f

Zurich, and pursued postdoctoral research at the University of Representatives Ltd., 416-363-1388
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for his work in evolutionary ecology. Since 1991 he has been a
professor at ETH Ziirich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Tech-
nology. He enjoys opera and hiking in the northern tundra.
|

| PICTURE CREDITS Cover: ©Martin Harvey/NHPA; pp. 6-7: ©Anup Shah; p. 12: ©Bud Grace; p. 14 (top): ©2003 Nature
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 a)

ihe Light Fantastic Einstein’s special theory of statements. So | was hurt and thus concluded his
| thought your 9/03 issue relativity, which specifies to discover in Michael presence was no longer re-
was sensational, but one that an object (or more Ruse’s review of Steve’s quired.
thing puzzled me in Neil generally, information) can- final book, The Hedgehog, Frederic Golden
deGrasse Tyson’s column not accelerate past the the Fox, and the Magister’s Santa Barbara, California
“In the Beginning,” about speed of light when travel- Pox [“The Mismeasure of
the early universe. He ing within a preexisting Science,” 7/03-8/08)|)the MICHAEL RUSE REPLIES: As
writes, “By now, one sec- space. Einstein’s later, more claim that Carl wouldn’t in Akira Kurosawa’s film
ond has passed since the complete general theory of “take time out to go to Rashomon, the real story 1s
beginning of time. The relativity accounts for what the South and fight the unlikely to emerge at this
universe has grown to a can happen to the fabric of creationists” during the time. But rather than get
few light-years across.” space-time itself, and places 1981 trial of the Arkansas into justifications of claims,
Huh!!?? How could no restriction on the speed bill mandating that biol- let me cover my somewhat
the universe have grown with which that space-time ogy teachers in publicly ungracious reference to
to several light-years can expand. funded schools evenhand- Carl Sagan by acknowledg-
edly discuss both evolu- ing that, in the last half cen-
tion and creationism. tury, he and Steve Gould
Carl began fighting for were two of the most im-
science in the dangerous portant science popularizers
Deep South of 1962, and and educators. We owe
never stopped as long as he thanks to both of them.
lived. Mr. Ruse’s gratuitous
swipe at Carl brought to Whence the Moon
mind another time he was I would like to take issue
asked to testify against with three elements in G.
“creationism.” It was when Jeffrey Taylor’s excellent sum-
he was undergoing one of mary of the legacy of forty
three bone marrow trans- years of lunar exploration
plants endured in his heroic [“Moonstruck,’ 9/03].
struggle for his life. His im- First, the “giant impact”
mune system destroyed by hypothesis for the origin of
radiation and chemother- the Moon 1s seriously
apy, emaciated and ex- flawed. There is strong evi-
“Of course it’sfull of rodent hairs.” hausted, he failed to satisfy dence that the lower mantle
the high standards of Mr. of the Moon is chemically
across in one second? Carl Sagan's Legacy Ruse. Instead, he stayed in primitive (chondritic) and
That would mean it ex- It was a great comfort to his hospital room as or- could not have been part of
panded several hundred me in 1997, the year fol- dered and wrote The either the early Earth or the
thousand times faster lowing the death of my Demon-Haunted World. impactor, nor could it have
than the speed of light. husband and professional Ann Druyan undergone the heating
Did Einstein’s laws not collaborator, Carl Sagan, to Ithaca, New York caused by a giant impact.
apply at this time? read the dedication in Serious attention should be
HansJ. Berliner Stephen Jay Gould’s book Michael Ruse does Carl given to the hypothesis that
Carnegie Mellon University Questioning the Millennium: Sagan a serious injustice. the Moon was an indepen-
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Sagan had in fact planned dent, co-orbiting planet
In loving memory of my
to testify at the Little Rock captured by the Earth.
friend Carl Sagan
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON trial, but medical treatment Second, the Moon was
The most passionate rationalist
REPLIES: During the very kept him from appearing. resurfaced by a dozen or so
of our times
early moments of the uni- He offered to act as a rebut- large impacts around 4 bil-
The best advocate for science
verse, space-time expanded tal witness at the end of the lion years ago, not just by
in our millennium
much, much faster than the proceedings, but the the impact that created the
speed of light. That stag- Steve was learned and American Civil Liberties huge Imbrium Basin. A
geringly rapid rate does not highly principled, not one Union’s lawyers felt they cataclysmic period half a
es eh
Old le principles of
LIC to toss out hyperbolic had already made their case billion years long is thus

2
more likely than one lasting is right on: huge early im- what it was called.” were a noiseless firefight of
100 million years. pacts on Earth might indeed William J. Rihn tracer rounds. All ofa sud-
Third, Mr. Taylor does have affected how the crust Laguna Beach, California den, one “tracer” flew di-
not note the potential con- formed and evolved, and rectly at my face, almost in
nection between the very even how life originated. Night Lights perfect line with my two
early huge lunar impacts Until my first week as a wide-open eyeballs. J
that created basins with di- Ask Pooh Marine grunt in Vietnam, ducked. To my relief, the
ameters larger than a thou- Robert M. Sapolsky’s arti- I had never seen fireflies. green light flew in slow
sand kilometers (the oldest cle’ <The Pleasure (and Reading Sara Lewis and motion over my helmet.
being the South Pole— Pain) of ‘Maybe’” [9/03] James E. Lloyd’s “Summer Later the guys asked me
Aitken Basin) and the early gives fresh meaning to Flings” [7/03-8/03] why I had been ducking and
evolution of Earth’s crust. Winnie-the-Pooh’s re- brought back strong thrashing around the night
Harrison H. (“Jack”) Schmitt sponse to Christopher memories. before. They nearly died of
Albuquerque, New Mexico Robin’s question “What It’s hard to describe the laughter when I told them.
do you like doing best in tension and fear you expe- Now Ifind out the fireflies
Editor’s note: The letter the world, Pooh?” We read rience on an all-night am- were making love in front of
writer is the only geologist to that Pooh “had to stop and bush. Maximum discipline our killing zone. If those
have visited the Moon; in think. Because although is called for; at times we fireflies had only known.
December 1972 he was an Eating Honey was a very would even control our Vicente Rivera
astronaut member of the crew good thing to do, there breathing to avoid detec- Tucson, Arizona
of Apollo 17, the last was a moment just before tion. One night as I lay in
manned lunar mission. you began to eat it which wait above a trail, I noticed Natural History’ e-mail
was better than when you little green flares flying in address is nhmag@natural
G, JEFFREY TAYLOR REPLIES: were, but he didn’t know all directions—as if there historymag.com
I welcome Jack Schmitt’s
comments. Planetary geolo-
gists, however, know little
about the lower mantle of
the Moon, so no one knows
whether it 1s chondritic.
New computer models sug-
gest the giant impact might
have taken place when the
Earth was half built. Then,
as planetary construction
was being completed, the
Moon could have accreted
additional material. Such an
explanation combines as-
pects of both ideas.
The article mentioned
that the idea of a relatively
brief cataclysm isn’t univer-
sally accepted. The dis-
senters’ view will be de-
bated until samples have
been taken from the South
Pole—Aitken Basin and
from some of the younger
impact basins superim-
posed on it; that will re-
quire a return mission to
the far side of the Moon.
Mr. Schmitt’s third point
 By Stéphan Reebs

Naked: it’s So 68,000 B.c. Poisoning the Waters

yreat questions for the fashion soned that by estimating when the body Algae are a diverse crew. They range
dustry must be, When was clothing in- louse emerged as a separate subspecies from single cells less than one ten-thou-
nted? Climate being what it is, body they could estimate when wearing clothes sandth of an inch across to gigantic or-
erings could not have been long in became the normal thing to do. The team ganisms hundreds of feet long. They’re
coming after the loss of hominid fur, but examined differences between parts of the also the mainstay of the marine food
the familiar paleontological clues aren't genes of body lice and head lice. In addi- chain, but that doesn’t mean they pas-
much use in pinning down either of those tion, because human beings and chim- sively accept their status as food. Cer-
developments. Fossilized bones say noth- panzees went their separate ways 5.5 mil- tain microalgae actively emit toxins, and
lion years ago, the team compared the recent investigations show the toxins
human louse sequences with the sequences may have an offensive as well as a de-
of chimpanzee lice. The latter comparison fensive role. Marine biologists Alf Skov-
made it possible to calibrate the rate of gaard of the Institute of Marine Sciences
change in the genomes of the lice. On the in Barcelona, Spain, and Per Juel
basis of their estimates of those rates of ge- Hansen of the University of Copen-
netic change, they calculated that the hagen now have hard evidence that tox-
human body louse emerged as a species ins from the microalga Prymnesium
some 70,000 years ago—a time frame that parvum may ward off competitors or
coincides nicely with the spread of modern even help the algae procure lunch. tia
humans out of Africa and into colder climes. Marine biologists have long believed_
Body louse: a downside of clothing
Earlier estimates for the widespread use that algal toxins repel would-be preda-
ing about external layers, and skin and of clothing were based on artifacts. Bone tors, such as fish and crustaceans. And it -
clothes don’t fossilize well. But Ralf Kittler, needles have been dated to 40,000 years is well known that when algae prolifer-
a geneticist now at the Max Planck Institute ago; statuettes and clay impressions attest ate, their toxic blooms can wipe out ai.
of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in to the variety of weaving techniques in Eu- region's aquaculture or close down its
_ - -
Dresden, Germany, and his colleagues rope by 30,000 years ago. Fashion mavens, seafood restaurants. P. parvum—a noto-
haven't let such details stand in their way. rejoice: the demise of nakedness is no rious source of toxic blooms world-
The body louse (Pediculus humanus cor- longer completely cloaked in mystery. wide—photosynthesizes like a plant, but
poris)—an evolutionary offshoot of the (“Molecular evolution of Pediculus humanus it also has animal ambitions: the crea-
head louse—munches on the skin but in- and the origin of clothing,” Current Biology ture ingests prey, sidling up to othermie
habits clothing. So Kittler and his team rea- 13:1414-17, August 19, 2003) croorganisms and engulfing them. But
that process works well only with prey—
that aren't mobile: single-celled algae,
Spinmeisters after all, have no limbs or mouthparahe
You wouldn't think spider webs could be catch and hold their next meal. P-
part of the fossil record—and if it weren't parvum’s way around that limitation
is to
for the preservative power of amber, they secrete chemical stun guns. ii
wouldn't be. Scrutinizing a fragment of Skovgaard and Hansen have shown —
Lebanese amber 130 million years old, that the higher the concentration of P.
Samuel Zschokke, a biologist at the Uni- parvum secretions, the more the motile
versity of Basel in Switzerland, discovered microorganisms become immobilized
a thread of spider silk a sixth of an inch and the more P. parvum move in to feed.
long, studded with thirty-eight minuscule Sticky spider silk in amber, magnified on them. And besides helping to pro-
150 diameters
droplets of glue. Both the diameter of the vide meals, toxins could be disabling
thread and the size, shape, and arrange- in Schoharie County, New York, show that competitors and predators. In fact, the
ment of the droplets are nearly identical spiders have been making silk for at least multifaceted function of toxins could
to those of modern web-weaving spiders. 380 million years. But there’s no evidence contribute to the alga’s periodic, and |
The specimen, whose true identity had that the threads made by those ancient destructive, population explosions.
remained unrecognized since 1969, came spinnerets were gluey. Zschokke's discov- ("Food uptake in the harmful alga
trom the world’s oldest deposits of amber ery thus establishes the earliest time that Prymnesium parvum mediated by ex-
ntaining insect remains. Fossilized spin- spider webs became sticky. (“Spider-web creted toxins,” Limnology and Ocean-.
2 organs that spit out the spider silk from the Early Cretaceous,” " Nature ography 48:1161-66, May 2003)
424:636-37; August 7, 2003)

14| Natu
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 Elemental Question
When attention wanders in science class, students’ eyes often
scan a familiar wall adornment: the periodic table of the ele-
CT@6iIN>
Reduced carbon Reduced nitrogen
7 O* 8
Oxygen as oxide
m=12.011 | m=14.007 m=15.999
ments. But if L. Bruce Railsback has his way, that enormous r=2.60@>| r=1.71 r=1.40
but relatively simple chart will be replaced—at least in earth- Most natural occurrences of carbides and
nitrides are in meteorites or mantle phases @&
sciences classrooms—by a far more complex table. 1213 14 1415 16 17 18
Railsback, a geologist at the University of Georgia, in lons get a place at the geologist’'s new periodic table.
Athens, notes that the now-standard version of the periodic
table, formulated in Europe in the 1860s, is of little use to earth correspond to the abundance of the ion; and a host of sym-
scientists. It lines up only the pure elements. In nature, though, bols to indicate which minerals an ion forms.
elements usually occur as ions—that is, in a charged form, The result is a visually striking, information-packed
often as part of compounds such as salt. chart that goes a long way toward explaining geochemical
So Railsback has rearranged the elements as ions, not hesi- processes and patterns of abundance in the Earth's crust,
tating to revise the “sacred” text of chemistry by repeating mantle, and oceans. A patient student can now make better
elements that commonly occur as different ions, with different sense of why certain elements are more soluble than others
electric charges, under different conditions. The rearrange- (and thus more likely to occur in the sea), or why gold doesn’t
ment has the advantage of grouping the ions on the basis of rust. But such a student will need more time to read the elab-
the kinds of combinations in which they often occur. Railsback orate chart than most boring classes will ever afford. (“An
also depicts interrelations via such devices as color (green for earth scientist's periodic table of the elements and their
2
nutrients essential to life, red-brown for ions that make oxide ions,” Geology 31:737-40, September 2003; www.gly.uga.
minerals, and so on); size and boldness of the labels, which edu/railsback/PT.html)

Really Sinister
What did Julius Caesar, Marilyn Monroe,
Ronald Reagan, and Babe Ruth have in
common? If you said all of them were left-
ies, smile and take a bow. Favoring the use
of one side of the body isn’t unique to
people, though: some cats tend to reach
with their left paws, for instance. Nor is the
trait restricted to the use of limbs: some
fishes tend to use the left eye to check out
members of their own species.
But a left-handed snake? Well, yes: when
snakes are at rest, they coil their bodies,
and that puts one side or the other on the
inside of the coil. According to Eric D. Roth,
a herpetologist at the University of Okla-
Cottonmouth coiling (most of the way) with its left side on the inside
homa in Norman, if an individual snake or a
species coils one way or the other in a rea- population as “left-handed.” Among the But it is safe to say that the idea ofa left-
sonably consistent way, it makes sense to sixteen lefties, three were southpaws at handed snake isn’t just a put-on. ("‘Hand-
call the behavior “handedness.” the individual level: they coiled to the left edness’ in snakes? Lateralization of coiling
Roth recently spent six months repeat- twice as often as they coiled to the right— behaviour in a cottonmouth, Agkistrodon
edly noting the coiling configuration of too marked a tendency to be caused by piscivorus leucostoma, population,” Animal
twenty adult cottonmouths, a venomous chance alone. Behaviour 66:337—41, August 2003)
species native to the southeastern United Does the frequency of handedness—or,
States. Sixteen of the cottonmouths coiled more generally, “behavioral lateraliza- Stéphan Reebs is a professor of biology at the
nore often with the left side of the body tion”—in lower vertebrates suggest that University of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada,
nside of the coil. Roth considered the animal brain became lateralized early in and the author of Fish Behavior in the Aquarium
ct strong enough to regard the vertebrate evolution? It’s too soon to tell. and in the Wild (Cornell University Press).

16| NATURAL TORY

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Dark and Darker
There’s a lot more gravity in the cosmos
than meets the eye.

By Neil deGrasse Tyson

ravity, that most familiar of anates from something other than dozen galaxies, Zwicky discovered
nature’s forces, is both the matter. In any event, the experts are that their average speed is astonishingly
best- and least-understood clueless—and no closer to an answer high—much too high for the gravity
phenomenon in the cosmos. Not today than they were in the 1930s. field exerted by all of the Coma clus-
until Sir Isaac Newton turned his at- That’s when the colorfully contentious ter’s visible matter to be holding the
tention to the problem in the late sev- Swiss-American astrophysicist Fritz cluster together. By all rights, the
enteenth century did anybody figure Zwicky discovered the first sign that galaxies he observed ought to have
out that gravity’s mysterious “action there is far more gravity in the cosmos been flung off into deep space—yet
at. ar distance issicaused by enatter than the stars, galaxies, and other visi- they clearly seemed bound by gravity
Newton was the first to realize that a ble objects could ever account for. to the rest of the Coma cluster. Some
simple algebraic equation could de- Where was the “missing mass’’? matter—at least some source of grav-
scribe the gravitational attraction be- ity—seemed to be misbehaving.
tween any two bodies, and that from wicky had been studying the Zwicky based his conclusion on an
that equation you could “weigh” the Coma cluster, a titanic ensemble intimate relation between the total
Earth and predict the future orbits of of galaxies far beyond the local stars amount of matter in a galaxy cluster
the planets. And not until Albert Ein- that trace the constellation Coma and the observed speeds of its orbiting
stein pondered gravity in the member galaxies. Assuming the
early twentieth century did cluster is not in some odd state
anyone figure out that action at of expansion or collapse, if you
The dark matter in the universe
a distance is better understood know the size of the cluster, and
as a warp of space-time, caused is six times more common, if you can estimate its mass, you
by the presence of matter or en- can invoke Newton’s equation
ergy or both.
on average, than ordinary matter. to calculate what the orbital
Neither Newton nor Einstein speed of its galaxies should be.
thought he was describing any- You can do a similar calcula-
thing other than ordinary matter, the Berenices (a Latin phrase meaning tion for the orbital speed of each
kind you can see, touch, feel, and taste. “hair of Berenice,’ in honor of an an- planet in the solar system. All you
Yet for nearly three-quarters of a cen- cient Egyptian queen who willingly need to know is the planet’s mass, the
tury astrophysicists have been waiting cut off her tresses). Isolated and richly Sun’s mass, and the distance between
for someone to explain why 85 per- populated, the Coma cluster lies more the two—well-known quantities by
cent of all the gravity in the universe than 300 million lght-years from now. Calculate what the orbital speed
originates in a substance that no one Earth. Thousands of galaxies revolve of the Earth should be, and then mea-
has ever seen, touched, felt, or tasted. about its center, moving in every pos- sure the actual speed. The two figures
There’s no guarantee that it even is a sible orbit like bees circling a beehive. will agree. But suppose you measured
maybe “excess’’ gravity em- By measuring the motion of a few Earth’s speed and it came out ten
 Rupert Deese, Swimmer, 1988

times greater than Newton’s laws said ting visible light. For a short time, in Things that make you go hmmm.
it should be. Knowing that Earth’s ve- fact, investigators named the problem If there isn’t enough visible matter
locity of escape from the solar system “missing light” rather than “missing in the outer zone to account for the
is only one-sixth that figure, you’d mass.” But even when astrophysicists sustained orbital speeds of the tracer
have to wonder why Earth (and all realized that the true problem was sur- stars, she reasoned, there must also be
the other planets) hadn’t flown the plus gravity, they hurried to invent its some form of dark matter out there.
coop long ago. presumed source, bestowing upon it Something was creating enough grav-
In the Coma cluster, Zwicky found, the spooky name “dark matter.” ity to prevent the expected drop-off
galaxies were traveling faster than the in speed. It turns out that the “extra”
escape velocity he calculated for them. be as astrophysicists were growing gravity, which astrophysicists came to
Hence the cluster should have flung accustomed to their ignorance, the call a dark-matter halo, extends out-
itself apart within several hundred problem of dark matter reared its in- ward to at least ten times the radius of
million years of its birth, leaving barely visible head somewhere else. During every spiral galaxy ever observed.
petrace Of its existence. Yet Coma’s the 1970s and 1980s Vera Rubin, an Ordinary matter and dark matter
symmetrical beehive shape bespeaks an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution loosely track each other in space, but
age perhaps as venerable as that of of Washington in Washington, D.C., not in a one-to-one ratio. Averaged
the universe itself. and her colleagues discovered that in- across the entire universe, cosmic dark
In the decades that followed dividual spiral galaxies present matter “outweighs” visible matter by a
Zwicky’s discovery, other galaxy clus- a similar anomaly. Beyond the lumi- factor of six. But the ratio varies sub-
ters were found to have the same pat- nous disk of such galaxies, scattered stantially from one kind of astrophysi-
tern. That meant no one could dismiss across the largely empty, “rural” areas cal environment to another. Dark
the Coma cluster as a renegade, and of the cosmos, are a few gas clouds matter is most dominant in large enti-
the significance of the problem be- and isolated regions where bright stars ties such as galaxy clusters, and un-
came correspondingly magnified. are being born. By observing such measurable in small entities such as
Who—or what—was to blame? New- star-forming regions, Rubin could planets. The surface gravity of Earth,
ton? Not likely. His theory had sur- trace the gravity field beyond the for instance, can be accounted for en-
vived two and a half centuries of galaxy’s visible edge. If those regions tirely by the ordinary matter that’s
testing. Einstein? Nope. Even the for- and gas clouds were subject only to under your feet. So don’t try to blame
midable gravity operating within the gravity of the visible matter in the dark matter if you’re overweight.
galaxy clusters is too weak to require galactic disk, their orbital speeds out That variation in ratios is a sure sign
the corrective treatment of Einstein’s there in Nowheresville should have that dark matter distributes itself more
general relativity. Perhaps the absent dropped. But Rubin discovered that diffusely than ordinary matter. Other-
mass was just ordinary matter that hap- their speeds stayed high, without a wise, six pieces of dark matter would
pened to be dark—burned-out stars, trace of dropping off, even in the most be clinging to every chunk of ordi-
for instance, that were no longer emit- remote locations. nary matter. As far as anyone can tell,

|
November 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 19
 though, that’s not the way things are. Newton’s law of gravity: modified
Given the six-to-one ratio, all the or- Newtonian dynamics, affectionately
dinary, recognizable matter in the uni- called MOND. Admitting that stan-
verse the stuff you and I are made dard Newtonian dynamics works just
of—amounts to no more than a minor fine on the scale of stars and planets,
ingredient in the birth, evolution, and Milgrom suggested that Newton
fate of the cosmos. Get over it. needed help at the scale of galaxies and
galaxy clusters. His solution was to add
est as astrophysicists can figure, a term to Newton’s equation—a term
dark matter isn’t just matter that mathematically rigged to come to life
happens to be dark; it’s something only when applied to great distances.
else altogether. Yes, it wields gravity, Although the term was intended pri-
but it doesn’t do much else that’s fa- marily as a computational tool, Mil-
miliar. It neither absorbs nor emits grom didn’t rule out the possibility
light, rendering telescopes practically that it referred to an unheralded phe-
throughout the useless. And so a big, basic question nomenon of nature.
remains unanswered: If all matter has MOND enjoyed some success de-
Museum and join in fun mass, and all mass has gravity, does all scribing isolated spiral galaxies, but it
activities, including Halloween gravity have matter? was not conceived as a complete the-
SetoNECTOKE TuaSe-aCe Geb ecs How can we be sure dark matter ory of gravity, and so it lacks a mecha-
isn't simply matter that happens to be nism for calculating the motions of
- Enjoy live entertainment by dark? Investigators exam-
the Big Apple Circus, ined all the plausible can-
David Grover and the Big Bear didates—as if they were “Dark matter” wields gravity,
Band, Big Nazo, and Louie. looking over the suspects
all right, but no one knows
im appolice Lineup Ist
made of black holes that whether it’s really matter at all.
_ See a spooky new come from stars? No, the-
ories of stellar evolution
Halloween Space Show in the rule out that possibility, and besides, more complex systems, such as multi-
: ean Mceitaerettney such a huge quantity of black holes ple galaxies. More important, MOND
would have shown up in other ways. Is jumps through hoops to say anything
it dark clouds of gas? No, they would about the early universe, where galax-
absorb or otherwise interact with light ies had not yet formed. In early 2003
from the stars behind them, which NASA published a portrait of the cos-
genuine dark matter doesn’t do. Is it mic microwave background made by
interstellar or intergalactic planets, as- the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy
teroids, or comets, all of which emit Probe (WMAP); that image, combined
no light of their own? Seems unlikely: with data from other telescopes, iso-
it’s hard to believe the universe would lated and measured the effects of dark
lock up six times as much mass in matter in the early universe—leaving
planets as it does in stars. If it had, MOND with nothing to contribute,
there would be 6,000 Jupiters for awaiting a likely burial in the graveyard
every Sun, or even less likely, 2 million of creative but wrong ideas.
Earths per Sun. But in our own solar
system—if that’s a typical example— ark matter, though mysterious,
the mass of everything other than the has quite real effects, and helps
Sun adds up to less than two-tenths of demystify many phenomena that
1 percent of the solar mass. would otherwise go unexplained. By
When nothing else works, scientists the time the universe was half a mil-
sometimes question the foundations of lion years old, matter had begun to
their assumptions. In the early 1980s coalesce into the blobs that later be-
the physicist Mordehai Milgrom of the came galaxy clusters and superclusters;
Weizmann Institute of Science in Re- during its next half million years the
hovot, Israel, proposed a new twist to universe grew by 50 percent. All the

20 | NATURAL HISTORY November 2003

 competing efforts were at of the deuterium in the process. Having resisted all attempts to un-
ravity was trying to collect and As it happens, all the deuter1um in derstand it, dark matter has become a
oncentfa ite matter; Cosmic expansion the cosmos was manufactured imme- kind of Rorschach test for investiga-
was trying to dilute it. When you do diately after the big bang. And be- tors. Gravity skeptics say we don’t re-
the math, you rapidly conclude that cause deuterium is readily consumed ally understand gravity. Particle physi-
the gravity of ordinary matter could in the cores of stars, the most un- cists say dark matter could be some
not have won the battle on its own. It evolved regions of the cosmos should ghostly class of undiscovered particle.
needed help, and that help came from hold no more of the stuff than existed Maybe the particles interact through
the gravity of dark matter. Without at the end of the fusion era, after the gravity plus some unknown addi-
dark matter the universe would have first few minutes of the universe. And tional force, or maybe (and more
no structures: no galaxies, no stars, no sure enough, the spectra of galaxies likely) they do respond to normal
planets, no astrophysicists. How much whose gas clouds have been only min- forces, but so weakly that the particles
extra gravity did ordinary matter imally processed show one deuterium are virtually undetectable. Or how
need? Six times as much as it could atom in every hundred thousand. Just about the cosmic exotica that some-
provide on its own. what one would expect from a big- times appear in “theories of every-
Dark matter played another crucial bang birthday suit wrapped in a dark- thing’? Perhaps a parallel, phantom
role a couple of minutes after the big matter blanket. universe exists right next to ours, re-
bang, when the universe was dense vealed only through its gravity. We'll
and fiery, and protons began to form HASees are generally reluc- never actually run into its matter, but
hydrogen nuclei. Within that cosmic tant to base calculations on things we might feel its tug.
crucible, other atomic nuclei were they don’t understand. Unrelenting
soon forged by nuclear fusion: signi- skeptics will surely compare the dark hatever dark matter is, though,
ficant quantities of helium, as well matter of today with the hypothetical, its effects in the contemporary
as minute quantities of deuterium now-defunct “luminiferous aether” universe are straightforward enough
to calculate. It doesn’t appear to inter-
act through the strong force, so it
Without dark matter the universe would have can’t make nuclei. It doesn’t interact
through the weak force, so its par-
no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no astrophysicists. ticles don’t decay into lighter ones. It
doesn’t interact through the electro-
magnetic force, so it doesn’t make
(which is hydrogen with a neutron that generations of physicists had pro- molecules, nor does it absorb, emit,
added to the nucleus) and lithium. posed as the carrier of light waves. But reflect, or otherwise scatter light. It
Of the four forces of nature, the dark-matter ignorance is fundamen- exerts gravity that ordinary matter
strong nuclear force—the one that tally different from aether ignorance. responds to. End of story. Beginning
packs protons and neutrons together Whereas the aether was a cover for sci- of ignorance.
to form nuclei—was the prime mover entific cluelessness, dark matter is not But so far as anyone knows, the
back then. By the time the tempera- merely presumed to exist. Its gravity march of astrophysics hasn’t yet been
ture dropped below the threshold for has been shown to exist. No one is derailed or stymied by that bit of un-
fusion, one in ten nuclei in the uni- pulling it out of thin space. In fact, certainty. We astrophysicists don’t
verse had become helium, one in a dark matter is no less real than the happen to know what the stuff is.
hundred thousand deuterium, and hundred-plus planets now known to Nevertheless, we carry it along as a
one in 5 billion lithium. The rest— orbit stars other than the Sun—planets strange friend, and invoke it wherever
about 90 percent of all nuclei— discovered solely by the effects of their and whenever the universe demands.
remained hydrogen. gravity on their central star. And by doing so, we get all the right
What if all the dark matter during Other unrelenting skeptics might answers—except to the question that
the first few minutes after the big bang declare, “Seeing is believing.” That matters most.
had been dark ordinary matter? Six premise may make you a good car-
times as many interactive particles Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the
penter or cook or resident of Mis-
Frederick P Rose Director of the Hayden
would have been squeezed into the in- sourl, but it won’t make you a good
Planetarium in New York City. Videotapes of
fant universe. That huge extra quantity physicist. Physics is not about seeing; a dozen of his lectures, under the title “My
of ordinary matter, gung-ho as it was it’s about measuring—preferably with Favorite Universe,” were recently released by
for fusion, would have dramatically something that’s not your own eyes, the ‘Teaching Company (www.teachco.com).
pumped up the fusion rate of hydro- which are inextricably conjoined All twelve are based on essays that have ap-
) put would have consumed much with the bagc gage of your brain. peared in Natural History.
 TM

PROT ONLY DO WE MEASURE THE MOVEMENT

_ BY THE TIME, BUT ALSO THE TIME BY THE
MOVEMENT, BECAUSE THEY DEFINE EACH OTHER.”
Aristotle, The Physics

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 NATURALIST AT LARGE
SER EO RTI a,

dragged away by a predator before I

could get to it. The thought jolted me
wide-awake. It was 3:00 A.m., and the
Sun wouldn’t be up for hours. The
cold stillness hardly beckoned me out
of my sleeping bag. I rationalized:
How could I find the trap in the dark,
anyway? I decided to wait for dawn.

Ss: deserts or salt pans—‘salinas”

in Latin America—are among the
most extreme habitats on Earth. In
some cases they formed where ancient
seas once intruded on the land, then
retreated and evaporated, leaving crys-
talline salts—mainly sodium chlor-
A salt desert in the Bolson de Pipanaco, an enclosed basin in northern Argentina, ide—behind. In other areas, where
is home to a rare species of rodent. The animals dig their tunnels in some of the arid mountains surrounded enclosed
natural mounds that pepper the landscape. Fresh tracks provide good clues to basins, salts weathered from the up-
the whereabouts of the tunnels’ occupants.
lands by seasonal precipitation were
carried with the runoff into the valley
below; again, when the water evapo-

Desert Dreams rated, the salts remained. But in what-

ever way the salts accumulated, even-
tually they covered the soil with a
blindingly white patina. Few species,
Seeking the secret mammals of the salt pans plant or animal, can survive in the for-
bidding habitat.
Among the exceptions are certain
By Michael
A. Mares
halophytic, or salt-tolerant, plant spe-
cles in the goosefoot family (the
Chenopodiaceae, or chenopods), which
n several forays into the loaded traps (named for their inventor, thrive in hot salt deserts throughout
Salinas Grandes—one of Ar- Frank Conibear) that can seize and kill the world. The salt concentrations in
gentina’s great salt deserts— animals without the need for bait. The the stems and leaves of these plants are
we had dug up mysterious burrows, problem had been figuring out where many times what they are in seawater;
but we had never discovered what to place the traps so that animals would the salts keep precious fluids in the
kind of animal made them. Our team step into them. I had never been able plants’ cells from being drawn by os-
of biologists was looking for a rare to catch anything in Conibear traps be- motic pressure into the salty soil. At
mammal, a salt-pan specialist with a fore, but now I pinned my hopes on the same time, as the water in their
store of unique genetic information. them. “There must be some reason I cells evaporates, the plants must pre-
Our failure was like a weight I carried carted them down here,” I told myself. vent their internal salt concentrations
with me every day. The bad news, I Back we went, to the Gran Chaco from getting too high. Many halo-
told my three co-workers, was that we area of Central Argentina, the road by phytes compensate for evaporation by
would go back one more time. There now familiar, and made camp. That depositing salt crystals on the surfaces
were groans; it was a long, hard field first day I spread out my two dozen of their leaves, giving the leaves a
trip. The good news, I said, was that Conibear traps, while the others set grayish silver cast.
we wouldn’t dig anymore. Moving our standard array of baited traps. Halophytic chenopods, such as salt-
tons of earth had already proved to be There was nothing to do now but bushes, are green throughout the year,
no way to find our quarry, presumed wait. In the frigid winter night, I and their lush color might mislead one
to be a rodent. i dreamed that a new, rare, salt-desert into thinking they are an ideal food
The year before, I had brought some rodent got caught in one of my traps. source for plant-eating mammals. In
Conibear traps to Argentina, spring- In my dream, though, the animal was fact, almost no mammals can process

Navember 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 29

 rh concentrations of salts. In concentrated urine that removes those The two saltbush-eating species re-
widely separated deserts, how- salts. Those adaptations enable the ro- mained the only ones known to sci-
ver, a few remarkable exceptions dent to rely on the evergreen saltbush ence until the 1990s Bute 199 5m)
have been discovered, some only quite plants for sustenance throughout the was able to determine that there is a
recently. All the species are rodents year. But for many years ecologists third species, native to a third desert
that have evolved highly specialized thought it was the only mammal to habitat: the Argentine Monte. I had
features to overcome the challenge of have solved the riddle ofliving on the first worked in this biogeographical
surviving on the salt-filled vegetation poisonous saltbush. region, a 1,200-mile-long strip of
of the salt pans. western Argentina, in the 1970s,
The first such species to be discov- when I studied the evolution of the
4
ered was the chisel-toothed kangaroo I began to study another desert mammals of the Monte. On one of
rat (Dipodomys microps). Kangaroo rats denizen, the fat sand rat (Psammomys my field trips, | had hoped to find a
little-known rodent called the plains,
or red, viscacha rat (Tympanoctomys
barrerae). The species was known to be
a ratlike creature with a somewhat
bushy-tipped tail, which presumably
lived in saltbush areas near salt flats.
It had been classified among the
Octodontidae, a family of rodents that
has inhabited South America for tens
of millions of years. But the plains vis-
cacha rat had not been found again in
four decades, and only a few museum
specimens were available for study.
My own search in the 1970s came
up short, but in the late 1980s my for-
Chisel-toothed kangaroo rat (Dipodomys microps) survives on a diet of salt-
mer student, Ricardo Ojeda, an Ar-
loving desert plants in the Great Basin Desert of the western United States. It
was the first mammal discovered that could cope with such salty food in the
gentine desert biologist working for
absence ofa source of freshwater. the Institute of Arid Zone Studies
(IADIZA) in Mendoza city, and sev-
belong to a North American family of obesus) of the northern Sahara. The eral Chilean colleagues, finally col-
rodents well known for living in arid species belongs to the same family as lected some live specimens of the elu-
habitats, where they forage almost ex- the house mouse and the Norway and sive animal. In the decades that had
clusively for seeds. They seldom have black rats, but it is only distantly re- passed since the species had first been
access to drinking water, but instead lated to the kangaroo rat. Even the captured, scientific techniques had
get most of their moisture from di- basic body forms of the two desert entered the era of genomics. The in-
gesting the seeds. rodents underscore the remoteness of vestigators discovered that the plains
Even among kangaroo rats, though, their evolutionary kinship. The kan- viscacha rat has 102 pairs of chromo-
the chisel-toothed species is unusual. garoo rat has long hind legs on which somes, the highest number then
Unlike other species in the family, it hops—a bit like its Australian known for a mammal. At the time,
which have pointed upper and lower namesake in miniature. The fat sand the nearest known relative of the
incisors, the upper incisors of D. mi- rat looks more like a gerbil. Yet, just plains viscacha rat was another vis-
crops have a broad cutting edge, and like the chisel-toothed kangaroo rat, cacha rat, Octomys mimax, with fifty-
the lower incisors have the bladelike the fat sand rat inhabits saltbush areas six chromosomes.
profile of a wood chisel. Investigators in a desert; it feeds on the saltbush; it
who studied the animal in the Great scrapes salt crystals from leaves with n the mid-1990s, working in the
Basin Desert of the western United its lower incisors; and its kidneys ex- Monte desert with Janet Braun, a
States in the 1970s discovered that it crete a highly concentrated urine. colleague at the Sam Noble Oklahoma
scrapes saltbush leaves against the Having embarked long ago on dis- Museum of Natural History in Nor-
lower incisors, thereby peeling away tinct evolutionary journeys in widely man, and Robert B. Channell, then a
the crystalline layer of salt. The succu- separated arid areas of the planet, the graduate student at the University of
lent green leaf tissues that remain still two species have converged in certain Oklahoma and now of Fort Hays State
high levels of salt, but the rat’s remarkable details of their anatomy, University in Kansas, I was finally able
ys produce a highly physiology, behavior, and ecology. to capture several plains viscacha rats
alive. We learned that they make their cal purposes, the rodent has three sets become isolated sometime in the past
homes in mounds largely formed of incisors with which to deal with 15 million years, as the Andean moun-
through soil erosion and deposition. the salt-encrusted leaves. And like the tain chains were uplifted.
The mounds afford protection from North American kangaroo rat and the After crossing through dense desert
the floodwaters that arise each sum- North African fat sand rat, the South woodland with large, thorny mesquite
mer, when monsoonlike rains and American plains viscacha rat also trees, we entered the salt flat and
runoff water from the surrounding proved to have kidneys that produce began to search for telltale mounds
mountains inundate the parched salt highly concentrated urine. that might belong to our hypothetical
flats. A typical mound 1s thirty feet rodent. Within half an hour we had
long, ten feet wide, and three feet fter our work with the plains vis- found mounds riddled with tunnels
high, with as many as thirty openings _ & cacha rat, I became convinced that looked unlike the mounds of any
and burrows at three different levels, that the |vaste salt Silats scattered species we were familiar with.
perhaps dug over more than one gen- throughout the deserts and arid thorn Tellingly, the only vegetation growing
eration. Sometimes several mounds lie forests of northern Argentina could on or near them was a halophytic
close together. Surprisingly, however, harbor other salt-pan specialists. chenopod, Heterostachys ritteriana. The
each mound or set of mounds houses In 1999, along with Rubén Barquez plant lacked the broad, grayish leaves
only one plains viscacha rat. of the National University of Tu- of saltbush; instead, the leaves were
We examined a captive animal in a compressed into small bluish green
terrarium, where | fed it samples of balls, only slightly larger than BBs.
the plants that grow on the mounds. But when I tasted them, they were
It refused to feed on most of them, extremely salty, and the leaves had ob-
but when saltbush was offered, the viously been cropped by a rodent.
creature quickly gobbled up the gray- The mounds occurred in clusters of
green leaves. I noticed that as it held as many as six, and the larger mounds
the plant in its forepaws, it rapidly were connected to several smaller
moved its face and mouth, so that at ones. Each was about twelve feet by
times they appeared to vibrate. Bits of six feet—somewhat smaller than the
plant tissue flew aside, some sticking mounds of the plains viscacha rat—
to the glass walls of the terrarium. and had many openings. A few were
As I gathered up the bits, I was as- covered with fresh rodent tracks. We
tonished to find that they were the salt grabbed our shovels and began to dig.
covering of the leaves. How did the
rodent manage to strip the salt from () ur customary tactic was to plug
the leaves so quickly? I examined its the burrow openings with live
mouth. Not too surprisingly, it had traps (boxlike traps with a door that
broad upper incisors and _ chisel- swings shut when an animal enters,
shaped lower incisors. But remarkably, thus capturing the animal alive), ex-
in the soft tissue of the mouth, the an- pecting to catch the animal as it raced
imal appeared to have an extra pair of Saltbushes-—such as this Atriplex canescens, away from the mound in panic. We
upper incisors, something no one had which ranges from northern Mexico to found burrows at several levels, with
southern Canada—excrete excess salt onto many intersecting passages and large
noticed while preparing the few mu- their leaves. The salt crystals that form not
seum specimens. only discourage consumption by herbivores,
chambers at the intersections.
Examining these structures with a but may also help protect the plants from the We would follow a tunnel from the
hand lens (and later with a light mi- intense sunlight. central part of the mound to the trap
croscope and an electron microscope), we had placed at the exit. As each
I found that the extra “teeth” are ac- cuman in Argentina, Monica Diaz of tunnel was opened and cleared, we
tually stiffened bristles of hair [see pho- Texas Tech University in Lubbock, would move on to the next. But after
tomicrograph on page 32|. The bristles and Braun, I traveled to a salt desert opening an entire cluster—and mov-
are gathered into bundles that not within the Bolsén de Pipanaco, in ing half a ton of soil—we had found
only look like teeth, but are also Catamarca Province, Argentina. An nothing. We began to excavate a sec-
sharpened against the tips of the lower enclosed basin that runs 120 miles ond cluster. We uncovered food stores
incisors, much the way the true upper from north to south, and as wide as 80 and latrines, but no traps slammed
incisors are. (Both upper and lower miles, the Bolson de Pipanaco ap- shut. There were about thirty tunnels
incisors continue growing throughout peared to be just the kind of place in the mound complex, some as deep
the animal’s life.) Hence for all practi- where another octodontid might have as three feet underground and snaking

November 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 31

 tough roots of the
Finally only a sin-
“le tunnel remained. If an an-
imal occupied the cluster at
all, it had to be here.
All of us were on high
alert, waiting for it to run
into the last trap. We cleared
away the final bit of tunnel.
Then: Nothing. Our hopes
were dashed. We stared at
the sand as if willing an ani-
mal to appear. Suddenly Janet
screamed, “There it is!” We
watched transfixed as a large
golden rodent with a bright
Bundle of bristles (left), here shown fifteen times natural size, is one ofa pair of such
red bushy tail sprang from the
bundles on the mouth of the plains viscacha rat Tympanoctomys barrerae) of western
sand and tried to escape. Argentina (right). The bundles act as an extra pair of upper incisors, enabling the animal
Monica dove on the animal to quickly strip salt off the surface of saltbush leaves. The animal belongs to the rodent
and grabbed it. It was beauti- family Octodontidae, a group whose fossil record in South America extends back tens of
ful. We all leaped with joy and millions of years. Such rare desert mammals embody ancient genetic lineages that are
hugged one another. We had not preserved in the continent's biologically rich rainforests.
found it! As we examined our
prize it seemed obvious that it be- America, for instance, more genera being irrigated with so-called fossil
longed to no genus and species that and families of mammals occur in the water—underground aquifers that ac-
had ever before been described. But it grasslands, scrublands, and deserts of cumulated in ancient times. Eventually
was, indeed, an octodontid. the continent than live in the vast the water table of the valley will drop,
Amazonian rainforest. Numerous the drainage pattern of the salt flat will
ah named our find the golden families of the continent’s mammals change, and the plants that the golden
viscacha rat, Pipanacoctomys au- are restricted to deserts, whereas only viscacha rat depends on will disappear.
reus, its genus reflecting the isolated one or two mammalian families are
valley where it lives and its species restricted to the tropical forest proper. y story might have ended here,
name highlighting its golden color. It is hard for any organism to survive if I had not been so persistent in
Like the plains viscacha rat, it has a in extremely arid regions. When convincing my colleagues to try our
pair of little toothlike brushes behind today’s deserts began to form, often luck again. That was how, during our
its upper incisors, but they are less millions of years ago, some mammals year 2000 field season, we had come to
pronounced and less stiff than they are colonized them and gradually evolved the Salinas Grandes, to begin a survey
in the plains species. The golden vis- unique adaptations. With time those of that 3,200-square-mile area within
cacha rat has ninety-two chromo- early colonists differentiated through the thorn forest of central Argentina
somes. Because genetic analysis shows natural selection into species, genera, known as the Gran Chaco. And so,
that this animal is the closest relative of and even families. Their tough descen- after my anxiety dream about losing a
the plains viscacha rat, the high num- dants, which have few relatives outside trapped rodent, I was up at first light to
ber of chromosomes in the latter spe- the desert, are a store of unique, ge- check my Conibear traps. As I ap-
cies no longer seems so anomalous. netic information. proached the end of the trapline, I still
The golden viscacha rat is an ex- Unfortunately, that heritage is 1m- had caught nothing. Only two traps re-
tremely rare species, occurring over periled throughout the world by such mained. Then I saw it. The next-to-
less than ten square miles of salt desert. man-made factors as global climate the-last trap held an animal—a viscacha
That gives it one of the most restricted change, agricultural biotechnology, rat, unlike any I had ever seen. My
ranges of any mammal. overgrazing, habitat destruction, un- nightmare notwithstanding, no preda-
Why bother at all with these few controlled hunting, petroleum pro- tor had robbed me of it while I slept!
little rodents? To most people, their duction, and urbanization. Even the In the past, we had saved some-
desert realms appear to be wastelands. isolated Bolson de Pipanaco is not im- thing special to celebrate the discov-
In some ways, however, deserts have a mune. Large parts of the region have ery of a new species. Usually it was a
more distinctive biodiversity than the been cleared to make way for olive bottle of champagne or fine wine, but
much-touted tropical forests: In South groves and vineyards, crops that are even a can of hearts of palm would
Felt but
not seen.

