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When
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began shooting
BE
IT
life
old,
NOT
AIR,
FILM.
David Doubilet placed a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye cannera into a rubber bag and
underwater off the coast of
New Jersey. Today, he is one of the world's leading
underwater
photographers. David often stalks his photographic prey for hours underwater, painstakingly lighting them
under conditions photographers above sea
lighting
level can't
even imagine.
It is
through David's eyes and
brilliant
techniques that the monochromatic world beneath the sea has been discovered and colorfully
presented to those
living
so far above
its
surface.
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©2005
TOYOTA
m>8^
JUNE 2005
VOLUME
NUMBER
114
5
FEATURES
COVER STORY
34
DANCE OF THE SEXES
A
lemur needs some unusual
in
Madagascar's unpredictable environment.
traits to
survive
SHARON T. POCHRON
AND PATRICIA C. WRIGHT
40BEHIND
CLOSED DOORS
Wielding a vintage
camera, a photographer
explores the storerooms
and hack-room
cabinets
of a great natural
history
museum.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
JUSTINE COOPER
44
WHY DO CAVE
FISH
LOSE THEIR EYES?
A
Darwinian mystery
unfolds in the dark.
LUIS
AND MONIKA ESPINASA
ON THE
sifaka;
COVER: Milne- Edwards's
photograph by Frans Lanting
P^VM
DEPARTMENTS
6
THE NATURAL MOMENT
What the Cat Dragged Up
Photograph by TmceyJ. Rich
8
UP FRONT
Editor's
10
-»
-».
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'A
^^ ^J^ M m
Notebook
CONTRIBUTORS
12 LETTERS
14
SAMPLINGS
News from Nature
18
UNIVERSE
Fueling
Up
Neil deGmsse Tyson
24
FIELD NOTES
Death Valley
Life in
50
Erin Espelie
26
28
BIOMECHANICS
BOOKSHELF
Laurence A. Marschall
53
nature.net
Snap!
The Talking Web
Adam Summers
Robert Anderson
NATURALIST AT LARGE
54
OUT THERE
Jointed Threads
Peekaboo Planets
Lyrm MarguUs
Cliarles
58
Liu
THE SKY
IN
JUNE
Joe Rao
60
64
AT THE
MUSEUM
ENDPAPER
Balanophagy
WiUiam Bryant Logan
PICTURE CREDITS: Page 10
Visit
our
Web
site at
www.naturalhistorymag.com
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THE NATURAL
What
MOMENT
the Cat
Dragged
Photograph by Tracey
r •#•
•«A#i
?^^
',
J.
Rich
Up
—
THE NATURAL
:
UP FRONT
MOMENT
See preceding two pages
Observing, Skeptically
The
first
time
I
ever visited a "wild" cave was decades ago, in
the karst-rich country of the southern Appalachians. Caves
in their natural state bear Uttle resemblance to
no
caverns:
We scrunched into
few dozen
But then we emerged, rewarded
Rich
too high for our headlamps to penetrate.
spied this leopard in
first
nimbly dragging
as
it
Rich
gawked, the leopard gripped its
catch by the neck and, without
too much effort, lugged it twenty feet straight up an acacia tree.
Leopards (Panthera pardiis) often trundle their bulky prey into
trees for safekeeping from competitors such as hyenas, lions,
and wild dogs. But Rich saw no
other animals nearby on the
plains, except for herself and her
two human companions. The
acacia was not well protected
from the sun or from vultures,
either.
Perhaps the main attrac-
bird nest in the treetop, just the
thing for a leopard to lounge
on.
A
community of sociable
weaverbirds
(Philetainis socitis)
had created the billowy thatching, but they apparently aban-
doned the
sometime be-
roost
at
a
the base of a deafening
weakness
as
as far as
I
feet
of
a tight Uttle passage.
for our efforts, into an
waterfall, cascading
immense
from
a darkness
know, never crawled around in caves; his
islands. But there's no
an explorer was isolated volcanic
Monika Espinasa's
on page 44, "Why Do Cave Fish Lose Their Eyes?" Darwin
posed the same question, and was not able to answer it to his own
question he would have been fascinated by Luis and
story
satisfaction. Subtle observations
of the bones in the
may
fishes'
eye sockets,
conundrum.
and the genes in the
fishes' cells,
Lynn Margulis
another close observer of nature, but she
is
finally resolve the
is
also a
independent thinker. Remarkably, nearly four years after the anthrax attacks of 2001, the Kfe history of the anthrax disease agent remains an open scientific question.
Where, MarguUs pointedly asks, is the anthrax bacterium in nature?
The usual response is, it's the spore of a soil bacterium, lying in
wait to infect an animal. But the bacterium doesn't grow, or develscholarly explorer
and
a fiercely
op, or infect anything in the soil; describing
it
as a "soil
bacterium,"
as Margulis deadpans in her article "Jointed Threads" (page 28),
not very "useful." In
fact,
the label
is
more
is
likely just a placeholder
covering for scientific ignorance.
Margulis and her coworkers have
enormous weaver-
tion was an
belly-crawUng
Charles Darwin,
—
—
as
pit,
room
was
springbok
weighing at
antelope carcass
toward her
least sixty pounds
a
on the ground. Then,
the
a crack in the floor
through
whether hunting, kilhng, or absently tearing flesh from a fresh
catch. Photographer Tracey J.
southern Namibia,
cafe
gift
adventure got even better.
ing coolly graceful,
no
shop at the main entrance. The entrance to my first cave was
a pit, 160 feet deep; to enter, my guides and I tied a rope to a tree,
dropped the other end to the bottom, and rappeUed down. The
and
Cats have a knack for look-
commercial
freight elevators or tastefrilly lighted stalactites,
the anthrax puzzle:
a stage in
its life
Bacillus,
now added
a surprising
piece to
which anthrax belongs, has
collection of cells, growing
the genus to
history as a threadlike
benignly on the intestinal walls of many animals.
What
light wOl this work shed on the anthrax bacUlus? It's impossible
But you would think, given the threat of anthrax spores as a biological weapon, that a basic understanding of their hfe cycle in nature
would not be a place to skimp in the nation's budget.
to
say.
fore the big cat arrived.
Content
ard gave
now and
in
aerie, the leop-
its
Rich an "odd look"
then
—
a signal that
hadn't forgotten
But
for the
its
most
it
audience.
part, she says,
with the dead springbok, Hcked it, and occasionally
took a few mouthfuls."
"It played
Erin Espelie
NATURAL HISTORY
June 2005
you're a graduate this month,
Ifminded,
portentously, that Ufe
or
is
know
one, you're Hable to be re-
an adventure in learning.
I
don't
But my word to the graduates this commencement season is,
Look to Darwin, or the Espinasas, or Margulis for e.xamples of Uves to
emulate. Be skeptical. Challenge dogma. Ask: "How do you know?"
and think for yourself. And if you're exploring a cave, make
See
sure you're observing closely enough to keep track of where you
disagree.
—
came from.
—
—Peter Brown
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CONTRIBUTORS
A faniily-wide passion for picture taking spurred TRACEY J. RICH
("The Natural Moment," page 6) to take up wildlife photography herself She's been snapping photos, she says, "since she can
remember." In the field, she draws on her doctoral study in behavioral ecology at the University of Nottingham in England.
mm
Peter
Steven R. Black
Executive Editor
Art Director
Board of Editors
Mary
T.J. Kelleher,
("Jointed Threads," page 28) has long
MARGULIS
origin of nucleated
MarguHs
cells.
is
POCHRON
T.
National
Donohue, Rebecca
Contriiniting Editors
Charles
Donna M. Ponzoni
Production
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Michael Shectman
Eulfillment
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page 40) remembers exploring secret places ever since she was
five, when she discovered her parents' collection of color-coded
bones (her parents are veterinarians) Her photographs behind the
Director
Sonia W. Paratore National Advertising Manager
at
through her
Publisher
Maria Volpe Promotion
about baboon behavior would apply to her new subjects.
Pochron, upper left, is an assistant research professor at the
Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments (ICTE),
ly
Harris
E.
Edgar L. Harrison Advertising Director
Gale Page Consumer Marketing Director
httle
The park was
Kessler Interns
Robert Anderson, Charles Liu, Laurence A. Marschall,
Richard Milner, Robert H. Mohlenbrock, Joe Rao,
Stephan Reebs, Adam Summers, Neil deGrasse Tyson
("Dance of the Sexes," page 34) earned
Project in Madagascar.
Managing Editor
Graciela Flores Editorial Associate
Liz
her doctorate for fieldwork studying baboons, but when she began observing Milne-Edwards's sifakas, she quickly reahzed that
international coordinator for the
Associate
Thomas Rosinski Associate Art Director
Hannah Black, Assistant Art Director
Erin M. Espelie Special Projects Editor
LYNN
Academy of Sciences. In 1999 she was one of twelve recipients of
National Medal of Science. She thanks James di Properzio, Celeste Asikainen, Abe Gomel, and A.I. Tauber, who made important contributions to the research and preparation of this article.
SHARON
Knight, Avis Lang, Vittorio Maestro
Michel DeMatteis
worked on the
member of the
a
Eduor-in-ChieJ
Mary Beth Aberlin
A Distinguished University Professor in the department of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst,
Brown
Miami
ToDii Happer
Vice President, Science Education
.
Educational Advisory Board
American Museum of Natural History, from which
is selected, are on display at the Kashya
Hildebrand art gallery in New York City, through June 4.
scenes at the
this
Myles Gordon American Museum of Natural History
David Chesebrough Buffalo Museum of Science
month's portfolio
Stephanie Ratcliffe Natural
Ronen Mir
Carol Valenta
Louis Science Center
St.
MONIKA ESPINASA ("Why Do Cave
LUIS and
Natural History Magazine,
met while attendthe American Museum.
Fish Lose Their Eyes?" page 44)
ing a graduate course at
On
Museum of the Adirondacks
Hands On Museum
Histor)'
SciTech
one of their
them inside
first dates,
a cave for
Inc.
Charles E. Harris President, Chief Executive Officer
Charles Lalanne Chief Finamial Officer
Judy Buller General Manager
Cecile Washington General Manager
a flash flood trapped
eighteen hours. Since then,
Charles Rodin
Publishing Advisor
the couple has jointly discovered and described
several
new
of cave organisms. Luis
species
is
an associate professor of biology
at
where he speciaHzes in the evoShenandoah
teaches
biology at the same institution,
Monika
lution of blindness in cave fish.
Middletown,
Virginia.
College
in
Lord
Fairfax
Community
and at
University in Winchester, Virginia,
PICTURE CREDITS
p.
]4{cop):
©Greg
& 8: ©Traccy Rich/Naturepl.com:
Cover: ©Frans Lanring/Minden Pictures; pp. 5-7
Lasley; p. i4(iniddle): ©Bill
of page): ©Tibor Dunaj;
I5(top):
p.
©Mieke
©Gudrun Heraner/Current
Biology 2005:
Evans Picture Libiary;
©NASA;
p.
20:
Wood/Bruce Coleman:
Dalle/Getty Images;
p
16(middie):
pp- 24(left)
©Tom
p.
p,
15(bottoni):
12(c,inoon):
©Dr. Jeremy Burgess/Photo
Colicott/lmages.coni:
& 25(middle): ©Erin
p.
©Jonny Riwldns;
]4(bottom): ©Erwiti &' Peggy Bauer/Bruce Coleman;
p.
I6(bonom):
Espelie; pp. 24-25(top)
&
p.
Researchers, Inc.;
©Edmund
24{bottoni right)
Brodie
III: p.
& 2,S(bottom
14(bottom
p.
25(bottom
right):
©John P George:
51:
by Advanced
©Mary
Illustration; p. 47:
Evans Picnjre Library;
Earth Scenes;
p.
54:
©ESC;
p.
64:
p. 52(left):
p.
49: Painting
by John Sibbick;
©Marie Read/ Animals Animals-Eanh
©Betnuann/CORBIS
Scenes;
p.
p.
50:
site
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LETTERS
Pushing Capacity
the eve of first contact, ac-
sculptural programs to glo-
In his article "Collapse"
cording to Enga elders, the
rify the
population was growing
selves),
growth was accompanied by runaway
competition, demands on
land and production were
ever accelerating, and warfare was rampant. It is Hke-
farmers into nonfood-
[4/05], Jared
Diamond
chooses the population that
inhabits the highlands
New
Guinea
of
an example
as
of a society that has solved
its environmental problems.
Unfortunately, the pioneer-
rapidly,
its
gods (and them-
which displaced
on
action,
I
why
it is,
biotechnology pro-
Pamela Malier
Lajolla, California
their cities.
Where Mr. Diamond
no
are the
ducers so opposed to
mandatory safety testing
and labeUng?
producing labor in the
cities. That put added
stresses
Ms. Brown claim
sees
see definite
actions that in hindsight
probably were not the best.
Jeremy A. Sabloff
University of Pennsylvania
Museum
Nina Fedoroff replies:
In our book Nancy Marie
Brown and I address all of
the issues Pamela Maher
raises.
have
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Most gene insertions
or no effect on
little
the plant, but the cellculture procedures used in
Pick of the
The book Mendel
Kitchen:
Oh,
ing
dear! Fin almost out of luadagascara.
work ofJames
Wat-
B.
highland societies
son, an anthropologist at the
were headed
University of Washington in
Polly Wiessiier
Seattle, has
shown
that the
favorable picture of
New
Guinea described by early
explorers was not a longestablished one, but rather
just a snapshot taken
during
University of
Salt
Lake
for coUapse.
View of
Scientist's
reviewed by Laurence A.
Marschall ["Bookshelf,"
all have been apphed in
what people now refer to
3/05], suggests that if only
traditional, or conventional,
people understood the
plant breeding for the bet-
sci-
ter part
modified (GM) food crops,
they would embrace the
sands of ne\v and valuable
varieties
new
cluding the familiar
technology.
ecular biologist,
As
I
mol-
a
under-
much opposed
am
I
to
GM
Nina Fedoroffand Nancy
Marie Brown are incorrect
Enga Cultural Centre
Wabag, Enga Province,
Papua New Guinea
GM technolo-
imply that
gy is the same
to
as
standard
Red
as
of a century. Thou-
ence behind genetically
crops in their present form.
Akii Tuinu
chemi-
mutagens, and radiation
cal
very
Utah
indeed mutagenic. Cell-
culture procedures,
Genetically Modified Foods,
stand the science, and
Utah
City,
are
in the
of food
plants, in-
Rio
grapefruit, have
been
developed through such
mutagenic procedures.
Such plants undoubtedly
carry genetic changes other
than the ones underlying
the selected
traits.
Unex-
pected health problems due
plant breeding. Introducing
to those genetic changes are
foreign material into plant
rare,
DNA
of
pended on hunting and
one of the causes of collapse at Copan "was a failure of the Mayan kings and
procedures of cell culture
insect resistance, for ex-
gathering, supplemented by
nobles to address problems
ample, they can inadver-
within their control." But
and transformation used in
producing
crops cause
years ago, sweet-potato
the archaeological evidence
many random
higher content of toxic
vines arrived from Indone-
indicates to
a period
For
of rapid change.
much of New
Guinea's prehistory, populations in the highlands de-
agriculture.
sia,
making
the
first
Around 350
Jared
Diamond
Mayan
me
states that
that the
is
neither "pre-
dictable" nor "precise."
The
GM
mutations
and chromosomal
though not unheard
When breeders
for such
tently
traits as
produce plants with
compounds than
re-
select
improved
a
plants nat-
produce to defend
were well
aware of many of the environmental problems they
faced in the second half of
arrangements. Mutations
urally
that cause subtle but signifi-
themselves against pests. Yet
of precolonial traditions
the eighth century A.D.,
to the plant; but
the Enga in New
Guinea show that once
they could produce a surplus, change was rapid. On
and
it
possible for
time to store sur-
plus food in the
livestock: pigs.
form of
Our
studies
among
12
ly that
A
transforming some plants
Crop
NATURAL HISTORY
June 2005
rulers
that they
took
a
num-
ber of steps in response.
For example, they undertook massive building and
cant changes in plant
me-
tabolism need not be lethal
such
consuming
a plant could lead to
GM technology
safe as
is
are
not required to do safety
of new food crops.
For crops derived via
testing
molecular techniques,
serious health problems.
If
traditional plant breeders
as
Ms. Fedoroffand
ever, the
how-
requirements for
compositional
analysis, as
well
as for toxicity
and
In
allergenicity testing, are
rigorous.
Hence
more
it is
Hkely in the case of
J.
GM
crops that such problems
will
be caught before food-
stufis
come
my knowledge,
that
produce
companies
GM foods are
not opposed to such
Mandatory
different issue.
that the
To
to market.
testing.
labeling
It
is
GM crops be har-
vested, stored, shipped,
handled
which
separately,
all
translates into
costs. If the
same
as
a
requires
of
higher
crops look the
non-GM
identifying
and
them
crops,
requires
the Sticks
David Henry's
age and root development.
article
The
on
boreal forest also in-
the boreal forest ["Northern
cludes dry northern forest,
Exposure," 2/05] perpe-
as
trates the
misconception
and boreal forest
one and the same. In
that taiga
are
fact,
however, not
forest
taiga,
is
all
boreal
and not
all
taiga occurs in the boreal
forest.
Taiga (Russian for
"forest
of litde
sticks")
specifically refers to a forest-
ed area dominated by stunted coniferous
as
trees
such
black spruce or lodgepole
pine
(as
in the
photograph
on page 29 of Mr. Henrys
article).
Taiga often
lies
on pages 28 and
There you wiU find as-
pictured
30.
pen, white spruce, and other
commercially valuable
trees.
taiga,
But that forest
and urJike the
is
not
taiga,
dry northern forest faces
substantial threat
from
overexploitation.
Confusing the terms
and "boreal forest"
may worsen the threat.
Protecting vast areas of
"taiga"
taiga as a "feel
sure
good" mea-
taiga generally occurs in
Baiiibridge Island, Washington
fect the poorest
consumers.
frost
is
forest.
Crispin
which perma-
close to the surface,
and thus
inhibits drain-
weU-estabHshed Russian
word
predom-
for the
inantly coniferous forest
most of Siberia
and western Russia. Russians and most Europeans
that covers
use the
word
"taiga" to
refer to the entire boreal
forest.
I
foUow
this estab-
lished usage.
correspondence from readers
Mark
areas in
Crispin de-
one of them, but a
consistent use of the word
has not yet emerged.
"Taiga" is an old and
Natural History welcomes
tundra. In the boreal forest,
wet
Mark
scribes
ern
Mandatory labeling would
drive up food costs, but offer no health benefits, and it
would disproportionately af-
treeless
ways.
wiU not help preserve
between
and
term "taiga"
used in several different
the exploitable dry north-
expensive molecular testing.
forest
ecologists, the
is
(nhmag@naturalhistorymag.
com). All
letters
should include
a daytime telephone number,
J.
David Henry replies:
Among North American
and
all letters
length
and
may
clarity.
be edited for
—
—
SAMPLINGS
Report Card
The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is dear
to the hearts of most American environmentalists. Vital to its framework is the listing of
animal and plant species
whose numbers
put at
Associated with each
risk.
list-
ing are guidelines for the species' recovery.
Now that the
decades,
it's
act has
fair
been
in
place for three
to ask whether the
the species under
its
protection has
lot
of
signifi-
Yes, say Martin F.J. Taylor, a conservation
biologist at the National Parks Association
Queensland
in
Australia,
and two
the accelerating intensity of the threats. The
designation of
critical habitats,
too, slowed
to a crawl between 1986 and 2000. Rarely
have recovery plans been
fully
followed.
than a quarter of the species improved
in
numbers, and about 40 percent declined.
—and some not-so-obvious
The longer
listed as
a jeopardized species
endangered (and was thus
listed as en-
eli-
become
numbers eventually inwhose recovery plans were
customized and whose habitats were pro-
And for about $150
more
likely
critical
were
extinct,
whereas with-
out the protections afforded by the
species would
its
re-
Nevertheless, only twenty-two listed
species have
gible for the act's protections), the greater
tected by being designated as
sheep
has
slowed since the mid-1990s, despite
Only thirteen of 1,370 species
col-
creased. Species
blackbird, green sea turtle, bighorn
roses,
listings
covered enough to be delisted.
the chances that
on the
new
nearly 1,100 species, the investigators found
was
U.S. species that are
steadily
coming up
dangered since the act was passed have
some obvious
upswing: (from top) yellow-shouldered
is
leagues. Looking at federal census data for
trends.
