Too Busy Visiting Elephants to Blog

I recently traveled to Hope, Maine, as a featured speaker at Hope Elephants, a charity that is caring for two fortysomething Asian elephants retired from an Oklahoma circus. I delivered a talk to an overflow crowd about elephants as urban wildlife in Bangkok, Thailand, and signed my two most recent books for TFCB, Elephant Talk: The Surprising Science of Elephant Communication (2011) and Wild Animal Neighbors: Sharing Our Urban World (2013).

It's been a busy year for Elefolio, with developmental editing projects for various university press clients and individual authors, work on the SEPA-grant funded Biology of Human project, writing museum labels for the interactive Life on Earth project, ongoing podcast support for the Encyclopedia of Life, and writing projects for Lerner's Twenty-First Century Books imprint.

This blog will stay up as a home page for Elefolio, but you might find me more active over on Facebook and Twitter.

Exploring, and Saving, an Underwater Eden

I had the great good fortune to work with Dr. Gregory Stone of Conservation International and the New England Aquarium and Dr. David Obura of CORDIO East Africa (Coastal Oceans Rearch and Development in the Indian Ocean) on a splendid book, being published by the University of Chicago Press in December.

Underwater Eden: Saving the Last Coral Wilderness on Earth details the story of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, or PIPA. In 1999, dive-boat operators Rob Barrell and Cat Holloway chanced to dive the waters off the remote Phoenix Islands. Located in the middle of the central Pacific, these low-lying coral atolls belong to the island nation of Kiribati. They are home to a tiny settlement of i-Kiribati on the island of Kanton, and hundreds of thousands of nesting seabirds on the island of Rawaki. They have been home to a NASA listening station and an airstrip for PamAm's Clipper service. They may even be the final resting place of aviator Amelia Earhart.

In fact, Barrell's boat had been chartered by a group looking for evidence that Earhart's plane had gone down off Nikumaroro Island in the Phoenix chain. Anchored off Nikumaroro while their charter clients explored the island, Barrell and Holloway decided to dive the reefs. What they saw astonished them: spectacular coral reefs, schooling fish in mind-bloggling numbers, and healthy populations of sharks and invertebrates. Barrell and Holloway were experienced divers, used to seeing spectacular wildlife on charter dives in Fiji. Yet they were totally amazed by the Phoenix Island corals and their wildlife. It was a true underwater wilderness, seemingly untouched by human activity.

Barrell and Holloway surfaced, exhilarated and stunned by the health and beauty of the Phoenix Islands' reefs. They were convinced they had to act fast to preserve the pristine coral oasis, to prevent it from the overfishing and degradation common throughout the Pacific. They reached out to Stone, then with the New England Aquarium, explaining what they had seen, and inviting him to see it for himself. The result was the first New England Aquarium expedition to the Phoenix Islands in 2000. That first expedition set in motion a chain of events with profound consequences for the Phoenix Islands as well as the people of Kiribati. After additional expeditions in 2002 and 2005, the government of Kiribati moved in 2006 to protect the islands, establishing the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, within which most commercial fishing is banned. PIPA now protects over 408,000 square kilometers of ocean waters, as well as the islands, atolls, and seamounts within its borders.

More expeditions have followed. In 2010 PIPA was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the first marine park to be so designated. Now the establishment of PIPA is sending ripples through the central Pacific. Other island nations are looking to PIPA as a model for their own protected areas, and a chain of new marine wildlife preserves is beginning to dot the map, an expanding oceanscape of hope. 

You can read the full story in the participants' own words in Underwater Eden and hear Stone's account in his 2010 TED Talk and follow the latest PIPA news on the Aquarium's PIPA blog.

Listening In, One Species at a Time

An ongoing project here at Elefolio is my work with the fine folks at the Encyclopedia of Life's Learning + Education group and radio host Ari Daniel Shapiro on a series of podcasts, One Species at a Time. Ari hosts the podcasts, which are produced by Atlantic Public Media; I work with the Learning + Education group staff and Ari to provide the Extras you find online.

If you don't know about EOL, it's the brainchild of evolutionary biology and ant man E. O. Wilson (from his 2007 TED talk), to give every species on Earth its own web page, providing easily accessible, authoritative information and images of all living things known to science.