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 this trip I had splurged on lyrics mentioned so many places our tering other new or rare animals. The
le of exceptionally good Argen- field crews had collected type speci- world still harbors many undiscovered
tine wine, which I packed with care mens. It seemed the most appropriate mammals. Each time a new species is
ind k ept from freezing or overheat- and permanent way for us to thank the found we peel back another layer of
ing.
ct
In the several weeks we had been musicians for all the enjoyment their mystery about the complex history of
on the road, the rest of our wine sup- music had given us. life on earth. Crisscrossing the com-
ply had been depleted, but I had not plex terrain of northwest Argentina,
allowed anyone to open this special VY /e celebrated our good fortune our routes bisect the ancient paths of
bottle. “If you want to drink the VV by drinking that wonderful Incas, as well as the unexcavated ruins
wine, you have to catch the mam- bottle of wine, but the joy of discov- of desert peoples who lived a millen-
mal,” I would say. ery was tinged with a hint of melan- nium before the Incas. We gasp for air
As I returned to camp in the cold choly. Such a moment would likely as we climb above 15,000 feet, pop
light of dawn, I hid the rodent behind never be repeated. We planned to ex- Tylenol like candy for headaches, suf-
my back, hanging it from my belt. plore other isolated valleys and equally fer in the freezing Andean winds, and
Janet was already up, making coffee. I isolated mountaintops—habitat islands broil in the heat of lowland desert. It
put on a dejected look. “Catch any- at high and low elevations, each as is hard work, to be sure, but we
thing?” she asked. “Nothing,” I said. ecologically distant from the others as couldn’t be happier.
Rubén and Monica emerged from the islands in a Pacific archipelago—
Michael A. Mares, former director of the Sam
their respective tents. “Nothing?” but we doubted we would ever en- Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural His-
they asked. “Nothing,” I said. The counter such a pair of distinctively tory, is a research curator and professor at the
sun was peeking above the horizon, new animals again, much less deduce University of Oklahoma in Norman. He is
and the aroma of coffee and salt min- their existence beforehand using only the author ofA Desert Calling: Life in a
gled in the damp air. I began to rum- inferences about the habitat. Forbidding Landscape (Harvard University
mage through the food boxes. Still, we take satisfaction in encoun- Press, 2002).
“What are you looking for?”
Janet and Monica asked, know-
ing I can never find anything
around camp. “I’m looking for
that bottle of wine,’ I said.
Everyone stopped and looked
at me. They knew I had caught
an animal, and that it had to be
new to science: it would be-
come a type specimen, the
specimen that 1s needed for the
first scientific description of
any new species or genus.
“Get the wine!” I said.
We named the new genus
Salinoctomys, “the octodontid
rodent of the salt flat’’ The spe-
cies name, loschalchalerosorum,
honors the great Argentine
folklore group, Los Chalcha-
leros, whose songs my crews
had sung during thirty years of
field research across Argentina.
The musicians had announced
they would retire in 2001, after
singing together for fifty-two
years. We felt that they had ac-
companied us on every trip; we
even joked that some of their ¢ cacha rat (Pipanacoctomys aureus) was discovered by the author and his
songs could be called “type in the Bolson de Pipanaco. Here the animal nibbles on Heterostachys
locality” because their rit ilt-tolerant plant.

34 NATURAL HIST ember 2003

 Catch and Release
Sea cucumbers might put a torn Achilles tendon back together again.
”

yo8
ee ors
eae 2 S00839 8 ane

North Atlantic sea cucumber, Cucumaria frondosa

hen football season rolls derms do have a kind of connective unwanted adhesions to other sur-
around, a biomechanist’s tissue, but one whose qualities are rounding tissue. As a result, the ten-
thoughts inevitably turn quite unlike those of mammalian liga- don never regains more than about
to connective tissue—and then, of ments and tendons. Biochemists and 60 percent of its original strength.
course, to sea cucumbers. Most fans biomechanists are studying the stuff, Imagine, then, the implications of
focus on cutbacks, open-field tackles known as catch connective tissue, be- an ointment that could cleanly break
and chop blocks, but I can’t help but cause it might lead to new and dra- bonds between collagen fibrils and
ponder the common casualties of these matically superior repairs for injuries form new ones. A surgeon could
maneuvers: anterior cruciate ligaments such as a running back’s torn ACL. chemically undo the rest of the
(of the infamous ACL injury), ham- Tendon is made up mostly of colla- bonds between two partially dis-
strings, and Achilles tendons. Anyone gen, a protein that spontaneously ag- joined fibrils in the torn ends ofa
who has had to endure an injury in gregates into long, thin structures tendon, add fibrils to the gap at the
one of those body parts understands known as fibrils. The fibrils interact frayed ends, and finally stabilize the
why they come to mind. Although with each other and with their sur- repair by reestablishing the bonds be-
tendons and ligaments—generally re- roundings to form a stiff and cohesive tween new and old fibrils and the
ferred to as connective tissue—do tissue. But the process is apparently rest of the tissue in the matrix: no
stretch, they aren’t nearly as elastic as irreversible and non-renewable, and gap, no scar, no loss of strength.
rubber bands. In fact, they have a dis- so if physical strain sunders the fibril
tressing tendency to tear or break, and bonds, tearing the tendon, it is 1m- he armchair anatomist would be
when they do, they are devils to repair. possible to reform them, at least in hard-pressed to find similarities
Sea cucumbers, invertebrate animals living tissue. The standard treatment between a sea cucumber and any part
of the phylum Echinodermata, might is to tie the ruptured ends together ofa quarterback . Lacking arms, legs,
hold out some hope for the afflicted. and let scar tissue bridge the gap. But and head, the brown cuke looks
Although they have no internal skele- the bridge between fibrils is not terri- more like a football than a football
ton, sea cucumbers and other echino- bly effective, and the scar tissue forms player. Without an internal skeleton,

36 NATURAL HISTORY November 2003

it has to propel itself across the and elastic (solid) properties; it’s that different mechanisms for the mutable
seafloor with bands of minute, hy- the tissue’s viscoelasticity can change. viscoelasticity: First, the linkages be-
draulically powered tube feet. Some cells in the dermis secrete a tween the collagen fibrils might un-
Catch connective tissue, also called plasticizing protein that loosens the fasten in the presence of the plasti-
mutable connective tissue, is a dense, grip on the collagen fibrils, enabling cizer, allowing the fibrils to move
white, fibrous material that makes up them to slide past one another and independently of each other and thus
the dermis, or body wall, of the sea making the overall tissue soft and pli- making the dermis flexible. Second,
cucumber. What grabs the biomech- able. Other cells release a stiffening the fibrils might become more tightly
anist’s interest is that it can change factor that causes the fibrils to “catch” bound to the gooey fluid. Or, third,
from stiff to flexible and back again and make the dermis far stiffer. the goo might become more viscous.
with ease. For example, when you To distinguish among the three pos-
hold the sea cucumber’s skin between iomechanists Greg K. Szulgit of sibilities Szulgit and Shadwick set slabs
your thumb and forefinger, at first it Hiram College in Ohio and of sea cucumber dermis on a fixed bot-
feels soft. Within moments, though, it Robert E. Shadwick of the Scripps tom and rapidly oscillated the top sur-
hardens, retaining the indentations of Institution of Oceanography in La face of each slab. They measured the
your hand for some time. Catch con- Jolla, California, were able to extract force it took to move the top relative
nective tissue enables the foraging sea chemical derivatives of both the “stiff- to the bottom when the tissue was stiff,
cucumber to be soft enough to flow eners” and the “plasticizers” from the and again when it was relaxed. The
into nooks and crannies in pursuit of dermis cells. Those derivatives gave two investigators confirmed early work
food. But it could also enable the crea- the investigators a tool for altering the indicating that cellular extracts can
ture to “don” leathery armor rapidly material properties of pieces of dermis change the stiffness of dermis between
when a predator threatens (though at will, and thus to address a key ques- tenfold and seventyfold. Furthermore,
that possiblity has not been tested). tion about the mechanism for the the way the movements of the top and
A mammal’s tendon can do no such mutable viscoelasticity: Does the mu- bottom of the dermis responded to the
trick. But both mammalian and catch tability originate from changes in the applied force shed light on the nature
connective tissue do share common solid collagen fibrils, or from changes of the stiffened tissue. As the stiffness of
structures. Both are made up of colla- in the viscous, gooey matrix in which the dermis samples increased, the con-
gen fibrils, and the fibrils of both are they are suspended (or both)? tribution of the viscous matrix to the
suspended in a gooey material that Szulgit and Shadwick posited three stiffness decreased.
makes the tissues “viscoelastic.” (The The most likely explanation for
goo, called the extracellular matrix, is those results is that the stiffener causes
made of water, proteins, and com- bonds to form between pairs of col-
pounds known as proteoglycans, lagen fibrils or between collagen
with filaments known as mi- and other solid elements in the
crofibrils suspended in it to serve matrix. The plasticizer probably
as scaffolding.) A viscoelastic ma- works by breaking those same
terial acts partly like a solid and bonds. That mechanism, though
partly like a fluid. Under a better understood, 1s still a ways
rapidly applied load, the material from becoming the basis ofa
reacts like a solid, deforming practical alternative to the crude
slightly but holding its shape, splicing of tendons performed by
and pushing back as hard as it is surgeons today. For one thing, the
pushed on. Under a force applied plasticizers and stiffeners have not
for a sustained period of time, been well characterized; their
the material reacts like a liquid, exact composition is still a mys-
Echinoderms, the phylum that includes sea stars, sea
slowly taking whatever shape its tery. Nevertheless, | have high
urchins, and sea cucumbers, possess a kind of connective
surroundings impose. Silly Putty tissue that, unlike human ligaments and tendons, has vari-
hopes that someday soon a sur-
is a good example. A ball of the able viscoelastic properties. The material, known as catch geon somewhere will repair a ca-
stuff bounces like a Super Ball (or mutable) connective tissue, has two states—pliable reer-ending ligament injury with
when thrown, but it flows so and stiff—that are mediated by two proteins. Recent the help ofa sea cuke.
research suggests that in the pliable state, collagen fibrils
well under steady, slow pressure
that make up the catch connective tissue are unattached
that it takes a nice fingerprint. to each other (left panel of schematic diagram). Adam Summers (asummers@uci.edu) is
The great trick of catch con- “Something, perhaps a threat from a predator, causes an assistant professor ofecology and evo-
nective tissue, however, isn’t just bonds to form between the fibrils (right panel), stiffening lutionary biology at the University of
that it has both viscous (fluid) the tissue and making it resist physical deformation. California, Irvine.

November 2003 NATURAL HISTOR‘

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 ihe Lizard Kings
ray

Small monitors roam to the east of an unseen frontier;

mammals roam to the west
By Samuel S. Sweet and Eric R. Pianka

small lizard, caught in the open, flushes sophisticated, or perhaps just unlucky,
ahead of a pursuing monitor. The prey, prey individuals perish. On average,
desperately seeking escape, begins to run a those with better means of escape sur-
winding course. The tactic could throw a predator vive. More effective escape, in turn,
off, but the monitor doesn’t bite. Rather than en- favors predators better able to capture
gage in a tail chase, the monitor heads straight for a evasive prey, and the bar for both spe-
pile of rocks—the only nearby feature to which the cies rises in a reciprocating fashion.
hunted animal could possibly escape. The smaller Similarly, competing lineages of preda-
lizard, outsmarted, arrives at the refuge too late. tors—cats and foxes, for example—are
Such a display of intelligence in monitor lizards, also subject to the Red Queen’s dic-
the animals of the family Varanidae, is not unusual. tum that “it takes all the running you
As arule, monitors do not have to chase their prey can do, to keep in the same place.’
very far, and in many cases they seem to anticipate A common result of such pres-
some gambit by their prey. When arboreal lizards sures—less adept animals either don’t
are being hunted and run for a tree, they usually catch a meal or can’t avoid being
spiral around to the back side to ascend; one of us eaten—is the evolution of larger
(Sweet) has watched pursuing monitors of two brains and more sophisticated nervous
species (Varanus tristis and V. glauerti), on at least systems, as well as a potential for in-
three occasions, spiral around the tree in the oppo- creased intelligence. A successful car-
site direction to catch the prey unawares. (Experi- nivore might have better neuromus-
enced human lizard-catchers do the same thing.) cular coordination than its peers or its prey; more
The black-palmed rock monitor (V gle- refined senses (and brain to process the informa-
bopalma), a three-foot-long lizard from northern tion); or enhanced problem-solving capabilities.
Australia, hunts by taking up perches on three- to Those aspects of neurophysiology co-evolve in
six-foot-high boulders along the margins of turn with ecological and behavioral differences
ledges, where it has a good view of some area of among various kinds of carnivores. The range of
more-or-less open ground. If it spots prey—such possibilities for a predator’s behavior—whether it
as, in Sweet’s observations, a skink or a frog—it hunts alone or in a pack; whether it lies in wait to
literally projects itself off the boulder, dashes after ambush or actively chases down its prey; and the
the prey, and then returns with its quarry at top degree to which it relies on visual, auditory, or ol-
speed to some rock crevice before doing anything factory input to find its meal—all affect the nature
like chomping or whacking the prey and gulping and sophistication of the animal’s brain.
it down. “Lizards” don’t do this: if they have None of the logic of this arms race leads to the
something in their mouth, they eat it then and conclusion that effective brains and neural sophis-
there—no matter that something else may be tication are restricted to mammals; monitor lizards
zooming in at top speed in hopes of a double make that much clear. Superb predators, these ani-
lunch. But monitors do. mals surpass all other lizards in intelligence. They
Predators and their prey are locked into a co-evo- are alert and agile. Their styles of hunting rely on
lutionary arms race, in which any advantage gained acute vision and extremely sensitive chemorecep-
by one calls for a countermeasure by the other. Less tion to cover what are typically huge areas relative

November 200
Mertens’ water monitor (Varanus mertensi) hunts aquatic life in waterways
across north central Australia.

to their size. In these and other ways, convergent he similar adaptations of monitor lizards and
evolution has led to many similarities between mammalian carnivores are certainly not the
monitors and mammals. Herpetologists have relied products of a shared family history. The most re-
on terms such as “mammal-like” and “near-mam- cent common ancestor of the two groups lived
malian” so often to describe the monitors that more than 300 million years ago. It was a far less so-
such phrases have nearly become clichés. phisticated animal, lacking the metabolic scope, vi-
The descriptions, however, divert attention from sual and chemoreceptive abilities, and complex in-
a question that is far more intriguing than mere formation processing that characterize both groups
similarities in habits between the two groups of today. Most contemporary features of monitors and
vertebrates: Are the two groups so similar that they mammals that function in similar ways are clearly
are ecologically incompatible as top carnivores? In not the results of similar anatomical endowments.
other words, does the presence of one group in an One substantial difference is that monitors are
ecosystem restrict the presence of the other? An ectotherms—loosely referred to as being cold-
analysis of the capabilities of monitor lizards and blooded. The more familiar term is something of a
small mammalian carnivores, combined with the misnomer, because the “cold-blooded” monitors,
study of their biogeography, may throw some light at least, typically operate at tightly regulated body
on whether, in some ecosystems, the monitor temperatures equal to or higher than those of
lizards became a fair match for the mammals. mammals. Monitors, however, do without the

3 NATURAIL HIS
 costly molecular and physiological control mecha- tunnels. They do not gain access via the tunnel en-
nisms required by endotherms, the so-called trance, which is often three feet or more away
warm-blooded animals. Both monitors and mam- from the eggs; instead, they dig straight down from
mals can sustain their activities for long periods. above. Walter Auffenberg, a herpetologist formerly
Monitors do not sense chemicals with the nasal at the Florida Museum of Natural History in
olfactory chamber that is so well developed in Gainesville, demonstrated that Komodo monitors
mammals. Instead, they transfer compounds from can detect carrion from nearly seven miles away.
their tongues into two elaborate sensory receptors Auffenberg also concluded that some monitors
known as the vomeronasal organs. Vestigial in climb to ridgelines expressly to sniff the wind for
mammals, these organs occupy paired cavities that carrion odors over a large area, a foraging strategy
open onto the roof of the monitor’s mouth. that requires substantial planning.
Monitors can apparently recall the positions of
M any accounts of monitors in captivity cite be- refuges within their home ranges. Pianka has ob-
haviors unusual among reptiles that attest to served that such Australian desert species as the per-
sophisticated information-processing capabilities. entie and the rusty desert monitor (V eremius) re-
White-throated monitors (V albigularis) can count member exactly where good burrows are located:
up to six. Komodo dragons (Vv komodoensis) recog- the lizards head directly toward them cross-country,
nize their keepers. When chasing rats, crocodile which for perenties may be a mile or more. Lace
monitors (V salvadorii) anticipate evasive tactics. Few monitors (V varius) display a similar talent, though
field studies, however, have explored the monitor put to different use: They lay their eggs in active
intellect, and the wariness of monitors in the wild is termite mounds, then return about nine months
legendary. But the work that has been done demon- later to reopen the nests for the hatchlings to exit.
strates that the animals can locate terrain features, Such a feat calls for map knowledge as well as an
mates, and food both by memory and with their accurate sense of timing.
remarkably sensitive chem-
ical detectors.
Monitors are renowned
trackers. Alexey Y. Tsellarius
of the Severtsov Institute of
Ecology and Evolution in
Moscow and his colleagues
found that Caspian moni-
tors (Vv griseus caspius) can
distinguish male from fe-
male and resident from non-
resident monitors merely
by sampling their tracks
with the vomeronasal or-
gan. If the monitor then
gives chase, it unhesitat-
ingly follows the track of the
other animal in the correct
direction. Our observations
in Australia corroborate
Tsellartus’s finding for both
With the tongue monitor lizards sample the air for chemical compounds, then transfer the
desert and woodland species.
compounds into two cavities that open into the roof of the mouth. The cavities house
One of us (Pianka) once elaborate chemical sensors called the vomeronasal organs. Pictured here is the common
came upon the track of a water monitor (V. salvator).
large monitor known as a
perentie (lV giganteus) that had intercepted his own. Pe ee attached to individual moni-
The track showed that the lizard “ricocheted”’ off _ tors make it possible to follow them closely.
the human footprints and fled in the direction it We have learned, for instance, that male monitors
came from, illustrating its chemosensory talents. seek out multiple partners by visiting the home
Monitors that feed on the eggs of other reptiles ranges of several females. Sweet observed a male of
can locate a clutch buried in sloping, backfilled the small arboreal species Vv glauerti descend the

42 NATUR A
home tree of one female and travel more than 300
yards in a straight line, through dense forest and
rock outcrops, to the base ofanother tree. Six days
earlier, he had mated with a second female in that
tree, but in the interim she had relocated twice. So, OCEAN
finding no one home, the male trailed her to a third
tree fifty yards away, then traveled another seventy-
six yards to a fourth tree, where the second female
then resided. The entire episode took only forty-
five minutes and covered nearly 440 yards in
rugged terrain.
This feat called on both mental maps and expert
chemical detection. The male was familiar enough
with his eighteen-acre home range to make a
straight-line return to the second female’s old loca-
tion. Then he tracked her by her odor trail. Each of
five male Vv glauerti studied displayed similar abili-
ties. And Pianka in Australia observed a male of the
small arboreal black-tailed monitor V. tristis travel CARNIVOROUS ‘oa?
790 yards in a straight line into the wind in one 15
PLACENTAL LiZARDS
MAMMALS
day; it was found in a hollow tree with a female,
suggesting that it may have followed an airborne a o LARGE
scent trail to find her. MONITOR
LIZARDS
Monitors sometimes adopt unusual foraging tac-
tics. Some semiaquatic species, such as Mertens’
SPECIES
NUMBER
OF
water monitor (VV mertensi), use their body and tail
to herd fishes into shallow water. The black-tailed
monitor has a unique tactic to rustle up skinks, the
small lizards on which it feeds. Sweet watched sev-
eral black-tailed monitors hunting skinks in leaf-
filled depressions. The monitors would surge for-
ward under the dry litter and then pop up, holding
Transect line (purple line on map and on horizontal axis of
the head high and ready to pounce on any move- graph) reveals a complementary distribution of species of car-
ment. After a few moments of watching, some in- nivorous mammals and small monitor lizards. The transect, de-
dividuals abruptly began to twitch and wiggle their fined by the authors, makes a roughly perpendicular intersec-
tails under the leaves. The twitching sometimes tion with a biogeographic barrier first described by Alfred Russel
caused a concealed skink to reveal its location. Wallace. Wallace's Line marks the eastern limit of many animals
having Southeast Asian affinities, and the western limit of a
Many people are familiar with the differences fauna derived from Australia and New Guinea. On the graph
between cats and dogs, as well as between individ- below the map, the number of species belonging to four groups
uals of either group. Similar patterns show up in of animals is plotted for various ecosystems that occur along the
monitors, both in species and in individuals. Dur- transect. The graph shows that the diversity of small carnivorous
ing field studies that brought Sweet into daily con- mammals (yellow) and that of small monitors (blue) are virtually
mirror images of each other, as if they were reflected across
tact with individuals of several species, he found
Wallace's Line. The diversity of large monitor species (green)
that some male members of some species became fluctuates randomly across the transect line. The pattern sug-
habituated to his presence. Those lizards could be gests that carnivorous mammals and small monitors may be too
followed closely, and some even climbed onto him similar as predators to coexist, or that the small monitors be-
a few times. Others, however, became less ap- come prey for the mammals when both are introduced into the
proachable as his studies continued. Four out of six same ecosystem. Interestingly, carnivorous marsupials (orange)
do not prey on monitors, suggesting that the monitors can out-
Vi glauerti, two out of forty-two V scalaris, and
smart the marsupials but are outdone by the mammals.
three out of twelve V/ tristis habituated, whereas
each of twelve V’ glebopalma and five each of Vv
scalaris and V. tristis became increasingly wary with None of the complex behaviors we are describ-
time. Either way, the animals clearly recognized ing commonly occurs in other reptiles. And cer-
and remembered him. Curiously, however, no fe- tainly no reptiles except monitors have such a
males of any of these species ever habituated. broad repertoire of “mammal-like” attributes.

November 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 43

 » ‘hroughout Africa and southern Asia monitors more than half of them are small (adults less than
~. coexist successfully with a wide range of car- four feet long) and of slender build.
nivorous mammals. The diversity of monitor spe-
cies on those continents, however, is fairly low, and a o understand why small monitor species have
most of them are large (meaning the adults are radiated so dramatically through Australia,
more than four feet long) and relatively bulky. Six New Guinea, and their adjacent islands, but not
species occur in Africa and the Arabian peninsula, elsewhere, we examined the possible role of Wal-
and one of those extends well into central Asia. Six lace’s Line [see map on preceding page|. Alfred Russel
more species range across mainland southern Asia. Wallace, the nineteenth-century naturalist, did ex-
As one moves east, into offshore Southeast Asia, tensive fieldwork in what is now Indonesia, where
the diversity of monitors increases sharply. Four- he noted a sharp dichotomy in fauna between cer-
teen species are native to the East Indies and the tain islands. One side of the line he traced to mark
Philippines (four of them also live on the main- the dichotomy represents the eastern limit of many
land), and sixteen species are native to New animals with Southeast Asian affinities; the other
Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and the islands of the side is the western limit of a fauna derived from
Bismarck Archipelago. Australia and New Guinea.
That high diversity of small monitors in eastern Wallace’s Line is now understood to overlie a
Indonesia and Melanesia has only recently been region incorporating three major tectonic plates
recognized. Before 1990 and several smaller ones. Thousands of islands
only three small species made up of transient volcanic peaks and scattered
were known in the re- microcontinental fragments are sandwiched be-
gion: the widespread tween the eastern edge of the Asian continental
mangrove monitor (Vv shelf and the shelf that encloses Australia and
indicus), which varied New Guinea. Most important to the biota, no
greatly from island to is- land connections have ever spanned Wallace’s
land; the green tree mon- Line, and so it represents an absolute limit to the
itor (Vv prasinus) of New dispersal of organisms that cannot cross the sea.
Guinea; and JV timoren- For other species, the line is just a filter, and it is
sis, of Timor. Through almost irrelevant for many plants or insects that
the efforts of Wolfgang can fly long distances.
Boehme, a zoologist at The lands in the vicinity of Wallace’s Line pro-
the Alexander Koenig vide a natural laboratory for testing ideas about the
Research Institute in ecological equivalence of mammals and monitors.
Bonn, Germany, and his Virtually none of the small carnivorous mammals
colleagues, sixteen addi- of Southeast Asia (cats, civets, mongooses, weasels)
tional species are now have crossed it from west to east on their own. Just
recognized. That work one species of civet is native to Sulawesi, to the east
alone has increased the of Wallace’s Line; other civet and mongoose spe-
species count of the fam- cies in the archipelago were introduced by people.
Northern quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus; top), a car- ily Varanidae by about In contrast to its influence on the mammals,
nivorous marsupial native to Australia, and the
25 percent. Some of the Wallace’s Line is not a barrier to monitors—or is it?
masked palm civet (Paguma larvata; above), a
carnivorous mammal native to Southeast Asia,
newly recognized spe- That depends on the adult size of the species [see
both coexist with large monitor lizards. Species cies are local derivatives lower illustration on preceding page|. Large monitor
of small monitors, however, thrive only where of the widely ranging species (in which adults are greater than four feet
the civet and its kin are absent. indicus and V. prasinus; long) are just as diverse on lands east of Wallace’s
others are more distinct. Line as they are to the west, or for that matter in
The diversity of monitors reaches its peak in mainland Asia and Africa. Small monitor species,
Australia, which hosts twenty-seven named species however, occur only to the east of the line. Their
(five are shared with New Guinea) and more than diversity in that region forms a near-mirror image
a dozen as yet undescribed species as well. In parts of the species distribution of small carnivorous
of northern Australia as many as eight or nine spe- mamunals to the west. And Sulawesi, the only island
cies may occur in the same areas, partitioning re- east of Wallace’s Line that harbors a native placental
sources according to differences in body size and mammalian carnivore, lacks small monitors.
habit. One unique and important feature of the Did the small monitors, like the small carnivo-
Australasian radiation of monitor species is that rous mammals, simply halt their radiation at Wal-

44 JATURAI
Member of the mangrove monitor group (V. indicus and other species) is pictured in New Guinea. The group's
domain extends from the islands around the Banda Sea to the Solomon Islands. The indicus group radiated
into a variety of habitats; the absence of small placental carnivores has probably facilitated that spread.

lace’s Line? Probably not: most monitors are ac- o complete our story, we must point out that
complished rafters, and so their distributions prob- small monitors actually do coexist with small
ably did not arise from any geographical barrier. placental mammalian carnivores such as civets and
Instead, the distributions may have an ecological mongooses—in the form of juveniles of the large
explanation: the two groups are simply too similar monitor species! The young of these large monitors
as predators to coexist, and on the landmasses west are typically highly secretive and often arboreal, but
of Wallace’s Line, the small mammals prevailed. so are many of the small monitor species. Thus, se-
One informative twist on this idea arises in Aus- crecy is not a sufficient explanation for coexistence.
tralia and New Guinea. Many small carnivorous We suggest that this coexistence succeeds because
marsupials live there, and some of them—six spe- large adults can lay many eggs and the young grow
cies of quolls and one phascogale—grow to about quickly; even if many become prey to carnivores, a
the size of civets and mongooses |see photographs on few will probably reach adult size. Species of small
opposite page|. These marsupial carnivores are fierce monitors lay fewer eggs, and must spend their en-
and agile predators, yet they have evolved and co- tire lives in the arms race with small mammals.
exist with many species of small monitors. Whether they lose out primarily because they be-
The behavior of these groups and the ways their come prey, or because they must compete for prey
ecologies overlap suggest that small monitors are, with mammals, remains to be studied.
roughly speaking, “dumber than civets but Wherever monitors live, the arms race has
smarter than quolls.’ Unfortunately, that simple honed their original predatory tool kit. Particu-
generalization is being tested by human interven- larly to the east of Wallace’s Line, monitors appear
tions. Mongooses and civets have been introduced to have achieved striking ecological and behavioral
to islands east of Wallace’s Line, and foxes and feral parity with mammals. A century ago the German
cats have been brought to Australia. In a recent herpetologist Franz Werner proclaimed monitors
field study in northern Australia, Sweet lost thir- “the proudest, best-proportioned, mightiest, and
teen out of fifty-four individual monitors to pre- most intelligent of all lizards.” We certainly concur,
dation: four were killed by native predators, but and could add many superlatives to Werner’s list.
nine were taken by a single feral cat- The northern Human beings are fortunate to share this planet
quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus), however, failed to with such extraordinary animals, and we should
catch any of the monitors. try to learn from them whatever we can. LJ

November 2003 NATURAL HIS1 ) RR > on

 Trashed
Across the Pacific Ocean, plastics, plastics, everywhere

By Charles Moore

t was on our way home, after finishing the Los ried an extra supply of fuel. So on the way back to
Angeles-to-Hawaii sail race known as the our home port in Long Beach, California, we de-
Transpac, that my crew andI first caught sight cided to take a shortcut through the gyre, which
of the trash, floating in one of the most remote re- few seafarers ever cross. Fishermen shun it because
gions of all the oceans. I had entered my cutter- its waters lack the nutrients to support an abundant
rigged research vessel, Alguita, an aluminum-hulled catch. Sailors dodge it because it lacks the wind to
catamaran, in the race to test a new mast. Although propel their sailboats.
Alguita was built for research trawling, she was also I often struggle to find words that will communi-
a smart sailor, and she fit into the “cruising class” of cate the vastness of the Pacific Ocean to people who
boats that regularly enter the race. We did well, hit- have never been to sea. Day after day, Alguita was
ting a top speed of twenty knots under sail and the only vehicle on a highway without landmarks,
winning a trophy for finishing in third place. stretching from horizon to horizon. Yet as I gazed
Throughout the race our strategy, like that of from the deck at the surface of what ought to have
every other boat in the race, had been mainly to been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the
avoid the North Pacific subtropical gyre—the great eye could see, with the sight of plastic.
high-pressure system in the central Pacific Ocean It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear
that, most of the time, is centered just north of the spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical
racecourse and halfway between Hawaii and the high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic
mainland. But after our success with the race we debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps,
were feeling mellow and unhurried, and our vessel wrappers, fragments. Months later, after I discussed
was equipped with auxiliary twin diesels and car- what I had seen with the oceanographer Curtis
Ebbesmeyer, perhaps the world’s leading expert on
flotsam, he began referring to the area as the “east-
ern garbage patch.” But “patch” doesn’t begin to
convey the reality. Ebbesmeyer has estimated that
the area, nearly covered with floating plastic debris,
is roughly the size of Texas.

M interest in marine debris did not begin

with my crossing of the North Pacific sub-
tropical gyre. Voyaging in the Pacific has been part
of my life since earliest childhood. In fifty-odd
years as a deckhand, stock tender, able seaman, and
now captain, I became increasingly alarmed by the
growth in plastic debris I was seeing. But the float-
ing plastics in the gyre galvanized my interest.
Laysan aloatross is a species that forages throughout the North I did a quick calculation, estimating the debris at
Pacific : regurgitated stomach contents, or boluses, of many halfa pound for every hundred square meters of sea
such birds contain plastic debris. surface. Multiplied by the circular area defined by
Bottle caps and other plastic objects are visible inside the decomposed carcass of this Laysan
albatross on Kure Atoll, which lies in a remote and virtually uninhabited region of the North Pacific,
The bird probably mistook the plastics for food and ingested them while foraging for prey.

our roughly thousand-mile course through the gyre, are still plastic polymers. In fact, the degradation
the weight of the debris was about 3 million tons, eventually yields individual molecules of plastic, but
comparable to a year’s deposition at Puente Hills, these are still too tough for most anything—even
Los Angeles’s largest landfill. I resolved to return such indiscriminate consumers as bacteria—to di-
someday to test my alarming estimate. gest. And for the past fifty years or so, plastics that
Historically, the kind of drastic accumulation | have made their way into the Pacific Ocean have
encountered is a brand-new kind of despoilment. been fragmenting and accumulating as a kind of
Trash has always been tossed into the seas, but it has swirling sewer in the North Pacific subtropical gyre.
been broken down inafairly short time into car- It surprised me that the debris problem in the
bon dioxide and water by marine microorganisms. gyre had not already been looked at more closely by
Now, however, in the quest for lightweight but the scientific community. In fact, only recently—
durable means of storing goods, we have created a starting in the early 1990s—has the scientific com-
class of products—plastics—that defeat even the munity begun to focus attention on the trash in the
most creative and voracious bacteria. gyre. One of the first investigators to study the
Unlike many discarded materials, most plastics problem was W. James Ingraham Jr., an oceanogra-
in common use do not biodegrade. Instead they pher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Ad-
“photodegrade,’ a process whereby sunlight breaks ministration (NOAA) in Seattle. Ingraham’s Ocean
them into progressively smaller pieces, all of which Surface Current Simulator (OSCURS) predicts that

November 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 47

objects reaching this area might revolve |
around in it for sixteen years or more [see fe ——
}000 MILES
illustrations on opposite page]. amine
A year after my sobering voyage, I
asked Steven B. Weisberg, director of the
Southern California Coastal Water Re-
search Project and an expert in marine
environmental monitoring, to help me
make a more rigorous estimate of the ex-
tent of the debris in the subtropical gyre.
Weisberg’s group had already published
an article on the debris they had collected \

in fish trawls of the Southern California Ga.

ee

Bight, a region along the Pacific coast Me

extending a hundred miles both north |
and south of Los Angeles. As I discussed oe x ee |

the design plan for our survey with Weis- Currents in the North Pacific move in a clockwise spiral, or gyre, which
berg’s statisticians, Molly K. Leecaster and tends to trap debris originating from sources along the North Pacific rim.
Plastics and other waste have accumulated in the region, which includes
Shelly L. Moore, it became apparent that the foraging areas of Pacific bird colonies, such as that of the Tern Island
we were facing a new problem. In the albatross, shown in blue, and that of the Guadalupe Island albatross,
coastal ocean, bodies of water are natu- shown in green.
rally defined, in part, by the coasts they lie
against. In the open ocean, however, bodies of throughout the region. Those high pressures de-
water are bounded by atmospheric pressure systems press the ocean surface, and the rotating air mass
and the currents those systems create. In other also drives a slow but oceanic-scale surface current
words, air, not land, defines the body of water. Be- that moves with the air in a clockwise spiral. Winds
cause air pressure systems move, the body of water near the center of the high are light or even calm,
we wanted to survey would be moving as well. A and so they do not mix the floating debris into the
random sample ofa moving area such as the gyre water column. This huge region, what I call a
would have to be done quite differently from the “gentle maelstrom,’ has become an accumulator of
way Weisberg’s group had conducted their survey debris from innumerable sources along the North
along the Pacific coast. Pacific rim, as well as from ships at sea.
The subtropical gyres are also oceanic deserts—
he gyre we planned to survey is one of the in fact, many of the world’s land-based deserts lie at
largest ocean realms on Earth, and one of five nearly the same latitudes as the oceanic gyres. Like
major subtropical gyres on the planet. Each subtrop- their terrestrial counterparts, the oceanic deserts are
ical gyre is created by mountainous flows of air low in biomass. On land the low biomass is caused
moving from the tropics toward the polar regions. by the lack of moisture; in oceanic deserts the low
The air in the North Pacific biomass is a consequence of
subtropical gyre is heated at great ocean depths.
the equator and rises high In coastal areas and shal-
into the atmosphere because low seas, winds and waves
of its buoyancy in cooler, constantly stir up and recy-
surrounding air masses. The cle nutrients, increasing the
rotation of the Earth on its biomass of the food web. In
axis moves the heated air the deep oceans, though,
mass westward as it rises, such forces have no effect;
then eastward once it cools the bottom sequesters the
and descends at around 30 nutrient-rich residue of mil-
degrees north latitude, cre- lions of years of near-surface
ating a huge, clockwise-ro- photosynthetic production,
Filter-feeding chordate jellyfishes known as “salps”
tating mass of air [see map on as well as the decomposed
dominate the North Pacific subtropical gyre. Investi-
this page). gators aboard the research vessel Alguita observed fragments of life in the sea,
The rotating air mass cre- salps in the gyre, such as the one shown here, with trapping them miles below
ates a high-pressure system brightly colored plastic fragments in their bellies. the surface. Hence the major
source of food for the web of life in deep ocean areas dius. The area of the circle would then be almost
is photosynthesis. : exactly 1 million square miles. Trawling would start
But even in the clear waters that prevail in the when we estimated we were under the central pres-
subtropical gyres, photosynthesis 1s confined to the sure cell of the high-pressure system that creates the
top of the water column. Sunlight attenuates gyre. We would regard the starting point as the east-
rapidly with depth, and by the time it has gone ernmost point along the circumference of the circle.
only about 5 percent of the way to the bottom, the Then we would proceed due west to the center of
light is too weak to fuel marine plants. The net ef- the circle, turn south, and sail back to the southern-
fect is a vast area poor in resources, an effect that most point on the circumference, alternating be-
makes itself felt throughout the food web. Top tween trawling and cruising. We intended to obtain
predators such as tuna and other commercially vi- transect samples with random lengths and random
able fish don’t hang out in the gyres because the spacing between trawls. To be conservative about
density of prey is so low. The human predator stays our sampling technique, we decided that any debris
away too: the resources that have drawn entrepre- we collected would count only as a sample of the
neurs and scientists alike to various regions of the debris within the area of the transected circle.
ocean are not present in the subtropical gyres. In August 1998 I set out with a four-member
What does exist in the gyres is a great variety of volunteer crew from Point Conception, California
filter-feeding organisms that prey on the ever-re- heading northwest toward the subtropical gyre.
newed crop of tiny plants, or phytoplankton. Each Onboard Alguita was a manta trawl, an apparatus
day the phytoplankton grow in the sunlit part of resembling a manta ray with wings and a broad
the water, and each night they are consumed by mouth, which skimmed the ocean surface trailing a
the filter feeders, a fantastic array of alien-looking net with a fine mesh. Eight days out of port, the
animals called zooplankton. The zooplankton in- wind dropped below ten knots and we decided to
clude chordate jellyfishes known as “‘salps,” which practice our manta trawling technique, taking a
are among the fastest-growing multicellular organ- sample at the edge of the subtropical gyre, about
isms on the planet. By fashioning their bodies into 800 miles offshore. We pulled in the manta after
pulsating tubes, the salps are able, each day, to filter trawling three and a half miles.