Endangered
Not everything
though. The pace of
Even under the best conditions, no more
cantly improved.
of
remained unprotected.
are
so depleted that the survival of the species
itself is
protected only by umbrella recovery plans,
covering multiple species, or whose habitats
likely
have become
million,
the
act,
227
extinct.
listings of
endangered species and the habitats that
shelter
them could be brought up to
date.
{Bioscience 55:360-67, 2005)
to be improving than species
•
Stephan Reebs
Rock of Ages
you want to know how long a rock has
been exposed to the sky, measure its neonIf
21.
Cosmic
originate
in
— energetic particles that
distant stars and galaxies — are
rays
constantly smashing into the atoms that
make up
When
various minerals
in
exposed
ble isotope of that noble gas.
The more
lie in
A team
of geologists led by Tibor
Vrije University in
sured the neon-21
sta-
doned
of
in
in
J.
Amsterdam mea-
quartz from an aban-
river terrace in
the Atacama Desert
northern Chile. Currently the area gets
most unchanged surfaces
2005
rainfall or rivers,
23
its
and appar-
surface have
posed and undisturbed for
the Atacama Desert.
NATURAL HISTORY June
no runoff from
the Earth.
St>_
14
a rock, the longer
ently the rocks on
'«^.
Earth's
in
the rock has been lying on the surface of
Dunai of
rock.
they do, they produce neon-21, a
the isotope you find
lain
ex-
a very long time:
million years, according to
Dunai and
his
means uneroded,
the Atacama the old-
colleagues. Undisturbed
making that corner of
est unaltered landscape
33:321-24, 2005)
on Earth. [Geology
—S.R.
Preservation
Wood
and so even
rots readily,
though it's been used for construction
around the world and through the
ages, almost every
wooden
On
Soup's
Halls
building
Knowing whether you're hungry or sated
average, but thought they had eaten less
should be a classic case of gut intuition. Yet
than ten.
a recent study of eating habits
showed
gut: they rely instead
on
to assess whether they've eaten
peared. But Heather McKillop, an an-
their
Baton Rouge, and a team of
psychologist at Cornell University
New York,
Ithaca,
and two
leagues set out to determine
whether people can be tricked
partly intact after
some 1,400 years. Embedded in mangrove peat on the floor of a huge lagoon off the coast of Belize, they are
the
ancient
first
ever found
in
wooden
buildings
cal
entrepreneurs apparently boiled
seawater or brine (seawater made
saltier by being poured through saltsaturated
ic
soil) in
standardized ceram-
pots, packed the salt residue into
and paddled upriver to
their canoes,
the inland, salt-deprived
of the
cities
Yucatan Peninsula. Other desirable
goods
—seafood, stingray spines for
conch shells for
were transported in-
ritual bloodletting,
use as horns
—
land from other sites.
addition to hundreds of
In
posts, which
wooden
demarcated both exterior
lagoon.
buried
ered
—
One
in
great abundance
large
in
the
wooden paddle
one ever found, though
paddles are depicted
in
an-
Mayan art. {Proceedings of the
Academy of Sciences 102:
National
5630-34, 2005)
have a good idea of
they actually ate (no,
they don't).
At lunchtime
teria,
university cafe-
in a
the investigators seated vol-
unteers
groups of four
in
at a
modi-
fied table, set with four eighteen-
ounce soup bowls. Two bowls were
two were
ordinary, but
by
a
hose to
refilled as
ing their
covertly connected
a vat of soup,
and very slowly
the volunteers ate. Those spoon-
soup from the ordinary bowls
ate,
and correctly thought they had eaten,
slightly
more than
eight ounces.
of
The de-
modern biology
is
that only
needed
for building an organ-
ism. Henceforth, however, that tenet
have to appear with an
terisk.
Robert
Susan
the meal
in
in
may
plant's
organs are grossly deformed. Ac-
both parents
(or
—S.R.
tant Arabidopsis gave rise
DNA
may
and
to
some nonmutant proge-
ny.
There was no evidence
that the mutant alleles
were simply mutating back
their
to normal, or that
working
Arabidopsis thai
ing the offspring.
explore genetic questions. Like you and
me
and most other sexually reproducing organisms, Arabidopsis has
two
copies, or alleles,
genes (even though
self-fertilizing).
it
hap-
And when both
some
other gene was normaliz-
f^s
in
Arabidopsis thaliana, a plant often used to
alleles of its
progeny must
show the mutation, too.
So it came as a shock to
the investigators that mu-
with a gene that occurs
pens to be
self-fertilizing parent)
tion, their
not be the only one.
its
one
express a recessive muta-
as-
West
discovered that the
of each of
common
circumstance with a clear implication: when
and two
their finding while
—T.J. Kelleher
cording to biology 101, that's a
Lafayette, Indiana, have
Lolle, Pruitt,
^the
really
13:93-100, 2005)
other botanists at Purdue
University
Apparently—
—the eyes are
similar terms.
J. Lolle,
E. Pruitt,
in
smaller than the stomach. (Obesity Research
— long sequences of DNA—carry the
information
from the height of the soup
the bowl, and described their fullness after
DNA?
Beyond
genes
their intake
adage notwithstanding
ceived diners ate nearly fifteen ounces, on
A basic tenet
they had eaten. Most of them estimated
colleagues chanced on
the peat has also been recov-
^the first
identical
cient
in
how much
path of inheritance
walls and interior rooms, ceramics
were found
they can) and whether, once
tricked, they
the Maya's homeland
The wood in the buildings dates to
between a.d. 600 and 900, when
grand Mayan cities such as Palenque
and Tikal flourished in the area. At
the time, the lagoon's buildings were
on dry land; a subsequent rise in sea
level transformed the site into mangrove forest. The mangroves' waterlogged roots decayed into peat, and
the peat's acidity and lack of oxygen
kept the wood from rotting.
What went on in all those buildings, and at some twenty other nearby sites discovered by the snorkelers,
was salt making on a grand scale. Lo-
into
more than they Intend to
eating
(yes,
in
col-
portant exception: a group of twenty-
still
knew how much
fill.
three hardwood and palm-wood buildings that are
both groups, similar proportions of the
Brian Wansink, a food-marketing
thropologist at Louisiana State Univer-
snorkelers recently discovered an im-
In
volunteers claimed they
their eyes
ever made has eventually disap-
sity in
that
people don't pay much attention to the
What
gives? Perhaps, the biologists suggest,
some
heritable
RNA— bearing the
instructions for normality
reproductive
structions
cells,
where
it
ancestral
— lurks within the
ready to insert
its in-
meets mutated DNA.
(Nature 434:505-509, 2005)
gene HOTHEAD are mutant, the
—S.R.
June 2005
NATURAL HISTORY
15
—
—a
SAMPLINGS
Wave
Here's a conundrum: even
multiply.
in
Does the water
live
cannibalize
cell. Then she lays an
egg and closes up the chamber. Several
months later the larvae hatch. They touch
smears inside each
retain trace
and seemingly ingest some of the glop,
Female beewolf toting honeybee
one another?
Dissatisfied with those explanations, Vic-
tor A.
Gusev
Mathematics
of the Sobolev Institute of
in
Novosibirsk, Russia, and Dirk
Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University in
the Streptomyces and their medicine.
of Prevention
A
And
little
protective
electromagnetic waves from the Sun and
provision each
waves, a form of
ra-
live
cell
honeybees so that the larvae
dinner ready
when they
will
glop, only
find
in
Germany, and
his
swab the
also
cells
coon
in
moms
his col-
of
larvae survived
emerge from the
co-
—compared with fifteen of eighteen
larvae.
propose that symbiotic,
biologists
otic-producing
soil
The
antibi-
bacteria such as Strep-
tomyces may have joined forces with
the wasp's anten-
numerous species of arthropods, and may
nae host bacteria of the genus Strepto-
myces
and
when deprived
from a batch of undeprived
colleagues
with disinfectant.
Specialized glands
—and the diner—could
one of fifteen
long enough to
hatch. Martin
recently discovered that beewolf
thing for the larvae.
—
leagues found that
Kaltenpoth, a biologist at the University of
Wurzburg
good
can get hot and steamy
readily decay. Kaltenpoth
with a few paralyzed
cell
cell
infections. Dinner
eggs and
for each of their
that's a
brood
perfect setting for fungal and bacterial
to
chance. They build a separate underground
specifically radio
cocoons
An Ounce
geobiologist, propose that low-frequency
—
start spinning their
inadvertently infusing the threads with
Beewolf wasp mothers leave
Pullman came up with another one.
and then
Gusev, a biophysicist, and Schulze-Makuch, a
Earth
readies her brood
bacteria-laden white glop, which she
and
amounts of nutrients? Do the microorganisms somehow manufacture their own food?
Do they
mom
As
her antennae secrete lots of
cells,
the purest of
microorganisms
ultrapurified water,
even
tetracycline.
the Water
in
— normally soil-dwelling bacteria
have helped make the
soil
a hospitable
that produce antibiotic and antifungal
place for a nest. [Current Biology 15:
compounds such
475-79, 2005)
as streptomycin and
—G.F.
Strike, Counterstrike
weapon
Poison can be a formidable
particularly
if it's
tract. In
10,000 times more lethal
light
in
— may provide the necessary energy.
To test their hypothesis, the investigators
grew
cultures of Escherichia coli bacteria
in
animals, too
thrill,
turns up
American West, has the
the cultures from
electromagnetic waves
its skin,
ber,
all
an airtight metal cham-
cultures.
But
The
re-
prey or predator evolves a
ial
were unequivocal: nearly
all
the bacter-
populations deprived of radiation died
out within a week, whereas nearly
all
the
some populations
How
L.
is
will-
*
^
that possible?
Geffeney, a biologist at
Utah State University
in
Logan,
free protons, generated by the continual
dissociation of water molecules under ordi-
the
nary conditions, are excited by naturally oc-
paralyzing
The
investigators' explanation
curring electromagnetic waves.
is
that
The protons
accumulate enough kinetic energy that by
the time they reach the bacteria's
cell
mem-
brane, they can form high-energy chemical
bonds
—
in
other words, usable energy.
{Naturwissenschaften 92:115-20, 2005)
— Graciela Flores
NATURAL HISTORY
iur\e
2005
its
trick.
way
Tetrodotoxin
its
victims.
into a hole
expressed
muscle
—
(Nature 434:759-63, 2005)
S.R.
-:.^.'^..>:.,
of
and several colleagues say just a
few key mutations in one gartersnake gene are enough to do
populations exposed to radiation survived.
16
Shana
until either
J
which acts as an excel-
garter snakes eat the newt
ingly.
—
new weapon.
stuff in
J?
sults
in vul-
enough to thwart the tetrodotoxin
and keep the muscles going
lent deterrent to predators.
and permitted only low-frequency
waves to reach the other
That's
other
skinned newt. This newt, a resident of the
They shielded some of
in
in
— among them the rough-
superdistilled water.
by placing them
may be Japanese
pufferfish organs that
cuisine's biggest
from the one
nerable snakes by only a few amino acids.
than cyanide. Tetrodotoxin, the substance
diation that's less energetic than visible
the poison-tolerant snakes, how-
ever, the protein differs
in
the
in
kills
It
into the cells.
If
^r./^V
of
J-
'
r
'
T
^
MtSkk
^H
-> ^^^M'
•.'<;' '''.^r'-
*
%M
a protein
membrane
movement
,
by
of
con-
There the poison
blocks the
'
•#•
•*
—f
-If*-'
•
worms
cells that control
traction.
'.
J "/
;
:'V.
-^
sodium
"a"
*
..
^.
-
:
..
the sodium can't
move, the muscles can't con-
Some
garter snakes survive a dinner of supertoxic newt.
THE 2005 UNITED STATES MINT PROOF
GIVE
A
SET^'
GIFT THAT
REMEMBERS
FEATURING THE WESTWARD JOURNEY NICKEL SERIES
United States Mint
Proof Set'
-P05
The perfect
gift for a special occasion celebrates the day and commemorates
the year of that occasion. It helps us remember the joy and happiness of a
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Beautifully crafted products from the United States Mint are thoughtful,
lasting gifts for friends and family members. And they're great collectibles.
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Call 1-800-USA-MINT
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^^'
UNITED STATES MINT
©2005
United States Mint
UNIVERSE
Fueling
To
travel from the
Earth
Up
to the
sky requires propulsion.
Propulsion requires energy. Energy requires fuel.
By Neil deGrasse Tyson
I
n daily life you rarely
need to think about
swiftly sacrifice a
propulsion, at least
tal
mass. Release that mass
in
one
you ofi
the ground and keeps you
the kind that gets
get around
without booster
rockets
simply by walk-
aloft.
—
and the
Therein hes the soul
of propulsion. The mass
er.
released
by
a spacecraft
is
which
ing, running, roUerblad-
hot, spent fuel,
ing, taking a bus, or driv-
produces
ing a
sure gusts of exhaust that
those activ-
car. All
depend on friction
between you (or your vehicle) and Earth s surface.
When you walk or
feet
enables
high-pres-
hindquarters, enabling the
spacecraft to ascend.
Propulsion exploits
Newton's third law
of motion, one of the
universal laws of physics:
run, friction between
your
fiery,
channel out the vehicle's
ities
Isaac
and the ground
to push for-
you
When
you drive,
between the rubber wheels and the pave-
for every action, there
ment enables the car to
move forward. But try to
run or drive on slick ice.
where there's hardly any
may have
ward.
and you'll slip
and slide and generally
embarrass yourself as you
go nowhere fast.
For motion that doesn't
engage Earth's surface,
action.
a vehicle
moving
Artist's
engineer Wernher von Braun
fliel
newspaper Corriere
equipped with an
that burns the free
supply of oxygen provided by the
But
if you're
hankering to cross the
NATURAL HISTORY
June 2005
(detail
of
illustration
Molino, cover of the Sunday supplement to the
air.
air-
less
della Sera,
May
9,
jets at
home and
law that he
1954)
ward
look for
a
propulsion
mechanism that requires no friction and
no chemical help from the air.
One way to get a vehicle to leave our
planet is to point its nose upward, aim
its engine nozzles downward, and
rifle.
as
he
Mean-
while, the ornery out-
by Walter
Italian
vacuum of space, leave the props and
muscle
a
shoots his
conception of spacecraft designs by the German rocl<et
use a propeller-driven engine or a jet en-
both fed by
classic
stands flat-footed, barely
Within the atmosphere, you could
gine,
noticed, rarely
Westerns, the gunsHnger
engine stoked with massive quantities ot
fuel.
Hollywood, you
obeys that law. In
friction,
you'U need
is
an equal and opposite re-
firiction
18
direction,
vehicle recoils in the oth-
You can
just fine
goodly
amount ofthe vehicle's to-
—
butt
hits sails
ofl'his feet,
first
back-
landing
in the feeding
mismatch between
action and reaction. Superman exhibits
the opposite eflect: he doesn't recoU
even sUghtly as bullets bounce off his
chest. Arnold Schwarzenegger's character the Terminator was truer to Newtrough
clearly a
ton than most: every time a shotgun
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Success
—
reaching a top speed of about 3,500
V-2 could go a few
hundred miles before plummeting back
miles an hour, the
to Earth's surface in a deadly free faU
from the edge of space.
To achieve a fuU orbit of Earth, however, a spacecraft must travel five times
than the V-2,
faster
a feat that, for a
rocket of the same mass
as
the V-2, re-
no less than twenty-five times the
V-2's energy. And to escape from Earth
orbit altogether, and head out toward
quires
Moon, Mars, or beyond, the craft
must reach 25,000 nules an hour. That's
what the Apollo missions did in the
1 960s and 1 970s to get to the Moon
the
requiring
a trip
ot
two
at least
another factor
in energy.
And
that represents a
phenomenal
amount of fuel.
Because of Tsiolkovsky 's unforgiving
rocket equation, the biggest problem
facing any craft heading into space
is
the
need to boost "excess" mass in the form
of friel most of which is the friel re-
—
quired tor transporting the fuel
Space shuttle Columbia
lifts off,
October
20, 1995
vented to soften
blast hit the
coiled
—
cybernetic menace, he re-
a bit.
ple rocket stages that
as
Spacecraft, however, can't pick
choose their action shots.
obey Newton's third law,
get off the ground.
and
If they don't
they'll
never
the fuel in
would drop away
them was used
up, re-
ducing the weight of the remaining
load and thus maximizing the capacity ot the remaining fuel to accelerate
the craft. He also came up with the so-
which tells you
you'll need (as-
called rocket equation,
ReaHzable
dreams of space explo-
ration took off in the 1920s,
when
the
American
physicist
and in-
ventor Robert H. Goddard got a small
liquid-fueled rocket engine off the
ground
for nearly three seconds.
The
rocket rose to an altitude of forty feet
and landed 180
from its launch site.
But Goddard was hardly alone in his
quest. Several decades earher, around
the turn of the twentieth century, a
Russian physicist named Konstantin
Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky who earned
his hving as a provincial high school
teacher, had already set forth some of
the basic concepts of space travel and
rocket propulsion. Tsiolkovsky conceived
20
of,
feet
among
NATURAL HISTORY
other things, multi-
June 2005
will
it
burn later in the journey. And the spacecraft's "weight problems grow exponentially. The multistage vehicle was in-
just
how much
fuel
suming you won't be stopping at any
filhng stations en route) for your journey through space.
Nearly half a century after Tsiolkovky's investigations came the forerunner of modern spacecraft, Nazi
Germany's V-2 rocket "V" for Vergeltimgswaffen, or "Vengeance Weapon."
The V-2 was conceived and designed
for war, and was first used in combat m
1944, principally to terrorize London.
The brainchild of Wernher von Braun
and hundreds of other scientists and
engineers working with the Nazis, the
V-2 was the first baUistic missile and the
—
first
rocket to target
yond
its
own
cities that lay
be-
horizon. Capable of
this
problem. In such
a vehicle, a relatively small
such
payload
Ex-
the Apollo spacecraft, an
as
plorer sateUite, or the space shutde
gets
launched by huge, powerfiil rock-
ets that
drop away sequentially or in
sections
when
come
ftiel
Why
tow an empty
tank when you can just dump
possibly reuse
be-
their fuel supphes
exhausted.
it
on another
it
and
flight?
Take the Saturn V, a three-stage rocklaunched the Apollo astronauts
toward the Moon. Designed by von
et that
Braun (among
be described
Saturn
V
others),
as a
and
its
thirty-six stories
giant
it
human
tall,
could almost
fiael
tank.
The
cargo stood
yet the three as-
tronauts returned to Earth in an ittybitty,
one-story capsule.
The
first
stage
dropped away about ten minutes after
hftotf, once the vehicle had been boosted off the ground and was moving at
about 9,000 feet per second (more than
6,000 miles per hour). Stage two
dropped away about ten minutes later,
once the vehicle was moving at about
a
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Changing
the
way
the world sleeps!
:
rubber pincers on the hand brake
squeeze the wheel rim; on a car, the
space shuttle were cremated in midair
complicated life, performing several
episodes of fiiel burning: the first to ac-
brake pads squeeze against the wheels'
as their
celerate the vehicle into Earth orbit, the
rubber tires. In those
next to get it out of Earth orbit and head
quires
23,000
per second (almost 16,000
feet
more
miles per hour). Stage three had a
it
Moon, and a
craft down so
toward the
to slow the
puU
into lunar orbit.
fiiel
could
stage, the
point in the direction of morion, and
launch and had pierced a hole in the
shield covering the left wing. That hole
that
could do more with
Since 1981,
NASA
it
The
no
distance.
fuel.
fiiel
cases,
stopping re-
To slow down and
you've dragged
as
stop
that
exposed the
back and watch
your vehicle recoils
mis, causing
Then you
your speed drop
less.
has used the
all
sit
To return
to Earth after your
cosmic
excursion, rather than using fuel to
slow
shuttle has three
down you could do what
the
"or-
space shuttle does: gHde back to Earth
biter" that holds the crew, the payload,
unpowered, and exploit the fact that
our planet has an atmosphere, a source
parts: a stubby, airplanelike
and the three main engines; an
aluminum derwarp and melt in the
orbiter's
it
to
rush of superheated
air.
in reverse.