EOL is a consortium of institutions, individual scientists, and ordinary citizens working to document the extraordinary variety and richness of life on our blue planet. It's a project that's highly participatory: average folks, young and old, can contribute based on their level of expertise and ability. Citizen scientists can work to curate a species page, create an online collection or field guide, upload images or video to the EOL Group Flickr Pool, and visit the podcast pages for extras and curriculum links for the classroom. You can also join other citizen scientists on the annual BioBlitz species inventory. Start exploring all EOL has to offer by listening to some of my favorite podcasts from the past (the giant squid and corpse flower) or with this week's entry on killer whales.

Because it's enormous in scope and constantly evolving, it's difficult to do justice to EOL in a blog post. There's always something new. I recommend you dive in via The Learning + Education group's home page. You can also subscribe to the podcasts on iTunes, follow EOL on Facebook, or subscribe to the YouTube channel.

Can Comics Teach Science? Part One

Can comics teach science? Teachers have already recognized the role that comics can play in Language Arts and Social Studies: honing reading skills, drawing in reluctant readers, and telling compelling stories about U.S. and world history, from Maus to Persepolis. Websites like The Graphic Classroom and No Flying, No Tights help teachers and school librarians discover and share comic books and graphic novels for use in the classroom.

But science? Can the complexity of science be squeezed into a speech bubble? And can comics help spark a love of science to last a lifetime and inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, and citizen-scientists? Teachers, authors, artists, and publishers are coming together to voice a resounding:

In this first in a series of posts, I'm going to highlight some of the developments coming out of the exciting collision of science and comics. And I mean "collision" in the best possible, supercollidor kind of way: smashing things together at high speed, releasing lots of energy--maybe even bringing entirely new fundamental particles into being. Or at least some fog zombies and stalk-eyed fly pirates.

First up is Sequential SmArt. Coming up May 18 and 19 at Juniata College in Huntingdon, PA, this conference and workshop will explore the use of comics and graphic novels across the curriculum, from kindergarten through college. The final day will explore the use of comics to teach science, and will feature Kevin Kinney of DePauw on using the X-Men to teach about mutation and conference organizer Jay Hosler (Biology, Juniata) on teaching, testing, and creating science comics.

Hosler has created some of the best: Clan Apis about the lives of honey bees, The Sandwalk Adventures (in which Charles Darwin schools some creationist mites living in his eyebrows on evolution), and Optical Allusions (in which Wrinkles the Wonder Brain meets some stalk-eyed fly pirates on his quest to retrieve his employer's missing eyeball).

Funded by an NSF grant, Hosler wrote Optical Allusions (2007) as an experimental biology text for non-majors. He undertook the project in an effort to reverse the downward trend in science literacy. In hilarious fashion, Optical Allusions takes an example frequently cited by creationists in support of intelligent design--the supposedly irreducible complexity of the human eye--and reduces it. Since then, science comics have really begun to come into their own with such acclaimed titles as Nick Abaszis's Laika, about the Cold War canine cosmonaut, also from 2007, and Mark Schultz's The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA, with art by Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon (2009).

So the writers, artists, and publishers are embracing science comics. And they are even making their way onto syllabi and into classrooms. But what about the readers? Do science comics work as comics and as science? Stay tuned for the next exciting installment...

In the meantime, please share your own science comic favorites here, or on the Elefolio Facebook page, or via twitter @elefolio.

(Full disclosure: Hosler and I worked together on May Berenbaum's book The Earwig's Tail. I was the book's editor and Jay was the illustrator. And I'm a fan. Does it show?)

Christmas Comes Early for Elefolio Author

Christmas has arrived a little early for Elefolio author and elephant scientist Caitlin O'Connell. Her new book from Lyons Press, An Elephant's Life: An Intimate Portrait from Africa, graces the cover of USA Today as the lead image for their story on books for holiday gift-giving. (Waves trunk at the fine folks at Lyons Press.)

You can see the book trailer for An Elephant's Life here.

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.

 

If I Ran Shark Week

In case you hadn't noticed, it's Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. The promo spot is in heavy rotation: footage of Great White launching itself up out of the ocean and snatching some unfortunate pinniped in its jaws.

Perhaps in some attempt at synergy, our local movie theater is showing Speilberg's Jaws. As I drive past the marquee, I can't help thinking that our perception of sharks hasn't come very far since 1975. Sharks themselves have fared even worse, decimated worldwide by overfishing and sharkfinning boats.