ET MON, Spent
a2
Sy
L ¥

Re

pone
Ae ot
vie | oi i a
,

’ | pa
Ocean Surface Current Simulator (OSCURS) model! developed by W. James Ingraham Jr., an
oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), predicts the
trajectory of drift originating along the coasts of the North Pacific rim. Drift from Japan is shown
in red; drift from the United States, in blue. The diagrams show the position of drift after 183
days (left), three years (center), and ten years (right).

half the water column they inhabit, drawing out What we saw amazed us. We were looking at a
the phytoplankton and smaller zooplankton for rich broth of minute sea creatures mixed with hun-
food. But salps are gelatinous creatures with a low dreds of colored plastic fragments—a plastic-plank-
biomass, and so there is no market for them, either. ton soup. The easy pickings energized all of us, and
Hence the realm they dominate, one of the largest soon we began sampling in earnest. Because plank-
uniform habitats on the planet, remains unex- ton move up and down in the water column each
ploited and largely unexplored. day, we needed to trawl nonstop, day and night, to
get representative samples. When we encountered
eecaster, Moore, and I came up with a plan to the light winds typical of the subtropical gyre, we
make a series of trawls with a surface plankton deployed the manta outside the port wake, along
net, along paths within a circle with a 564-mile ra- with two other kinds of nets. Each net caught

November 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 49

 plenty of debris, but far The potential scope of the
ind away the most produc- problem is staggering. Every
tive trawl was the manta. year some 5.5 quadrillion
There was plenty of (5.5x10") plastic pellets—
larger debris in our path about 250 billion pounds of
as well, which the crew them—are produced world-
members retrieved with an wide for use in the manu-
inflatable dingy. In the end, facture of plastic products.
we took about a ton of this When those pellets or prod-
debris on board. The items ucts degrade, break into
included SN RR fragments, and disperse, the
ea drum of hazardous — golus coughed up by an albatross on G uadalupe pieces may also become
chemicals; Island, Mexico, includes many plastic fragments. concentrators and_ trans-
ean inflated volleyball, Differences in the condition of debris the birds porters of toxic chemicals in
half covered in goose- consume—whether it is whole or fragmented—can be the marine environment.
traced to the way trash flows into their respective
neck barnacles; Thus an astronomical num-
foraging areas. Debris leaving the West Coast of the
ea plastic coat hanger United States drifts for six years or more—enough time ber of vectors for some of
with a swivel hook; to photodegrade into fragments—before it reaches the the most toxic pollutants
e a cathode-ray tube for Guadalupe Island birds. known are being released
a nineteen-inch TV; into an ecosystem domi-
e an inflated truck tire mounted on asteel rim; nated by the most efficient natural vacuum cleaners
e numerous plastic, and some glass, fishing floats; nature ever invented: the jellies and salps living in
ea gallon bleach bottle that was so brittle it the ocean. After those organisms ingest the toxins,
crumbled in our hands; and they are eaten in turn by fish, and so the poisons
ea menacing medusa of tangled net lines and pass into the food web that leads, in some cases, to
hawsers that we hung from the A-frame of human beings. Farmers can grow pesticide-free or-
our catamaran and named Polly P, for the ganic produce, but can nature still produce a pollu-
polypropylene lines that made up its bulk. tant-free organic fish? After what I have seen first-
In 2001, in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, we pub- hand in the Pacific, I have my doubts.
lished the results of our survey and the analysis we
had made of the debris, reporting, among other MA people have seen photographs of seals
things, that there are six pounds of plastic floating trapped in nets or choked by plastic six-
in the North Pacific subtropical gyre for every pack rings, or sea turtles feeding on plastic shop-
pound of naturally occurring zooplankton. Our ping bags, but the poster child for the consump-
readers were as shocked as we were when we saw tion of pelagic plastic debris has to be the Laysan
the yield of our first trawl. Since then we have re- albatross. The plastic gadgets one typically finds in
turned to the area twice to continue documenting the stomach of the bird—whose range encom-
the phenomenon. During the latest trip, in the passes the remote, virtually uninhabited region
summer of 2002, our photographers captured un- around the northwest Hawaiian Islands—could
derwater images ofjellyfish hopelessly entangled in stock the checkout counter at a convenience store.
frayed lines, and transparent filter feeding organisms ‘My analysis of the stomach contents of birds from
with colored plastic fragments in their bellies. two colonies of Laysan albatrosses that nest and
feed in divergent areas of the North Pacific [see
3 ntanglement and indigestion, however, are not map on page 48] show differences in the types of
the worst problems caused by the ubiquitous plastic they eat. I believe those differences reveal
plastic pollution. Hideshige Takada, an environ- something about the way plastic is transported and
mental geochemist at Tokyo University, and his breaks down in the ocean.
colleagues have discovered that floating plastic On Midway Island in the Hawaiian chain, a
fragments accumulate hydrophobic—that is, non- bolus, or mass of chewed food, coughed up by one
water-soluble—toxic chemicals. Plastic polymers, bird included many identifiable objects. By con-
it turns out, are sponges for DDT, PCBs, and other trast, a bird on Guadalupe Island, which lies 150
oily pollutants. The Japanese investigators found miles off the coast of Baja California, produced a
that plastic resin pellets concentrate such poisons bolus containing only plastic fragments. The prin-
to levels as high as a million times their concentra- cipal natural prey of both bird colonies is squid,
nis in the water as free-floating substances. but as the ecologist Carl Safina notes in his book

oi
Eye of the Albatross, the birds’ foraging style can be Ironically, the debris is re-entering the oceans
described as “better full than fussy.’ Robert W. whence it came; the ancient plankton that once
Henry III, a biologist at the University of Califor- floated on Earth’s primordial sea gave rise to the
nia, Santa Cruz, and his colleagues have tracked petroleum now being transformed into plastic
both the Hawaiian and the Guadalupe populations polymers. That exhumed life, our “civilized
of birds and found that the foraging areas of each plankton,” is, in effect, competing with its natural
colony in the Pacific are generally nonoverlapping counterparts, as well as with those life-forms that
and wide apart. directly or indirectly feed on them.
One difference between the two areas is appar- And the scale of the phenomenon is astounding.
ently the way debris flows into them. In Ingra- I now believe plastic debris to be the most com-
ham’s OSCURS model, debris from the coast of mon surface feature of the world’s oceans. Because
Japan reaches the foraging area of the Hawauan 40 percent of the oceans are classified as subtropi-
birds within a year. Debris from the West Coast of cal gyres, a fourth of the planet’s surface area has
the United States, however, sticks close to the become an accumulator of floating plastic debris.
coast until it bypasses the foraging area of the What can be done with this new class of products
Guadalupe birds, then heads westward to Asia, not made specifically to defeat natural recycling? How
to return for six years or more. The lengthy pas- can the dictum “In ecosystems, everything is used”
sage seems to give the plastic debris time to break be made to work with plastic? L
into fragments.

he subtropical gyres of the world are

pact noetsthe. deep ocean realm,
whose ability to absorb, hide, and recycle
refuse has long been seen as limitless.
That ecologically sound image, however,
was born in an era devoid of petroleum-
based plastic polymers. Yet the many
benefits of modern society’s productivity
have made nearly all of us hopelessly, and
to a large degree rationally, addicted to
plastic. Many, if not most, of the prod-
ucts we use daily contain or are con-
tained by plastic. Plastic wraps, packag-
ing, and even clothing defeat air and
moisture and so defeat bacterial and ox-
idative decay. Plastic is ubiquitous pre-
cisely because it 1s so good at preventing
nature from robbing us of our hard-
earned goods through incessant decay.
But the plastic polymers commonly
used in consumer products, even as single
molecules of plastic, are indigestible by
any known organism. Even those single
molecules must be further degraded by
sunlight or slow oxidative breakdown be-
fore their constituents can be recycled
into the building blocks of life. There is
no data on how long such recycling takes
in the ocean—some ecologists have made
estimates of 500 years or more. Even
more ominously, no one knows the ulti-
mate consequences of the worldwide dis-
persion of plastic fragments that can_con- Contents ofa bolus coughed up by an albatross on Midway Island shows that the Hawaiian
centrate the toxic chemicals already bird has consumed many identifiable objects. Debris from Japan reaches the foraging area of
present in the world’s oceans. the Hawaiian birds within a year and is mostly intact.

November 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 151

 Fight of the Bumblebee
Insects, like people, are constantly threatened by disease.
Bumblebees’ simple but effective immune systems shed light
on the evolution of immune defenses and the costs of maintaining them.

By Paul Schmid-Hempel

umming from flower to flower, a workers and a queen are put at risk. The disease
H bumblebee worker busily collecting nec- often spreads rapidly through the colony and then,
tar and pollen for its colony 1s, for many, via more flower visits, to other colonies in the pop-
the epitome of nature’s peace and tranquillity. Yet ulation. By June almost all bumblebee colonies in a
nothing could be further from the truth. Not only population have become infected by C. bombi,
is the foraging bumblebee always on the verge of though a large fraction of workers within each
an energy crisis; it 1s also entangled in a lifelong colony do survive the infection.
battle with microscopic enemies that try to capital- Another health hazard of collecting nectar and
ize on its efforts. pollen in flowering meadows is that workers are
All complex organisms, people included, face es- forced to fly slowly when they maneuver around
sentially the same predicament. Coping with actual flower stalks. Slower flying speeds invite attacks by
disease, of course, makes prodigious demands on female parasitic flies of the family Conopidae. The
one’s energy: taking to bed is often the only pos- conopids inject their eggs into the abdomens of
sible solution. Yet even as we foraging worker bees. There
go about the business of ordi- the eggs hatch, and the parasite
nary living—working, crowd- Insects battle some larvae develop inside each bee,
ing together in close quarters, rapidly consuming their host
caring for children, shopping at of the same parasites from the inside out. Between
a local market—keeping disease
at bay takes a constant toll on
that they transmit ten and twelve days later the
worker dies as the parasitic lar-
the body’s resources. Ironically, to people. vae pupate inside its body. The
the insects that carry some of pupas survive the winter—
the disease organisms against while the bee colony hiber-
which people must be most on guard, including nates—and in the spring, as new queens and drone
malaria, dengue, West Nile virus, and leishmaniasis, bees are born, they develop into adult flies, ready
are themselves locked in equally desperate battles to attack the next batch of vulnerable workers.
with simular, if not identical, parasites. The biology of social insects—ants, bees, ter-
Because of their importance as pollinators of fruit mites, and wasps—is fascinating in its own right.
crops and flowers, bees have been a focus in the But I became intrigued with how such organisms
study of disease and disease resistance in “lower” or- deal with the additional threats posed by disease
ganisms. The most prevalent disease in bumblebees and parasites. Social insect colonies offer a standing
is caused by the trypanosome Crithidia bombi—a invitation for parasites to thrive. Besides being
mobile protozoan closely related to the microorgan- crowded together in one nest, colony members
ism that causes human sleeping sickness. C. bombi typically are close relatives of one another and
cells are left behind when an infected bee visits a therefore susceptible to similar diseases. An abun-
Hower, and those cells can survive for a day or two at dance of parasites, such as viruses, bacteria, fungi,
the bottom of flower tubes. When the next bee vis- nematodes, tapeworms, and the larvae of flies,
its the flower, the infectious cells are picked up and wasps, and moths, are known to infect bumble-
rried back to the nest, where a few dozen other bees. Collecting common European bumblebees

52|
Bumblebee worker runs a double risk when collecting nectar from a flower. First, viruses, bacteria,
and other disease organisms left behind by infected bees can contaminate the flower parts and
thereby spread from bee to bee. Second, hovering in place before landing on the flower exposes
the bee to attacks by parasitic flies, which inject their eggs into the abdomen of the bee.

(Bombus terrestris) from summer meadows shows organism is the immune system. The insect 1m-
that in some years and locations the larvae of mune system has ties to that of the common ances-
conopid flies parasitize two-thirds or more of the tor of insects and vertebrates, dating back more
worker bees, leaving them with just a week or so than 450 million years, and has even older affinities
to live. A scene of busy bees may look untroubled, with the defense systems of plants. In a dangerous
but what is actually charming our senses is an army world, it seems, no organism—not even the small-
of the living dead. How do bumblebees survive est or most “primitive’”—has been able to go en-
such an onslaught? tirely without immune defenses. Yet even immu-
Fortunately, bees and other social insects have nity has its downside. In our work on bumblebees,
their countermeasures. The most potent weapon my colleagues and I have been able to make quan-
against parasites in the arsenal of every complex titative estimates of the costs of sustaining a simple
 eee speaking, insects have two kinds of
immune responses, which differ primarily in
response time and specificity. The more general
branch of the immune system is known as the in-
nate, or constitutive, response. Innate defensive ma-
chinery can be directed against an infection imme-
diately, though in a nonspecific way. A main
element of that response is the so-called proPO cas-
cade (PO stands for the enzyme phenoloxidase), a
rapid sequence of biochemical steps that make a
large molecule called melanin. Together with its in-
termediate products, melanin is toxic to most mi-
croorganisms. The cascade of reactions begins
when PO is converted to an active form that helps
catalyze the further chemical steps that lead to
melanin. The proPO cascade—stepped up when
an infection is recognized—is characteristic of de-
fense systems that occur in such diverse invertebrate
organisms as butterflies, starfish, and water fleas.
The proPO cascade and melanin also play a key
role in the second major defensive action of the in-
sect’s Innate immune response. That response,
known as encapsulation, is directed mainly against
relatively large parasites that invade an insect’s
body. At least in most insects, the principal players
in the process are the blood cells, more properly
called hemolymph cells. (Insect “blood,” or he-
molymph, unlike our own blood, is not delivered
to body cells through vessels by a pump. Instead, it
freely laps around all the internal organs, propelled
by muscle action.)
During encapsulation, specialized hemolymph
cells called hemocytes become attracted to an in-
vader, such as the larva ofa conopid fly. As the he-
mocytes attach to its surface and aggregate, the
proPO cascade 1s activated. The resulting melanin
acts as a kind of mortar that cements hemocyte
“bricks” in place around the larva. Within a few
hours, the invader becomes enclosed in a hardened
capsule of melanized cells, which seals it off from
the rest of the interior of the host.
Mi E a Lai ‘ ! ; a
In addition to their innate immune system, in-
Social insect populations such as (top to bottom) honey-
bees, weaver ants, and soldier termites live in ideal
sects can also mount a so-called induced immune
conditions for the spread of disease. They share close response. In that case, the immune system responds
quarters, making rapid infection possible, and they are more specifically to certain invaders. For example,
often close relatives of one another, making them all within thirty minutes after a fungus has penetrated
susceptible to similar disease strains. the larva or adult of a fruit fly (Drosophila
melanogaster), the fly’s immune system starts pro-
immune system. That work has implications be- ducing a peptide, or short protein, called dro-
yond the insect world, however, because the insect somycin. The peptide is inactive against bacteria,
immune system is, in many ways, a simplified but it is highly potent against filamentous fungi.
model of our own. Our observations of bees have Drosophila also produces peptides such as defensin,
made it clear that the benefits of immune protec- in response to infection by gram-positive bacteria,
tion, like nearly everything else in life, must ulti- and diptericin, in response to gram-negative ones.
mately be balanced against its costs. The foreign intruders that trigger distinct induced
immune responses 1n insects belong to fairly broad cell that belongs to the body displays a kind of
categories—bacteria, fungi,:and protozoa. At its molecular identity card. Cells acting as sentries pa-
core, though, the system 1s a simpler but functional trol for intruders and constantly check the ID
equivalent to the system of induced immunity in cards. Foreign bodies without proper identification
mammals. Human immune cells, for example, are are marked for destruction.
exquisitely tuned to produce custom-made antibod- Understandably, perhaps, the workings of the in-
ies in response to millions of foreign substances, or sect immune identification system are far less well
antigens. The highly specific antibodies and the bat- known. A few of the proteins that act as sentries and
talion of destroyer cells of the mammalian induced recognize intruders have been identified, but most
immune system may seem like the evolutionary pin- are still obscure. The specificity of the insect system
nacle of precision. Yet, in fact, the simpler insect sys- has been deduced simply by observing how it reacts
tem requires a smaller overhead to function, and its to various experimental infections.
general effectiveness against the insect’s enemies may What is clear, nonetheless, is that in both insect
well render it no less sophisticated than our own. and human systems, once an intruder is recognized,
a cascade of events is set in motion. Any sentry cell
hether the immune response is innate or that identifies an intruder spews messenger mole-
induced, the host must first manage to rec- cules into the hemolymph (or the blood). Those
ognize that a foreign molecule has breached the molecules must then reach various classes of recep-
skin and gotten into its body. In people, a great tors on the surfaces of the cells responsible for the
deal of work has led to a reasonably clear scientific immune reaction. In people, immune cells are con-
understanding of how the cells of the immune sys- centrated in the bone marrow and the lymph glands.
tem patrol for foreign substances. Basically, each In insects, immune cells occur mostly in the so-

THICK SKIN.

ACID MIDGUT

FAT
BoDY iINDUCED
HEMOLYMPH MMUNITY
PMs Ge
Nz
AAS “2.

fungus bacterium
Messen eras oles
hae
molecules 4 = aa.
INNATE IMMUNITY jy
oe
ve
eo
pals
Vv

PHAGOCYTOSIS TOXIN PRODUCTION fat bod

bo |se iy —
cell > ad
@ ‘a
ss)

peptides - = “Vy kc

melanin and
other quinones : ruptured ruptured
‘i melanized fungus bacterium
“foreign body
melanin

Simplified and stylized diagram of the bee immune system. After getting past the bee's
exoskeleton, or “skin,” and its acidic midgut, an intruder faces two branches of immune defense:
the innate and induced responses. The innate response is a general yet speedy reaction, whereas
the slower induced response can tell the difference between, say, fungi or bacteria. (Early steps in
the activation of the induced immune response are not well understood.)

November 2003 NAT URAL HISTORY | 55

 called fat body, a decentralized organ that is spread granulosis virus have fewer offspring than the
out over almost the entire interior of the insect. moths that carry no such immunity. In all those
Two main insect immune receptors have been cases the price of having the immunity is paid in
identified to date: the Toll-receptor, which plays a the reduced fitness of some other component of
role in the defense against fungi, and a receptor as- the organism.
sociated with the so-called IMD pathway, which is Immune readiness is not the only aspect of im-
mostly a mechanism for defense against bacteria. munity that has a cost; the actual deployment of an
Once activated by the messenger molecules, the immune response is costly, too. Along with my col-
insect immune cells produce peptides, which are laborators, I have experimentally investigated that
then secreted into the hemolymph. cost in bumblebees. We first tested their innate re-
Insect peptides have potent antimicrobial proper- sponse by fooling their immune systems into react-
ties, and act more or less specifically against the var- ing to an artificial parasite. Early in the morning,
ious categories of pathogens: gram-negative bacte- we implanted a thread of nylon into the body cavi-
ria, gram-positive bacteria, and fungi. Not much is ties of workers of B. terrestris. The nylon was cho-
known about how the peptides act against bacteria, sen to mimic the larva ofa conopid fly.
but one important effect is that they alter the per- One group of bees was then allowed to fly out for
food, while the other group was kept from leaving
the hive. Flying consumes a great deal of energy,
Insects may turn out to be a rich source and so, we reasoned, the energy demands of flying
of powerful antibiotics for people. would compete with the energy needed to fuel the
immune response. We retrieved the nylon implant
after the bees had worked for a day. Sure enough,
meability of the bacterial cell membrane. That the bees that were allowed to fly encapsulated the
change eventually kills the invader. nylon thread 20 percent less often than the bees that
Two such peptides in the bee, hymenoptaecin were kept from flying. Such a difference could be
and apidaecin, attack many kinds of bacteria. In just enough for a parasite to survive a bee’s immune
fact, their targets include several well-known response, with fatal consequences for the bee.
human pathogens, such as Enterobacter, Escherichia
coli, Salmonella, Shigella, Streptococcus, Staphylococcus, AX/ 5 also tested the bees for the costs of mount-
and Yersinia. That raises an exciting possibility for ing an induced immune response. In that
medicine. Insects are by far the most species-rich experiment we again activated the bumblebees’ im-
group ofanimals on the planet, and the diversity of mune systems, but without introducing any stand-in
their antimicrobial peptides must also be enormous. for an actual parasitic infection. Instead, we ex-
Some of those peptides may well turn out to be tracted lipopolysaccharide (LPS) molecules from
powerful antibiotics for our own medical purposes. the surface of gram-negative bacteria and injected a
dose of LPS into the worker bees’ hemolymph with
he insect immune system mobilizes defenses a fine needle. As we expected, the bees’ immune
for coping with the various threats bumble- systems recognized the molecules and subsequently
bees may encounter. But effective protection released specific antibacterial peptides into the he-
comes at a cost. Everyday life offers plenty of good molymph—even though no bacterial infection was
analogies. A burglar alarm in your house, for in- ever really present. To our surprise, however, we de-
stance, 1s costly to purchase and operate, even if you tected no negative consequences. The test bees be-
never use it. Moreover, once it is activated, you haved normally, unimpressed by the energy chal-
have to call in the police for an effective defense. lenge of having to activate their immune systems.
Insects face similar trade-ofts—though the cur- They seemed to carry on with their daily routines.
rency in which costs are counted is Darwinian fit- Only later were we able to tease out the costs of
ness, not dollars. Consider what happens when the immune response. Our first group of bees had
closely related honeybees, or lines, are selected for free access to energy, in the form of sugar water.
resistance to foulbrood, a bacterial disease of But in a later test group, we denied the bees sugar
honeybee larvae. It turns out that the foulbrood- water, then carried out the rest of our procedure
resistant larvae grow more slowly than the lines with LPS. That time, the immune response took
susceptible to the disease. Similarly, fruit flies se- its toll. Almost regardless of how their immune
lected to resist the attacks of parasites are less com- systems were challenged, those bees were more
petitive foragers than their nonresistant counter- than 50 percent more likely to die than their un-
parts. And Indian meal moths selected to resist challenged counterparts.
@) ur findings suggest that sometimes the actual and drones. The bumblebees paid a high price for
_/ damage inflicted by a parasite on its host— their immune response.
whether bumblebee, human, or otherwise—may The study of insect immunity has become a hot
not even be caused directly by the parasite. Rather, topic in immunology. Major new discoveries about
the costs to the host of mounting a defense, even a the underlying molecular and biochemical processes
“successful” one, could lead to damage unless the are made each year. Investigators have become par-
host can offset those costs, say, by consuming more ticularly excited about tracing several elements of
food. The costs of defense are probably borne by insect immune defenses to the system of innate im-
all organisms all the time, just to keep parasites in munity that goes back more than 450 million years.
check. Usually organisms are oblivious to the That innate system, exhaustively tested by evolu-
stress, except when conditions become so unfavor- tionary change, has played a crucial role in the more
able as to reveal it. recent evolution of the induced immune defenses of
We also discovered that individual bumblebees mammals. To understand the evolutionary process,
were not the only entities to pay a price. When we it will be essential to understand how the benefits
challenged the workers ofa colony with small in- and costs of various kinds of immune response were
jections of LPS over the life cycle of the entire balanced against the prevailing parasitic threats.
colony, a major loss in reproductive capacity en- Bumblebees are a good living model in which to
sued. Even though no worker ever got sick (since study those issues. Examining their struggles with
no actual parasite is involved), the colony still lost disease promises to shed light on how and why im-
at least half its normal numbers of daughter queens mune systems evolved the way we observe. L

Bees loaded down with parasites may not appear sick, until their routine is disrupted. If forced to
fly a bit farther for nectar, for instance, disease-ridden bees—initially unfazed by an infection—
can die suddenly and in large numbers.

November 2003 NATURAI

 e,Ree Jasis in the Everglades
A Florida wildlife refuge combines nature and nurture.

By Robert H. Mohlenbrock
Spider lily

etlands once covered the late 1940s, the U.S. Army Corps more than 220 square miles. Most of
much of the southern of Engineers began the establishment the refuge is Everglades marsh bor-
third of the Florida of three so-called water conservation dered by levees. The water flow 1s
peninsula. Cypress swamps dominated areas, which further reduced the nat- managed to create marsh areas for
the western part of the region and ural flow of water through the waterfowl and other plant and ani-
mangrove swamps the south coast. In Everglades. The good news for the mal species. Within the marsh are
the east lay a vast tract of water and plants and animals that depended on slightly elevated portions of terrain
sawerass known as the Everglades. the vanishing wetlands is that in known as tree islands, which, true to
Prior to the nineteenth century, most 1951, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife their name, support the growth of
of the settlement in southern Florida Service and the State of Florida, trees. In addition, a 400-acre cypress
was confined to the strip of elevated under the Migratory Bird swamp conserves the remains ofa
land along the Atlantic coast. But by Conservation Act, turned one of the habitat that once extended all the
the 1800s people bent on farming water conservation areas into a na- way from Lake Okeechobee south-
began draining the Everglades by tional wildlife refuge. east to Fort Lauderdale.
constructing canals and levees. Still managed by the Fish and Perhaps the most striking plants in
the cypress swamp are the epiphytic
bromeliads, which are members of
the pineapple family. These gray or
gray-green plants live on the branches
and trunks of the trees, but they are
not parasitic. Instead, their leaves ab-
sorb moisture and nutrient particles
directly from the air, such as the re-
mains of decaying leaves and the
droppings of insects and birds.
Spanish moss is the most familiar ex-
ample, though a misnomer: it is not
a moss but a flowering plant. Its
small, yellow-green flowers are par-
ticularly fragrant after sundown.
The main entrance and the visitor’s
center of the refuge are located west
of Boynton Beach, on Lee Road, off
US. Highway 441. The only other
White water lilies bloom along a canoe trail in the Arthur R. Marshall public entry point (from Loxahatchee
Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. Road, also off route 441) is farther
south, west of Boca Raton. The
In 1934 Congress established the Wildlife Service, the Arthur R. northern two-thirds of the refuge is
Everglades National Park to preserve Marshall Loxahatchee National closed to public use, but the rest pro-
the southern part of the original Wildlife Refuge (named for the vides ample opportunities for biking,
erglades. North of the park and nearby town of Loxahatchee and in canoeing, fishing, and hiking.
south of Lake Okeechobee, however, honor ofa former employee of the The refuge needs extensive man-
nent continued. There, in Fish and Wildlife Service) covers agement to maintain its present con-

58
dition. Periodic prescribed burning ten feet long, to the tiny
enhances the growth of certain native water spangles and mosquito
species and, perhaps more important, fern that float on the water.
slows the growth of an aggressive in- In between are cinnamon
vasive species, melaleuca. Further- fern, giant sword fern, long
more, the refuge is a part of the strap fern, royal fern, and
Comprehensive Everglades Restora- swamp fern. Apart from
tion Project, which is trying to re- Spanish moss, epiphytic
turn as much of the Everglades as bromeliads include ball
possible to more natural conditions. moss, Schultes northern
A major part of the project, under needleleaf (with curved
the direction of the Corps of leaves) and southern needle-
Engineers, 1s to restore the natural leaf, and the rare spreading
flow of water. The South Florida air plant. The showiest
Water Management District, which bromeliad is the wild
is manipulating water depths and pineapple, which produces
flows under its jurisdiction and ex- small purple flowers emerg-
amining the responses of plants and ing from red, usually yel-
animals, is conducting experimental low-tipped bracts.
studies at the refuge. The hope is to
learn how to re-create, on a small Marsh About a mile from
scale, natural communities similar to the visitors center, a 0.8-
the ones that still occur in the mile hiking trail circles one
Everglades. Results from these stud- of the marshes. Various
ies will be applied to the larger plants are visible floating in Wild pineapple grows on trees but is not a parasitic plant;
Everglades complex. the water or protruding it gets its nutrients from moisture and particles in the air.
above it. Among them are
HABITATS arrow arum, bull-tongue arrowhead, lily, sweetscent, Virginia saltmarsh
pickerelweed, water lettuce, white mallow, and winged loosestrife.
Cypress swamp Visitors can see a water lily, yellow water lily, and the
good cross section of the cypress invasive alligator weed. Growing in Sawgrass The species is actually a
swamp by following a 0.4-mile soggy soil but usually not in standing sedge, not a grass, though at least it is
boardwalk near the main entrance. water are such species as alligator lily, aptly named for its notched leaf
The standing water along the way bog hemp, camphor pluchea, seaside edges and their effects on unpro-
can be as much as two feet deep in goldenrod, southern swamp crinum tected legs. It often grows in dense
rainy seasons, or it can vanish en- colonies interspersed with dahoon
tirely in dry periods. Pond cypress is holly and wax myrtle. This habitat
the dominant tree, but other species Peau a pe:
typically borders tree islands.
such as coco plum, red bay, and red Marshall
Loxahatchee
maple also grow here. Native shrubs FNdestef] Tree island Areas of the marsh slightly
scattered beneath the canopy in- Wildlife elevated above the water level usually
clude buttonbush, dahoon holly, have a dense growth of trees. Among
Virginia willow and wax myrtle. them are buttonbush, coco plum, da-
Among the invasive species found hoon holly, and red bay.
here and there are Brazilian pep-
pertree, guava, laurel fig, melaleuca, Robert Mohlenbrock is professor emeritus of
Old World climbing fern, and stran- plant biology at Southern Illinois University in
gler fig. Climbing hempweed, laurel Carbondale.
greenbrier (bamboo vine), musca-
dine grape, pepper vine, saltmarsh For visitor intormation, contact:
Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee
morning glory, Virginia creeper,
National Wildlife Refuge
wild balsam pear, and other vines 10216 Lee Road
form dense entanglements. Boynton Beach, FL 33437
Ferns range in size from the giant (561) 734-8303
leather fern, with fronds as much as http://loxahatchee.fws.gov

November 2003 NATURAL HISTORY

 SLA

Stand and Deliver

|
a

Why did early hominids begin to walk on two feet?

By lan Tattersall

sk any paleoanthropologist these scientists have sought the Holy

what got humankind started Grail ofa single critical function: what
on its unique evolutionary exactly was it about being upright that
trajectory, and the reflex answer will gave early hominids the edge? For,
almost certainly be “the adoption of given that teetering along on asingle
upright bipedalism.” And whatever pair of feet is, to “all appearances,
the exact characteristics of the most hardly an optimal solution for a hom-
ancient hominid may have been, inid whose ancestors almost certainly
there is no question that the adoption got around using four limbs, isn’t it in- vote up and down on the whole
of upright locomotion on the ground tuitively obvious that the particular thing, warts and all. Still, there is no
was an epoch-making event for our advantage of walking upright on two doubt that paleoanthropologists have
hominid family. limbs must have been an overwhelm- come up with a whole host of terrific
The idea that Homo sapiens might be ing one? And, at the very least, it’s stories on the subject.
descended from some ancient ape- clear that upright bipedalism is not
like animal that walked around on its an automatic primate response to de- he first to describe a truly an-
two hind legs goes back at least as scending from the trees to live on the cient biped was the Australian-
far as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s great ground. Even patas monkeys, apart born physical anthropologist and pale-
Philosophie Zoologique, which appeared from ourselves the most committed- ontologist Raymond Dart, in 1925.
in the opening decade of the nine- to-ground-dwelling of all living pri- Dart understood that life on the
teenth century. And Darwin famously mates, have accomplished that shift predator-ridden open savannas would
expressed a similar viewpoint in The by becoming even more specialized have been pretty dangerous for the
Descent of Man, published in 1871. quadrupeds than their more arboreal relatively small, slow, and defenseless
Darwin speculated that the impor- ancestors had been before them. early hominids. He suggested that
tance of bipedalism was that it freed So just what was going on when standing up would have enabled the
the hands from the demands of loco- our ancient forebears, in a period of creatures to peer over tall grass and
motion, thereby opening the way for climate change that transformed their spot dangerous animals at a distance.
toolmaking and other manual activities ancestral forested habitats in Africa Other investigators have pointed out
that make us uniquely human. If so, it into one of trees, shrubs, and grasses, that an animal looks bigger when it
took some time for our precursors to started opting for upright, two-legged stands up, which might help discour-
realize the potential of their upright locomotion on the ground? There age predators from attacking it. Cor-
posture: it is now clear that the origin has been no dearth of suggestions, all roborating that idea, contemporary
of stone toolmaking postdated the ac- based on adaptation to some aspect or studies do seem to show that the
quisition of bipedalism by millions of another of ground-dwelling life. I predatory interest of big cats is more
years. Still, it is hard to resist the idea have to confess here that I have long readily triggered by horizontal silhou-
that bipedalism was a necessary condi- been suspicious of the profligate use ettes than by vertical ones.
tion for all that followed, even if it of “adaptation” to simultaneously ex- Those who prefer to look upon
might not have been a sufficient one. plain any and all evolutionary innova- even our remotest ancestors as bush-
Since Darwin’s day, paleoanthropol- tions. After all, any individual is made league versions of ourselves have
ogists have energetically sought the up of a whole host of features that tended to side with Darwin. They see
key to hominid erectness in many dif- one could describe as adaptations, bipedalism as a mechanism for freeing
ferent places. Nearly always, though, whereas natural selection can only the hands to carry food and other ob-

60 ATUR | ) smber 2003

Alexis Rockman, Creationist’s Classroom, 1998

jects back to home base, or as a way to cool down your body—particularly esis has by no means met with univer-
of making it easier for mothers to tote your heat-sensitive brain. Lacking spe- sal acclaim. An opposing camp argues
babies around. The most recent wrin- cialized means for such cooling, hom- that bipedalism is simply the most en-
kle in this hypothesis has been the inids might have discovered that by ergy-efficient way for a hominid to
suggestion (by male paleoanthropolo- standing up, they absorbed less of the get around on a flat surface. Careful
gists) that bipedal early hominid Sun’s heat (by minimizing the surface calculations show that, under certain
males used their free hands to carry area exposed directly to the Sun’s ver- plausible conditions, ground-living
food back to hapless females, whose tical rays). Furthermore, standing ex- hominids expend less energy moving
baby-toting activities had dramatically posed the heat-radiating portions of around on two legs than they do on
curtailed their food seeking. This so- their bodies to the cooling breezes four. And the less energy you expend,
cial behavior supposedly led in turn that blow above ground-level vegeta- the less food you need to find—
to such far-reaching consequences as another clear advantage.
pair-bonding, concealed ovulation, Pina RE
HG BHO aep wD i Will the real reason for bipedalism
RE
and the prominence of female breasts. —_ Lowly Origin: — please stand up?
The story has the undeniable attrac- Where, When, and Why —
tion of tying bipedalism to a variety ur
HIN
Ancestors First Stood Up ip light of all the competing theo-
of human physical and social peculiar- sciby. Jonathan Kingdon ries, some cautious weighing of
ities, but it is no less controversial for rinceton
a
University Press, 2003; their relative merits is clearly wel-
that, and it has recently come under ee a Es 835.00 — come. With excellent timing, here
attack on a variety of grounds. Femi- ae
thes
akin
Rag
egies
nea
ee
Sera
Seo
cae
2
Yet
Plierheten Resae now are two books that, from rather
nist anthropologists, for example, per- U;So
a The Eoladonaty Keys different perspectives, devote them-
haps in retaliation for the perceived Beto Becoming Human selves to the question of why hom-
Sa ase
sexual slight, have directly blamed by Craig Stanford— inids became upright, and to explor-
erect bipedalism on the appalling ex- ue Mifflin, 2003; $23.00 ing exactly how that event may have
hibitionist tendencies of males. Bede SS
shaped subsequent human evolution-
ary history. Intriguingly, both authors
LES the bulk of the debate on tion. The idea is persuasive. The cool- at least partly avoid the Holy Grail
the subject has focused on what ing effects dovetail nicely with such trap by developing quite complex
might be called the thermoregulatory special human characteristics as sweat- scenarios. Each book, moreover, is a
hypothesis. When you're out of the ing and the drastic reduction—com- work of advocacy, with a clear and
forest, the argument goes, you're out pared with our ape ancestors—of well-defined story to tell. That ap-
of the shade. With direct exposure to body hair. proach has the advantage of making
the tropical Sun, you need some way But the thermoregulatory hypoth- both books highly readable. At the

November 2003 NATURAL HISTORY |61

 sume the support of the upper body’s
though, it leaves readers early hominids: creatures who were
little choice but to embrace or weight. The resulting reduction of forced to change their ancestral feed-
to spurn the arguments in their en- upper-body bulk improves the balance ing habits as a result ofa changing en-
tirety, instead of offering readers a of the vertical trunk, until “four-legged vironment. More specifically, they
chance to shop around among the movement cease[s] to be as efficient as had to supplement the food resources
various components of each story. simple straightening of the legs.” At the available in the forest canopy with
Jonathan Kingdon commands a same time, the pressure from predators nutrients found on the forest floor.
unique position at the interface of sci- on the ground becomes greater than it Such a bald statement of Kingdon’s
ence and art. Not only has he made a ever was in the trees, and so survival complex and nuanced argument—
substantial contribution to the scien- dictates greater social cooperation and which actually reaches back to explore
tific understanding of African mammal more complex behaviors than ever be- our remotest primate origins, and
evolution and diversity; he has also en- fore. Those developments enable the beyond—does little justice to his ele-
hanced our aesthetic appreciation of hominids to explore an increasingly gant and thoughtful, if somewhat
idiosyncratic, book. Whether or not
Kingdon manages to convince you of
his larger thesis, you will be provoked
along the way by the many connec-
tions he makes. And just as important,
Lowly Origin is a landmark for its thor-
oughness in integrating the story of
human evolution (which he brings up
to the present day) with that of the
evolving landscapes and habitats of the
African continent. What’s more,
Kingdon doesn’t shy away from ex-
trapolating the past to the future,
painting an unattractive portrait of our
species as a “niche thief” whose past
success has depended on invading the
A. Demarle, Evolution of Man from Mammals, 1883 ecological niches of others, but whose
rapacious activities now threaten even
these animals through his graceful broad range of environments, until its own future survival.
drawings and paintings. Predictably, his they occupy the open savanna.
book Lowly Origin (a title drawn from Governing this proposed sequence Gu Stanford, the author of Up-
Darwin’s concluding statement in The of events is the African environment right, is an accomplished prima-
Descent of Man) is enlivened by a gen- in which the early hominids lived. tologist who has specialized in study-
erous selection of engaging illustra- Somewhat controversially, Kingdon ing the behaviors of African apes. His
tions. After listing at least thirteen contends that apelike human ancestors knowledge of chimpanzees, and, in
distinct explanations that have been from Eurasia, originally of African an- particular, his field experience with
advanced at one time or another for cestry, crossed back into Africa from them, inform much of his new book.
hominid bipedalism (including all the Arabia about 10.5 million years ago. Stanford points out that bipedal loco-
ones mentioned above, and many At that time the ancient Tethys Sea, motion is a pretty bizarre way of get-
more besides), Kingdon plumps for which preceded the Mediterranean, ting around, with the clear implica-
a multicausal argument, drawing on was closing, permitting interconti- tion that it calls for a pretty special
his extensive knowledge of African nental contact between Africa and explanation. He looks for that expla-
ecology and biogeography. Eurasia. These apelike ancestors ulti- nation in all the usual places, notably
mately evolved to become chim- in the energetics of walking and the
is scenario is a gradualist one. At panzees and gorillas in the dense rain- cooling of the brain, but he finds
first an ancestral quadrupedal forests of central Africa, while, problems with them all.
“ground ape” slowly but smoothly isolated on the other side of a rela- One of the pleasures of Stanford’s
progresses to a long-lasting squat-feed- tively arid, treeless barrier, another book is its splendidly gossipy account
ing phase. Whenever the creature for- group of descendants occupied the of recent research into the early history
‘s on the forest or woodland floor, drier littoral forests of the African of hominid bipedalism. It dwells lov-
trunk is held upright. Over mil- continent’s eastern edge. Those latter ingly, for instance, on the prolonged
lions of years the hind legs gradually as- primates eventually gave rise to the sniping that went on between two

62 NATL AL HISTORY Novembe 003

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 ps Of SCIENUSTS, one based in the cause they were generalists, he eventu- evolutionists can hardly invoke those
t and the other on the East ally falls back on environmental change possibilities and their exploitation as
Coast, over 5 the interpretation of the as at least the initial external impetus explanations for the appearance of the
>.
famous 3.2-million-year-old skeleton for the multistage sequence of events new behavior.
from Ethiopia known as Lucy. Stan- that led to bipedalism. So what can be said about how
ford places himself somewhere in the Once a taste for meat had been ac- this fateful innovation came to pass?
middle. Reasonably, he rejects the East quired, everything else followed. “By Well, it is clear that bipedalism arose
Coast scientists’ assertion that Lucy’s three million years ago,” he writes, quite early in hominid history, even -
locomotor adaptation was Steamist “the whole equation of foraging en- if no one can be certain, in the
tional.” Just as reasonably, he accepts ergetics and diet had begun a funda- strictest genealogical sense, that the
their (totally correct) conclusion that mental shift.’ A “virtuous circle” had earliest hominid was an upright
Lucy’s bipedalism differed significantly been established. More efficient up- biped. It is also pretty safe to con-
from that of her successors of the right walking fed back into increasing clude that the adoption of bipedal-
genus Homo. intelligence and social complexity, ism was a formative event, with the
Oddly, in view of what Stanford has and those attributes led to ever more profoundest possible consequences
to say later on in his book, he also effective hunting. The last part of for later hominid evolution.
takes time to trash the idea that Stanford’s short book is devoted to a And there is a simple explanation,
bipedalism was driven by environmen- once-over-lightly of the later hom- potentially testable by future fossil dis-
tal change. More significant, coveries, for why early hom-
he arg
argues, x was that from the [—_——
k - ce co
A (a eg De
Oshcah ney = inids began to move upright
Gesnnne hominids appear to be Dideeas
ly‘hominic s begin to . _ i Bon the ground as their ances-
have been ecological general- z aaue upright on t he gro gro unnd - ee S tral forests started to fragment.
ists. The key to their success a he oe, ea me foes «=6Lhe explanation is that their
was, ? and is,? their abilityyy) to ecausetheirBG
ASA ate og
« Bees as Javoreadot 3 We
. EE ae
own ancestors already y, favored
thrive in diverse See a : pr oe post ystures intrees? 2 7. 2 ‘ . upright postures in ng trees,
Yet despite his emphasis on en- ou eee eee Pe keeping their trunks erect dur-
vironmental adaptability, he is ing foraging, as many other
still convinced that the hominids’ un- inid fossil record, illustrating how that primates do today. In other words,
usual and implication-ridden form of dynamic has played out over the past the early hominids were bipedal be-
locomotion was a response to some- couple of million years. cause they were already creatures that _
thing, and he 1s clearly concerned to would have been most comfortable (if
discover a single underlying explana- wo very different books, then, initially not totally at ease) moving
tion for it. He finds it in meat eating. presenting radically different sce- upright on the ground.
narios for the origin of bipedalism in If that was indeed the case, paleo-
Hey cece 7 million and 8 million our lineage. But, significantly, what anthropologists don’t need to make
years ago, at the beginning of the both books have in common isa firm difficult choices from the extensive
scenario he reconstructs, some very belief in the gradual environmental menu of potential advantages that
early hominids “shuffled across the molding of lineages, generation by upright locomotion may or may not
ground a bit between fruit trees.’ But generation, through natural selection. have offered the early hominids.
as the climate became increasingly sea- Indeed, both authors see natural selec- Once our precursors had begun to
sonal, and the grasslands expanded at tion as a driving force in human evolu- descend from the trees, at the very
the expense of the forest, natural selec- tion—though Stanford correctly em- least encouraged to do so by a chang-
tion would have favored those individ- phasizes that natural selection promotes ing milieu, they stood and moved
uals who shuffled most efficiently the diversity of species, and stoutly de- upright simply because it was the
across the enlarging open areas. That nies that evolution is toward anything. most natural thing for them to do. Of
would have laid the groundwork for Yet natural selection can only work course, once they had made this
the success of the archaic bipedal hom- on novelties presented to it sponta- move, all the advantages of this new
inids. They were the animals that could neously; it cannot call anatomical in- posture were theirs. And all of the li-
most effectively scavenge meat from novations into being, however desir- abilities too, for that matter.
carcasses they encountered in increas- able they might appear. In nature,
ingly open areas, even as they hunted form has to precede function, for Ian Tattersall is a curator in the Division of
smaller game in forests and wood- without form there can be no func- Anthropology at the American Museum of
1\ds—niuch as some chimpanzees do tion. Yes, in retrospect bipedalism Natural History, and the author of numerous
Thus, despite Stanford’s earlier opened up a huge range of radical books, most recently The Monkey in the
e that hominids succeeded be- new possibilities for hominids. But Mirror (Harcourt, 2002).