—
above our planet.
slowing the rotation of the four
Ignite the
space shuttle for missions in "lowa few hundred miles
Earth orbit"
main
2003,
however, you must turn your
rocket nozzles backward, so that they
lighter,
ing
1,
tumbled out of control
in space,
got progressively smaller and
which means that the remain-
craft
orbiter
and broke apart during reentry. They
met their deaths because a chunk of
foam insulation had come loose from
the shuttle's huge fuel tank during the
rotors,
couple more
At each
on the morning of February
ini-
Here's a safer idea for the return trip
Why not put a fdHng station in
Earth orbit? When
it's
time for the shut-
come home, you attach a new set
of tanks and fire them at fuU throttle,
backward. The shuttle slows to a crawl,
to
tle
drops into Earth's atmosphere, and just
The
flies
biggest
L
r,
•
problem facing any
1,1
.1
No
But how much
Exactly
ii^
No friction.
home like an airplane.
shock waves. No heat
as
much
fuel
shields.
would that take?
fuel as
took to get
it
the fuel required to transport the fuel
the thing up there to begin with.
k
how might
will
burn
later in the journey.
all
And
that fuel reach the or-
biting filling station that could service
the shuttle's needs? Presumably
mense external fuel tank that holds
more than half a million gallons of seltcombustible liquid; and two "solid
rocket boosters," whose two iniUion
pounds of rubbery aluminum fuel generate
85 percent of the thrust needed
to get the giant off the ground.
On the
launchpad the shuttle weighs four and
a half million pounds. Two minutes after the launch, the boosters have finished their work and drop away into
wa-
the ocean, to be fished out of the
ter
and reused. Six minutes
later, just
before the shuttle reaches orbital speed,
the
now-empty external tank drops
By
Now
Fact
is,
in
One solution is to sheathe the
it. If you wanted to
from New York to California and
back again, and there were no gas sta-
tions along the
you'd have to drag
But then you'd need an engine strong
enough to puU a tanker, so you'd need
to buy a much bigger engine. Then
you'd need even more fiiel to drive the
car.
Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation eats
your lunch every time.
leading surface of the craft in a heat
which
vi'ay,
along a fuel tank as big as a tanker truck.
In any case, slowing
down
or land-
just passing the far-fiung planets in
method
fleeting "flybys," a
left
behind.
space, slowing
how
down
fuel as speeding up.
earthbound ways to slow
NATURAL HISTORY
June 2005
shield,
deals
cone-shaped Apollois carried away
by shock waves in the air and a continuously peehng supply of vaporized
material on the capsule's bottom. For
the space shuttle and its famous tiles,
dissipation is the method of choice.
Unfortunately, as we all now know,
for the
era capsules, the heat
down require firiction. On a bicycle, the
22
ginning.
Think about
drive
dissipation. In ablation, the preferred
empty
Familiar,
—
other skyscraper-high rocket.
reenters Earth's
as it
that you're launched,
much
1 8,
it
some
the time the shuttle
about slowing down, landing
gently, and one day returning home?
takes as
launch. It's dropping out of an
000-mile-an-hour orbit and plunging toward Earth's surface
so heat and
firiction are much bigger problems at
the end of the journey than at the beits
there, atop
ing isn't only about returning to Earth.
off
reaches orbit, 90 percent of its launch
mass has been
down for you.
One comphcation, though, is that
the craft is traveling much faster during its home stretch than it was during
it
would be launched
with the swiftly accumulating heat through ablation or
and disintegrates
atmosphere.
of friction. Instead of using all that fuel to slow down the craft before reentry, you could let the atmosphere slow-
heat shields are hardly invulnerable.
The
seven astronauts of the Columbia
also
It's
about exploration. Instead of
mode
that charac-
terized an entire generation of
NASA
space probes, the spacecraft ought to
spend some time getting to
know those
But it takes extra
slow down and puU into orbit.
distant worlds.
to
—launched
ager 2, for instance
gust 1977
—
has spent
its
in
entire
fuel
I ii)'-
Aulife
both
Jupiter and then Saturn (the poor man's
coasting. After gravity assists fi-om
Voyager 2 flew
weigh nothing. To
actually launch
1986 and past
Neptune in August 1989. For a spacecraft to spend a dozen years reaching a
planet and then spend only a few hours
yourself, anything
more than 150
propulsion mechanism)
past
Uranus
,
in January
collecting data
on
like
it is
waiting two
days in line to see a rock concert that
lasts six
seconds. Flybys are better than
nothing, but they
a scientist really
On
fall
far short
of what
pounds of thrust will do, depending on
your tolerance for acceleration. But
wait. You'U need even more thrust than
that to account for the weight of the
erate skyward.
Earth, a fdl-up at the local gas
become
a pricey ac-
mavens' perennial goal
The space
fmd
source
packs
a fuel
to
is
that
astronomical levels of energy into the
scientists
smallest possible volumes. Because
chemical fuels use chemical energy,
there's a hmit to how much thrust they
can provide, and that limit comes from
the stored binding energies within
of late. Plenty of smart
developing alternative fuels that might
see widespread use.
And plen-
doing the
same for the world of propulsion.
The most common forms of fuel for
spacecraft are chemical substances:
ethanol, hydrogen, oxygen, monomethyl hydrazine, powdered aluminum. But unlike airplanes, which
burn fuel by drawing oxygen through
their engines, spacecraft have no such
luxury; they must bring the whole
chemical equation along with them. So
ty of other smart scientists are
they carry not only the
fiiel
but an ox-
idizer as well, kept separate until valves
bring them together. The ignited,
high-temperature mixture then creates
high-pressure exhaust,
all
in the service
of Newton's third law of motion.
Bummer. Even ignoring
specially
from
the free
fliel
fijel
the Saturn
V
was ethanol and water;
was kerosene for the
first stage and liquid hydrogen for the
second stage. Both rockets used Uquid
oxygen as the oxidizer. The space shuts
fuel
main engine, which must work
above the atmosphere, uses 385,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and 143,000
gallons of Uquid oxygen.
Wouldn't
After a vehicle rises beyond Earth's
atmosphere, propulsion need not
come from burning vast quantities of
chemical fuel. In deep space, the propellant can be small amounts of ionized xenon gas, accelerated to enormous speeds within a new kind of engine. A vehicle equipped with a
reflective sail can be pushed along by
the gentle pressure ot the Sun's rays, or
even by a
on an
it
be nice
laser stationed
orbiting platform.
ten years or
—
orders
launch yourself into space, you'll need
150 pounds of thrust under your feet
(or spewed forth from a jet pack) just to
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ical fuels
While we're getting carried away
with ourselves, making the impossible
possible, what we really want is the
antimatter rocket. Better yet, we'd hke
to arrive at a
new understanding of the
universe, to enable journeys that exploit shortcuts in the fabric
and time.
When
of space
that happens, the sky
no longer be the Hmit.
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The energy it generates will be
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if the fiael itself
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so, a
reactor will
engine.
The V-2s
tle's
looking into innovative alternatives.
possible
load than does an airplane.
and engineers have been
physicists
rushing over
air
pound, any craft whose agenda is to
leave the atmosphere must carry a much
heavier
molecules. So, given those limitations,
shaped wings, pound for
"Hft" a plane gets
its
DCF SP BINOCULARS
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have spent plenty ofyears inventing and
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PENTAX
director of
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Available at
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oj
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Donald Gold-
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FIELD NOTES
Life in
Death Valley
A
tide
of blossoms, in the wake of heavy
storms, has
grown
into a big attraction.
brought floods and mudslides
Deadly
but
Southern California
rains
this past year,
to
the rains have offered amends: a profusion
ofspring wildflowers. In Death Valley National Park
the bloom has been particularly spectacular. The
predominant flower, a yellow beauty called desert
sunflower, dressed up what is, more commonly, a
barren valley floor. The flowers created a
kind of golden alluvium, marking where courses of
rainwater had surged down the mountains just
months before. The floral wash converged into a
a sight to behold
giant pool on the basin's floor
relatively
—
photograph at upper
[see
Death Valley
rain a year.
six
and
right].
a half
inches
fell,
having
The
—
boom year
a
until
reviving
seeds and leaving small lakes
are
two inches of
June 2005 about
usually gets, at most,
From June 2004
dormant flower
—where
desert pupfish
in place of dry, salty
flats.
flowers in turn have lured tourists in record
numbers. Cars, RVs, and motorcycles will probably
continue to line the roads through early June.
Yet visitors who venture into some of the sparser
S
may be the most rewarded. There,
among dry shrubs and rocks, are the more unusual
buds. The chia, for instance, has exquisite flowers that
flower patches
look Hke mini-orchids unfolding from
ple sphere.
that
The
a
pointed pur-
desert five-spot has deUcate petals
blow open in
a
breeze to reveal five blushing cir-
cles inside. [See photographs at lower right.]
The
Toothed dodder (Cuscuta
denticulata),
wrapped
drils
around desert lupine
rain also brought with
toothed dodder
it
a parasite
[see photograph at left]. Its
its new host, grows
and ultimately chokes and
kills its Hfeline. Yet even the toothed dodder adds a
bright color to this year's striking and unusual spring
Erin Espelie
palette in Death Valley.
the dodder snakes around
into a large stringy mass,
—
NATURAL HISTORY
as
creep across the ground until they find a plant.
Then
(Lupinus sparsiflorus)
24
known
orange ten-
June 2005
»,«*.«
Desert sunflower (Geraea canescens)
i'm-
'
;
^
'
-
%::
i^
Desert chicory (Rafinesquia neomexicana)
Chia (Salvia columbariae)
w
*4
Scarlet
locoweed (Astragalus cocclneus)
June 2005
natural history 25
BIOMECHANICS
Snap!
How can
The
Venus flytrap indulge
the
secret is the
its
taste for insect flesh?
cunning construction of its
leaves.
By Adam Summers ~
Illustrations
by
state
the
Ian
Worpole
Although plants are firmly
rooted in the ground, they
do move: sunflowers track
the
Sun
across the sky; daffodils turn
away from the wind
plant motion is ei-
their floral faces
as
it
blows.
Most
ther quite slow (the sunflower), or
wind
driven by external factors (the
on the
daSbdil). Herbal hustle
caused by internal forces
mon.
That's
no
is
uncom-
surprise, really: plants
have neither nerves nor muscles, nor
do they have other obvious mechanisms for generating force rapidly.
Yet despite the lack of muscle, sevhave independent-
eral plant lineages
ly
evolved some capacity for rapid
movement. The
trigger plants of
Venus
flytrap catches insects with a
modified
the
leaf. In
initial
(left),
two halves of the leaf curve away from each other But a landing insect
triggers the two halves to rotate slowly toward each other, making their
convex curvature unstable. Suddenly,
in
about a tenth of a second, the
curvature of the
two halves becomes concave
and the
trapped.
insect
is
(right),
the leaves snap shut,
Austraha, for instance, slap a dab of
pollen
on
bidly, the
visiting bees.
Venus
halves of a leaf shut
sects.
More mortwo
flytrap slams
on
nutritious in-
Recently, investigators discov-
ered that the flytrap owes
its
quick
grasp to a "bistable configuration" of
its
leaves,
whereby
can trigger
much
sniall
movements
tastes.
Among
its
those refugees from the Little
Shop of
ever since.
dulge their carnivorous
Insect Horrors, though, the flytrap
has a uniquely
dynamic method
for
catching prey.
The
flytrap features a set
of inch-
long, heart-shaped capture leaves,
larger ones.
each fringed with trigger hairs and bi-
The
Venus
Any insect unwary enough to bend a single hair is a
goner. The two halves of the leaf snap
sected by a deep fold.
boggy coastal plains of North and South
CaroHna. Bogs are more acidic and
have fewer nutrients than most plants
can tolerate, and so it's no coincidence that several bog plants supple-
prison. In the ensuing
ment
trap seals
ciptila) is
26
flytrap (Dionaea miis-
native to verdant,
their root-gathered nutrition
shut along
its
The
glands in
pitcher plants, and sundews
flytrap several
NATURAL HISTORY
June 2005
in-
become
the bars of a
few hours the
itself airtight, and digestive
the leaf secrete enzymes that
trigger hairs
with insect snacks. That makes a bog
into a minefield for winged and
walking arthropods. Bladderworts,
all
fold in just 100 millisec-
onds, swiftly enveloping the animal.
reduce the insect to
a
dry husk.
Botanists discovered the Venus
hundred years ago, and
behavior has fascinated people
It
may come
then, that until recently
as a surprise,
no one
knew how a flytrap, unthinking and
without muscles, could move fast
enough to capture flies. The mystery
prompted Yoel Forterre, a physicist
at the University of Provence in
Marseille, France, and his colleagues
to take up the case.
To improve visibiHty, the team began by daubing flytrap leaves with
dots of paint that glows under ultraviolet light. Then they shot videos of
the leaves closing, at 400 frames per
second (a somewhat smaller video
file, showing the action at 125 frames
per second is available online at
www.nature.com/nature/journal/v433/
n7024/suppinfo/nature031 85.html).
den closure of the
Watching the videos in slow motion,
and tracing the path of each painted
be
a quick, fluid
enough
stabiHty slowly
dot in three dimensions, the investi-
what appears
snap of the two
gators discovered that
to
flytrap.
The
closing
pushes the structure to the edge of
less insect
becomes
denly, in
halves of the leaf is actually a three-
and the prey
in,
that the hap-
Then
never notices.
out, out
sud-
becomes
neatly trapped.
is
phase process.
EarUer botanists
In
its initial,
open configuration,
had proposed
the capture leaf looks like a paper-
lied
on
cellular
water pumps called
back book that has been splayed
open by breaking its binding, and
further insulted by bending its spine
into an arc. The two halves of the
leaf also curve away from each other;
if you were to see them from the
hapless insect's point of view, they
would appear to be convex, with the
center of each leaf toward you and
vacuoles to drive the leaf closure.
the edges curving away.
see
The
begins
turbed.
first
That hypothesis had been met with
some skepticism, because the change
in leaf shape seemed to require that a
large volume of fluid move rapidly
from one place to another. Waterpowered movement can drive slow
motions, such
last
a
are forced to buckle into a
The continuing slow
The
Take
"Bistable configuration" of a toilet plunger
good analog
of half the leaf of a Venus flytrap.
(a)
A
plunger
open configuration
despite
some pushing
far
(b). If
the plunger
enough, however,
its
in a sta-
use it on a clogged toilet, as long as
you don't push too hard, the plunger
Venus
flytrap
is
curvature
(c).
self-erecting shelter for the
.
its
storage configuration
looks like several
fabric.
But when
it,
flat discs
I
grab one layer and
denly reconfigure, and a two-person
hut stands ready for use. The Venus
flytrap makes me wonder how hard it
my
add low-force actuators
to
—
enough to spring back to its
resting state. Push too hard, though,
and the rim of the plunger will snap
back along the handle, and the whole
to
thing will buckle into a convex shape
Ad.am Summers (asummers@uci.edu)
stable
[see ilhistmtion above].
Then, unfortuit back by hand.
nately,
you must
Much
the same effect drives the sud-
flip
it
of nylon
the fiberglass supports sud-
would be
think about the shape of a toilet
When you
my
beach. In
shake
leaf is
get a better picture of the idea,
is
in its
pushed
is
plunger
can remain
is
to the basic working feature
suddenly becomes reversed
therefore bistable.
toilet, a
pretty yet creepy
variety of self-assembUng structures.
Because both the open, convex
configuration and the closed, concave one resist any rotation of the
leaf halves about the spine, both
concave configuration.
also
illustrates a principle applicable to a
closed for days.
ble,
is
water into the leaf cells.
a
next to the
shape.
consistent with a slow flow rate of
long time; the trap
plunger, or plumber's helper. Stored
new
rotation of the
leaf halves in the third phase
keeps closing for hours and remains
To
—
—
third phase the leaf
The
pump-
any higher than that of the water in
and out of sunflower cells can cause
the trap to snap quickly. Pushed to
the point of instabihty the leaf halves
leaf halves retain their
configurations are stable.
isn't
needn't be powered by a flow rate
slowly continues to close. That proc-
can
howev-
fast
needed. Just a small change
in the shape of the leaf cells
which
convex curvature even as they rotate
slightly toward each other.
Suddenly the leaf crosses a critical
threshold, and the second phase begins. The two halves buckle outward,
into a new, concave configuration
(again, from the insect's point of
view), and the leaves snap shut.
ess
cells
to close the flytrap.
have demonstrated that
ing
curvature resisting the closure like
During the
But no one could
could gain volume fast
Forterre and his colleagues,
er,
more, reducing the "gape" of the leaf
by a few hundredths of an inch. As it
does so, the spine straightens shghtly,
The
how
enough
phase of the leaf closure
when a trigger hair is disThe capture leaf begins to
a spring.
of a sunflower
as that
tracking the Sun.
close slowly for half a second or
its
that
the flytrap, lacking muscles, re-
or,
sunshade for rapid repacking
with an unsuspecting person sit-
ting inside, simply for entertainment.
assistant professor of ecology
biology
and bioengineering
is
an
and evolutionary
at the University
of California, Irvine.
June 2005
NATURAL HISTORY 27
NATURALIST AT LARGE
Jointed Threads
Joseph Leidy was the first
to describe
symbiotic bacteria growing together in long strings
in
animal
now
intestines. Microbiological analyses
Joseph Leidy (1823-91), a Philadelphia
naturalist, was well known in his day for
independent, broad-ranging, and meticulous biological and geological studies. His
link the bacteria with anthrax.
scientifically
By Lynn Margulis
accurate contributions remain
widely known, even though his
largely neglected
Anthrax, once upon a time, was
a
marginal disease in people,
or even with the episode
It
and
few others. Most people who contracted it at all got the cutaneous form
of the disease, which forms black scabs
on the skin that look like anthracite coal
(hence the name "anthrax"). But in autumn 2001, around the time of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, deadly anthrax spores began to
be spread in letters mailed to news organizations and prominent govern-
fort
ment
terium
afflicting sheepshearers
Several people inhaled
officials.
the spores and died from the
much
by
a large crew,
—
sobering
a
testament to the durabiHty, both tem-
the nineteenth century.
poral and chemical, of anthrax spores.
figure of the story
ogy.
Is
is
the bacterium's ecol-
dy was the
anthrax just a kind of bacterial
sit-and-wait predator,
which
bides
culture.
The
of the
Fear of the an-
disease.
anthrax bac-
The very
tities
idea that small quan-
of white powder in en-
velopes could be anthrax spores
has
changed post
tices to
many
citizens' daily
my
own.
Anthrax spores became infamous as
a potential weapon during the Second
World War, when the British test-fired
anthrax bombs on the Scottish island of
The
bacterium's infectious
spores spread across the island's 520
acres
and
left
Gruinard uninhabitable
for nearly fifty years.
28
NATURAL HISTORY
Not
until the late
June 2005
its
our labora-
natural habitat,
of animals.
everyone, yet he enjoys almost no
posthumous reputation. A nineteenthcentury polymath, who was
J
'
'1
y
initially trained as a physician,
Leidy became one of his
greatest naturahsts.
He
era's
identi-
nematode in undercooked pork that is responsible
fied the
for trichinosis, a debilitating
office prac-
routines, including
Gruinard.
rea
grown in laboratory culture.
But where is it in nature?
such a degree that they have ad-
versely affected
is
to observe
eidy's scientific legacy affects
i
J
readily
The anthrax bacterium
central
a Philadelphia nat-
living in the intestines
grown in laboratory
But where is it in nature?
is
first
tory bacterium in
its
time until a sheepshearer cuts himself
or a letter handler inhales a cloud of
spore-laden dust?
is
middle of
The
uraHst named Joseph Leidy, once famous but now largely forgotten. Lei-
What is still unknown, even after the
island's cleanup,
New Jersey
that borders Pennsylvania, in
more deadly pulmonary form
thrax contagion was rampant.
field,
road tracks in the part of
wielding almost
300 tons of formaldehyde
begins in the
is
on Gruinard.
on the ties of rail-
1980s was the island decontaminated.
The cleanup
required four years of ef-
name
by historians of science.
