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Created a system to prevent collisions between whales and ships.

TECHNOLOGY

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Explored the sub-polar islands of Patagonia,

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www.rolexawards.com SEPTEMBER 2004 VOLUME 113 NUMBER 7

FEATURES

COVER STORY 32 HOW PLANTS "SEE"

Plants catch light for the information it carries as well as for its energy. Tlie light helps plants determine when to germinate, when to flower, or how to respond to neighboring plants.

MARCELO J. YANOVSKY AND JORGE J. CASAL

38 THE SEX LIVES OF SCALES

Scale insects appear to be caught in a game

of cat and mouse with internal, symbiotic hacteria- a game that has unleashed genetic bedlam.

BENJAMIN B. NORMARK

46 A ROOM REVISITED

A contemporary artist is inspired by a "cabinet of curiosities" collected by a naturalist of another era. ROSAMOND PURCELL

50 SECRET SURVIVOR

"Extinct" for 50 million years, an enigmatic fossil species

may still live at the bottom of the sea—but it defies capture. PETER A. RONA

ON THE cover: Albrecht Diirer, A Large Piece of Turf, 1503 iSi,'-^"-

DEPARTMENTS

6 THE NATURAL MOMENT Rest Stop Photograph by Roger Eriksson

8 UP FRONT Editors Notebook

10 LETTERS

12 CONTRIBUTORS

16 SAMPLINGS News from Nature

22 BIOMECHANICS Flexible Feeders Adam Suuiiuers 56 THIS LAND 24 UNIVERSE From Water Hole to Rhino Barn Sandy S. Mosel The Information Trap Neil deGrasse Tyson 58 REVIEW "A Paradox to Everyone but Himself" Menno Schilthuizen

Blurring Wallace's Line Robert R. Dunn

66 BOOKSHELF Laurence A. Marschall

70 nature.net Slip-SUding Away Robert Anderson

72 OUT THERE Ablaze from Afar Charles Liu

73 THE SKY IN SEPTEMBER Joe Rao

76 AT THE MUSEUM

80 ENDPAPER Mixing It Up Lynn Margulis

PICTURE CREDITS: Page 30

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THE NATURAL MOMENT UP FRONT

"* See preceding two pages

Flying long dis- It Came from Outer Space tances can take the wind out of al- most any traveler. Strange things are happening here, on this old, familiar planet. Even members of The age of terrestrial exploration, somerimes thought to have

the hummingbird burned itself out for lack of the fiiel of new frontiers, is still rag- family, champions ing for those willing to probe. And the more you probe, the less famil-

of the continuous iar, the more, well, extraterrestrial the Earth and its life-forms seem to wing beat, can tire on their long be. The organisms and behavioral patterns we're covering in this issue seasonal migrations. The female are not what most people mean when they think of life on Earth. ruby-throated hummingbird (Ar- Some of the creatures occur in plain sight, in fields and forests, not

chilochits cohibris) pictured here to mention on the windowsills of urban apartments. Others are so

was probably leapfrogging its way well hidden that the habitats themselves were unimaginable just a

south for the winter when it few decades ago, and the creatures still go unobserved. Consider the landed on a feeder in Michigan familiar scale insects, as inconspicuous as they are ubiquitous on one sunny August morning and plants. Once you begin to look closely, though, at the ways they dropped into an energy-conserv- transfer their genes, these creatures might as well have blown in from ing state even deeper than sleep: another solar system on stellar winds (see "The Sex Lives of Scales," torpor. In torpor, brain waves by Benjamin B. Normark, page 38). slow down, the body cools, and Here's another example. Ordinary weeds and grasses are proving to the metaboHc rate plummets. have elaborate systems for discrimination and action that go far be- Sara Hiebert, a biologist at yond conventional "vegetable intelligence." The plants look around; Swarthmore College in Pennsyl- they measure the length of the day; they check out the density of vania, studies torpor and stress nearby plants and adjust their growth accordingly. In their intelli-

in a similar migratory "hum- gence report from the front, Marcelo J. Yanovsky and Jorge J. Casal mer," Selasphoms nifus. She re- describe their surprising findings about the molecular details of cently found that the birds go "How Plants 'See'" (page 32). into torpor most often just be- But "extraterrestrial" bugs and plants are just warm-ups for an even fore they head south, when their weirder Hfe-form. Peter A. Rona, the author of "Secret Survivor"

energy reserves are greatest. In (page 50), was the first scientist to discover an undersea community

winter, torpor is less frequent, thriving on the deep-sea floor of the Atlantic, living on chemicals but more closely tied to the birds' cooked up by Earth's own internal heat. Among the traces of Hfe he day-to-day stress-hormone levels found were bizarre hexagonal patterns of holes in the seafloor. Years

than it is in summer. Torpor is later, Rona became a scientific adviser to the makers of the recent also known to happen almost ex- IMAX film. Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, and the filmmakers adopted his clusively at night in S. rufus, end- quest to identify the hexagonal patterns as a story line for their movie. ing like clockwork about two In his article for this issue, Rona makes a positive connection, only hours before sunrise. guessed at in the movie, between those holes and the fossil remains of The hummer in our picture a creature thought to have been extinct for the past 50 miUion years. was literally at the lip of a Uter of How the creature survived environmental change and catastrophe

sugar water when photographer in its reflige on the seafloor poses a pertinent rejoinder to those who

Roger Eriksson spotted it at the imagine that other planets offer a refiage for humanity, in case the Earth

feeder. As Hiebert put it, the bird becomes uninhabitable. Wouldn't it be just as "easy" to follow the ex- was probably "in energetically ample of that mysterious creature, and seek bleak refuge in the warmth

deep trouble." Eriksson took a from the fires that burn inside the planet, on the bottom of the sea? few pictures, and then moved both feeder and lolling bird to a safe area. A few hours later the Late this month on NOVA, PBS wiU broadcast a four-hour televi- rubythroat revived and quickly sion miniseries hosted and narrated by our "Universe" colum- flew off—renewed, one hopes, nist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. The show, titled "Origins," will air in two for its flight south. 2-hour segments, 8—10 P.M. eastern time, on September 28 and 29 —Erin Espelie (www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/). —PETER BROWN

8 NATURAL HISTORY Septembei 2004 BAJA CALIFORNIA

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I was delighted when my wife. Maria, So, consider a quarter century's experience, our comfortable expedition inspired by a bool< she read {Sightings ships and one of the world's most dramatic geographies. Then join us as we by Peterson and Hogan), wanted to explore Baja way beyond the peninsula's iconic Cabo. celebrate her 40th birthday amongst

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^0^ LETTERS

Little Souls Roman Catholic Church to- frightening. Mr. Calvin possible only because of a

In his review of Soul Made ward science from the fif- states that in the continuum human level of ability to Flesh, by Carl Zinimer, and teenth through the seven- of Hfe from fertilized egg to speculate, judge quafrty,

The Birth of the Mind, by teenth centuries is often seen maturity, there is some and modify our possible ac- Gary Marcus ("The Fate of to be wholly negative and point where "one cell tions accordingly. The re-

the Soul," 6/04), William obstructionist, whereas the slowly becomes a real per- sult is a big step up from H. Calvin seems to have attitude actually varied wildly son, gradually able to com- whatever altruism and em-

little appreciation of the from avidly pro scientific re- prehend life's great jour- pathy might have existed

complex history of reli- search to rabidly against it. ney." The inference is that earlier. It certainly is one of gious institutions or of the- Mary Fain unless you are able to com- the modern connotations ological dialogues. For ex- Gaylord, Michigan prehend, then somehow of "soul."

ample, he mentions that are a real is you not person. Philip J. Lehpamer try- "The tortures imposed on William Calvin's review is a Thus, a retarded adult and a ing to put words in my dissenters by the inquisi- welcome voice of reason small child do not quaUfy as mouth. To say that "The

tions of the Roman over what amounts to a su- real persons, the dream of inference is that unless you CathoHc Church attested perstition—a belief in the every despot who would are able to comprehend, to the dangers of thinking "Httle soul," a vestige of stifle humanity. then somehow you are not

Unable to precisely de- a real person" is hardly a fair fine when one cell becomes inference from the rhetori-

a person, I simply observe cal flourish at the end of facts. The fertilized egg my essay. cannot exhibit a personality,

but it is Ufe, and its genetic Artistic License

makeup shows it to be As a former high school human Hfe. These facts track coach and biology

stand, even if "nature seems teacher, I have been dis- rather careless with early mayed and somewhat embryos" or some women amused by the trophies that choose to abort. often depict runners in

Philip J. Lehpamer motion with the right arm Brooklyn, New York and right leg extended in

differently." That may be pre-seventeenth-century the same direction. I see true, but in the context of thinking. If the concept of William H. Calvin that the makers of modern

his discussion of seven- soul could be released from REPLIES: I mostly agree with trophies may have gotten

teenth-century English its archaic limitations, it Mary Fain's points, and in- their model from the

thinkers it would have would no longer be perti- deed gave, as briefly as I Greek Olympics. The urn made more sense to have nent for us to labor over could, a CathoHc and an shown on the opening

mentioned the equivalent such silly questions as Anghcan example. That I pages of David C. Young's dangers imposed by the whether other animals did not elaborate my discus- article ("With Hands or Church of England, which "have" what we call sion of them hardly means Swift Feet," 7-8/04) makes

since 1563 had been the "souls." All creatures vary that I "have Htde apprecia- the same mistake! official church in that land. in their awareness, as indi- tion of the complex history Warren Wliitaker Similarly, quoting viduals and as species. A of religious institutions or of Chillicothe, Ohio Zimmer, Mr. Calvin refers sign of higher conscious- theological dialogues."

to the bishops who in 1 666 ness is the ability to appre- Jefirey Aaron has it about David C. Young replies:

blamed London's fire and ciate the variations on all right, but note that we hu- Warren Whitaker is quite plague on Thomas levels. mans have added a new right: anyone running as Hobbes's atheism. I would Jeffrey Aaron kind of level via the emer- that ancient vase painter has

assume these were the bish- Highland Park, NewJersey gence (quite late in the ho- it wiU immediately fall ops of the Anglican minid lineage) of structured down. Many ancient vase Communion, not the I found the view of hu- thought—syntax, contin- paintings have it right, but a Roman CathoUc Church. manity expressed by gent planning, polyphonic handful have it wrong—un- These may seem small William Calvin in the last music, chains of logic, fortunately, several of the

points, but the attitude of the sentence of his review games with rules. Ethics are most attractive of the lot.

10 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 Fitness Test tion of matter in the early the anthropic approach: lite data on global tempera-

Donald Goldsmith s article universe had been "a bit Either the existence of life, tures, which "show a much on the anthropic principle larger," galaxies might never as well as other "fine tun- smaller increase in global ("The Best of All Possible have formed. But we have ing" of the cosmos, cries warming than do measure- Worids," 7-8/04) suggests no idea what complexity out for an explanation, or ments at ground stations or that we must beHeve either such a universe might spon- else things just happened projections based on com- that the one and only uni- taneously produce, and we to turn out that way. Al- puter climate models." My verse just happens to be can't deny the possibility though my own feelings answer is that I was reluctant finely tuned to produce that it might produce be- closely correspond to to devote space to the arcane life—an improbable coinci- ings even niore glorious Tucker McCrady 's, I appar- technical interpretations of dence—or that there are so (gasp!) than humans. If so, ently presented the oppo- such data because most sci- many alternate universes the "cosmic coincidence" site conclusion with greater entists find the subject suspi- that the existence of one that the universe is finely vigor. The beauty and in- ciously complex and uncer- like ours isn't so improbable tuned to support humans is terest of the anthropic ar- tain. My hesitancy appears after all. But that is a false no more astounding than gument reside in the fact justified by the results of dichotomy, resting on the the "coincidence" that the that it provokes strong more recent studies, which arrogant notion that we can Arctic is finely tuned to opinions that cannot be indicate that the satellite predict the necessary pre- support polar bears. quickly tested. measurements have underes- conditions for sentient Ufe Tucker McCrady timated tropospheric warm- in alternate universes, when New York, New York Getting Warmer ing. It now appears that we can't even predict the In his review of my book these data offer no support necessary preconditions in Donald Goldsmith The Discovery of Global to the position of those who our own. For example, Mr. REPLIES: In my article I at- Warming ("Heat Exchange," would deny the probability Goldsmith points out that if tempted to present both 4/04), Robert EhrHch asks of global warming. deviations in the distribu- sides of the argument over why I did not mention satel- (Continued on page 71)

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A city boy from Detroit, Roger Eriksson traces his long- standing interest in birds ("The Natural Moment," page 6) to childhood weekends in Ontario's Point Pelee National mm Peter Brown Ediioi i-Chicf passion grew in his teens, when he banded birds as Park. His Mary Beth Aberlin Elizabeth Meryman a volunteer with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When Managing Editor An Director he became a professional wildlife photographer, he decided Board of Editors to speciaHze in birds. But training and passion notwith- T.J. Kelleher. Avis Lang, Vittono Maestro standing, Eriksson says he was just plain lucky to discover a female ruby- Michel DeMatteis Associate Matiagitig Editor Thomas Rosinski Associate Art Director throated hummingbird in torpor. Erin M. Espelie Special Projects Editor Graciela Flores Editorial Associate Inspired by the research interests of his father, a microbiologist who studied Hannah Black, Jordan Moore. Adam Rathe Ititenis disease, Yanovsky (left) Chagas' Marcelo J. ^ ("How Plants 'See,'" page 32) became a biolo- Contributing Editors Robert Anderson, Charles Liu, Laurence A. Marschall, gist. His interest was soon drawn to plants and, Richard Milner. Robert H. Mohlenbrock, Joe Rao, in particular, to how seasonal changes affect Stephan Reebs, Adam Summers, Neil deGrasse Tyson plants' growth and development. For his doc- toral research he studied plants' rudimentary Charles E. Harris Publisher "visual" systems and their photoreceptors with Gale Page Consumer Marketing Director Maria Volpe Promotion Director his co-author. Casal is a plant physiologist and associate Jorge J. Casal, Edgar L. Harrison National Advertising Manager researcher and professor at the Institute for Agricultural Plant Physiology and Sonia W. Paratore Senior Account Manager Donna M. Lemmon Production Manager Ecology m Buenos Aires. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Leicester in Michael Shectman Fnlfiilment Manager England. Casal and his former student now work closely together at the Institute. Jennifer Evans Business Administrator

Adi'enising Sales Representatives in ("The Sex Lives of As a kid growing up Seatde, Benjamin B. Normark New York—Metrocorp Marketing, 212-972-1 157, Scales," page 38) was fascinated by the creatures of the inter- Duke International Media. 212-986-6098 Detroit—joe McHugh. Breakdirough Media. 586-360-3980 tidal zone. But he studied linguistics, speciaHzing in the his- Mitweapolii—Ricken Media. Inc., 612-920-0080 tory of the Germanic languages, and became a lexicographer. West Coast—PVW Sales Group/Sue Todd, 415-543-5001 Stephen Jay Gould's essays in this magazine persuaded him Toronto—American Publishers Representatives Ltd., 416-363-1388 that the most interesting ancient "text" was DNA, so he Atlanta and Miami—Rickles and Co., 770-664-4567 National Direct Response—Smyth Media Group,646-638-4985 talked his way into the doctoral program in ecology and evo- lutionary biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Todd Happer Vice President, Science Education He is now an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Educational Advisor)' Board

Myles Gordon American Museinn of Natural History Photographer and writer ROSAMOND PuRCELL ("A Room David Chesebrough Buffalo Mnseiun of Science Stephanie Ratclifie Natural Histoiy Museum of the Adirondacks Revisited," page 46) grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ronen Mir SciTech Hands On Musetmi not far the of Comparative Zoology at Harvard from Museum Carol Valenta St. Louis Science Center University, where she formed early impressions—initially un- pleasant—of the appearance of animal remains. Between 1986 Natural History Magazine, Inc. Charles E. Harris President. Chief Executive and 2000 Purcell and Stephen Jay Gould collaborated on three Offia Charles Lalanne Chief Financial Officer I books, including Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors. Her latest Judy Buller General Manager book, Owls Head, is a nonfiction meditation on the nature of ruined objects, as Charles Rodin Publishing Advisor Cherami Publishing Advisor well as a biography of one man who collected them.' Russell

To contact us regarding your subscription, to order a new A leader in the exploration of the deep-sea floor, Peter A. RoNA ("Secret subscription, or to change your address, please visit our Web site www.naturalhistorymag.CQm or write to us at Natural History, Survivor," page 50) was thrilled to work with director Stephen Low and others P.O. Box 5000, Harlan lA 51593-0257.

on the IMAX film Volcanoes of the Deep Sea. The film highlights Rona's dis- For advertising information, call 646-356-6555. ^^^R. covery of the enigmatic living fossil Paleodictyon, the subject of NaiiiMl Hiilory (ISSN 0028-0712) is published monthly, cxcepi for combined Decern ber/J.inuarj-, by Natural History' Magazine, his article in this issue. He is also the author of an earUer arti- issues in July/Augusi and ^^KK^^^f affiliation [he American Museum of Natural History', Central Inc.. in with Street, York. NY 10024. E-mail: nhm3g@naturalhis- BpPIPB^^ cle for Natural History, "Metal Factories of the Deep Sea" Park West ai 79th New torymag.com. Natural History Magazine. Inc., is solely responsible for editorial Pr, (January 1988). Rona is a professor of marine geology and content and publishing practices. Subscriptions: S30.00 a year; for Canada and all other countries: S-tO.OO a year, Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and geophysics at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New at additional mailing offices. Canada Publications Mail No. 40030827. Copy- right © 2004 by Natural History Magazine. Inc. All rights reserved. No part of Jersey, and a consultant to the United Nations on seafloor re- this periodical may be repnaduced without wTitten consent of iVndiml History. If you would like to contact us regarding your subscription or to enter a new sub- sources. He continues to make dives in deep-sea submersibles, scription, please write to us at Natural History, PO, Box 5000, Harlan, lA 51593-0257. Postmaster: Send address changes to Natural History, P.O. Box an activity that he considers safer than driving to work. 5000, Harlan, lA 51537-5000. Printed in the U.S.A.

12 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 — —

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we are free to think, and write, and say, and believe Mrhat

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HISTORY Sunday CHANNEL. 12"' 9pm/8c Sept. History.com SAMPLINGS Hunters and Freeloaders Breaking Up Is Hard to Time Puzzling over the whys and wherefores of wolf

Ever since plate tectonics began to other linking Antarctica with packs, evolutionary biologists have noted that they

gain acceptance in the 1960s, in- Australia—broke off between 90 are often larger than they "should" be. Most carni- vestigators have been trying to de- million and 80 million years ago. vore species hunt alone, and so each individual

duce the distribution of landmasses Based on recent fossil discoveries, gets to eat what it kills. Group hunting, by contrast,

and life-forms in earlier eras. One however, Paul C. Sereno, a, paleon- makes it possible to take more prey, but the bounty

persistent puzzle is the breakup of tologist at the University of must then be shared. And If a pack exceeds a cer- the southern supercontinent known Chicago, and his colleagues reject tain number of animals (a number based on such as Gondwana, source of the mod- that hypothesis. variables as available food, the risks of nutritional

Working in Niger, the investi- shortfall, and the energy requirements of territorial gators uncovered the 95-million- defense), competition for food becomes so Intense

year-old fossilized remains of an that Its members should, theoretically, fare better if abelisaurid dinosaur—remains they hunt alone. Yet wolf packs frequently exceed

that bear a strong resemblance the expected optimum number.

to fossils found recently in South To resolve the paradox, say John A. Vucetlch, an

America. Nearby, Sereno and his ecologlst at Michigan Technological University in

colleagues also found fragments Houghton, and his colleagues, the focus needs to

of the abelisaurid's forerunners, shift from the wolves to their hangers-on: ravens.

dating to about 1 10 million More mobile than wolves, ravens often manage to supercontinent Southern Gondwana, years ago. The finds indicate the steal a large proportion of a wolf pack's kill. One about T90 million years ago persistence of a trans-Atlantic raven can consume or hoard four pounds a day from

em continents of Africa, Antarctica, land bridge between Africa and a large carcass. The key, say the Investigators, two of Australia, and South America, as the rest of Gondwana, via South whom have studied the wolves of Isle Royale

well as the Indian subcontinent and America, as late as 95 million years National Park in northern Michigan for decades, is

the large island of Madagascar. ago. The story of evolution In the that wolves In large packs lose less food to ravens,

When, and in what sequence, did ancient Southern Hemisphere may simply because the carcass gets consumed faster. the whole become parts? now need some major editing. That single benefit of belonging to a large group

One hypothesis has been that ("New dinosaurs link southern outweighs the costs of having to hunt more often

Africa split off first, between 140 landmasses in the Mid-Cretaceous, and share the kill among more packmates. ("Raven

million and 120 million years ago, "Proceedings of the Royal Society scavenging favours group foraging In wolves,"

and that the two key remaining ofLondon 6 271:1325-30, Animal Behav/our 67:1 1 17-26, June 2004)

land bridges—one linking July 7, 2004) —Nick W. Atkinson Antarctica with South America, the —T.J. Kelleher

FRIED RICE

To a vacationer in Southeast Asia, increasingly dry-season nighttime lows and the yield balmy March nights might mean more of one popular high-yielding cultivar: for

strolling and less clothing. But to a rice plant each Increase in the average temperature they mean hard times, say Shaobing Peng of of two degrees Fahrenheit, the yield of the

the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) cultivar declined by nearly 10 percent.

in Manila, Philippines, and his colleagues. That's bad news. The Earth's rice production

In that part of the world there are two rice- must expand by about 1 percent annually growing seasons: dry (January to April) and to meet increasing demand, and almost no

wet (late June to September). Average night- available uncultivated land Is suited to in- time lows at IRRI during the dry season have tensive agriculture. Dealing with that chal-

risen by a total of 2.39 degrees Fahrenheit lenge alone has been daunting for farmers

(1 .33 degree Celsius) In the past twenty-five and plant scientists. Now, It seems, global Rice yields threatened by global warming years. Throughout the year the days, too, have warming will add to their woes. ("Rice become warmer, as have nights during the wet season—but both yields decline with higher night temperature from global warm- have warmed substantially less than the dry-season nights. ing," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101:

Peng and his associates found a strong correlation between 9971-75, July 6, 2004) —Stephan Reebs

16 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 a world of ADVENTURE in every issue

Natural History takes you to the ends of the Earth and the far reaches of the universe to answer common questions with uncommon insight. From astronomy to zoology, the big bang to microscopic organisms, the depths of the sea to distant stars, Natural History spans the spectrum of science, nature, and history.