To be fair to the folks at Discovery, their website for Shark Week 2010 has a lot of good information about sharks, and they've partnered with Oceana and the Ocean Conservancy. There is information about the ten most endangered sharks ("see them before it's too late!") and the 25-75 million sharks   killed each year to satisfy the demand for shark-fin soup. But the actual on-air line up for Shark Week is all shark-attacks, all the time. Jaws, jaws, and more jaws.

We're in the process of exterminating sharks at a faster rate than we are finding out the most basic facts of their biology. It's hard to mobilize people to take the kind of action that's necessary to save sharks if all they see about them is a 35-year-old Jaws stereotype. So is Discovery's shark conservation message just going through the motions? In my humble opinion, they won't change hearts and minds about the plight of sharks until their programming presents another side of sharks than as perfect, mindless killing machines.

Knowing that sharks are in far more peril from humans than humans are from sharks, it's hard for me not to want to give Shark Week a complete overhaul. Here, then, is my version of Shark Week.

Sunday: Sharkabet with Ray Troll. Game show a la Jeopardy! hosted by the author of Sharkabet.

Troll's picture book Sharkabet was where my family learned about such wonderful animals as wobbegongs and goblin sharks. I think Troll would be the perfect ambassador for shark diversity.

Monday: Diving with Sharks. Hammerheads, Galapagos sharks, and silky sharks off Cocos Islands, Costa Rica, stingrays off the Canary Islands with the dive experts from Elasmodiver.com. It's hard to generalize about any large community on the internet, but folks at Elasmodiver appear dedicated to shark education and conservation.This would be a Travel-channel type show of shark diving sites around the world.

Photo copyright Tom Burns. All rights reserved. Elasmodiver.com.

Tuesday: The Secret Lives of Sharks. My reality show would follow scientists as they use satellite tagging to solve the mysteries of white sharks and other pelagic top predators.



Above, footage from Stanford University of the National Park Service's Scot Anderson discussing data from tagged sharks.

Wednesday: SharkCam. This show would feature footage from "crittercams"--also known as animal-borne imaging systems--attached to a variety of sharks, from a basking shark to rare and mysterious six-gill shark. Sharks occur in a variety of habitats from tropical reefs to the ocean's dark, cold abyss. The shark-mounted cameras of SharkCam will allow viewers to follow sharks wherever they live.

Attaching a "crittercam" to a whale shark.
Photo by Peter Nicholas.

Thursday: Doc Gruber's SharkLab. Profiling the work of Dr. Sam Gruber and colleagues on lemon sharks at Bimini Biological Field Station.

Friday: Sharkspiration. The science of biomimicry is bringing sharks' best evolutionary innovations to a product near you. Sharkskin is inspiring a new kind of medical film that inhibits the growth of bacteria. Overreliance on antibiotics is fueling the rise of so-called superbugs, but it may be that a super marterial--sharkskin--will be able to take these bugs on.

Photo; Sharklet Technologies.

Are you listening, Discovery? The sharks are running out of time. For Shark Week 2011, maybe you can find a different story to tell about the world's emperiled sharks than "My, what big teeth you have."

Petits Serpents Bruns

Asked to name fun things to do in Paris in the summer, chances are you won’t think of sitting down in the back room of a natural history museum with a large bucket of venomous snakes and measuring them.

But measuring snakes is just what undergraduate and budding herpetologist Khoa Nguyen (Whitman ‘12) found himself doing under the direction of herpetologist and leading expert on the snakes of Africa, Kate Jackson. The Whitman College biology professor brought Nguyen and classmate Claire Snyder (’12) to the Musée Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris to get some research under their belts. Whitman College encourages its biology faculty to take undergraduates into the field, except when the field is a part of Congo so remote that most herpetologists have never set foot in it and where Jackson not so long ago found herself on the wrong end of a forest cobra’s fang. (You can find out how that turned out in her 2008 book, Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo.)

Jackson originally planned for all three to work together on the museum’s collection of forest cobras, only to be told that a researcher at the museum was already at work on their forest cobra holdings himself. Jackson quickly had to come up with another project, and so Nguyen and Snyder found themselves in the back rooms of the research collection of the MNHN-Paris, learning all about “little brown snakes.”