Our eclectic reading habits have
helped my students and me disentangle
one strand of the anthrax
recently discovered that
a
story. We
common
laboratory bacterium, identical in
but the most
all
ways with the organism that causes anthrax, lives deep
inside the intestines of many healthy
animals. But the scientific story of anthrax does not begin with our work,
or with the terrorist attacks of 2001,
trifling
and sometimes deadly muscle disease.
He described and named some 400
new species of North American animals, plants, and mushrooms and other fungi. He was the father of modern
vertebrate paleontology in North
America. He properly interpreted certain fossil remains found in the West as
belonging to dinosaurs. Leidy worked
tirelessly
on
the reconstruction ot the
history of the Earth's surface by inves-
metamorphic rocks and eroded minerals. He even discovered a
thriving diversity of microscopic life
adhering to fish scales, after he had admonished his fishmonger in the
Philadelphia open market to neither
damage nor remove them.
Exceedingly broad in his choices of
nature's gifts to investigate, Leidy pubHshed some 400 scientific papers durrigaring
ing a fifty-year career.
are single-authored
AU
the papers
—not because he
was uncooperative (there is much evidence ot his generosity toward his scientific colleagues as well as his stu-
he was consistentAs Leonard
Warren makes clear in his recent
hiognphy, Joseph Leidy: The Last Man
IMw Knew Everything, the main reason
the history of science overlooks his accomplishments relates to the breadth
of his interests. Leidy 's science could
never be assigned to a single discipline.
dents), but because
ly
ahead ot
his colleagues.
Yet his writings never generalize. Lei-
dy
stays so close to his
to those today
who
own
data that
are looking to the
past for overarching theories or gen-
eral principles,
with
he seems to deal only
trivia.
dered drawings of the microcosm that
he made throughout his career.
Today's neglect, however, contrasts
sharply with the fame he achieved dur-
ing his lifetime
as a scientist,
particu-
larly in his native Philadelphia.
A
him stands
Academy of Natural
larger-than-life statue of
outside the
city's
and the building housing the
department at the Universits'
ot Pennsylvania bears his name. Several mountains in the western United
States are also named for him. And he
helped President Lincoln found the
National Academy of Sciences.
In spite of Leidy wide-ranging interests and activities, he was never away
from his first scientific passion for long:
the study of the microcosm. Warren
conveys Leidy boundless curiosity for
the microworld by quoting a characteristic remark: "How can life be tiresome," Leidy asked, "so long as there is
still a new rhizopod [amoeba] undescribed?" Leidy certainly never tired.
The archives of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia hold the
delicate, accurate, even lovina;lv renSciences,
biolog\'
's
"s
Leidy
One of long
walks
's
pleasures was to
take
across
the
Delaware River tirom Philadelphia to
New Jersey, where he would explore
what were then isolated and bucolic
landscapes along the railroad tracks.
Next to the rail beds, Leidy observed
with custoinaiy curiosity, were discarded ties beset with "white ants," as
termites were then called. By contrast,
he noted, in sound and sturdy ties the
insects were seldom present. Leidy
long wondered what the insects ate,
because termites also occurred so often in teeming numbers in rotting logs
and fences, where no obvious sources
of food were present.
Leidy punctured the guts of the insects and examined the contents under
his rmcroscope. Amid liquid brown
matter in the hindgut, he found the
pieces of wood the insects had eaten.
But his greatest astonishment came
when he looked closely at the brown
Uquid: "[It was] swarming with niyri-
Ufe within the intestine of the
millipede Julus marginatus
picted
in
a chart
is
de-
drawn by Leidy
in
1888. The wall of the arthropod's
intestine is shown along the bottom of the image as a horizontal
row of epithelial cells (each cell is
twelve micrometers high). Two
nematodes, packed with eggs,
are prominently depicted in partial
longitudinal section. The four filamentous growths that look like
small, leafless shrubs
rooted
in
the
intestinal wall are Arthromitus, as
described by Leidy.
segments, or
cells,
Some of the
make
that
up the threadlike filaments of
Arthromitus have mature spores
inside them.
The most mature
spores, ready for release (one per
cell)
into the arthropod's intestine,
are on the tips of the filaments.
The branched Arthromitus
at the
far right lacks spores. Leidy's origi-
nal chart
by ten
measures
six
and
a half
feet.
June 2005
NATURAL HISTORY 29
ads of parasites
wonderful in
number, variety, and form." Watching this scene under the microscope, he later wrote, reminded
him of "the turning out of a multitude of persons from the door of
a crowded meeting-house."
The episode came to be one of
Leidy's most abiding microbial
discoveries. The myriad citizens
in Leidy's jostling crowds turned
out to be symbionts that are
omnipresent in healthy termites.
Leidy later discovered similar
microorganisms in \vood-eating
cockroaches. In 1850 he introduced those intestinal inhabitants
to the world of science, in a paper
titled "On the existence of ento.
.
phyta in healthy animals
al
condition."
phyta"
tory in the
.
Among
life
carried, in-
blown into some wet
environment abundant with
food: a clump of decaying vegetation in a
farm pond, perhaps, or
the intestine of another animal, or
a petri
dish of nutrient agar in a
laboratory. If the spores reach
such nutritious surroundings,
they germinate; then, seizing the
grow and multiply
day, they
as long as they are
surrounded by enough air, food,
and water to continue.
Leidy recognized from the outset that the spores of jointedthread entophytes that occur in
healthy organisms might be related to contagion. As he observed,
quickly for
the "ento-
(literally "plants [living]
the life-forms within the intestine
and some others
and reproductive character through the agency
of cryptogamic spores, which from
their minuteness and lightness are so
easily conveyed from place to place
through the atmosphere by means of
more than
a
century
later,
Contagious
might have
became
the subject of our study.
A
large teaching chart, complet-
ed by Leidy in 1888, shows
diseases
their origin
ofjulus marginatiis, a millipede; the
the gentlest zephyr.
arthropod plays host,
as
Leidy by
then had reaKzed, to some of the
The word cryptogamic (from the
Greek crypto-, "hidden," plus
same microorganisms
do [see
New
gamein, "to marry") in Leidy's
illustration
Jersey termites
as
the
on
he recorded on the chart, he discovered bundles of long filaments, which he
dubbed "jointed threads," in the intestines of a number of arthropods.
Leidy went on to depict and describe the development and propagation of shiny spherical bodies, or
spores, along many of the filaments.
He noted that mature spores are released into the digestive tract, and
he suspected that fi-om there they
move through the intestines by
time referred to an archaic group-
preceding page]. In fact, as
peristalsis. It is
now known that they
are defecated into the soil,
where
they survive because of their high
resistance to desiccation
and
heat.
But though the spores from the
cells that make up Leidy's jointed
threads spend part of their hfe his-
I
usefiil to
gested, or
the termite was a bacterium that,
I
must be
cycle, they
inside") that Leidy discovered in
30
not
reach the next stage in their
natur-
as a
soil, it is
them as soil bacteria, because they do not grow in soil. To
describe
NATURAL HISTORY June
2005
ing of seedless plants (such
and mosses)
,
as
well
as to
as ferns
algae
and
bacteria (regarded as plants that
lack flowers).
Only two
great
groups, or "kingdoms," of hving
Arthromitus
cells (blue
micrograph at
top),
grown
beings were recognized. If an orin lab-
cludes the bacterium that causes the disease anthrax.
ganism was not an animal, it had
be a plant.
Given that dichotomous clas-
The Arthromltus
sification,
oratory culture from spores, are indistinguishable from
rod-shaped bacteria
in
the genus Bacillus. The genus
cells are
in-
each about four micrometers
them are spherical spores that, when mameasure one to two micrometers across. An
long; inside
ture,
Arthromitus filament (electron micrograph above)
in
the
life
history of Bacillus.
it should be no surprise
Leidy described his jointed
threads in the language of botany.
that
is
segmented; the high-power magnification of the electron microscope, unavailable to Leidy, shows that each
segment is a single cell. Because such filamentous multicellular growth patterns are lost in laboratory culture,
the segments in this image look quite different from the
cells of cultured Arthromltus (top), and the difference
shows why microbiologists fail to recognize Arthromitus
as a stage
to
The organisms tended
to
be
"rooted" to the epithehum, or inside surface layer ot cells,
of the
animal's intestine. Less frequently,
they were rooted to one of the
They
They developed
other intestinal inhabitants.
did not swim.
shiny spheres that he suspected
—
were "plant spores."
Clearly, then, the
does not
sification
mean
that Leidy
failed to recognize his jointed threads
as bacteria. It
was just
for that matter,
clearly
be
all
—and
—were
that they
bacteria
not anmials, and so they had to
plants.)
From various
termite species, Leidy
identified a series of related but dis-
tinguishable jointed threads,
named
Arthromitus cristatm.
which he
He
A.
cies,
cockroach
intestinalis.
digest hefty
wood
fragments
from the
second speAfter Leidy 's de-
and branched Arthromitus-YikQ filaments
learning from the keeper of the
that Leidy
key house that the noisy little primates
simply did not produce feces any time
s
drawings portray. Sixty years
after Kirby,
we, too, saw the filaments.
mon-
after 8 A.M., visited the
\vhere golden lion tamarins (Leoiito-
ment as sow bugs, thousands of them,
emerged as one from their hiding
places to ingest the tamarin poop almost instantly. Here was the comple-
monkey house
dawn. Promptly as the sun rose, all
the tamarins
with surprising synat
chronicity
—
—dropped
their feces at
once. Jorgensen watched in amaze-
tion of the hfe cycle: the "soil" bacteria
were
drawings
sow bugs? Jorgensen,
One nontermite host o{ Arthromitus
that my colleagues and I examined in
depth was the common sow bug, Porcellio scaber. Sow bugs form hordes in
the warm, smelly monkey house
tailed scientific articles
and
How did the bac-
teria get into the
Hve at
the EcoTarium in Worcester, Massachusetts. The sow bugs love to feed and
breed under rocks and in other dark
as a
complete, however.
but his sHdes include the same straight
pithecus rosalia), native to Brazil,
classi-
fied the jointed threads
common
and
ly,
jointed thread was a plant. (Such a clas-
enter the intestines
of the insects and the
published, such jointed
fr'
mammals by
same
the
threads were also dis-
route
covered in the intesof many other animals, including ducks
and dogs. Jointed
M;
Arthromitus bacterium
turns out, are
that occurs in termites
"plants" inside intes-
continued. With the
help of Frederick A.
Rainey, a microbiologist at Louisiana State
University in Baton
tines
threads,
everywhere.
tines
A
my
it
century
and
a
half after Leidy,
colleagues and
Spore attachment
I
have often followed in
his
footsteps in our
studies
bial
of the micro-
communities
termites,
in
wood-eating
image
in this
fibers,
the thin filaments at the center of the
electron micrograph, attach Arthromitus
(left)
cells lining
served
in
in
University,
is
made by
the
Bjorn Afzelius of
magnified 52,000 diameters.
lished ones.
sured
On occasion,
I
have
crannies
where the monkeys scamper
Jeremy Jor-
collected termites in Arizona south of
in that steamy enclosure.
Tucson, and was fortunate to examine
what Uves inside the Sonoran desert
gensen, then a graduate student
termite (Pterotermes ocddentis).
We keep
termites in the laboratory, and
we have
at
the
University of Massachusetts—Amherst,
isohited Arthromitus
intestines
with
from the sow bugs'
ease. Jorgensen's
simple
RNA,
and compared the sequences with other pub-
cockroaches, and a few
other arthropods.
our
um's ribosomal
the Sonoran desert termite, tend not to be ob-
laboratory cultures. The image,
Stockholm
eanwhile,
work with
the gene for the bacteri-
the gut walls of insects. Such fibers, characteristic of
the Arthromitus
Jths.
Rouge, we sequenced
to an-
other microorganism, just as they usually connect the bacterium to
the
-their
We
many
and we
mea-
bacterial
traits o£ Arthromitus,
studied it
with the electron microscope. Those
data, along with the ribosomal
sequence, confirmed that Arthromitus is
equivalent to a large, familiar, rod-
RNA
grown in
harmspore-forming microorganism
shaped bacterium that is
easily
often observed, with variations, just
but eflective method ot isolating the
the microbiologist's laboratory: a
what Leidy depicted in his illustrations.
We have even seen the same branching filaments that Leidy drew but did
spores was simply to boil the intestinal
less
contents of sow bugs continuously for
known
not name.
other intestinal bacteria, only Arthro-
Arthromitus
We were not the first, however, to reconfirm Leidy s findings. In the 1940s,
mitus spores survived the boihng.
crobiologists, but the interest these
Jorgensen also found Artluvinitus filaments in the intestines ofthe tamarins.
field.
the protozoologist Harold Kirby pre-
pared beautiful, permanent stained
slides for the microscopic study of symbionts in the guts of termites. Kirby interest was in wood nymphs
protists
's
—
that lack mitochondria,
swim vigorous-
at least
He
twenty minutes.
figured out
there
how
Among all the
the bacteria got
when he saw the sow bugs crawl-
ing over the tamarins' food and defe-
on it with abandon. The cycle
of Arthromitus propagation was not
cating
as Bacilhis cereus.
Recognizing
that Bacillus cereus
may be of interest
to
is
mi-
days transcends the boundaries of the
The genus
Bacillus includes the
anthrax bacterium, B.
anthracis.
No
one had realized that Bacillus, the organism so commonly cultured and often considered a pest or contaminant
in the laboratory,
is
essentially the
June 2005
same
NATURAL HISTORY
31
armed. B.
with
organism to which Leidy had given the
is
name Arthromitus in the wUd. The rod-
two or three additional plasmids:
lengths of DNA formed into tight
rings. The relation of B. cereus to B. au-
shaped bacteria cultured on an agar
from the
that make up
petri dish look quite different
shiny spores and the
cells
"jointed threads" in their native habitat
—
the digestive systems of healthy
anim.als. Leidy's
is
not so well
work on
known
Arthromitus
today, but
mod-
authracis
is
B. cereus
sect intestine.
tamed by laboratory
ly,
Unfortunate-
similar to that
assistance
him, but
sapiens
had just been ac-
culture of bacilli that
quired for his collection. Examining
of us, ignore
the culture through a microscope, he
our peril.
Part of the difficulty in making this
connection, oddly enough, arose from
had been perplexed by the little fibers
he had seen growing on the spores.
After he read our Arthromitus pa-
ern science, and the
it
rest
at
y
X
the fact that, since 1980, practices
pers,Ellarrealizedthatinonenew
il^
with laboratory bacteria have been
biologist
name
a
cause
it
culture the spores
The professional inicromay not describe and
codified.
bacterium simply beappears in nature
within an aninral, on
—
their
X
say,
in the laboratory for long.
or
I asked him where he had
found the new strain. He
looked through his extensive records and called back
excitedly a few weeks later.
The bacillus with the tiny
fibers had been collected in
the Pasoh forest of Malaysia.
And yes, it came from a ter-
a plant
According to the interrules of bacterial
nomenclature, a microorganism
must be described and named
protists.
national
Sow bug
only in "pure culture." In other
at least
two
their
color electron micrograph
different in-
is
that sev-
swimming
the spore-attachment fibers
—tend not
outside an animal's intestine.
is
magnified about nine diameters.
fil-
[see
image
form
Those acto
is
simply the genes that code for a ter-
and for a coating that prothe bacterium carrying the toxin
tects
clear that Bacillus authracis, the anthrax
bionts are filaments that live inside
genus
people, sheep, and various
Bacillus.
In addition to B. cereus
and B. authracis, many other members
of the genus exist: oxygen-breathing,
heat-resistant spore-formers.
number of
A
large
those walled, rod-shaped
EUar heads a Bacillus genome project
intent on obtaining a fuU sequence of
"in healthy
animals as a natural condition," be-
comes
Bacillus,
in the service
the test-tube bacterium
of microbiology.
sects,
mammals, or
agricultural plants.
baciUi other than B. authracis to
com-
pare with that dangerous one.
After
my
student colleagues, includ-
ing Jorgensen, Michael Dolan, Rita
The
causative agent of anthrax, B.
antliracis,
differs
from
B. cereus
(and, equivalently, test-tube Arthromitus)
in
one crucial
NATURAL HISTORY
respect: B. authracis
June 2005
equaUy keen empiricism, and
work have made it
Kirby's
from the host's immune system.
David J. Ellar of the University of
Cambridge is an expert on the huge
laboratory conditions,
as Arthromitus,
meticulous obser-
our.,comparative
bacteria regularly associate with in-
that lives
eidy's
vation of Uve organisms,
/
rible toxin
coutrements of symbiotic life are dispensable, and dispensed with, under
the jointed thread
mite mound.
intestines, as well as
„
aments that pursue a docking site on
the lining of the animal's intestine; and
on preceding page]
a kind of
J
of the bacteria in the
habit of assembhng into
filaments; their shorter,
is
must
irony of those rules
—
louse or roly-poly)
in
those of the monkeys, were replete with Arthromitus. This false
eral features
wild
wood
as a
under rocks and in logs.
key house by Jeremy Jorgensen. Their
ternational culture collections.
The
known
damp, warm places, especially
Sow bugs were collected from a mon-
be described as it lives and grows
in a test tube, all by itself. Furthermore, two different purebe banked in
(also
land crustacean that lives
words, the inicroorganism must
culture samples of bacteria
had retained
attachment fibers, typical
of wild Arthromitus. The culture probably had not been
;'
mushroom, or as a coating of
hundreds on wood-nymph
32
life.
of research fianding and other
a lack
made it impossible to oblige
we had a lively conversation.
EUar remembered once observing a
between a Hoby himself and a Homo sapiens with an inherited gun. Like the
gun, the plasmids may be passed from
parent to offspring. Their ammunition
thracis is
mo
He wanted to examine the
genome of a bacillus that had never been
Kolchinsky, and
Andrew Wier,
fied ^rf/iro(;iifi(5
with
me
him with
to provide
Arthromitus
newly
BaciUus,
isolated
identi-
EUar asked
sample of
from an in-
a
culprit,
comes from
a
long Une of sym-
bionts in animal intestines.
barnyard and
wUd
animal
Those sym-
members of
communi-
ties. Without its two e.xtra plasmids, the
bacterium is harmless. It grows on
mushy food both inside and outside the
intestine.
And when
conditions dete-
forms remarkably tolerant
propagules
tough, even boilproof,
riorate,
it
—
by the millions that waft
be afraid of anthrax,
as indeed we must be, we need to condemn those who would deliberately
culture a bacUlus that is armed with
shiny, spores
on
air.
If we are to
the dangerous plasmids that enable
be
a
than a
testinal
it
to
of nature, rather
law-abiding citizen of the inmicrocosm.
pathogen,
a freak
D
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JUNE2005
Dance of the Sexes
A
lemur needs some unusual
traits to
survive
in Madagascar's unpredictable environment.
By Sharon
T.
Pochron and
The
Patricia C.
Wright
group of lemurs, known as MilneEdwards s sifakas, was small an adult male,
an adult female, and two large offspring.
—
evolved into monkeys,
and humans.
That ancient genet-
apes,
With only four animals, distinguishing them should
have been easy. "That's the male," said Georges
ic split is
Rakotonirina, pointing. Rakotonirina was the lead
boast such unusual
field technician, a native
been studying the
sifakas
of Madagascar who had
with one of us (Wright)
the female." The novice
humanity's closer pri-
They
store
at the
dark forms up in the tree and blinked.
looked the same.
all
relatives.
it
"What?" Pochron thought to herself. "How can
tell from down here what they're eating? And
can I possibly learn to pronounce and spell
what-
Members
ever
it
is?"
Hearing chattering in the
.
.
OCEAN
no mon-
miles
key or ape hibernates.
lemur
of
one
family, the in-
Lemurs occur only in Madagascar. They are
all descended from an ancestral
probably
primate species that rafted to the island
forest canopy,
Pochron then asked aloud, "What bird
is
that?"
Rakotonirina laughed. "That's the sifaka," he said.
means he wants to stop fighting." Pochron knew
then and there she had some catching up to do,
"It
notwithstanding her previous experience studying
baboons in Tanzania. But like Wright and many others whose first encounter with lemurs was lifechanging, she was hooked.
The lemurs of Madagascar are the surviving members of a Hneage that has been genetically isolated from
the rest of the primate family for at least 65 million
years. The island became separated from the Afi-ican
mainland 160 million years ago, and from the Indian
landmass 80 million years ago. The ancestors of lemurs
probably colonized the island by rafting there on drifting vegetation. Until relatively recently, lemurs lived
in a separate world.