Subscribe now and receive: 10 issues for just $25 — a savings of 37% off the regular newsstand price FREE (one-time only) general admission pass to the American Museum of Natural History

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You may never hear the sound of one hand clap- Fifty years from now, the year 2004 may well be remembered as a high

ping, but if you visit the western reaches of point in space and planetary science. Here are some late dispatches.

Amazonia, you will certainly hear one leaf falling.

One of the most common Amazonian trees is the Roving

stilt-rooted palm Iriartea deltoidea, whose cousins you Intended primarily to find out if and where water

may have seen if you've ever sunned yourself on the once existed on the now-dry Martian surface, the beaches of the Caribbean or the Indian Ocean. Those two Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity)

majestic fronds swaying in the tropical breezes are sin- that landed on the planet this past January continue

gle leaves, subject, like any other leaf, to desiccation to photograph their surroundings and check out the rocks and soil. and death. And when a twenty-foot-long, thirty-pound Both rovers have found hematite, often a mineralogical sign of water.

dead leaf falls to the ground from a height of, say, Investigators say it's clear that parts of Mars's surface were once sop-

ninety or a hundred feet, it ping wet and, at least for some time, habitable. The rovers were ex-

not only makes quite a pected to poop out in April or so, but as of press time, they're still on a

noise but also has a long- roll, (marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/) term impact. V^P^P^^^^P^^VW Halton A. Peters, an Lord of the Rings

ecologist at Stanford Meanwhile, the Cassini spacecraft has been orbiting

University, and his col- Saturn since June 30. It has captured the closest-ever

leagues recently deter- look at the planet's icy rings, and provided new insights

mined that even though on Saturn's vast magnetosphere—^the invisible bubble

an /. deltoidea drops just of magnetic fields, electric currents, and trapped radiation that surrounds

two or three fronds a the planet. On Christmas Eve 2004 the Huygens probe, which has been

year, the fronds do so hitching a ride with Cassini, will separate from the mother ship and, three palm, Stilt-rooted soon to much damage that they weeks later, plunge into the nitrogen- and methane-rich atmosphere of drop 3 lethal frond on the "weed out" many of the Saturn's largest moon, Titan—where signs of former or (who knows?) forest below saplings beneath the present-day life might be lurking, (saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm)

tree. The saplings that survive are, disproportion-

ately, members of species whose root systems hold Comet Catcher

large reserves of nutrients, making them better able On January 2, 2004, NASA's Stardust spacecraft,

to compensate for aboveground breakage. Because launched in February 1 999, came within 1 50 miles of

/. deltoidea is so abundant, the ecologists note, it a several-mile-wide comet named Wild 2. Attached ends up determining the composition of much of the to the craft was a 155-square-inch racket-shaped dust

rainforest understory. ("Falling palm fronds structure collector made of aerogel, a prodigiously tangled material that is 99.8

Amazonian rainforest sapling communities," percent air, with a dash of silicon dioxide added. The collector slowed

Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B and trapped some of Wild 2's minuscule particles as it swept past the

(Suppl.) 271:5367-69, August 7, 2004) —S.R. comet at 13,000 miles per hour. Stardust has since collapsed itself into

a capsule and is set to land in Utah on January 15, 2006. Soon after-

ward, analysts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston will get the Cryptic Creatures first-ever chance to take a close-up look at the ingredients of a comet. (stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/)

Lest We Forget . . .

|: Launched in March 1972, Pioneer JO passed within

81,000 miles of Jupiter in December 1973 and then moved out beyond the solar system. Until February

2003 its transmitter stayed in contact with Earth. On

board Pioneer W and its sister probe, Pioneer 1 1 (launched in April 1973), are plaques showing the figures of a man and a woman along with several symbols meant to indicate the origin of the spacecraft: a kind of interstellar

message in a bottle. Now about 8 billion miles from home. Pioneer 10 is Only three of these pictures are close-ups coasting in the direction of the star Aldebaran. The spacecraft will take of the same animal. Which one doesn't belong? (Answer on page 71) more than 2 million years to reach it. (spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_ Projects/pioneer/PNhome.html) —Joe Rao

18 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 Five essential reference books worth $255.95 Yours for only $19.95

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Defying Gravity

The next time you see an ant or a form to every bump and cranny of a surface, acting as intimate spider walking upside down, con- contact elements between the wall and the foot. At each contact

sider this: rope systems designed to point, interactions between molecules set up a so-called van der

hold rock climbers can support at Waals force, a weak electrostatic attraction; collectively, the innu-

least ten times the weight of • merable points of attraction create a powerful adhesion.

an average adult, but the critter How powerful? Kesel and her colleagues found that when

clinging to your ceiling has vastly all eight legs of the quarter-inch-long spider Evarcha arcuata

more protection than that. Now are applied to a surface, 624,000 hairs can make contact,

Hairs on the leg tip of a Antonia B. Kesel, a zoologist at giving rise to a force 173 times stronger than what's needed spider, magnified seventy the University of Applied Sciences . to keep the creature from dropping off the ceiling. That diameters in Bremen, Germany, and her col- makes the spiders the champion surface dingers by a wide

leagues have applied a technique called atomic force micro- margin; the closest insect competitor is an ant, with a safety

scopy to precisely measure the adhesive forces involved. factor of about 100. So how does the spider ever get its leg

To hold on, insects, including ants, rely on small claws or on unstuck? It just pulls along a single edge of hairs, much as

sticky foot secretions. Spiders, however, have a different adhesive you do when you peel off a piece of tape. ("Getting a grip

structure at the tip of each leg, formed from a dense aggregation on spider attachment: An AFM approach to microstructure

of miniature hairs called setae. Each seta is covered with even adhesion in arthropods," Smart Materials and Structures

smaller hairs whose tips are shaped like sails. The "sails" can con- 1 3:51 2-1 8, June 2004) —S.R.

GRAINS OF EVIDENCE Wiiat Is a Picture Worth? Exactly when did barley and wheat and wheat, though, would collectively

become staples of the human diet in have yielded roughly double the

the Mediterranean basin? The question amount of food yielded by the 1 6,000

has been hard to answer, in part small grains. Indeed, by 8,000 years

because ancient plant remains are so ago, wild brome and its ilk had

scarce. But recent excavations at Ohalo disappeared from the Levantine diet,

II, a 23,000-year-old archaeological site having been decisively supplanted by on the shores of Lake Tiberias (aka the domesticated barley and wheat.

Sea of Galilee) in Israel, have yielded According to Ehud Weiss, an

more than 90,000 extremely well archaeobotanist at Harvard University

preserved botanical remains. Nearly a who first examined the evidence, and

quarter of this enormous cache consists his colleagues, this finding pushes Maxime van de Woestyne, of the grains of various wild cereals and back the evidence for grass collecting Se/f-Portrait, 1951 grasses, some of which were found next 10,000 years earlier than previously

The average human brain has 100 billion to a grinding stone in the known, and strongly

neurons, and, contrary to myth, a person remnants of a hut. Other supports the hypothesis

uses every one of them. But how many are edibles in the cache that agriculture (more

needed at a given time for a simple task? include wild almonds, figs, precisely, the cultivation

Ifat Levy, a neuroscientist at the Hebrew grapes, legumes, olives, of large-grained cereals)

University of Jerusalem, and her colleagues pistachios, and raspberries. had its roots in the prac- have calculated that when you see the image Among the grains, tice of foraging for a wide of a face or a house, at least a million neu- more than 16,000 have variety of relatively unpro-

rons fire in the area of your brain responsible been identified as seeds ductive grasses. ("The

for object recognition, and between 30 mil- gathered from a dozen broad spectrum revisited:

lion and 400 million fire in the visual cortex species of very small- Evidence from plant

as a whole. So, as the investigators titled grained grasses, particu- remains," Proceedings of

their article, "One picture is worth at least a larly brome. About 2,500 the National Academy of million neurons." (Current Biology 14:996- of the grains are from wild Sc/ences 101:9551-55,

1001, Junes, 2004) —S.R. barley and 100 from wild Brome, a small-grained June 29, 2004) emmer wheat. The barley but edible grass —S.R. I

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Flexible: Feeders

The lower hill of the hummingbird makes a nectar- drinking beak

into onefor catching insects.

By Adam Summers Illustrations by Roberto Osti

uinmingbirds, those com- truly brilliant fit between form and Nectar is the avian equivalent of mon visitors to bird feeders function. Hummingbirds with long Coca-Cola—it's not much H and honeysuckle vines, bills feed on deep flowers, while those more than sugar and water. In the seem adapted for one primary task: with shorter biUs head for smaller course of a day a hummer drinks

gathering nectar from flowers. blooms. Even the degree of bill cur- more than its body weight in nectar, Consider the apparent singularity of vature of any particular hummingbird and the bird burns through the purpose with which these animals are species matches the arc of the birds' solution—which is 20 to 50 shaped. Their wing bones are fused preferred floral food source [see "All percent sugar by weight—at a into a stifl'' paddle that enables the them Right Ciuves," by Ethan J. Teineles, furious pace. But as parents point to hover at a bloom while drinking. Not/ember 2002]. But all is not sweet out to their kids, you can't live on

Their tongues are long and specially water and bUss, for the huiTmiingbird's sugar alone, and that fact is as true

shaped to hold an abundance of the beak must perform another task that for hummingbirds as it is for people. sugary Uquid on which they feed. seems opposed to nectar gathering The birds must supplement their

Their beaks, though, represent a catching insects on the fly. carbohydrate-rich diet with daily

22 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 —

helpings of insects to get necessary covered with a structure known as a and bends like a strip of thin plastic fats and amino acids that are scarce rhamphotheca, a sheath made of when the lower bill opens far or even nonexistent in nectar. keratin, the same stuff" your finger- enough. Bones that bend? No Birds have two strategies for snag- nails are made of. Unlike most verte- wonder the anatomists missed that ging insects on the wing. Some brates, many birds have a joint in the one. But bendy bones, though rare, species with large mouths and small upper jaw, behind the beak, that en- are not unheard of For example, bills, such as nighthawks, whip-poor- ables the upper beak to bend toward the bones in a bat's wing bend [see wills, and the aptly named frogmouth the head as it opens. Some bird "Flap Your Hands," by Adam Summers, owls, open their bills wide as they fly species also have a joint in the lower February 2003], and so do the into insects, and the prey is captured jaw, but in most species the lower bill tongue bones of woodpeckers. in the birds' gaping maws. In con- is inflexible: it opens by rotating at You can get a feel for the remark- trast, narrow-billed birds such as fly- the jaw joint, just like your mandible, able bending action of the hum- catchers rely on their bills to catch and, also like your mandible, it does mingbird's lower bill by cutting a flying prey; some flycatchers are so not bend in the middle. Careful narrow strip from the long dimen- specialized that they maneuver the examination of hummingbird skele- sion of a piece of typing paper, tips of their bills Uke forceps, making a rectangle one inch by pinching insects out of the air. eleven inches long. Fold the strip in The hummingbird might half along the short axis, leaving a V seem best suited to the forceps whose two legs are each one inch by approach, though a bird with five-and-a-half inches long. Hold an such a long bill might have a end between the thumb and forefin- hard time snapping both ger of each hand, with the vertex of quickly and precisely on an the V pointing away from you [see evasive gnat. Gregor M. illustration at left]. Touch your thumb Yanega and Margaret A. knuckles together while keeping Rubega, both biologists at the your palms parallel to the ground. University of Connecticut in The paper "bill" should now be Storrs, have discovered that pointed straight out in front of you, not only do hummers act ready to open wide. Rotate your more Hke mghthawks than palms together and you will see that hke flycatchers, they also man- the sides of the bill spread apart age to widen their needleUke while the far end rotates downward, bill to better snag their prey. about an axis roughly midway be- To see how hummingbirds tween your thumbs and the tip of catch insects, Yanega and the V. Like the narrow paper bill, the (opposite page) depends, Rubega ran a video camera at Ruby-throated hummingbird real hummingbird's lower bfll splays as do other hummingbird species, on a beak specially 500 frames a second to film apart into a shape that is far better shaped for gathering nectar from flowers. But the bird individuals of several species in though certainly not ideal—for must also eat insects to survive. How, then, to catch catching insects. slow motion as they fed on insects with a thin, nectar-drinking beak? The solution fruit flies. Projected at far is a flexible lower bill, which widens and bends down- The beak of any bird, even of a slower rates, the movies reveal ward as the bird opens its mouth, presenting a larger dietary specialist such as a humming- for catching flies. The action can be modeled that a hummingbird catches "mitt" bird, serves multiple fimctions. Poten- by twisting a narrow strip of folded paper (above), as flies at the base of its biU rather tial conflicts, such as the simultaneous described in the text. than at the tip. Most surpris- need for a long, narrow biU to fit

ing, as the bird opens its beak flowers and a broad biU to catch in-

to catch a fly, the lower bill tons shows that they belong to the sects, often give rise to the most suddenly bends downward at a point latter, mainstream crowd. interesting cases of natural selection near the middle and widens, enlarg- How, then, does a hummingbird in action. The hummer resolves the ing the bird's mouth to the detriment manage to expand its lower bill conflict by devoting the shape of its

of the fly. when hunting insects? Despite bill to one purpose and its material

decades of study, speciaHsts were still properties to the other. The upper and lower parts of a surprised when they took a close bird's beak correspond to the look at this part of the humming- Adam Summers ([email protected]) is ati upper and lower jaws in people. The bird's anatomy. It turns out that the assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary bones of both parts of the beak are bone of the lower beak both twists biology at the University of California, hvine.

September 2004 HISTORY 23 NATURAL | UNIVERSE

The Information Trap

Tempted by the devil in the details

By Neil deGrasse Tyson

Most people assume that the more information you have about something, the

better you understand it. Up to a point, that's usually true. When you look at this page from across the room,

you can see it's in a magazine, but you can't make out the words. Get closer, and you'll be able to read the article. If you put your nose right up against the page, though, your understanding of the arti-

cle's contents will not im- prove. You may get more

''How long is the coast Oj

visual detail, but by being so close you'll sacrifice crucial information—whole words, entire sentences, complete paragraphs. The old story about the bhnd men and the elephant makes the same point: if you stand a few inches away and fixate on the hard, pointed projections, the long rubbery hose, the thick, wrinkled posts, and the dangling rope with a tassel on the end that you quickly learn not to pull, you won't be able to tell much about the animal as a whole. Gyorgy Kepes, Cosmohgical Eye, 1941

24 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 —

One of the challenges of scientific Britain, from Dunnet Head down to

inquiry is knowing when to step Lizard Point, making sure you go into back—and how far back to step—and all the bays and headlands. Then un- w^hen to move in close. In some con- furl the string, compare its length to texts, approximation brings clarity; in the scale on the map, and voila! you've

others it leads to oversimplification. A measured the island's coastUne. raft of complications sometimes point Wanting to spot-check your work, to true complexity and sometimes just you get hold of a more detailed Ord-

clutter up the picture. If you want to nance Survey map, scaled at, say, two know the overall properties of an en- and a half inches to the mile, as op- semble of molecules under various posed to the kind of map that shows

states of pressure and temperature, for all of Britain on a single panel. Now

instance, it's irrelevant and sometimes there are inlets and spits and promon- downright misleading to pay attention tories that you'U have to trace with to what individual molecules are your string; the variations are small, doing. A single particle cannot have a but there are lots of them. You find temperature, because the very con- that the QS. map shows the coastline cept of temperature addresses the av- to be longer than the atlas did.

erage motion of all the molecules in So which measurement is correct?

the group. In biochemistry, by con- Surely it's the one based on the more

trast, you understand next to nothing detailed map. Yet you could have cho- unless you pay attention to how one sen a map that has even more detail

molecule interacts with another. one that shows every boulder that sits

Let me put the issue this way: at the base of every cliff. Cartogra- Visit Sunset Crater. When does a measurement, an obser- phers usually ignore rocks on a map, vation, or simply a map have the right unless they're the size of Gibraltar.

amount of detail? Well, I guess you'll just have to walk Then celebrate the coastline of Britain yourself if you the fact that you In 1967 Benoit B. Mandelbrot, really want to measure it accurately a mathematician now at IBM's and you'd better carry a very long weren't here when that it Thomas J. Watson Research Center string so you can run around in Yorktown Heights, New York, and every nook and cranny. But you'O still it was created.

Sunset Crater is one of many

Britain?" asked Mandelbrot. The answer is not so simple. natural wonders waiting for you in Flagstaff, Arizona. You can also explore the Grand Canyon, Aleteor also at Yale University, posed a ques- be leaving out some pebbles, not to Crater, the Petrified Forest and tion in the journal Science: "How mention the rivulets of water trickling Walnut Canyon. Then sit down in long is the coast of Britain?" A simple among the grains of sand. question with a simple answer, you Where does all this end? Each time a cozy cafe and celebrate them all. might expect. But the answer is you measure it, the coastline gets Call (888) 788-FLAG or visit deeper than anyone had imagined. longer and longer. If you take into ac- www.visitflagstaff.us. Explorers and cartographers have count the boundaries of molecules, been mapping coastlines for centuries. atoms, subatomic particles, will the They don't make The earliest dra\vings depict the con- coastline prove to be infinitely long? towns like this anymore. tinents as having crude, funny-look- Not exactly. Mandelbrot would say ing boundaries; today's high-resolu- "undefinable." Maybe we need the tion maps, enabled by satellites, are help of another dimension to rethink worlds away in precision. To begin to the problem. Perhaps the concept of

answer Mandelbrot's question, how- one-dimensional length is simply ill

ever, all you need is a handy world suited for convoluted coastlines. atlas and a spool of string. Unwind Playing out Mandelbrot's mental the string along the perimeter of exercise involved a newly synthesized a

field of mathematics, based on frac- Noticing a few problems with the tional—or iiactal (from the Latin frac- concept of a flat Earth, the ancient tus, "broken")—dimensions rather Greeks—including such thinkers as ^ than the one, two, and three dimen- Pythagoras and Herodotus—pondered sions of classic EucHdean geometry. the possibihty that Earth might be a The ordinary concepts of dimension, sphere. In the fourth century B.C., Mandelbrot argued, are just too sim- Aristotle, the great systematizer of plistic to characterize the complexity knowledge, summarized several argu- of coastlines. Turns out, fractals are ments in support of that view. One of ideally suited for describing "self-simi- them was based on lunar eclipses.

lar" patterns, which look much the Every now and then, the Moon, as it same at different scales. Broccoli, orbits, intercepts the cone-shaped ferns, and snowflakes are good exam- shadow that Earth casts in space. ples from the natural world, but only Across decades of these spectacles, certain computer-generated, indefi- Aristode noted. Earth's shadow on the nitely repeating structures can produce Moon was always circular. For that to the ideal fractal, in 'which the shape of be true. Earth had to be a sphere, be-

the macro object is made up of smaller cause only spheres cast circular shad-

versions of the same shape or pattern, ows via all Hght sources, from all an-

Dive the longest barrier reef

in the Western Hemisphere. Because spinning makes the Earth bulge, And when you surface, explore one degree of latitude is slightly longer IVIaya tempies, listen to exotic Garifuna music. Discover at the Arctic Circle than it is at the equator.

inland streams, waterfalls

and even Mennonite villages. which are in turn formed from even gles, and at all times. If Earth were a And at day's end, you'll discover more miniature versions of the very flat disk, the shadow would sometimes that the people are as warm same thing, and so on indefinitely. be oval. Sometimes, when Earth's

and friendly as the climate. As you descend into a pure fractal, edge faced the Sun, it would be a Hne.