“Khoa was very disappointed that we couldn’t do the project on forest cobras,” Jackson reported in a recent conversation from Paris. “Instead I set them a project researching the museum’s collection of egg-eating snakes and file snakes—what Jackson calls ‘little brown snakes.’ Well, that just didn’t do it for poor Khoa. World expert on venomous snake systematics, Wolfgang Wüster, when I discussed this with him, said he would have felt the same way as Khoa if he had to work on egg-eating snakes instead of cobras."

Jackson found a way for Nguyen to work on a charismatic, venomous snake after all--the Musée had a large vat of uncatalogued snakes from Cameroon. Nguyen was tasked to work on the museum’s holdings of Dendroaspis jamesoni, an arboreal snake known as Jameson's mamba. “Green mambas are so well studied, it was unlikely a student could uncover anything new about them in three weeks,” Jackson tells me.  “So he’s photographing them and measuring them and collecting data that might yield insights into snakes more generally.”

Nguyen and Snyder's weeks at the Paris Museum are being funded by a Perry Award from Whitman College to fund faculty-student research. Their work is part of a larger, more ambitious project to revise The Snakes of Western and Central Africa by Jackson and her colleague, tropical medicine expert Jean-Philippe Chippaux. The much-needed book will cover half the continent and nearly 250 species--a vital resource for a region where snakebite is serious problem and one of the only resources available is a reprint of the account of a 1912 snake collecting expedition. Nguyen and Snyder's efforts are contributing to a project that may help reduce some of the 20,000 deaths from snakebite in Africa each year.

Nguyen first takes a large carboy of miscellaneous mambas and begin to sort them by size—small, medium, and large.

By the end of the day the floor of the room is covered in drifts of snakeskin and scales, which have to be swept up with a dustpan.

Snyder is working on file snakes. “Claire thinks file snakes are incredibly cute, and she can’t understand why everyone doesn’t work on them,” Jackson reports. You can judge their cuteness for yourself; here is a file snake, Gonionotophis brussauxi, collected by Jackson last month during field work in the Congo. I think they are rather fetching.

File snakes are so named because they are triangular in cross-section, and resemble an old-fashioned three-sided file. File snakes come from Africa, and they’re cannibalistic, eating other snakes and even others of their own species. On her second day working on the MNHN-Paris holdings of file snakes, Snyder had found a misidentified specimen and correctly identified it. Jackson alerted the collections manager, and Snyder was asked to write out a new label. The relabeled jar now announces a “new determination, Claire Snyder.” Not bad for an undergraduate. 

When they run out of specimens, Nguyen and Snyder have to wheel a cart through the research building, past the small menagerie and snack bar in the museum complex, to a door “like the door of a dungeon” that leads to the collections storage. “Miles of corridors and stairs and things before you get to the actual shelves.” These are the compact, rotating kind. Eventually Nguyen and Snyder arrive at the section storing the carboys full of the species Khoa needs: Jameson’s mamba (Dendroaspis jamesoni).

While Jackson converses in French with the collections technician to arrange the transfer of the specimens to the cart, Snyder, who does not speak French, is managing through sign language to extract a recipe for crepes from the other technician. We rather admire Snyder’s initiative.

Older jars are sealed with silica gel (like the caulk around your tub) and beeswax. When a jar needs to be opened, a technician has to be summoned to come and carefully open it with a razor blade—with skill, this will leave both the jar lid and the technician’s hand intact.

It turns out many of the mambas were in bits—the way venomous snakes often find their way into collections. Non-herpetologists tend to want to make very sure the snake is dead before collecting it. “I told Khoa the Museum would be very grateful if you would reassemble all those and reattach them with string,” Jackson says, “but when he was done it turned out they were almost all heads.” A carboy of snakes is a lot like une boîte de chocolats--one can never be quite sure what one is going to get. But imagine the thrill of reaching into a jar sealed decades or even a century earlier, and extracting a specimen,  wondering about the story its collector must have to tell, the kind of story that doesn't fit on a label on a jar.

Jackson is in Paris writing up the next installment of her own story, her recent research expedition to the Congo—part of which will find its way into her next book, tentatively titled A Thousand, Thousand Slimy Things. In the meantime, you can listen to her being interviewed about her research and field work on NPR here. Mean and Lowly Things is newly out in paperback from Harvard University Press and The Snakes of Western and Central Africa will be published by Johns Hopkins Press in 2011.

All photos by Claire Snyder and Kate Jackson.