I
'INDIAN
while hibernating;
in contrast,
.
Range of the Milne-Edwards';
sifaka (Propithecus edwardsi)
up fat in their
and then draw on
hanikondro."
he
For ex-
ample, dwarf lemurs
tails
"Look," said Rakotonirina. "They're eating vahia-
M^DA
compared with
traits,
mate
,
i Ranomafana National Park.
one
reason lemurs often
"And that's
among us (Pochron) new to the study in 2000, stared
since 1986.
surely
Meanwhile, primates elsewhere
maintain an
upright, kangarooHke
driids,
posture
as
they leap
from one tree trunk
and cUng to another;
monkeys, however,
about 65 million years ago, well after
Madagascar had separated from the African
mainland and the Indian landmass. The map
shows the range of the lemur species studied by the authors, who observed groups of
them in Ranomafana National Park.
are quadrupedal, like
—
lemurs have toothcombs
a set of teeth
shaped for grooining; monkey and ape teeth
are shaped for biting and chewing.
squirrels. All
ideally
Especially surprising to evolutionary biologists,
most groups of lemurs, females are dominant over
some lemur species female dominance becomes manifest only in conflicts over food; in other species it emerges in all social settings. Yet in monkeys and apes
indeed, in maminals generally
female dominance is rare. What has led to such an
in
males. In
—
—
unusual social characteristic
among lemurs, with
its
far-reaching implications?
Milne-Edwards's sifaka, one of the lemur species of
Madagascar, lives in trees, mainly on a diet of fruits, leaves,
and seeds. The species has been the subject of a long-term
study by the authors.
Female mammals that do dominate males are usually
well equipped physically to do
so.
Female
spotted hyenas are often bigger than males. Female
June 2005
NATURAL HISTORY 35
VARIATION
KEY
IN
GROUP COMPOSITION
Adult female
i
CONFLICT
Adult female
with
POLYGYNOUS
POLYANDROUS
SINGLE PAIR
MULTIPLE ADULTS OF EACH SEX
WHEN AN OUTSIDER JOINS A GROUP
Male enters group.
^•®i
dependent
young
Female enters group
Adult male
Incoming male may
kill
dependent
Incoming female fights with resident
young
the
in
newcomer
same group.
Composition of groups of Milne-Edwards's
sifa\<as varies
and rr)ay shift from year to year w/t/iin a single group,
as shown in this schematic diagram. Groups range in size
from two to nine individuals: as juveniles mature, many leave
widely,
to join other groups.
fighting
may
When
an outsider
tries to join a
group,
ensue, particularly between adult females.
reindeer rule over males during the short season
when males have shed their antlers prior to growing
new ones and the females have not yet shed theirs.
Female golden hamsters call the shots when they are
fatter
than males.
But female lemurs
are not usually larger than males,
nor do they have any special weapons for enforcing
dominance, such
comes
Members of the two
monomorphic, or similar, when it
as
sexes are virtually
Park, a
to physical strength.
How do females manage
1
kill
dependent young;
drives off resident female.
70-square-mile emerald forest
It
,
white patches on the ammal's back. The females have
a lemony, maple-syrupy smell; the males, which have
more glands for scent marking, smell muskier.
Active by day, Milne-Edwards's sifakas prefer to
hang out some forty feet up in the trees, and they
travel, as do other indriids, by leaping from one tree
trunk to the next. Adults are mainly leaf eaters, but
they also rely heavily on
and
seeds.
Females and males do not often
come
flict,
but
when
fruits
percent of the time. Apparently males are letting fe-
What are they giving up
males vidn such altercations.
The
we
have some inklings.
into con-
they do, the females win about 95
by submitting? The answer may be
ing one indriid species,
[see
has orange eyes
We
a definitive
cloud-
map
and woolly, water-resistant ftir (a usefiil trait in a rainforest) which
is colored dark brown to black except for two large,
on preceding page].
to get their way without the brawn to back up a threat?
and our colleagues do not yet have
set in
covered mountains, and in adjacent regions
bigger teeth.
answer to that question, but after eighteen years study-
females, for instance, appear to eat
adult males do.
The
difference
is
calories.
more
Adult
seeds than
most pronounced
the Milne-Edwards's
during the mating season. Seeds are generally high
it was condiademed sifaka, but geneticists have now determined that it is a separate
species. Weighing in at about thirteen pounds and
looking Hke something out of the Muppet studio,
fat, and storing up fat is good preparation for a female on her way to becoming reproductively active.
When you see males and females fighting, you wiU
probably find tempting seeds nearby.
If males are allowing females to enjoy more seeds,
center of our universe
is
sifaka (Propitliecus edwardsi). Until recently
sidered a subspecies of the
the animal lives throughout
36
female and may
young; males can coexist peaceably
Independent
NATURAL HISTORY
June 2005
Ranomafana National
in
what
are they getting in return?
The answers
that
.
jump to mind are: sex and offspring. And that would
make sense in evolutionary terms. Unfortunately
may be no
for the theory, the annual estrus cycle of the female
the intended target emit birdlike chatter, the equiv-
lasts
only ten hours, and in that short period she
may mate with
ing males
several males.
You can
alent of, "Stop picking
None of those mat-
know whose baby
Ukely to
is
accident.
that a threatening
tell
look, a swipe, or a bite has had an effect if you hear
on me!
leave
I'll
now!"
Since the males are clearly competing with each
the female
other for access to
fertile females, it is
puzzHng
that
having. If he allows a female to take his food, and
males have not evolved to be larger than the females
he has
So why would he allow
her to win extra calories? Nature is hardly known
for its generosity. In our years of field observations
seeking answers to this question, we have found
ourselves bumping into some other unusual and fascinatmg lemur traits. Our goal, then, is to find a coherent explanation that makes sense of it all: with
apologies to the high-energy physicists, our holy
grail is a kind of grand unified theory of the lemur.
(or to have bigger teeth or other such endowments)
According to classic behavioral ecology, when males
compete, the larger or stronger males usually prevail. The larger males thus have more offspring, and
those off^spring carry the genes associated with be-
M
Most large mammal species are sexually dimorphic. Monomorphism, where it is found, typically
occurs in monogamous species, in which a single
male and female pair up to raise their offspring together. To succeed evolutionarily, monogamy has to
be a two-way street. The male has the genetic incentive to help feed, carry, and protect the young of
a particular female only if the monogamous bond
assures him the young are his. If the female needs a
is
she uses
to raise another male's offspring,
it
not helped himself
at
all.
ing large. After several generations the repeated selection for large males should lead to males that are
larger than the females.
istics,
ilne-Edwards's sifakas usually occur in small
groups ranging from two to nine individuals.
Typically, the groups include three adults (either
two
males and one female, or vice versa), infants, and older oifspring.
A
female
may come
into her brief pe-
riod of estrus at any time during the mating season,
which runs
uary.
The
froin late
babies are
November through mid-JanMay, June, and July. A
at a time, and
the next mating season, if
born
When
in
the species
is
said to
be sexually dimorphic.
female gives birth to only one baby
devoted mate to help
raise
nurses
genetic incentive of her
own
it
it
attentively until
The cycle puts weaning at a
when food is most likely to be abun-
dant.
A
mother
that has nursed a
baby that long
is
most likely
up enough fat.
apt to skip a year before breeding again,
because
it
Within
ful:
takes a while to store
a
group of sifakas hfe
members spend
a lot
is
According to evolutionary theory, a male
for example,
most of the year. During the mating season, though, fights between males can be among the
most aggressive in this species. There is Uttle question that the fights are about sex, and the fact that
fighters sometimes suffer injuries to their testicles
action
get along
Male
assists a
a
mating with
will
—only
a female
if
increase the likelihood of perpetuating his
the schematic diagram below must hold
males
if
in
—
his
own
in
future
generations are to inherit his "altruistic" behavior Males and
females are represented by the shapes shown
in
the key
in
the diagram on the opposite page.
Male
Male
will assist
by ceding disputed food to her
genes. At least one of the three social conditions outlined
female that
his offspring.
to avoid
reasonably peace-
more time grooming each
other than they do squabbKng. Males within a group
bears
her young, she has
—
a male that beats up other males, because, despite
winning the "right" to take many "wives," he cannot oflier parental care to all his offspring. When male
fighting is suppressed by such female preferences, so
too is sexual dimorphism. Some lemurs such as in-
survives until then.
propitious time,
the males and fe-
males of a species differ in such physical character-
assists his sister.
Their offspring carries
Her offspring
half his genes.
a fourth of his genes.
carries,
on average,
female that mates
and several other males.
assists a
with him
Her offspring may carry
his
genes
— or none at
half
all.
June 2005
NATURAL HISTORY 37
dris (Iiidri indri)
phic and
monomor-
that pattern: they are
fit
monogamous
[for a comparison of the indri
A.
Powzyk, April 2002].
Paradoxically, though, most lemur species do not
behave like indris: they mate promiscuously, and
with the diademed sifaka, see "Scent Wars," by Joyce
males provide
little
may not be
or
nogamous
or no care for infants,
theirs. In short,
but they act
species,
mous ones. The Milne-Edwards
But how can
tern, too.
Our
it
be
which may
they look like
's
like
nonmonoga-
When an adult female tries to join a group, friction
that pat-
with the resident female seems inevitable. The two
sometimes bite, slap, and chase each other. The resident female generally leaves, probably an indication
sifaka
a stable
mo-
fits
arrangement?
observations offer part of the solution to the
puzzle. First,
no male, even if he is stronger than othfrom mating promis-
er males, can prevent a female
Nor
male have the advantage
of producing more sperm, because during the breeding season the testicles of all the males are roughly
the same size. Thus the ejaculate of a heavy male
cuously.
cannot,
as
does
a larger
has been observed in
and the newcomer fight, and one is driven away. And
sometimes a female prefers the new male, and she
may help force the old male to leave.
For any dependent offspring in the group, an incoming male poses great danger: he is hkely to kill
them, a measure that is evolutionarily adaptive because it speeds up his chance to father offspring.
Such behavior is well documented in primates.
some mammalian
that the
incoming female has shrewdly judged her
chances before attempting to gain entry. Just
incoming female may
do, an
as
males
any dependent
kill
young. In other primates, at least, it is less common and less easUy explained as adaptive behavior
—
—
male.
for the female to
The murderous
kill
the
young than
it is
for the
action of the incoming female
seems to hasten the departure of the resident female.
When
he
may
a male joins a group of sifakas,
kill
any
babies, a
measure that
and avian
two
group,
we
adult females live together peaceably in a
suspect that they are closely related.
netic studies currently
speeds up his chance offathering offspring.
oven,vhelm the ejaculate of a light
both mate with a particular female, each
has an equal chance to father her offspring.
male:
When
species,
if they
To
investigate
under way should
why
the sifaka's social arrange-
ments vary so widely, we compared sifaka survivorship and fertility patterns with those of some
other primates. For example, tamarins and marmosets, both New World monkeys, suffer high morthen, they reach
tality in their early years; sensibly,
Aside from the competition between males over
sexual maturity and begin reproducing at an early
when
By contrast, many Old World monkeys, such
baboons and macaques, live longer, start to reproduce later, and have more time between babies.
The mortality pattern of the Milne-Edwards
sifaka closely resembles that of the tamarins and marmosets: many die in their first few years of Hfe. In
fertihty, however, Milne-Edwards sifakas resemble
baboons and macaques: the sifakas that do survive
reach sexual maturity fairly late (about three and a
half years for females, and four and a half years for
males), and they reproduce at a slow rate over a span
females, serious fighting
a
new
may
adult animal joins a group.
also erupt
Such
transitions
group membership shed additional light on the
of males and females and, in particular, the
dominance of females within lemur groups.
Milne-Edwards sifaka groups are far less predictable in composition than those of monkey and ape
species. A baboon troop, for instance, characteristically includes many adult males and females. GorUla
groups are generally polygynous, consisting of one silverback male, his harem of several adult females, their
young, and one or more subordinate males. By contrast, sifaka groups can be polyandrous (one female
and two or more males) or polygynous (one male and
two or more females). They can include multiple
males and multiple females
or just one adult pair [see
in
roles
—
—
's
—
ilhistration
on page 36].
Not only do
all
such combinations turn up with
a group may change in
composition from one year to the next. A new member is most hkely to join a group from August until
roughly equal frequency, but
October, just before the mating season.
seeks to join a group,
peacefully.
38
Ge-
clarify this.
NATURAL HISTORY
all
the animals
new male
may coexist
If a
Sometimes, though, the resident male
June 2005
age.
as
's
's
approaching thirty years.
deliberately chosen the
It is
most
almost
have
of all the pri-
as if sifakas
difficult
mate patterns ever observed: high mortality coupled with slow reproduction. By the end of her Ufe,
a female tamarin or marmoset will have three or
four daughters; a baboon or macaque wiU have two
or three. But by the end of her lifespan, a female
sifaka will rarely have more than one daughter that
survives to reproduce. The constraints on reproduction may be responsible for encouraging the
sifakas' highly flexible group structures.
The sifaka's lifespan is unusual for a mammal its size.
On average,
the larger the species, the longer
it
Uves.
<*-»
As we noted
earlier,
Milne-Edwards's
sifakas
weigh
about thirteen pounds, yet they live nearly thirty years
in the wild. Such longevity may have evolved in response to unpredictable environmental conditions.
After
all,
a
> tMI
longer Ufe gives the animals a better chance
of reproducing during the years when conditions are
most favorable. It is hard to imagine that food could
Ranomatana National
where greenery covers every surface. Yet the
ever be scarce in a place such as
Park,
of food varies
Furthermore, Madagascar
availability
droughts,
which can
Perhaps
here too
seasonally,
prone
is
to cyclones
rain.
and
is
The
why are females
behavioral pattern, in
which
ancing female and male reproductive needs. For females, fertility, pregnancy, and nursing all depend on
body weight. "Weight
is
less
as
we mentioned
breeding season, the
the same size
as
testes
r
important for
males, because their reproductive role
copulation and,
m.
part of the solution to our
males cede food to females, appears essential for bal-
sufficient
^V;
AiV.;.
/
i
also lead to shortages.
original question about lemurs:
the dominant sex?
with the
is
earher,
limited to
during the
of small-bodied males are
those of larger-bodied males. If the
males did grow larger
overall, Madagascar's unpreenvironment might prove fatal to them. In
sum, neither having a small body size nor relinquishing high-calorie foods to females seems to
compromise the fertihty of males.
In the past few years we have considered a number of ways to account for these observations. Because the females mate promiscuously, perhaps each
male simply defers to aU females, on the grounds that
there is always some chance that one of them will
bear his offspring. Or a male may yield food to a female only when he has some good reasons for thinking he will sire her offspring. Or a male may defer
dictable
to a close female relative (mother,
would
whose
offspring
genes.
Or maybe
all
those factors
One way
is
sister,
indirectly share
the reahty
daughter),
some of his
some combination of
is
[see illustration
on page 37].
more about what is going on
for paternity. Toni Lyn MoreUi,
to learn
to test offspring
one of Wright's graduate students, has been sampHng blood of these sifakas and analyzing it genetically. In a species where the average number of
adults in a group is three, however, discerning a statistically significant
—
pattern
—
And ^who knows?
new lemur mystery.
Milne-Edwards's sifakas,
may take some time.
may lead us to some
the results
D
lilce
otiier
lemurs
in
the indriid family,
and leap from one
trunk to another in this posture, instead of jumping in a fourfooted, squirrel-like fashion, as arboreal monkeys do.
usually cling to trees in an upright position
*
f
1-.*.:^;!
'k
Behind Closed Doors
Wielding a vintage camera, a photographer
A
explores the storerooms and hack-room cabinets
of a great natural history museum.
Photographs by Justine Cooper
Many ofwith have
an
us
gleefully
rummaged through a grandparent's
The objects we found of-
eye for lost treasure.
attic
ten brought the past to
life.
Now imagine
an
attic
with more than
v.>
of floor space, crammed with treasures dating to millions
of years in the past and replete with "crawl spaces" high enough for
dinosaurs and mammoths to stand upright.
Beginning in 2003 the artist Justine Cooper was granted access
five acres
one of the great "attics" of the world: behind the scenes at the
American Museum of Natural History in New York. The museum
specimens and
is the repository for a staggering 32 million-plus
of twentywarren
mazeHke
other objects, distributed throughout a
to
five buildings,
with
as
many
as
eleven floors.
Most items
are stored
some with multiple drawers, others adapted to
the odd shapes of their occupants. But specimens also reside in glass
in metal cabinets,
40
NATURAL HISTORY
June 2005
V
,ii
Mold of polyester resin and silicone, of a Homo ergaster
female, upper photograph, appears to flee Justine
Cooper's camera in this view of an anthropology storeroom
York
in
the American
City.
Museum
of Natural History
in
Drawer of /una moths, lower photograph,
sparkles with variations
among
the individuals.
New
\
'
i /l,,.
W
*
.
Clockwise from above
nets
in
right: a corridor
of storage cabi-
the department of herpetology; a
honeycreepers
in
a collection drawer;
line
of yellow
common
horn
from waters off the coast of California, preserved
in alcohol; and a row of elephant skulls, collected in the
nineteenth century, each weighing about 150 pounds.
sharl<s
%><
June 2005
NATURAL HISTORY
41
left on these two pages: taxidermied polar bear specimen awaits its turn outside a
freezer, where it will get antivermin treatment; Australian
grouper skeleton dominates a storage room in the
ichthyology department; racks and trophy heads of various ungulates populate a room in the mammalogy department; a drawer in the entomology department holds
some of the galls collected by the zoologist (and pioneer
Clockwise from upper
in
the social study of
human
sexuality) Alfred C. Kinsey.
of ethanol, in nitrogen-cooled stainless steel
chambers and even in the open,
in offices and along corridors. (At any one time, less
than 1 percent of the collection is on display in the
jars
—
tanks, in freezer
public areas.)
Cooper appropriated an item that was itself part
a 1910 Korona View camera, to
of the collection,
recapture the treasures of the museum's storerooms
and back-room
the
modern
cabinets.
With
it,
she could offer
public at least a vicarious view of the
museum's hidden wonders.
For more than a year Cooper visited every department of the museum and shot more than a hun-
42
NATURAL HISTORY
June 2005
dred images. Each image, focused razor-sharp, was
recorded in detail on
a
four-by-five-inch negative.
Cooper was drawn again and again to the drawers
upon drawers of insects, which comprise more than
45 percent of
all
the items in the
tion. In addition to millions
ers
and millions more preserved
seum
museums
collec-
of insects pinned in drawin alcohol, the
mu-
boasts an important research collection of in-
sects fossihzed in
whose
amber.
collections
made
Among the many naturaHsts
their
way
to the
museum
is
of the American zoologist Alfred C. Kinsey, best
known for his pioneering saidies of human sexuality; here resides his unparalleled trove of more than 5
million wasps and galls. Particularly fascinating for
Cooper was that each grouping luna moths pinned
in neat rows, elephant skuUs all in a Hne, a jumble of
sharks in ajar of alcohol
was a constant reminder
of nature's endless variation.
Unlike your typical grandparents' cherished keepsakes, the items in the museum's collection
as in the
collection of any natural history museum
were not
stashed behind the scenes because they had outHved
that
—
—
—
—
their usefulness.
Quite the contrary. They serve
as a
Ubrary of life and nature from which humanity learns
ever
more about our world.
—Mary Knight
Why Do
Cave Fish
Lose Their Eyes?
A Darwinian mystery unfolds
in the dark.
By
Sometimes, when we lead students or beginning
cave explorers into their
turn out
many people,
all
our
lights at
first
our
"wild" cave,
first rest stop.
the experience of total darkness
is
we
For
stun-
Wave a hand in
and you see nothing. Yet other
senses seem to come alive. If the cave is wet, you can
hear the drip, drip, drip of water across the chamber.