Experience the diversity of however, even though its components Only when Earth was face-on to the

Belize, your English-speaking multiply, no new information comes Sun would its shadow cast a circle. neighbor on the Caribbean your way—because the pattern con- Given the strength of that one ar- tinues to look the same. By contrast, if gument, you might think cartogra- coast of Central America, you look deeper and deeper into the phers would have made a spherical only 2 hours J human body, you eventually en- model of Earth within the next few from the U.S. counter a cell, an enormously com- centuries. But no. The earhest known plex structure endowed with different terrestrial globe was built in 1490—92, attributes and operating under differ- on the eve of the European ocean ent rules than the ones that hold sway voyages of discovery and colonization. Your Caribbean Gateway at the macro levels of the body. Cross- to Central America ing the boundary into the cell reveals a yes. Earth is approximately a Call 1-800-624-0686 So, new universe of information. sphere. But the devil, as always, - - or visit our website: , / lurks in the details. In his Prindpia, How about Earth itself? One of published in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton the earliest representations of proposed that, because spinning spher- the world, preserved on a 2,600-year- ical objects thrust their substance out-

old Babylonian clay tablet, depicts it ward as they rotate, our planet (and the

as a disk encircled by oceans. Fact is, others as well) is a bit flattened at the when you stand in the middle of a poles and a bit bulgy at the equator— broad plain (the valley of the Tigris shape known as an oblate spheroid. To i« and Euphrates Rivers, for instance) test Newton's hypothesis, half a cen- and check out the view in every di- tury later the French Academy of Sci- rection. Earth does seem to be a disk. ences in Paris sent mathematicians on

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its "equatorial bulge." A single day on mate Experiment) sends up a pair of fast-spinning Jupiter, the most massive satellites to map Earth's geoid, which

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four-hour day, is just 0.3 percent wider the force of gravity is perpendicular at the equator—twenty-seven miles on to every mapped point. [See "Serious a diameter of just under 8,000 miles. Gravity" in "Samplings," by Stephan That's hardly anything. Reebs, October 2003]. Thus, at any One fascinating consequence of this given point on Earth's surface, the mild oblateness is that if you stand at geoid—even though it turns out to sea level anywhere on the equator, be riddled with bumps and cavities 11- to 33-day you'U be farther from Earth's center because of the uneven density of than you'd be nearly anywhere else on matter below Earth's surface, inducing Cruise Expeditions Earth. And if you really want to do uneven gravity at Earth's surface things right, cHmb Mount Chimbo- also embodies the truly horizontal. from ^^)0^^ pp razo in central Ecuador, close to the Carpenters, land surveyors, and

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bulgier than the bulge north of the crystalline spheres. It was the spheres

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are not perfect circles, but ellipses of he course of a scientific disci- varying elongation. t:pline gets shaped in different We have only just begun. ways depending on whether theories lue Consider the Earth-Moon system. lead data or data lead theories. A the- The two bodies orbit their common ory tells you what to look for, and

center of mass, their barycenter you either find it or you don't. If you

which lies rouglily a thousand miles find it, you move on to the next open below the spot on Earth's surface closest question. If you have no theory but to the Moon at any given moment. So you wield tools of measurement,

instead of the planets themselves, it's ac- you'll start collecting as much data as tually their planet-moon barycenters you can and hope that patterns that trace the Keplerian eUiprical orbits emerge. But until you arrive at an around the Sun. So now what's Earth's overview, you're mostly poking trajectory? A series of loop-the- around in the dark. loops—thirteen of them in a year, one Nevertheless, one would be mis- for each cycle of lunar phases—rolled guided to declare that Copernicus was together with an ellipse. wrong simply because his orbits were the wrong shape. His deeper concept The ballet of the solar system is that planets orbit the Sun—is what mattered a performance only a computer most. From then on, as- can know and love. trophysicists have contin- ually refined the inodel by looking closer and Meanwhile, not only do the Moon closer. Copernicus may not have been

and Earth tug on each other, but all in the right ballpark, but he was surely the other planets (and their moons) on the right side of town. Geome- are tugging on them too. Everybody's ters—those who measure the Earth— tugging on everybody else. As you didn't suddenly find our planet to be a

might suspect, it's a complicated mess cube; dynamicists didn't suddenly find

[see "Going Ballistic," by Neil deGrasse Earth's orbit to be a triangle. But look- Tyson, November 2002]. Plus, each ing closer only rarely simpUfies things. time the Earth-Moon system takes a If Kepler had had the ability to mea-

trip around the Sun, its orbit shifts sure the actual trajectory of each planet slightly, not to mention the fact that in the solar system, he might stiU be

the Moon is spiraling away fi-om Earth scratching his head. at a rate of one or two inches a year, [77;/.'; is part one of a two-part article.] and that some orbits are chaotic. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the All told, this ballet of the solar sys- Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Plan- tem, choreographed by the forces of etarium in New York City. He is abo host and gravity, is a performance only a com- narrator of the PBS NOVA miniseries "Ori- puter can know and love. We've come gins," which will air in two 2-hour segments,

Gorilla Glue is the versa't''-' a long way from single, isolated bodies 8-10 P.M. eastern time, on September 28 and interior/exterior adhesive tracing pure, simple circles in space. 29 (www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/). ideal for most liouseliolr fixes and building projeci: furniture repair, ci-afts, PICTURE CREDITS Cover: Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY; pp. 6-8: ©Roger Eriksson; p. 10: ©Joseph Farris; p. 1 fi{top): 0M3.irren De woodworking, and general Wic; p lh{bocroni): 'CSean Sprague/Peter Arnold; p. 18(left): ©Martin Gibbons/Tobias Spanner/The Paliii Center, UK; p. l8{bottom)ii,fc,iy:

©OSF/D. Fleetham/Animals Ammals/Earth Scenes; c. ©Konrad Wothe/Mindcn Pictures; p. 18(right): JPL/NASA; 20(top): ©A. Kesel, repairs around tfie house p A. Marrin, X Seidl; p. 20{bottom,left): Private CoUecdon/Bridgenian Art Library; p.20 (Isottoni, right): ©Larry Allain/USGS NWRC; Bonds wood, stone, p.24: courtesy Stephen Daiter Cillery, Chicago; p. 32; Digit-al Image ©The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, Pole/CORBIS; 38(top,lcft); ©Peter metal, ceramic & more' NY; pp 34 and 36; illustrations by Patricia J. Wynne; p 35; ©Olivia Parker; p 37: ©Michael p. Incredibly strong and Chew/Brisbane Insects and Spiders; pp. 38-44; ©Takumasa Kondo; p. 43(center): ©Donald Specker/Animals Animals; pp. 4! and 42; illus- 55; courtesy the author and Stephen Low tradons by Patricia J. Wynne; pp. 46-48: ©Rosamond Purcell; pp. 50, 51, 53(bottom) and The 1 00% waterproof. Company from the film Volcanoes ofllic Deep Se.r. p. 52: ©NOAA/NGDC; p. 53(top); courtesy Dr. Adolf Seilacher; pp. 56-57: University of

Nebraska State Museum; pp. 58-60: ©The Natur.al History Museum, London; p. 61: from A Journey lltrotigh SingopOTC by Reena Siingh, Studie.s; State Historical Society of Missouri, Co- REQUEST YOUR FRSJ Landmark Books. 1995; p. 62: Mary Evans/CoUege of Psychic p. 66: Used by permission. himbia; p. 68(top): Peter Arnold/Peter Arnold, Inc; p. 68(right); Hulton-Deutsch CoUecdon/CORBIS; p. 72: ©Reunion des Musees Na- INFORMATJON KIT2 rionaux/Art Resource, NY, ©Estate Brassai-R.M,N.; p. SO: courtesy the author. www.gorJilagiue.com 8-800-966-3458 30 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 n

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Plants catch light for the information it carries as well as for its energy.

The light helps plants determine when to germinate, when to flower,

or how to respond to neighboring plants.

By Marcelo J. Yanovsky and Jorge J. Casal

-!at^>ISf^^aip

Douglas Prince, Seed Chamber, 1970

32 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 I dozen grass plants, each one sur- plex process? They certainly do. Just as plants mea- Two time, rounded by a fine circle of red lights, stood sure Hght with photoreceptors, they measure

in the stillness of the morning air. From a appropriately, with a biological clock. And as for the distance they looked just as they had when a team integration of Hght and time, we have been able to of investigators had left them a few weeks before. show, after countless hours of experimentation, that But in fact, they had changed. What the members plants are constantly, monotonously making and of the team were about to observe, after a five-hour then destroying molecules that help control flower- journey across the hot Argentine Pampas, would ing. The concentration of those molecules is the come as a generous reward for their labors. key to a seemingly complex decision. One of us (Casal) was a member of that team, which had come to the plants' natural environ- The whole idea that plants can perceive such ment hoping to answer an unusual question: What subtle variations in Hght as the ones caused by are the limits of plant "vision"? When a verdant nearby plants, and respond to them with dramatic locale becomes overpopulated, and the plants start changes in their own growth patterns, has always shading one another, some species display a re- fascinated us. Light, of course, carries a wealth of markable strategy: they restrict the development of information for those able to decode it. Plants their own new shoots and accelerate stem growth begin decoding Hght by "dissecting" the ambient instead, thus becoming more aggressive competi- white Hght, which is made up of aU the colors of tors for Hght. Somehow, these plants seemed to be the rainbow. Molecules such as chlorophyU, present sensing the shadow cast by other plants; but, how throughout the leaves and stems, selectively extract were they doing it? specific colors, or wavelengths, from the white At that time, most plant physiologists thought light. Green foliage absorbs most of the red and the that mutual plant shading simply reduces the blue, and reflects, as well as transmits through its amount of Hght available for photosynthesis, the process whereby plants build organic molecules plants into with energy from surdight; shaded plants, after all, With red light we fooled the grow fewer new shoots than plants growing in the "thinking" there were Jew other plants around.^\ sunlight. A second hypothesis was that plants in the shade detect more specific changes in the Ught envi- ronment caused by the presence of other plants, leaves, a color known as "far-red," whose wave- presumably via an array of molecules called pho- length Hes just outside the range of visible Hght [see toreceptors, which work much like a visual system. illustration on next page]. And the reason plants look No one knew which hypothesis was correct. green is that they reflect green Hght. In recent decades, plant physiologists have be- Plants can measure not only the amount, or in- come increasingly aware that plants use Hght for tensity, of each of several colors, but also the ratios much more than photosynthesis. Plants have of certain pairs of colors. At the time ot the experi- sophisticated skills for obtaining and processing the ments in the Pampas, the team had hypothesized information that Hght carries about their local envi- that plants can "see" the overshadowing leaves of ronment. Not only can they sense the presence of other plants by measuring the ratio of red to far-red. other plants and react in ways that maximize their The idea was that a densely populated, shaded envi- chances of survival. But more, Hght enables plants ronment is rich in the far-red wavelengths that

to determine that spring is beginning or that winter other plants reflect, but is poor in red, the color that

is ending. Via Hght, seeds know when to germi- the other plants absorb. Thus, a plant detecting the nate, and adult plants know when to flower. ratio of red to far-red would immediately "know" if

The flowering process is particularly intriguing it is being shaded; with other shading plants around,

because, in most plants, it is precisely synchronized the red-to-far-red ratio would be low. with seasonal changes. Certain plant species do not In the field, the uppermost leaves of grass plants flower if the days are too long; others flower only are exposed to fuU sunHght; only their bases are mu-

when dayHght lasts longer than a certain number ot tually shaded. Hence, only the plant's base is ex- hours. This observation suggests that plants can as- posed to a low red-to-far-red ratio. Is that Hght sig- sess the changing length of the day as the seasons nal enough to modify their growth pattern? That come and go, a complex and diflicult task. To do so, was the big question for Rodolfo A. Sanchez, a they must discriminate day from night, measure the plant physiologist, and Victor A. Deregibus, a for- passage of time, and integrate the information. Do age scientist, both at the University of Buenos Aires, plants possess the means of carrying out such a com- in 1980, when Casal joined them as a undergradu-

September 2004 NATURAL HISTORY 33 "untreated" counterparts. The artificial red light had

delivered a message, and the plants had deciphered it.

After those encouraging first results the team re- turned to the experimental plot a few times throughout the season to foUow the tillers—the shoots that had been tricked into growing at the base of the plants. Most of those plants died later on; they had indeed overextended themselves.

They had, it seemed, been fooled by the red lights into "thinking" there were very few other plants nearby—and hence that their competition for re- sources in later life would be ininimal. In fact, though, the competition was fierce; the environ- ment was already overcrowded, and could not sus- tain the population explosion the team had caused. To better understand the effect of the red-to-far- red ratio, Casal conducted laboratory experiments in which he manipulated not only the color of the Ught reaching the plants, but the plants' density as Plants absorb mainly red and blue light and reflect green and well. As in the field experiments, he exposed half far-red light (a color invisible to the eye, but rendered here as the plants red left dark red) (a). They also transmit far-red. Thus when the density to LEDs, and the other half alone.

of plants is low, the ambient light is rich in red and poor in far- And just as in the field, the plants bathed in red Hght

red. Grass plants can sense the ratio of red to far-red light; grew the most new tillers. The big surprise for him, when the ratio is high (b), the plant at the center of the though, was that even when plants were grown at illustration "knows " the competl\tl\on from other, surrounding very low density—so low that the shade of a neigh- plants is minimal, and so it grows many new tillers. When the bor could not even reach them—the plants were density of surrounding plants is high, the ambient light is rich

in far-red, and so the central plant greatly reduces its sensing their neighbors. The result was baffling.

production of tillers (c). To demonstrate the effect At that time, Carlos L. BaUare, another student experimentally, investigators illuminated the central plant with of Sanchez's, was facing a similar problem with an-

red lights (d), to make it "think" it had little competition, even other species, the weed Datum ferox. His plants, though it was densely surrounded by other plants. The high too, were responding to the presence of neighbors ratio of red to far-red light in the central plant's micro- before mutual shading took place. BaUare and environment "tricked" it into growing abundant new tillers. Casal joined forces.

ate. The three investigators studied the reaction of In all the experiments they performed, the results the grasses Paspalum dilatatum and Sporobohis indicus were so consistent that once they, like Sherlock to the red-to-far-red ratio. Those two grasses, an Holmes, had eliminated the impossible, they had to

important source of food for catde in the Pampas, accept the most improbable explanation of all. Plants also turned out to be good experimental models for can "see" their competitors long before their com- the studies. petitors cast a shadow on them. Even minor changes in spectral composition—the increase in far-red- The team devised a beautifully simple experi- Hght reflected and transinitted by leaves—give plants ment to test the color-ratio hypothesis. If plants an early warning signal, before the competition ac-

were using color ratios to estimate the population tually starts, that competitors have arrived. We can around them, they could be tricked simply by illu- hardly overstate the importance of this discovery. minating them with artificial red lights, thereby changing the red-to-far-red ratio. In the experiment Light strongly affects developmental processes on the Pampas, the team chose a small patch of soU throughout the life cycle of a plant, starting with where dozens ot grass plants Uved in cramped, high- germination. Many seeds germinate only when ex- density conditions. But if they were grown with sup- posed to hght. Ana L. Scopel, a plant physiologist plementally red lights (actually red LEDs, or light- also at the University of Buenos Aires, and her col- emitting diodes), they might act as if they had leagues knew that the seeds of the weed Datura are unlimited territory. That was just what happened. enormously sensitive to Ught. They determined in "Treated" plants, the ones that got a Uttle more red 1991 that several miUiseconds' exposure to

light at the right place—but not enough to affect sunUght—even, for example, when a field is being photosynthesis—grew far more shoots that their plowed—is enough to enable Ught to reach Datura

34 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 seeds buried in the field and trigger germination. ceptors, for instance, are now known to be two- After that brief interruption of the darkness, most of part molecules, a protein and a "pigment" that re- the seeds fall back to a position relatively distant from acts to light. Most of the recent experiments that the dry soil surface. Once germinated, the Datura have led to an understanding of how plants use stem grows rapidly beneath the soil. When the plant light at those molecular levels were performed on emerges from the ground, its environment is practi- Arabidopsis thaliana, the thale cress. cally free of vegetation and competition is minimal. Datum's strategy has turned out to be highly suc- Arabidopsis bears three classes of photorecep- cessful, and the seeds of many weed species have tors: phytochromes, phototropins, and crypto- adopted it. In fact, it may have evolved as a result of chromes. Phytochromes exist in two forms, an "in- plowing, which favors plants that are extremely active" one that absorbs red hght, and an "active" sensitive to Hght. Knowledge about those plants one that absorbs far-red. When the inactive form could improve weed management in agriculture, absorbs red Ught, it rapidly metamorphoses into the minimizing the need for herbicides. In fact, Scopel active form, which then regulates numerous devel- and others have shown that such weeds as Datura opmental processes. Conversely, when the active are strongly suppressed when plowing is done at form absorbs far-red Ught, it soon changes back into night, or in some other way that minimizes the the inactive form. Under natural, unchanging Ught, chances of exposing buried seeds to Ught. the two forms reach dynamic equUibrium, and the Of course, hght not only ratio of the active form to triggers the emergence of the inactive form reflects a plant from its seed. Plant the ratio of red to far-red physiologists recognized Ught reaching the plant. more than eight decades In environments that ago that Ught also plays an sustain only a few plants, essential role in determin- the proportion of red Ught ing how fast a plant grows reaching a given plant is and when it flo'wers. But high. That pushes the those early investigators as- equilibrium toward the sumed that photosynthesis active form of the phy- was the Unk between light tochrome in Arabidopsis, and developmental mile- suppressing the elongation stones, just as later plant of the stem. The plant starts physiologists had assumed to grow compact and ro- that photosynthesis was the bust. In a dense patch of link between the shading grass, however, red Ught is of light by neighboring scarce at ground level be- plants and the diminished cause most of it is absorbed, production of new shoots. and the ratio of red to far-

But by now, both links red Ught is sharply reduced. have come to seem sim- That pushes the equiUb- plistic. Plants schedule their rium between the two development not by gath- forms of the phytochrome ering the energy of light, molecules toward the in- but by gathering and pro- active form. Hence the cessing the information it plant grows taUer and de- carries. Although they do velops a body shape better Olivia Parker, Specimens, 1993 not have organs for per- suited to the competition ceiving, much less focusing, light, they do have for hght in the patch of grass. The interplay be- photoreceptors in virtually every cell of the plant tween the two forms of the phytochrome gives a body. Photoreceptors enable the plant to sense the solid physiological underpinning to the color-ratio presence of light, its intensity, its duration, its di- hypothesis about how plants sense their neighbors. rection, and the relative proportion of its colors. But red and far-red are not the only colors plants As the complexity of plant "vision" has been can "see." The effect of blue light on plant growth recognized, plant physiologists have sought to de- has been known since the late nineteenth century, scribe how it works in molecular terms. Photore- when naturaUsts such as Charles Darwin and his

September 2004 NATURAL HISTORY 35 a. processes, from sleep-wake cycles in people to leaf

. ., , -v movements in plants, follow a daily, circadian -:6? . 1 -:a rhythm. As long ago as the early 1930s the Ger- 1 r. ..^,^ man physiologist Erwin Biinning hypothesized o >W yi__^. h ^ ,„ _„ __^!^»^^ 1-, — \. _| that plants measure day length with an — S 1 \ ^ (X \ internal circadian clock—and biological clocks are t 1- ' now thought to be virtually ubiquitous. Circadian Iz Z UJ ui rhythms, however, are not mechanically precise; CJ ; • u 2 vii; z • their cyclical period lasts approximately, not ex- (J o -Si;;' m , u A 1 i«i actly, twenty-four hours. Accordingly, biological TIME — TIME clocks are constantly adjusted, or synchronized, According to the "external coincidence model," the concentration of some with the light-dark transitions of the physical solar regulatory molecule builds up, peaks, and falls off every twenty-four hours. cycle. Synchronization is done, not surprisingly, by Flowering is triggered only when daylight overlaps with any part of the cycle the light-sensitive photoreceptors. at which the concentration of the molecule reaches or exceeds some

threshold value (dashed red line). On short days (a), the concentrations reach threshold levels only after sunset, and so no flowering takes place. On long In 1998 Steve A. Kay, a plant biologist at the days, however (b), the concentrations reach threshold levels during the day Scripps Research Institute in LaJoUa, California,

in flowering is triggered. (area red), and and his group became the first to identify the pho- c d toreceptors that synchronize circadian clocks in "^ ^^^- >: plants. Those molecules turned out to be the al-

• -P- J)' M -n- J) ready faiTuliar phytochromes and cryptochromes. More recently, the two of us (Yanovsky and Casal), I /--x 2 -X i' ^^ together with M. Agustina Mazzela, a graduate stu- i^_ x^ u t dent working in our laboratory, discovered that £ even plants lacking the main phytochromes and "? 1 / 2 cryptochromes could measure time. Other pho- u UJ V toreceptors had to be involved. G 8 * . M- ^ M- "i Soon afterward, Yanovsky joined Kay's labora- TIME TIME tory, where he continued to study the elusive flowering. Daily cycle in the concentration of the precursor of the Constans protein in mechanism of photoperiodic The work

plants is similar to that of the generic molecule in the external coincidence was guided by a version of Btinning's hypothesis

model. On short days (c) the threshold levels of the precursor are not that was proposed in 1964 by CoUn S. Pittendrigh, reached during daylight, and so flowering does not occur. In certain mutant another pioneer in the study of biological clocks. plants the twenty-four-hour cycle of the precursor's concentration is shifted Pittendrigh suggested that a clock directs the pro- in phase (d). Threshold concentrations are thereby reached during daylight duction of a molecule that is somehow essential to on short days (area in red), and so the plant is forced to flower the plant's seasonal responses to Ught, and whose son Francis became interested in phototropism, the concentration builds and declines according to cir- bending of plants toward blue light. By isolating cadian rhythms. The way the molecule functions, mutants o£ Arabidopsis that failed to bend, investiga- he said, would depend on whether light triggers tors later identified the second class of photorecep- nearby photoreceptors. According to the hypothe-

tors: the phototropnis. Phototropins, it turns out, sis, a photoresponse such as flowering is set in mo- control many other plant responses to blue Ught be- tion when dayHght overlaps with a part of the cycle sides phototropism, such as the rhythmic opening at which the concentration of the molecule ex- and closing of minute pores called stomata on the ceeds a certain threshold value. Pittendrigh's ver-

surfaces of leaves. sion of Biinning's hypothesis is known as the "ex- Blue light, Uke red, also regulates stem growth in ternal coincidence model" [see illustration at the top

seedlings. Cryptochromes, the third class of pho- of this page]. One of its predictions is that neither toreceptors, mediate that process and play an im- the molecule nor the photoreceptors alone can ex- portant role, as well, in the regulation of flowering. plain photoperiodic flowering; plants need both. But to schedule developmental processes such as Evidendy, a key step in confirming Pittendrigh's flowering throughout the year, plants cannot de- hypothesis was to identify the generic molecule he pend on photoreceptors alone; they also need to had described in his model. One protein, called measure the length of the day. Constans, seemed a likely candidate. Although the Most organisms are adapted to the Earth's concentrations of Constans could not be directly twenty-four-hour day-night cycle, and plants are measured at that time, Yanovsky knew that the

no exception. As a consequence, most biological abundance of its precursor was controlled by a cir-

36 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 abundance of its precursor was controlled by a cir- Although we photobiologists are delighted with cadian clock. The precursor acted like Pitten- our recent successes, we are also well aware that we drigh s generic molecule. On short days there was understand in detail only a handful of the many virtually no overlap between high levels of the mechanisms whereby plants, through a complex Constans precursor and daylight; on long days the network of interacting signals, coordinate their de- overlap was maxiinized. velopment with their changing environment. The The relevance of that pattern for the precise regu- continuing study of Arabidopsis and other species lation of flowering in response to day length became will surely enable us to expand our knowledge of apparent when Yanovsky studied the Constans pre- plants and their exquisite ability to respond to the

' cursor in a mutant plant whose clock runs faster. subtlest light signals. D The faster clock led to a "phase shift" in the production of the Constans precursor, making it peak during the daylight hours of a short day instead of after dark. Remarkably, those plants, which usually blossom only when the days aire long, were blos- soming on short days [see lower illus- tration oil opposite page]. Here was powerfiil confirmation that Constans protein was integrating information about light and time.