NATURA HIS (
 BOOKSHELF
Sans
EEE EE By Laurence A. Marschall
And then there is a wealth of lin- tures that go back well before written
Ancient Wine: The Search guistic and cultural evidence. Dozens records. The ancient legends, it turns
for the Origins of Viniculture of living rituals, from the kiddush, or out, may have contained more than a
by Patrick E. McGovern Sabbath “blessing over wine,” which “grape seed” of truth. The first wines,
Princeton University Press, 2003; is central to Jewish life, to the com- he believes, were made at least 7,000
Bong} munion wine of Christianity, attest years ago in the Caucasus, perhaps in
to an ancient connection between the shadow of Mount Ararat, where
wine and civilization. Noah’s ark supposedly came to rest.
S o old is the love of wine, and so From there, not surprisingly, the art of
rich in lore and legend, that its Bas E. McGovern, who heads wine making spread quickly: down
origins remain lost in the tangles of the Molecular Archaeology Lab- the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers,
time. In Greco-Roman legend the oratory at the University of Pennsyl- along the coast of the Levant to Egypt,
god Dionysus is identified with bring- vania Museum, brings a unique set of and west to Turkey and Greece.
ing the art of wine making westward, skills to this daunting study. He’s a Molecular archaeology can identify
from lands east of Persia. Biblical practitioner of molecular archaeology, not only the source of the clay pots but
scholars who name Noah as the first an emerging field that applies the pre- the substances they once contained.
cultivator of wine grapes describe him
as settling down after the flood to
become the first wine maker. He
loved his work so much, according to
the story, that he became the first
town drunk.
In one of the most charming tales
about the origins of wine, from an-
cient Persia, a fictitious King Jamsheed
keeps jars of fresh grapes year-round,
which he enjoys almost as much as he
does his concubines. One of his con-
sorts, suffering from severe headaches,
mistakenly drinks from a jar contain-
ing spoiled fruit and falls into a deep
slumber, from which she awakes re-
freshed and cured of her illness. She
reports her experience to the king, Fresco of putti pouring wine, Casa dei Vettii, Pompeii, first century
who deliberately ferments his next
batch of grapes, and the rest is what cision tools of microchemical analysis Many early wines, judging from the
passed for history in those times. to the study of prehistoric artifacts. By residues they left, were liberally mixed
In the wry judgment of a Persian measuring the precise mix of isotopes with pungent tree resins that probably
poet ofa later period, however, “Who- in a potsherd, for instance, he can served as preservatives in the absence
ever seeks the origins of wine must be identify its source in a specific clay de- of effective seals for containers. Few
crazy.’ Clearly, the problem is not the posit, and tie it to other pots whose today except the Greeks, who con-
lack of evidence but too much of it. locations trace out trade routes and tinue to produce and consume retsina
Millions of clay pots that may have cultural migrations that would other- table wine, seem to regard the practice
held intoxicating beverages are buried wise remain unknown. Scrapings of as anything other than an odd way to
at countless archaeological sites. Pic- residue from pots can identify key in- spoil a god-given drink.
tures of drinkers and grape stompers gredients that once were stored inside The methods of McGovern and his
decorate tomb walls and ceremonial them, even if only a few micrograms colleagues have only begun to reveal
vessels from sites throughout the an- of material remain. The jumble of an- the details of how grape cultivation
cient world. In the Fertile Crescent cient remains can be sorted out to re- and wine making developed in the an-
alone, so many clay tablets record the veal hidden patterns of wine usage cient Mediterranean and the Near
holdings of royal wine cellars and the and distinctive variations in wine East. But their findings so far, summa-
commerce of wine makers that ex- composition never before suspected. rized in the book, are already a rich
perts have translated and studied only With those tools McGovern and his treasury of lore on viticulture and on
a fraction of them so far. coworkers have investigated wine cul- the drinking habits of the Assyrians,

November 2003 NATURAL HISTORY Oo ul

 eks. and other cultural
th region. This field of
destined to yield
er crops in years to come, but
VMicGovern’s book will likely remain
‘tandard in every serious wine-lover’s
library for a long time. To that
achievement—and to glorious wine
itself—let us raise our glasses high.

Mutants: On Genetic Variety

and the Human Body
by Armand Marie Leroi
Viking Press, 2003; $25.95

Rosamond Purcell, Twins Joined at the R ib Cage, 1987

wee let the bearded lady on the

dust jacket fool you: this book is on the subject of genetic variability B Leroi’s aim is to uluminate,
not a smarmy gallery of freaks and and its manifestations in the develop- not to titillate. Variability in the
monsters. Armand Marie Leroi, a de- ing human organism. human species can be trivial, heroic,
velopmental biologist at Imperial Not that the book isn’t bulging with or tragic, but in all cases it is evidence
College, London, has written an ele- such oddities as flies born without eyes of the coded blueprint in our genes,
gant study, filled with narratives from and babies born without irises—not to and of the way that blueprint is ex-
early medical literature and insights mention the person born with five pressed in the developing organism.
from the latest biomolecular research, nipples on one side and four on the Although it is ethically impossible to
other (a record). Leroi is also a gifted experiment with the blueprint in the
From the makers of the award-winning Civil War Life Series raconteur, and he’s assembled a cast of laboratory—turning genes on and off
fascinating and exotic characters. Josef to see what happens—the outcome
JOHNSTOWN Boruwlaski, an eighteenth-century can be studied if nature does the ex-
Polish courtier whose memoirs intro- periment. Each mutation thus offers a
duce a chapter on. human ‘stature, glimpse of how one set of instruc-
stood just over three feet tall. He was a tions, written in our genes, ends up
"A fascinating look at a national ~
fixture at the courts of Europe, how- forming a body.
disaster and its aftermath.” ever, married well, raised a family, and Sometimes a mutant form arises
Video Store Magazine died at the respectable age of 98. Carl from one alteration in a single gene.
IT DEVASTATED A TOWN AND GALVANIZED AMERL Herman Unthan, born without arms Leroi cites the descendants of an “ex-
JOHNSTOWN
in 1848, appears in a chapter on limb ceptionally philoprogenitive” Chi-
development. By age 20 Unthan was nese sailor, who in 1896 came ashore
an established violin virtuoso, per- at Cape Town, South Africa, and set-
forming in Viennese concert halls tled in the Cape Malay quarter. All of
with the great classical musicians of his his numerous progeny carry a muta-
time. In 1928, by then a naturalized tion, on a gene called CBFA1, that
citizen of the United States, he pro- affects cells that produce bone. And
duced an autobiographical “pedis- many of his descendants have inher-
cript” (so named because he had typed ited the mutation’s traits, which in-
it out with his toes) that was published clude soft skulls, missing clavicles, and
under the title The armless fiddler. missing teeth—a fact that does not
For every uplifting story, of course, seem to affect their vitality: a 1996
there are many tales far more disturb- survey turned up about a thousand
ing: conjoined twins sharing a single people around Cape Town with the
pair of legs; a man virtually frozen in mutation, and they all speak with
place when his flesh turned to bone; pride of their cartilaginous ancestor.
people with single eyes, or with no Other mutations involve multiple
eyes at all. genes and work in ways far subtler
Liss Wwww.JohnstownFlood.com
2003 Inacom Entertainment Company

ete ee NR Annem enemas

66 |NATURAL HISTORY November 2003
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 than do single-point mutations. Such anything that comes after it. Ever
characteristics as skin color, stature, since the last lions and cheetahs
longevity, and propensities for partic- died out in North America more
ular types of cancers often require sev- than 10,000 years ago, there has
eral mutations to express themselves. been no serious predator on the con-
Many variations in the human form, tinent that can match the prong-
such as dwarfism or gigantism, can horn for speed. Today’s hungry coy-
arise from such combined mutations. otes—the only mammals, other than
To make matters even more compli- you-know-who, that effectively hunt
cated, the: DNA blueprint teams be pronghorn—can only hope to snatch
How to buy the modified during the “construction” an occasional fawn in an unguarded
lowest-priced phase, and changing conditions in the
embryonic environment can have far-
moment.
John A. Byers is a field biologist
insurance from reaching effects on later development. who has. spent almost a quarter of a
the highest- The thalidomide disaster of the 1960s,
for instance, was caused by a drug pre-
century chasing pronghorn antelopes
on Montana’s National Bison Range.
rated companies scribed to alleviate morning sickness. Byers observes his subjects with such
Inadvertently, though, it affected the patience that he can recognize individ-
$500,000 Term Life Sampler growth oflimb buds, and thousands of ual faces the way most people recog-
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35 156 246 416
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Although the entire human genome
45 286 481 826 has been officially mapped since 2001,
50 381 666 1,096 most of the ways it expresses itself are
5S 546 1,071 uli
60 Zoi 1,731 5,916
still unexplored. Leroi has written a
65 1h251 3,316 7,756 euidebook to the territory, in which
mutations are the landmarks that give
Premiums shown above are not specific to any person,
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(M Over 135,000 customers ravelers passing through the If you spied a pronghorn browsing
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(4 Easy to buy from the antelope “prairie ghosts,” as a testa- western plains of North America,
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mace fast and easy. it cruises along effortlessly at forty- battle. Females, Byers found, expend
five miles an hour, easily outrunning huge efforts bullying other prong-
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 nd much of their time is taken It’s even a bit misleading to de- horn serenity comes from burping up
jostling each other for the choicest scribe them as “placidly browsing.” a recent meal, which has been fer-
napping spots. When one female gets Unlike bison or sheep, which simply menting in an outer stomach, and
pushed out of her spot by a more mow down everything edible in their then chewing it all over and over
dominant individual, she'll wander path, pronghorns are extremely fussy again for an hour or more. The con-
around looking for an even weaker fe- diners. Most of the time they aren’t tinuing mastication helps digest the
male to rouse—and so on, until every- actually eating but nervously nuzzling tough material they take in, but it re-
one except the weakest has gotten in a plants, like a matron at a tea party minds me of one of those stomach-
lick. Young males challenge equals and looking for the choicest nibbles. churning ads that run on the seven
inferiors with their horns, playfully at And yet, despite their choosiness, I o'clock news.
first—then, as they mature and begin wouldn’t want to adopt their nutri- What sounds even worse are the
to compete for mates, with injurious tional habits. Like cows and camels, special snacks reserved for nursing
and even deadly intent. they are ruminants, and true prong- mothers. After dining on fresh pla-
centa, a. pronghorn mom regularly
chows down her fawn’s feces for sev-

Natural Selections
eral weeks, apparently as a way to
manufacture disease-fighting anti-
bodies transmitted to her offspring
through the mother’s milk. “Natural
selection,’ Byers writes, “can shape
the brain to make anything that con-
Pazera My Family Album tributes directly to reproduction feel
like fun.” Yummy.
Bian aa?
Thirty Years of Primate Photography
Text and Photographs
by Frans de Waal he dramatic climax of the prong-
“One of the most distinguished and cre- horn year, and of the book, is the
ative primatologists in the world, takes rut. With winter approaching, prong-
us through his primatological family horn males each gather small harems
album....A terrific, unique book.” of females into gullies and valleys on
—Robert Sapolsky, author of
the prairie, trying to keep them out of
A Primate’s Memoir
PHARTY YEARS OF PRIMATE PHOT OGRA PHY $29.95 hardcover
sight of their rivals while they woo
them. But the females will have none
of it. They resist amorous advances
Lizards time and again. Often, for several
Dinosaurs and Windows to the Evolution of Diversity weeks, they move from one harem to
Other Mesozoic Reptiles by Eric R. Pianka and Laurie J. Vitt
Foreword by Harry W. Greene
another, sometimes with a male in
pursuit, leaving behind the spilled
of California “No one knows lizards better than Pianka blood of rejected suitors. Byers’s ac-
by Richard P. Hilton and Vitt....If you like lizards, you must count of one female’s experiences is
Illustrated by Ken Kirkland, read this book.” —Raymond B. Huey,
filled with white-knuckle suspense.
Foreword by Kevin Padian co-editor of Lizard Ecology
Which male gets to mate with the
“Vividly described and illustrated, this Organisms and Environments, $45.00 hardcover
lovely pronghorn ingenue? Will she
engaging saga ofthe California ‘bone
fall in love with Archie’s subauricular
rush’ is authoritative and accessible to
expert or amateur paleontologists and American Bison gland? Will an interloping yearling
the general reader.” —Michael Novacek, A Natural History take her by force before Kareem gets a
American Museum of Natural History, by Dale F. Lott chance to charm her? It’s the prong-
and author of Time Traveler Foreword by Harry W. Greene horn equivalent of a bodice-ripper,
$39.95 hardcover
New in paperback—“Movingly written and a natural history lover’s delight.
and scientifically persuasive.”
—Washington Post Book World Laurence A, Marschall, author of The
Organisms and Environments, $16.95 paperback Supernova Story, is the WK.T’ Sahm
At bookstores or order professor of physics at Gettysburg College
(800) 822-6657 « www.ucpress.edu in Pennsylvania, and director of Project
CLEA, which produces widely used simu-

_ UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

lation software for education in astronomy.
|
_
nature.net
(www. biology.ualberta.ca/facilities/multi
media). Click on the blue-lettered
directions at the bottom of the page
Time Will Tell to see the time-lapse selections. You
might want to skip a few if, like me,
By Robert Anderson you're squeamish about bot flies,
but don’t miss the “Clam Escape
he movie camera is a marvelous Response.”
tool in the hands of anyone, sci- I particularly liked a collection of
entist or amateur, who is curious movies from Erta Ale, an extremely
about time. The camera, after all, can photogenic volcano in Ethiopia Shea
control time—speed it up or slow it (www.educeth.ch/stromboli/perm/erta/ ideal for
down—and so open a new and often movies-en.html). Scroll down this
surprising window on reality. page and you’ll find five accelerated
The best collection of time- clips of the lava lake. Like a minia-
altered movies on the Internet can ture version of Earth’s plate tecton-
be found at a site created by Red ics, thin slabs of basalt crust jostle
Hill Studios in Larkspur, California, about, driven by the heat below.
in cooperation with the Science New crust 1s quickly formed, then
Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. subducted and recycled. Another site,
Appropriately, its address is playing at the NASA Goddard Space Flight
withtime.org. Select “to see and do” Center (svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/search/Key
from the bar at the top of the page words/Glacier.html), speeds up the
and then go to “gallery”? On nine movement of glaciers, some of na-
pages of choices, you'll find an eclec- ture’s most famous slowpokes, in a
tic mix of fascinating movies that go series of satellite images.
beyond Harold Edgerton’s familiar Astronomy, too, benefits from the
stop-action work with drops of milk miracle of time-lapse photography.
and apples pierced by bullets. The On Antonio Cicadao’s “Lunar and
site also encourages viewers to create Planetary Observation” page (www.
their own time-lapse movie projects. astrosurf.com/cidadao/animations.htm)
At “Plants in Motion” (sunflower. are beautifully presented solar and
bio.indiana.edu/rhangart/plantmotion/ lunar eclipses, dancing satellites, and
PlantsInMotion.html), maintained by spinning planetary atmospheres.
Roger Hangarter, a biologist at Indi- And at solarviews.com/eng/jupiter.
ana University at Bloomington, is a htm#movie, click on “Animations of
collection of movie clips that make Jupiter” in the table of contents to
the growth of plants come alive. view Jupiter’s famous red spot. At
Choose from the category selections the same Web site, another page
in the menu at the right, and watch (solar views.com/raw/nep/nepspot.mov),
the slender new stalks of sunflower presents Neptune’s dark spot.
seeds twisting toward the light, or the Finally, the site of the Chandra X-
“sleep movements” of bean leaves re- ray Observatory has a remarkable
sponding to their biological clock. movie, taken over a span of half a
Stephen Deban, a biologist at the year, of the pulsar at the center of the
University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Crab Nebula (Chandra.harvard.edu/
has a page with movies showing photo/2002/0052/movies.html). Watch
how fourteen species of salamanders the spinning neutron star spew
zap insect prey with their tongues wisps and jets of matter and anti-
(autodax.net/feeding movieindex.html). matter into the surrounding nebula.
The Department of Biology at the
University of Alberta runs an un- Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer
usual instructional multimedia site living in Los Angeles,

November 2003 NATURAL HISTORY | 71

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 PORE JSEUM EVENTS
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EXHIBITIONS The Butterfly Conservatory: ac
es)
@
Petra: Lost City of Stone Tropical Butterflies Alive in Winter =
Zz
m
Through July 6, 2004 Through May 31, 2004 =
D
Oo
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This exhibition tells the story of a The butterflies are back! This popular mM
Az

thriving metropolis at the crossroads exhibition includes more than 500 live,
of the ancient world’s major trade free-flying tropical butterflies in an en-
routes and of the technological virtu- closed tropical habitat where visitors
osity that allowed the Nabataeans to can mingle with them.
build and maintain Petra in the harsh
desert environment. The Butterfly Conservatory /s made possible
through the generous support of Bernard and
In New York, Petra: Lost City of Stone is Anne Spitzer.
made possible by Banc of America Securi-
ties and Con Edison. The American Museum This blue-green alga, Hormothamnion,
of Natural History also gratefully acknow/l- Vietnam: produces peptides toxic to cancer cells.
edges the generous support of Lionel! I. Pin-
Journeys of Body, Mind & Spirit
cus and HRH Princess Firyal and of The An-
drew W. Mellon Foundation. This exhibition is Through January 4, 2004 The Lost Camels of Tartary
organized by the American Museum of Nat- Gallery 77, first floor Tuesday, 11/18, 7:00 p.m.
ural History, New York, and the Cincinnati Art This comprehensive exhibition pre- John Hare, founder of the Wild
Museum, under the patronage of Her Majesty sents Vietnamese culture in the early Camel Protection Foundation, tells
Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of the Hashemite 21st century. The visitor is invited to the compelling story of his expedi-
Kingdom of Jordan. Air transportation gener-
“walk in Vietnamese shoes” and ex- tions in search of the elusive and
ously provided by Royal Jordanian.
plore daily life among Vietnam's more critically endangered wild Bactrian
than 50 ethnic groups. camel.

Organized by the American Museum of Nat-

ural History, New York, and the Vietnam Mu-
Petra and the Middle East:
seum of Ethnology, Hanoi. This exhibition and Uncovering History’s Earthquakes
related programs are made possible by the Thursday, 11/20, 7:00 p.m.
philanthropic leadership of the Freeman Paleoseismology, the study of past
Foundation. Additional generous funding pro-
earthquakes, provides new insights
vided by the Ford Foundation for the collabo-
ration between the American Museum of Nat- into the archaeological interpretation
ural History and the Vietnam Museum of of Petra’s fall. With Tom Rockwell,
HHOA
YNV1OO
ALVLS
OIHOLSIH
‘ALIS
MAN
Ethnology. Also supported by the Asian Cul- San Diego State University.
tural Council. Planning grant provided by the
National Endowment for the Humanities.
FAMILY AND CHILDREN’S
“MHVd
OIHOLSIH
NOILYVAYSS3Yd
NOILWSYOSY
30540
SO
GNV
PROGRAMS
LECTURES Mosaic Tile Workshop
Over the Edge of the World Sunday, 11/2 (Ages 7-9)
Thursday, 11/6, 7:00 p.m. 11:30 a.m—12:30 p.m. or 1:30-2:30 p.m.
Laurence Bergreen discusses Sunday, 11/9 (Ages 4-6, each child
Frederic Edwin Church, El Khasné, Petra,
Ferdinand Magellan's daring circum- with one adult)
1874. Oil on canvas
navigation of the globe in the 16!) 11:30 a.m—12:30 p.m. or 1:30-2:30 p.m.
The Bedouin of Petra century.
Through July 6, 2004 Nature for Kids and Caregivers
Photojournalist Vivian Ronay’s evoca- From Sea to Pharmacy Four Wednesdays, 11/12-12/10,
tive color photographs document the Thursday, 11/13, 7:00-9:00 p.m. 9:30-10:15 a.m. (Ages 2 and 3,
Bdoul group of Bedouin tribes living Are marine invertebrates and microor- each child with one adult)
around the archaeological site of ganisms the next source of anticancer
Peira in Jordan. and other drugs? Three top re- Ocean Fridays
This exhibition is maa possible by the searchers in marine biomedicine Four Fridays, 11/14-12/12
nerosity of the Arth
Puri Ross Foundation. discuss the latest findings. 2:00-3:30 p.m. (Ages 5-7)

(HE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HISTORY BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
CHILDREN’S ASTRONOMY > LARGE-FORMAT FILMS
PROGRAMS In the LeFrak IMAX® Theater
Solar System Adventures
Saturday, 11/1, 1:00-2:30 p.m. Coral Reef Adventure
(Ages 7-9) Closes November 7
A fantastic underwater journey to
Journey through the Solar System document some of the world’s largest
Sunday, 11/9, 1:00-2:30 p.m. and most beautiful—and most threat-
(Ages 4-6, each child with one adult) ened—reefs.
The super-hot star WR124
Space Explorers: Galaxies Volcanoes of the Deep Sea
Tuesday, 11/11, 4:30-5:45 p.m. Echo of the Big Bang Opens November 8
(Ages 10 and up) Monday, 11/24, 7:30 p.m. Explore Earth’s most hostile environ-
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy ments and its strangest creatures,
Einstein for Everyone: Probe, with Michael Lemonick, Time and consider the implications for our
Adventures in Light! magazine senior science writer. search for life.
Tuesday, 11/18, 4:00-5:30 p.m.
(Ages 4-6, each child with one adult) Celestial Highlights: India: Kingdom of the Tiger
Winter Preview A glorious tribute to this magnificent
HAYDEN PLANETARIUM Tuesday, 11/25, 6:30-7:30 p.m. land and its greatest ambassador—
PROGRAMS Find out what's up in the December sky. the mighty Bengal tiger.
Virtual Universe:
Black Holes and Quasars SPACE SHOWS INFORMATION
Tuesday, 11/4, 6:30-7:30 p.m. The Search for Life: Are We Call 212-769-5100 or visit
Redefine your sense of “home” on Alone? www.amnh.org.
this monthly tour through charted Narrated by Harrison Ford
space. TICKETS AND REGISTRATION
Passport to the Universe Call 212-769-5200, Monday-Friday,
Truth and Beauty in Cosmology: Narrated by Tom Hanks 9:00 a.m.—5:00 p.m., or visit
Does the Universe Have www.amnh.org. A service charge
an Aesthetic? Look Up! may apply.
Monday, 11/10, 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, 10:15 a.m.
With Chris Impey, (Recommended for children ages 5 All programs are subject to change.
University of Arizona. and under)

Become a Member of the Starry Nights

American Museum of Natural History
Live Jazz
As a Museum Member you will be among the first to
embark on new journeys to explore the natural world
and the cultures of humanity. You'll enjoy:
Friday, 11/7, 5:30 and
1 OOKOIN:
e Unlimited free general admission to the Museum
and special exhibitions, and discounts on Space Rose Center for Earth
Shows and IMAX® films and Space
¢ Discounts in the Museum Shop and restaurants and
on program tickets
The Louis Hayes
e Free subscription to Natural History magazine and Quartet
to Rotunda, our newsletter Starry Nights
¢ Invitations to Members-only special events, parties, is made possible
and exhibition previews by Lead Sponsor Verizon
and Associate Sponsors
CenterCare Health Plan
For further information, call 212-769-5606 or visit and WNBC-TV.
www.amnh.org.
 guidly around in the disk, settling
into clouds made of softly swirling

Up the Chimney wisps and loops. But ifa breeze blows

through it—say, a stellar wind from a
giant star nearby—the gas is driven
outward. Depending on the strength
and persistence of the winds, the gas
Pipes ofhot gas stream from superbubbles gets piled up into new configurations:
shells, bubbles, and walls.
bursting out of the disk of the Milky Way. In extreme cases, entire clusters of
hot, massive stars combine to blow su-
perwinds outward at more than a mil-
By Charles Liu lion miles an hour. The superwinds are
then further energized when the most
massive stars in the cluster self-destruct
he Milky Way has gas—and Imagine the stream of smoke rising in titanic supernova explosions, releas-
lots of it. Throughout the from a just-extinguished candle. At ing more energy in seconds than our
flapjack-shaped spiral galaxy first the smoke rises straight up, but Sun gives off in a billion years. The re-
we live in, there’s at least half a then it starts to bend, spreading out- sult: a “superbubble” forms in the
quadrillion Earth-masses’ worth of ward and upward. What the plume surrounding interstellar space, rapidly
free-floating gas, most of 1t cold, neu- looks like a few seconds later depends expanding to hundreds or even thou-
tral hydrogen just a few degrees above on the local atmospheric conditions sands of light-years across. Inside the
absolute zero. That’s impressive, but around the candle. Set the candle out- superbubble is very sparse, hot gas; all
it’s still just a drop in the bucket on a doors, on a breezy day, and the smoke around it is a thin, dense shell of the
galactic scale. Even excluding the blows away in a formless, ashy wind. cooler gas that was once drifting near
ubiquitous dark matter that surrounds Place it indoors, in a quiet room, and the central star cluster. Eventually, a
our galaxy [see “Dark and Darker,’ by the smoke becomes a cloud of wispy weak spot on the shell may rupture
Neil deGrasse Tyson, page 18], gas com- filaments, swirling gently until they all and the superbubble will burst, allow-
prises only about 1 percent of the total blend into a screen of gray. ing the hot gas to stream out and caus-
mass of the Milky Way. Gas moving around in a galaxy acts ing the bubble to break up.
Stull, that 1 percent packs a lot of like candle smoke on a cosmic scale. But ifa superbubble does not burst,
astrophysical punch. As it flows and Nearly all the gas in a typical spiral it can grow large enough to reach an
ebbs through the galaxy, interstellar galaxy is confined to the galactic disk. edge “above” or “below” the galaxy’s
gas serves as the raw material of Left undisturbed, the gas moves lan- disk. There, with no more cool gas
creation——trom, ‘the tiniest to pile up against its expan-
planet-bound life-forms to the sion, the superbubble pops
grandest stars and nebulae. out of the disk and into the
Among the most spectacular much sparser galactic halo.
patterns of gas flow are galactic The hot gas pours out of this
chimneys—vast rivers of hot hole, spewing energy and su-
gas thousands of light-years perheated particles into the
long that can transport matter halo and sometimes beyond,
from the galactic disk into into intergalactic space. A
uitergalactic space. Recently, a galactic chimney is born.
research group led by Naomi
McClure-Griffiths of the Ne that’s one idea,
Australia Telescope National anyway. But the model
Facility in Epping, New South has its problems, and one of
Wales, has produced the most them comes from observations
detailed map made of a of gas in the Milky Way: there
galactic chim: nd it has Massive outflow of hot gas (red in this false-color image) emerges aren't enough hot, luminous
from the stellar disk of the starburst galaxy M82. More than 10,000
shed new light on scinat-
light-years long, the flow is driven by “winds” ofparticles and by
stars in our own galaxy to gen-
ing movement of | rearing
supernovae from a large collection of massive stars within the galaxy. erate the supernovae and su-
gas into, out of, and Similar, smaller-scale chimneylike structures erupt out of many perwinds needed to make all
out the Milk.’ Way galaxies, including our own Milky Way, into intergalactic space. the shells, bubbles and galactic

78 NATURAL HISTO}
chimneys that have been observed. the walls have fine structures, ripples, light-years outside the disk of the
Why should other galaxies act any dif- or intrusions, they probably reflect Milky Way and into the galactic halo.
ferently? To patch up the galactic- an interaction of hot, sparse gas with In the detailed images the investigators
chimney model, energy sources other dense, cold gas—what you'd expect found countless loops, whorls, drips,
than stellar winds have been suggested if a superwind were at work. and blips on the chimney’s inside
over the years, but none has been alto- McClure-Griffiths and her collab- walls—like huge villi along a giant in-
gether satisfactory. Recently super- orators made images of the galactic terstellar intestine. By themselves, the
computer simulations have suggested chimney designated GSH 277+00 images don’t resolve the question of
that stellar winds aren’t even necessary; +36; some images show structures how galactic chimneys form. But they
the random swirling of the gas can give more than 3,000 light-years long, oth- do bring us one step closer to the an-
rise to galactic chimneys by chance. ers zoom in on details less than thirty swer—and afford us a beautiful glimpse
One way to address the problem is light-years long. Studying the over- of streaming, swirling star smoke.
to look closely at a chimney’s inte- views, they noted that the chimney bi-
rior walls. If they are smooth, they’re furcates, both at the top and the bot- Charles Liu is a professor of astrophysics at the
more likely to have formed by gen- tom of the superbubble, into vast City University of New York and an associate
tle, fairly random processes. But if “pipes” that direct the gas thousands of with the American Museum of Natural History.

iar eS KY, IN NOVEMBER By Joe Rao

Mercury spends most of November 30th. At midmonth the planet shines with a yellow-
lost in the Sun’s glare. But at month’s white light at magnitude —0.2. Its great ring system is
end the planet may be visible through tilted at 25 degrees to our line of sight, making it breath-
binoculars, low in the southwestern takingly beautiful, even through a small telescope.
sky after sunset.
Less than six months after the lunar eclipse in May, the
Brilliant Venus, at magnitude —3.9, Moon will again undergo total eclipse, this time on the
shines low in the southwestern sky 8th. And again, eastern North America has the best
as darkness gathers. As the month view: those living east of a line running roughly from
begins, the planet sets less than an hour after the Sun. By Medicine Hat, Alberta, to Corpus Christi, Texas, will be
month’s end, though, the rapidly shortening days in the able to see the entire eclipse as the full Moon slowly
onrush to the (northern) winter solstice leave the planet climbs the eastern sky. Farther west, the eclipse is under
setting more than an hour and a half after the Sun. way as the Moon rises; for skywatchers along the Pacific
coast of California, the beginning of the total phase
Orange-yellow Mars makes a good apparition this month; nearly coincides with moonrise.
it’s already high overhead at sunset and doesn’t set until Totality is brief, just twenty-five minutes. The
around 1 A.M. In early November Mars culminates, or Moon’s disk should remain relatively bright (for an
reaches its highest point in the sky, at about 7 PM.; by eclipse). The light-scattering effects of our planet’s at-
month’s end it culminates an hour earlier. On the 1st Mars mosphere could make for some colorful viewing. At the
is 59 million miles from Earth and shines at magnitude midpoint of totality the Moon’s upper rim should look
—1.2. Among the stars, only Sirius is brighter. By the 30th reddish brown; its middle should glow reddish orange;
the distance to Mars increases to 79 million miles, and the and its lower rim may be brighter orange—perhaps
planet has dimmed to magnitude —0.4. The waxing gib- even tinged with a whitish “cap.”
bous Moon overtakes Mars on November 2 and 3. The Moon enters the Earth’s shadow at 6:32 P.M. and
leaves it at 10:05 pM. Totality begins at 8:06 P.M. and
Jupiter, in the constellation Leo, rises at about 1:45 A.M. at ends at 8:31 P.M. Our satellite waxes full on the 8th at
the beginning of November and just after midnight by 8:13 pM. It wanes to last quarter on the 16th at 11:15
month’s end. The best time for viewing the planet this P.M. and to new on the 23rd at 5:59 P.M. Just one minute
month is at approximately 5 A.M., when it shines brightly, later the Moon arrives at perigee, its closest point to
high in the southeast. Earth, 221,722 miles away. The Moon returns to first
quarter on the 30th at 12:16 P.M.
Saturn, in the constellation Gemini, the Twins, rises at
about 8:45 P.M. on the 1st and two hours earlier by the Unless otherwise noted, all times are given in Eastern Daylight Time.

November 2003 NATURAL HISTORY 79

 Captivated rail and get into the Zen of figuring out what these
monkeys already know about each other: who 1s re-
lated to whom, how do they rank, which pair will
be the next to mate?
My primatological reverie is interrupted by a
By Meredith F Small crowd of visitors. | hear one woman call a male
“she,’ and 'm compelled to correct her. “It’s the
shape of his face,’ I tell her, “and his size—and
those bright red testicles.” But I should know better
"m sitting on a bench in New York City’s Cen- than to be so patronizing, such a know-it-all. Sev-
tral Park, waiting for the zoo to open. I have eral years ago, on one frozen January day, I asked
spent years observing macaque monkeys in the some of the zoo’s wild-animal keepers why the
field, but these days I only teach and write about snow monkeys were indoors. After all, I told them,
what they do, and I miss them. So whenever I’m in these monkeys are accustomed to crawling through
Manhattan, I hang out here with the snow monkeys snowdrifts in their native Japan. “If the pond froze
(Macaca fuscata). over,” they patiently responded, “the monkeys
I’ve been visiting this troop for years.I have seen would simply walk out of the zoo.’ Humbled, |
them in sunshine and snow; stood in the rain and went to see the polar bear.
watched them lick drops of wetness off their fur; When I have the monkeys to myself again, I walk
held short business meetings in front of their ex- up the hill behind the exhibit and lean over the
hibit; forced friends to meet me here. Unbe- granite wall overlooking their enclosure, focusing on
knownst to them, these furry gray monkeys from a pair of females. One is stretched out on a rock, arms
Japan have become my primate and legs splayed in relaxation. Her
touchstone. eyelids droop. She is at peace. The
Onmthis visit it's clear -and other methodically moves a hand
sunny, and through the entrance across her partner’s belly, separat-
gates I see the macaques jumping ing each strand of hair, gently
around their island exhibit. A touching each exposed patch of
path of rocks breaks the surface skin. Monkeys have done this to
of the retaining pond that sur- me, sitting on my shoulders with
rounds their enclosure, and a their handlike feet pressed against
young female hops from one to my neck, picking through my
another, leapfrogging over her hair. I know it feels like heaven.
troopmates as she goes. Concentrating on the groom-
Finally the gates open, and as | ing females, I stretch my own arms
approach the group, my profes- across the wall and feel the re-
sional observing skills click in. By flected warmth of the sun seep up
the time I reach them, my training from the granite slab. I, too, let my
as an observer—and that touch of eyelids droop in contentment. For
magic I always feel in the presence a few precious minutes I pretend
of monkeys—has locked out the that I have done nothing for the
world; all that matters is the past few months but watch this
movement of these animals. group, that we know each other
Today I count nine adults, one intimately, observer and observed.
juvenile, and no babies. I know Monkey noises, their barks and
that fall is breeding season, and calls, fill my ears. The familiar,
the females are signaling their musty odor of monkey fur at
fertility with red behinds. To my close quarters fills my nostrils.
right a status interaction is un- Iam, once again, renewed.
folding—a female turns her rear
to another female, indicating her Snow monkey family, ink and water color Meredith E Small is a writer and profes-
lower position. { lean across
T
the — on paper, Japan sor of anthropology at Cornell University.