Moving On

Guest blogger Karen Romano Young aboard the icebreaker Healy, June 26, 2010.

Say it ain’t so.  My time with ICESCAPE aboard the jolly red icebreaker Coast Guard Cutter Healy has come to an end.  Kathryn Hansen, NASA’s cryosphere writer, joins the ship via helicopter from Barrow on Monday, June 28.  Then the helicopter takes me back to that small town on the edge of the Beaufort Sea, the northernmost point in North America and home to our community observer, Benny Hopson.

Benny has told me a lot about Barrow, told me about some whale scientists to talk to, and advised me to attend the Nalukataq, the celebration that marks the spring whaling hunt. If I’m lucky I’ll meet Harry Brower, Jr., a whale researcher who brought in the first bowhead  of the whaling season -- and I might even get thrown into the air at the blanket toss that’s the hallmark of Nalukataq.

I’ll be busy in Barrow, but I’ll be sad too, regretful about having to leave this wonderful group of scientists and “coasties”, which is what we affectionately call the men and women who look after the research needs of our country so well -- and who have done each of us aboard ICESCAPE so many good turns.  I’m grateful to the scientists, too, for their patience and forebearance in the face of my efforts to understand their work. This has been a crash course in Arctic ocean science for me, and it has been full of difficult concepts and surprises.

One thing that is not a surprise is the continued confirmation that the Arctic ice is melting due to climate change, and that the climate change is due to global warming, and that the melting of the Arctic ice is a sign of the averse effects of human activities on our planet. Scientists, Coast Guard, and everyone who spends time in the Arctic is in agreement about the decrease in the sea ice that supports a vital and rich food chain, and which contributes to the circulation of water throughout the planet.

I’m glad that NASA cared enough to send the scientists to study the Arctic ecosystem in an effort to get new evidence to support and strengthen their satellite surveillance of the area. And I’m grateful that they sent me along to help cover it.  I appreciate all three of my blog hosts, and to Ann Downer-Hazell, host of the Science + Story blog: hey Ann, I kept my promise. I found you an eddy chaser!

His name is Bob Pickart, a physical oceanographer from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.  Pickart and  his technician, Frank Bahr, are here measuring the circulation and water types throughout this cruise, using an instrument called the Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler, which emits sound signals from the Healy’s hull. “It emits sound that reflects off the particles (plankton and other substances) in the water.  If the bugs are moving, that tells you how the water’s moving relative to the ship.” Pickart uses the ADCP together with the CTD to link the character of the water with the currents and the sea floor, and supplies data about it to the other ICESCAPE scientists. As the cruise moves north (without me!) of Barrow and into a particularly volatile area, Pickart will shift gears, taking a more active role in guiding the ship’s path -- and maybe getting the chance to chase an eddy or two.

Pickart’s images from an expendable probe called the XBT reveals temperature at different depths. Can you spot the eddy? (top left)

Eddies form near the boundary of two different water types where there is often a strong current running parallel to the boundary. The current begins to “wiggle” and eventually pulls water from one side of the boundary to the other in the form of a lens (or eddy in oceanographic jargon). Bob Pickart provided this animation of eddy formation.

In the Arctic these eddies are tiny, often only 10 miles across. If Pickart can find an eddy, the Healy may attempt to stay with it, giving Pickart and the rest of the ICESCAPE team the chance to examine one up close. “It can be like finding a needle in a haystack,” says Pickart. But it’s a worthwhile needle, one that could reveal the mechanism that carries cold Pacific water from the shelf into the central Arctic, where it helps maintain the halocline, the salty barrier layer that keeps the deep, warm Atlantic water from rising to the top of the water column, where it could melt the Arctic ice sheet.

Oceanographers know the Pacific waters get there, but not how.  Pickart’s focus haystack is the shelf break jet, formed at the boundary of the Pacific water and the central Arctic water. This jet is known to be unstable, and the hope is that it will be spinning off eddies of cold Pacific winter water at this time of year.

The original plan had been for ICESCAPE  to run transects (paths of stations) in lines radiating out from Barrow, using the instruments we’ve been using since Dutch Harbor -- finding out what sorts of organisms live in the water, what they live on, and what their health is. As a group, the scientists understand the vitality of Barrow Canyon -- a deep canyon north of the town of Barrow -- and are eager to see what is happening here. Enter Bob Pickart to run quick stations using the CTD and ADCP only to measure salinity temperature and velocity in hope of finding one of these cold spirals  down deep.