You can smeU the earth and damp air as the cave
"breathes." As you grope for the comforting switch
on your electric headlamp or the flint Ughter ofyour
ning, and even a bit overwhelming.
front
of your
face,
—
In evolution, "use
or
it
lose it" does not apply.
carbide lamp
—
and Monika Espinasa
The loss or degradation of a trait through time is
known as regressive evolution. But why is loss so fascinating, and so important to understand? Textbooks
tend to focus instead on "constructive" evolution and
the development of
student of biology
is
new
or modified structures.
bound
A
to learn about the de-
velopment of such novelties as legs in amphibians,
hair and mammary glands in mammals, and the large,
complex brain in higher primates. What the student
probably does not realize
velopment, in
is
that for every
new
de-
something was sacrificed. The gills, scales, and tails that were lost by the
ancestors of amphibians, mammals, and higher primates are just a few cases in point.
So why do cave fish lose their eyes? We ask the reader to stop for a moment and ponder this riddle. Whenever we pose the question to our students in introductory biology classes, one of them invariably responds: "It's obvious, isn't it? Caves are dark. Cave fish
all
likelihood,
don't use their eyes because they can't see in the dark."
^your spatial sense, or proprioception,
becomes keen and alert. If you leave the Hghts off for
a few minutes, you might even begin to "see" how,
with patience, you could learn a lot about your surroundings and perhaps move about (if there are no
—
deep
Luis
pits nearby!)
without the sense of sight
at aU.
Oops, wrong. That would be a Lamarckian anPoor Lamarck! The French naturalist Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet Lamarck, a pioneer of
evolutionary thinking in the late eighteenth and ear-
swer.
ly
nineteenth centuries,
ories
is
often ridiculed for his the-
of use and disuse and
his
behef in the inheri-
Many species, of course, have lived in the total dark-
tance of acquired characteristics. In academia, being
of the underground for millennia, functioning
of troglo-
called a Lamarckian is less than flattering. But if you,
Uke our students, came to a Lamarckian conclusion,
you're in very good company. The question of eyelessness in cave fish is, and was, so challenging that it
baffled even Darwin. The co-founder of the theory
of evolution by natural selection gave an explanation
ness
perfectly well without vision. In fact, scores
bitic (cave-Hving) animals as diverse as crustaceans, insects,
salamanders, and spiders have lost their eyes in
the process.
More
than
a
hundred
species offish Uv-
ing permanently in caves around the world are blind
or have
some degree of eye degeneration. To
a biol-
—and deeply per-
that was, in the end, remarkably Lamarckian.
Even
ogist, those facts are fascinating
plexing.
With
eyes
and without
eyes, a fish
can see
no more than you can in the perpetual darkness of a
cave. But why lose them? What's more, since so many
species of cave-dwelling fish, not at all closely related, have lost their eyes, the phenomenon seems to be
neither an accident of evolution nor an isolated event.
44
NATUkAL HISTORY
June 2005
Underground environment of a cave
is
often a place of abun-
dant freshwater and nearly constant temperatures, but
little
Around the world more than one hundred species
of fish have adapted to life in the cave environment, often in
quite subtle ways. Underground waterfalls such as the one in
the photograph are quite common in caves; this one is located in Gaping Gill Cave, in North Yorkshire, England.
or no
light.
,
,Jf?H|*.ist
.-•^
—
—
—
no
definitive answer
though
of research suggest a genuinely Darwinian resolution is within sight. But the
complexity and sophistication of the efforts that have
today, the question has
several fascinating Hnes
Remove degenerated
embryonic lens
Surface-fish
Cave-fish
embryo
embryo
rates
is
"We desperately need our exercise
and beauty treatments, so we can have
bodies like Brad Pitt and Salma Hayek,"
we joke with our students. "We're certain they will gready enhance our fitness. Yet regardless of our needs and aU
our efforts, our children have not in-
Remove embryonic lens
®
o'-
#
embryo
Transplant
O
*."_''—''
Degenerated
embryonic lens
Embryorlie
lens
Surface-fish
embryo
1
giraffe
natural selection.
~
Cave-fish
of survival and reproduction skewed the
population toward animals with elongated necks.
The key to the mechanism of Darwinian evolution
can
we
come
Darwinian mechanism
to ex-
herited those characteristics. Please,"
if you
urge the students, "see
up with
plain
-%.
a
why cave fish lose their eyes
—one
that involves natural selection."
'^',:.:
•
/
^
Adult cave
fish
So how did Darwin slip into Lamarckism? Cave organisms are ideal
models to support Darwin's idea of nat-
)
with restored lens
\
Adult surface
fish
ural selection. In the dark, organisms
with degenerated eye
with the more acute sensory organs
should survive and reproduce preferentially. Hence, with time, the population
should evolve such characteristics as
longer antennae, longer legs, and addi-
Lens-transp/ant experiment by William R. Jeffery and his colleagues, carried
out with cave and surface varieties of the tetra
showed
fish
(Astyanax mexicanus),
fish, most of
The diagram
outlines the primary experimental steps of the twin transplant. Two months
after the transplants the corneas, irises, and lenses of the cave-fish eyes
were restored, and the surface fish had highly degenerated eyes.
that despite the degeneration of the eyes in the cave
the genes involved
in
eye formation remain
been needed
fully functional.
tional organs rich in sensory receptors
just
show how, at
open up penetrating new
to reach this resolution
times, a simple question can
leads into the labyrinth
biology textbooks describe the mecha-
proposed for evolution, they
unfaiHngly invoke his explanation of neck length in
giraffes: Giraffes
have long necks, Lamarck main-
tained, because their forebears
evolution. Reluctantly, he invoked disuse:
The
desire to reach higher leaves led to longer necks,
and
later on, the giraffes' offspring inherited that physi-
Lamarck
believed,
unused organs
shrivel until they disappear. In short, use
Darwin
it
or lose
told the story quite differently.
A
it.
Dar-
winian explanation assumes that neck length has always varied among the individuals in a giraffe pop-
with the longest necks
which were more abun-
ulation. In the past, the giraffes
reached the highest leaves,
and may have held more nutrients than the lower leaves, but were inaccessible to shorter-necked giraffes. Overall, then, the longest-necked animals were
the best-fed members of the population. Better nutrition translated into longer or healthier lives, and
so longer-necked giraffes produced more offspring
dant,
than shorter-necked
46
NATURAL HISTORY
June 2005
giraffes.
the time that an animal had reached, after numberless
on
this view
and natural selection wiU often have effected other changes, such as
an increase in the length of the antemiae or palpi, as a com-
generations, the deepest recesses, disuse will
have more or
less
perfectly obliterated
its
eyes,
pensation for blindness.
were continually
stretching to reach the highest leaves in trees.
cal trait. Similarly,
in fact, they do. Nevertheless,
of evolutionary theory.
By
When
nism Lamarck
as,
Darwin was stumped over just how the
same kind of mechanism could work for regressive
With
time, differential
But that conclusion irked Darwin. He continued, no
doubt in frustration, and fell back on a Lamarckian
explanation: "It appears probable that disuse has been
the main agent in rendering organs rudimentary. It
would at first lead by slow steps to the more and more
complete reduction of
a part,
...
as in
the case of
the eyes of animals inhabiting dark caverns." Al-
though Dai"win found that conclusion unsatisfactoin the end, he adiTutted defeat:
ry,
It is
scarcely possible that disuse can
go on producing any
further effect after the organ has once been rendered functionless.
which
I
Some
cannot
additional explanation
is
here requisite
give.
Can
what
advantage, if any, does a fish without eyes
have over
a fish
biologists today
do any
with eyes?
Our
better? In a cave,
students typically
bring up efficiency and the idea of conserving
energy. Maybe blind fish do not have to waste
valuable energy
on making
useless eyes.
work
Yet that explanation won't
sically a
The
either.
energy needed to make an eyeball, which
globule of protein that encapsulates
is
ba-
some
much less
than what is needed
bone that covers the
same space in blind cave fish. As every dieter
knows, there are more calories in a gram of fat
than in a gram of protein, and even more calories in fat than in water. Growing a complex strucwater,
to
is
probably
make
the plug of fat and
ture such as the vertebrate eye seems to require
less
energy than growdng a
generated eye. Complexity
mous
-with
fatty
is
plug over
a
de-
not always synony-
energy expenditure.
two principal but
competing hypotheses to account for the evolution of degenerated eyes. The first hypothesis
Biologists today endorse
assumes that the
loss
somehow enhances
of eyes
the efficiency of neural processing or reshapes
the
fish's
suit a life
morphology and physiology to better
of total darkness. As a consequence,
natural selection drives the regressive evolution.
The second
ling the
hypothesis
is
that genes control-
development of unnecessary structures
become effectively neutral. Once the genes neither enhance nor hinder the organism's survival,
the forces of natural selection that once main-
good working order no
tained those genes in
longer operate.
The
genes accumulate muta-
tions that impair their function,
and so the un-
necessary structures governed by the genes degenerate.
That view is summed up
in the phrase
"neutral-mutation theory."
Biologists favoring
the
first
the problem of having to
hypothesis face
come up with an
advantage for losing one's eyes.
One
of the best
ways to address this kind of puzzle is to look for
instances of pleiotropy, a known and common
phenomenon of genetics. Pleiotropic effects are
the multiple, often seemingly unrelated characters
fish
are netted for further study from a cave
in
northern
Thailand by one of the authors (Luis Espinasa) and the cave biologist
Richard
caused by a single gene.
One
Cave
L.
Borow/sl<y of
New York
University.
of the best-documented cases of
pleiotropy
is
ease. In the
the gene associated with sickle-ceU dis-
mutant gene show enhanced
red blood
The
malaria resistance conferred by the sickle-ceU
gene
is
cells
of people carrying the
gene, mutant hemoglobin molecules stick together to
form rodHke bundles
that
deform the red blood
resistance to malaria.
a pleiotropic effect. In spite
of its harmful
ef-
the gene persists among human
of Afi-ica with a high incidence of malaria. Sim-
populations in
cells
fects,
into the shape of a sickle. People with sickle cells of-
parts
ten suffer chronic anemia, extreme pain, and organ
ilarly,
damage. At the same time, however, the parasite that
causes malaria cannot thrive inside red blood cells that
cave fish also control other, um-elated structures that
carry the altered hemoglobin, and so people with the
pleiotropy could explain the loss of eyes.
if
the genes that control eye degeneration in
could confer an advantage to
fish living in darkness,
June 2005
NATURAL HISTORY 47
What
about the second hypothesis, neutral-muall living organisms and in all genes. Natural selection, though,
exercises quality control over genes. If a fish Uving
tation theory? Mutations occur in
in a surface stream suffers a mutation
vision,
more Hkely than
it is
its
harming
its
taboHsm could
harm eye development, or be
The hnkage therefore
also
linked to a gene that does.
provides a clue that pleiotropic (or pleiotropic-like)
account for the regressive evolution of
effects inight
cave-fish eyes.
A
sighted fishmates to
second group of
R.
mutation.
ers in Jeffery 's laboratory transplanted
According to the neutral-mutation theory, howmutation leads to bUndness of an
eyed fish Uving in a cave, the fish will have no ad-
surface-fish lens into the optic cup, or eye socket,
ever, if a genetic
Jeffery a biologist at the University of Maryland
in College Park, has taken great strides in unraveling
the history of blindness in Astyanax. In 2000,
cave-fish lens into a surface-fish
tion
The mutation will simply remain in the population. As more and more such mutations accumulate, the entire population will become bHnd.
with
on page 46].
Two months
generation of molecular and develop-
mental biologists have been tackling the
issues
by such questions for several years. Horst
Wilkens of the Zoological Institute and Zoological
Museum of the University of Hamburg in Germany
and Richard L. Borowsky of New York University
have been working with both cave and surface varieties of the tetra fish, Astyanax mexicanus. They have
mapped the genes in both cave and surface fish that
control eye size, pigment loss, and condition factor
(a polite term for "fatness"). Caves, in general, are
food-poor environments, and cave fish
raised
have evolved
doomed
make up
embryonic
different
must have
The
iris,
different parts
the surface fish
had a highly defish previ-
tissues,
and lens. Because cells
of the eye come from
the transplanted lens
activated genes in the cave
fish's
own cells.
significance of their finding cannot be
overemphasized. For one thing,
gives
it
no boost
the neutral-mutation theory ofblindness in cave
to
fish.
Recall that, according to the theory, all genes not
being expressed that is, used as a template for mak-
—
—should be accumulating
ing proteins in the
cell
mutations and degenerating. But Jeffery 's research
showed
that,
even
after tens
of thousands of years of
evolution in caves,
most Astyanax genes
that play a role in eye
meta-
remain
formation
bolism that enables
them
later,
a
to eyelessness possessed a large eye
high-
a
efficient
ly
that
of
[see illustm-
generated eye. At the same time, the cave
with a restored cornea,
Anew
embryo
a transplanted cave-fish lens
ously
work-
an embryonic
embryo, and, conversely, transplanted
a cave-fish
vantage or disadvantage over other eyed fish in the
cave.
perfectly functional.
on
Blindness in Asty-
fewer calories than
coun-
anax seems to be
caused instead by mu-
The gene mapping
number of master
to survive
their surface
terparts need.
showed
distinct
tations
on
three
somes, affect eye de-
Configuration of the bones surrounding the eye socket of the tetra
fish (A.
According to worl< by one of the authors (Luis Espinasa),
variety of the fish, where no eye is present, the olfactory
known. Borowsky
available to sensors for smell.
and Wilkens
pits of the
mexicanus) depends on the presence or absence of eyes.
cent wider than
two
it is
in
fish in
the surface
fish,
metabolic rate
both eye development and metabolism are
affected by one gene). Because of the hnkage, it is
that
possible that a genetic mutation that improves
NATURAL HISTORY
June 2005
the cave
is
13 per-
thereby enlarging the area
development of the
and his
eye. Jeffery
colleagues have isolat-
ed one of those master-control genes, a
gene known as Hedgehog,
gene that regulates
even possible, though unproved,
closely linked to a
(it is
in
pit
The size differences of the olfactory
the diagram have been exaggerated for clarity.
covered that one of
is
small
teins necessary to the
velopment, though
the exact roles of the
genes are still un-
those genes
a
other genes and pro-
Surface fish
Eyeless cave fish
chromo-
also dis-
in
switches that control
that at least
three genes,
48
by William
investigators, led
by predators. The decreased fitness often leads to early death or a low
rate of reproduction, thus eliminating the harmful
die of hunger or to be eaten
me-
or Hh,
modified expression leads to blindness in cave
Not
all
whose
fish.
the possible pleiotropic effects of Hli in
cave fish are
known, but suggestive scenarios abound.
The Hh gene
controls not only the size of the eyes,
but also the development of teeth,
taste
buds, the an-
.
Eyelessness
trait
is
the
common
oi a wide range of cave-
adapted animals. The painting, by John B. Sibfaick, portrays a representative sample,
though not all to the same
scale. They are (clockwise
from upper left): an olm, or
proteus (Proteus anguinus),
an underground freshwater
amphibian, which grows as
long as twelve inches; a onehalf-inch-long water louse
(Cirolanides texensis); a tetra
mexicanus), which
fish (A.
grows to about four and a
half inches long; and a Texas
blind salamander (Eurycea
rathbuni), which grows to
about
the neurons of many
terior part
nections in the brain. After
tures.
non-troglobitic organisms, such
of the brain, and other craniofacial strucMost intriguingly, Hh has an inverse effect on
all,
as cats
the development of eyes and taste buds: the smaller
have a certain inherent plasticity which
buds are produced, which
sense of taste.
enhanced
undoubtedly lead to an
bhnd cave orwith
worked
Collectively, we have
and one of us
years,
eighteen
than
ganisms for more
on
the eyes, the
more
(Luis Espinasa)
taste
was working with bhnd cave
fish in
time, Espinasa's research was focusing on the bones
surrounding the eye socket in cave Astyanax and
are
modified by the presence or ab-
noted that when a fish develops
bones are shifted into the empty
socket space, deforming the entire skuU. Part of this
deformation includes the bones of the nose. The
width of the olfactory pit in bhnd fish increases on
average by 13 percent, thus enlarging the surface of
the olfactory epitheHum, where the chemical receptors are lodged [see illustration on opposite page]
Could the larger size enhance the bhnd fish's sense
of smell? It is very hkely, and we view the trade-off
He
sence of eyes.
without
eyes, the
as a beautiful
example of a pleiotropic
tation causes eye
loss in
cave
fish,
effect.
A mu-
which conse-
quently deforms the skuU. In turn, the deformation
enhances olfaction. Natural selection is not acting
on
cave-fish eyes;
fish's
it is
acting instead to increase the
is
probably not the end of the story;
bhnd
neurons become sequestered, forming networks that
can process information only ffom either the right
eye or the left eye. If one eye is removed, or simply
covered with an eye patch, more neurons join the
network of the eye being used. In short, more neurons are apphed to the most frequently used networks, making the brain more efficient.
Could something similar be happening in cave fish?
Electrodes inserted into the visual cortex of eyeless
cave fish
show that their "visual" neurons
spond to
tactile
stimuh, not visual ones.
actively re-
Do
eyeless
develop a more efficient neural network
than eyed fish Uving in the dark? We think the answer is yes, because flinctional eyes in darkness do not
fish in caves
stop sending information to the brain: "I detect no
light. I detect no Ught. I stUl detect no Ught." If there
are
no
receptors, however, the neurons can
recruited and sequestered by other systems,
be
fully
making
whole work more efficiently.
There is evidence that bhnd people develop above-
the brain
as a
average abihties in specific tasks related to hearing or
to touching. There is also anecdotal evidence that
—
other effects have surely been
evolution of the
for instance, neurons of
sighted people have keener nonvisual senses when
^remember how the nonvisual sensthey cannot see
sense of smell.
Olfaction
newborn kittens,
and mice,
may depend
the visual cortex are activated and connected to both
eyes. As development progresses, however, some
Jeffery's laboratory shortly after the pubHcation of
the momentous work on lens transplants. At the
how the bones
age. In
five inches long.
at
work
in the
cave fish of the world.
Aca
cording to one of our favorite theories, there
kind of pleiotropic trade-off of neurological conis
come ahve in a cave when the hghts go
es seem
out? Would bhnd people reorganize their neural netto
works better than eyed people,
if both
groups began
hving in the dark or inside a cave? That is a question
our students, and readers, will have to ponder.
D
June 2005
NATURAL HISTORY 49
BOOKSHELF
By Laurence A. Marschall
Was
TIte Fly in the Cathedral:
How
was it only the
threshold of further nanoworlds within?
Group of Cambridge
a
Won
Scientists
Race
the International
to Split the
Atom
by Brian Cathcart
Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2005;
$25.00
For
a
man who admits he never took
Brian Cathcart
a class in physics,
certainly
knows how
to turn great sci-
ence into arresting drama.
the nucleus a single particle or, Uke
a nested
Russian
doll,
Rutherford knew that alpha particles, which readily pierced the atom's
cloud of electrons, didn't have enough
energy to penetrate and pry apart the
nucleus. Since the probe particles bore
a positive charge, just hke the nucleus,
the probe and the nucleus repelled each
other. What was needed, Rutherford
realized, was a way of accelerating the
sian-born American physicist George
Gamow. A practical j okester and racon-
Gamow
not only played Falstaff
Cavendish crew, but he also made
the crucial calculations of the voltage
teur,
to the
needed
And
the
had
all
the usual obstacles: equipment break-
downs, bhnd
competition from
alleys,
The
other groups of physicists.
gle reached
when,
cUmax
its
strug-
in April 1932,
of repeated ex-
after several years
The
periments, high-voltage pro-
the Cavendish Labo-
tons from Cockcroft and Wal-
ratory in Cambridge, England,
ton's accelerator penetrated
in the late 1920s. Scientists, just
the nuclei of lithium atoms,
beginning to unlock the secrets of the atom, had been as-
splitting the nuclei in two.
tonished almost two decades
papers proclaimed
earher by the discovery that
rest
scene
is
matter
is
"The Atom
atom,
ture
like a
moons,
sics, a
first
nature, but also of a funda-
mental change in the research
seininal figure
who had
Trio that first spl/t
the atom; Ernest IS. VJakon
Rutherford (center), and John D. Cockcroft,
proposed the existence of
(left),
enterprise. Gone are the days
when you could investigate the
Ernest
May 1932
atom on
Ernest Rutherford, an inventive.
Zealand-born
at
New
1909, while
physicist. In
the University of Manchester, he de-
vised a plan to
bombard gold atoms with
alpha particles, or positively charged bits
of matter einitted by the radioactive
el-
they would slam through the electric
ing explored by accelerators that encir-
barrier that walled off the nucleus
from
Hke-charged intruders.