Yanovsky's discovery left many questions unanswered. Why is the overlap of light with a high concentration of Constans neces- sary for flowering? And what is the connection between Constans and flowering? In February 2004, Federico Val- verde, a plant physiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany, and his team were finally able to make direct measurements of the concentration of the Constans protein. They discovered that the in- tegrity of Constans depends on its exposure to Ught. Without Hght, the protein is destroyed and its concen- tration remains low, even when its precursor is abundant. To reach high levels of Constans, there must be an overlap between the clock-con- trolled Constans precursor and the photoresponse of the photorecep- tors, the two key elements of Pitten- drigh's model. As for the connection between Constans and flowering, it turns out that Constans switches on a gene called Flowering Locus T, which induces a small group of un- differentiated cells to produce flow- ers at the tip of a plant stem. Michael Pole, Tree and root system, 2002

September 2004 HISTORY 37 NATURAL i -i^^^^v j-> ^:

Bird-of-paradise flies—which are not really flies at all, but Female scale insects of the family Ortheziidae have members of the scale-insect family Margarodidae—are a sunk their mouth parts into a leaf, where they will stay, rarely seen kind of scale insect mature males. Here are two feeding on the plant sap, for much of their sedentary, of them on one enormous female. On reaching adulthood, parasitic lives. The sap gives the insects access to a the typical male scale insect lives just a few days. The practically unlimited supply of sugars. genetic system of many margarodids, unlike that of most

scale insects, is "conventional": both mother and father contribute half of their genome to each of their offspring.

The Sex Lives of Scales

Scale insects have evolved one bizarre genetic system after another. The author argues that they are caught in a game of cat and mouse with internal, symbiotic bacteria, which has unleashed genetic bedlam.

By Benjamin B. Normark

you were in the backyard this summer, water- lifestyle to the farthest extreme: the females of Ifing your lilacs or checking your apple trees for some lineages have evolved into legless, eyeless pests, you may have noticed that the plants were blobs that are permanently attached to their hosts.

afflicted with little bumps on the leaves or bark, Even among the most casual keepers of house- coming down with what looks like nothing so much plants, most people's reactions to scale insects run as a case of botanical acne. Many people are sur- from mere distaste to fuU-blown disgust. But if you

prised the first time they find out that each bump is take the trouble to look beneath the surface, scale actually an animal: a scale insect. Many scale insects insects turn out to be quite fascinating creatures. In look more like moUusks or turdes than Uke beedes or particular, the laws of genetics—the rules that de- cicadas—the bodies aren't obviously segmented into scribe how the DNA of one generation is passed head, thorax, and abdomen, and the six legs and four on to the next—seem to have gone totally haywire wings typical of most insects are nowhere to be seen. as the scale insects have evolved. The group en- Yet those htde bumps are indeed insects, related to compasses more weird variations on the laws of ge- aphids, whiteflies, andjumping plant Uce. netics than does any other group of animals.

AH scale insects are parasites of plants, and the But surely, weirdness is in the eye of the be- insects' habit of sucking the sap out of plants makes holder. Just because mammals don't have such var-

them generally disliked by farmers and gardeners. ied genetic systems, is that grounds for caUing scale hi a sense, scale insects have taken the parasitic insects strange? Well, consider this: From a genetic

38 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 father at all. In other species the males have fathers,

but all the chromosomes they get from the fathers

are deactivated. In still other species the chromo- somes from the fathers are present in some ceUs but not in others.

Much of this is not news. Thanks to the pioneer- ing work of the American geneticist Sally Hughes- Schrader and others, many of these facts have been known since the 1920s. Only recently, however, has evolutionary theory begun to catch up with Female scale insect of the genus Steatococcus is a margarodid, those facts, and to describe them with concepts like the bird-of-paradise fly pictured at top left of opposite page. powerful enough to explain the data in a satisfac- Although: the genetic system of Steatococcus is as yet unknown, tory way. Only now do biologists have an inkling it is possible that the system (deduced from that of its close relatives) is decidedly unconventional. The male might develop about what might be causing the apparently staid from an unfertilized egg and thus have only half the DNA that world of blobby little plant parasites to be con- the female has—a genetic state that would make him little more vulsed by so many sexual revolutions. than flying sperm that can spread half of his mother's genes.

It is not readily apparent why scale insects, of all point of view, a typical multicellular animal is an life-forms, should exhibit such a diversity of ge- assemblage of cells that are nearly all clones, or ge- netic systems. After all, other, related groups of netically identical to one another. Yet m most spe- insects show nothing approaching the same degree cies of scale insects, not all the cells of an individual of variation in their genetic machinery. Particularly get the same genes from the insect's mother. Fur- puzzhng is the scale insects' patrilineal inheritance. thermore, scale-insect fathers vary widely in the Why is it so frequently sabotaged? Those are un- genes they contribute (or, often, do not con- solved mysteries, but quite recently, suspicion has tribute) to their sons: In some species the males are fallen on some unusual suspects: bacteria. the product of asexual reproduction and have no The bacteria in question are not disease organ-

Mealybug females (rough white line of insects), like many other scale insects, defecate the excess sugar they ingest while feeding on the sap of plants. That waste, commonly called honeydew, provides a good source of food for other insects (and sometimes even humans). Asian weaver ants are tending the mealybugs above, protecting the defenseless scale insects and, in return, getting access to the honeydew.

I September 2004 NATURAL history 39 the insect generally remains through subsequent

immature stages, regardless of its sex. The hfe and form of an adult scale insect, how-

ever, depends heavily on its sex. The males are not exceptionally strange-looking insects. Most people

would probably mistake them for small flies, such as gnats or midges. Their strangeness becomes ap- parent only when you look more closely: they have only two wings (like true flies but unUke al-

most all other insects) and simple, rather than compound, eyes, and they always lack functional mouthparts; grown males never feed. Much more unusual looking are the adult females; they are the Female putoid scd/e insect depends, as do other scale insects, bumps you may have seen on your houseplants. on symbiotic bacteria for nutritional aid. In putoids, the Adult females never have wings, and they often bacteriome cells, where the bacteria reside, appear to be passed lack legs and eyes as well; for antennae, many pos- down intact from mothers to offspring. That may make it more

difficult for the bacteria to develop a male-killing habit, because sess only the tiniest nubs. they are always insulated from genetically male tissues and so AH scale insects feed by sucking up plant juices, may be unable to distinguish between male and female hosts. and most feed directly on the phloem sap of long-

lived trees and bushes. Phloem sap is typically rich in sugar, and most scale insects ingest farmore sugar than they can use; they simply defecate the excess.

The sugary excrement, called honeydew, is often

consumed by ants. Sometimes it is even consumed by people, particularly in arid regions where evap- oration of dripping honeydew can leave a solid sug- ary residue called manna. The manna referred to in the Bible, in Exodus 16:14, seems to have been the dried excrement of Trabutina mannipara, a scale in- sect that feeds on tamarisk trees.

But even though plant sap is rich in sugar, it is poor in other nutrients, particularly amino acids. Mealybugs, such as the male citrus mealybug above, have Partly on the basis of studies of scale insects' independently evolved a bizarre system for creating a better-known relatives, the aphids, one can infer bacteriome, which is quite similar to the method of the armored scales (see diagram on opposite page). that the symbiotic bacteria living inside scale in- sects manufacture essential amino acids lacking in isms; rather, they hve symbiotically with their the insect's diet.

scale-insect hosts, a relationship that is vital to both organisms. The bacteria derive their very liveli- The essential bacteria in scale insects (and hoods from the insects, and the insects in turn de- aphids) live inside the cells of an organ called pend on their resident bacteria for help surviving the bacteriome. (The location and size of the organ

on a diet that is conspicuously lacking in protein. varies, depending on the species of insect.) Each

Yet despite the aid the bacteria render the insects, scale insect inherits the bacteria in its bacteriome

the bacteria may still interfere with the insects' ge- firom its mother. When the adult female scale insect

netics. To understand why, it is helpful to under- is provisioning its eggs, cells from the mother's bac- stand something about the lives of scale insects and teriome discharge bacteria into the yolk. No scale

the bacteria that live inside them. insect gets bacteria from its father. Thus, the bacte- Immature scale insects do not look much like ria in the cells of male insects are efiectively sterile; the little bumps on plants that many of them are in an evolutionary sense, they are as good as dead.

destined to become. During the first, or "crawler," John H. Werren, a biologist at the University of stage in the Hfe cycles of scale insects, the animal Rochester in New York, has described how certain looks a bit like a small potato bug. The typical insects' maternally inherited bacteria rebel against

crawler, after hatching from its egg, walks a short the inglorious destiny of winding up in a male [see

distance on its natal plant, then inserts its mouth- "Invasion of the Gender Benders," Febniaij 2003]: they parts into the plant and becomes immobile. There kill the male in which they Uve. Although that act is

40 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 suicidal (the bacteria in the male they kill die along ' bus one might expect a kind of struggle be- with the insect) and so indght seem gratuitous, it t:tween scale insects and their bacteria. On the is not poindess. Each bacterium in an embryo is one hand, the scale insects are under pressure to practically identical to the bacteria that populate keep their sons alive. On the other hand, the bacte- other individuals in the same insect brood. More- ria can benefit by killing males and only males. over, if the goal of each bacterium is to pass its DNA (Killing a female host insect is decidedly against the on to future generations of bacteria, what is good interests of the bacteria, since they cannot spread for one bacterium is good for the rest. Thus a bac- beyond their host except through her egg cells.) terium's suicide by kiUing its male host makes evolu- For the bacteria to kill males and not females, they tionary sense, as long as such must be able to distinguish a killing helps the bac- MAL£ INSECT FEMALE male from female hosts, and BACT6R10ME INSECr terium's kin to prosper. TISSUE s,BACTERIOME it is possible they detect the GERM 'CELL It's easy to imagine how LINE sex of their host by inter- CELL that circumstance could CHROMOSOMES acting with their host's FROM FATHER arise. For example, if female chromosomes. (Males often CHROMOSOMES scale insects harboring bac- FROM MOTHER have a deactivated set of DtAOTiVATED /\\\ teria were forced to com- CHROMOSOMES MEIOSIS OF GERM UNE CELL chromosomes or otherwise PRODUCnOlI / \ \ \ pete with their brothers, the diSer geneticaOy from the chromosomesYjeN (5) (g) competition could very well (a) females.) How could this ' POLAR BODIES „^„ , \?r ^tee , be detrimental to the bacte- SPERM struggle escalate? One way CHLL WITH^vJl_/ THREE ria in the females. But from COPIESJlJ^^^ is that the scale insects OF EACH W B B) CHROMOSOME the perspective of the bacte- might "fool" the bacteria rial genome, the bacteria in into not killing males by the male insects are expend- keeping the bacteria inside able, since they are guaran- cells that lack any clear sign teed never to reproduce. about the sex of the host

Their suicidal killing of the insect. Remarkably, that is males, though, gives the fe- exactly what many scale in- male insects (and their bac- sects have evolved to do. teria) freer run of available To understand how a resources. That cold calcula- scale insect might puU off tion holds particularly true BACTERIOME that bit of legerdemain, it is CELL among scale insects, partly helpful to start with some because their host plants live of the most ancient groups so long, and partly because of scale insects. Their ge- the insects move around so netic characteristics are the little. There is plenty of time most similar, among the in the Ufe span of a long- Both male and female armored scale insects and scale insects living today, to Uved plant for the insects mealybugs (a) host bacteria within the cells of an those of the superfamily's organ called the bactehome. A male produces sperm that hve on it to produce long-dead ancestors. Each (b) that carries only his mother's genome; a female enormous extended fami- cell in each insect has a full produces an egg and three polar bodies (c) with a lies. Moreover, the females' mixture of chromosomes from both her parents. The set of functional chromo- sedentary nature keeps close union of DNA from both egg and sperm form a somes, one set from its fa- kin, and their closely related zygotic nucleus within the egg cell, constituting a new ther and one set from its individual; the egg in these two groups of bacteria, on a single host genetic mother. Such groups in- scale insects also hosts symbiotic bacteria in the yolk. plant. Insects in such close clude the scale-insect fami- The chromosomes from both sperm and egg in each proximity are particularly lies Ortheziidae and Phe- new individual are "imprinted" as paternal (blue) or nacoleachiidae, likely to compete with one maternal (pink) in source (d). As the nucleus begins to and many another for hiding places or divide and the embryo grows (e), the three polar branches of the family other resources, and the bodies fuse with each other and then fuse with one of Margarodidae (but not all the cells of the embryo (f). The resulting cell has four genes of their resident bacte- branches; even within fam- copies of the maternal chromosome and one copy of ria are so similar that the ilies, the scale insects have the chromosome of the paternal grandmother. That common bacterial genome more genetic systems than I cell becomes the parent cell of the new scale insect's is have space to discuss). particularly likely to bene- bactehome (g), to which the bacteria from the egg fit if male insects are killed. yolk then migrate. Many ortheziids, as they

Septerr^ber 2004 HISTORY 41 NATURAL | Sex (or the lack of it) among scale are known, live in soil or leaf litter and feed on insects gives rise to a bewildering flmgi, lichens, mosses, and plant roots. Margarodids variety of systems of genetic comprise a diverse group, found on all parts of inheritance. Four of them are detailed plants; the family includes the largest and most at right, based on the same scheme striking scale insects, such as Australia's bird-of-par- as in the diagram on the preceding page. Parthenogenesis, or the virgin adise flies [see photograph at top left on page 38]. The birth of females, takes several forms, phenacoleachiids comprise a "living fossil" group; but in automixis, the form pictured today only two species exist, and they occur on the here, the female egg fuses with a South Island of New Zealand and on adjacent is- polar body instead of with a sperm. In lands. All three families include scale insects that are diplodiploidy, which is also the relatively insects human genetic system, both the "normal" —not very normal; they mother and the father contribute one are scale insects, after all. But they have more in copy of each of their chromosomes to common with other insects than most scale insects each offspring, which can be either do. Adult females have fiinctional legs and eyes. The male or female. In paternal genome sex chromosomes are distributed in a reasonably elimination, the most common ordinary way: as in aphids, males have one sex method of genetic inheritance in scale insects, the male can pass along only chromosome and females have two. And the en- those genes he received from his tire insect has the same genome in every cell, in- mother In arrhenotoky, the male cluding the cells of the insect's bacteriome. develops from unfertilized eggs. Those males mate with females, and genetic simplicity is rare for the scale in- every egg that gets fertilized But sects. Consider the family Putoidae. Putoids develops into a female. typically occur on the foliage or roots of woody plants in the southwestern United States. They, like their ancient relatives, look fairly "primi- tive": adult females retain their eyes and legs, and they can walk. Putoids also have the ancestral j margarodids number of sex chromosomes: one for males, two J ORrHEZiJPS^ for females. Yet according :dphenacoleachiids to the German biolo- :iPUTOIDS gist Paul Buchner, a microscopist and pioneer in MEALYBUGS the study of symbiosis, putoid bacteriomes are iFEir SCALES deeply strange.

] COCHINEAL INSECTS The putoids, unlike other scale insects, are appar- STICTOCOCCIDS ently not content to simply insert bacteria from the BEESONUDS ORIGIN mother's bacteriome cells into the yoLk of the fertil- OF PATERNAL ]KERMESIDS ized egg. Instead, when the essential but potentially GENOME iLECANODiASPlDlDS troublesome bacteria move from the mother putoid

1 WAX SCALES ELIMINATION to her offspring, entire cells from the mother's bac- ]LAC INSECTS teriome move with them, taking up residence to SOFT SCALES form bacteriome of the RE-EVOLUTION GRASS SCALES the embryo. OF DIPLODIPLOIDV It is hard to overstate how weird that process II ASTEROLECANIIDS |L_rprr] CONCHASPIDIDS seems to a geneticist, (It is so weird, in fact, that ezd diplodiploidy [^ ARMORED SCALES some biologists think Buchner must have gotten it cid paternal genome elimination wrong.) For the most part, we animals grow our birth of ^virgin females own organs. Each of my organs is genetically "me." ARRHENOTOKY Saa Putoids are the only animals I know of that appear INDETERMINATE ^a to import one of their organs and then pass it down

Cladogram, or biological "family tree, " of the scale insects from mother to offspring much the way people pass shows how the genetic systems of scale insects—four of which along the family chiiTa or silverware. Normally an are outlined in the diagram at the top of this page—are animal's germ line—the cells that give rise to ga- distributed through the various families; the significance of the metes—is the only cell line that is, potentially, im- colors on the branches of the cladogram and of the underlining mortal: the only cell Hne inherited by offspring. of family names is given in the color key. Branch color indicates in cells the are the predominant genetic system in each family: underlining But putoids the of bacteriome

indicates genetic systems that have evolved independently in equally immortal, yet they are independent of the

one or more groups within the family. germ Hne and not even closely related to it.

42 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 —

Biologists still do not really know what origi- nally led to the evolution of such a wholesale mi- gration of maternal cells (though those cells might play a role in provisioning the embryo). But one effect of the migration is that bacteriome cells in males are genetically identical to the bacteriome cells in their sisters. That may make it hard for the bacteria to identify the sex of their host insect and thus too risky to their own genetic well-being to kill their hosts at all.

Two other families of scale insects form their bacteriomes in bizarre ways. One is the fam- ily Pseudococcidae, another ancient, primitive- looking group whose females retain their legs. Females of mealybug species that is closely related to the

Pseudococcids are commonly known as mealy- mealybug species in the photograph at the bottom of page 39 bugs, a name referring to a coating of fine wax on their bodies that makes them look as though they had been roUed in flour. The other family with ex- traordinary bacteriomes is Diaspididae, the ar- mored scale insects. Whereas mealybugs retain many of their ancestral characteristics—like legs the armored scales lie at the opposite extreme in the morphological evolution of scale insects. Adult female armored scales lack legs and eyes, and they barely have antennae. Taken together, the mealy- bug and armored-scale families encompass more than 4,300 species, some 60 percent of all scale- insect species. Yet despite their clearly visible dif- ferences, the two famihes have each evolved, ap- parently quite independently, similar yet highly exotic systems of bacteriome development.