JATURAL HISTORY November 2003

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Alain Hubert did it in 99 days. a) is not one to shy away from challenges. In fact, you might say he

provokes them. In 1997-98, he traversed the entire continent of Antarctica on foot and skis with

a powerkite. His Te of accomplishments reads like a history book. Among others he was the first

to climb the sheer wall of ct Holtanna in Queen Maud Land, Antarctica. He’s crossed Greenland

on skis. He’s been to the geographic North Pole and has attempted Everest five times without

oxygen. If anybody embodies the perpetual quest for adventure, Alain Hubert is that man.

i
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 DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 VOEUME 112 NUMBER 10

FEATURES

COVER STORY
32 WHAT BECAME OF THE WATER ON MARS?
This January, a cluster of spacecraft will converge
on the Red Planet, probing for clues
to the mysterious role of water in its past.
MICHAEL H. CARR

40 UNDERWATER URBANITES
Snapping shrimp lead social lives
that resemble those of bees and wasps.
COVER J. EMMETT DUFFY
Mars: Syrtis Major with
wind streaks. Image made
by a Viking orbiter.
STORY BEGINS
ON PAGE 32

Hi

ONcE More,
Bren 46 THE BREADFRUIT TRAIL
Tracing the genetic ancestors ofa staple food
illuminates human migration in the Pacific.
Visit our Web site at
www.naturalhistorymag.com NYREE J.C. ZEREGA
 :PARTMENTS
THE NATURAL MOMENT
Ah... Heaven!
Photograph by Art Wolfe
UP FRONT
Editor’s Notebook

CONTRIBUTORS

10 PETERS

12 SAMPLINGS
Stéphan Reebs
16 UNIVERSE
Gravity in Reverse
Neil deGrasse Tyson
24 NATURALIST AT LARGE
Good Whale Hunting
Robert L. Pitman

30 BIOMECHANICS
Uphill Flight
Adam Summers

oz THIS LAND
Giving Cranes a Lift
Robert H. Mohlenbrock
REVIEW
54 Books for Young Readers
Diana Lutz
1, Books for the Coffee Table
Laurence A. Marschall

61 nature.net
Mars on My Mind
Robert Anderson
62 OUT THERE
Star Baby
Charles Liu
64 THE SKY IN DECEMBER AND JANUARY
Joe Rao
68 AT THE MUSEUM

72 ENDPAPER
On Thin Ice
Kirsten Weir

PICTURE CREDITS: Page 8

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ef Hig Pages

Once More, Jo Mars!

ne of the defining episodes in the public embrace of the
Internet was the 1997 Pathfinder mission to Mars.
Sojourner, the six-wheeled rover deployed by the
hirty-four years ago this Jan- Pathfinder lander, was the little robot that could. After Pathfinder
uary, a snow monkey much shed the air bags that had softened the landing, Sojourner crept
like the bathing beauties pictured down a ramp to the martian surface, shook out its solar panel, and
here made the cover of Life maga- opened up its electronic eyes. Then, on command from radio signals
zine. Japanese macaques (Macaca that took eleven minutes to make the transit, Sojourner motored up
fuscata), as they are also known, to big rocks, probed them with its onboard instruments, and, most
have always been quick to soak important, sent pictures ofits out-of-this-world surroundings back
up human culture. People are to Earth. Pathfinder became the target of what was, at the time, the
thought to have enticed monkeys biggest “hit blizzard” in Web history. Millions logged on. Television
into Japan’s Yaen-Koen hot came of age with wars, assassinations, and political conventions; the
springs, near Nagano, about fifty Internet came of age with a visit to Mars.
years ago—apparently the mon- This January NASA is doing its long-awaited encore: landing two
keys’ first dip in this natural hot new rover missions, Spirit and Opportunity, on opposite sides of the
tub after 500,000 years on Hon- Red Planet. But Spirit and Opportunity are only part of the space ar-
shu Island. Other “people” skills, mada scheduled to take part in this winter’s unprecedented martian ex-
passed on to younger generations, ploratory extravaganza. Mars Express, launched by the European Space
include how to wash and salt Agency, will reach Mars on Christmas day (Mars Express carries its own
potatoes with sea water, make lander, Beagle 2). Japan’s Nozomi spacecraft will reach Mars in January.
snowballs, and trigger the auto- As they arrive, all four spacecraft will find Mars Odyssey and Mars Global
matic doors of supermarkets to Surveyor already orbiting the planet. And once again, you can log on to
shoplift food. the Internet, as Robert Anderson describes in his “‘nature.net” column
One ingenious troop of 150 “Mars on My Mind” (page 61), and follow the action as it happens.
snow monkeys got so good at
stealing farmers’ crops near Kyoto
that the entire troop was banished ne of the many extraordinary things I learned from Michael
to Texas in 1972. Over the years; H. Carr’s splendid preview of the scientific purpose of the
the transplanted monkeys have rover missions, “What Became of the Water on Mars?” (page 32), is
proved their adaptability. Linda the critical role of a hot, roiling iron core to the “health” of a planet.
Fedigan, an anthropologist at the The core of Mars cooled billions of years ago, and so the planet is
University of Calgary, in Alberta, magnetically dead. With a map and a compass to find your way
says the Texas troop has learned around, you could just as well throw away the compass.
how to eat prickly pear cactus ~ But surely that’s a trivial price to pay for a planet-size piece of real
and to warn each other about estate. In fact, though, as Carr explains, one result of the loss of mar-
rattlesnakes and bobcats. tian magnetism was the slow attenuation of its atmosphere. On Earth,
But some aspects of Japanese the atmosphere and the magnetosphere deflect the charged particles
macaque culture, such as their that stream in from the Sun at a million miles an hour: the solar
matrilineal society, remain con- wind. But on Mars, the thin atmosphere and the loss of magnetism
stant from place to place. Photo- leave the surface exposed to the full brunt of the solar wind. Living
grapher Art Wolfe observed sev- on the martian surface would be like living inside an oversize televi-
eral mother-child pairs, including sion picture tube—except that you would be part of the screen, and
the one in the foreground here, charged particles would be raining down on your head. Large mole-
ambling around the banks of the cules such as proteins and DNA don’t do well under heavy ion bom-
hot springs. They seemed relaxed bardment. In short, without a good lead umbrella, living on Mars
and content simply to hang out would be cancer city. If you think Mars might offer a second chance
together. for a species that fouls its own nest on Earth, think again.
—Erin Espelie —PETER BROWN

| 6 NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

Cook, Darwin, Shackleton, Sullivan and Lindblad — great explorers all, who saw the world as something
wondrous and new.

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 RI BUTORS
: ena

in fine arts, nature photographer ART WOLFE (“The Natural Mo-

PAE 1) published his first book, Indian Baskets ofthe Northwest Coast, just
three years after earning a BFA from the University of Wash-
ington, in Seattle. In his twenty-five-year career he has PETER BROWN Editor-in-Chief
worked on every continent and in hundreds of locations. Im- Mary Beth Aberlin Elizabeth Meryman
ages from a recent photo safari in Africa can be previewed at Managing Editor Art Director
his Web site www.artwolfe.com Wolfe’s latest book, Edge of the
Board of Editors
Earth, Corner of the Sky, with essays by Art Davidson, focuses
T. J. Kelleher, Avis Lang, Vittorio Maestro
on landscape photography.
Michel DeMatteis Associate Managing Editor
Lynette Johnson Associate Managing Editor
A native of Leeds, England, geologist MICHAEL H. CARR (“What Became of
Thomas Rosinski Associate Art Director
the Water on Mars?” page 32) has devoted a long career to the exploration of
Erin M. Espelie Special Projects Editor
Earth’s nearest neighbors. In 1962 he joined the United States Geological
* Graciela Flores Editorial Associate
Survey. Since then, he has worked on the Apollo missions,
Richard Milner Contributing Editor
on Mariner 9, and on the Viking and Pathfinder missions to
Mars. Carr is a member of the team overseeing the opera-
tion of the two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, scheduled to
BRENDAN BANAHAN Publisher
land on Mars this January. He is the author of The Surface of
Gale Page Consumer Marketing Director
Mars (Yale University Press, 1984) and Water on Mars (Ox-
Maria Volpe Promotion Director
ford University Press, 1996).
Edgar L. Harrison National Advertising Manager
Sonia W. Paratore Senior Account Manager
J. Emmett Durry (“Underwater Urbanites,” page 40), an as- Donna M. Lemmon Production Manager
sociate professor of marine science at the Virginia Institute of Michael Shectman Fulfillment Manager
Marine Science in Gloucester Point, Virginia (part of the Jennifer Evans Business Administrator
College of William and Mary), has been a biophile since his
undergraduate days in Mobile, Alabama, on the Gulf of Advertising Sales Representatives
Mexico. He has been investigating the social life of shrimps New York—Metrocorp Marketing, 212-972-1157,
Duke International Media, 212-968-6098
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Tee and marine ecosystems of the Chesapeake Bay. Duffy is editing a Minneapolis—Rickert Media, Inc., 612-920-0080
book on crustacean behavioral ecology and social organization. West Coast—PPW Sales Group/Sue Todd 415-543-5001
Toronto—American Publishers
Representatives Ltd., 416-363-1388
When NyRree J.C. ZEREGA (“The Breadfruit Trail,” page 46) arrived at the New Atlanta and Miami—Rickles and Co., 770-664-4567
York Botanical Garden to do graduate work in systematics with assistant curator National Direct Response—Smyth Media Group,
Timothy J. Motley, she wanted to study the origins and evolutionary relation- 646-638-4985
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of the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawa1‘i, who in Topp HApPER Vice President, Science Education
turn introduced her to the garden’s immense collection of
breadfruit trees from regions around the Pacific Ocean. Zerega
is currently a postdoctoral associate at the University of NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE, INC.
CHARLES E. HARRIS President, Chief Executive Officer
Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her article on human migrations
CHARLES LALANNE Chief Financial Officer
and the origins of breadfruit in Oceania, coauthored with Juby BULLER General Manager
Ragone and Motley, will appear in 2004 in the American Journal A Bee CHARLES RODIN Publishing Advisor

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PICTURE CREDITS Cover and pp. 32-38: ©Tony Hallas, from Magnificent Mars, by Ken Croswell (Simon & Schus-
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(bottom): ©Werner H. Miiller/Peter Arnold, Inc.; p. 14 (top): Tui De Roy/Minden Pictures; (bottom): Universidad
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 As Freed felt thatl had nology in defiance ofa Universal Clock
1s Marc J. Cohen writes in “barely mentioned” farm- government ban. So there 1s Neil deGrasse Tyson closes
his review [““Crop Circles,” ers In my review, since I no doubt that farmers in his column “In the
10/03], “few aspects of identified boosting small- developing countries are Beginning” [9/03] with
everyday life provoke such farmer productivity major participants in the what seems to be a mean-
sharp disagreement as the in developing countries as biotechnology debate. ingless question: “What
emerging biotechnology of key to reducing world happened before the begin-
food.” Barely mentioned by hunger, and as the main Moonlighting ning?” Didn’t time itself
Mr. Cohen, the farmer is a area in which biotechnol- G. Jeftrey Taylor, in his arti- begin with the big bang?
major player in the battle ogy might help. Otherwise, cle “Moonstruck” [9/03], David G. King
over biotechnology. I find his comments right refers to the Earth’s tidal pull. Southern Illinois University
In India, for example, on the mark. Indeed, Bt But if the same side of the Carbondale, Illinois
farmers were critical in the cotton has boosted the in- Moon always faces Earth,
struggle over whether to comes of poor farmers else- there should be no lunar NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
permit genetically modified tides. Shouldn't the force REPLIES: The question,
(GM) cotton to be grown. simply be Earth’s gravita- “What happened before
The government tried to tional pull? He also mentions the beginning?” may have
stop it, but a small company mapping the Moon’s mag- no more meaning than the
smuggled GM (Bt) cotton netic field. But the lunar questions, “What lies north
into the state of Gujarat, core is small and not liquid, of the North Pole?” or
and for three years farmers so there should be no mag- “What time is it in Santa
grew it beside fields of tra- netic field. Could it be that Claus’s home?” Yes, we
ditional cotton. The secret what was mapped was the define time to begin at the
was revealed in 2001 by a residual magnetization of big bang, but only as a
great bollworm infestation. portions of the lunar surface? convenience. Emerging
Although the indigenous William J. Rihn theories provide for a mul-
variety was devastated, the Laguna Beach, CA tiple, perhaps infinite,
Bt cotton was unharmed. number of universes, each
The government ordered G, JEFFREY TAYLOR REPLIES: with its own big bang, and,
the destruction of the illegal Earth’s gravitational pull cre- therefore, its own internal
crop, but farmers had seen ates a bulge on the side of the clock. What clock would
the overwhelming advan- Moon nearer Earth and one we use to keep track of
tage of Bt cotton. The gov- on the opposite side. The them all? If that question is
ernment soon approved its where in the developing Moon is commonly said to meaningful, so too would
cultivation (S.A. Freed and world, including South always present the same side be the question, “What
R.S. Freed, “Green Africa and China, while re- toward Earth, but in fact it happened before the begin-
Revolution: Agricultural ducing pesticide use. The wobbles a bit. As the bulges ning of our universe?”
and Social Change in a problem of how quickly the move relative to the lunar
North Indian Village,” cotton pests will develop surface, they create tidal The Best Defense?
Anthropological Papers of the resistance to the Bt toxin forces in the rock. William J. I was surprised that one of
American Museum of Natural remains a major issue 1n Ruhn is correct, it is not the more infamous reasons
History, 85, 2002). managing the technology. exactly “Earth’s tidal pull.’ for “pee” dumping by frogs
India is a democracy Research is also needed to Nor does the Moon have a wasn't mentioned in the
where 75 percent of the determine the extent to global magnetic field gener- “Endpaper” by Ryan C.
people live in rural areas. which impoverished farm ated by an active core dy- Taylor Pees 6 Cues
The farmers are voting households are converting namo. There is a paleomag- 10/03]. If any urine makes
with their plows. their income gains into bet- netic field recorded in surface contact with a creature’s
Stanley A. Freed ter nutrition. In a case simi- rocks (and also measured in eyes, 1t will cause immediate
American Museum of Natural lar to the one Mr. Freed lunar samples), which shows burning and can cause the
History cites, soybean producers in that the Moon once had eyes to swell shut: a great
New York, New York Brazil engaged in civil dis- such a global magnetic field. defensive strategy if you're
obedience on their farms, It existed before about 3 bil- on a predator’s menu.
ARC COHEN REPLIES: I planting herbicide-tolerant lion years ago and died out as Thomas Smilie
Vi sul prised that Stanley seeds derived from biotech- the small core cooled. Lakeland, Florida

02
HISTORY January 2004
RYAN TAYLOR REPLIES: likely that frog urine would in the flexible tissue slip by AMENDMENT: A few
In our study, Bryant cause eye irritation. Mam- each other with ease, a commonly repeated his-
Buchanan and I found that malian predators such as property that enables the torical errors were unfor-
one benefit frogs may gain raccoons readily prey on roots to stretch like rubber tunately propagated in
by dumping their bladder frogs with seemingly no rope, whereas the wood Richard Ellis’s article,
water 1s an increase in ill effects. fibers resist a tearing force. Terrible Lizardsvor the
jumping performance. But Moreover, the sinuous sea” (9703). The type
that doesn’t rule out other shape of vines converts skull of Mosasaurus
possible benefits. For ex- forces that might stretch the hoffmanni was unearthed
ample, when a frog dumps The hanas discussed by vine into shear forces, giv- between 1770 and 1774
its bladder water, a snake Adam Summers [“Extreme ing it spring-like elasticity. (not 1780), and the army
may be temporarily dis- Forestry,’ 7/03-8/03] illus- Takashi Okuyama surgeon who had it
tracted by chemical cues, trate well the biomechani- Nagoya University brought to the surface
allowing the frog to escape. cal problems faced by Nagoya, Japan was Johann Leonhard
But I am not aware of any plants. Apart from the (not C.K.) Hoffmann
studies demonstrating that physical structure of a cell ADAM SUMMERS REPLIES: (Wit0=17-32) sPrenen
the urine of frogs contains wall, the elasticity of tissues Takashi Okuyama raises revolutionary troops
chemical irritants strong should be considered. For several good points. In par- confiscated the skull on
enough to cause eyes to example, the aerial roots of ticular, the overall structure November 8, 1794;
swell shut. Snakes (prob- parasitic strangler figs have of a plant plays an impor- Napoleon’s army did not
ably one of the primary flexible tissue, containing tant role in its response to carry it to Paris.
predators of squirrel little lignin, that is woven stress. Many vines look like
treefrogs) have a scale into rigid wood fibers made a spring, and the coils Natural History’ e-mail
covering the eye, which up ofcellulose microfibrils absorb the energy of address is nhmag@natural
makes it particularly un- and a lot of lignin. The cells suddenly applied loads. historymag.com

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R44

Probably the first thing concerned citizens of an unrepeatable combination of unique ae

think of when the word “endangered” fauna and flora (many of them now extinct), Astronomers have long known that
pops up is an animal: the California condor, as well as cyclic glaciations beginning Mercury and Venus have no moons, —
the giant panda, the bowhead whale, the about 1.6 million years ago. The resulting Earth has but one, and Mars two. The
leatherback sea turtle. But right under our soil types—characterized by such features count for the other planets in the a
feet may be something equally endan- as depth, mineral composition, organic system, however, is far from fixed. New |
gered: the soils of content, and texture— moons are constantly being discovered,
America. Of the 13,129 are therefore as unique and the pace has picked up dramati-
5
soil “series,” or spe- as living species. Un- cally in recent years. one
cies, that occur in the usual soil types, more- In the first nine months of 20039
United States, 4,540 over, are often the sub- alone, the tally of discoveries totaled
are classified as “rare” strate for rare plants. twenty-one new satellites for Jupiter, E
(having a total area of Alter the soil, and the one for Saturn, three for Uranus, and
less than 2,500 acres) ecosystem changes. “one for ‘Neptune (also announced in
or “rare-unique” (pre- By correlating a map 12003; but discovered earlier,were two>
sent in only one state, of soil distribution with morefor Uranus and one iioleden lep-
and having a total area a satellite map show- moe That brings ‘the known totals t
of less than 25,000 ing land use, Amund- ‘sixty-one for Jupiter,thirty-one forSat-
acres). According to son’s team found 508 “urn, twenty-seven for Uranus, an thie
Ronald Amundson, a U.S. soils that are now “teenfor Neptune. comp ig ‘ se
soil scientist at the Uni- Some soils are getting scarcer in the endangered. California _: Why have so many ¢inconstcg.
versity of California, Utada leads the list with 104, fdetectionuntil
t now? Simply put,th
th
Berkeley, and his colleagues, if more than the most of any state. The rare soils of f"smalland faraway. Some measure li
50 percent of a rare or rare-unique soil has the country's agricultural heartland are in more>th
than half a mile across, and th
been lost to such incursions as housing, greatest jeopardy: more than 80 percent “newest discovery 2 Neptunian moot Sa
highways, or agribusiness, the soil should of Indiana’s and lowa’s rare soils, for in- almost 3 billion miles.from ean But
be considered endangered. stance, are endangered. (“Soil diversity and — -of-the-oe ae
The earth scientists caution that the di- land use in the United States,” Ecosystems "sophisticated computer programs that
versity of soils on Earth today is the product 6:470-82, October 2003) can 1 quickly calculate the2orbitsofmo
'ee alts are iia theea
e
e stealthysatellites. é— = ee oo”
Small Is Powerful 2 Besides being small,thenewmo ;
Sometimes small is ineffectual. But not have ‘irregular shapes: and hig
when it comes to photosynthesis. The sin- ellipticalorbits,yeas think tHS
gle-celled cyanobacterium Prochlorococ- _started fe aswandering asteroids.
cus—0.00002 inch in diameter—is the ~§ chunks |of rock—and eventually ¢g
smallest known organism capable of pho- t caught in the planets’ gravitation
tosynthesis. Yet numbers can make up for fields. (Up-to-date tabulations at or
size: the bacterium is the dominant force ifa. hawail. elu/sheppa'e/eatell aE
in the production of organic material in the maintained by David e Jewitt an
oceans. iscon S. Sheppard, both astronomers at
Oceans are home to the smallest known photo-
You might think any organism that has the’ inivientetty of Hawai'ii,in oeluk)
synthetic organism.
to make all its own building materials from
carbon dioxide, dissolved mineral salts, 1,884 genes for making proteins and forty
and light would need elaborate cellular more genes for making transfer RNA. (By and his coworkers to think they've found
machinery and a great many genes. If so, comparison, an Arabidopsis plant—the the smallest genome that can sustain life
you'd be wrong. Alexis Dufresne, a biolo- “lab rat” of plant-genetics research—has through photosynthesis alone. (“Genome
gist at the Biological Station of Roscoff in some 25,000 protein-coding genes.) Many sequence of the cyanobacterium Pro-
France, and an international team of genes responsible for nitrogen assimila- chlorococcus marinus $$120, a nearly min-
investigators have sequenced the entire tion, movement, cell repair, and response imal oxyphototrophic genome,” Proceea-
genome of » little powerhouse: one to stress in other cyanobacteria are absent ings of the National Academy of Sciences
om ne. In it they counted just in Prochlorococcus. That leads Dufresne 100:10020-25, August 19, 2003)
 ce oe
HRTEM aes
ar e NIGEL
WENCOAY DAVIES

yA* your introduction to The Folio Society, we the third and the sixteenth centuries AD. As books sell for less than $45.00.
are offering you this unique beautifully their art and architecture indicates, the Maya, the The Folio Society, founded in 1947, is for
bound set — worth $374.65 -— for just $19.95. Aztecs and the Incas were bold and brilliant dedicated readers who wish to rediscover the
Plus, our latest edition of The Greek Myths, a two people, and these books show how significant pleasure of the fine edition.
-yolume set worth $87.50, is yours FREE just they are to an understanding of how civilization Why not join us now with The Empires of the
for replying. developed outside the Christian world. Ancient World? Simply fill out and return the
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To: The Membership Secretary, The Folio Society Ltd.,

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ie stories full of passion, adventure,
suspense and tragedy. Robert
Graves tells them with great Date
Title Name
verve and flair, from Ariadne BLOCK CAPITALS PLEASE
and the Minotaur to the
: Address
tVV
manacling of Prometheus;
Jason and the Golden Fleece
may to the birth of Aphrodite.
‘Immensely readable’ State Zipcode y
City
FREDERIC RAPHAEL
Please allow 21 days for delivery. Applications subject to approval.
 iINGS
bY OR

-air is Fair
For more than two years Sarah F. Brosnan
and Frans B.M. de Waal have been barter-
ing with brown capuchin monkeys. Some-
times the animals get a fair deal, sometimes
not. It’s all part of a study the two primatol-
ogists are conducting at the Yerkes Na-
tional Primate Research Center in Atlanta,
on the evolutionary origins of the sense of
fairness. Brosnan and de Waal propose that
an aversion to inequity, regarded as a cor-
nerstone of human cooperation, may have
evolved in our primate ancestors.
In a recent experiment with pairs of
captive capuchins, Brosnan handed afa-
miliar token (a small rock) to one of the
monkeys, then turned her own hand
palm up. If the capuchin returned the
token to Brosnan’s hand within a minute,
it got a reward. The same basic proce-
dure was repeated nonstop with both Capuchin monkeys know when they're getting a raw deal.
monkeys, alternating between them, for
twenty-five cycles. partner was absent, but a grape was When treated unfairly, the five subjects
The reward setup had four variations: placed in the partner's area as the subject often refused to return the rock token or
(1) The reward was a piece of cucumber watched. Then the subject not only had tossed the cuke across the room. Occasion-
(“boring” food) for both monkeys in the to work but also got cucumber in return. ally a monkey settled for inequality, al-
pair—equal treatment for equal “work.” (4) The partner was given a grape without though sometimes it became more out-
(2) The “subject” got cucumber and its having done any work; the subject did the raged as the unequal treatment persisted.
partner got a yummy grape, even though work but got the cuke—outrageously un- (“Monkeys reject unequal pay,” Nature
both monkeys did the same work. (3) The equal treatment. 425:297-99, September 18, 2003)

; S Te
weg
ig

The Mouse That Roared iz

“nih
a=
Anybody unlucky enough to have roden- the cross section of its leg & Villagra’s team suggests th a
tophobia should probably not contem- bones, unlikely to have been Phoberomys fed on rough:
plate hopping a time machine back to broader than necessary to sup- grasses in or near water,a &
Miocene-era Venezuela. It seems that port the rest of the body. Factor- capybaras still do. So what would _
not all rodents in those days were cute ing in Phoberomys’s likely form the Uber-rodents have been afraid
little balls of fur like your daughter's of locomotion, they calculated that of? Possibly the forty-foot-long-
guinea pig. Indeed, fossils of Phober- the critter must have weighed crocodiles that abounded in
omys pattersoni—an 8-million-year-old something like 1,500 pounds, mak- the same place and time. ("The -
close relative of the guinea pig recently ing it by far the largest rodent anatomy of the world’s largest
discovered in a paleontological treasure ever to have roamed the Earth. extinct rodent,” Science 301:
trove known as the Urumaco Forma- South America is still the home 1708-10, September 19, 2003)
tion—show that this animal had plenty of of overblown rodents, in fact, in- 4
ay
long teeth and weighed almost as much cluding the largest one extant:
Stéphan Reebs is a professor of —
as a Holstein cow. the sheep-size capybara. biology at the University of Monc-
To determine the animal's weight, On the basis of fossil ton in New Brunswick, Canada,
Mar elo R. Sanchez-Villagra, a paleon- plants surrounding the re- Leg-bone cross section and the author of Fish Behavior in
tolc st at the University of Tubingen in mains, as well as the shape of is a good indicator of the Aquarium and in the Wild ,
Gert ly, and his cclleagues measured the animal's teeth, Sanchez- an animal's weight. (Cornell University Press).
te
.

14 O03/January 2004
 aS Dre AT ateoh

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{5 SPORE

Gravity in Reverse
The tale of Albert Einstein’s “greatest blunder”
By Neil deGrasse Tyson

Sung to the tune of “The Times They venting a situation or a model and the theory, only to extend the enve-
Are A-Changin’”: then working out the consequences lope of its accuracy.
of some physical principle. Most scientific models are only half
Come gather ’round, math phobes,
If—as was the case for Einstein—a baked, and have some wiggle room for
Wherever you roam
And admit that the cosmos
physicist’s model is intended to repre- the adjustment of parameters to fit the
Around you has grown sent the entire universe, then manipu- known universe. In the heliocentric
And accept it that soon lating the model should be tantamount universe conceived by the sixteenth-
You won’t know what’s worth knowin’ to manipulating the universe itself. century astronomer Nicolaus Coper-
Until Einstein to you Observers and experimentalists can nicus, for example, planets orbited the
Becomes clearer. then go out and look for the phenom- Sun in perfect circles. The orbit-the-
So youd better start listenin’ ena predicted by that model. If the Sun part was correct, but the perfect-
Or you'll drift cold and lone model is flawed, or if the theorists circle part turned out to bea bit off.
For the cosmos ts weird, gettin’ weirder, make a mistake in their calculations, Making the orbits elliptical made the
—The Editors (with apologies to Bob Dylan) the observers will detect a mismatch Copernican system more accurate.
between the model’s predictions and Yet, in the case of Einstein’s relativ-
osmology has always been the way things happen in the real uni- ity, the founding principles of the en-
weird. Worlds resting on the verse. That’s the first cue to try again, tire theory require that everything
backs of turtles, matter and either by adjusting the old model or by take place exactly as predicted. Ein-
energy coming into existence out of creating a new one. stein had, in effect, built a house of
much less than thin air. And now, cards, with only two or three simple
just when you’d gotten familiar, if postulates holding up the entire struc-
not really comfortable, with the idea “Negative gravity” has ture. (Indeed, on learning of a 1931
of a big bang, along comes some- forced the expansion book titled 100 Authors Against Ein-
thing new to worry about. A myste- stein, he responded, “Why one hun-
rious and universal pressure pervades of the universe to dred? IfI am incorrect, one would
all of space and acts against the cos- accelerate exponentially. have been enough.’)
mic gravity that has tried to drag the That unassailable structure—the
universe back together ever since the fact that the theory is fully baked—is
big bang. On top of that, “negative One of the most powerful and far- the source of one of the most fasci-
gravity” has forced the expansion of reaching theoretical models ever de- nating blunders in the history of sci-
the universe to accelerate exponen- vised is Einstein’s theory of general ence. Einstein’s 1917 refinement of
tially, and cosmic gravity 1s losing the relativity, published in 1916 as “The his equations of gravity included a
tug-of-war. Foundation of the General Theory of new term—denoted by the Greek
For these and similarly mind-warp- Relativity” and refined in 1917 in letter lambda—in which his model
ing ideas in twentieth-century physics, “Cosmological Considerations in the universe neither expands nor con-
just blame Albert Einstein. : General Theory of Relativity.’ To- tracts. Because lambda served to op-
Einstein hardly ever set foot in the gether, the papers outline the rele- pose gravity within Einstein’s model,
laboratory; he didn’t test phenomena vant mathematical details of how it could keep the universe in balance,
or use elaborate equipment. He was a everything in the universe moves resisting gravity’s natural tendency to
theori vho perfected the “thought under the influence of gravity. Every pull the whole cosmos into one giant
experi Ty 1D whicl You engage few years, laboratory scientists devise mass. Einstein’s universe was indeed
nature tl igh your imaginat Onl, 11 ever more precise experiments to test balanced, but, as the Russian physi-

ary 2004
cist Alexsandr Friedmann showed believed in: the status quo of a static verse himself, Einstein discarded
mathematically in 1922, it was in a universe. Static it was, but stable it was lambda, calling its introduction his
precarious state—like a ball at the top not. And to invoke an unstable condi- life’s “greatest blunder.”
of a hill, ready to roll down in one tion as the natural state of a physical
direction or another at the slightest system violates scientific credo: you hat wasn’t the end of the story,
provocation. Moreover, giving some- cannot assert that the entire universe is though. Off and on over the
thing a name does not make it real, a special case that happens to be pre- decades, theoreticians would exhume
and Einstein knew of no counterpart cariously balanced for eternity. Noth- lambda—imore commonly known as
in the physical universe to the lambda ing ever seen, heard, or measured has the “cosmological constant”—from
in his equations. acted that way in the history of sci- the graveyard of discredited theories.
ence. Yet, in spite of being deeply un- Then, sixty-nine years: later am 1993;
‘ instein’s general theory of relativ- easy with lambda, Einstein included it science exhumed lambda one last
LU ity—called GR by verbally lazy in his equations. time, because now there was evidence
cognoscenti—radically departed from Twelve years later, in 1929, the U.S. to justify it. Early that year two teams
all previous thinking about the attrac- astronomer Edwin P. Hubble discov- of astrophysicists—one led by Saul
tion ofgravity. Instead of settling for Sir ered that the universe 1s not static after Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley Na-
Isaac Newton’s view of gravity as “‘ac- all: convincing evidence showed that tional Laboratory in Berkeley, Califor-
tion at a distance” (a conclusion that dis- the more distant a galaxy, the faster nia; the other by Brian Schmidt of
comfited Newton himself), GR regards that galaxy is receding from the Earth. Mount Stromlo and Siding Springs
gravity as the response ofa mass to the In other words, the universe is grow- Observatories in Canberra, Aus-
local curvature of space and time caused ing. Embarrassed by lambda, and ex- tralia—made the same remarkable
by some other mass. In other words, asperated by having thus blown the announcement. Dozens of the most
concentrations of mass cause distor- chance to predict the expanding uni- distant supernovas ever observed,
tions—dimples, really— they said, appeared no-
in the fabric of space and ticeably dimmer than
time. Those distortions expected—a disturbing
guide the moving masses finding, given the well-
along straight-line geo- documented behavior of
desics, which look like this species of exploding
the curved trajectories star. Reconciliation re-
that physicists call orbits. quired that either those
John Archibald Wheeler, distant supernovas acted
a physicist at Princeton quite differently from
University, put it best their nearer brethren,
when he summed up or else they were as
Einstein’s concept this much as 15 percent far-
way: “Matter tells space ther away than the
how to curve; space tells prevailing cosmological
matter how to move.’ models had placed them.
in “eftect, .GR. ac- Not only was the cos-
counts for two opposite mos expanding, but a re-
phenomena: good ol’ pulsive pressure within
gravity, such as the at- the vacuum of space was
traction between the also causing the expan-
Earth and a ball thrown sion to accelerate. Some-
into the air or between thing had to be driving
the Sun and the Earth; the universe outward at
and a mysterious, repul- an ever-increasing pace.
sive pressure associated The only thing that “nat-
with the vacuum of urally”” accounted for the
space-time itself. Acting acceleration was lambda,
against gravity, lambda the cosmological con-
preserved what Einstein stant. When _ physicists
and every other physicist dusted it off and put it
of his day had strongly Mark Rothko, No. 5 (Red, Black, and Brown-Black), 1963 back in Einstein’s original

ecember 2003/January 2004 NATURAI HISTORY ie

 equations for general relativity, the state the careful scrutiny of many skeptical
of the universe matched the state of investigators. Astrophysicists were left
Einstein’s equations. with a universe that is expanding faster
than they had ever thought it was. Dis-
hay é afe an astrophysicist, the super-
novas used in Perlmutter’s and
tant galaxies turned out to be even far-
ther away than their recession speed
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50 31.75 55.50 91.33 have the same wattage, the dim ones are That value for lambda suddenly
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If those two well-tested methods ally written as the uppercase Greek
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18 NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004
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 the cosmos. If omega is less than one, of the critical density. How about the
the actual mass-energy falls below the mysterious dark matter? Nobody
critical value, and the universe ex- knows what dark matter is, but ob-
pands forever in every direction for servers knew there is five times as
all of time. In that case, the shape of much dark matter as visible matter.
the universe is analogous to the shape They added that in as well. Alas, still
of a saddle, in which initially parallel way too little mass-energy. The ob-
lines diverge. If omega is equal to servers were at a loss. “Guys,” they
alc Compte te
‘Roman Army one, the universe expands forever,
but only barely so; in that case the
protested, “there’s nothing else out
there.’ And the theorists answered,
shape is flat, preserving all the geo- “Just keep looking.”
metric rules we all learned in high Both camps were sure the other
school about parallel lines. If omega camp was wrong—until the discovery
exceeds one, parallel lines converge, of dark energy. That single compo-
and the universe curves back on it- nent raised the mass-energy density of
self, ultimately recollapsing into the the universe to the critical level. Yes,
fireball whence it came. if you do the math, the universe holds
At no time since Hubble discov- three times as much dark energy as
Kea Aa
ered the expanding universe has any anything else.
Every as oS mace Corer) team of observers ever reliably mea-
EVeNiM ABORT Imeem UAC sured omega to be anywhere close to Ae ees lot, the community of
of individual soldiers to the one. Adding up all the mass and en- astrophysicists decided they
outcome of major campaigns,
ergy they could measure, dark matter would feel better about the result if
is examined in detail.
included, the biggest values from the there were some way to corroborate
$39.95 cloth best observations topped out at about it. The Wilkinson Microwave Aniso-
245 illustrations / 224 pages
History and Discovery Channel
0.3. Since that’s less than one, as far as tropy Probe (WMAP) was just what
book clubs observers were concerned, the uni- the doctors ordered and needed. This
verse was “open” for the business of NASA satellite, launched in 2001, was
expansion, riding a one-way saddle the latest and best effort to measure
into the future. and map the cosmic microwave back-
ground, the big bang’s blueprint for
eanwhile, beginning in 1979, the amount and distribution of matter
SEVENTY Alan H. Guth, a physicist at
MIT, and others advanced an adjust-
and energy in the universe. Astro-
physicists can now say with confi-
GREAT MYSTERIES
ment to big bang theory that cleared dence that omega is indeed equal to
¢ ANCIENT EGYPT.
up some nagging problems. In brief, one: the matter-energy density of the
Guth explained why things look about universe we know and love is equal to
the same everywhere in the universe. the critical density. The tabulation?
A fundamental by-product of this up- The cosmos holds 73 percent dark en-
date to the big bang was that it drove ergy, 23 percent dark matter, and a
omega toward one. Not toward one- measly 4 percent ordinary matter, the
half. Not toward two. Certainly not stuff you and I are made of.
toward a million. Toward one. For the first time ever, the theorists
In this latest addition to the. Scarcely a theorist in the world had and observers kissed and made up.
Be ey iE lanyaaa moe Cree a problem with that requirement, be- Both, in their own way, were correct.
“international team of Egyp- cause it helped get the big bang to ac- Omega is one, just as the theorists
tologists and archaeologists count for the global properties of the demanded of the universe, even
Se meanest sear
known universe. There was, however, though you can’t get there by adding
Bhi eC Bete awe Ceol
. ee another little problem: the update pre- up all the matter—dark or other-
dicted three times as much mass and wise—as they had naively presumed.
$40.00 cloth
7 Pu I304 pages energy as observers could find. Unde- There’s no more matter running
terred, the theorists said the observers around the cosmos today than had
just weren't looking hard enough. ever been estimated by the observers.
At the end of the tallies, visible mat- Nobody had foreseen the dominating
ter alone could account for very little presence of cosmic dark energy, nor

20 | NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

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 had anybody imagined it as the great sity of matter and energy diminishes
reconciler of differences. without limit. With greater repulsive
pressure comes more vacuum, driving
S° what is this stuff? As with dark its exponential growth—the endless
matter, nobody knows. The closest acceleration of the cosmic expansion.
anybody has come to a reasonable As a consequence, anything not
guess is to presume that dark energy is gravitationally bound to the neighbor-
a quantum eftect—whereby the vac- hood of the Milky Way will move
uum of space, instead of being empty, away from us at ever-increasing speed,
actually seethes with particles and their embedded within the expanding fab-
antimatter counterparts. They pop in ric of space-time. Galaxies now visible
and out of existence in pairs, and don’t will disappear beyond an unreachable
last long enough to be measured. horizon. In a trillion or so years, any-
Their transient existence is captured in one alive in our own galaxy may know
their moniker: virtual particles. nothing of other galaxies. Our—or
pair, woodworking
well as general
But the remarkable legacy of quantum our alien Milky Way brethren’s—
id thehouse. mechanics—the physics of the small— observable universe will merely com-
demands that we give these particles seri- prise a system of nearby stars. Beyond
ous attention. Each pair of virtual particles the starry night will lie an endless void,
exerts a little bit of outward pressure as it without form: “darkness upon the face
ever so briefly elbows its way into space. of the deep.”
Unfortunately, when you estimate the
amount of repulsive “vacuum pressure” D ark energy, a fundamental prop-
that arises from the abbreviated lives of erty of the cosmos, will, in the
virtual particles, the result is more than end, undermine the ability of later
10'” times bigger than the value of the generations to comprehend their uni-
cosmological constant
derived from the super-
nova measurements and — Are we missing some basic pieces
WMAP. That may be
the most embarrassing Of the earlier universe? What part
calculation ever made, gf the cosmic saga has been erased?
the biggest mismatch
between theory and
observation in the history of science. verse. Unless contemporary astro-
Vd say astrophysicists remain clue- physicists across the galaxy keep re-
less—but it’s not abject cluelessness. markable records, or bury an awesome
Dark energy is not adrift, with nary a time capsule, future astrophysicists will
theory to call home. It inhabits one of know nothing of external galaxies—
the safest homes we can imagine: Ein- the principal form of organization for
stein’s equations of general relativity. matter in our cosmos. Dark energy
It’s lambda. Whatever dark energy will deny them access to entire chap-
turns out to be, we already know how ters from the book of the universe.
to measure it and how to calculate its Here, then, is my recurring night-
effects on the cosmos. mare: Are we, too, missing some basic
Without a doubt, Einstein’s greatest pieces of the universe that once was?
blunder was having declared that What part of our cosmic saga has
lambda was his greatest blunder. been erased? What remains absent
A remarkable feature of lambda and from our theories and equations that
the accelerating universe is that the ought to be there, leaving us groping
repulsive force arises from within the for answers we may never find?
vacuum, not from anything material.
As the vacuum grows, lambda’s influ- Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the
ence on the cosmic state of affairs Frederick P Rose Director of the Hayden
grows with it. All the while, the den- Planetarium in New York City.

22 | NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

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Good Whale Hunting

Tivo tantalizing Russian reports take the author on a quest to the Antarctic,
in search of two previously unrecognized kinds of killer whale.