What they find by chasing an eddy may contribute greatly to the understanding of how water, and other vital properties, moves through the Arctic -- and that, in turn, will make it easier to see how the Arctic will be affected by climate change.

Thank you for reading my  ICESCAPE blogs at Science + Story.  For more on ICESCAPE, please see my blog posts at Climate Central and NASA What on Earth? and Haley Smith Kingsland’s blog at the ICESCAPE site.

The Walrus Post

Guest Science + Story blogger Karen Romano Young aboard ICESCAPE, Coast Guard Cutter Healy, Arctic Circle, 21 June 2010

“ ‘The time has come,’ the walrus said, ‘to talk of many things --’ ”

Such as what a big red ship was doing pushing through the ice floes at the head of Kotzebue Sound the other night, and what the big brown tusked lumps on the ice were thinking.

The walrus hauled out on the floes seemed to raft by us like Huckleberry Finn drifting down the Mississippi; actually of course they were immobile as swimmers lounging on poolside, while the Coast Guard Cutter Healy passed them by.  They were serene, but we on board were not. One cadet spotted a big bull swimming, and dashed along the rail to stay parallel to it, calling, “Walrus, my boy!”

Odobenus rosmarus

Inside the ship in the Future Lab, my friend Haley Smith Kingsland, who’s writing the ICESCAPE blog for the official ICESCAPE site, googled up the collective noun for walrus: pod or herd. But, after seeing the walrus in their stoic groups along the floes, I searched for a more stately term. It ought to be a court of walrus, or a panel of walrus, or a parliament. This animal has attitude, and we can only imagine what it thinks of us.

But enough anthropomorphizing. My fantasy life aside, there is quite a walrus story, with a rich inner life, and with broad ramifications.  The walrus, some say, could be as much a poster child for the effects of climate change as its compatriot, the polar bear.

Walrus require ice to haul out on once they’ve finished diving deep and scouring the bottom for benthic (bottom) creatures such as snails and clams. But what happens when the ice melts? Walrus spend 80 percent of their time swimming, foraging for food at the sea floor, and then they haul out to rest on the ice.  Now that the Arctic climate is changing, the ice cover of the shallow continental shelf has melted back, and what ice can be found it too often over waters too deep for walrus to dive through on one breath.  The walrus have to move their poolside perch to the beach, too far from the food they rely upon.

Besides, the food they rely upon in turn relies upon algae that forms at the bottom of the ice. Without the ice, without the algae, without the benthic life...the Arctic could find itself without the number of walrus that once thrived here. And so the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has petitioned for endangered status for the Pacific walrus.  A detailed report will be published in September 2010 in the Federal Register.

For another view, here’s a walrus doodle I did based on my walrus photographs and the information I found by researching the work of scientists Chad Jay of the U.S. Geological Survey, Carleton Ray of University of Virginia,  and Lee Cooper and Jacqueline Grebmeier of the University of Maryland Chesapeake Biological Lab, and by talking to ICESCAPE’s own Karen Frey, from Clark University.

Visit the Coast Guard Cutter Healy online.

Read the official ICESCAPE blog.

For more of my ICESCAPE experiences, please check
Climate Central:
and
NASA’s What on Earth?

Into the Bering Sea with ICESCAPE

Hey, it’s me, Karen Romano Young, guest-blogging on Science + Story from the Arctic Ocean.
After weeks of planning and losing sleep and counting the days, I’m finally aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Healy as it steams out of Dutch Harbor north, north, north into the Bering Sea, heading for the Arctic Circle.

This is the voyage of ICESCAPE, a contingent of 48 science crew and some 90 Coast Guard. For five weeks this group will explore the Bering Strait, Chukchi Sea, and Beaufort Sea, examining ice and sea in hope of reaching a better understanding of what climate change is doing to this region.
The sea is like slate, like shale, glowing with reflections of the sky, multilayered in shades of grey like rock, not steel.  As we move through Dutch’s giant rocky gates, we roll along gently with only a few reports of seasickness so far. My swivel stool rotates ten degrees with each swell.

The sky is all cloudy but with layers and streamers of cloud that let through just enough light to make you realize there really is color there if only the sun would come out -- but no, it’s gone again, above the clouds, where it’s mostly been, for the three days we’ve been to Dutch Harbor.