Rutherford assigned the task to two
young Cavendish Laboratory physi-
Day
device that could shoot particles into
after day, a student in Rutherford's
an atomic nucleus had to be physically
laboratory stared through his eyepiece,
huge: the charged particles would have
How often did
penetrated the material:
they hit something soUd, and
did they pass straight through?
tallying the faint flashes
of light that
sig-
naled the arrival of an alpha particle recoiling off something very dense in the
By
—
the nuclei.
the late 1920s, most of the mass
of the atom was known to
reside in the
positively charged nucleus at
a kernel a
its
center,
hundred thousand times
atom itself It had been
smaller than the
tough going to probe this far into the
atom, yet the success of the efforts, it
seemed, only deepened the mystery:
NATURAL HISTORY
June 2005
The mys-
teries
how often
happened to the alpha particles after they
a tabletop.
of the atomic nucleus are now be-
particles to ultrahigh speeds, so that
Ernest TS. Walton and John D.
Cockcroft the heroes of Cathcart's
story. Although atoms are minuscule,
Rutherford's proteges knew that any
ement radium, and then watch what
gold atoms
won
phyrecognition not only of
in
a great leap in understanding
dense atomic nucleus was
a
Nobel Prize
with negative
electric charge.
The
the
of elec-
a cloud
trons, particles
—and
history.
the 1951
system of miniais
is
the news-
Split,"
Cockcroft and Walton
mostly empty space;
orbiting the nucleus of each
50
to crack the nucleus.
team's race for scientific glory
cists,
—
be propelled by special guns powered not by black powder but by millions of volts of electricity. As their research progressed, Cockcroft and Walton's laboratory began to fiU up with
cle areas as large as Swiss cantons,
lions
of dollars. In nature,
costher
might have looked more at
home in a Manchester mill than on the
venerable Cambridge campus.
Cathcart's drama is leavened by colorful characters popping in and out of
the narrative, most notably the Rus-
turns out,
to study.
it is
Earthquakes
in
Human
The Far-Reaching
History:
Effects
of Seismic Disruptions
byjelle Zeilinga dc Boer
and Donald Theodore Sanders
Princeton University Press,
2005;
$24.95
What':
s
industrial-strength transformers and
that
it
the smaller the subject, the harder and
to
pumps
with
annual worldwide budgets of many bil-
The question
shakin'?
migi
ight have
made
for this book, instantly
reader's attention to the
a
snappy
title
drawing the
human
side
of
earthquakes. Tremors in the earth, after
all,
change not only the landscape
but also the course of
From
ancient times
—
human
affairs.
for example, in
.
the biblical account of the
Worshippers, crowded into churches
walls ofjericho
for celebrations for All Saints' Day,
fall of the
and the subsequent rise
of the Israehte nation
cial,
—
geologic, so-
economic, and even
political
changes have followed close in the wake
of tectonic disaster.
To be sure, earthquakes are no longer
feared as the retribution of an angry
god; geologists
know
they are side ef-
of Earth's crustal readjustments.
Yet as last year's devastating tsunami in
fects
the Indian
strated,
Ocean
earthquakes
warning. Their
demon-
tragically
still
effects
strike
can
without
level
still
towns, sweep communities away, and
benumb
survivors with their display of
nature's utterly
effects
random
violence.
all
natural disasters, leaving scars
One
eyewitness account, relayed to
the British geologist Charles Lyell,
told
how
bor.
Suddenly the entire structure,
on the unconsolidated sediments
hundreds of people fled for
refuge to a new marble quay at the harbuilt
tvolutioii
of the Tagus River estuary, sank into
the sea, as if swallowed up by the devil
himself. Tsunamis, some as high as
twenty feet, swept through harbors all
along the Portuguese coast, sinking
ships and submerging coastal villages.
The
of tremors lasting only minutes
often dwarf those of almost
were crushed by collapsing stone walls
and roofs.
'^Cbmplete
Wojid of
other
on the
Atbon
the time of the earthquake, Lis-
was one of the richest cities
The temblor left it battered and impoverished,
knocking Portugal permanently into the second tier of
in the world.
European nations. Libraries
housed naval charts and
other documents from the
great Portuguese voyages of
discovery were lost, along
with priceless works of art.
that
Religious zealots battled civic
authorities for control of the
hearts, minds,
and purses of
the survivors; only slowly
were order and
stability re-
Elsewhere in Europe
stored.
the pitiful devastation fueled
the skepticism of Enlighten-
ment
thinkers about the
om-
nipotence and justness of
God. In Voltaire's satire Candid e, Pangloss, the inimitable
Earthquake
in
Pisani for the
optimist, views the Lisbon
Los Angeles, 1933, as depicted by Vittorio
Roman
devastation and declares:
weekly. La Tribuna lllustrata
For
landscape and the population that can
last
for centuries.
Geologist Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and
science writer Donald Theodore
Sanders drive that point home with
well-chosen evidence from notable
seisinic
upheavals of the past.
all
tliis
is
a manifestation
the rightness of things, since if there
Some of
the most impressive documentation
comes from the Lisbon earthquake,
which rocked the Portuguese city at
midmorning on November 1, 1755.
volcano
where
at
else.
Lisbon
For
it
it
is
is
of
a
could not be any-
impossible for things
not to be where they
thing
is
are,
because every-
for the best.
De Boer and
Sanders spend time, in
on some of the
technical deabout the geologic faults and tectonic niovements that were ultimately
responsible for the quakes they focus
passing,
tails
'^^ Thames & Hudson
Available wherever books are sold
thamesandhudsonusa.com
—
on.
But the
best parts of their
book
are
the stories, big and small, of people and
when
air
is
forced through
it.
In nearly
Orlando,
may not have professional cre-
every group of birds, different parts of
dentials in animal acoustics, but he's a
institutions affected
by the great
seis-
the syrinx vibrate independently, en-
seasoned birder
who
mic
a fascinating field,
abling a bird, in efiect, to sing a duet with
Hshed a book (A
Parrot Without a
disruptions.
It's
seismology: part science, part history,
part sociology, and,
alas,
part prophecy.
There are, of course, some things we
can do to improve our chances of sursuch as building better warning
vival
—
systems for tsunamis.
When
best place to be, will be
A
by
Scribner,
of experiments, pigeons were able
to discriminate rehably
positions
by Bach and
between com-
Stravinsky.
He provides both a lucid
overview of the major research fmdings
about birdsong, and a running narrative
about the daily lives of two ornitholonithologists.
as it
anywhere
else.
Natural History
Don
Stap
2005; $24.00
Among some
among
series
almost certain that the
it's
Birdsong:
Moreover, avian hearing and per-
ception can be remarkably acute. In one
the next
big one hits somewhere, though,
surely wiU,
itself.
pubName)
based on fieldwork by prominent orhas already
birds, life
others, hfe
an opera;
is
is
a cabaret.
Eastern towhees, with a repertoire ot
fewer than
dozen songs, present
a
of weU-practiced favoTheir performances include frequent encores, presumably lasting until the singers tire and the birds move
daytime
recitals
Song contestants: Chipping sparrow, left, sings only one song, but the
marsh wren can perform more than two hundred.
rites.
on
to the next tune.
By
contrast, the
male marsh wren is a seasoned crooner
that plays up to his mostly female listeners with a repertoire of more than
a hundred songs. He performs them
one after another in rapid succession,
without repeating a number. Most
versatile of all is the brown thrasher, a
singer's singer,
which knows
as
many
is
many birds learn their songs from other
at least among the 4,500 species
—
birds
in a large suborder called oscines, or
songbirds, a group that includes chick-
and warsuch as
chickens, ducks, and hawks, tend to
make calls that are genetically wired in.
adees, jays, orioles, thrushes,
blers.
Other kinds of
birds,
most part, one of the most enigAlthough ornithologists
have amassed vast recorded archives of
glides, twitters, and warbles, little is
known of the origin and function of
avian musicianship. Because most of the
singers are male, and because birdsong
tends to peak in the spring mating sea-
But if you're a singing bird rather than
a squawking or quacking one, chances
are you learned your song from your
father, uncle, or neighbor. There are,
consequently, "dialects" of birdsong:
variations on timing, pitch, and pronunciation evident in distinct local populations. Black-capped chickadees in
mainland New England (and in most of
the U.S.) sing a two-note song that
sounds Uke "hey! sweetie." But out on
son, singing probably helps to stake out
Martha's Vineyard, an island off the
as
2,000 songs.
Birdsong, one of the most familiar and
pleasing of natural phenomena, remains,
for the
matic
as well.
— —
good territory and just as it does
among people to attract the opposite
sex. Ornithologists also
thing about
how
know some-
birdsong
The sound comes from
is
produced.
an organ called
the syrinx, a Uttle chamber of muscle,
membrane, and cartilage, which vibrates
52
the most remarkable and puzButzling
that
aspect of birdsong
NATURAL HISTORY
June 2005
Gregory E Budney of Cornell
New York, and
Donald E. Kroodsma, of the University
of Massachusetts-Amherst. Much of
the time, they just sit around listening
in the velvet fog of early morning in the
Sierras, for instance, or in the dank mist
of a Central American rainforest. But
even to a tin-eared nonbirder Uke me,
gists,
University, in Ithaca,
Stap's descriptions
sound
make
Stap has a
gift for
depicting exotic
songs change over time? In
age, a
might have added a useful dimension
to an otherwise boffo performance.
Even without audio-visual aids,
though, Stap's fine book
I
—
—
nesting location.
Don
Stap, a professor
of EngHsh
at
the University of Central Florida in
this digital
CD or DVD attached to the book
sings
same species
song with many specific variations
ranging from "sweetie, hey! " to
depending on its
"sosweetie-sweetie"
work
places. But the puzzle of birdsong by
itself is an engaging one: Just what are
the birds saying to one another, anyway? If their songs are learned, how did
the tunes originate? And how do the
coast of Massachusetts, the
its
the
exciting.
sum
it
up
—
Laurence A. Marschall,
Supernova
—how
is
shall
a tweet!
Story,
is
author of The
W.K.T. Sahm
Professor
of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. He is the 2005 winner of the Education
prize of the American Astronomical Society.
—
nature.net
The
Talking
commander of the ApoUo 15 mission
to the Moon, explains the "Challenges
facing the human exploration of Mars"
Web
(go to www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp7id
By Robert Anderson
Recently
=2406). The "Video Library" offers
more selections in a column on the left.
read aloud to
I
my
chil-
dren from "Surely You're Joking,
Mr. Feynman!," recorded and edited by
Ralph Leighton,
a friend
of the Nobel
prize— winning physicist Richard
Feynman. The
I
kids' favorite part (and,
suspect, everyone
With
too)
else's,
man's retelling of
safecracker.
P.
his
the other attractions available
the "Video Library"
at
and
literature,"
Ben Okri, and
J.
as a
math, a Utde
A
hattan Project, demonstrating that classified
information about the atomic
bomb
was
secure, after
gram Hst"
top,
of
I
my
in the red
scroll
found
archival video
Feynman gave in New Zealand at
the University of Auckland in 1979.
But Feynman is just the beginning of
what the Vega Trust has to ofier. On
the "Science Programmes" page, the
"Face2Face" link takes you to an archive
of recordings by famous
menu box on
Programmes" page,
scientists.
In
the "Science
you'll find a link
evolution are intertwined.
University,
I
found three
quantum theory given in
Hans Bethe (bethe.cornell.edu).
What makes
Bethe's talks so special
and so accessible to the general public
is that he prepared them for a particular
audience: his neighbors in a retire-
ment community near
True to its eclectic reputation, the
Exploratorium in San Francisco (www.
exploratorium.edu/) offers a
lecture series. In the
by the recendy deceased evolutionary
biologist John Maynard Smith
^were
delivered at the Royal Institution of
Great Britain in London, where the tradition of making science accessible to
the public goes back two centuries.
—
Consult the
"A-Z"
Unk, in the gray
box, to see the
full
catalog of
downloadable science videos.
If,
like
me, you get hooked on
watching scientists talk on video,
there's
no end to the fascinating bounty on the
Internet. At the site of The Royal Society in London, for instance, you can
watch and listen as David R. Scott, the
the university
New York.
campus, in Ithaca,
"By Subject." Many of
as "The Origin of Life,"
—such
At Cornell
on
1999 by the
lectures
late
of unusual topics in
menu
the
favorite thinkers, the biologist
to even more such recordings, hsted "By
Scientist" or
at
to
about the ways our genetic and cultural
free,
recordings fr^om a series of physics lec-
the talks
banner menu
down
view the selecmade a beeline for a talk by one
and
U.K.-
a
high-quality science programs over the
the gray
"harvard@home" site
on "pro-
Edward O. Wilson; he explains his ideas
ence Trust (www.vega.org.uk),
tures
the
me to the Vega Sci-
based organization that broadcasts
I
Nancy
(athome.harvard.edu). Click
tions.
all.
A search of the Web for more stories
There
novelist,
on the Web. One is Harvard Uni-
versity, at
Internet.
poet and
a
science lectures available to the
Feynman managed to break
into safes when he worked on the Mana scientist,
about Feynman led
by
a neuroscientist,
number of other institutions make
public
from
an unusual
RothweU.
psychology, and the persistence of, well,
far
is
discussion about "Beauty in science
was Feyn-
adventures
a little
Among
right of the
casts," click
home
its
wide range
audio and video
menu
at
the upper
page, under
on "Archive"
"Web-
to access
"Live(§Exploratorium." You'll find
worth of lectures. One
segment I particularly enjoyed comes
from a series of talks and panel discussions on memory, presented in 1998
nearly a decade's
(click on "1996-8" on the banner
menu). Choose "Memory Lectures"
from the scroU-down Hst, and then click
on the selection by the neuroscientist
Robert M. Sapolsky his talk is called
"Stress and Memory: Forget It!"
—
Robert Anderson
writer living in
is
a freelance science
Los Angeles.
June 2005
NATURAL HISTORY 53
FOR
25XYEARS,
THE BEST
BROWSE IN
BARGAIN
BOOKS.
—
—
OUT THERE
times the mass of Earth (for compari-
which
son, the mass ofJupiter,
gas giant,
Peekaboo Planet
A
The
es).
is
also a
equal to 320 Earth mass-
is
of both are
orbits
known
to
high precision, and the orbital plane of
each one is edge-on as seen from Earth:
from our point of view, both exoplan-
decade afterfirst finding exoplanets,
may now
astronomers
he seeing them.
ets pass directly in
front of, then be-
hind, their parent
star.
Finally,
both
exoplanets orbit close to the parent
—
at only about a tenth the radius
of Mercury's orbit around the Sun
star
By Charles
Liu
close
enough that intervals between oc-
cukations of one object by the other
are not long.
little
more than
Innumber of
a decade, the
Perhaps the most spectacular ex-
planets discovered out-
ample of an infrared telescopic camera
side our solar system has grown
from zero to nearly 200. Ask what an
individual "exoplanet" looks like,
though, and we astronomers still
can't tell you for sure. That's because astronomers have ob-
is
NASA's
Spitzer Space Telescope
an orbiting observatory of unprece-
dented
sensitivity,
dedicated to taking
close to
parent
star that
the Hght
it
is
planets' surface temperatures to
a
either by watching their
scorching
1
,500 degrees Fahr-
they orbit, or by measuring pe-
At that temperature, the
astronomers calculated, both
planets would glow so bright-
ly
gravitational effects
on the
enheit.
stars
with infrared radiation that
riodic dips in starlight as the
ly
planets pass in front of the stars
when
they orbit. Until now, directly
sun, the absence of infrared
detecting the light of exoplanets
emissions mieht be noticeable.
was beyond our
th that in mind, both
few
months, at least three groups of
investigators have drawn on new
technology and human creativ-
groups aimed the Spitzer
with infrared
Telescope
Infrared
photograph of the
star
GQ Lupi (center) reveals
a point of light (dot at right), thought to
the measure of the infrared cosmos.
planets, orbiting their respective stars.
Two
The technology behind
is
break-
also the basis for infrared
night-vision goggles,
which
heat that objects radiate
light,
this
sense the
as infrared
then translate the infrared into
visible light. Infrared
cameras are the
astronomer's heat-vision spectacles.
Objects
warmer than their background
emit more infrared light than the back-
ground does, and
relatively bright.
so they show up as
Mounted on a tele-
makes an
instrument for exoplanet pa-
scope, the infrared camera
ideal
of the three groups I mentioned
above reHed on it to gather their exo-
The first, led by Drake
Deming of NASA's Goddard Space
planetary data.
Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Maryland,
targeted the exoplanet called
Both
more than 200
ting their quarry in the infrared.
picture of a distant planet's light.
exoplanets are gas giants
June 2005
HD
209458b, 150 hght-years from Earth;
the second, led by David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, singled out TrES-1,
about 500 light-years away.
The groups chose their targets carefully, to have the best chance of spot-
parazzi angling to capture the perfect
NATURAL HISTORY
lar
be an orbiting planet
eyes,
the light ofwhat appear to be three exo-
through
its
W"
Happily, the key words here
ity to "see,"
each passed behind
scientific reach.
are "until now." In the past
54
its
209458b nor TrES-1
Each one is so
distinctly.
overwhelmed by the stars' light.
But the atmospheres of both exoplanets absorb huge amounts of
heat from their stars, raising the
emits
served exoplanets only indirect-
—
HD
Neither
can be imaged
at
the
two
distant so-
systems before, during, and
each object was passing behind its parent star. Deming's
group measured the infrared emission
of the
209458b system at a wavelength of 24 microns; Charbonneau's
after
HD
group did the same for the TrES-1 system at 4.5 and 8.0 microns. (For comparison, the infrared emission of a
healthy human body peaks at about 9.3
microns.) Both groups detected a dimming of the infrared emissions from the
exoplanetary systems
when
the planets
were echpsed by their stars. The dimming was vei-y slight, less than 0.3 percent, but, small as it was, it stood out
clearly in the exquisitely precise data
from the Spitzer Telescope.
The third group of investigators, led
by Ralph Neuhauser of the Astro-
physical Institute of the University of
Germany, stuck
Jena,
based observing
strategy.
infrared
surface,
From
biting,
at
with spectra calculated from models of
gas giants, they concluded that the com-
panion
as
is
most hkely two to three times
massive
If
as Jupiter.
Neuhauser's interpretation
companion
firmed, the
would be the
rectly imaged
star. But that
out
first
conLupi
is
GQ
to
still
is
big
a
"if."
Neucom-
With the 8.2-meter Yepun Telescope
pared with models of relatively old gas
Cerro Paranal, Chile, Neuhauser and
giants.
made
pictures at
the star
Earth.
small
two
wave bands of
two milHon
GQ Lupi, 450 Hght-years from
of the
star
years old
2004].
The
infant stars
made by
an
just
is
one or
"Star Baby,"
[see
by Charles Liu, December
Next to the star they detected a
companion object. Recognizing
in archived images
Lupi, however,
infant by stellar standards, only
high-resolution
infrared
GQ
2003 /January
current understanding of
—
—and
their planets
is
in
Hubble Space Telescope six years
ago, the team was able to calculate that
the
itself.
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they are powerful confirmations of
the recent achievements of exoplane-
The images also pose
tary astronomers.
new
open new avenues
questions and
of inquiry. Perhaps best of all, they
triumphantly provide, for us picturehungry humans, something fascinating to look at.
its
Assuming the companion
formed during the same period as its
parent star, various competing models
infancy
its mass could be between
one and forty-two times the mass of
Jupiter. The upper end of that range
takes the companion out of the giantplanet class and into the realm of brown
dwarf stars. So, even though Neuhauser
and his coworkers are fairly sure GQ
Lupi's companion is a planet, they also
acknowledge the possibility that it's not.