Most animal cells, including the cells of the germ Tuliptree scale insects are members of the soft-scale family, but Une, have two copies of each chromosome: one they do a remarkable imitation of a cluster of arboreal turtles. firom the animal's mother, the other from the father. Many soft-scale species engage in paternal genome elimination: Egg and sperm cells, though, which are derived the genome of the father is disabled or eliminated in male progeny. species have done away with males altogether from germ-line cells, each have only one copy of Some each chromosome. In particular, to make an egg

cell, a female animal must throw away one copy of

each chromosome. That is accomplished, among other things, during a process called meiosis. Meiosis actually starts with the duplication of every chromosome in the germ-line cell, followed by two divisions of the nucleus. Thus, one nucleus with two copies of each chromosome first gives rise to a nucleus with four copies of the chromosome. Then that nucleus spUts into two nuclei, each with two copies of each chromosome; those nuclei in turn spUt into four nuclei, each with one copy of each chromosome. One of those four becomes the egg nucleus; the other three are called polar bodies. In most organisms, the polar bodies are simply Black thread scales, here shown infesting a leaf, are members destroyed; only in a few cases do they avoid de- of the armored scale family. Although many armored scales struction. One such case is prominent and impor- reproduce sexually by paternal genome elimination, black thread tant: the nutritive tissue packaged into the seeds of scales have eliminated fathers—in fact, all males—completely.

September 2004 NATURAL HISTORY 1 43 —

flowering plants contains polar-body genomes. But are completely eliminated from cells early in em- even in that case, the polar bodies don't wind up in bryonic development. In a few scale insect groups the embryo of the plant. The only case for which the father's genes have become reactivated, and

polar bodies from the mother are actually incorpo- there is one tissue in most scale insect species rated into the body of her offspring occurs in scale those unusual bacteriomes of mealybugs and ar- insects. And where the polar-body genomes wind mored scale insects—that retains active paternal

up -is, as you might have guessed, the bacteriome. genes, though even there they are greatly outnum- After a mealybug or an armored scale female bered by maternal ones. forms her three polar bodies, the three fuse into a Geneticists have long wondered how genetic single nucleus; that nucleus thereby contains three systems involving the deactivation or destruction full copies of the mother's genome, the three "ex- of the paternal genome could ever have arisen,

tras" left over from meiosis. The nucleus is engulfed since the first males to completely lack a paternal by the developing embryo, and then fuses with a genome probably did not survive. But the recent cell from the embryo to form a cell with five copies focus on the bacterial genome gives a possible an- of each chromosome. That cell proliferates to form swer to the puzzle. Symbiotic bacteria had both the bacteriome [see illustration on page 4f\. the motive and the opportunity to destroy the pa- No one reaUy knows why polar bodies survive ternal genome in males, particularly if they could destruction in those scale insects, why they fuse thereby kill the male. But the destruction of pater- with a cell from the embryo, nal genomes in sons could also or why they then form the be a phenomenon that the fe- bacteriome. But one conse- males have turned to their

quence is that the genomes of own advantage. In most ge- bacteriome cells of males are netic systems, such as the identical to those of their sis- mammaUan one, a typical male ters. The participation of polar endows his offspring, on aver- bodies in forming the bacteri- age, with half the genes he re- ome, like the inheritance of ceived from his mother and the maternal bacteriome in half the genes he received putoids, would seem to make from his father. In contrast, a

it hard for the bacteria to se- male armored scale or mealy- lectively kiU males. bug that manages to survive the depredations of the bacte-

Bacteriome formation is ria is twice as efficient as the probably the strangest as- typical mammalian male at pect of scale-insect genetics, transmitting his mother's

and the one in which bac- genes. After all, the male scale teria are most obviously in- insect's cells have basically jet- volved. But a close runner-up Female margarodid scale insect tisoned the genes the male re-

for strangeness is the genetics ceived from his father. Thus

of male scale insects. The male scale is originally the destruction of the paternal genome may have endowed with two sets of chromosomes, but the begun as a means of male-kiUing by bacteria. But

ones from his father typically form an inactive over evolutionary time it may have been co-opted clump in every cell. They never direct the synthesis by females as a way to spread their own genes at of proteins, and they are discarded from the germ the expense of the genes of their mates. line when sperm are made. Hence each sperm a male produces has exactly the same genome—the The ongoing partnership between scale in- genes he got from his mother. That, of course, is in sects and their bacteria is evidently a stormy

marked contrast with most male organisms, includ- one. Their conflict and its shifting tactics could ing men, who each produce a diversity of geneti- well be what drive the dynamic evolution of the

cally unique sperm. It also differs sharply from the scale insects' genetic systems. But no one knows genetics of the female scale, which has an active pa- for sure. To find out, new generations of natural-

ternal genome and apparently produces genetically ists will need to explore the field, people who are diverse eggs. subtle enough to resist the allure of prettier crea- In some species of armored scale insects, the fa- tures and delve into the deep enigmas that are ther's genes are not merely deactivated; rather, they scale insects. D

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24 hours a day, 7 days a week / We accept checks by ptione! A Room Revisited

A contemporary artist is inspired by a "cabinet of curiosities''

collected by a naturalist oj another era.

Qy Rosamond Purcell

1985, in a back room of the Museums of Near the reproduction of the picture I

InNatural History in Copenhagen, I came face saw one of the few known survivors from to face with a waU-size reproduction of a fa- Worm's collection: the jaw of a horse, miliar engraving. It depicted the interior of a mu- clasped by the branch of a tree that had

seum—the Museum Wormianum—established by grown around it. In the engraving, this cu- Ole Worm, a seventeenth-century Danish archae- rious object appears, pale and shadowy, ologist, embryologist, natural philosopher, physi- alongside hundreds of other objects. But cian, and teacher. The engraving was the fron- here, in the modern museum, that single

tispiece to his 400-page catalog Worm's Museum; or, element had been uprooted, transported to History of Very Rare Things, Natural and Artificial, the present, and transmuted, as if by | Domestic and Exotic, Wliich Are Stored in the Author's alchemy, into three-dimensional bone and

House in Copenhagen, pubUshed (in Latin) in 1655, wood. I photographed the captive jaw a year after his death. from every angle.

As the years passed, I stared at the frontispiece to Worm's catalog

wherever it appeared (and it appears 4

often in writings on the history of I

science). Small private museums, [ often referred to as "cabinets of cu- "— ^ riosities," were commonplace during the seventeenth century. Those created by Worm's English and Itahan counterparts fea- tured both natural and artificial rarities housed inside or displayed on top of elegant pieces of furniture. Worm's collection, created for his students and his peers, was a compendium of natural objects and ethnographic and archaeological artifacts. Like his fellow European collectors. Worm took pleasure in amassing treasures from exotic places: coconuts, coins, and corals; fossils and twisted roots; magnifiers, mirrors, and other instruments for measuring. He owned artifacts from the daily lives of peoples from the circumpolar region, includ- ing baskets, spears, and tools; he displayed stuffed gulls, a polar bear, and a grinning croc-

One-room natural history museum created in the seventeenth centufy

by the Danish physician Ole Worm, as depicted in the frontispiece to his catalog of the museum's collection

46 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 Recent re-creation of Ole Worm's museum, fay Rosamond Purcell

odile; he possessed partial skeletons of whales, seals, his royal patient King Christian V of Denmark, and and the long-toothed narwhal. Worm collected much of that was later dispersed. monstrous specimens, too, including a horse with suspension of disbelief to dream horns growing from inside its ears, a unicorn goat, It takes a certain and what sounds, by his description, like an enor- one's way back into a picture. Yet whenever I mous hydrocephalic skull, thin as an eggshell, found stared at the engraving, it was as if I were actually in a local field. Some of these objects are visible in there, inside a day-Ht room among so many myste- the frontispiece to his catalog; others are simply de- rious and familiar things I inight touch or even scribed. Behind the public showcase, then, was per- hold. When, in 2002, the curatorial staff at the haps a storeroom. Santa Monica Museum of Art, in California, began Worm's room, in contrast to the rooms of other negotiations for an exhibition of my studio, they collectors, is depicted as a modest space, unadorned. observed my obsession with Ole Worm and de- Everything—^whether arranged on the shelves, sus- cided to commission me to create a full-scale pended from the ceiling, or placed on the walls—is repUca of both his room and mine. in plain sight. After his death, the contents of his I worked my way into understanding something museum were absorbed into the larger collection of about Worm's methods of classification by studying

September 2004 NATURAL HISTORY 147 how his collection was arranged. Placed on his open tive remedy so as to test the remedy's curative shelves, such boxes as Lapides (stones), Salia (salts), properties. But Worm struggled to subject himself Sulphum (sulfur), and Terrae (earths) follow con- to the unfamiliar discipline of scientific thinking. ventional seventeenth-century taxonomic thinking. He reports that in Iceland, in 1648, many people For Worm and his contemporaries, the category ate narwhal meat without suffering repercussions,

"stones," for instance, could include fruit pits as well yet he still repeats the anxious warnings of his day

as fossils, and the category "fossils" referred to any- that partaking of the narwhal is to risk "danger of thing dug from the ground, including death." In general, though, his experi- pottery shards and ancient coins. ments demonstrate his commitment Reptiles—a crocodile, lizards, snakes, to distinguishing myth from fact, to and turtles—share a wall in Worm's drawing firmer lines between supersti- museum. Yet, suspended between his tion and scientific proof. lizards and near his giant turtle shells, is a large armadillo, which is no rep- As I stare at the wide-angle depic- tile, though it certainly looks like one. tion of Worm's narrow room, its

Thus all the scaly and armored crea- walls and even its corners seem to un- tures hang together—a reminder to fold Hke a body splayed open for au- the modern viewer that certain ani- topsy. What, I wonder, was actually on mals had not yet been precisely classi- the shelves in 1655, and what was in fied, and that certain rules of taxon- storage or had already passed into King omy did not yet exist. Christian V's collection? How much Even after the Swedish bota- of the engraving (done not by nist Carolus Linnaeus estab- Worm himself but by a con- lished the binomial system of temporary artist) derived from scientific classification in his well-documented observations Systema Naturae, published in of the scene, and how much

1735, the boundaries between from the artist's imagination? creatures of the sky, the earth, The engraving accurately de- and the ocean were blurred. picts familiar animals and ob- People spoke of river horses jects, as well as cartoonlike (hippopotamuses) and vege- renderings of other things, yet

table lambs (sheep supposed- I treat it as a cross-section of an Jaw of a horse (top), encircled by a branch as it

ly engendered by plants). grew, is one of the few extant objects known to authentic archaeological site. The names of fishes, too, have been in Ole Worm's museum. The jaw is My mission was to make a were commingled with those shown above in a detail of the frontispiece to physical re-creation of Worm's the museum's seventeenth-century catalog. of birds and mammals. The room. With the help of artists goosefish and wolffish that are depicted hanging who simulated certain artifacts, and with the ben- from the rafters in the engraving more closely re- efit of indispensable loans from natural history col-

semble the deep-sea monsters depicted on early lections, I have produced a version ot the past. But, maps than the dried planks that such specimens in paradoxically, each gesture we made toward repH-

fact become. These fish swim above the visitor's cating the room led away from it. The closer we head; alongside them fly the birds. came to matching each three-dimensional object

Worm sought to represent "the world as against its shadowy twin, the more the original known." He taught his students to make direct form receded. There can be no perfect replication, observations of natural phenomena rather than to of course. Worm's collection exists best in the en-

memorize the observations made by earlier schol- graving. Our replica is one attempt to bridge an ars, including Aristotle. In this approach to natural unbridgeable gap. history he was a pioneer. As a physician, he con- "Bringing Nature Inside," an exhibition that inchides Rosamond ducted his own experiments: hanging spiders PnrccH's re-creation of Ok Worm's mnseuni, opens September 21 and runs above a sick person's bed to banish disease, or giv- through Jannary 2005 at the Collection of Historical Scientific Instru- ing a dog some poison and then feeding it a puta- ments, Harvard Unh'ersity Science Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

48 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 The trees are free. The benefits are priceless.

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"Extinct" for 50 million years, Alvin, a deep-sea submersible vehicle, is pictured here in a nighttime photograph, an enigmaticfossil species may still live much as it would appear in the ocean depths. Arrayed with lights and carrying a at the bottom of the sea—hut it defies capture. pilot, a cinematographer, and an IMAX camera, the vehicle captured the most detailed images of undersea hydro thermal vents ever made, including the By Peter A. Rona image on the opposite page.

little is known about the deep ocean, that Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institu- Sothose of us who explore it should expect tion, in Washington. surprises. Yet even I and my research team The area we had surveyed was in the rift valley from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Ad- that lies along the center of the Mid-Atlantic ministration were dumbfounded in 1976, when Padge, a mile-high undersea volcanic mountain we studied photographs of the seafloor in the mid- range that traverses the Atlantic from north to dle of the Atlantic Ocean. From our research ship south. The ridge Hnks with similar ridges in the

Discoverer, we had slowly towed a deep-sea camera Arctic, Indian, and Pacific oceans [see map on page on a cable two and a half miles long. Pings of 52]. Along this global ridge system, continent-size sound had guided the camera roughly ten feet tectonic plates, which form the outer shell of the

above the seafloor, while strobe lights fired every planet, are moving apart, and new crust is con- twenty seconds to illuminate patches about the size stantly being created by the upweUing of magma

of a bed sheet. In those days we had to wait until from the Earths hot interior. As it emerges, the we were back on land—Florida, in this case—to molten rock cools, solidifies, and spreads apart at a process the film and view the images. rate of a few inches per year. Earthquakes accom-

At first all we saw was the silt that coats the ocean pany the slow widening of the seafloor. floor. Then something a litde bigger than a poker Armed with a dozen black-and-white pho-

chip caught our attention. Under a magnifying tographs, I made the rounds behind the scenes at glass, a distinctive pattern of black dots appeared in the Smithsonian. My first consultation was with our photograph. The dots were evenly spaced and Frederick M. Bayer, an expert on corals. But Bayer

arranged in crisscrossing rows, forixdng a perfect six- concluded that the form was not a coral at all, and sided figure that resembled the center of a board of introduced me to an expert on another phylum of Chinese checkers [see lower photograph on page 53]. marine invertebrates. By the end of the day, spe- Once we knew what to look for, we recognized cialists in every major group of marine inverte- thousands of these hexagonal forms in our se- brates had examined the photographs and had quence of hundreds of photographs. Could such a drawn a blank. Their only advice was to prepare an uniform pattern be the sign of some unimagined article for publication in a scientific journal, with hfe-form? Certain corals, for example, build struc- photographs showing the pattern as related to "an tures with hexagonal symmetry, but not in seafloor invertebrate of uncertain identity." sediment. Our imaginations ran wild. Was this a No sooner had the suggested article appeared, hoax perpetrated by the people who had processed our film? Was this some strange cargo spilled from "Eyeless" shrimp, belonging to a species discovered by the author, cluster around a hydrothermal vent along the Mid- a shipwreck? A message left by extraterrestrials? Atlantic Ridge, two and a half miles beneath the ocean Surely my local marine biology colleagues at the surface. They live off bacteria, which derive their energy from University of Miami would quickly enlighten us. the rich, sulfurous brew (smokelike discharge) created when But they were just as puzzled as we were. They re- water leaks into the rock below the seafloor, gets heated by ferred me to their counterparts at the National nearby magma, and circulates up to the vent.

50 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 l^k^

'7 m f

.: »v;^

^i .

than I received a letter and a reprint of a paper from were added to improve circulation, culminating in Adolf "Dolf" Seilacher, a paleontologist then at the the strikingly regular Paleodictyon form.

University of Tiibingen in Germany. Seilacher is an expert on classifying and interpreting traces of In 1977, a discovery was made near the Galapagos life—such as the trails left by worms—that are pre- Islands, in the eastern equatorial Pacific, that fun- served in ancient marine sediments. "Your pictures damentally changed the biological understanding of were a real thriU to me," his letter began. "Hoping life on Earth. At a depth of about a mile and a that you have in the meantime received my reprint, half—far deeper than sunlight can penetrate to pro- the perfect identity with the trace fossil Paleodictyoii vide the energy needed for photosynthesis—an nodosum of my paper is beyond any doubt." oasis of life was unexpectedly found in the desert of sediment and lava flows that covers most of the Seilacher's paper described a fossil form pre- deep-sea floor. In an area about the size of a football served at least 50 million years ago in sediments field Uved foot-long clams and red-plumed mbe- of the deep-sea floor, which were now exposed on worms that stood taller than a person. land at various sites in continental Europe. He These and what turned out to be hundreds was particularly excited that our discovery would of other animal species new to science were pros- enable us to fmd out pering in warm springs what had left this issuing from cracks in enigmatic form in the pillow-shaped lava fossil record. In other flows. Biologists im- words, he proposed, mediately wondered we had stumbled onto how these animals evidence that a crea- could make a living, ture presumed to have apparendy without de- been long extinct was pending on nutrients

still alive today. If we generated through could confirm Sei- photosynthesis. It lacher's confident be- turned out that at lief in the identity of the base of the food the fossil and the pat- chain were bacteria tern on the seafloor, that nourished them- Hydrothermal vent system dubbed the TAG Hydrothermal Field was it also seemed pos- selves through a pro- discovered by the author. It lies in the rift valley of the Mid-Atlantic sible that we could Ridge, an undersea volcanic mountain range that connects with cess of chemosyn- discover what crea- ridges in the Arctic, Indian, and Pacific oceans. thesis. Drawing their

ture had produced it. energy from gases From the sketches in Seilacher's paper, we learned dissolved in the warm springs, mainly hydrogen that the black dots visible in our photographs might sulfide, they were able to manufacture sugars and be holes that led straight down a fraction of an inch starches from carbon dioxide and water. to a horizontal network of tubes or tunnels just The Galapagos discovery was soon followed by beneath the sediment surface. The tubes in the fossil the revelation of similar ecosystems at hot springs forms interconnected in an orderly hexagonal net- discharging from spectacular "black smoker" vents

work [see upper photograph on opposite page]. Seilacher's along the ridge system in the Pacific. The tempera- interpretation was that the network was a tunnel tures in these hydrothermal vents ranged as high as a system excavated by some kind of worm. This crea- scalding 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Cel-

ture, he believed, augmented its sparse supply of sius). With these discoveries geologists realized that food in the deep ocean by "farming" and harvest- the ocean basins are really leaky places. The cold, ing bacteria in the tunnels. Furthermore, he pro- heavy seawater can sink downward for miles, posed, the hexagonally arranged network was an through cracks in the underlying volcanic rock.

evolutionaiy descendant of simpler traces preserved There it is heated as it flows near reservoirs of in 500-million-year-old sediments. As he envisioned magma at sites beneath the ridge system, expanding

it., the first organisms that excavated such tunnels and rising untU it discharges from the seafloor. Along

inhabited shallow waters, but soon they retreated to the way it dissolves metals and picks up gases from the d;'en sea, perhaps a place where they could pur- the rocks and the magma. The metals precipitate out sue thc'.r feeding strategy undisturbed. Over time of solution as iron-rich sulfides, coalescing into the turn: els became more regular, and multiple exits chimney-Hke structares and pouring into the sur-

52 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 rounding cold seawater as a black cloud of particles Accompanied by Dudley Foster, Alvin\ pilot, I (hence the name "black smoker"). was able to view our mysterious hexagonal patterns For marine biologists, discovering these new up close. Then, with one of the sub's manipulator ecosystems was like being a member of a Star Trek arms, Foster and I pushed clear plastic tubes, about crew and finding a previously unknown basis for two-and-a-half inches in diameter, a foot down into

Hfe on another planet. More astonishing still, cer- the seafloor sediments. The coring tubes were just tain heat-loving, chemosynthetic microorganisms wide enough to recover a cylindrical sample of the Uving in those ecosystems turned out to have ge- sediment with the intact pattern on the top. Back on netic characteristics that place them near the base of the surface support vessel, I the tree of Hfe. That raises the tantahzing possibiHty could see that what had ap- that life on Earth began at such hydrothermal vents peared as black dots on our in the early ocean, rather than in shallow waters at original photographs were Earth's surface. indeed tiny holes, just like the ones in SeOacher's sketches of The initial consensus of the scientific commu- the fossil Paleodictyon. nity was that the hot springs and their ecosys- But to my dismay, when tems were confined to the Pacific Ocean, where we sieved some samples to the seafloor is spreading as much as ten times faster look for the worm or other than it is in other ocean basins. Challenging such a organism that might have consensus can give one pause, but I became con- made the pattern, the sedi- vinced that similar hot springs and ecosystems ex- ment passed through the isted along the slow-spreading Mid-Atlantic Ridge. sieve and left nothing be-