Dutch Harbor feels like a place at the end of the world, like the place in the epic novel The Golden Compass where Iorek Byrnison, the heroic polar bear, is enslaved. Maybe that is because of the icy mountains and harsh creatures -- a Supreme Court-gone bad of bald eagles, the ubiquitous sprawling king crabs that decorate t-shirts and mugs  (this is the home of The Deadliest Catch, after all -- I even met Lenny!). Maybe it’s because of our trip in, on a Saab 340 twin-propeller airplane so heavily laden with scientists and gear that it had to stop twice to refuel at tiny island airports, over the 800-mile flight.

Ahead of the Healy’s giant red prow, the sea troughs deepen. We’ve been advised to expect 9- to 12-foot seas, so those who haven’t completely secured their labs and berths hurry to do so. I sit on the stool next to and sleep in the bunk over Emily Peacock, from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Emily is a baker at the local pie shop, an owner of Chihuahas, and a technician in the lab of biologist Sam Laney. She has shown me how to secure my laptop, with cord strung across the hinge through two eyes screwed into the plywood countertop. I used bungee cords to create a little safe hammock in a corner for my books, cameras, and sound equipment. And now I’m back on deck again, sniffing the sea and shivering.

It’s in the 40s, and rain is spitting down. I hang on tight as I make my way, against the wind, up one of Healy’s many slick, steep ladders. I wonder what’s ahead, how long it will be before we see a whale or seal, how long before we reach ice.

Just before I left my home in Connecticut, late last week, ICESCAPE co-chief scientist Don Perovich, of the Army’s Cold Region’s Research and Engineering Laboratory, sent the science group a map showing the sea ice.  Here it is:

I wrote him,

Dear Don,

Beautiful!  What satellite is it from? And, to what degree does this meet your expectations?

Back came the answer:

Hi Karen

The image is from the website

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/  [The Cryosphere Today, UIUC website]

I think it is from SSMI. There is less ice than I expected.

If you check there, you’ll see a new map of the Arctic ice, out this week, and can make your own comparisons.

Overall there is less ice in the Arctic than usual, and less for this date than in 2007, the year known for having the least ice there has been in the years since 1979, when the Arctic ice has been measured.

What would this change in ice mean to our mission? Today I asked ICESCAPE Chief Scientist Kevin Arrigo and his research partner Gert Van Dijken.  For their views, check in with my blog at Climate Central.


In days to come I will be blogging there, here,  and at NASA’s Earth Science blog, What on Earth?

The Real Professors of the Far North

My son and I just finished reading The 7 Professors of the Far North, John Fardell’s 2005 arctic adventure romp. We really enjoyed the Tintin-esque vibe of the exotic setting, the even more exotic methods of transportation, and series of narrow escapes. (In this undated interview, circa 2006, Fardell cites both Tintin and Narnia as influences, and it shows. You quite easily could imagine these kids slipping through the wardrobe into Narnia, and Fardell’s illustrations pay homage to the late, great Hergé). Much as I enjoyed it, I closed the book wishing Fardell had added a tad more actual arctic science to the mix.

Well, over the next two months we'll all have the chance to follow the progress of some real-life professors of the far north, members of the NASA-sponsored ICESCAPE mission to study the effects of climate change on pack ice and the arctic ecosystem.

Don’t you wish you could tag along? Then be jealous—very, very jealous—of Karen Romano Young—children’s book writer and science explainer extraordinaire. Karen is the author of many books, including Across the Wide Ocean, four titles in National Geographic's Science Fair Winners series, and the forthcoming novel Doodlebug: A Novel in Doodles. She's been to sea before, and down to the bottom of the ocean in the submersible Alvin. So it's not suprising that she landed the gig of accompanying the ICESCAPE crew to the Arctic Sea on the Coast Guard icebreaker Healy this June and July. Karen will be checking in with Science + Story off and on while she's at sea as a guest blogger.

Science + Story: First, I'm unspeakably jealous! What will you actually be doing on board?

Karen Romano Young: Drawing, photographing, bothering, interviewing, looking over shoulders, asking questions, observing...I am writing a series of books about science notebooks--[a method being used in K-12 education in the lower grades to teach kids the method of observing and recording data scientists use]. The first book will be a science notebook about an investigation in the Arctic. The working title is Wren's Science Notebook: Investigating the Arctic. I published another book, Arctic Investigations, in 2000, but over the last decade the science has changed radically because of climate change.