By Robert L. Pitman

hey always remind me of

witch’s hats—a little bit of
Halloween in the winter
wonderland. Looking across a flat plain
of frozen Antarctic sea ice, I watch as a
herd of killer whales swims along a
lead—a long, narrow crack in the six-
foot-thick ice. The fins of the males
are black isosceles triangles, five feet
tall, and they look like a band of trick-
or-treaters coming our way. I am on
board the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker
Polar Star as it back-and-rams the
frozen ocean to open up a fourteen-
mile-long channel into McMurdo Sta-
New killer whale on the block? Unlike the killer whale familiar to aquarium
tion, fifty feet at a whack. The Na- visitors, the kind pictured above, in the southern Ross Sea, lives in the Antarctic
tional Science Foundation has offered pack ice. To find their way from one breathing hole to the next, the whales
me a bunk on board the vessel while I “spyhop,” lifting their heads above the surface to get a better view before
study the killer whales that inhabit the picking their way through the dangerous and shifting channels of pack ice.
pack ice of the southern Ross Sea.
In the early 1980s, whalers from the designated, so the description has to be whales (Balaenoptera bonaerensis). This
former Soviet Union, presumably in scientifically ignored. The other de- form is likely just a summer visitor
the mood for some new product scription, however, by Alfred Berzin to Antarctica.
testing, slaughtered more than 900 and Vladimir Vladimirov, both ceta- Berzin and Vladimirov reported
Antarctic killer whales in one season. cean biologists at the Pacific Research that the second form, which they pro-
Workmen on the flensing deck of the Institute of Fisheries and Oceanogra- vided a name for—Orcinus glacialis—
factory ships, where the blubber and phy in Vladivostok, Russia, provided in their belief that the species was new
meat is stripped off the animals, some fairly solid evidence that there to science, lives mainly in the pack ice,
quickly realized that two quite differ- might be two species of killer whale in where it may be a year-round resi-
ent kinds of killer whale were being Antarctica. (Unfortunately, although dent. It occurs, they said, in herds that
hauled up the slipway for processing. Berzin and Vladimirov designated a sometimes number in the hundreds of
The differences were so striking that holotype specimen, it has subsequently individuals. The animal is between
two groups of Soviet investigators in- been discarded.) One species, of three and five feet shorter than O. orca,
dependently described new species of course, is the familiar denizen of Sea- with markings that are yellowish in
killer whale from the Soviet catch World, a large black-and-white form color instead of white, and feeds al-
data—though it is not clear from their that lives throughout the world’s most exclusively on fish. The yellow
accounts whether they were describ- oceans but does not penetrate into the coloration is presumed to be from an
ing the same, or different, new species. Antarctic ice. It travels in herds of be- infestation of diatoms. Caused by mi-
In any event, one group’s descrip- tween ten and twenty animals and croscopic phytoplankton that occur in
tion was too vague, and a holotype, or feeds almost exclusively on marine polar waters and on the underside of
museum reference specimen, was not mammals, particularly Antarctic minke ice, the coloration is a characteristic of

24 NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

 all forms of pack-ice killer whales, but before the whales break the surface, is the only time they are allowed to
not of O. orca. The pack-ice animal the sea boils vigorously and a perfect smoke while on board the Polar Star,
also has much smaller teeth than O. circle of clear water opens up above Probably none of them has ever been
orca, which may be related to its diet them. Most of the broken ice behind right up close to a whale in the wild
of fish. Although the Russian descrip- the ship is tightly packed, and the before, and they aren't quite sure what
tion of O. glacialis is in many ways shards are hard and often sharp. The to expect. Some of the killer whales are
convincing, most cetacean biologists adult whales are forcefully exhaling almost as long as our twenty-five-foot
have not accepted the validity ofa sec- just before surfacing, opening up a launch, and there is concern on the
ond species, much less a third one (the breathing space several feet across so faces of the younger crew members,
species described so vaguely by the they won't cut or scrape their sensitive some only recently out of high school.
second group of Soviet investigators). skin on the ice debris. Whale calves Someone asks me ifI am going to be
Yet the evidence is tantalizing enough also surface in the ring of open water, killing any whales today, and I realize I
that I have come to the Antarctic right next to their mothers. should have given them alittle talk
Ocean to see for myself. Later that evening a different group before our initial outing.
of twenty killer whales appears to be The launch is rather boxy looking,
A: the Polar Star sits motionless at socializing in a large open pool in our but somehow it churns ahead at forty
the head of the channel we have channel. We count as many as twelve knots. We quickly catch up to the
just created, killer whales that were individuals that seem to be practicing herd. These whales are the kind I
swimming along the edge of the synchronized swimming: they charge came here to find: they are smaller
pack ice are now moving toward us around at high speeds and make sharp than the usual form; and they have a
through the broken ice that has filled in turns, all the while keeping in tight distinctive “cape,” or darker coloring
behind the ship. As they enter the shoulder-to-shoulder formation. One on the back, in contrast to the lighter
dense pack ice, their heads start sprout- animal is swimming upside-down at shading below, and yellowish instead
ing up through the shattered of white patches. We are
ice like giant black-and-white lucky to find them in open
tulips. They are “spyhop- water. It is a fairly large group,
ping”: hovering above the maybe fifty-five individuals,
surface for a second or two, including several adult males
where they seem to be eyeing and some very young calves.
our vessel and the ice in be- They “are™ scattered over a
tween us and them, and then mile or so, in subgroups of
easing straight back down between one and ten animals.
into the water. My hope is to photograph as
It dawns on us that the many individuals as I can from
entire herd of thirty or so close range, to confirm that
animals are leap-frogging they are the pack-ice types. I
through the pack ice and also plan to collect some
Smssae

moving toward the stern of biopsy samples, which will

Pack-ice killer whales of the Ross Sea, probably the form to which
our ship, seemingly inter- Russian biologists gave the new species name Orcinus glacialis, are
enable us to compare these
ested in the pool of open also partly distinguishable by a “cape”—a dark coloring on the animals genetically with killer
water that our prop wash has whale’s back that is distinct from the lighter shading below, typified whale populations elsewhere
created. Sometimes individ- by the animal shown here. The cape is not present in O. orca. in the world, to determine
uals pop up several times in just how distinct they are. If
the same spot, apparently looking the surface when an adult female the whales are cooperative, we'll get
ahead for the next open water before strikes it midbody from below, pro- our photos and samples; if they're eva-
they proceed. Their heads jut high pelling it sideways and ten feet out of sive, all we'll get is wet.
out of the water, maybe six feet or so, the water. It looks like tons of fun. To collect the biopsy samples, I
and they crane their necks to scan the have brought two crossbows along: a
surface in search of the next breathing few days later we find another small crossbow if the whales allow us
hole. Getting stuck under the ice herd of killer whales beyond the close access, and a compound cross-
would spell certain death for these pack ice. Captain Dave MacKenzie bow in case I have to call long dis-
air-breathers, and they need to care- gives me the okay to go over the side in tance, a hundred feet or more. The
fully plan their moves. a launch, along with fifteen or so curi- darts I shoot are regular aluminum-
As they close in around us, we no- ous Coasties. Most of the crew truly shaft arrows, but they have a float at-
tice another intriguing behavior: just enjoy being outside—if only because it tached to the business end and a small

December 2003/January 2004 NATURAL HISTORY 25

|
 ‘utting head threaded onto the tip. out in the bow, over the din of the en- good. I pick out a pair of adult males
cutting head extracts a plug of gine and the pounding of our launch for the driver to sidle up to.
tissue about the size ofa pencil eraser. against the waves. Our operation is
Normally when I shoot, the dart akin to calf-roping from a jet ski, and fire a dart that seems to loft for an
bounces harmlessly off the back of the our young driver begins a little appre- eternity. But it finds its mark, then
animal and lands floating on the sur- hensively. But goading from the other bounces off the back of the nearest
face, where we motor over and pick it crew members onboard carries the day, whale. As frequently happens when
up. When I describe the biopsy opera- and soon she’s charging into the fray. two whales travel close together, the
tion to the launch crew, some seem The whales are moving along, all in companion whale responds to the
uncomfortable with the idea at first, the same direction and at a fairly fast darting the instant the target whale is
but that only lasts until they see the dart clip; they seem to have an appoint- hit. This companion gives a quick
bounce off a whale like a soda straw off ment somewhere. That makes it rela- flick of the tail—just a little reminder
a truck tire. The darting itself usually tively easy for us because what we that whales and dolphins perfected
has little noticeable effect on the whales plan to do is come up directly behind high-speed, wireless communication
and they are often more annoyed at the them, traveling only slightly faster millions of years before human beings
launch buzzing around among them, than they are, and then swing out even began doodling on cave walls.
I wave wildly at the driver for us to
go back and pick up the dart—she
hasn’t seen me shoot and is still throt-
tling hard forward, trying to keep up
with the whales. We finally do a hard
turn to starboard and circle back to
where my Day-Glo orange dart is
bobbing in the middle of aslick left
by the diving whale. As we ease in for
the pick-up, I can see a tiny nub of
blubber protruding from the end of
the tip. We have the sample. The first
one is always the most important.
We catch up with the herd again,
trying to take more photographs and
samples. And as we do, our boat crew
looks on in stunned awe as four-ton
killer whales lunge alongside, within
ten feet of our launch. For sheer size
O. orca, the most familiar killer whale, is the largest member of the dolphin and predatory power, the killer whale
family. When the animal visits Antarctic waters, it probably does so only as a is probably the closest thing to a living
summer migrant, feeding in open water seaward of the ice pack. The whale Tyrannosaurus rex on Earth today. But
is usually jet-black, with a white underbelly.
there is also a remarkable beauty about
the beasts: they fairly gallop, like sleek
sO we try to take care of business sixty feet or so to the side. That ma- thoroughbreds, through the velvety
quickly and then leave them alone. neuver will get us broadside to the cold Antarctic water, their black and
whales and give us nice targets for the white bodies a glistening collage of
lot is riding on this sortie— camera and crossbow, with minimal wet inner tube and white porcelain.
months of planning are coming disturbance to the herd. We spend almost two hours with
to a head. The weather is sloppy, and As we move to within 300 feet of the whales, half of it as my shipmates
subfreezing spray douses us whenever our target subgroup, some of the hold me by the ankles while I dangle
we head upwind (apparently a favorite whales slightly alter the way they swim, over the side retrieving darts. (In my
direction for killer whales!). Clearly the but clearly in response to our presence. haste I forgot to bring a net, but fortu-
weather is not going to give us much of Their surfacing rhythm changes, and nately the Coast Guard has a knack for
a break. I just hope the whales will co- some animals veer away from the pulling people out of the water.) Still,
operate. Although I have talked to the group a bit as they dive. Some of the we have a fine outing: nine tissue sam-
helmsman in advance about how to females rein in their calves. But ulti- ples and three rolls of exposed film.
approach the whales, I still have to mately the whales have no major reac- As in nearly all biological investiga-
shout instructions back from my look- tions to us, and our prospects look tions, simple questions rarely have sim-

26 NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

 25th Anniversat | ne johnPaul
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 ers, and the taxonomic status members clapped their mouths onto vocalizations, and morphology of
tic killer whales—How many either side of its tail and pulled it back Antarctic killer whales that will bring
species are there?-—is no exception. All into the water. I think people who additional evidence to bear on these
killer whales have a white pigmented train killer whales may be giving them- issues. The preliminary analysis of the
area behind. the eye called an eye selves too much credit. tissue samples I have collected, for
patch. Around McMurdo, in the After three seasons in Antarctica, I instance, already suggests that the
southern Ross Sea, I found that the am convinced that in addition to the three forms may not interbreed, but
killer whales in the pack ice have familiar killer whale from around the the results are still preliminary and
small, slanted eyepatches, and they world, at least one and probably two verification will take a while. There
apparently feed mainly on Antarctic additional species of killer whale lurk are no simple answers.
toothfish (Dissostichus mawsoni), a fish in the icy waters around the cold con-
that grows to more than six feet long tinent. What I have seen are three ut there is a sense of urgency to
and more than 250 pounds. quite different-looking forms, which learn more about the Antarctic
have different, but at times overlap- pack-ice killer whales, an urgency that
he following year, however, near ping, ranges and habitats. The three goes far beyond academic concerns.
the Antarctic Peninsula on the forms also prefer different prey and Fishing boats from New Zealand and
other side of the continent, I found travel together in herds of different elsewhere have recently begun to
that the killer whales experiment with com-
patrolling the pack ice mercial fishing for
are quite different: they Antarctic toothfish in
have large eye patches the southern Ross Sea.
that aren’t slanted, and That. raises <a» hostiet
they prey mainly on the questions for pack-ice
several species of seals killer whales. How de-
that feed and live among pendent are they on
the ice floes. toothfish? How abun-
The seal hunters also dant is the toothfish?
forage in a distinctive How many whales do
way: they travel in scat- the toothfish support,
tered groups, spyhopping and where else do those
through the loose pack whales occur? Will the
ice, looking for seals. new fishery, as our
And when they locate a ee Pee work suggests so far, en-
seal on a floe, they have Pack-ice killer whales living along the Antarctic Peninsula may danger the food source
plenty oftricks for taking constitute a second new species. Characterized by large “eye of an entirely new and
if. On thevicewlt theyice patches,” whitish oval markings above and behind the eyes, independent species?
these orcas prey mainly on seals. The three most prominent spy-
is thin, less than a foot Biologists have a long
hopping orcas in the photograph have encircled a Weddell seal
or so, they can smash on an ice floe; a leopard seal is at left, on an adjacent floe.
way to go before they
through from below. can resolve such ques-
Sometimes, if a seal is on a small but size (the latter behavior suggests their tions. Yet the answers could become
thick chunk of ice, a large male whale social structure is probably different, critically important to the survival of
will tilt one end of the floe up with its too). And though there are no dis- the whales, particularly if they are
head, tumbling the hapless seal into the cernible physical barriers to prevent forced to compete with an industrial-
clutches of the rest of the waiting herd. intermingling or interbreeding, I have scale fishery. Until now, their obscu-
At other times, a group of whales will never seen mixed herds or any indi- rity in the Antarctic pack ice has
swim off to 150 feet or so from a target vidual that looks like an intermediate served them well. But it may be time
seal, then turn and charge it. At the last form, or hybrid. The failure to find for pack-ice killer whales to come in
second the whales turn sharply, sending any social mixing or apparent hybrids out of the cold.
a large wave over the floe that washes is highly significant in itself.
Robert L. Pitman is a marine ecologist with
the seal off the ice and onto the menu. Like the earlier reports of the Sovi-
the National Marine Fisheries Service in La
According to one report posted on the ets, these conclusions will be met Jolla, California. He spends six to eight
Internet, a killer whale lunged com- with healthy skepticism by other ma- months a year at sea studying whales and dol-
pletely out of the water, stranding itself rine-mammal scientists. To meet this phins. His most recent contribution to Natural
on an ice floe as it grabbed a seal. Im- challenge I have already begun some History was “Alive and Whale,” in the Sep-
mediately thereafter, two other herd collaborative studies on the genetics, tember 2002 issue.

28 NATURAI HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

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 BIOMECHANICS
PNG RA ea

Uphill Flight
A partridge’s ability to climb overhanging slopes
might explain how dinosaurs took to the skies.

By Adam Summers ~ Illustration by Roberto Osti

he debate over the origin of tion of avian flight has recently been oe extant gliding animals
birds has raged through the well fortified by observing the habits . perform even rudimentary
paleontological community of some of today’s poorest fliers. flapping. They are all strictly gliders,
for more than a century. Fitting spe- Two main camps have dominated and there is no reason to suppose they
cles into evolutionary family trees 1s the debate about the origin of flight. will ever be otherwise. Even worse,
painstaking and often contentious According to the “trees-down” the dinosaurs most closely related to
work, but truly amazing discoveries camp, arboreal dinosaurs first evolved birds, the unfeathered dromaeosaurs,
of feathered fossils in Liaoning the ability to glide off their perch in which include such terrors as
Province in northeastern China have a tree, much the way colugos—the Deinonychus and the better known
enabled paleontologists to identify so-called “flying lemurs’”—and some Velociraptor, were clearly terrestrial. So
the group of dinosaurs that gave rise frogs, lizards, snakes, and squirrels do even though a change from gliding to
to Tweety and brethren. The fossils, today. Later, the gliders evolved the flapping might be an easy idea to
unearthed in the past decade, even ability to flap from tree to tree. swallow, neither the several indepen-
give a peek at the origin of feathers. Proponents of the trees-down sce- dently evolved gliders nor the fossil
But paleontologists still debate one nario maintain that wings and feath- record lend it any support.
point: How did bipedal but terrestrial ers would have been useful for glid- Partisans from the second camp, in
archosaurs (the “old lizards,’ which ing, even if they preceded such contrast, favor a “ground-up” hypoth-
include dinosaurs, birds, and croco- adaptations as the shoulder girdle, the esis. In their view, terrestrial, bipedal
dilians) learn to flap their arms and huge pectoral muscles, and the pecu- dinosaurs flapped their “arms”’ first
fly? Not surprisingly (given the title har wrist and hand structures that and later evolved into fliers. But the
of this column), biomechanics has make possible the powered, flapping ground-up hypothesis has faced an
come to the rescue. One of the most flight of birds. Yet, as detractors of the even tougher challenge than the trees-
compelling hypotheses for the evolu- hypothesis point out, none of the down view. Although the fossil record
clearly demonstrates that pre-avian
Chukar partridge does not use its wings when on level ground (right). But when it dinosaurs were fond of terra firma,
climbs a steep slope (lower illustration on opposite page), it flaps its wings from explanations that require the tran-
roughly its head to its tail, generating a force (purple arrow) perpendicular to sition from bald, sprinting dinosaur
the plane in which the wings move. That force “holds” the animal to the to feathered, flapping bird seem a bit
ground, giving extra traction to the bird's feet as it climbs. When the bird far-fetched. Feathers might have, for
climbs a vertical surface (upper illustration on opposite page), how-
example, evolved as insulation, which
ever, its wings beat in a more back-to-front fashion, and the force
they generate has both a horizontal (blue arrow) and a vertical would further imply that dro-
(red arrow) component. Although the vertical component is not maeosaurs were endothermic, or
necessary for climbing a tree trunk—the bird generates warm-blooded. Or maybe feathered
enough force for that with its legs alone—the component arms were useful as a net to catch fly-
shows that the bird (or, equally, perhaps, a protobird or a ing insects, or as a horizontal stabi-
feathered dinosaur) can redirect the wing-flapping
force merely by altering the plane in which the wings
lizer-—ike a tightrope-
are flapped. Such an ability would have been crucial walker’s pole—for swiftly
to the origins of flight, as wings were co-opted to running, predatory bipeds.
provide thrust instead of traction (top). One biologist has come

30 NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

up with a ground-up proposal that, tured, which gave quite differ-
on the face ofit, might seem even ent traction to scrabbling claws.
more off the wall. Kenneth P. Dial No matter how well feathered
studies the biomechanics of flight at they were, adult birds and young
the University of Montana in birds alike couldn’t scale smooth
Missoula. He suggested recently that ramps steeper than fifty degrees.
flight arose from arm movements in- The data could be explained in
tended to push a bird (ora feathered two ways. It might initially seem obvi-
dinosaur) into the ground rather than ous that the flight feathers, though
lift it up. The genesis of that odd idea short on the younger birds, nonethe-
was his observation that, when run- less provide enough vertical lift to
ning up a slope, a chukar partridge make the chicks light on their feet,
(Alectoris chukar) flaps its wings quite boosting them up the steeper
differently than a bird does when it slopes. Alternatively, the flapping
tries to get off the ground. wings could be generating force in
the direction of the ramp, increasing
artridges, chickens, and quail are the hind-limb traction of the fleeing
known as galliform birds (the chicks. This hypothesis also fits with
name comes from the Latin word another observation: the stroke of from late in
gallus, meaning “rooster,” and the every chukar’s (whether young or old) the downstroke
Galliformes are all chickenlike). wing beat while running is quite dif through the middle of the
Typically, they have broad, stubby ferent than that of its wing beat while upstroke, much of the “®
wings; easily fatigued flight muscles; flying. Rather than flapping the wings force generated by the flap- 71
and chicks that are ready to run, from back to belly, as other birds do, ping wings helps a chukar’s
though not to fly, when they hatch. the partridges flap from head to tail. feet get traction.
When a predator such as a fox or a To test the two hypotheses, Dial
weasel threatens a young chukar par- and his student Matthew W. Bundle his research implies a plausible
tridge, the bird escapes by fleeing up attached a small accelerometer to the model for the selective advan-
a steep slope. As it runs uphill, the back of a bird (the instrument mea- tage of both the flapping motion and
chukar flaps its wings madly. The sures the acceleration of the a poorly feathered wing. Lightly
behavior has long been regarded as a bird’s center of mass at feathered dromaeosaurs might have
failed attempt at flying, pointless be- any point in time) and relied on wings for help in climbing
cause the young chukar’s flight filmed the animal run- steep slopes and even entering trees,
feathers (called remiges) are not yet ning up a ramp. They Just as extant galliform birds do. The
fully developed. confirmed that peculiar flapping style that helps
Dial first established that though ground the bird could then easily be
the remiges are not long enough to co-opted into the wing stroke now
enable takeoff, they do improve trac- present in flighted birds. The chukars
tion enough for the young chukars vary the angle of their wings depend-
to climb. After trimming or remov- ing on the slope of the substrate
ing the remiges of chukars of various they’re climbing, and the angle be-
ages, Dial discovered that without the comes increasingly similar to that of a
help of feathers, the birds could not flying bird as a chukar climbs slopes
run up slopes steeper than sixty de- of ninety degrees or steeper.
grees. Fully feathered animals, It’s not conclusive evidence for the
however, could scamper and evolution of flight—and since behav-
flap their way up vertical ior doesn’t fossilize, one can never be
and even slightly over- certain. For the first time, however,
hanging slopes. the ground-up proponents have a
Dial then turned his at- model that’s not so much “off the
tention to the birds’ legs. wall” as up it.
To measure their contri-
bution to the climb, he Adam Summers is an assistant professor ofecol-
constructed two kinds of ”, ogy and evolutionary biology at the University
ramp, smooth and tex- of California, Irvine (asummers@uci.edu).

December 2003/January 2004 NATURAL HISTORY |31

 Gusev crater (left), the landing site for the NASA rover Spirit, may be an ancient lake bed. Feeding into the crater
from the southeast is Ma’adim Vallis, a dry valley that appears to have been cut by a 540-mile-long river. (Ma’adim is
Hebrew for “Mars.”) The Gusev crater, some 100 miles across, probably dates to at least 3.8 billion years ago, when
the large-scale bombardment of the inner solar system by meteorites ceased. The crater floor, however, is quite
smooth, probably because of the deposition of sediments by the river, which could have continued until much later.
Eventually rivers would have ceased to flow, probably because the planet turned colder (if, indeed, it was ever
warm) and the remaining liquid water either froze or evaporated into space. The photomosaic shown here was made
by a Viking orbiter; “north” is toward the left.

What Became
of the Water on Mars?
This January, a cluster of spacecraft will converge
on the Red Planet, probing for clues to the mysterious
but unmistakable role of water in its past.

By Michael H. Carr

32 | NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

 s this issue of Natural History went to ticles from the Sun. Since Mars has no magnetic
press, at least six spacecraft were already or- field, it is constantly bombarded by the solar wind.
biting—or speeding toward a rendezvous The particles carry enough energy to break mole-
with—the planet Mars. In the vanguard of this wave cules in the upper atmosphere into their atomic
of martian exploration are two NASA orbiters, the constituents. Some of the lighter resultant elements
Mars Global Surveyor, in orbit since 1997, and the get carried away in the solar wind, and so the planet
Mars Odyssey, in orbit since 2001, which have by is gradually losing its atmosphere. Knowing how fast
now collectively observed the planet for eight years. that is happening today will enable scientists to esti-
The two have already returned an enormous mate how thick the atmosphere was in the past, and
amount of data about Mars: its topography, which so—because of the greenhouse effect of an atmos-
reflects a surprisingly complex geological history, phere—how warm the planet may once have been.
incorporating thick stacks of layered sediments and This past June the European Space Agency
seemingly recently waterworn gullies; its ancient launched the Mars Express, made up of an orbiter,
magnetic field, now vanished because its core has the eponymous Mars Express, and a lander known
cooled, but still traceable in the magnetization of as the Beagle 2. Mars Express will go into orbit this
ancient rocks; its surface chemistry and its primarily Christmas Day, minutes after Beagle 2 is scheduled
basaltic mineralogy; and its fine-scale surface struc- to land on Isidis Planitia [see map on page 35]. The
tures, sculpted by wind and ice. The data from the lander is to measure surface and atmospheric prop-
two orbiters have also been crucial for planning the erties, and will probe as deep as five feet into the
other missions now approaching Mars, particularly martian soil. Its onboard instruments will seek bulk
in helping planetary geologists pick exploration sites organic matter, as well as the isotopic signature of
that are both scientifically interesting and relatively the biologically important element carbon. Most
free of hazards to landing. elements occur in nature as a mix of isotopes of
First among the approaching missions is another slightly differing atomic weights. On Earth, some
orbiter, Nozomi, launched by Japan’s Institute of biological processes preferentially utilize certain
Space and Aeronautical Science in 1998. It is due to isotopes of some elements, so that the carbon iso-
arrive in January. Nozomi will examine the interac- topes that occur in organic molecules, for instance,
tion of the planet’s upper atmosphere with the so- have different weights than the ones that occur in
called solar wind, made up of highly energetic par- inorganic compounds. Measuring the isotopic ra-

December 2003/January 2004 NATURAL HISTORY So

 of the planet and investigate the geology of regions
where liquid water might once: have been present.
The targets of their searches will be water-bearing
minerals and sediments laid down by water.
The two rover missions, along with the other
four, constitute by far the greatest assemblage of
spacecraft people have ever sent to Mars. Their
presence will dramatically pick up the tempo of the
research begun by the Viking missions and, more
recently, by the 1997 Pathfinder rover. Those mis-
sions failed to find any evidence of life on the mar-
tian surface. Yet of all the extraterrestrial bodies in
the solar system, Mars is still the most likely place
where conditions might have been hospitable for
life. If Spirit and Opportunity successfully carry out
their missions, planetary scientists will have a much
better idea of whether some form of life evolved on
Mars in the past, and of where we might best go to
look for it, or for its remains.

he modern roots of people’s fascination with

Mars extend at least as deep as the late eigh-
teenth century. By that time observations had al-
ready revealed that Mars has some remarkably Earth-
like qualities: polar caps, seasons, clouds, a day that
lasts roughly twenty-four hours, and even, it seemed,
oceans. On the basis of those observations, the con-
temporary English astronomer William Herschel
speculated that life existed on Mars.
It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century, how-
ever, that the public became caught up in what
quickly grew to be a frenzied discussion about the
i= = 28
ways of martians. The dynamo behind the popular
Teardrop-shaped islands in the region known as Ares Vallis suggest the awe-
hysteria was a nineteenth-century American named
some force of martian floods. The large crater at the lower right is about three
miles across. The islands were left standing as the floodwaters, deflected by
Percival Lowell. Lowell, a scion of a prominent
craters, eroded away and scoured the surrounding terrain. This region is near Boston family, was a devotee of Asian culture and an
the 1997 landing site of the Pathfinder rover. Water would have flowed from accomplished amateur astronomer. The main “‘evi-
the lower right corner of the image in a torrent probably lasting a few days— dence” Lowell offered for his speculations about life
if earthly floods are any guide. The image was made by the Mars Odyssey. was an elaborate network of “canals” that had been
observed and mapped by the Italian astronomer
tios on Mars will provide clues about possible bio- Giovanni Schiaparelli. Lowell suggested that intelli-
logical activity. gent martians had built the “canals” to transport
The orbiter Mars Express has numerous instru- water from the polar caps to the equatorial deserts.
ments for analyzing the surface and atmosphere, Other observers failed to see the waterworks, but
including a high-resolution stereo camera and in- the possibility of civilizations populated by martian
struments for measuring surface composition that little green men led to a torrent of writings about
complement the ones on Mars Global Surveyor. martian invasions, the potential colonization of
Mars Express also has a radar device for detecting Mars, and the threat of interplanetary wars.
water more than a mile below the surface. In spite of Lowell’s claim to the contrary, little can
Finally, this past summer NASA launched two be seen of Mars’s surface features through a tele-
Mars rovers, which will join the two U.S. spacecraft scope; the planet is just too small and too far away.
already examining the planet. Spirit, the first rover, The sightings of the canals proved to be imaginary,
is scheduled to land on the surface on January 4, the result of too much striving to make out features
2004; Opportunity, the second, will land on Janu- at the limits of telescopic resolution. Scientific inter-
ary 25. The two rovers will land on opposite sides pretation of the martian surface did not realistically

34 NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

begin before observations could be made from The northern martian hemisphere, however, is
spacecraft. And for those hoping to confirm Low- sparsely cratered, indicating that the old cratered
ell’s ideas, the first such images, obtained in the surface there has been buried by younger materi-
1960s by NASA’s Mariner 4, were deeply disap- als. What are these materials? They could be vol-
pointing. The small areas photographed showed no canic, but Timothy J. Parker and his coworkers at
canals, no oceans, no oases. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
California, have speculated that they are sediments
ut water on Mars still seemed a real possibility. in what were once ocean basins. Their elevations
The Mariner 9 spacecraft revealed a complex are some three miles lower than those of the
surface geology: volcanoes, canyons, dry valleys, cratered southern uplands. Perhaps, then, the old,
lava plains, and, most intriguingly, flood channels. cratered surface is partly buried by marine sedi-
The discovery of the flood channels led to tantaliz- ments. But what exactly caused the northern de-
ing visions of running water—and it went almost pression is unknown.
without saying that where water flows, there could Straddling the boundary between the northern
be life. The data were returned to Earth in 1972, plains and the southern highlands is Tharsis, a broad
just as NASA was preparing the Viking missions. dome more than 3,600 miles across and more than
The discoveries were timely because the main em- six miles high at its center. The dome is comprised
phasis of those missions was to search for life. mostly of layers of volcanic rock, which can be seen
Once again, however, the outcome was disap- in the walls of canyons on the dome’s eastern flank.
pointing: Viking did not even find organic mole- On the Tharsis dome are several huge volcanoes,
cules suggestive of the presence of life on the the largest being the 370-mile-wide, fourteen-mile-
planet’s surface—much less life itself. high Olympus Mons.
After the Viking program, the pace of Mars ex- But Olympus Mons is not the most spectacular
ploration slowed. The focus shifted from the direct surface feature of the planet. That distinction prob-
and rapid detection of life to acquiring a better un-
derstanding of the planet. That still meant looking
for water, or at least for where it might have been.
In the meantime, public attention drifted elsewhere,
until two events renewed wider interest in Mars.
The first event was the announcement in 1996
that a meteorite from Mars contained evidence— -
possibly fossilized bacteria—suggestive of ancient
life. The second event was the extraordinary success
of NASA’s Pathfinder rover in 1997. The martian
meteorite that caused such a fuss in 1996 is gener-
ally no longer considered to contain any fossils, and
nonbiological explanations of the observed mineral
formations now seem more appropriate. Yet the
search for water—and life—on Mars has hardly
been abandoned. The new convergence of space-
craft is proof enough of that, all of them trying to
help answer essentially the same questions that fired
the imaginations of Herschel and Lowell: Has liquid
water ever been abundant on the martian surface?
And if so, has it enabled the planet to support life?

he geology of Mars is a spectacle to behold. Valles Marineris 2

The planet’s southern hemisphere bears the
Gusev crater and oe
scarring of heavy bombardment by meteorites; the Ma’adim Vallis-
craters, much like the ones that pockmark the Sirenum
highlands of our Moon, clearly date to the era,
sometime before 3.8 billion years ago, when all the Mars can be roughly divided into a low, northern terrain—
bodies of the inner solar system were subject to possibly the basin of an ancient ocean—and a highland,
heavy meteorite bombardment [see “Moonstruck,” southern terrain, which is deeply cratered. The image was
by G. Jeffrey Taylor, September 2003}. made by the Mars Global Surveyor.

December 2003/January 2004 NATURAL HISTORY | 35

 ably belongs to the Valles Marineris, a system of in-
terconnected canyons extending 2,000 miles east-
ward from the summit of the Tharsis dome to a low
region called the Chryse Planitia, which adjoins the
northern plains. The canyons in the Valles
Marineris are typically 120 miles across and be-
tween 3.7 and 6.2 miles deep. Their origin is un-
known, but faults that radiate outward from Tharsis
can clearly be seen in the canyon walls, suggesting
that stresses caused by the Tharsis bulge may have
fractured the crust and formed great rift valleys.
Once the rift valleys formed, landslides and water
erosion probably enlarged the rifts to create the
canyons that we see today.
The canyons themselves are not entirely the
product of erosion (as is, for instance, the Earth’s
Grand Canyon). But they still preserve evidence of
a wetter Mars. Layered deposits, which may be the
remnants of sediments suspended in long-dry
lakes, cover some of the floors of the canyons.
Near the east end of the system of canyons are
some areas of collapsed ground, out of which rise
several huge, seemingly waterworn flood channels.
Other flood channels emerge from the east end of
the canyons as well, possibly as a result of the sud-
den release of water from lakes within the canyons.

n the effort to explore Mars for water, one of the

most perplexing and important issues to address
is its climate. Today the planet is inhospitable to any
life resembling the life on Earth. The atmosphere,
mostly carbon dioxide, is thin: its surface pressure is
less than 1 percent that of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Such a thin blanket of air provides almost no
greenhouse warming, so surface temperatures aver-
age —67 degrees Fahrenheit at the equator, and less
than —103 degrees Fahrenheit at high latitudes. It is
so cold that carbon dioxide condenses out of the-at-
mosphere each winter to form thin but extensive
polar caps. Their retreat each summer exposes
water-ice caps more than a mile and a half thick.
Geologists have known about that abundant ice
since 1976, but liquid water must be quite rare.
The scarcity of liquid water on Mars today is not
easy to square with the abundant evidence that
large volumes of water flowed on the planet in the
past. In addition to the channels left by large
floods, dry valleys that appear to have been cut by Deeply eroded gullies in a crater wall, hundreds of
slow-moving water also meander across much of feet high, are visible in the upper half of this image from
the old cratered terrain in the southern highlands. the Terra Sirenum region. The gullies were probably eroded
Dry river valleys also occur occasionally on by water, derived either from springs on the crater wall or
from the melting of snow that had accumulated within the
younger surfaces, particularly on volcanoes. Their
crater. In this region, many of the rocks are strongly magne-
presence and their distribution on the surface tized, indicating that when they formed, early in the history
strongly suggest that warm climatic conditions of Mars, the planet had a strong magnetic field. The image
prevailed at times in the past, particularly early in was made by the Mars Global Surveyor.

36 NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

 martian history, when most of the valleys were
formed. Perhaps early Mars had a thick atmos-
phere that was subsequently eroded by large im-
pacts and by the solar wind, or was destroyed by
chemical reactions with the surface.
But not everything on Mars conforms with that
picture of a warmer, wetter planet in the past. Under
warm, wet conditions, rocks weather to produce
salts, such as carbonates, and hydrated minerals, such
as Clays. Those minerals have not been detected by
the orbiters. Moreover, computer simulations sug-
gest that the greenhouse effects ofa carbon dioxide
atmosphere could not have created a wet climate: no
matter how thick it was, it could not have trapped
enough solar energy to stabilize liquid water.
Yet geomorphologists insist that the evidence on
the surface for running water is unequivocal. The
salts and clays, they argue, must be hidden from
view, and some factor must be missing from the
computer simulations. Climatologists are equally
adamant that warm conditions were unlikely, par-
ticularly in the planet’s early history. At that time
the Sun’s energy output was likely to have been
lower. But if Mars was never warm and wet, the
prospects that some form of life once flourished
there become very dim.

he need to study the history of water on Mars

has heavily influenced NASA’s choice of
landing sites. But mission scientists had to balance
that objective with a large number of engineering
criteria: a site’s altitude must be at least 0.8 miles
below the martian “‘sea level,’ so that there is
enough air for the parachutes to work. The site
must be low in latitude as well, so that solar panels
can get the most intense sunlight possible. And it —
must not be too windy, too rocky, too dusty, too
rough, or too cold at night.
Two landing sites were eventually chosen. The
first, for Spirit, is on the floor of an ancient, ninety-
five-mile-wide impact crater called Gusev [see image
on page 32and 33). A broad, 540-mile-long channel
known as Ma’adim Vallis cuts through the southern
rim of Gusev and extends deep into the southern
highlands. Within the crater a group of hills stands
at the mouth of the channel, which could be the
remnants of a former delta. If the channel was cut
by water, the water must have pooled within Gusev
before exiting slowly to the north, and much of the
material displaced by water erosion would thus have
settled out where the water pooled.
Windblown sediments, ash from a large volcano
some 150 miles to the north, and lava eruptions
; within the Gusev crater itself may also have helped
fill the crater. Layered deposits have been partly

December 2003/January 2004 NATURAL HISTORY | 37

 eroded by the wind in some places, exposing an deposited from iron-rich water percolating
etched surface. Elsewhere, dunes are common. Sed- through the sediments. The rover Opportunity
iments deposited by the water may also have been will seek to determine how the layers were laid
brought to the surface by the meteorite impacts that down, and look for evidence of water from hot
gave rise to the many craters visible today. If Spirit springs, which could arise out of local volcanic
can find such materials, they would help show warming. On Earth, such springs, as in Yellow-
whether a lake once existed within the Gusev stone, commonly support hardy organisms. Per-
crater, and under what conditions the sediments haps they did on Mars, too.
were deposited. The size of the particles, their
shape, their composition, variations from layer to () perating the rovers on Mars will be a de-
layer, and the presence or absence ofa cement will manding task for those of us who control
all provide clues to answer such questions as: What them from Earth. Every day will begin with an
were the climatic conditions when Ma’adim Vallis assessment of the data from the preceding day.
was cut? What is the composition of the highland We’ll interpret new images or spectra and deter-
rocks? Was the early martian climate ever really mine the new position of the rover as quickly as
warm and wet? possible. Then, within two hours of receiving the
new data, all the project scientists will meet to
he second landing site, for Opportunity, is discuss the data and what to do next: Shall we do
in Meridiani Planum, which lies on the side more analyses on the rock we examined yester-
of the planet, opposite the day? Shall we get a more
Gusev crater [see map on page detailed look at the cliff a
35|. The Meridiani site rep- hundred yards away? Shall
resents a different line of at- we move to a new location,
tack in the search for water— and if so, where?
a mineralogical rather than a After settling on the broad
geomorphological approach. plan, the various scientific
Gray hematite, an iron-bear- groups—chenusts, geologists,
ing mineral that normally, mineralogists, and the like—
but not exclusively, forms in will disperse to draw up a
a wet environment, was de- wish list of observations. Two
tected there by the orbiting hours later we'll reconvene,
Mars Global Surveyor. reconcile our differences, and
The hematite lies in the make a plan roughly con-
uppermost
;
layer
:
of a geo-
? “Splosh” crater, about five miles across, indicates sistent with the resources
logically complicated region. that a meteorite collided with water. or jee-rich available: time, power, data
That top layer is part of a se- ground. Some sixty miles to the west of the crater bits for transmission, and
ries of layered deposits partly _ sa large flood channel (not shown) called so forth.
overlying the ancient cratered Mangala Vallis (Mangala is Sanskrit for “Mars”). A long and tedious process
Impact craters such as the one shown are com-
surface, which has been cut
mon all over Mars. The image was made by a
translates the plan into spe-
by river valleys. The hematite Viking orbiter. cific commands that are fi-
layer appears to be thin, and nally sent to the spacecraft.
the underlying layers poke through it to the surface The rover will carry out the program, and the next
in many places. The rover Opportunity should be day the process will start all over again.
able to sample both the hematite-bearing layer and The availability of solar power limits each
the layers below. It may also be able to collect sam- rover’s lifetime to just a few months. The goal is
ples of the ancient cratered surface, because mete- for each to travel at least 600 yards, but the actual
orite impacts may have excavated such material distance will depend on the site, the ease of travel
and thrown it into the site. on it, and the scientific interest of the terrain
How the hematite was deposited presents an around the landing site. At this stage we can only
intriguing puzzle. It is unlikely that the layers of hope we have chosen the sites wisely. But if we
sediment formed in a lake, because no basin is have, and if our good fortune continues, in just a
present. Instead, they were probably deposited few more months some of our questions about
from the air, perhaps as volcanic ash. The hematite Mars’s ancient past will be answered, and we will
could have formed from iron-rich materials in the have a better understanding of the role of water in
original layers of sediment, or it could have been the evolution of the planet. O

38 NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

 ERAN SALAD SEALS STMT

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 Underwater Urbanites
Sponge-dwelling snapping shrimps are the only known marine
animals to live in colonies that resemble the societies of bees and wasps.

