Elefolio welcomes a new client

I am happy to welcome to the Elefolio client roster Conservation International. I'd had the privilege and pleasure of working with a number of CI authors on a forthcoming title in the CEMEX Conservation Series published by Earth in Focus Editions. This new project, undertaken with CI directly, will allow me to work with additional dedicated, talented conservation professionals from CI. As they say, it's all good.

A first for Elefolio

Caitlin O'Connell's An Elephant's Life: An Intimate Portrait from Africa (Lyons Press) will be the first project agented by Elefolio LLC to appear in print. The folks at Globe Pequot have prepared this video for Book Expo America, a.k.a. BEA.



Readers and wildlife enthusiasts everywhere can be grateful that O'Connell has spent twenty years in the heat of the Namibian salt pans, enduring dust in her teeth and in her camera, to bring us these images and the story of what she has learned about elephants, and about herself.

Learn more about O'Connell's work at the Mushara water hole in Etosha National Park at her website.

Look for An Elephant's Life in November 2011, wherever books are sold.

Props to the Bee Maven

Lots of buzz about bee maven extraordinaire May Berenbaum, winner of the 2011 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. A longtime professor of entomology at the University of Illinois of Urbana-Champaign, Berenbaum won the prize partly for her groundbreaking work into the causes of Colony Collapse Disorder, the mysterious plague striking honeybee colonies across North America, as well as for her many contributions to our understanding of plant-insect interactions. Through her many books for the general reader, insectophile or -phobe, she has become an ambassador for the little things that run the world.

Don't know May? You ought to. She knows her bees and beetles, moths and roaches. She has organized a long-running Insect Fear Film Festival, now in its 28th year. And she's a very, very funny writer. I had the pleasure of working with her on The Earwig's Tail, a "modern bestiary" of essays debunking urban legends about insects in the age of the Internet. You can learn more about that book, with splendid art by Jay Hosler, here.

And there probably isn't another person on the planet whose ego is in such spectacular inverse proportion to her wit, intelligence, wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, generosity, and warmth.

Using Their Little Grey Cells

Elefolio is all about elephants these days...I wrote a book on elephant communication for Lerner Books, and have been blogging about elephants over on my personal writing blog on WordPress. This is a copy of today's post over there.

Amazing, if not surprising, study showing that elephants cooperate to get food. And even cheat. Lots going on in those big, social brains.



There are short write-ups of the study, conducted by Joshua Plotnik, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, up on New Scientist and Wired Science. The work was done with 12 Asian elephants at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang, Thailand.

Plotnik wanted to investigate whether cooperation, known anecdotally in elephants, could be shown through a rigorous experiment. He was scaling up a study previously done with bonobos, in which two bonobos had to cooperate to pull a heavy box. The problem was, if it was scaled up to a size an elephant couldn't pull alone, they would have a box the size of a jumbo jet.

The video shows Plotnik's elegant solution. The entire paper, which makes good reading, is available online at PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. If you don't normally seek out the papers on which popular news stories about science stories are based, I recommend it. IMHO, more nonspecialists should learn their way around a real scientific paper, and it's a habit that can start pretty young.

Plotnik is a former student of Frans de Waal, a comparative psychologist and the dean of altrusiam and cooperation in animals. I had the privilege of working with DeWaal on Animal Social Complexity and Intelligence, co-edited with Peter J. Tyack. That book is a fascinating look at intelligence in an amazing range of relatively large-brained, social animals, from apes and whales to much less expected animals: bats, hyenas, and starlings, as well as elephants. It's highly recommended, too.

Welcoming ILCP to the Elefolio roster

I'm delighted to add a new client to the Elefolio roster. I will be working with the International League of Conservation Photographers on a book about ocean biomes, in the latest of a series of books by Earth in Focus Editions.

Snark Hunting in the Floating World

In August, Science + Story will be going to the beach--figuratively, anyway. We'll really be on the rocky coast of Maine. Here is the second installment on beach science, on flotsam. You can catch up on this series by reading the earlier post on shells.

I hadn't planned to blog about this until later today, but want to catch the wave--if you'll pardon the expression--of an upcoming segment on Ira Flatow's Science Friday. In today's second hour, 3:00 PM EST, SciFri will interview Karen Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole about plastic in the sea.

Scientists are trying to understand what goes on in and around floating patches of plastic debris in the world's oceans. Results from a 22 year investigation into floating plastic garbage were published this week in the journal Science. The researchers looked at the physics behind the plastic accumulation, its concentration, and biological activity in and around the debris. Interestingly, the researchers found somewhat less plastic than they anticipated. We'll talk to one of the authors of the report [KLL] about the findings.

 I'll be tuning in. You can listen live here. Plastic in the ocean has been much on my mind as I've been reading Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science by Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano. It was published last year by Smithsonian Books and released in paperback just time for this summer's exodus to the beach.

I confess I've been guilty til now of priveleging marine biology over oceanography, the science of the sea itself. No more. Ebbesmeyer and Scigliano have introduced me to a world of gyres, eddies, meddies, and snarks--the term Ebbesmeyer coined for the water slabs of different salinity and density that drift through the ocean like clouds in the sky. Ebbesmeyer hunts for watery snarks in this mysterious floating world.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, snark hunter. Photo by Rick Rickman/NOAA

As other reviewers have noted, this is a mix of memoir and science, and it works well, as Ebbesmeyer's personal career trajectory traces the growth and maturation of ocean science itself over the last forty years. Ebbesmeyer has become an expert on the behavior of nonliving objects in the ocean, be they sneakers, rubber ducks, messages in bottles, coconuts, or cadavers.