S+S: It sounds fantastic. Why is NASA interested in the Arctic?

KRY: Previous research missions have usually included either open-ocean scientists or ice scientists. NASA is bringing them together in order to create dialogue and-- ultimately--a new discipline in science, focused on the sea-ice-air interface called the cryosphere.

S+S: So, in a way, you will be present at the birth of a new science?

KRY: Yes.

S+S: How did you convince NASA to save a berth for a children's book writer?

KRY: I can't think of a better place for a children's book writer to be than at a scientist's elbow as the discovery happens. On her blog, Melissa Stewart writes about research that shows that some huge percentage of scientists can trace their career choice back to an experience they had or mentor they knew when they were 7, 10 years old. For some kids, that experience may be a book.

Karen's ICESCAPE mission sets sail from Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutians, on June 15. Stay tuned for a schedule of her blog posts. I hope she will be able to tell me she saw a narwhal, if not a villain’s narwhal-shaped submarine. And maybe she will be able to tell me what “eddy chasing” involves.

For more about Karen, visit her website, www.karenromanoyoung.com. For more about ICESCAPE, visit the mission website.

Animal Zombies Want Your Brains

I’m always scanning the news for stories about the science behind one of my ten-year-old’s current obsessions (zombies, robots, strange creatures from the deep), and this article and accompanying image gallery of animal zombies caught my attention. The folks at Scientific American have assembled a truly mind-boggling round-up of nature’s weirdest parasites, experts at hijacking other species to do their bidding. One parasitic worm impels its pillbug host to run out from under the safety of the leaf litter; an infected caterpillar is forced to guard the larvae of a parasitic wasp; a nematode turns a snail’s tentacles into light-up, wriggling appendages that look like tasty caterpillars to passing birds.

 

These examples go way beyond a wasp paralyzing a spider to serve as incubator and meal for her growing brood. These parasites actually change the behavior of their unwitting hosts. In his 1996 book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, Lawrence Weschler wrote about one spectacular animal zombie, tropical ants infected by a fungus called Cordyceps.  The fungus eats the ants from the inside out without killing them. When the food supply is almost exhausted and the fungus is ready to reproduce, its compels its host to climb to a high point and clamp onto a plant stem with its jaws. The fungus now devours the ant’s brain and its fruiting bodies sprout through the ant’s head and the joints of its appendages. I highly recommend exploring every nook of Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet; you can also learn how Cordyceps turns ants into pronged zombies here, on the Neurophilosophy blog.

(Bad as the ravages of Cordyceps may be for an individual worker ant, the ant-fungus relationship in general is far more beneficial to the colony, as the spectacular success of the fungus-farming ants attests. Recent research shows that ants didn’t just begin farming a single strain of fungus 50 million years ago—they have practiced real horticulture, domesticating new strains for their underground gardens.)

 

Even more mind-blowing? You might know of toxoplasmosis, the parasite found in garden soil and cat litter, that can cause serious medical complications in the fetuses of pregnant women who become exposed to the protozoan, Toxoplasma gondii. As the SciAm slide show points out, researchers now suspect latent toxoplasmosis may be behind subtle personality changes in people--a claim based on work by Kevin Lafferty at UC Santa Barbara. Men with a latent infection appeat to exhibit more jealousy and aggression and women hosting T. gondii in their brains appear warmer and more nurturing--though whether the parasite makes you more likely to have a dozen cats is still a matter of conjecture. There’s an older post, "Return of the Puppet Masters," on Carl Zimmer’s blog, The Loom,  that covers the science up to 2006.

You can also read the more recent post, “Parasitic Personality Disorder” order on the blog Strange Loops, and contemplate how much you yourself might have been shaped by a parasite in your brain. Strange Loops writes:

… there is a decent chance you are infected with T. gondii, and it may have helped shape your personality, who you are. It’s always disorienting to contemplate, but it is hard to deny fact that our personality – how we think and act and respond to situations – is to at least to some extent externally determined, by genes inherited from our parents, by past experiences growing up, and even by latent parasitic infections.

My son, who was a spectacular zombie for Halloween last year, may be thrilled to learn he may be a little bit zombie after all. Me? Not so much.

Zombie bunny (c) 2009 Chris Boyd, www.crazy3Dman