By J. Emmett Duffy

iving the pellucid waters of the Caribbean them are ecological specialists that inhabit the pas-
1D Sea off the coast of central Belize, down sageways of one or, at most, a few sponge species.
past jewel-like transparent plankton, I see Their apparently unrequited dependency makes the
the ridge of the Belize Barrier Reef materializing shrimps parasites: they scrape their sustenance from
out of the turquoise depths. Even before the reef the linings of their host sponges’ canals with a
becomes visible, I sense its proximity from the small, specialized claw. (In fact, as the synalpheids
mufHed crackling that issues from the submarine live out their lives within a given host, their stom-
landscape. In places the crackling is so vigorous it achs become packed with the delicate spicules that
sounds like frying bacon. The noise is the clamor form the sponge’s skeleton.) Because the inner
of countless little “snapping architecture of their hosts
shrimps” (also known as “pis- provides not only safe shelter
tol shrimps”), so named for but also a permanent food
the report each one produces supply—and because the
by swiftly closing its dispropor- shrimps are undeterred by
tionately large and powerful the sponges’ formidable de-
fighting claw. The chorus of fensive chemistry, which foils
snapping and crackling is the most other predators and
sound of homeland defense. invaders—synalpheid popula-
Although rarely seen, snap- tions have expanded to fill
ping shrimps are one of the nearly every cubic centimeter
great success stories of the of the sponge canals.
Earth’s tropical seas. Hundreds The queen ofa colony of Synalpheus regalis
Having successfully escaped
of species—all members of the snapping shrimps is pictured here inside a living the reef’s ubiquitous preda-
family Alpheidae—and mil- tropical sponge. The green spheres are the tors by occupying its living
lions of individuals pack into queen's eggs. fortresses, sponge-dwelling
the reef’s innumerable nooks snapping shrimps face a chal-
and crannies, even lodging in the delicate arms of lenge familiar to crowded urbanites everywhere:
feather stars [see photograph on page 43]. Where snap- stiff competition for space. Several years ago, in an
ping shrimps truly flourish, though, is within the effort to understand why many reef animals adopt
internal canals of the living sponges that pepper the symbiotic lifestyles, I conducted a census of Carib-
reefs. Sponges often exceed even corals in both bean sponge inhabitants. And I was puzzled, as sev-
abundance and species diversity. And throughout eral workers had been before me, by the paucity of
the Caribbean, sponge canals—akin to the interior female shrimps. I well remember the night back in
of a Swiss cheese—are teeming with snapping 1988 in Panama when, bent over a microscope, I
shrimps of the genus Synalpheus. suddenly realized that the shrimp aggregations I was
More than a hundred species of synalpheids have studying were not merely deficient in females. They
been described worldwide, ranging from the size of comprised exactly one breeding female per sponge,
a rice grain to the size of a baby carrot. Some forty even though the aggregations were made up of as
of the species are native to the Caribbean; most of many as sixty individuals. That was my first tantaliz-

40| NATURAI HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

often inhabited by social species of Synalpheus snapping shrimps. As many as 350 individual
but usually only one "queen," live in such a sponge, much the way social insects live in a hive.
 ing clue that a few species of shrimps are social Synalpheus species typically remain for an extended
creatures, living in organized colonies—one colony time—perhaps for life—in the sponge of their
to a sponge. This way of life—organized, coopera- birth. Periodically a few young adult snapping
tive defense of the community’s turf—had previ- shrimps probably strike out in search of a new
ously been unknown among marine animals. Snap- domicile, but in general, a colony of S. regalis is es-
ping shrimps, it turns out, are living the lives of sentially a two-parent family with a whole lot of
social insects; they are the ants, bees, termites, and grown male children hanging around.
wasps of the deep.
I: the parlance of behavioral ecology, the genetic
aes quite recently, the retiring lifestyle and and social properties of S. regalis and its direct-
puzzling taxonomy of Synalpheus made the developing, colonial cousins make the species “eu-
fascinating biology of snapping shrimps largely in- social.’ The term means that most inhabitants of
scrutable, despite their abundance. Even my recog- the colony, rather than engage in reproduction
nition that they live remarkable social lives came themselves, help raise and defend the offspring ofa
about entirely by accident. In retrospect, one can lucky few.
see why evolution might favor such close social re- In spite of the seeming evolutionary advantages of
lationships. By working together, a group of a common defense, eusocial animals present one of
diminutive shrimps transcends the limitations of the most enduring paradoxes in nature: If adaptive
size and, with the aid of the single massive fighting evolution proceeds via the differential survival and
claw sported by each individual, musters a formi- reproduction of individuals, how can a species arise
dable resistance against would-be intruders. in which most individuals never breed at all? Dar-

In our next several years of fieldwork my col- win himself was famously troubled by the dilemma;
leagues and I showed that at least five Synalpheus in Origin of Species he writes that the phenomenon
species live in tightly packed colonies. Most of sterile workers among the social insects posed the
colonies have just one breeding female each, “one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me
though in a few colonies we identified more than insuperable, and actually fatal to my whole theory.”
one. All other members are most likely either The extreme case of the sterile worker, however, is
males or sexually undifferentiated juveniles. But in just one example of a broader question: How does
S. regalis—a species found so far only on the Belize evolutionary theory account for the occurrence of
Barrier Reef—the analogy with the social insects altruism—behavior that does not benefit an individ-
is particularly close. A colony always includes just ual creature but is beneficial to others of its spe-
one breeding female and (judging by genetic evi- cies—in a Darwinian world?
dence) one dominant breeding male, even though Darwin correctly anticipated that the key to the
it can have as many as 350 members. That genetic paradox of eusociality is the close genetic related-
structure makes most of the members of the ness between an insect colony’s breeders and its
colony into full siblings: offspring of a single sterile workers. But the full explanation did not
breeding pair that reigns as “queen” and “king” for emerge until the 1960s, when the late English evo-
most of the colony’s life. lutionary biologist William D. Hamilton first put
Such collections of kinfolk arise because the so- forward his ingenious ideas. As Hamilton pointed
cial species of synalpheid shrimps exhibit “direct out, among species in the order Hymenoptera, a
development”: their eggs hatch directly into complex mechanism of sex determination known
crawlers rather than into the planktonic swimmers as haplodiploidy gives rise to “supersisters”: all the
that typically hatch from the eggs of their close female offspring of a colony’s queen share 75 per-
crustacean relatives. Born into a suitable sponge, ju- cent of their genes, rather than the 50 percent
venile synalpheids needn't travel far to fulfill their shared by full sisters in most other animals. In other
needs. Both observational and genetic evidence in- words, in colonies of social insects the sterile work-
dicates that the juveniles of direct-developing ers, which are almost exclusively female, are more

42 NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

closely related to their sisters than they would be to naked mole rats and termites. Both of these euso-
their own offspring (if they had any). cial species are genetically diploid—that is, their
Hamilton suggested that the differential related- offspring carry two sets of chromosomes, one set
ness between sisters and offspring might explain from each parent. In that regard, they are just like
the high frequency of eusociality among hy- most animals other than the hymenopterans.
menopterans. In theory, a female social insect gets Alexander and his coworkers then proposed that
a larger genetic payoff from raising a sister than she most cases of eusociality in diploid animals would
does from raising a daughter. Hence a worker fe- arise when three conditions are satisfied: the animal
male is better able to transmit her own genes to undergoes a gradual metamorphosis sometime dur-
future generations indirectly, by ensuring that the ing its life cycle; the offspring receive extensive
queen mother of the colony produces more “super- parental care; and the individual animals occupy, in
sisters,’ than she can by breeding herself. The so- the words of Alexander and his colleagues, “long-
cial structure of the colony thus emerges from the lasting, expansible niches (nests or microhabitats)
genetic self-interest of its constituent workers. safe from predation and rich with food that does
The close genetic related-
ness among colony members
in S. regalis is consistent with
the usual pattern of eusocial-
ity based on kinship. But ge-
netics is only part of the story.
Many animals live in kin
groups; few, however, have
taken family life to the ex-
tremes that the eusocial ani-
mals have. Colonies of bees
and snapping shrimps have
hundreds of members, but the
number of breeders in each
colony hovers around one. As
Hamilton recognized, the
other, interlocking part of the
story behind what is often
called “animal altruism”—the
foundation of advanced so-
ciality—is ecology.

n the past couple of decades

biologists have documented
eusociality in a growing list Feather star is an echinoderm that serves as home turf for Synalpheus shrimps in the
of animal species besides the Indian and western Pacific Oceans. One shrimp, with an oversize left fighting claw, is
social insects. Those species visible at the two o'clock position.
include the naked mole rat, a
burrow-dwelling mammal that lives in East Africa; not require exiting the safety of the niche to obtain
certain aphids; a group of inconspicuous gall-form- it.’ Those three conditions, they contended, pro-
ing insects called thrips [see “Altruism in the Out- mote sustained interaction among close relatives.
back,” by Bernard J. Crespi, November 2001]; an Aus- Furthermore, when the three conditions are satis-
tralian “ambrosia” beetle; and, now, sponge- fied, nonbreeders can increase their genetic contri-
dwelling snapping shrimps. bution to future generations indirectly, either by
As the number of such examples grows, so does helping close relatives to breed or by defending the
the opportunity to identify the evolutionary drivers communal nest.
of advanced social life. A good way to start is to Sponge-dwelling shrimps are also diploid, and so
look for commonalties among disparate eusocial they provide an independent test of the hypothesis
animals. In 1991 the evolutionary biologist put forward by Alexander and his team. And sure
Richard D. Alexander of the University of Michi- enough, the eusocial species of Synalpheus are among
gan in Ann Arbor and his colleagues compared the few crustaceans that undergo gradual metamor-

December 2003/January 2004 NATURAL HIS ORY 43

 phosis (other examples are sow bugs and sand fleas), of S. regalis, my team has discovered that large non-
and among the even fewer in which offspring re- breeding males constitute the first line of defense
main with their parents for a goodly amount of time. against intruders. Such males often patrol boldly and
Moreover, the quoted passage is an almost perfect restlessly throughout the sponge, and they are more
description of life within the long-lasting niche of a likely than other colonists to be found near its pe-
sponge’s canals. The lives of snapping shrimps seem riphery. Like the honeybee workers that sacrifice
to offer dramatic support for the contention that their own lives to protect the hive, they are the
those three conditions lead to eusociality. colony’s sterile defenders.
But according to Alexander and his colleagues, Other eusocial animal groups defend themselves
there is a fourth condition that strongly drives eu- with stingers, mandibles, and sharp teeth. Synalpheid
sociality: enemy pressure. Here, too, evidence shrimps and some of their closest relatives also pos-
from synalpheids supports their analysis. The oc- sess a formidable defensive tool: the major chela, a
cupied territory in an individual sponge is usually marvel of bioengineering that is also known as the
filled to capacity. But the canals of a living sponge fighting claw or snapping claw. (The smaller, minor
are too narrow for most predators of the shrimps. chela is used in feeding.) In both sexes of Synalpheus
What kind of enemy could the shrimps be defend- the major chela is the most visually conspicuous fea-
ing against? ture, though it is proportionally larger in males.
The answer appears to be other synalpheids. The One of the two “fingers” of the oversize limb bears
host sponge provides such a scarce and valuable re- a plunger that fits snugly into a socket in the other
finger. As the plunger is slammed into the
socket, a focused and remarkably strong jet of
water is forced out, producing the species’
characteristic warning: a bubble that collapses
with a loud snap.
Physical confrontations between two com-
peting shrimps generally start with contact
by the first pair of antennae, and often esca-
late to a state of readiness in which the snap-
ping claw is cocked open in a threat display.
If a fight breaks out, the claw becomes a
weapon, grappling with the opponent’s claw
or pinching it in a sensitive region, some-
times inflicting serious damage. The major
chela is used in other ways as well. Eva Toth,
a postdoctoral investigator in my laboratory,
is studying a striking phenomenon we call
“mass snapping,” which probably serves as a
warning to intruders: members of Synalpheus
Turf war between two male S. regalis snapping shrimps. Each colonies snap their claws in unison for a few
brandishes his huge fighting claw (leaf-shaped structures in contact at seconds, producing a startling sound clearly
center of photograph) at his opponent prior to physical battle. distinguishable from the chaotic background
noise of the reef environment.
source—combining abundant food, living space, By shouldering the burden of colony defense,
and safety from predators—that settling and keep- the large S. regalis males make it safe for the vulner-
ing it is a matter of life and death for the sponge able queen to feed and reproduce abundantly, and
dwellers. My associates and I have witnessed de- for the sexually undifferentiated juveniles to feed
fenders among captive colonies in the laboratory and grow. Field comparisons among species of
fighting to the death to repel intruders—clear evi- Synalpheus shrimps suggest that the division oflabor
dence of the high stakes of territorial defense [see translates into greater efficiency and greater com-
photograph above}. petitive success. Eusocial species are much better
able to keep other shrimps from entering their host
I? a Darwinian world, nonbreeding members of sponge than are their non-eusocial relatives.
.crowded colonies must be contributing to the The division of labor between reproduction and
olony, or their burden on resources would not be defense is most clearly manifest in S. _filidigitus,
tolerated. Observing captive experimental colonies another, smaller eusocial species that lives on the

44 Figs PORY yer 2003/January 2004

| :

fra

Belize Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef in the Northern Hemisphere, is prime territory
for living sponges and the colonies of snapping shrimps that reside within the sponges.

Belize Barrier Reef and is the closest relative of rather than physiological. Eusocial shrimp colonies,
S. regalis. Queens in S. filidigitus colonies frequently after all, are made up entirely of close relatives. A
lose the snapping claw in adulthood, and so must nonbreeding shrimp has two options: either bide its
depend entirely on the other adults of the colony time and potentially inherit the nest in the future as
for protection. S. filidigitus thus presents a striking a breeder, or risk its life defending the colony as a
parallel with the advanced eusocial insects, whose whole, thus indirectly advancing its own genetic fit-
queens typically become nearly helpless egg- ness by helping close relatives. But the specialized
laying machines. life history and ecology of sponge-dwelling shrimps
foster long-term occupation of specific nest sites by
oe Darwin’s conundrum remains: Why does multigenerational family groups. Breeding opportu-
only a single female breed? How can the evo- nities turn over slowly, and dynastic lineages persist,
lution of sterility be explained? headed by one or a few breeders of each sex. So the
Of several available hypotheses, the most straight- best strategy for a nonbreeding adult is to aid its sib-
forward is dominance: in several wasp species, as lings and parents by keeping intruders at bay.
well as in social vertebrates such as wolves, meerkats, How, then, to explain the spotty distribution
and certain birds, the breeder aggressively prevents of eusociality among the numerous species of
subordinates from reproducing. In S. regalis, how- Synalpheus? After all, many of the species have di-
ever, the queens in the captive colonies we observed rect development and specialize in one or just a
showed no evidence of such aggression or behav- few hosts. All the species, moreover, bear the snap-
ioral dominance. And since the fighting claw 1s typ- ping claw. Perhaps the severity of competition, or
ically missing in S. filidigitus queens, the primary the low turnover rate in the housing market, tips a
breeder in that species could not dominate her delicate balance toward eusociality in certain spe-
competitors through aggressiveness. cies. Whatever the details of the explanation, it
A more likely possibility—supported, for in- seems clear that the enigmatic ecology of sponge-
stance, by the case of the Damaraland mole rat of dwelling shrimps must hold the key to understand-
southern Africa—is that sterility results from the ing how these humble creatures have achieved the
avoidance of inbreeding, and is often behavioral highest form of social life in the sea. O

December 2003/January 2004 NATURAL HISTORY 45

 The Breadfruit Trail
The wild ancestors ofa staple food illuminate
human migrations in the Pacific islands.

By Nyree J.C. Zerega

any years ago a god named Ku came to this range. Thus there is no prime local
Hawai‘i and married a mortal woman. candidate for botanists to name as
Together they had a large family, but Ku breadfruit’s ancestor. And if the transfor-
never told her he was a god. One year, a terrible mation did not occur throughout the
famine came to the islands, and Ku’s family became Pacific, it probably occurred in just
weak with hunger. When Ku could no longer bear one place, and the sterile trees must have
his family’s suffering, he confided to his wife: “If I been spread by human means. But
go on a long journey, I can get food for our chil- where did these people come from?
dren and everyone on the island, but I will never be Seafaring people reached Australia
able to return.” At first his wife would not hear of and New Guinea at least 40,000 years
such a thing, but after watching her children slowly ago and, relaunching from those
starve, she finally relented. The couple walked to- lands, settled the Solomon Islands by
gether into their garden, where Ku kissed his wife 30,000 years ago. But the broader
good-bye and disappeared into the earth. In her peopling of Oceania—the middle and
grief Ku’s wife waited at the spot where he had dis- southern Pacific islands—did not get
appeared, watering it for several days with her tears. underway until about 4,000 years ago.
Soon a sprout pushed up from the spot and rapidly Most scholars attribute the resurgence
grew into a tree. Within just a few days Ku’s body in settlement to a people they call the
had transformed into a large tree trunk, his arms Lapita, after an archaeological site in
into branches, his blood into a white latex flowing New Caledonia. The main evidence
through the tree, and his head into a fruit that pro- for the patterns of their migrations
vided Ku’s family with the food he had promised. comes from tracing a characteristic
The tree, and the food, was the breadfruit. style of pottery, in which geometric
This legend 1s just one of many that are told to ac- and, occasionally, representational de-
count for the origins of breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis). signs were stamped into the clay. Lin-
It is little wonder that the plant is the stuff of legend, guistic and genetic data generally sup-
for it has been cultivated as a staple starch crop port the archaeological conclusions.
in the Pacific islands for thousands of years. The Lapita, thought to have come
Biologists, however, are still looking for a more from somewhere in island Southeast
down-to-earth explanation of the plant’s origins. Asia, first traveled to the northern
The puzzle begins with the fact that many breadfruit coast of New Guinea. They con-
trees are seedless and sterile. Sometime in the past, tinued their migrations eastward
cultivators must have transformed a fertile plant into through Melanesia and into the far reaches of east-
one that needs human intervention to reproduce ern Polynesia, making their way to Easter Island by
itself. But what was the ancestral tree? Breadfruit is about 1,700 years ago [see map on pages 48 and 49].
scattered across thousands of islands in the Pacific, Micronesia is much more culturally and linguisti-
but no close wild relatives grow throughout much of cally heterogeneous than Polynesia, and its island

46 NATI
RAL HIST ORY December 2003/January 2004
 ret

Thomas Gosse, Transplanting of the Bread-Fruit-Trees from Otaheite [Tahiti], 1796. Gosse’s
hand-colored mezzotint depicts Lieutenant William Bligh, standing at right in uniform, overseeing
the collection of young breadfruit trees for transport to the Caribbean. Although the voyage, on
HMS Bounty, ended in the famed mutiny in 1789, Bligh carried out his mission on a later voyage.
Analysis of breadfruit DNA is enabling biologists to trace its wild origins, and the spread of
related cultivars by Pacific islanders.
 sroups were probably settled by migrants who who transported it. Unfortunately, reconstructing
came at various times from island Southeast Asia, the plant’s botanical history has long proved
Melanesia, New Guinea, and elsewhere. The last difficult. During the millennia breadfruit has been
of the principal Oceanic islands to be settled were cultivated, the trees changed with time and place.
the Hawaiian Islands, about 1,700 years ago, and Mutations occurred, and cultivators on various
New Zealand, about 1,200 years ago—in both islands selected for trees that grew best under local
cases by Polynesians. particularly conditions or whose fruits were partic-
Prehistoric seafarers casting off from their home ularly appealing in size, taste, and texture. My hope
islands to settle elsewhere would have been sure to was that DNA evidence obtained through the new
take along breadfruit trees, which provide an tools of molecular biology would finally resolve the
abundance of fruit. The first breadfruit trees, like puzzle of the species’ origins.
their unknown progenitor, may have been capable
of reproducing by means of seeds. At some point, cholars have put forward at least two testable
however, the voyagers must have begun to trans- hypotheses about the origins of breadfruit.
port and transplant root cuttings, which can be The first was advanced in 1940, when Eduardo
nicked with a sharp blade to produce shoots. In Quisumbing, a Filipino botanist, suggested bread-

HAWAIIAN.
ISLANDS

ETA
“asMARQUESAS ISLANDS

Pes a ; s
- \CALEDONIA / Fld FONGATAPU
ISLANDS

Facitic
et
1,000 MILES
: State

BREADFRUIT

Origins of breadfruit and its precursors, proposed by the author on the basis of her genetic analyses and the
archaeological record, are traced through the islands of the Pacific. A seafaring people known as the Lapita quickly
spread through Melanesia and Polynesia, bringing the breadnut plant with them as they fanned outward from New
Guinea. The Lapita often carried cuttings on their long ocean voyages, and so, over time, the breadnut, propagated
by seeds, was transformed into the breadfruit, a plant that is often sterile. At some stage, they or other early
voyagers brought breadfruit into the range of the dugdug plant (purple arrow), and so the two closely related
species were able to hybridize. Many breadfruit cultivars in Micronesia bear the genetic stamp of that union.

that way the trees were propagated vegetatively fruit may be “derived, by selection, from some spe-
throughout Oceania. cies perhaps even approximating the ‘camansi.’” He
If migrating people were responsible for the was referring to the breadnut, A. camansi, native to
propagation of breadfruit, finding its wild progeni- New Guinea and possibly the Philippines and the
tor might contribute to far more than the botanical Moluccas. It produces edible, chestnutlike seeds. A
problem of finding the origins of the plant. By second, much more complex hypothesis was pro-
tracing the paths of ancient breadfruit, light might posed in 1960 by Francis Raymond Fosberg, an
be shed on the routes taken by the ancient mariners accomplished American botanist of the Pacific flora.

48 NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

Fosberg implicated two other species in addition to breadfruit genus, Artocarpus. The genus belongs to
the breadnut. One is the Philippine endemic com- the mulberry family (Moraceae) and encompasses
monly known as antipolo (A. blancoi), which is used many useful and curious species. On the basis of
primarily for lumber. The other, often called dug- the DNA sequences, I constructed a family tree for
dug (A. mariannensis), is endemic to certain upliftedArtocarpus, which showed that breadfruit is closely
limestone islands in Micronesia, namely Palau and related to breadnut and dugdug but not to antipolo.
the Marianas. The islanders consume both its seeds In DNA sequencing, the base pairs, or molecular
and the surrounding flesh. building blocks, in a species’ chromosomes are iden-
Fosberg suggested that antipolo first hybridized tified one by one. But a single genome can include
with breadnut, giving rise to sterile breadfruit. Butbillions of base pairs. Although the speed at which
he also noted that Micronesian breadfruit has its this kind of data can be generated is rapidly increas-
own unique characteristics. For example, some ing, many biologists must content themselves with
specimens have leaves like those of the dugdug but sequencing only small regions of an organism’s
seedless fruit like that of breadfruit; others have genome. Unless those regions happen to be highly
deeply cut leaves like the breadfruit’s, but those variable, they may not shed much light on the
leaves have brownish and reddish hairs on the leaf genetic relatedness among closely related species.
The regions I had sequenced were just too similar to
reveal how breadfruit, breadnut, and dugdug fit
together on the tree of life. I needed more data.
I turned to a method of DNA fingerprinting
called amplified fragment length polymorphisms
(AFLP). In effect, the technique takes many snap-
shots of an organism’s entire genome, increasing
the chances that informative regions will be found.
The first step in the process is to extract DNA and
treat it with enzymes that slice it into many small
fragments. Examining all of these fragments is not
BREADFRUIT feasible, so the next step is to “amplify” (make
"7 DERIVED FROM
| BREADNUT many copies of) only a subset of the fragments.
Among the amplified fragments, some will be
BREADFRUIT
DERIVED FROM unique to the single individual source of the DNA,
BREADNUT AND
DUGDUG
whereas others will be shared with other members
of the same species. Of the latter, some will prove
PRESUMED ROUTE OF to be unique to the species as a whole, and others
\ BREADNUT-DERIVED
a. BREADFRUIT INTO will be shared with members of various other spe-
DUGDUG RANGE cies. By sorting through the amplified fragments,
ptr
4GAAMS
©
Abad
GKASD the investigator can determined which of them are
ADS PO CAAaDADAAD oN Va)
«
“fingerprints” of particular individuals, species, or
SCAN Tas
SSS TNS ah
even more distant genetic relations.

veins, like the dugdug’s. To account for those ees I would have to analyze tissue from
features, Fosberg suggested that in Micronesia several individual specimens of breadfruit, dug-
the sterile breadfruit trees had somehow hy- dug, and breadnut. Would that force me to island-
bridized with dugdug. hop around the Pacific, collecting samples of trees
from tropical forests and white-sand beaches? As
o begin my own study into the origins of arduous (and appealing) as that might be, there was
breadfruit, I wanted to test both these hy- a quicker (and cheaper) way.
potheses about its wild progenitors. That led imme- Kahanu Garden, part of the National Tropical
diately to my first question: Are breadnut, dugdug, Botanical Garden, is situated on the Hawaiian is-
and antipolo the species most closely related to land of Maui, near the Pi‘ilanihale Heiau, a struc-
breadfruit, and if not, what is? Second, is there evi- ture of lava rock thought to be the largest ancient
dence that any of those species contributed to Polynesian place of worship. Approximately ten
breadfruit’s gene pool? A acres of the garden is devoted to the largest known
I determined the DNA sequences for two re- collection of breadfruit cultivars in the world:
gions of the genome in nearly forty species in the more than 200 trees have been collected from

December 2003/January 2004 NATURAL HISTORY 4G

|
 seventeen Pacific island groups and beyond. Al- ward from New Guinea, they-likely carried along
though the collection was originally established in whatever they needed of the wild breadnut, so that
the 1970s, the bulk ofit was assembled in the 1980s they could establish breadnut as a crop. But bread-
by Diane Ragone, the director of the National nut seeds remain viable for just a few weeks; sea-
Tropical Garden’s Breadfruit Institute. At this one farers who anticipated a long ocean voyage, such as
location I obtained samples of breadfruit from Java the ones that led colonizers to regions east of the
and the Philippine Islands, in island Southeast Asia, Solomon Islands, would have known to bring
and from various islands in Melanesia, Micronesia, along root cuttings. (In fact, the Lapita vegetatively
and Polynesia. Only a handful of dugdug and propagated several of their important crops, in-
breadnut trees grow at Kahanu, however, so I trav- cluding yams and taro.) By propagating and
eled, along with Timothy J. Motley of the New spreading their breadnut trees via cuttings, genera-
York Botanical Garden, to New Guinea and the tion upon generation of islanders transformed it
Marianas. In both places knowledgeable local into the breadfruit, a species that did not reliably
botanists helped me collect more samples. produce viable or edible seeds but that could be
consumed as a starch crop.
hen I examined the DNA from all the trees, Human settlement of Micronesia was not so
I found many genetic fingerprints that were straightforward as it was in Melanesia and Polynesia,
common to breadfruit, breadnut, and dugdug. That and several migration routes may have been estab-
confirmed just how closely related the three species lished. One route scholars have suggested began in the
are. But I was also able to eastern Solomon Islands or
identify some dugdug fin- in the islands to their
gerprints absent in all bread- southeast, and followed a
nut trees, and some bread- northward course to the
nut fingerprints absent in Caroline Islands. Lapita
all dugdug trees. Looking or other people taking
at the distribution revealed that route could have
an intriguing pattern. Both introduced the breadnut-
breadnut and dugdug fin- derived breadfruit into Mi-
gerprints were present in cronesia. Migrations and
virtually all Micronesian trade routes within Mi-
breadfruit cultivars. But cronesia could then have
most of the breadfruit brought the introduced
cultivars in Melanesia and breadfruit into the range of
Polynesia included only the native dugdug, where
the fingerprints of bread- the two species could have
nut, not of dugdug. cross-pollinated.
To some extent, then,
both Quisumbing and Fos- he earliest breadnut-
berg were correct. Over- derived breadfruit oc-
whelmingly, in Melanesia Breadfruit tree, shown here in an engraving made about curs in Melanesia, where
and Polynesia, breadfruit 1800, grows to a height of sixty-five feet. breadfruit cultivars that pro-
cultivars were derived duce seeds are still com-
through selection from breadnut, just as Quisum- monly found. I speculate that such fertile plants may
bing surmised. But Fosberg was right to think there be what hybridized with dugdug. Nothing like
was something different about the Micronesian them persists in Micronesia, however, though the
breadfruit trees. In Micronesia, breadnut or bread- hybrid breadfruit trees themselves sometimes do
nut-derived breadfruit appears to have hybridized produce seeds. The ancestral cultivars may have
with dugdug, probably not in a single event but disappeared from the region because of a difference
in a process known as introgression, in which a in environmental conditions or because people who
series of interspecies crosses are followed by re- lived there—perhaps owing to the availability of
peated backcrosses. The result was a unique diver- the edible dugdug seeds—preferentially selected
sity of cultivars. seedless cultivars.
How do these findings tie in with the migra- Finally, the route from Melanesia into Micro-
tions of people across the Pacific? Here’s a possible nesia might well have been a two-way street. I dis-
explanation. As the Lapita people voyaged east- covered dugdug fingerprints in a small number of

50 NATURAI HIS T ORY December 2003/January 2004

|
Tahitian breadfruit is shown here as it was published in the journals of Captain James Cook, during
Cook’s first Pacific voyage, 1768-1771.

cultivars I sampled from the Solomon Islands and finer details of how people selected and spread
farther east, in Efate, the Fiji Islands, Samoa, and breadfruit trees. Because of the genetic scrambling
the Society Islands. The evidence suggests that that has taken place, and can still occur, between
hybrid breadfruit cultivars, developed in Micro- fertile plants, and because of the continual move-
nesia, could later have joined the breadnut- ment of humans, the picture is complex. Bringing
derived breadfruit in Melanesia and Polynesia. it into sharper focus will keep us breadfruit
Much more remains to be learned about the botanists plying the Pacific for years to come. OU

December 2003/January 2004 NATURAL HISTORY 51

 , Nj D

A Mississippi refuge
preserves a bird
and its habitat.

By Robert H. Mohlenbrock Mississippi sandhill cranes, an endangered subspecies

7 ith their stately stature, visitor can always see native shrubs eth century, however, lumber compa-
wingspreads as broad as and trees along the entrance road, or nies systematically harvested longleaf
eight feet, loud calls, and follow the Dees Nature Trail that pines from the savannas and planted
elaborate courtship dances, cranes are leads through a savanna and along an slash pines to supply the paper indus-
among the most impressive birds in open water marsh. In addition, Scott try. The companies suppressed fire
the world. Two species are native to Hereford, the lead biologist at the and improved the drainage, to favor
North America, the whooping crane refuge, and his colleagues have created the growth of the slash pines. Other
(Grus americana) and the sandhill crane an informative video about the his- industries, joined by vacationers and
(G. canadensis). Whooping cranes, tory of the cranes and their environ- retirees, swelled the surrounding
whose population fell to just sixteen ment, which plays at the Visitor towns and further impinged on the
birds in 1941, now number about Center. The following account is savanna habitat. By 1972, when they
300, thanks to a much publicized based on information provided by were designated a separate subspecies,
conservation effort. Nevertheless, Hereford and the refuge staff. Mississippi sandhill cranes had been
they still teeter on the edge of extinc- At one time Mississippi sandhill reduced to a single, isolated, non-mi-
tion. Sandhill cranes, which number cranes probably frequented marshes grating population near Biloxi that
more than half a million, would seem and savannas all the way from southern numbered only about thirty birds, in-
to be in much better shape. Yet there Louisiana to the Florida panhandle. cluding just five or six nesting pairs.
are six subspecies of sandhill crane, A savanna 1s a grassland scattered with Fortunately they soon became bene-
and not all are thriving. The rarest, trees, a combination that often sug- ficiaries of the Federal Endangered
the Mississippi sandhill crane (G. gests a manicured parkland. But the Species Act of 1973:
canadensis pulla), is the focus of an- savannas along the coast of the Gulf It was a close call: Interstate
other concerted conservation eftort, of Mexico were hardly parks; rather, Highway 10 was slated to pass
now under way at the Mississipp1 they owed their existence to acidic, through the only remaining habitat
Sandhill Crane Wildlife Refuge poorly drained soils and frequent nat- for the birds. Construction was held
northeast of Biloxi, Mississippi. ural fires, which suppressed shrubs and up while a federal court case was
Because this subspecies is listed as most trees except for longleaf pines. heard, the first under the 1973 law.
endangered, only a limited area of the Because the grasses attracted game As part of the settlement, the
refuge is open to the public. The best animals and were suitable for cattle Department of Transportation pur-
opportunities to view the cranes come grazing, Native Americans and early chased 1,960 acres adjacent to one of
in January and February, when the settlers kept the savannas intact by set- the interchanges and along the con-
refuge offers tours to blinds overlook- ting fires themselves. necting road to protect some lands
ing areas where the birds feed. The Around the middle of the twenti- from development. Although the

52 | NATURAI HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

 highway was built, this their offspring are maintained in
acreage became part of captive flocks; others are released. = Mississippi Sandhill Crane
"National Wildlife R
the refuge when it was Precautions are taken to make sure
established in 1975. that the ones to be released remain
wary of people. Some are reared in
he refuge, which pens by captive foster parents. Others
covers some thirty are hand-reared, but human contact
square miles, is the is minimized through the use of one-
object of a long-term way glass and full-body bird disguises.
restoration project. Tame young birds are kept in adjacent
Through prescribed pens, so that the hand-reared birds
burning, fire is once will be familiar with other members
again suppressing the of their species. O memes
miles
4
MISSISSIPP] SOUND
growth of invasive The juvenile captive birds bound For visitor information, contact:
shrubs. In areas too for release are shipped to Mississippi Mississippi Sandhill Crane
wet for fire to be ef- after about a month, and they National Wildlife Refuge
fective, unwanted quickly learn to fit in with the refuge 7200 Crane Lane
shrubs and trees are population. Now about a hundred Gautier, MS 39553
228-497-6322
cleared by hand or by Mississippi sandhill cranes live in the
http://mississippisandhillcrane.fws.gov
machine. Several refuge or on adjacent land, including
ponds have also been about twenty-five breeding pairs—
created for the cranes though without the captive-breeding Wet depressions in the savannas are
to roost near, replacing program, the population still could home to various sedges and rushes
some of the many marshes that were not sustain itself. and a few small trees of poison
drained years ago. sumac. Because the soil is acidic and
Mississippi sandhill cranes make infertile, some plants are carnivo-
their nests on the ground, primarily rous, supplementing their diets by
in the savannas, on the borders of trapping small insects. Among them
narrow swamps, and on the edges of are a bladderwort, a butterwort, two
small ponds. The cranes, which usu- kinds of pitcher plant, and three
ally mate for life, become sexually kinds of sundew.
mature at about age three, but they
often do not become parents until Open marsh Sandweed grows exten-
two or three years later. Both parents sively beneath bald cypress, pond cy-
share in building the nests, incubat- press, swamp bay, swamp-tupelo, and
ing the eggs, and caring for the other trees. Nonwoody plants in or
chicks. During the nesting season, in Yellow pitcher plants in bloom near the water include arrow arum,
spring and early summer, the female bulltongue arrowhead, foxtail club
usually lays just two eggs, which HABITATS moss, golden club, Jamaica swamp
hatch in thirty days. The chicks can saw grass, pipewort, royal fern, tall
swim the same day they hatch. Two Savanna Principal grasses that grow pinebarren milkwort, and several
days later the chicks can accompany beneath the longleaf pine are Beyrich kinds of sedges and rushes.
their parents into the savanna, and by threeawn, bushy bluestem, cutover
the time the young birds, called colts, muhly, little bluestem, and toothache Shrub border Among the native
are between seventy-five and ninety grass. Colorful spring wildflowers in- shrubs along the entrance road are
days old, they have learned to fly. clude candyroot, several meadow black titi, five kinds of holly (da-
Unlike many birds, the young cranes beauties, Osceola’s plume, pale hoon, gallberry, large gallberry, myr-
remain with their parents until the grasspink, rose pogonia orchid, south- tle-leaved holly, and yaupon),
next nesting season. ern colicroot, tuberous grasspink, yel- leatherwood, two kinds of wax myr-
Parent birds rarely succeed in low colicroot, and yellow milkwort. tle, two kinds of wild blueberry, and
rearing both of their chicks. Con- Showing off in autumn are blazing a wild huckleberry.
sequently, since 1965, some of the star, bristleleaf chafthead, goldcrest,
“extra” eggs have been taken to out- redroot, two kinds of native sun- Robert H. Mohlenbrock is professor emeritus
of-state wildlife centers to be hatched flower, woolly sunbonnets, and several ofplant biology at Southern Ilinois University
in captivity. Some of these birds and species ofyellow-eyed grasses. in Carbondale.

|
December 2003/January 2004 NATURAL HISTORY |53
 Gifted in Science
For the young readers in your life
By Diana Lutz

FOR SMALL PEOPLE males). Two scientists served as expert started over, she had seven years of re-
Fireflies at Midnight, by Marilyn Singer; consultants for this simple but pleasing search at her disposal. They weren’t
illustrated by Ken Robbins (Atheneum narrative, which ends with “Tarantula wasted. The Queen’s Progress 1s not just
Books for Young Readers, April 2003; an alphabet book; it’s also a brief his-
$16.95) tory of a “progress” (the royal version
Fireflies at Midnight describes the of a summer trip), a murder (or near-
everyday lives of common animals on murder) mystery, and a seek-and-find
a summer's day. The day begins with book (the queen’s three small rescuers
a robin’s wake-up call and ends with a appear in many of the illustrations).
mole’s droning lullaby. On each two- Because of its complex layering, the
page spread a short poem faces a pho- book will stand up to many readings.
tograph of an animal that has been Bagram Ibatoulline’s illustrations are
done in the style of Elizabethan state
portraits; the courtiers’ elaborately
decorated clothing is rendered more
realistically than their faces.
Facts.’ The real draw, though, 1s Hen-
rik Drescher, whose off-the-wall illus- FoR MEDIUM-SIZE PEOPLE
trations make the tarantula a lovable The Man Who Made Time Travel, by
(though admittedly “harry”) old crank. Kathryn Lasky; illustrated by Kevin
Hawkes (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April
The Queen’s Progress: An Elizabe- 2003; $17.00)
than Alphabet, by Celeste Davidson John Harrison, an uneducated but
Mannis; illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline persevering clock maker, devoted a
manipulated to look like a painting. (Viking, May 2003; $16.99) lifetime to inventing a mechanism that
Parents will enjoy reading the verses, Celeste Mannis unabashedly admits would keep accurate time at sea. He
which expertly mimic an animal’s that The Queen’s Progress, an ABC thus solved “the longitude problem,”
song or the rhythm of its motion, book, began life as a long historical making it possible for sailors to avoid
from the frog’s “baron I’m the baron” novel. But when she finally threw out shipwreck by determining their east-
to the firefly’s “Come/ (flash) /Choose her thousand-page manuscript and west position when they were out of
me (flash flash).” sight of land. Since the 1995 publica-
tion of Longitude, Dava Sobel’s best-
An Interview with Harry the Taran- selling book on the topic for adults,
tula, by Leigh Ann Tyson; illustrated by the story of Harrison and his clock has
Henrik Drescher (National Geographic, slowly worked its way to more and
September 2003; $15.95) more elementary reading levels.
Radio host Katy Did interviews Here Harrison appears once again
Harry Spyder about his recent trau- (somewhat umprobably) in a superb
matic encounter with a human. As is picture book by an award-winning au-
the annoying habit of interviewers thor and an equally accomplished
everywhere, she delves into Harry’s artist. The continually varying integra-
love life (he must transfer his web sack tion of text and art in The Man Who
of sperm to a female, but he’s afraid Made Time Tiavel is a book-lover’s de-
of female spiders because they eat hight, and its luminous and whimsical

54 NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

paintings portray even wizened gov- with cold water, add one tablespoon
ernment officials and the mechanical of vinegar, and boil for five minutes). I
innards of clocks in a warm and tested it several times in the course of
friendly glow. This is another Kathryn writing these reviews.
Lasky and Kevin Hawkes collabora-
tion; their first, The Librarian Who Horseshoe Crabs and Shorebirds: The
Measured the Earth (1994), was selected Story of a Food Web, by Victoria Cren-
by the School Library Journal as a “best son; illustrated by Annie Cannon (Marshall
book” of the year, and this one de- Cavendish Corp., October 2003; $16.95)
serves similar accolades. The horseshoe crab is the most
Parents of older children might want pope); and tricks of various kinds child-friendly of animals: slow
to consider The Longitude Prize, a book (how to magnetize a walnut, how to enough to be caught, about the right
for young adults by Joan Dash, pub- climb through a playing card). All this size and weight to be carried, fierce-
esoterica 1s punctuated by full-size looking but harmless, spectacularly
game boards for obscure games and alien, and (if dead) the possessor of a
instructions for playing them. truly magnificent reek. But this gentle
The editors remark that they were book coaxes children to think beyond
not able to test all of the ideas since the beast itself. Every spring, the
“none of [us] was prepared to volun- crabs’ mass beaching and egg laying
teer for mummification.” Accordingly, become a great ege feast for starving
they don’t promise that all the ideas shorebirds on the wing northward,
really work. They doubt, for instance, from Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.
that Aristotle ever managed to mea- The names of the feeding migrators—
sure a flea’s leaps by dipping its legs in red knots and ruddy turnstones—trip
lished in 2000 (Farrar, Straus & wax. I can vouch, however, for the off the tongue in lyrical sentences
Giroux). It supplies more of the histor- method of cleaning a burned pot (fill crafted for their sound as well as their
ical context for the longitude problem,
and explains how historians know
what is known about Harrison. The
book is embellished with witty line
drawings and cleverly decorated initial
capitals, both by DuSan Petricié.