I spent several years with my team developing tech- hind. Other samples that we niques to explore the mountainous terrain of the preserved in formalin to take Atlantic seafloor, both by remote sensing and by back for study by biologists sampling in situ with instruments lowered firom the were also a disappointment: r*"?^? surface. In 1985 our efforts paid off. We discovered the pattern of holes collapsed the first hydrothermal field, or vent area, and asso- and disappeared, and the ex- ciated vent ecosystem in the Atlantic Ocean—stiU pected underlying hexagonal one of the largest such fields known. We named it network of tunnels or tubes the TAG Hydrothermal Field, after the Trans-At- was nowhere to be seen. lantic Geotraverse Project that brought us there. For biologists, the most surprising aspect of our next opportunity discovery was that the animals at the Atlantic vents Myto pursue this elusive differed from those in the Pacific. The red-plumed phenomenon came in 1991, Cast of a fossil Paleodictyon, shown actual size (top), has been interpreted as tubeworms and giant clams were nowhere to be when the Canadian director an orderly network of tunnels excavated seen. In their place, the dominant vent animal is a Stephen Low began work just beneath the surface of sediment on greatest sur- his film about the new variety of shrimp. But for me the on IMAX the deep-sea floor, possibly by a marine prise was that the vent field lay in the same region Titanic. Because the wreck worm. Whatever organism was of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge—near the latitude of lies in 12,500 feet of water responsible, it was thought to have Miami, Florida—where we had photographed the several hundred miles off become extinct about 50 million years ago, until the recent discovery of hexagonal forms nearly a decade earlier. Newfoundland, Low had mysterious arrays of holes (above) that Our Ariantic site now became the cutting edge contracted with the P. P. might overlie a similar tunnel network. of seafloor hydrothermal research. Almost Shirshov Institute of Ocean- The arrays were found near the field of overnight, we gained ready access to collaborators ology in Moscow to use its active hydrothermal vents that the author and support for undersea expeditions in human- two state-of-the-art sub- discovered in the Atlantic Ocean. occupied deep-sea-diving submersibles. Although mersibles Mir 1 and Mir 2. we were focusing our efforts on an actively venting The underwater photographer Emory Kristof of mound the size and shape of the Houston As- the National Geographic Society in Washington, trodome, in 1990 I managed to piggyback some D.C., and I arranged for a series of dives en route dive time with the submersible Ahin to visit the to the filming off Newfoundland, in which we east wall of the rift valley, about a mile east of our would test the IMAX cameras while exploring mound. That was where our photographs of Paleo- the TAG Hydrothermal Field. Our tests of the dictyon—or whatever the creature was—had been cameras contributed little to the film, revealing taken years earlier. only the inadequacy of the lighting system then

Septerr\ber 200A natural history | 53 available. In research terms, however, the dives ing the curious surface pattern of holes. But noth- paid rich rewards. ing more definitive was learned, and the sample The Mir's passenger compartment—a steel sphere was stored away. no wider than one person's outstretched arms—-can

accommodate only three people at a rime. I made next close encounter of the hexagonal kind the first of the research dives with Yury Bogdanov, a Mycame in 2001, when I joined a team making senior research scientist with the Shirshov Institute, a new IMAX film, again directed by Stephen Low. and Mir chief pilot Evgeny Chernjaev. Our aim was The star of the enterprise was the Alviii, now to explore the region from our Astrodome riiound equipped with IMAX and high-defmition TV cam- eastward to the hexagonal forms. eras and a powerfiil underwater lighting array ca- pable of niuminating an area half the size of a football The dive was breathtaking. After a two-and-a- field. The team had already made spectacular images half-mile descent, at a rate of about one mile an of a vent site in the Pacific. I was there to help with hour, we landed on top of the Astrodome mound filming the contrasting Mid-Atlantic Ridge. next to chimneys that poured forth turbulent clouds The new equipment performed beautifully. of black "smoke" and swarmed with shrimp. From Only one thing seemed to be missing—a story that there we set our course eastward, slowly gliding away could tie together all the spectacular images. When

from the rusted bright red and yellow mineral de- I recounted how Seilacher and I had converged on

posits of the mound and over the monotonous light the fossil Paleodictyon and its apparently living

tan sediments and pillow-shaped lava flows of the counterpart, and how we were trying to solve its surrounding seafloor. Then we began to see the mysteries, Low became intrigued. He invited me hexagonal patterns on the surface of the sediments. to make a dive with Emory Kristof to point out

As we continued eastward, the sediments gradu- the form and its setting. We used the high-defini- ally changed from light tan to reddish brown. Inac- tion TV camera and replayed the video to a packed tive chimneys, several feet high, began to appear, house in the ship's laboratoiy that evening. The while the hexagonal patterns disappeared. Farther next day. Low sent his director of photography, on, the chimneys became much taller, and we William Reeve, down with the IA/L\X camera to make some more images. Our detective story ulti- mately became the narrative thread for the film, We sieved samples to find the organism Volcanoes of the Deep Sea. that made the patterns, but the sediment With Paleodictyon in the HmeHght, some nagging questions resurfaced: Did the form on the seafloor passed through, leaving nothing behind. really correspond to the fossil? If it did, where was its

hexagonal network of tubes or tunnels? I remem-

found ourselves traveling about a hundred feet bered the sample I'd preserved in epoxy and gave it

above the seafloor near the level of the dead chim- to Seilacher, who set out to dissect it. I received a ney tops, weaving our way as if we were flying photo from Seilacher with a handwritten note: through a forest of redwoods. Finally we were able "Epoxy did not evenly penetrate. StOl hexagonal to descend near to the seafloor, which was littered network of tunnels can clearly be seen." Drawing on

with fallen chimneys, each several feet in diameter his mental picture of what it should look hke,

and fluted Hke a column of a Greek temple. Seilacher could see a network, but I was skeptical. By After fifteen hours on the seafloor, my compan- now the fdm was a wrap, but to unequivocally prove ions apologetically asked me whether Iwas ready to the existence of the network, and to try to discover ascend. By comparison, the Almii typically spends what was making the patterns on the seafloor, Low only about four hours on the deep-sea floor. When supported an Alvin dive for Seilacher and me.

Bogdanov, Chernjaev, and I returned to the sur- The dive took place in July 2003. Twenty-five

face, we were chilled to the bone. The temperature years had passed since I had received Seilacher's ex-

of the deep water is near freezing, and deep-diving cited letter proposing a link between his ancient fos-

submersibles lose heat quickly through their metal sils and my seafloor photographs. We cHmbed into hulls. But back up on the support vessel, we the Ahin together and, after our long descent, warmed up quickly in a mercifully hot sauna. landed "knee deep" in hexagon country. Crouched We collected no hexagonal forms during the by the window on his side of the sub, Seilacher ex-

Mir dive, but I did secure several a couple of years claimed at the abundance of the patterns. We imme- later, using the Ali'iii. One core was dried and im- diately began collecting cores, targeting the freshest- pregnated with liquid epoxy resin, finally preserv- looking hexagons with the sharpest margins.

54 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 With time growing short, our pilot, Pat Hickey, We carefully preserved the sediment cores we dexterously aimed a hose he had rigged at a fresh had collected, and I felt confident that we finally pattern and began blowing away the surface sedi- had the answer in hand. Experts are now examin- ment with a gentle stream of water. Within sec- ing the structure of the forms and the microorgan- onds, as we watched on the video monitor, the isms they contain, and chemically analyzing the hexagonal pattern of tiny holes on the sediment sediment and sampling it for organic matter that surface disappeared and a hexagonal network of will be genetically sequenced. tubes or tunnels emerged, exactly hke those in the But Paleodictyoii remains elusive. Two hypotheses fossil form. for its origin are being tested. One is Seilacher's

original explanation, that the form is constructed For me, it was a "eureka" moment! Unable to as a burrow by an as-yet-unknown worm. The al- jump up and down in the confined space, I ternative hypothesis is that the form itself reflects reached across and shook hands with my compan- the shape of the organism, perhaps a large single- ions. The Kving form on the seafloor and the fossil celled organism whose living tissue fills the hori- form that lived on the seafloor more than 50 mil- zontal network. In that event, the organism might lion years ago were indeed one and the same. The take up the sediment to make a kind of hexagonal deep ocean had served as a sanctuary, a place where exoskeleton, leaving holes in the sediment open to Paleodictyoii had hved on for an unimaginably long catch food from above. These studies are in time, protected even from the global environmental progress. After nearly thirty years, to my surprise, changes that caused the extinction of many of the the mystery of Paleodictyoii still seems as deep as the animals Hving in shallow water and on land. waters where it lives.

"Black smoker, "an undersea vent in the Pacific, discharges hot water carrying a cloud of iron-rich mineral particles. The accretion of iron-rich minerals that forms a chimney around the vent is partly oxidized, creating a range of rusty colors.

Septerr)ber 2004 NATURAL HISTORY 55 | a

THIS LAND

From Water Hole to Rhino Barn

Twelve million years ago, a volcanic ashfall entombed prehistoric animals

that roamed what is now Nebraska.

By Sandy S. Mosel

you drive across northeastern IfNebraska on U.S. Highway 20, you see about what you'd ex- pect: fields of corn and soybeans, rolhng pastures with grazing cattle. But if you could travel in time, back

to, say, 12 million years ago, you'd come face to face with a very dif- ferent scene: an African-style sa- vanna, teeming with herds of camels, elephants, rhinoceroses, and

small horses, all grazing in seas of grass or browsing on shrubby trees.

As rich as it once was, though, this

ancient savanna and its ecosystem have left few traces in soil that has been tilled or pastured for more

than a century. Fossil skeleton of the three-toed horse Cormohipparion occidentale (left) lies near But in some places the evidence of the fossil rib cage of the barrel-bodied rhinoceros Teleoceras major (top center).

that distant time is still well preserved. The most spectacular remains occur been collecting since the 1850s. Voorhies directed a major excava- at Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Until 1971, however, the Ashfall tion of the Ashfall site during Park, about 140 miles northwest of site remained hidden. In that year, the summers of 1978 and 1979, Omaha. There the articulated skele- while exploring the upper slope of a bringing to light dozens of skeletons tons of many extinct mammals have ravine, Michael R. Voorhies, a pale- of birds, camels, horses, and rhinocer- been preserved in a bed of volcanic ontologist at the University of oses. That work continues. Geologists ash. More than 200 complete or Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln, think this mass graveyard was one nearly complete skeletons have been noted that a recent rainfall had re- consequence of a great volcanic erup- exposed through patient paleontolog- vealed a thick layer of volcanic ash. tion that took place 12 miUion years

ical excavations, and more, undoubt- Looking at it closely, he found the ago in what is now southwestern edly, are still to come. intact skull and jaws of a baby rhi- Idaho, nearly 900 miles due west. The Ashfall site occupies a hiU noceros eroding out of the ash. Prevaihng winds carried the ash east- overlooking a tributary of Verdigre Subsequent digging yielded the en- ward, blanketing a huge area of the Creek, which flows into the tire skeleton, then several more— Great Plains. Exposures of the same Niobrara River—itself a tributary of highly unusual phenomenon. ash layer—usually about a foot the Missouri River. Cutting a (Almost all fossilized mammals thick—occur in various places along rugged course through northern occur in ancient stream deposits: a 250-mile stretch of northern Nebraska, the Niobrara has exposed logjams of scattered bones and Nebraska. At Ashfall, though, the abundant remains of fossilized mam- teeth. Fully articulated skeletons are layer becomes ten feet thick. The site mals, which paleontologists have extremely rare.) was a water hole: essentially, a large

56 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 —

depression in the land- erated by the Univer- scape that retained water sity of Nebraska State during the wet seasons Museum and the but could dry out in Nebraska Game and times of drought. Parks Commission. The Made up of minute park is open seasonally shards of volcanic glass, to the public. A struc- the ash clouds that ture, aptly named the drifted across Nebraska Rhino Barn, covers part from the west were abra- of the fossil bed, where sive and dangerous. Small ^ paleontologists have ex- ' animals, especially birds, ,; cavated two dozen skele- must have succumbed al- * tons and left them for ' most immediately. Larger '*"*i.V, viewing in situ, as a animals could have sur- snapshot in time. the initial ashfall, Displays and exhibits in vived Buried in fine ash, the skeletons of the animals were preserved i I the round. but they would then have the Rhino Barn, the vis- encountered a landscape covered with sils belong to subtropical species that itor center, and along various trails powdery, abrasive dust that buried resemble grasses that no"w grow in inform visitors about the history and their food suppUes and became air- Central America, indicating that the scientific relevance of the site. borne again at the slightest step or cHmate was warmer than it is today. Meanwhile the research continues. breeze. The camels, horses, and large Supporting that conclusion are the Are there even more species of plants rhinoceroses suffocated within days fossilized giant tortoises that have been or animals whose fossils He buried in or weeks, as their lungs filled with discovered at the site: such large land the ash? What happened to the ele- ash. Ill and feverish, they probably reptUes could not have survived where phants and the carnivores—the saber- converged on the water hole. As they temperamres dipped below freezing. toothed cats and those bone-crushing perished, some of their remains were Fossil plants, animals, and ancient dogs—that also inhabited the area? Did scavenged by animals such as Aeliiro- soUs throughout Nebraska show that they find a way to survive the ancient doii, a bone-crushing predator in the by 12 miUion years ago, woodland en- catastrophe? Or are their skeletons, too, dog family. But Uttle by little, wind- vironments were giving way to grass- just waiting to be discovered in some blown ash filled the water hole, until lands. The horse skeletons from the unexcavated part of the fossil bed? it covered the carcasses. Ashfall site corroborate that inference:

Some of the horse species have three Sandy S. Mosel is an educational pro- The most abundant skeletons toes on each foot—a large toe in the grams assistant at tlie Ashfall Fossil Beds more than a hundred have been middle and a smaller one on each State Historical Park. excavated to date—are those of side. Other species have just one large AreaofDetaa^ Teleoceras major, a short, stocky rhinoc- toe. Side toes may have provided extra ^ NEBRASKA o^^a. eros with stout legs and a large, barrel- traction on soft forest floors, but they o like midsection. With so many skele- were less useful on the harder ground Linoln tons available from one population, of the open grassland. 1 investigators can infer a good deal Structures that are not helpful to an about the species' behavior and ecol- organism are weeded out by natural ogy. Young adult males are notably selection, because, at minimum, they Ashfall Fossil Beds absent, adult cost calories to maintain. One of the and only one mature State Historica Park male turns up for every five adult fe- horse species in particular shows evo- r males, suggesting that the rhinoceroses lution in action. Pliohipptis peniix was 1^. formed harems. Numerous skeletons essentially a one-toed horse, but it of young calves have also been un- retained vestigial side toes that did earthed, many of them nestled next to not provide support. This Hneage of adult females, no doubt their mothers. horses had Ukely moved into open For visitor information, contact: Because the calves are all generally grassland to take advantage of new Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park about the same age, calving must have niches, and the side toes were on their 86930 517th Avenue taken place at a particular season. way to vanishing. Royal, Nebraska 68773 Fossilized grass seeds lodged be- In 1991 the Ashfall site was 402-893-2000 tween the teeth of the rhinoceros fos- opened as a state historical park, op- wvtfw.ashfall.unl.edu

September 2004 NATURAL HISTORY 57 —

REVIEW

"A Paradox to Everyone but Himself

The naturalist who almost scooped Darwin

about natural selection was also an ardent mystic.

By Menno Schilthuizen

Ibrahim, suddenly pointed upward: "A recalls—his career was just beginning. Rajah Brooke!" We all looked, and Born to a middle-class family of down came the graceful butterfly, glid- scant means, the young Wallace

ing on its long emerald and black worked in England and Wales as a land Alfred Russel Wallace (right), aged about wings and settling at a puddle to drink. surveyor and schoolteacher, all the thirty-eight, with F.F. Geach, a mining A hundred and fifty years ago, Al- while educating himself as a naturalist. engineer and a long-time resident of fred Russel Wallace must have stood in At the age of twenty-five, he em- Timor, in 1861 similar awe when he first saw this barked on the life of a traveling collec- spectacular birdwing butterfly in tor, living off the sale of his specimens a miles to private collectors in The Heretic in Danvin 's Court: Sarawak, few hundred down museums and The Life ofAlfred Russel Wallace the coast from where we were hiking. the British Isles. His travels took him by Ross A. Slotten Having arrived in Borneo in Novem- first to South America, where he Columbia University Press, 2004; ber 1854, the naturalist struck up a spent four years traversing the Ama- $39.50 friendship with the legendary Sir zon basin. But he lost most of the col- James Brooke, the first "white rajah" lection he amassed there when the An Elusive Victorian: of Sarawak. It was Brooke who gave vessel carrying him back to England The Evolution him a specimen of the as-yet-unnamed sank in the middle of the Atlantic. ofAlfred Russel Wallace species. Wallace immediately dis- Undaunted, he spent the next eigh- by Martin Fichman patched a note to the Entomological teen months mustering the courage University of CIticago Press, 2004; Society of London, naming the species and funds for another trip, this time to $40.00 Ornithoptera brookiana after his new the Malay Archipelago, where he friend, "whose benevolent govern- would spend eight years before finally

ment of the country in which it was settling down in his native country. Last month my students and I discovered every true Englishman took a field trip to a small must admire." raveling naturalists were not un- forest reserve a couple of miles It is tempting to see the note as an T common in the nineteenth cen- from our university campus in Malay- early sign of Wallace's ability to marry tury, and Wallace probably would have sian Borneo. Slip-sliding down a steep science with social issues and with remained relatively obscure had he not

jungle path, clutching the soggy stems loyalty to a person or a cause, traits had two world-shattering insights dur- of wild yams in a futile attempt to that were to both drive and plague ing his stay in Southeast Asia. The first stay upright, we collapsed into a peb- him in his later career. But when the came to him around the same time he bly streambed. As we regained our thirty-one-year-old Wallace, as the penned his description of the Rajah

composure and began to look around guest of Brooke, was amusing those Brooke birdwing. It was the height of the steep-sided valley cluttered with at the rajah's dinner table with "his the monsoon season, and the incessant the mossy logs of fallen rainforest gi- clever and inexhaustible flow of talk rains gave Wallace, who was sojourn- ants, one of the students, Sharifah really good talk," as one dinner guest ing in Brooke's riverfront villa, Httle

58 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 —

eke to do but "ponder over the prob- science. Realizing that Wallace, in his Samuel S. Sweet and Eric R. Pianka, No- lem which was rarely absent from my hut in the Orient, had independently i>cnd>er 2003]. Few, however, wiU know thoughts." Evolution—though not yet stumbled upon natural selection, Dar- that, though he never returned to the called by that name—was a hot topic win was thrown into a fit of panic and Tropics after going home to England in in the mid-nineteenth century. No- depression. To LyeU he wrote, "Your 1862, Wallace's mind continued to body, however, had a clear idea of words have come true with a what it was or how it inight work vengeance AH mv originality will

nobody, that is. except Charles Dai- he smashed' LyeU and the botinist win, who for ten years had shared his Joseph Dalton Hooker helped save the thoughts with only a few friends. dw by auanging foi WaUace's "Temate

In Brooke's viHa, Wallace wrote the essay and abstiacts ot Darwin s stUl- treatise now known as the "Sarawak unpubhshed tieatises to be lead jointly

Law." In it he deduces, from the geographic distributions of ani- mals and plants, that ancestor spe- cies whose ranges were physically

separated split over time into mul-

tiple descendant species, a process

that biologists today call allopatric Thomas Baines My House at Bessir, in speciation. The paper, pubHshed Waigiou from a sketch by Wallace in 1855, drew the attention of the leading English geologist of the cioss boundaiies m the second haU ot day, Charles Lyell. LyeU warned his hte His mteUectual wanderlust took his friend Darwin that Wallace him foi the most part, away from the seemed on the verge of scooping field ot his eaily successes and into the-

him. And that, in fact, is what al- ism spiiitualism, phrenology, mes- most happened. Laid up on the merism socialism land nationaUzation, island of Ternate in 1858 with a enviionmentalism antivaccinationism, bout of malarial fever, Wallace, in and geocentrism In truth, he became a flash of inspiration, discovered something of a Victouan cult figure. natural selection. When he recu- Most WiUice biogiaphers have ig- perated, he spent three evenings noied avoided, or derided this latter writing "On the Tendency of WiUace to tocus instead on the youth- Varieties to Depart Indefinitely tul genius Now the authors of two from the Original Type," and new biographies, Ross A Slotten and quickly sent the manuscript ofl to Mai tin Fichman, have sought to cor- Darwin for comments. rect the bias m an attempt to see the T. W. Wood, Natives of Aru Shooting the Then unfolded one of the best- man as a whole. Great Bird of Paradise known episodes in the history of Slotten's The Heretic in Darwin's at the July 1, 1858, meet- Court is the more conventional of ing of the Linnaean Soci- the two. A physician from Chicago

ety. The rest is history. and a WaUace enthusiast, Slotten has

Or is it? WaUace is weU produced an admirable biography that known today, not only for conveys sympathy for its misunder- independently describing stood hero. That sympathy, Slotten's natural selection, but also predilection for quirky details, and his for writing The Malay talent for imaginative investigation Archipelago and discover- often make Wallace and his world ing what has come to be spring to Ufe. known as WaUace's Line, In 1866, for instance, WaUace had the faunal divide that runs just published Tlie Scientific Aspect of between eastern and west- the Supernatural, his first work on Thomas Baines, Ejecting an intruder. All pictures on Southeast Asia [see spirituaUsm, and a bundle of copies this page appear in The Malay Archipelago, by Alfred ern

Russel Wallace, published in London in 1869. "The Lizard Kings," by sat wrapped and bound on his sister