What would make their result definitive? More images, of course
and
predict that
be di-
gas giant to
in orbit about a surJike
hauser's observations are being
blurring.
his colleagues
it
Then, comparing the com-
the Sun.
enable
canceling
distortions,
much of the
hundred
a
panion's infrared emission spectrum
those telescopes to adapt to atmos-
pheric
— about
times the distance between Earth and
contend with the obscuring effects ot
the atmosphere, which not only blurs
and distorts astronomical images but
also blocks out all but a narrow band
of infrared wavelengths. The trade-off
is that ground-based infrared telescopes can be much larger than the
ones flown into space. Moreover,
optics
possibly or-
is
GQ Lupi at a distance of about
10 billion miles
Earth's
astronomers must
computer-controlled
separated from, and
it is
ground-
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Charles Liu is a professor ofastrophysics at tlie
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The County of Kent is a scenic
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CARD OFFER EXPIRES AUGUST
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^''
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THE SKY
June
saves
JUNE
IN
By Joe Rao
some of the best for last: three
form a
planets converge in the sky to
planetary
dazzler for sky gazers
trio, a
the month.
late in
A trio
is
conjunc-
a
tion so close that the three planets
side a circle
no more than
fit
in-
five degrees
visible
glimmering through the twi-
Hght just above the west-northwestern
horizon about forty-five minutes
after
(magnitude -0.2), and Saturn (magnitude 0.2) are
all
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readUy
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low
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about an hour
af-
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which change
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relative positions,
ing to watch. Individual conjunctions
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on the 25th, Mercury
and Saturn (1.4 degrees) on the 26th,
and Mercury and Venus (a mere 0. 1 degree) on the 27th.
just 1 .3 degrees)
ginning, shining
ed earlier, Venus and Saturn join Mercury in the sky.
planet
Venus remains just above the westnorthwestern horizon after sunset all
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Look early, soon after sunset and preferably with binoculars. On the 7th, Venus
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is
The following evening, the Moon
much
easier to see,
hovering well
its
solar orbit,
on the
evening sky.
By about the 14th it should
star Arcturus,
Mars
rises
1
around 2 A.M. on the
A.M.
month 111
the bear guard, in the con-
on
the 30th.
It
1st
and
begins the
million miles from Earth,
Serious Sun Protection
Not
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only are Mars and Arcmrus nearly equal
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On
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ilar
the
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pear
is
is
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the
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as
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The
the virgin.
ing just
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Mercury reaches superior conjunction,
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at
just a trifle brighter than the
is
stellation
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3rd and passes from the morning to the
shining at magnimde 0.3. By the end of
June Mars is 18 miUion miles closer and
45 percent brighter than it is at the be-
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Venus (magnitude— 3.9), Mercury
across.
Their
be
1 .5
rima on the 30th.
On the
appears to the upper
gibbous
month, pass-
degrees to the south of Por-
left
16th Jupiter
of the waxing
Moon.
Saturn, at magnitude 0.2, is 6.5 degrees
below and to the left of Pollux, in the
constellation Gemini, the twins. The
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the beginning of the month and two
hours after the Sun at month's end. On
Thousands of dermatologists have
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Moon
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the
is
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waxes to first
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women and
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ADNH0605
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NATURAL HISTORY
June 2005
EXfLO
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At the
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S
^
Natural History
www.amnh.org/dinosaurs
Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils,
Now through January
New Discoveries
2006
8,
This groundbreaking exhibition presents the most
up-to-date look at
how scientists
scribed.
From there,
the mechanics of
the knees (just six gears needed to pro-
are reinterpreting
duce the
roll/glide
needed
many of the most persistent and puzzling mysteries of the
dinosaurs: what they looked like, how they behaved, and
head, and
how they moved,
theories of why
challenging project of my
—
T.
REX WALKS
According to the
IN
weU
as
or even whether
PLACE
latest research, Tyran-
demon
depicted in Jurassic Park, and in
probably didn't run
—
prey
it
at all in
walked. So
fact,
pursuit of
model of a
Fossils,
New
Based on a
fossil in the
trates the
model
HaU Train
Studios in
Toronto combined mechanical design
this
model was the most
life
because
conveying movements that are organic
move vertical supporting
The
overall effect
—the
scientifically accurate
model ever
buUt of a dinosaur walking.
animal's
feet.
of 50 mechanical parts were
quired in each of the animal's
toes to
make them
tion of a T. rex
on the move.
ART AND SCIENCE BRING
MESOZOIC FOREST TO LIFE
A 700-square-foot diorama of an ancient
forest, the biggest
biggest hurdle was re-creating
movement of the
total
the result of his toiling culmi-
re-
a marvel of paleontological art
most
off:
nates in a surprisingly lifelike simtila-
A
re-
littlest
flex in the subtle,
curling pattern scientists have de-
and most
detailed re-
creation of a prehistoric environment
ever constructed,
is
the centerpiece of
new exhibition. Dinosaurs: Ancient
Fossils, New Discoveries, at the American
the
Museum of Natural History.
There are no glass walls in
this evoca-
'^^gmtlf'ii
This intricate mechanical model of a
T.
rex in
it
paid
the
illus-
walk cycle of these carnivo-
rous beasts.
extinct.
model for the exhibition. A
motor powers a dense array of
aluminum and plastic gears, cams, and
The
Museum's
"Making
single
History.
collection, the polyurethane
into place
easily.
to create the
search-dictated paths.
American
here), pelvis,
fell
and fluid," said Hall Train, a designer
and animator who specializes in natural
history projects. Train's work certainly
is
ton in the exhibition Dinosaurs: Ancient
Museum of Natural
became
rods up, down, and sideways in
T. rex skele-
Discoveries at the
^they
levers that
how did this
stalker walk? Just like the robotic six-
foot-long scale
—
movements
required coaxing machine parts into
with state-of-the-art animation expertise
nosaurus rex was not the speed
its
as the complex and hotly debated
more
tail
motion
will
amaze
visitors with its lifelike gait.
PEOPLE
THE AM NH
;vr
Denis Finnin
Director,
Photography Studio
Denis Finnin
Denis
Finnin
first
stepped foot inside
Museum
the unfamiliar walls of the
Now, 16 years
for a job interview.
later,
he knows every nook and cranny.
"The
An
exhibition preparator puts the finishing touches
on
this large-scale
diorama
role of the
of a prehistoric forest.
with
Photo Studio
most departments
photographing pieces
tive
diorama, so visitors
they are
immersed
feel as
though
in a prehistoric "lost
world" never before viewed by humans.
They
will
than loo
come
face to face with
more
and
science, partnering sculptors
painters in the
and
Museum's Department
of Exhibition with renowned paleontologists.
A team
of artists spent
wide range of amazing creatures that
lived there.
tors
As
it
of what
models depicting the
turns out, the prehistoric forests
is
now
Liaoning Province in
northeastern China looked a great deal
modem-day New
Most of
immersed themselves in the latest
scientific reports on the Liaoning fossil
partments.
finds before meticulously sculpting
the life-size, fleshed-out models of
of the
feat:
cally accurate re-creation
intricately designed, scientifi-
of a prehis-
toric world.
sketching and
New
and its
accompanying education and public programs are
made possible by Bank of America.
Fossi'/s,
Discoveries
ronment of the Pine Barrens.
Not just an artistic flight of fancy,
the creatures and backgrounds in the
Liaoning Forest diorama are the result
of an extraordinary collaboration of art
sia,
trips
recently,
in
where he documented the
tion of sulfur
He
across the globe.
the two weeks he spent
here at the
When
re-
Indonecollec-
specimens from the crater
Museum.
he's not behind the camera,
Denis enjoys outdoor
re-
real-life envi-
and more
Planet Earth, as a highlight of his career
Dinosoun: Ancient
organized by the American Museum
of Natural History, New York (www.amnh.org), in
This exhibition
search took place in the
many
and additions,
of a volcano for the Cottesman Hall of
sey Pine Barrens, according to paleob-
Museum
much of the initial
halls
halls ten years ago,
130 million years ago are very similar to
Johnson of the Denver
of Nature & Science. In fact,
documenting the
the Rose Center. His work has also sent
modem pines, ferns, and cedars that
otanist Kirk R.
and be-
Our images
including the renovation of the fossil
him on
New Jer-
in
Museum's
calls
grow abundantly today in the
events,
construction and rehabilitation of
collaboration has led to an astounding
an
Museum,
exhibitions." Denis has played
in
an integral role
creatures that populate the forest. This
Jersey.
the
are used for presentations, marketing,
the plants and trees growing in China
like
Museum
in
for scientific de-
hind-the-scenes activities.
and
weeks painting the 68-foot-long background mural, while Museum sculp-
fiill-size
mul-
is
Denis explains. "We work
tifaceted,"
activities, like
is
collaboration with the
Houston Museum of Natural
camping and hiking with
his wife
and
son. His love for the outdoors led him to
Academy of Sciences, San FranMuseum, Chicago; and North Carolina
Science: California
cisco;
The
Museum
Field
Major funding has also been provided by the
Wallace-Reader's Digest
The contents of these paces
Endowment
become an
mutes
of Natural Sciences, Raleigh.
Lila
avid cyclist,
to the
as possible
Museum of Natural
and he comby bicycle as often
—even through the
Fund.
are provided to Natural History by the American
Museum
History.
winter.
Museum
American Museum
Events
S
Natural History
^
www.amnh.org
EXHIBITIONS
Totems
to Turquoise:
Native
North American Jewelry Arts of
the Northwest
and Southwest
Through July
lo,
LECTURES
will
Searching for Our Distant
like living,
Ancestors in Asia
ing aboard the International
Thursday, 6/2, y:oo-8:}o p.m.
how
Chris Beard explains
200^
discoveries of 45-million-year-
tion celebrates the beauty,
old fossils
power, and symbolism of the
light
China shed new
arts,
examining
styles that have evolved over
Image taken by the NASA Transition
Region and Coronal Explorer
the past century as Native
American jewelers have trans-
artistic
Sunday, 6/12, 2:oo-y.}o p.m.
Earthquakes and
Tsunamis: Can They
Happen Here?
Carol
Thursday, 6/}o, 6:}0 p.m.
seum, from the dinosaur
Michael
(TRACE) telescope
cusses
their traditional craft
into vital
Melanie in Manhattan
ages 8-12)
techniques, materials, and
formed
Space Station.
(Recommended for children
on primate evolution.
magnificent tradition of Native
American
working, and play-
his
This groundbreaking exhibi-
in
see what a day might be
forms of cultural and
Wysession
halls to the stars of the
how earthquakes and
Through September ^, 200^
"other side" of the world, but
also
detectors capture the fiery
States, including
parts of the United
New York
City.
Dr. Nebula's Laboratory:
Dino Adventure
Sunday, 6/26, 2:oo-y.oo p.m.
Science theater for the whole
images of the Sun's atmosphere. This exhibition dis-
Hayden Planetarium.
just the
Special optical systems and
many
which Melanie
Martin explores the Mu-
dis-
tsunamis threaten not
Sunscapes
expression.
E.
Weston reads from her
latest book, in
WORKSHOP
family:
on
a paleontology ad-
these images.
Wear It:
Beading Workshop
J
Vital Variety:
'j:oo-g:oo p.m.
\
A
Participants will create their
ADVENTURE CAMPS
own unique beaded
Monkey
plays the
most dramatic of
Make
venture. Scooter
It,
will
uncover
the mysteries of the dinosaurs.
Three Thursdays, 6/g-6/2],
Visual Celebration of
o Invertebrate Biodiversity
Ongoing
1 Invertebrates,
critical role in
which play
a
these extraordinarily beautiful
often
weave outdoors.
jewelry
Primatology
techniques.
Monday-Friday, 6/20-6/24,
g:oo a.m.-4:oo p.m. (For
FAMILY AND
CHILDREN'S PROGRAMS
close-up photographs.
The Dinosaurs of
Waterhouse Hawkins
GLOBAL WEEKENDS
Saturday, 6/11, 12:00 noon-
SUMMER SOLSTICE
1:00 p.m.
Saturday, 6/18
Brian Selznick's performance
Through August
The Science of the Sun
magically depicts the
200^
These lush photographs of Bolivia
take viewers on a journey
through the mountain land-
and 2:oo-y.oo p.m.
life
of the
11:00 a.m.-r.^o p.m.
extraordinary 19th-century artist
Explore the Sun's energy with
who
built the world's first
fun-filled solar activities.
size
models of dinosaurs.
of the
tropical forests
Amazon and
the dry
forests of the Chaco. Captions
in
English and Spanish.
is
made
possible by
The Music and Dance of Rupai
Visit the Space Station!
2:oo-]:oo p.m. and
Saturday, 6/11, 11:00 a.m.-
/i.:oo-
12:^0 p.m. (Ages 4-5, each child
j:oop.m.
Join the
Andean music, dance,
traditional
summer
the generosity of the Arthur Ross
Foundation.
Jazz
Rose Center
FOR Earth and Space
Friday,
June 6
6:00 and 'j:}op.m.
and theater troupe Rupai
This exhibition
Live
life-
scapes of the Andes to the
dense lowland
chil-
dren entering grades 2 or})
Starry Nights
Exploring Bolivia's Biodiversity
8,
Business:
using traditional South African
the survival of
humankind, are the subject of
Andean women
SUMMER
performance.
for a
solstice
Ravi Coltrane
Quartet
with one adult) or i:}0-
y.oop.m. (Ages 6-j, each child
with one adult)
Kids fascinated by astronauts
made
possible, in
part, by Constellation
NewEnergy.
Stariy Nights
is
.
Own
Robotics
Build Your
Monday-Friday, 6/20-6/24,
Sunday, 6/26, 11:00 a.m.-
INFORMATION
g:oo a.m.-^'.oo p.m. (For
12:^0 p.m. (Ages 4-6, each
Call
chil-
Dinosaur
212-769-5100 or
dren entering grades 6 or 7J
child with one adult) or
i:}o-y.oo p.m. (Ages y-10)
TICKETS
Dinosaur Detectives
The anatomical
Call
similarities
between dinosaurs and birds
or visit
6/28-6/^0, q:oo a.m.-
come
All
jioop.m. (For children
dinosaur models with creative
entering grades
2or })
by constructing
life
DINOSAUR SUNDAYS
and
ies
public
Take
all
three and earn
AND REGISTRATION
www.amnh.org. A
Fossils,
New
Discover-
its accompanying education and
programs are made possible by
service charge
may
apply.
programs are subject to change.
AMNH eNotes
materials!
Dinosaurs: Ancient
www.amnh.org.
212-769-5200, Monday-Friday, 9:00 a.m.-5:oo p.m.,
Tuesday-Thursday,
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Major funding has also been provided
Dinosaur Trackways
by the
Lila
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Sunday, 6/^, 11:00 a.m.12:^0 p.m. (Ages 4-6, each
LARGE-FORMAT FILMS
The Search for
LeFrak Theater
HAYDEN PLANETARIUM
PROGRAMS
TUESDAYS IN THE DOME
r.^o-y.oo p.m. (Ages y-10)
what
Life:
We Alone?
Are
child with one adult) or
Participants will learn
PLANETARIUM SHOWS
Vikings
Narrated by Harrison Ford
Discover the historical and
technological achievements of
Made
possible through the generous
this legendary society of sea-
support of Swiss Re.
dinosaur trackways can and
Virtual Universe
can't reveal about dinosaur
At
behavior.
Tuesday, 6/y, 6:}0-j:}0 p.m.
Narrated by
Digging for Dinos
This Just In
SonicVision
Sunday, 6/12, 11:00 a.m.-
June's Hot Topics
Fridays and Saturdays,
12:^0 p.m. (Ages 4-6, each
Tuesday, 6/21, 6:}o-y:^o p.m.
8:30,
Hypnotic visuals and rhythms
film takes!
i:}o-]:oo p.m. (Ages y-io)
Celestial Highlights
take viewers on a ride through
visitors
become junior
paleontologists and learn how
Star
Home
in the Milky
faring explorers.
Way
Passport to the Universe
Tom Hanks
Jane Goodall's Wild
Chimpanzees
.
.
child with one adult) or
Children
will
scientists
conduct fieldwork
in
Hopping
Tuesday, 6/28, 6:}o-'j:}op.m.
This
breath-
•j:}0,
and g:jo p.m.
fantastical
SonicVision
is
taking
dreamspace.
made
into the
realm of
possible by generous
sponsorship and technology support
from Sun Microsystems,
our closest animal
relatives.
Inc.
their quest for fossils.
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ENDPAPER
Balanophagy
By William Bryant Logan
[Balanophagy, "aconi
balanos, "acorn"
Oaks
+
eating," froui the
phagein,
have been cut
Greek
Snellen hves in the
northern mountains of CaHfor-
"to eat"]
down without
nia,
a
thought around the world for the past
3,000 years, but they are not forgotten
as a source of foodstuff everywhere, or by everyone. My own culinary adventures with the acorn
began with a walk I took in the heart of New York
City's Little Korea,
town Manhattan.
the
city,
foods
when
I
on Thirty-second
Street in
mid-
In the biggest Korean market in
asked \vhether there were any
made from
acorns,
I
drew
a mystified
look
from the sales girl. I rummaged around in my
change pocket, where I usually keep at least one
acorn. Sure enough, there was a red-oak acorn. I
drew it out and held it up. "This," I said.
Immediately, the girl broke into smiles and
laughter; the acorn was obviously as familiar to her
as a rice grain, though not by the name "acorn."
She led me to a shelf fuH of one-pound packages of
acorn-starch flour, and then to the cold case, where
she showed me a tofli-Uke square of acorn jelly.
The furst prepared oak food I ate was the acorn
jelly. It was a lovely chocolate-brown color. It hit
the tongue with a shmy slipperiness, like the feel of
a slug, but fortunately it began to dissolve almost
immediately. It was lighter in texture than Jell-O,
and the sensation of it, after the first shock, was
pleasant. The only real trouble was the taste. One
writer called the flavor "insipid." But "absent"
might be nearer the mark. There is a definite presence and texture to the stuS", satisfying on the
tongue, and palatable going down the throat. But
flavor? Tap water is tastier.
1 tried frying it in oUve oil. That was better. I
sHced it thin, grated scalUons over it, added sesame
oil and rice vinegar. That was delicious. What I
eventually discovered by repeated experiment was
^•^^ the last sensation it produced when I ate it: a
pleasant feeling, in the pit of my
^^^^^
^^^^^k ^^t^^ stomach, of being fuU.
HJ^^B^^^^^P More experiments were called
^^^^ ^^f^
for.
I
Acorns and Eat
64
NATURAL HISTORY
June 2005
cookbook called
by SueUen Ocean.
pulled out a
'em,
where good
acorns are plentiful.
She
is
the
of person
who, if you called her an unregenerate
hippie, might proudly nod assent.
sort
I
made SueUen's acorn pancakes, using the acorn
They tasted fine; a little chewy perhaps. The
flour.
acorns added no flavor, but again they gave
odd feehng of being
me
that
my
hunger very
quickly. I felt that I could eat acorns on a regular
basis, so long as I varied the flavorings. That pleasant sensation of being fuU was strangely rewarding,
though I might not value it as highly as those who
have often gone hungry in their hves.
able to satisfy
occurred to me that the acorn might well have
been the foundation of all the stews and hot pots
that are stiU the mainstays of cuisines throughout the
temperate world. If the acorn was once a staple food,
it would have called out to be flavored, spiced,
varied, and embeUished. And if, as a number of
anthropologists now think, the culminating state of
hunter-gatherer culmre was one in which everything
from seeds and nuts to fleshy fruits, meats, fish, shellfish, turtles, insects, and berries were consumed, it
would have been namral to develop a cookery based
not on roasted or boiled meats but on mixed stews.
The first time I saw a map with the legend
"World Oak Distribution," I was startled. The map
showed clearly that the distribution of oak trees is
coterminous with the locations of the settled civiHzations of Asia, Europe, and North America. It is
It
where there are or have
and cultures that shaped the modern
world, there are or have been oaks.
interesting to think that
been the
cities
William Bryant Logan,
winning
writer, lives
TItis essay is
a
certifieii arbcrist
and gardens
in
Brooklyn,
and award-
New
York.
adapted from his forthcoming book Oak:
Frame of Civilization, whicli
by W.W. Norton & Company,
is
The
being pnblislied next inontli
Inc.
THmifiHT vny
American Museum
OPEN DAILY
.
o
Natural History 6Fj
>*-*^
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CENTRAL PARK WEST AT 79TH STREET
Presenting Sponsor:
Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils,
BankofAmerica
Natural History,
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in
•
organized by the American
Museum of
Museum
collaboration with the Houston
Natural Science; California Academy of Sciences,
San Francisco; The
Field
of
Museum, Chicago;
and North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh.
Major funding has also been provided by the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Endowment
Fund.
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