How to Hold a Crocodile: Plus Hun-

dreds of Other Practical Tips, Fasci-
nating Facts and Wicked Wisdom, by
The Diagram Group (Firefly Books, Sep-
tember 2003; $19.95)
Children of a certain age spend
enormous amounts of time trying to
figure out what adults are up to by
reading Ripley’ Believe It or Not!, The
Big Book of Big Secrets, Life’s Imponder-
ables, and other outlandish guides to
adult life, apparently under the illusion Head to Alabama’s beautiful Gulf Coast, where you'll not only find
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(how to choose the appropriate glass, closer by Elbe Meee te
ORANGE BEACH ALABAMA
how to get an audience with the
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 :
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 Annie Cannon’s watercol- entist notices something odd, follows about Walter Reed and about the
laughing gulls surrounding the clues, tests a hypothesis through Panama Canal, are only a srnall part of
ext in sinuous S-shaped curves, experiment, and eventually uncovers the last chapter of An American Plague.
for instance—similarly combine accu- a surprising hidden connection or an Written from a disabused modern
racy with poetry. Victoria Crenson unsuspected association. One scien- perspective, American Plague points out
confines to an author’s note the tist, for instance, wonders why female that reservoirs of yellow fever remain
gloomy observation that fewer and ithomiine butterflies are following intact in monkeys (thus making its
fewer crabs are returning to spawn, swarms of army ants. After several elimination unlikely); that there is stall
thus freeing children to revel in the false leads, he discovers that butterflies no cure for the disease once it 1s con-
joy of the horseshoe crabs’ spectacular are using the ants to locate birds. tracted; and that stocks of the vaccine
spring celebration. Why? The bird droppings are a good are limited.
source of the nitrogen that the butter- But Jim Murphy’s powerful ac-
For NEARLY GROWN PEOPLE flies need to produce eggs. count is primarily a social history. No
Close to Shore: The Terrifying Shark Much ecology writing for children one knew at the time how yellow
Attacks of 1916, by Michael Capuzzo is dull, second-hand, and sermoniz- fever was transmitted or how it might
(Crown Publishing Group, April 2003; ing. Susan Quinlan, a biologist her- be controlled, and those uncertainties
$16.95) self, reads the primary literature and exposed the fault lines of eighteenth-
An adaptation of Michael Ca- talks to the scientists whose work she century Philadelphia society. Murphy
puzzo’s 2001 adult nonfiction best describes. She is among a handful of discusses the role of black societies in
seller, Close to Shore tells the true story nursing the sick; the famous case of
of the rogue shark that killed three Dr. Rush, who believed so blindly in
men and a boy along the Atlantic his own cure (bleeding) that he al-
coast early in the twentieth century. It most killed himself with it; the im-
also breaks most of the rules of nature probable heroism of “a grogshop
writing. The shark is not a magnifi- man” named Israel Israel; and even
cent apex predator, but a kind of the impact of yellow fever on foreign
ichthyologic serial killer. Transgressing policy: George Washington had trou-
the ideal of objectivity, Capuzzo ble making decisions because his pa-
imagines the state of mind of the pers had been left” behind¥m
swimmers and, even more daringly, “boarded-up houses” when he fled
that of the shark. He even writes in an the stricken town.
ornate style similar to that of contem- children’s writers who manage to
porary newspaper accounts. capture the passion, beauty, and joy of Those planning gifts for almost-grown-up
But though he’s dancing on a high the scientific pursuit. Quinlan’s books readers should also consider The Longi-
wire, Capuzzo never falls off. He did are also characterized by her unusual tude Prize, noted in the review of The
the hard work needed to re-create respect for a young audience. She is Man Who Made Time Travel, above.
not just the events but also the tex- careful to be clear, but at the same
ture of the time. He read medical and time she assumes children can follow FOR GROWN PEOPLE WITH CHILD-
scientific journals, novels, plays, and the scientists’ arguments, that they LIKE CURIOSITY
love poems from the era, in addition will be interested, not bored, and that The Tree of Life: Charles Darwin, by
to hundreds of newspaper accounts they will value nature as much as she Peter Sis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
of the events and several hundred clearly does. Above all, she does not October 2003; $18.00)
books about sharks. More important, lecture or seek to place on small Starry Messenger, Peter Sis’s earlier
he has the storyteller’s gift. Close to shoulders the burden of solving the book about Galileo, had a bold and
Shore starts slowly, but it becomes a crushing environmental problems our simple story to tell, and a clear struc-
driving and nearly unstoppable generation has created. ture: the Inquisition quenched the
freight train of a tale. stars in Galileo’s eyes but could not put
An American Plague: The True and out the ones in his mind. The Tiee of
The Case of the Monkeys That Fell Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Life, Sis’s story of Darwin, is more
from the Trees: And Other Mysteries Epidemic of 1793, by Jim Murphy mufHed and difficult—as was the man
in Tropical Nature, by Susan E. Quin- (Clarion Books, June 2003; $17.00) himself. After a youth spent under his
lan (Boyds Mills Press, March 2003; Children’s books about the history father’s thumb, Darwin escaped on the
PL One)) of medicine tend to be guilty of old- HMS Beagle, but on returning to Eng-
Twelve ecological mysteries are set fashioned scientific triumphalism. But land he fell into procrastination and ill
in tropical forests. In each case a sci- the usual yellow-fever stories, the ones health. He was only stirred to publish

58 NATURAI HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

his famous theory years later, when
another naturalist was about to beat For the Coftee Table
him to the punch.
Both Sis’s books are layered mys- By Laurence A. Marschall
teries, with clue upon clue buried in
delicate marginal illustrations and he holiday season is supposed to book’s picture-a-day format, with
spiraling quotations that slow the offer some time for quiet reflec- images ranging from amateur snap-
skimmer and coax the hasty reader tion. Gift givers, well aware of the ab- shots of streaking comets to views of
into thought. In Starry Messenger the sence of such occasions in their own distant galaxies made by the Hubble
lives, still imagine that the lives of Space Telescope, provides a better
their friends and family are not so wake-up than a strong cup of black
constrained by reality. Here, then, is a coffee. You can augment each entry
highly selective listing for holiday with a picture from the book’s
shoppers of some of the finest coffee- mother Web site, Astronomy Picture
table books published in 2003 on sci- of the Day (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.
ence and nature. gov/apod/astropix.html), which has
been serving up this mind-enhancing
The Universe: 365 Days, by Robert J. fare daily since the mid-1990s.
Nemiroff
and Jerry T: Bonnell (Harry N. For an equally stirring view in the
Abrams, Inc., June 2003; $29.95) opposite direction, try the companion
Earth from Above: 366 Days, pho- volume, Earth from Above: 366 Days. A
tographs by Yann Arthus-Bertrand (Harry continuation of the French photogra-
N. Abrams, Inc., December 2003; $29.95) pher Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s ten-
With its uplifting views of space, year-long photographic and environ-
mysteries were solvable with the along with brief commentaries by mental project (represented in two
clues at hand. But in The Tiee of Life two veteran astronomers, The Uni- previous volumes), the book show-
the clues are too subtle and too verse: 365 Days conveys the immen- cases 200 of his new photographs.
learned. Unless you already know the sity and richness of the cosmos. The The aerial images present both famil-
intellectual history of the nineteenth
century, you will lose yourself in the
details, like Darwin on the sand path A Celebration of the World’s Barrier photographs illustrate each geological
he made at Down House, “thinking, Islands, by Orrin H. Pilkey; batiks by peculiarity that the text brings into
thinking, thinking.” Mary Edna Fraser (Columbia Univer- focus, but the most remarkable im-
Even the theory of evolution, pre- sity Press, June 2003; $44.95) ages in the book are the batiks created
sented on the book’s only foldout, is Some 2,200 barrier islands fringe
somehow smothered by the fact that the world’s coastlines, but that num-
it is expressed in quotations from the ber is constantly subject to revision.
heavily coded language of Origin of Nibbled at by storms and gobbled up
Species. And compared with Starry by tsunamis, barrier islands are among
Messenger’s bright defiance, The Tree the most rapidly changing geological
of Life has a much more melancholy features on Earth. Without frequent
tone. Galileo under house arrest was replenishment by sand and gravel they
freer than Darwin was, in the prison can disappear entirely, and new ones
of his own mind. As the pages grow are constantly forming. Orrin Pilkey,
grayer, Darwin turns to investigating a professor emeritus of geology at
the formation of vegetable mold, Duke University in Durham, North
and becomes increasingly isolated Carolina, provides an informative
behind his cloak and beard. Sis’s guide to the wheres and wherefores by Mary Edna Fraser. Her overflights
Darwin is not for children, I think, of barrier islands—from the vacation of shorelines in the open cockpit of
but it would make a wonderful gift meccas off the east coast of North her grandfather’s 1946 Ercoupe air-
for the right adult. America, to the exotic carbonate plane provided the inspiration for
archipelagos of Mozambique, to the dyed fabrics that capture the delicate
Diana Lutz keeps an eye on children’s litera- ice-battered slivers of tundra that line shapes and shadings of these evanes-
ture for her daughter Emily. She is also the ed- the Arctic Ocean. Aerial and satellite cent landforms.
itor of Muse, a science magazine for children.

December 2003/January 2004 NATURAL HISTORY 59

 otic scenes, but all appear composed black-and-white images pany its spectacular ultra-close-ups,
ing from the vantage point of a that recall the classic pictorialism of which showcase the technical virtu-
hovering bird (most were shot from the 1920s. His tight focus on faces, osity attainable with digital printing
helicopters). It is sobering, in some made possible because his subjects and scanning (the latter at resolutions
cases, to see how much the hand of knew him so well, conveys a genuine of 2,000 to 14,000 pixels per inch).
man has altered the face of nature. sense of intimacy. Most striking of all A luna moth, Actias luna, whose
the features, though, are the eyes.
My Family Album: Thirty Years of Apes and monkeys make eye contact
Primate Photography, text and pho- with each other and with the camera,
tographs by Frans de Waal (University of just as people sometimes do.
California Press, October 2003; $29.95) In brief paragraphs accompanying
Frans de Waal, a perceptive prima- the photographs de Waal tells the
tologist and an eloquent writer, has story behind each look and gesture.
made a career of studying the social He obviously has great love for the
apes and monkeys he’s known, and his
pictures and anecdotes invite the
reader to feel, rightly, that primates are wing coloration camouflages it against
members of our own extended family. leaves and stems from a distance, be-
comes so large on these pages that it
Night Visions: The Secret Designs of looks like a carpet of green grass, cov-
Moths, by Joseph Scheer (Prestel, De- ered inexplicably with rich tufts of
cember 2003; $45.00) whitish hairlike scales and two decora-
A few pages of technical notes by tive ferns (the moth’s antennae). Euclea
artist Joseph Scheer on the repro- delphinii, a nondescript brown insect,
interactions of apes and monkeys in duction of his photographs, along turns out on close inspection to be as
zoos around the world. In three with essays by lepidopterist Marc Ep- soft, plump, and fuzzy as a teddy bear.
decades of fieldwork he also made, by stein and media specialist Johanna A copy of this brilliant book on your
his own estimate, some 50,000 pho- Drucker, make up nearly all the text coffee table will cause as much ofastir
tographs. My Family Album is a sam- in this mammoth and colorful book. as an unshielded porch light on a sum-
pling of his favorites: 128 elegantly Not much else is needed to accom- mer evening.

Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey

De Historia Stirpium Commentarii highly regarded for the fine detail of of Humankind, by Randall White (Harry
Insignes (Notable commentaries on the its woodcuts. Now, with the magic of N. Abrams, Inc., June 2003; $45.00)
history of plants), by Leonhart Fuchs modern digital imagery, it is possible Before there was writing—in other
(Basel, 1542: Octavo Editions, Septem- to zoom in on every stem of hy- words, for most of humanity’s occu-
ber 2003, CD-ROM ed.; $30.00) acinth, every leaf of gentian. For pancy of this planet—there was art.
Few gift givers have the resources book collectors with other interests, Buxom figurines of the mother god-
to purchase a_ sixteenth-century Octavo Editions (octavo.com) also dess, reindeer antlers incised with
herbal for the book collector or gar- offers a large variety of rare and hunting scenes, and images of woolly
dener on their list. Oc- highly sought-after t- mammoths scratched into the calcite
tavo Editions has the tles—from an original walls of caves endure as records of the
solution. Here, on one Mercator world atlas to sensibilities of early Homo sapiens.
compact disk, is a com- Josiah Dwight Whit- But such representations are still
plete facsimile of the ney’s 1868 Yosemite Book - deeply mysterious: the mind-set of
first edition of one (the latter includes their creators is so distant, so alien to
by Leonhart Fuchs, plus twenty-eight early albu- modern culture, that the temptation is
notes and comimen-— men prints of one of to view them as merely beautiful, or as
tary by the botanical America’s most popular mere charms to ensure a successful
historian Karen Reeds. landmarks). All the fac- hunt, or as mere expressions of primi-
Considered a landmark similes are available, of tive superstition. Randall White, a pro-
in scientific illustration course, for thousands of fessor of anthropology at New York
when it appeared, dollars less than the paper University, is a thoroughly literate
Fuchs’s book is. still or parchment originals. modern, but he is also an ardent stu-
dent of ice-age archaeology. His magis-

60 NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

terial survey of prehistoric paintings
nature.net
and sculptures attempts to evoke the Sea and culture. To find out how we
voices of their anonymous creators. project ourselves nowadays onto the
The book’s handsome color pho-
tographs convey beauty and drama, but Mars on My Mind barren surface of the planet, check
out “Face on Mars” and “Cydonia
without such an able interpreter as Research,” available by choosing
White, the artworks would not speak By Robert Anderson the NSF “Archive” page of the
authentically for themselves. e-journal New Frontiers in Science
A Mars was making its much- (www.newfrontiersinscience.com/index.
Extraordinary Pigeons, by Stephen publicized close approach to shtml). Be sure to “Access high reso-
Green-Armytage (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Earth recently, I often looked up at lution animated content” by clicking
October 2003; $24.95) the southern sky at night and, in my on the hypertext. For those who
City dwellers regard pigeons as fly- imagination, tracked the Red daydream of actually setting foot on
ing rats, creatures whose insatiable ap- Planet’s movements. No telescope Mars, I recommend Explore Mars
petite for crumbs is matched only by needed: I could see the disk in my Now (www.exploremarsnow.org). The
their marksmanship in public defeca- mind’s eye. I felt its presence. Now, site’s interactive habitat lets you walk
with the imminent landings in around the first Mars “space base,’
January of the two NASA rovers, and hints at the difficulties of sur-
Spirit and Opportunity, I can imag- vival there.
ine myself closer still to Mars—a Perhaps the best overall introduc-
virtual geologist traversing the rocky tion to the planet can be found at
terrain of a hostile, alien planet. Windows to the Universe (www.
Earthbound explorers like me windows.ucar.edu/). After entering
haven’t had a show like this since the site, choose “Mars” from the
NASA posted the exploits of its extensive highlighted list. A good
1997 Mars Pathfinder rover, causing, place to begin is “Tour Mars!” To
at the time, the biggest “hit blizzard” dig deeper into the details of the
on a single Web site in Internet his- Martian surface, try the clickable
tory. Once again space buffs can tag atlas (www.roving-mouse.com/plane
along via the space agency’s Web tary/Mars/Atlas/clickable-globe.html).
tion. Yet the pigeon family, Colum- site, Mars Exploration Rover Mis- And if there’s a place on Mars you’ve
bidae, is one of the most adaptable sion. (mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/overview). got your heart set on seeing, go to
avian populations on Earth. So ancient Surf the menu bar below the title to the site of the Mars Global Surveyor
is their domestication that Darwin acquaint yourself with what’s avail- (mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs). The satellite
(who kept a well-stocked dovecote at able for your trip at this site. And began orbiting and photographing
his country estate) considered the se- preview the entire mission through the Red Planet in 1997, and so far
lective breeding of pigeons a paradigm its spectacular series of animations has taken more than 120,000 pic-
of the evolutionary process. (under the “Multimedia” list, from tures. Yet those photographs cover
Stephen Green-Armytage’s pho- the menu bar, click on “Video” and only about 3 percent of the planet.
tographs of avian finery have the chic then on “Animation”). This past September NASA began
detachment of high-fashion portrai- Before your departure, take a look taking requests from the public for
ture: a Jacobin winks coyly from the at how the image of our most allur- areas to be imaged, and posting them
folds of its hood, like a model ing celestial neighbor has changed monthly at the site (look for “Public
wrapped in a feather boa; a white with time. Go to Planet Mars in Requested Image”).
pigmy pouter poses erect and proud, Popular Culture (humbabe.arc.nasa. The image I found most moving,
with a puffed-up chest of olympian gov/mgcem/fun/pop.html), a site put though (mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/sci/
proportions. Even jaded urbanites will together by David Catling of NASA earth/index.html), was not of Mars
be charmed by the extravagance of Ames Research Center, and scroll at all, but showed what the first
these feathered queens. down through Mars-themed novels, people living there would see if
radio shows, and movies. A sister they looked back at. their home
Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Su-
site, Planet Mars Chronology (hum planet with a decent telescope.
pernova Story, is the WK. T? Sahm professor
ofphysics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylva- babe.arc.nasa.gov/mgcm/fun/mars_
nia, and director of Project CLEA, which pro- chro.html), offers a time line of the Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer
duces widely used simulation software for edu- Red Planet’s influence on science living in Los Angeles.
cation in astronomy.

December 2003/January 2004 NATURAL HISTORY 61

|
 HERE
ERTS

Ss tar B aby

T’ Tauri shows that a stellar nursery can be

a rough-and-tumble place to live.
By Charles Liu

ence between a baby only a few days

old and a middle-aged adult. Although
people of both ages are alike in having
head, limbs, and torso, their behavior
and physical development bear hardly
any resemblance at all. Much the same
is true for a novice star like T Tauri and
a middle-aged star like our Sun.
Like a human baby, a stellar baby is
unpredictable. When Hind discoy-
ered T Tauri, it was shining at about
magnitude ten—roughly one-fiftieth
the brightness visible with the un-
aided eye. In the following forty
years, though, the star gradually
dimmed by 98 percent, then, inex-
plicably, it started brightening again.
Winslow Homer, Snap the Whip, 1872 Today it’s about as bright as it was
when Hind first saw it. The star is still
inconstant, however; modern mea-
n 1852 the English astronomer Tauri, in the past 150 years. Among surements show that, even from one
John Russell Hind, exploring the the most significant discoveries has day to the next, T Tauri’s brightness
constellation Taurus through his been that T Tauri was part ofa multi- can change by as much as half its typ-
telescope, found a dim star that wasn’t ple birth: astronomers identified a ical output. Although the causes of
noted on his charts. The new star, second star in the system in 1981 and the variation remain unclear, the star’s
named T Tauri, has since become a third star in 1997. Another study, interaction with the gassy, dusty envi1-
something ofa minor celebrity among made early in 2003, suggested that a ronment in which it was born cer-
astronomers. It owes its fame primar- close encounter between the second tainly plays a big role.
ily to its status as a stellar ingenue: it’s and third star, acting as a kind of grav- An infant star, like a baby, also is
Just a million or so years old, which, itational slingshot, had hurled the hungry. T Tauri is so young that the
for a star about as massive as the Sun, third star out of the system. Now a nuclear fusion of hydrogen into he-
is very young indeed. Nowadays all research team led by Elise Furlan, an lum, which makes mature stars shine,
stars of similar age and mass are astronomer at Cornell University in hasn’t even begun. Without nuclear
known as T Tauri stars; they’re im- Ithaca, New York, has discovered fusion, the star’s luminosity depends
mensely important because they af- that, if the slingshot hypothesis is true, on gravity: matter falling onto the
ford astronomers a chance to study, by the T Tauri system probably includes stellar surface from the surrounding
inference, the early history of our own a fourth object, too. gas cloud glows as it accelerates; and
solar system and Sun, born more than the protostellar gas ball, as it collapses
four and a half billion years ago. Tauri is about two one-hun- inward from its own weight, also be-
\stronomers have learned a lot dredths ofa percent the age of our comes hot enough to glow. Plenty of
about this stellar baby, the original T Sun. That’s approximately the differ- power is generated as a consequence,

62 |NATURAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

enough to make T Tauri shine, but that such systems, with several young tions of South-A and South-B to ac-
the energy isn’t as steady and pre- stars in close orbit about one another, curacies of better than ten milliarcsec-
dictable as nuclear fusion. The thick might occasionally fling one of their onds. That’s about 1/400,000 ofa de-
clouds still swirling around the star components out of the system in a gi- gree of arc, or the apparent diameter
further accentuate the swings in lumi- gantic gravitational game of crack-the- of a penny at a distance of 200 miles.
nosity. As T Tauri consumes the mat- whip. High-precision radio astronomy After the radio observations were
ter around it, it grows in mass and in observations made in early 2001 sug- published, and they compared that
energy output, often spitting up gested that the stars in T Tauri were data with their own, however, Furlan’s
swirling streams of energetic particles doing just that: South-B seemed to be group realized that South-B isn’t the
called T Tauri winds. exiting the system, after having swung star moving along the crack-the-whip
around South-A in a curlicue path trajectory after all. It is apparently still
@ ne big difference, though, be- during the past two decades. orbiting South-A. Nevertheless, the
tween human and stellar child- Furlan and her collaborators aimed Furlan team doesn’t suspect that the
birth is the frequency of twins and the 200-inch Hale Telescope, at the earlier data were faulty. On the con-
triplets. A woman’s chances of bear- Palomar observatory in California, at trary, they think those measurements
ing twins are typically about one in a the system not to investigate the grav- actually detected a fourth body in the
hundred. But astronomers think that itational slingshot, but to study T T Tauri system. That body, tentatively
as many as two-thirds of all new stars Tauris circumstellar environment. named South-C, is probably being5
are born as binaries or multiples. T (The radio data had not yet been pub- ejected after a close encounter with
Tauri was no exception. As I noted lished when the Furlan team began South-B.
earlier, at least three components have their work.) Using an infrared camera
been identified, known as North, fitted with adaptive optics designed to f that interpretation holds up, the
South-A (the 1981 discovery), and cancel out the distorting effects of gravitational “flinger’—T Tauri
South-B (1997). Earth’s atmosphere, the astronomers South-B—1is too faint in radio waves
Astronomers have long suspected were able to plot the apparent posi- to be detected with radio telescopes,

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 the» “finsee ——1 = Laurs clouds of gas and stellar winds, with
C—1is too faint to be seen in another large body thrown in—and STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP
infrared light. What does that say being thrown out—for good measure. Statement of Ownership, Management, and Cir-
about South-C? One possibility is that That’s quite a commotion for a star at culation (required by 39 U.S.C. 3685). Publication
South-C isn’t a star at all, but rather a the dawn of its life. Name: Natural History. Publication Number:
374-800. Filing Date: October 31, 2003. Issue
brown dwarf, though it could be an Frequency: Monthly, with combined issues in De-
ordinary, low-mass young star. Charles Liu is a professor of astrophysics cember/January and July/August. Number of Is-
So imagine, if you will: a bright at the City University of New York and sues Published Annually: Ten. Annual Subscription
young star, orbited by two other an associate with the American Museum Price: $30. Complete Mailing Address of Office of
young stars, all swaddled in swirling of Natural History. Publication and General Business Office: Ameri-
can Museum of Natural History, Central Park
West at 79th Street, New York, NY 10024-5192.
Publisher: Brendan R. Banahan; Editor in Chief:
gtaBao Key, IN DECEMBER AND JANUARY
Peter G. Brown, American Museum of Natural
History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New
By Joe Rao York, NY 10024-5192. Owner: Natural History
Mercury sets dur- In January, Venus, gleaming at mag- Magazine, Inc., Central Park West at 79th Street,
New York, NY 10024-5192. Stockholders: Peter
ing twilight in nitude —4, ascends dramatically higher,
G. Brown, 310 W. 85th St., #7A, New York, NY
December and is its sunset altitude increasing to 33 de- 10024; Exeter Capital Partners IV, LP, 10 E. 53rd
barely visible all grees by month’s end. Seen through a St., New York, NY 10022; Todd Happer, 271 W.
month. It passes telescope, Venus wanes from nearly 47th St., #17J, New York, NY 10036; Charles E.
between the Sun full to more definitely gibbous. But Harris, 813 Churchill Dr., Chapel Hill, NC

and the Earth on the naked-eye view of the planet 27517; Charles Lalanne, 2680 Congress St., Fair-
field, CT 06824; Robert E. Marks, 5 Greenwich
the 26th. streaking across half of Capricornus
Office Park, Greenwich, CT 06831; David W.
In January, however, the planet puts and most of Aquarius as the month Niemiec, 535 Madison Ave., New York, NY
on an excellent show. Mercury 1s low progresses is the really exciting specta- 10022. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and
in the east-southeastern sky at dawn; cle. On the 24th Venus and the cres- other security holders owning or holding 1 per-
look for it an hour before sunrise. cent Moon virtually replicate their cent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages,
Find ruddy Antares in the constella- Christmas-night encounter. or other securities: None. Tax Status: N.A. Publi-
cation Title: Natural History. Issue Date for Circu-
tion Scorpius; Mercury is below and
lation Data Below: October 2003. Extent and Na-
to the left of the star, and becomes in- Mars, fading after its autumnal glory, is ture of Circulation. Average number copies of each
creasingly distant from it as the month near its highest point in the sky at issue during preceding 12 months: A. Total average
progresses. The little planet shines at evening twilight and sets at about number of copies printed: 271,943. B. Paid circu-
magnitude —0.2 between the 17th midnight. In December the planet, lation: 1, Paid outside-county mail subscriptions:
and the 24th and brightens through shining south of both Pisces (the 234,682. 2. Paid in-county mail subscriptions: 0. 3.
Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors,
the rest of the month. Unfortunately, fishes) and the square of Pegasus (the counter sales, and other non-USPS paid distribu-
the early morning is brightening as winged horse), progresses 15 degrees tion: 5,615. 4. Other classes mailed through the
well, making the planet harder to see. eastward relative to the two constella- USPS: 100. C. Total paid circulation: 240,397. D.
tions. On the 1st Mars is 79 million Free distribution by mail: 1,329. E. Free distribu-
Venus grows progressively more con- mules from Earth and shines at magni- tion outside the mail: 3,450. E Total free distribu-
tion: 4,779. G. Total distribution: 245,176. H.
spicuous in December, a radiant tude —0.4; by New Year’s Day the
Copies not distributed: 26,767. I. Total: 271,943.J.
evening “star” in the southwest visi- planet has receded 25 million miles Percent paid circulation: 98.1%. Number copies of
ble soon after sunset. For observers at more, and dimmed to magnitude 0.2. single issue published nearest to filing date (Octo-
midnorthern latitudes, the planet be- Mars declines in brightness again, ber 2003): A. Total number of copies printed:
gins the month less than 15 degrees by another half a magnitude, during 271,828. B. Paid circulation: 1. Paid outside-
above the horizon at sunset; by New January, as the Earth’s smaller orbit county mail subscriptions: 215,479. 2. Paid in-
county mail subscriptions: 0. 3. Sales through deal-
Year's Eve, though, Venus has shifted further separates the planets. On the
ers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales, and
to 23 degrees above the horizon at evening of the 27th Mars hovers other non-USPS paid distribution: 5,540. 4. Other
sundown. Binoculars help reveal above a fat crescent Moon. classes mailed through the USPS: 100. C. Total
background stars in the twilit sky as paid circulation; 221,119. D. Free distribution by
Venus glides past the top of the Jupiter rises in the east just after mid- mail: 1,322. E. Free distribution outside the mail:
“teapot” of the constellation Sagittar- night as December begins, and at 4,411. E Total free distribution: 5,733. G. Total
distribution: 226,852. H. Copies not distributed:
1us during the first third of the about 10:15 PM. by month’s end. It’s
44,976. I. Total: 271,828.J. Percent paid: 97.5%. I
month. On Christmas night a slender shining brilliantly at magnitude —2.1 certify that all information above is true and com-
crescent Moon and Venus make for all month in the constellation Leo (the plete. Charles E. Harris, President & CEO.
an eye-catching celestial tableau. lion)—about 18 degrees east of Regu-

64 NATURAL HIS TORY December 2003/January 2004

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lus, Leo’s brightest star, at midmonth. The Gemenid Meteor Shower should The solstice takes place at 2:04 A.M. on
Regulus precedes Jupiter on their way entice even those observers faced with December 22. Winter begins in the
up the sky by about ninety minutes, mid-December cold. Now considered northern hemisphere; summer begins
but the giant planet is well worth the richest of the annual meteor show- in the southern.
waiting for: even when Jupiter is low ers (surpassing even the celebrated
in the sky, its four bright moons pre- Perseids of August), the show should The Earth reaches perihelion, its clos-
sent an ever-changing dance for the peak on the night of December est approach to the Sun, at 1:00 PM.
telescope. 13-14. You might see as many as 120 on January 4. The Sun is 91,400,172
In January giant Jupiter rises four “shooting stars” an hour—but expect mules away.
minutes earlier with each passing considerable interference from a wan-
night, and comes up just after 8 P.M. ing gibbous Moon toward morning, Unless otherwise noted, all times are given in
local time by month’s end. The planet when the meteor rates are highest. Eastern Standard Time.
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 AT THE MUSEUM
AMERICAN MUSEUM 6 NATURAL HISTORY ro)

Dr. Sacha Spector on Saving

‘the Other 99 Percent”
Sacha Spector is Inverte- as herbivores, carnivores,
brate Conservation Pro- parasites, and decomposers.
gram Manager with the They also serve as food for
Museum's Center for Biodl- mammals, birds, fish, rep-
AYZAMA
SERGIO

versity and Conservation tiles, amphibians, other inver-

(CBC). We caught up with tebrates, and even carni-
Sacha in his invertebrate vorous plants! Ecosystem
lab at the Museum, as he Is services provided by inverte-
busy gearing up for the brates—such as pollination
CBC's March symposium, of crops, soil creation and
Expanding the Ark: The aeration, decomposition, and
Emerging Science and seed dispersal—are esti-
Practice of Invertebrate mated to be worth trillions of
Conservation. dollars to our economy each
Sacha Spector doing field research in Bolivia year. It is said that over one
third of the human diet de-
Q: What exactly are invertebrates, and grades or “water bears,” chitons, and pends directly or indirectly on pollina-
why should people care about them? flatworms. As a group, invertebrates tion by insects.
Invertebrates are united by what they probably constitute 99 percent of all
don't have, namely backbones, rather animal life on Earth, so we share this Q: Invertebrates seem to suffer from an
than any shared features. If you think planet with millions of invertebrate image problem...some elicit fear, while
of the evolutionary “Tree of Life” of ani- species. others are seen as pests.
mals, vertebrates—mammals, birds, Invertebrates are essential elements Usually, we fear things we don't under-
reptiles, etc.—make up only a single of every ecosystem—they fill niches stand. One of my favorite things is get-
branch. All the other animal ting kids to look at insects with
branches are invertebrates. a microscope—one look at
CBC's Spring 2004 Symposium
So invertebrates really rep- the metallic colors of a beetle
resent the vast majority of Expanding the Ark: The Emerging Science or the reflections from a fly's
evolutionary history on and Practice of Invertebrate Conservation eye and the “eeewww” usu-
Earth. While people mostly ally turns into “cool!” As for
March 25 and 26, 2004, 9:00 a.m.—6:00 p.m.
think of insects, inverte- pests, only a tiny percentage
brates actually encompass Tickets: $100 of invertebrates are injurious,
a huge range of animals $80 Museum Members, seniors and those we're most familiar
found on land and in water. $25 students (with ID) with are generally non-native
Some of these we’re quite After Friday, February 6, 2004: $125 species introduced by hu-
familiar with, like squid, lob- $100 Museum Members, seniors mans, such as the gypsy
sters, corals, and jellyfish, $50 students (with ID) moth, Japanese beetle, and
but there's a whole universe For information or to purchase tickets, call 212-769- some types of cockroaches.
of lesser-known inverte- 5200 or visit http://research.amnh.org/biodiversity/. But every organism has its
brates out there, like tardi- function in the web of life—

THE CONTENTS OF THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED TO NATURAL HISTORY BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
 Mantis making a meal of a planthopper

even mosquitoes. Mosquito larvae are signing approaches to choosing a few Q: What can we do as individuals to
an important food source for fish and invertebrate groups about which we help conserve invertebrates?
other aquatic creatures, and the adults can quickly compile as much data as There are important things you can
feed a lot of birds and bats. possible, and then use those groups do every day. Pesticides, which often
~as “information surrogates” for inver- kill many other organisms besides the
_Q: What drew you to the study of inver- tebrate conservation planning. target pest, are a major threat to in-
tebrates? vertebrates, SO one major.. thing
NOUN TAY RV APRA RATS TARA FathSyne
My interest in invertebrates hit me (): Are inverteprates lacing NN Maket tere tants) everyone can do is to support farm-
later in life. In fact, | went off to college ats and endangerment as mam- ing without chemical pesticides by
wanting to become a professional mals, fish, and other species? choosing organic foods. In the sub-
trombonist. But | was also very con- Absolutely. The three most endan- ‘urbs and rural areas, light pollution is
cerned about the environment, and gered groups of organisms in the a concern as it attracts insects away
I've always loved the outdoors, so | United States—freshwater mussels, from their habitats, disrupts their egg
eventually changed my major to biol- crayfish, and stoneflies—are all inver- laying, mating, and feeding, and also
ogy. (Also, | quickly realized | would tebrates. Widespread threats such as makes them more susceptible to pre-
never make a great trombonist.) | did habitat loss, introduced species, and dation. You can reduce or eliminate
a few insect-related projects as an un- pollution, are rapidly driving many in- outdoor lights or, if necessary, install
dergraduate, and the more | delved vertebrate species to the edge of ex- motion detectors or use yellow lights
into biodiversity research, the more | tinction. Part of their plight lies in their that don’t attract insects. But prob-
realized that invertebrates were being very diversity—how do you plan and ably the most important thing you can
left out of the majority of conservation manage communities of organisms do is to learn about the invertebrates
efforts. My current research is related when you aren't sure what (or how that live in your area. We save what
to addressing this issue. Because in- many) you're dealing with? This is we care about, so the first step is just
vertebrates as a whole are so numer- one of the major questions that we will getting out there and learning to love
ous and diverse, and most groups are be looking at in the Expanding the the fascinating and often beautiful
poorly understood, I’m working on de- Ark symposium. creatures all around us.
 Say
‘ts
i\JSEUM EVENTS
EXHIBITIONS The Bedouin of Petra Sylvia Earle on Sustainable Seas
Through July 6, 2004 Thursday, 12/18, 7:00 p.m.
Photojournalist Vivian Ronay’s evoca- With the National Geographic Society’s
tive color photographs document the Explorer-in-Residence Sylvia Earle.
Bedoul group of Bedouin tribes living
near the archaeological site of Petra
BANERJEE
SUBHANKAR
Petra: Lost City
in Jordan. of the Nabataean People
This exhibition is made possible by the Tuesday, 1/13, 7:00 p.m.
generosity of the Arthur Ross Foundation. A panel discussion of cross-cultural
influences among the many cultures
The Butterfly Conservatory: that passed through the ancient city
Tropical Butterflies Alive in Winter of Petra.
Through May 31, 2004
The butterflies are back! This popular FAMILY AND
exhibition includes more than 500 live, CHILDREN’S PROGRAMS
free-flying tropical butterflies in an en- Architecture and Archaeology
closed tropical habitat where visitors Saturday, 12/13, or Sunday, 12/14
can mingle with them. 10:30-11:30 a.m. (Ages 4-6, each
The Butterfly Conservatory is made possible
child with one adult)
A buff-breasted sandpiper engages in a through the generous support of Bernard and 1:30-3:00 p.m. (Ages 7-9)
courtship display Anne Spitzer. Astounding Science for Families
Sunday, 12/14, 1:00-2:00 or
Seasons of Life and Land: Vietnam: 3:00-4:00 p.m.
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Journeys of Body, Mind & Spirit Casting and Model-Making
Through March 7, 2004 Through March 7, 2004 Sunday, 1/18, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Over 40 large-format color pho- Gallery 77, first floor
tographs by conservationist Sub- This comprehensive exhibition pre- GLOBAL WEEKENDS
hankar Banerjee focus on the interde- sents Vietnamese culture in the early Kwanzaa 2003
pendent relationship of land, water, 21st century. The visitor is invited to Saturday, 12/27, 12:00—6:00 p.m.
wildlife, and humanity in Alaska’s “walk in Vietnamese shoes” and ex- This soulful celebration includes activi-
Arctic Refuge. plore daily life among Vietnam’s more ties and performances for the whole
than 50 ethnic groups. family.
Petra: Lost City of Stone
Through July 6, 2004 Organized by the American Museum of Living in America:
This exhibition tells the story of a thriv- Natural History, New York, and the Vietnam The Haitian Experience
Museum of Ethnology, Hanoi. This exhibi-
ing metropolis at the crossroads of the Saturdays, 1/10, 17, and 31, and
tion and related programs are made pos-
ancient world’s major trade routes. sible by the philanthropic leadership of the Sunday, 1/18, 1:00-5:00 p.m.
Freeman Foundation. Additional generous Celebrate the 200th anniversary of
In New York, Petra: Lost City of Stone funding provided by the Ford Foundation Haiti’s independence with perfor-
is made possible by Banc of America for the collaboration between the American mances, films, and workshops.
Securities and Con Edison. The American Museum of Natural History and the Vietnam
Museum of Natural History also gratefully Museum of Ethnology. Also supported by
acknowledges the generous support of Global Weekends are made possible, in
the Asian Cultural Council. Planning grant
Lionel |. Pincus and HRH Princess Firyal part, by The Coca-Cola Company. The
provided by the National Endowment for the
and of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. American Museum of Natural History wishes
Humanities.
This exhibition is organized by the Ameri- to thank the May and Samuel Rudin Family
can Museum of Natural History, New York, Foundation, Inc., the Tolan Family, and the
and the Cincinnati Art Museum, under the
LECTURES family of Frederick H. Leonharat for their
patronage of Her Majesty Queen Rania The Saga of Life support of these programs.
Al-Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Tuesday, 12/9, 7:00 p.m.
Jordan. Air transportation generously With Nobel laureate Christian de Duve.
provided by Royal Jordanian.

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 ———— aren
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ENDPAPER
LE LO

On Thin Ice
By Kirsten Weir

grew up in rural Michigan, in a house sur-

rounded by woodlands, with a sparkling, spring-
fed lake for a backyard. In the autumn the lake
reflected the patchwork of reds and oranges from the
maple trees that ringed it. In the spring the still sur-
face mirrored the pale green of new buds. The cool
water always looked darkest then, dyed by the tannins
leached from fallen leaves during the long winter. As
warm weather came on, the water cleared.
The lake was our childhood playground, summer behest 3 sich Mlle

and winter; it embodied my sense of the seasons. M.A. Hall, Stag at Echo Rock, c. 1850
Each hot day of summer vacation I played and swam
in the water until my fingers were wrinkled prunes. toward the shore, and helped him climb the bank.
When the bitter winter winds blew in, the surface The rescue operation took more than an hour.
froze to a perfect rink. My sisters and I had strict or- When, freezing and exhausted, he finally felt
ders to stay off the ice until my father tested it and land beneath his limbs, the buck collapsed. My
pronounced it safe, but from the moment he gave mother covered him with blankets, and a neighbor
the go-ahead, we'd skate until our toes went numb. phoned the local chapter of the Humane Society
We were (most of the time) obedient children. for help. When their man arrived, he told us there
We never ventured onto the ice until permission was nothing for it but to give the deer a quick and
was granted. Other creatures were not so patient. painless death.
One winter a buck fell through the ice. No one in the rescue party was ready to consign
I don’t know who first spotted the struggling the animal to such a fate. After all, he had put up a
deer, but I remember pressing my face against the magnificent struggle. But it was my father who
living-room window that afternoon and watching flatly tetused’ to give™in, You hear ythates ihe
him thrash about, trying to regain solid ground. He shouted at the buck. “They're going to kill you.”
was a large, heavy animal, with an impressive rack He kicked the animal firmly in the rump. “Get on,
of antlers, and each time he heaved himself onto the get out of here.”
ice, another chunk of it would break beneath him, To our astonishment, the buck got up. Wobbly-
plunging him back into the frigid water. kneed, as though he were punch-drunk, he stum-
It was clear that the deer was making no progress, bled toward the woods. After a few yards he picked
so my father called in the “troops.’ A group of up his pace. Then his gait returned to normal, and
neighbors soon congregated along the shore to as- he vanished into the trees.
sess the situation and work out a plan. After some
discussion, my father and a neighbor got out a few y father died a year ago this spring; a few
shovels and broke up the thin ice around the mouth months after that, my childhood home went
of the stream that ran into the lake. Then they up for sale. On a hot, bright July day, my sisters and
launched our rowboat, carrying a length of heavy I took the rowboat to the middle of the lake and
rope. Fortunately the animal was close by, but as the sprinkled his ashes into the cool, blue water. We
rescuers made their way toward him, the buck made couldn’t think ofa better way to say goodbye.
desperate lunges in the opposite direction, smashing
through the thick sheet of ice as he went. Kirsten Weir is a science writer who lives in New York City.
The two men fashioned a lasso and, after several She has a degree in biology from Kalamazoo College in Kala-
attempts, managed to encircle the deer’s head with mazoo, Michigan, and a master’s degree in science journalism
the rope. They coaxed the terrified animal gradually from New York University.

72 NATU RAL HISTORY December 2003/January 2004

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