September 2004 NATURAL HISTORY 59 Fanny s table. One morning the bundle sentation of a paper on spiritualism. recurrent theme in Slotten's book. The was inexplicably scattered about, and Meanwhile, other members of the author cites the so-called spiritualist Fanny (an ardent spiritualist herself) scientific community in London were wars of 1870s London, which featured consulted a Ouija board about the doing their best to expose the same vitriolic exchanges in Nature (a journal cause of the disruption. The "spirit" mediums as frauds. Darwin's son Wallace had helped found) between guiding Fanny's hand on the Ouija George organized a seance at the Wallace and such figures as WiUiam B. board urged her to distribute the book- home of Charles's brother Erasmus, Carpenter, a physiologist, anatomist,

lets as quickly as' possible, then wrote and urged Charles Darwin's intellec- and dedicated ghost buster. The occa- Fanny's name in one of them while she tual "bulldog," the- anatomist and biol- sion was only one of many, Slotten tells

held it closed under her hand. Slotten ogist TH. Huxley, to attend and help us, in which Wallace found himself at

is not content to take the episode on detect the "jugglery" of the medium. loggerheads with colleagues who had indirect authority. He describes how And at another seance, the zoologist E. revered him as an evolutionist. his research takes him to the archives of the Oxford Univer- the late 1860s, evolution- sity Museum of Natural History, Byary theory itself was no where he fmds that very copy longer safe from Wallace's un- of Wallace's book, with the orthodox ponderings, and he "spirit writing" in red crayon began pubHshing several provi-

still plainly visible inside it. sos, much to Darwin's horror. In Wallace's fascination with spiri- a collection of essays that ap- tualism also plays an important peared in 1870, Wallace claimed role elsewhere in Slotten's book. that natural selection was not a Not only incidental manifesta- strong enough process to have tions of spirits, but especially caused the appearance of hu- formal seances made a deep im- mans, and he invoked a Supreme pression on Wallace. An interest InteUigence. In a shockingly ve- in such matters was not as hement reproach, Darwin told

strange as it may seem today. Spir- his friend: "You write like a

its were all the rage in mid-Vic- metamorphosed (in retrograde

torian London, and organizing or direction) naturahst. . . . Eheu!

attending seances was a favorite Eheu! Eheu! ... I defy you to pastime among the higher eche- upset your own doctrine." lons of society, right up to Queen The publication of the 1870 Victoria herself The proceedings essays was the beginning of Wal- were normally held in darkened lace's descent into theism. His rooms, where tables might float flirtations with such unpopular through space, and musical in- causes as spontaneous genera- struments inight be played by in- tion, antivaccinationism, and

visible hands (sometimes, as Wal- land nationalization, combined

lace wrote in Tlie Scientific Aspect of with his newfound belief in the Supernatural, "in so wretched a God, made him a highly contro- style that the company begged versial figure. And yet, several

that it might be discontinued"). times when his popularity ap- Z. B. Zmeckei', A Malayan forest, with its characteristic birds to hit rock bottom, he But in what Slotten calls a From The Geographical Distribution of Animals, by Alfred peared

"fatal attraction," Wallace began Russe/ Wallace, published in London in 1876. rekindled it with such master- his own investigations into the pieces of natural history as Tiie supernatural in 1865. He became a Ray Lankester caught the medium Geographical Distribution of Animals dedicated supporter of several medi- Henry Slade in the act of scribbling his (1876) and Island Life (1880). The lat- ums, and urged his feUow scientists to own "spirit writings," which led to the ter, in fact, spurred Darwin and Hux-

take spiritualist claims seriously, most infamous Slade trial. (Wallace testified ley to arrange a civil pension for the

famously when he chaired a biology as a witness for the defense at the trial, often penurious Wallace. section of the annual meeting of the while Darwin discreetly offered to foot Slotten seems as bewildered as Wal-

British Associarion for the Advance- part of the bill for the prosecution.) lace's Victorian contemporaries were ment of Science, and used (many said Wallace's precarious circumstances by his eclecticism, and makes Uttle at-

abused) his position to secure the pre- within the scientific estabUshment is a tempt to explain Wallace's many-sided

60 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 .

Blurrine Wallace s Line By Robert R. Dunn

a few lost letters may make a sentence unin- Deforestation and the loss of indigenous species have Astelligible," Alfred Russel Wallace once wrote in all been far more dramatic in Singapore than anywhere a paper on the geography of the Malay Archi- else in Southeast Asia. Still, Singapore is hardly unique. pelago, "so the extinction of the numerous forms of life Recent studies by Barry W. Brook of Northern Territory which the progress of cultivation invariably entails will University in Darwin, Austraha, Navjot Sodhi of Na- necessarily obscure this invaluable record of the past." tional University of Singapore, and their colleagues noted When Wallace recorded those thoughts in 1863, the that forests are disappearing in this region faster than any- evolutionary record of the fauna and flora of Southeast where else on the globe—at a rate of about 0.9 percent Asia was clearer than it would ever be again. That "in- annually, compared with 0.4 percent a year in Africa and valuable record of the past," and Wallace's own detailed South America. Another study found that more timber

observations of it, led to Wallace's momentous insights has been harvested in Borneo alone in the past two about natural selection and biogeography. decades than from Africa and South America combined. What Wallace found was that many of the organisms he During his stay in the Malay Archipelago, from 1854 studied were restricted to single islands or groups of is- until 1862, Wallace collected 900 new species of beetles, lands, and that such idiosyncratic distri- 200 new species of ants, fifty new butions of species often told important species of butterflies, and 212 new stories about the past. In Bah, he found species of birds. If current estimates of "birds of the genera Copsychus, Mega- extinction rates are correct, between

laima, Tiga, Ploceus, and Stumopastoi; all 13 and 42 percent of all species that characteristic of the Indian region." On inhabited the region at the beginning a subsequent trip, to an island little of the nineteenth century could be more than fifteen and a half miles away, gone by 2100. Yet, sadly, not only has he noticed that "on crossing over to the evolutionary record been blurred, Lombock, during three months col- but a valuable basehne for estimating lecting there, not one [of the bird gen- the changes of the past century and a era he had observed on Bali] was ever half—Wallace's own observations and seen." More than a century before the collections—has also been under- acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics, Wallace began mined by a lack of rehable biohistorical research. Finding to imagine the movements of continents that might lead clear examples of individual species that Wallace observed

to such distinct variety and patterning. in abundance but that today are rare or extinct is no easy

I crossed Wallace's line when I traveled recently from task. No comprehensive hst of the species Wallace col-

Australia to the Malay Archipelago. It should have been lected exists, or, to my knowledge, is even in the works. easy to observe the transition in organisms that Wallace recorded: kangaroos in Austraha that give way to tapirs The key to Wallace's particular contributions was his in Asia; Australian cockatoos that cede to hornbiUs in ability to recognize biogeographic boundaries.

Southeast Asia. But when I landed in Singapore, the That ability rested on the possibility of moving among

first thing I saw was a cockatoo. Such introduced spe- neighboring islands that clearly demonstrated difler- cies, dragged across Wallace's Line, have partly obscured ences in plant and animal species. Yet in Bali today, for

it, and helped blot out the traces of evolutionary history instance, Wallace would be hard-pressed to find birds of that the boundary had preserved for so long. the Copsychus and other bird genera he wrote about. The evolutionary record has been most obscured on They survive, all right, but they are hiding in ever-dimin- the island-nation of Singapore, where Wallace did most ishing patches of forest. Wallace would now have to travel of his collecting. More than 99 percent of the mature farther down every trail, deeper into ever)' forest refrige,

forest that once covered the island is gone [see "Singa- to observe what he could so plainly distinguish fi-om pore's Vest-Pocket Park," by Jamie James, April 2004], and boats and coasthnes in the mid-nineteenth century.

Singapore has lost about half its animal species in the

last tiger a population so past two centuries. The —from Robert R. Dunn is a postdoctoral investigator in the department numerous in Wallace's time that they terrified him at of ecology and epohition at the University of Tennessee. His research night—was killed in 1 930 [see photograph aboue] focuses on the biogeograpliy of ants.

September 2004 NATURAL HISTORY 61 personality. He calls Wallace "a para- beyond that needed for mere survival Wallace's "evolutionary teleological

dox to everyone but himself," and and reproduction, and that, therefore, theism" is as diligently constructed a

documents his intellectual twists and human evolution was no longer within theory as Fichman claims it to be.

turns with a hint of pity. the realm of natural selection. In The Wallace's posture as a defender of spir- World of Life: A Manifestation of Creative ituaHsm, in the face of repeated expo- Historian Martin Fichman has a Power, Directive Mind, and Ultimate Pur- sures of fraudulent practices, is that of different take on Wallace. In An pose, published three years before his a beHever, not of an objective scientist.

Elusive Victorian; he condemns the death in 1913, Wallace the teleological Perhaps that is not surprising, consid- caricature painted by those who glo- theist invokes God- as the great instiga- ering the role of spirituahsm in Wal-

rify the naturalist-evolutionist Wallace tor and director of hfe, and places the lace's personal life. He credited medi- but view the older Wallace as a bit of a world at the center of the universe to ums with bringing him into contact crackpot. Instead, Fichman says, "the act as the stage for the evolution of with three dead siblings, including his whole of Wallaces oeuvre [must be] man, the clo^vning glory of creation. younger brother, Edward, who had taken seriously." died of yellow fever while assisting In spite of that admonition, Fich- It is a surprising conclusion for the Wallace in the Amazon. man's book is not a conventional, man who is often mentioned in the Wallace also seems to have reveled in chronological biography. He says Httle same breath as Darwin, and Fichman debate, and he often started an argu-

about Wallace's personal life, and the does a good job of trying to explain ment just for the fijn of it. Slotten de- obvious comparison with Darwin, a scribes how he casually picked a fight

main theme of other biographies (in- with Darwin over the latter's theory of

cluding Slottens), is largely absent. In- sexual selection, which Wallace did stead, Fichman takes a thematic ap- not accept. Darwin was pained by proach, analyzing each of Wallace's their disagreement, and he wrote to main preoccupations in turn. A disad- Wallace to say so. But Wallace seemed

vantage of the method is that the text to have lost no sleep over the skirmish, becomes a bit repetitive here and and repHed to Darwin Hghtheartedly:

there, with, for instance, identical (and "Pray don't distress yourself ... It wiU

sometimes quite long) excerpts from all come right in the end." Wallace Wallace's writings quoted in multiple once told a friend, "An uphill fight in

chapters. For the rest, the writing is el- an unpopular cause . . . has charms for

egant and accomplished (though, to [me] that [I cannot] resist." my taste, too cluttered with jargon Perhaps the greatest accomplish-

from the humanities). ment of the two new books is to show

Fichman 's main point is that Wallace that there was no "other Wallace."

himself sought to integrate all his vari- Through the rich sources that inform

ous interests and convictions into a them, the reader is afforded penetrat- single view of Ufe. Wallace the spiritu- ing gUmpses into Wallace's many idio- Wallace and spirit: The photograph allegedly alist believed that what he saw at syncrasies. He emerges as a kind, captures the famous naturalist, at about age seances was real proof of a higher level somewhat naive and gullible man, fifty, with a male spirit conjured by a London of human existence; he thought spirits quietly suffering personal pains—but medium, c. 1872. could form societies infused with a also as a man of keen intellect. After benevolence that most flesh-and- how Wallace the evolutionist arrived at reading almost a thousand pages of

blood humans had not yet achieved. such a mystical, Utopian optimism. Wallaceana by Slotten and Fichman, I But Wallace the socialist was confident From Fichman's fascinating re-creation am left with the impression of a some- that such benevolent societies would and analysis of the intellectual world times brilliant mind struggling, per-

eventually come into existence. Thus, Wallace moved in, it is clear that many haps not completely successfully, to humans had already evolved to rise beliefs that are held in disrepute today reconcile the good choices with the above the mere material stage at which were hardly unique to Wallace. LyeU bad and forge them into a single Ufe.

other organisms were still stagnating. believed in special creation for hu- And what a life it was! And Wallace the evolutionist, ac- mans; William Crookes, the inventor cording to Fichman, felt that the of the cathode-ray tube and the dis- Menno Schilthuizen is an associate pro- human spirit even the mind, the fac- coverer of thaUium, was a spiritualist, — fessor of evolutionary biology at the University ulty of speech, and the as statistician "marvelous was the Francis Galton, of Malaysia Sahah. He is the author of Fro^, beauty and symmetry of his whole ex- one of Darwin's cousins. Flies, and Dandelions: The Making of

ternal form"—had attained a level far Yet I am not entirely convinced that Species (Oxford University Press, 2001).

62 NATURAL HISTORY September ZOM Come see what the flutter is all abo Featherec Dinosaurs and the Ori£(in ' of FlififhL

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BOOKSHELF By Laurence A. Marschall

They had no way of making quantita- Tlie Big One: tive records of geologic disturbances, The Earthquake that Rocked and they knew nothing of the Earth's Early America interior. To those who relied on and Helped Create a Science guesswork and quasi-scientific anal- by Jake Page and Charles Officer ogy, earthquakes were traceable to The Complere World of Houghton Mifflin, 2004; $24.00 such factors as unfavorable wind con- ditions, electrical disturbances, and Greek the natural wrinkling of the Earth's Which of the lower forty-eight cooling crust. To the pious, earth- states has survived the most quakes were acts of divine retribu- powerful earthquake ever recorded in tion—though why Missouri deserved the United States? Strange to relate, God's wrath any more than Washing-

the answer is not California, but Missouri. In the middle of the night, on December 16, 1811, the residents of the town of New Madrid awoke to a churning in their stomachs and a rumbling in their ears. Stumbling into the darkness, they saw the ground

«/«-x5\t>;A' /Jiir»E|>y«af2it^i?^S£. flapping like a wind-tossed

This authoritativ, sheet, buildings crumbling all around, and, some claimed, and compendium combines a the Mississippi reversing itself, retelling of the Greek myths flowing toward the north. with a full and wholly engag- Radiating tremors tumbled ing account of the complex homesteaders from their beds ancient society in which these in neighboring Kentucky endlessly fascinating tales and shook church bells in were created. Charleston, South Carolina. Aftershocks continued for Complemented by lavish illus- months, and two more major The Great Earthquake of New Madrid, anonymous trations, genealogical tables, temblors shook the Earth engraving, 1851 box features, and specially again on January 23 and Feb- commissioned drawings, this ruary 7, 1812, finishing ofli'what the ton, D.C., or New York City was, December quake had not destroyed then as now, a theological enigma. is an essential book for anyone and rattling windows in Montreal, a interested in the world of the thousand miles away. By the time the and Officer take the New ancient Greeks. Page entire episode was over, the course of Madrid quake as a point of depar- the Mississippi had been changed in ture for their genial history of modern the Complete World of many places, and a new landscape of earthquake science. Seismographs lakes and ridges had been sculpted. were a key development: a host of Greek Mythology Entire towns had disappeared. clever recording devices were intro- At the beginning of the nineteenth duced by British, Japanese, and Italian

RIGHARitt BU)lfON century all this was a puzzlement; inventors in the mid 1 800s. The infant

when and where earthquakes might science of seismology made it possible

V $39.95cIoth :: occur was anybody's guess. According to listen to the "sound" of Earth's in- 300 illustrations, 139 in color to Jake Page, a science \vriter, and terior in response to temblors, just as

240 pages Charles Officer, a geologist, the scien- you can tell whether a tree is hollow

tists of the day had only the faintest by the sound it makes when you tap "^^ Thamte^ & Hudison idea that earthquakes might be associ- on its trunk. In time, seismograph ated with volcanoes or tectonic forces. recordings enabled geologists to deter- thamesahdhudsonusa.cojth

66 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 mine that Earth has a dense core sur- rounded by a slowly flowing mantle Sunken Cities, Sacred Cenotes, and a thin outer crust. and Golden Sharks: Travels Seismology also led to the mapping of a Water-Bound Adventurer all over the planet, and of earthquakes by Bill Belkvilk thus to the realization that some re- YANGTZE University of Georgia Press, 2004; gions—the edges of the Pacific Ocean, $29.95 RIVER CRUISES for instance—are more prone to 10-21 day discovery cruises aboard than others. the middle of quakes By Victoria Cruises, the only the twentieth century such earth- about the time that you, dear Just US-based cruise line in China. quake-prone zones were recognized as reader, are puUing out of your drive- the intersections of tectonic plates, way, heading for your daily aggres- Prices starting from huge rafts of crustal material that float sion-filled hour on the expressway - $1,525* on the mantle and jostle each other or inbound commuter train, Bill land and air ponderously, Uke giant floes in packs of Belleville is probably tumbling back- sea ice. Most earthquakes came to be ward off the gunwale of a diving boat ail your travel agent or understood as a natural consequence into a crystal-blue ocean. An environ- 1.800.221.7179 of the sticking and sudden slippage of mental journalist and filmmaker, crustal plates m contact with each Belleville has managed to make a de- www.PaclficDellghtTours.com other, the fitfiil adjustments of conti- cent living, as far as one can figure 'Restrictions apply. Space limited. Call or log on for details. nents in motion. from these enjoyable essays, out of vis- The New Madrid earthquakes, iting ecologically engaging underwa- however, remained strange and puz- ter sites in the West Indies and in "! PACIFIC DELIGHT zling, because they were centered far Central and South America, and then „., WORLD TOURS. from the margins of tectonic plates: writing about it for the folks at home. Exceptional Journeys-Remarkable Value half a continent away from the San Nice work if you can get it.

Andreas fault to the west, half a con- It's not all dog-paddling in a heated tinent and half an ocean a'way from pool, though. Belleville is an expert Enjoy Radiant the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to the east. diver whose wanderlust takes him to Soapstone Warmth Page and Officer explain how inves- places few sane people would venture. tigators working in the New Madrid In one early scene in the book he is area during the past decade have lo- dangling in a harness fifty feet above cated a fault, known as the Reelfoot the water level of an overgrown lime- Rift, inside the crust, buried several stone cenote, or sinkhole, deep in the kilometers deep beneath the sedi- jungle of the Dominican Republic. ment of an ancient inland sea and, From that precarious position, a overlying that, the deposits of the winch will lower him down to an in-

Mississippi River and its tributaries. flatable raft floating on the shadowed It was the sides of this deep crack waters far below. With a team of that slipped in 1811. Aftershocks scuba-clad archaeologists, he will dive continued for several years, and small more than a hundred feet farther

earthquakes still waggle seismographs down into the cenote, to a pinnacle in the region. of rock that rises from the pit's bot- 5 Reasons Soapstone is Better! • Soapstone holds twice as much heat as metal. So when, exactly, is the next "big tom (some 250 feet under water). • Soapstone heat is steady, even and comfoilable. hit there, he and the rest of the one" due to the nation's midsec- From • Soapstone has a proven record of durability.

tion? On this point Page and Officer team will get their bearings as they • It has beautiful color, texture and marbling. • Variations in the stone make each stove unique. judiciously demur. In spite of two cen- search for artifacts tossed into the Plus, no power is required, so you can enjoy turies' worth of increasing seismic sinkhole by pre-Columbian tribes as a radiant warmth regardless of the weather! savvy, earthquake prediction remains sacrifice to their gods. FREE COLOR almost as much a magic art as it was in It's cold, dark, and claustrophobic

1811. SdD, if I were planning a move down there, with practically no mar- Address to Missouri, I wouldn't buy a pent- gin for carelessness. But the journey, City/State/Zip_ house condo, no way, no matter how which leads to the discovery of shards Woodstock Soapstone Co., Inc attractive the price. of ancient pottery and the bones of 66 Airpark Rd., Dept. 1833, West Lebanon, NH 03784 www.woodstove.com 1-888-664-8188 ana, where rugged jungle and among Thomas Jefferson's papers at towering waterfalls become the Library of Congress. The vanilla exotic destinations for eco- flavoring Jefi'erson used in his kitchen, tourism; to the ominously made from the seedpods of a rare trop-

named Mosquito Coast of ical orchid [see "Age and Beauty," by Nicaragua, where conserva- Kenneth M. Cameron, June 2004], had tionists try to enlist native already been popular in Europe for fishermen in a project to pre- nearly three centuries. The Aztecs serve endangered sea turtles; showed the Spaniards how vanilla and to the Peruvian Amazon, could sweeten their chocolate and per-

where a team of biologists is fume their cigars, and the long, dark studying the behavior of the vanilla beans became part of the Span- Diving a cenote in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. boto, unusual, pink, fresh- ish empire's rich on the eastern Yucatan Peninsula an colonial trade as early water dolpliin. Belleville's ac- as the middle of the sixteenth century. extinct sloths, makes for a story of count of the commercial conch farm Privateers from European nations great suspense. he visits on one of the Turks and were soon looking for the stuff during

Equally chilling is Belleville's ac- Caicos Islands, an archipelago south- their raids of Spanish galleons, and count of a nocturnal dive off the coast east of the Bahamas, depicts an opera- their booty was directly responsible

of Cuba in search of the rarely seen, tion not unlike that of a Midwest cattle for Queen Elizabeth I's passion for bioluminescent flashlight fish (Krypto- ranch—though the conchs, which pluviaron alfredi). To spot its soft radi- look Uke foot-long garden slugs, are ance, Belleville and a companion turn destined for soup pots around the Car- off their lamps before descending into ibbean, not fast-food joints in Tulsa.