All those stories await you in the book, and Ebbesmeyer and Scigliano tell them well. The parts I want to highlight here are these. The first is the remarkable story of messages in bottles. The practice was popularized and romanticized in the nineteeth century in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens, but the deliberate release of messages in bottles may go back centuries--and messages set adrift back before there were bottles. In the nineteenth century, however, messages in bottles, or MIBs, came into their own--caught in a gyre, if you will, of naval ambition. As Ebbesmeyer and Scigliano note, the American, German, and British navies were eager to map the currents of the world's oceans, and bottles were one way to do it. Into the early twentieth century, they released thousands of bottles, casks, and other "deliberate drifters" into the oceans to try and gain a naval advantage.

Photo from www.guinntiques.com

A. W. Fawcett, the chairman of Guinness, the British brewery, used a message in a bottle in a spectacular ad campaign that is still washing ashore today. Between 1954 and 1959, Fawcell arranged to have shipping companies drop fifty thousand commemorative bottles into the sea at eleven sites around the world. The brown bottles were sealed with cork, a metal cap, and a lead wrapper. Inside was a scroll from "King Neptune" marking the bicentennial of the brewery. The bottles were retrieved from all over the world, including a penal colony off the coast of Mexico and remote Coats Island in Hudson Bay, where the Inuit fishermen who chanced on eighty of the bottles "used them for stone-throwing practice until they learned Guinness offered a reward."

The other great story in the book--and it is hard to choose among the many these author tell, --is how the practice of beachcombing is contributing to citizen science around the world. Beachcomber Alert Network and organizations like it are providing researchers with a constant stream of data about ocean currents. For more about the science of "flotsam oceanography," visit oceanmotion.org. For a wonderful read filled with astonishing stories that will transform your next walk on the beach, read Flotsametrics.








 

Autobiography of a Shell

In August, Science + Story will be going to the beach--figuratively, anyway. Here is the first installment, on shells.

Marble Cone (Conus marmoreus), 31 to 150 mm, common throughout the Indo West Pacific, including the Philippines, where I spent part of my childhood. The Marble Cone is a carnivore of the rocky bottom.

Like a message in a bottle, every shell on the beach has a story to tell. Each turban, limpet, conch, and cowrie can tell the trained eye stories about how and where it lived, and even battles it fought against storm, surf, and predator. Authors Jerry Harasewych and Fabio Moretzsohn teach us, in this spendidly conceived and realized book, how to train our own eyes to read and recover those stories.

It is second nature to us to admire the delicate shape, color, and beauty of a perfect specimen. Taking the time to "read" each shell as an autobiography of the animal that produced it is often just as rewarding. 

Harasewych, of the Smithsonian, and Moretzsohn, of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University, have not merely provided a deluxe field guide. They've chosen the six hundred shells showcased in the book's 656 pages to provide a cross section of the shell-bearing mollusks from around the world. As the authors point out in the introductory pages, "molluscan diversity is dominated by small animals"--most the size of a fingernail or smaller. A representative selection of shells would be small snails, and a lot of them. We wouldn't see such wonders as the Lazarus Jewelbox, the Pagoda Prickly Winkle, the Modest Worm Snail, or the Telescope Snail.

Windowpane Oyster (Placuna placenta), 100 to 200 mm, Tropical Indo-West Pacific. This oyster yields the capiz shell used widely for wind chimes and other crafts in the Philippines, where there is a major Placuna fishery.

I did wish for a few more images of the living animals, and for some backstory about some of the mollusks' common names. Surely there is a tale to be told about the Poor Ittibittium, Ittibittium parcum? I also wanted to know what made the Paradoxical Blind Limpet paradoxical. But those are quibbles. That would have been a 900-page book.

Gumboot Chiton (Cryptochiton stelleri), 100 to 400 mm, Hokkaido, Japan, to Aleutian Islands, Alaska to Southern California. A nocturnal grazer on red algae, the living animal is sometimes washed ashore after storms. In life, the eight plates of its shell are covered in a mantle.

What the authors have collected here for the reader is a museum-in-a-book. You can turn the pages almost as if you'd been let into the back rooms of Smithsonian and been allowed to open the drawers containing specimens, with Harasewych at your elbow, explaining what you're seeing. While the book is beautifully written and presented, it's so seamlessly done that nothing about the presentation gets in the way of the story of the shells.

True Heart Cockle (Corculum cardissa). 40 to 80 mm, Red Sea to Indo West Pacific. The true heart cockle can form dense colonies near coral reefs. Like the corals where it makes its home, it has a symbiotic relationship with zooxanthellae algae.

 And what stories they are. Of the Miter-Shaped Nutmeg we learn that its relatives, the cancellariids, are "known to suck the blood of sleeping fishes." Carrier shells like the Atlantic Carrier Shell cement shells, rocks, and derbis to their shells, perhaps as camouflage, perhaps as stabilization in the fine mud where they live. The Giant Owl Limpet aggressively guards an algae garden. The Common Janthina is a pelagic predator, roaming the oceans of the world on a raft of air bubbles trapped in mucus--its own bubblewrap. I know I will never look at a shell quite the same way again. It's time to go up in the attic and find the box with the childhood shell collection, and look at the shells with new eyes.

Elephant Tusk (Dentalium elephantium), 50 to 100 mm, Red Sea to Australia. This tusk shell lives buried in the sandy bottom, with only its narrow end sticking out of the surface. Some hermit crabs specialize in tusk shells.

M. G. Harasewych and Fabio Moretzsohn, The Book of Shells: A Life-Size Guide to Identifying and Classifying Six Hundred Seashells (Smithsonian/Chicago University Press, 656 pages, 2400 color plates. $55.) 

Disclosure: Science + Story received a copy of The Book of Shells from The Chicago University Press for the purpose of this review.