near total darkness, aiming for an un- Yet such is Belleville's talent that derwater cliff top. They can see nei- even when he ventures into relatively ther their depth gauges, the research familiar territory, he brings an unfamil- vessel above them, nor even one an- iar perspective, finding adventure and other. Except for the increasing crush wonderment in httle-seen corners of of water pressure, the luminous flashes the natural world. In one episode he

of the passing marine life, and the describes cave-diving on the Suwannee glow of their own ascending air bub- River in northern Florida, and rejoices bles (which roil the abundant plank- in "the singular wonder of being inside

ton in the water), the effect is one of the Uving veins of the earth." In an- almost total sensory deprivation. other, he and a college friend take a When Belleville finally pulls up, canoe trip into the heart of the Ever- turns on his Hght, and looks at his digi- glades. There, only a few dozen miles

tal wrist gauge, he finds that he's from the strip malls and beachfront Hyping vanilla ice cream, Brighton, dropped almost 110 feet, probably condos where former commuters go England, 1936 overshooting the target. For a tense ten to Uve out their days, are worlds out of minutes Belleville wanders around time: transparent channels fdled with vaniUa-flavored desserts. By the end of alone searching for his partner, whose needlefish, lone ospreys gliding past the seventeenth century such influen-

hght, if it's on, is nowhere in sight. He's tangled mangrove shores, flocks of sul- tial EngUshmen as Samuel Pepys and afraid to swim very far in any one di- fur-winged butterfhes. Christopher Wren were frequenting rection, terrified that, should he be coffeehouses where cocoa drinks, fla- forced to surface too far from the boat, vored with vanilla, were popular he'll be lost from sight, a helpless dot in Vanilla: Travels in Search menu items. Starbucks, Haagen-Dazs, the choppy waters that surround Cuba. of the Ice Cream Orchid and the myriad of other food and by Tim Ecott drink purveyors that rely on vanilla Fortunately for Belleville (and for Grove Press, 2004; $22.00 today are thus the beneficiaries of a readers v/ith a low tolerance for venerable and pleasant addiction. stress), most of the brief excursions he The vanilla bean has been prized describes in his book take place in far What may be the first American throughout its long history, not only less threatening, though no less inter- recipe for vanilla ice cream, for its flavor, but also for its great esting, settings. Short e-ssays describe written in the same hand that penned scarcity. Even today only about 2,200

travels to the interior of central Guy- the Declaration of Independence, is metric tons of beans reach the world's

68 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 agricultural markets each year, and Ecott's fascinating travelogue makes it ponents that greatly enhance the fla- the going price for the good stuff in clear that the high price of that little vor, and natural vanilla will surely

2004 was close to $275 a pound. Such vial of natural vanilla extract is, by any reign supreme for a long time among precious commodities breed violence, measure, a bargain. lovers of good food. and Tim Ecott, whose book recounts Modern chemists have learned to Laurence A. Marschall, author of The his travels to the prmcipal growing synthesize the principal ingredient of Supernova Story, is the W.K. T. Sahm pro- sites of the vaniUa orchid, needed the vanilla, and more than 90 percent of fessor of physics at Gettysburg College in vanilla-flavored steel nerves of a war correspondent to foods now contain Peniisyh'ania, and director of Project CLEA, cover this story. the artificial stufi. But the real beans which produces widely used simulation soft-

Buyers for the major companies contain an estimated 400 trace com- ware for education in astronomy. that trade in vanilla travel to remote jungle locations in Indonesia, Mada- gascar, Mexico, and Papua New Guinea, chartering private planes under aliases to confuse competitors. They carry suitcases stuffed with mil- Hons of dollars in cash and visit wealthy growers whose warehouses are surrounded by razor wire and armed guards. Stories of extortion, h s nuts to pay full price for a Tempur-Pedic' fraud, and murder in the vanilla trade when you can get a Posture-Temp"' for about 50% of the price. are as brutal as those told of diamond It has evetything you want DORMIA^ dealers or heroin smugglers. except the big price tag!

Posture-Temp'" The vanilla orchid, its essence so amazing space age material for easy on the tongue, has not made optimum pressure things easy for the grower. Although relief. High performance its vine flourishes in many tropical cli- base foam provides mates, the plant produces no seedpods We Challenge You To '^'^Sb ^^0 long lasting support unless it is fertilized. In nature, that ' Imagine How Good . Tell the Difference I work is done but only rarely a — —by Posture-Temp"' by Dormia* offers the It Will Feel species tropical native to of bee Mex- same great benefits of expensive Imagine how it will feel with your ico and Central America. The bee memory material mattresses but at whole body gently supported by a preserved the Spanish domination of almost half the cost! Using the same Posture-Temp'" mattress. You'll sleep the vardUa trade for many centuries. NASA space age technology to better and deeper than you ever thought possible. And your back will Early vaniUa-lovers from other coun- reduce pressure points, it offers advanced sleep surface comfort and thank you every day! tries, hoping to break the monopoly, support. You will love how it cradles managed to transplant cuttings to For a Limited Time Only. and comforts. Because it is virtually other parts of the globe, but it was not Free Shipping, No Interest, the perfect mattress material Posture- No Payment Financing untU the middle of the 1800s that a Temp™ comes with a 25 Year slave named Edmond, on the French Limited Warranty! for 6 Months colony of Reunion in the Indian To Qualified Buyers Ocean, devised a way to manually in- Why Posture-Temp™ Is the Easy Payment Plans Available seminate the plants. Best Memory Foam Mattress as Low as $29 a Month! 8" Edmond's discovery laid the Posture-Temp"' is an profile Prices may ne>er be this lo« again! mattress that features 3" of 5.3 lb. groundwork for the global trade Ecott Call Today for Your temperature sensitive memory foam writes about, but producing vanilla re- and a 5" high density foam Low Price Guarantee! mains a tedious and time consuming support base. It's hypo-allergenic, process. It takes months for the seed- anti-microbial, and dust mite resist 1-800-447-2406 pods to develop, and months more to Perfect for every body size and 10 Stage Door Rd., Fishkill. W{ 12524 cure the seeds. Once the vanilla beans shape, it has all the features and www.abed.com/224 reach the processing factory, extract- benefits of Tempur-Pedic' at about Dept. 224 ing the concentrated flavoring can half the cost. take weeks more, because the dried ©2004 Dormia'. Comparison based on 2004 manufacturer's price lists. Tempur-Pedic' is a registered trademark and a competitor of Dormia* and Poslure-Tenip^". Free shipping only within the continental United States. All others call for shipping quote. beans must be steeped in alcohol.

September 200A NATURAL HISTORY 69 NEW BOOKS FROM ISLAND PRESS

Why Some nature.net SOME Like It Hot report on the problem in British Food, Genes, and LIKE IT Columbia, titled "Going Downhill Cultural Diversity Slip-Sliding Away Fast" (www.sierralegal.org/reports/land Gary Paul Nabhan slide_toc.html). The deadliest and In Why Some Like II most infamous landslide in Canadian Hot, an award-winning By Robert Anderson history, the Frank Slide of 1903 in natural historian takes SAFIY PAUL »At)IUN southwestern Alberta, may have been us on a culinary , ! odyssey to solve the puzzles posed by "the predicting a landslide in Novem- triggered instead by badly regulated I'm ghosts of evolution" hidden within every ber, but not the political kind. I'm coal mining beneath the unstable culture and its traditional cuisine. Gary Paul talking about the sudden shift of hun- crest of Turtle Mountain. The resul- Nabhan offers us a view of genes, diets, eth- dreds or thousands of tons of rock and tant landslide brought some 90 mil- nicity, and place that will forever change the way we understand human health and soil, and that kind happens nearly hon tons of rock down on the sleep- cultural diversity. This book marks the dawn- every day. To catch up on the latest ing town of Frank, and claimed at ing of evolutionary gastronomy in tolls in death and destruction from least seventy lives (see www.canadian a way that may save and major landshde events, go to the U. S. geographic.ca/Magazine/maOS/alacarte. enrich millions of lives. Geological Survey's (USGS) main site asp and "The Day the Mountain Fell," Cloth: S24.00 1-55963-465-9 on the subject (landslides.usgs.gov), and at www3.synnpatico.ca/goweezer/canada/ click on "Recent Landshde Events." frank.htm).

-I The Remarkable In some places, such as the San Life of Francisco Bay area, weather and geol- greatest potential for disaster, William Beebe The ogy seem to conspire with gravity to however, may he offshore. Enor- Explorer and bring down mountainsides on a regu- mous blocks of volcanic islands or Naturalist lar basis. You can get the details from continental shelf can give way and Carol Grant Gould a section of the USGS Web site travel miles underwater. As the land- William Beebe was dedicated to the causes and effects of slide material comes to rest on the a fearless explorer and thoughtful scientist who El Niiio (walrus.wr.usgs.gov/elnino/). deep-sea floor, the sudden displace- put his life on the line in pursuit of knowledge. Scroll down the page to the "Land- ment of a huge vertical column of The unique glimpses he provided into the com- shdes" section, chck on "Potential San seawater can kick up deadly tsunamis plex web of interactions that keeps the earth Francisco Bay LandsHdes," then cHck across wide areas. The Monterey Bay alive and breathing have inspired on "fly-by movies." Download a cross- Aquarium Research Institute pro- generations of conservationists fail- and ecologists, and have helped to sectional view of a "slow-nroving vides a good explanation of how such shape the course of modern science. ure" and watch it undermine a typical submarine landslides have shaped the Cahfornia hillside home, or take a vir- Hawaiian Islands (www.mbari.org/ November* Cloth: $30.00 1-55963-858-3 Shearwater tual flight over Marin County or East volcanism/Hawaii/HR-Landsl ides. htm). Leadville Bay HiUs to get some idea of how To fmd out more about submarine The Struggle prevalent landslides have always been landslides, visit the site of New Zea- to Revive an in the region. Beneath the fly-by fea- land's National Institute of Water and American Town tures, you'll find movies of two actual Atmospheric Research (www.niwa. Gillian Klucas shdes from the 1996—97 rainy season. CO. nz/pubs/wa/09-1 /a valanche.htm).

Leadville explores the Many things can set critically unsta- Earth, of course, is not the only clash between a small ble rock in modon. On May 18, 1980, planet where geologic processes com- mining town high up in about a mile below Mount Saint He- bine to tear down and level the sur- Colorado's Rocky lens, a magnitude 5.1 temblor trig- face material. At "Geology of Mars" Mountains and the federal government, deter-

mined to clean up the toxic mess left from a gered the largest landshde worldwide (www.lukew.com/marsgeo/index.html), hundred years of mining. The book shows the in the past century (see pubs.usgs.gov/ a Web site created by Albert T. Hsui, reality behind the Western mystique and publications/msh/climactic.html and click a geologist at the University of lUinois explores the challenges to local autonomy on "Debris avalanche"). The moun- at Urbana-Champaign, you'll learn and community identity brought by a struggle tain shed 0.7 cubic miles of rock, un- about the "mass movements" on the for economic survival, unyielding ^-- government policy.and long-term" corking the more infamous eruption. Red Planet. Many of them cluster health consequences induced by Human activities sometimes set the around the huge Valles Marineris, a extractive-industry practices. stage for catastrophic landslides. Log- continent-size canyon that gives grav- November • Cloth: $26.00 1-55963-385-9 Shearwater ging is a good example. Steep slopes ity some steep chffs to work with. denuded of trees and cut with new Island Press roads don't stay put for long. The Robert Anderson is a freelance science SHEARWATER BOOKS:* Sierra Lesal Defence Fund has issued a writer living in Los Angeles. WASHINGTON • COVELO • LONDON www.islandpress.org 70 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 Call 1>800'828'1302 nh LETTE RS (Continued from page 1 1)

Mr. Ehrlich and I agree that some is determined by reinforcement and Mission Impossible global warming is highly likely, that punishment: as with all other laws of In "No-Fly Zone" ("Endpaper," we can't know for sure whether that natural phenomena, it is subject to 4/04), Robert Zimmerman describes will cause severe damage within our many Hmiting conditions. Mr. de in gory detail an experiment showing lifetimes, and that we can take steps Waal is incorrect when he speaks of that even with heroic efforts cosmo- now that will retard the warming behaviorism's "two separate lan- nauts were unable to keep quail without harm to—even with benefit guages: one for human behavior, an- chicks alive at zero gravity. The au- to—the economy. other for animal." In fact, radical be- thor makes his point convincingly, Spencer R. Weart haviorism (so named not because it is then turns around and claims that the American Institute of Physics extreme, but because it includes pri- cosmonauts' "efforts were for

College Park, Maryland vate events in its analysis) has always naught" and that their experiment

assumed that there is no fundamental, was a "failure." I could not disagree Not Dead Yet qualitative dividing line between hu- more. The results were as clear-cut as

While I enjoyed "Venomous Lizards mans and animals. As radical behav- they come: all the chicks died. Then of the Desert" (7-8/04), by my good iorists, I and my colleagues have not his punch-line: the cosmonauts' "self- friend, colleague, and collaborator "caved in" and exempted humans less labors illustrate how human ef-

Daniel D. Beck, I found it of interest from our behavior analysis. On the forts to expand into space could make to read that your editors apparently contrary, decades of experimental re- what is now a hostile, barren empti- regard me as deceased. I can assure search have demonstrated that the ness into a livable habitat . . . not just you that I am, thank you very much, laws and principles discovered initially for people, but for whatever Ufe we among the Uving. with nonhumans apply even to very bring along." Come again? Brent E. Martin complex forms of human behavior, Bernd Heinrich Tucson, Arizona such as language and thinking, that University of Vermont others attribute to mind. Burlington, Vermont The Editors reply: In the sentence Henry Schlinger in question, the word "late" should California State University, Northridge Robert Zimmerman replies: As have referred only to Charles H. Northridge, California Bernd Heinrich says, the experiment Lowe. We are happy to acknowledge produced a scientifically meaningfril re- our error. Frans B. M. de Waal replies: True, sult, and in that sense it was not a fail- a fragment of the behaviorist school ure. But for humans to successfrilly

Bad Behavior? adheres to the original notion that all colonize the planets, we will also have In his review "Brains and the Beast" organisms foUow the same law of ef- to make space livable for many other

(5/04), Frans B. M. de Waal bashes a fect, and that thinking is a behavior life-forms besides ourselves. Thus, the behaviorist straw person. For ex- rather than a mental process. This mi- failure of the Soviets to devise an envi- ample, he writes that the "so-called" nority view survives in a particular ronment in which quail chicks could law of effect states that "all behavior is school of therapy, known as Behavior prosper merely means that more exper- conditioned by reward and punish- Analysis. Since this school rarely if iments have to be done. Moreover, ment." But the law of effect—a bona ever says much about animal behavior, there is ample evidence from later ex- fide law of behavior with more than it was ignored in the present discus- periments in space that there is nothing sixty years of sohd research behind sion. The vast majority of psychol- inherent in weighdessness or space to it—does not state that "all" behavior ogy-trained students of animal behav- prevent our success. ior take a different stance. They are

behaviorists only when it comes to Amendment: A Web site was in- animals, being far more liberal in their correctly transcribed in the "nature, Answt interpretations of human behavior. net" column "Olympian Sites" "Cryp This double standard is reflected in (7-8/04). Petra H. Lenz's site is Creabjres" B^jg; www.pbrc.hawaii.edu/~petra/animal_ puzzle SMBjaH^^MSw questions, such as Chve D L. (page c ^^1 Wynne's, about how we compare olympians.html with animals. The question itself be- trays the historical roots of psychology Natural History welcomes correspon- 1^ in philosophy and religion, because dence from readers. Please send e-mail to m no biologist would ever ask such a [email protected] All let-

question. and animals are not ters should include a daytime telephone 1—fWiS^\j Humans ,|||H * wu separate categories, at least not any number, and all letters may be edited for more than giraffes and animals are. length and clarity.

September 2004 natural history 71 OUT THERE account for the observed variety of QSOs. If so, each view—each kind of QSO—affords the chance to study a different aspect of supermassive black Ablaze from Afar holes and their environs. One member of the QSO mena-

gerie is called a blazar, and it appears Astronomers may have identified to be a QSO viewed right "down the barrel" of one of its jets. Now a re- the most distant "hlazar" yet. search team led by Roger W Romani of Stanford University has reported By Charles Liu the discovery of the most distant blazar ever identified, some 13 billion Hght-years from Earth. Imagine standing on a hilltop on a sive black hole, several million to sev- foggy night, with a powerful eral billion times the mass of our Sun. Regardless of the viewing geom- flashlight in each hand. You point All around the black hole are enor- etry, all QSOs reside at the cen- one flashUght forward and one back- mous swirling clouds of matter, which ters of distant galaxies. The closest ward, then turn them both on. If a the black hole's great mass drags in- QSOs are about a bOlion hght-years

friend is watching from far away, what ward. The infaUing matter liberates from Earth. (Plenty of supermassive would she see? It depends, of course, tremendous amounts of energy—often black holes he closer by, but they and on what direction she's looking from. more in a few hours than the Sun will their environments are much less lu-

From either side, she would observe produce in its entire projected ten-bil- minous.) The central energy source of two cones of Hght—illuminated fog. Hon-year existence. a QSO is so bright and concentrated that, from our vantage, it drowns out

the Hght of its host galaxy. That's why, in any typical picture of the sky, QSOs look Hke ordinary stars. The resemblance creates a problem for astronomers. With miUions of fore- ground stars for every QSO in the sky, identifying the latter can be harder

i:| . '^^^^H^^^^^^P^^ than finding miniature black pearls in a barrel of peppercorns. The only way

to be sure that an object is a QSO is to

measure its fuU spectrum, and that can

take a lot of telescope time. There aren't enough telescopes in the world to permit astronomers to measure the spectra of every starhke object in the sky, hoping to discover QSOs by chance. So astronomers have to find BrassaT, Avenue de I'Observatoire (hesdiigbts), 1 934 clever ways to improve the odds of really—shining from one spot, in op- Much of the energy gets channeled finding these black-hole superengines.

posite directions. Observing from be- into two powerful, oppositely aimed One way is to search for electro- hind or in front of you, though, she'd jets of electromagnetic radiation and magnetic radiation other than visible see a single bright source, aimed di- subatomic particles, plowing outward light. Powered by nuclear fusion at rectly at her. at nearly the speed of light. So depend- their cores, ordinary stars generally This example illustrates the quan- ing on whether, from our vantage emit most of their energy as visible, dary we astronomers face when we point here in the Milky Way, the jets ultraviolet, and infrared hght in well- study the superenergetic systems of a QSO are head-on, sideways, or di- known output ratios, determined by known as quasi-stellar objects, or agonal to our line of sight, we observe their composition and temperature. QSOs. According to current theory, a single powerful beam, two expanding QSOs, by contrast, are powered by all QSOs lie far outside our Milky Way jets of glowing gas, or something in gravity, not nuclear fusion. They emit and harbor at their center a supermas- between. Viewing angles may thus copious quantities of X rays and

72 NATURAL HISTO.RY September 2004 radio waves, whereas typical stars pro- ray data obtained with the Compton billion years old. The object thus affords duce only minute amounts. So QSO Gamma Ray Observatory, and com- astronomers an unprecedented view of hunters often make X-ray images of pared them with X-ray, radio, and vis- a QSO jet early in cosmic history, and large areas of sky, then match them up ible light data to find probable QSOs. may illuminate how such jets affected with radio and visible-light images. If Then, with the 9.2-meter Hobby- the development of the universe.

an object shines brightly in all three Eberly Telescope 450 miles west of But the discovery also opens up a pictures, it's a good bet that it's a QSO. Austin, Texas, they measured the spec- new puzzle. Based on their observa- Romani and his colleagues added tra of the blazar candidates to confirm tions, Romani and his coworkers esti- another dimension to this multiwave- their identities. mate that the central black hole of the length strategy—one particularly blazar may be more than 15 billion suited to identifying blazars. QSOs he technique has enabled Romani times the mass of our Sun. How did emit gamma rays, the most energetic T and his colleagues to pinpoint a such an enormous black hole form so type of electromagnetic radiation, near number of blazars, all billions of light- soon after the big bang? If the mass their centers, but this radiation seems years from Earth. One of them, in an measurement is confirmed, black- to be directed largely along the jet. So area of the sky off the end of the bowl hole theorists will have yet another if you happen to be staring head-on at of the Big Dipper, stood out. With a mystery to ponder. a QSO jet—that is, when you're look- redshift of 5.47 it is so far away that the left the ing at a blazar—the gamma rays should when Ught we now observe Charles Liu is a professor ofastrophysia at the be visible. To pinpoint likely blazars, blazar, the universe was only 1 5 percent City Uiiii'ersity of New York and an associate

Romani's team assembled gamma- of its present size and "only" about a witli the American Museum c>f Natural History.

THE SKY IN SEPTEMBER By Joe Rao

Mercury makes a brief appearance in watchers at midnorthern latitudes, tude 0.2 but pales next to the brU- the September sky, peeking out from morning apparitions of Venus, shining Uance of Venus. Indeed, Saturn only

the glare of the Sun in the first week at magnitude -4.2, don't get much appears one-fifty-eighth as bright. of the month. On the 9th, shining at better than this. The planet glides Venus gradually moves east as Septem- magnitude —0.4, the swiftest planet about three and a half degrees south of ber ages, leaving Saturn on its own in

reaches its greatest elongation, eigh- the center of M44, the Beehive star Gemini. The planet's ring system is teen degrees west of the Sun, and rises cluster in the constellation Cancer, the tipped about twenty-two degrees to-

with the break of day. The following crab, on the mornings of the 1 0th and ward Earth, and provides a spectacular

morning Mercury is up ninety inin- 11th. By month's end Venus has de- view even in small telescopes. utes before the Sun and passes breath- scended to within five degrees of

takingly close to the star Regulus. Regulus, on its way to a close en- The Moon wanes to last quarter on Observed from Europe, the planet al- counter on October 3. the 6th at 11:11 A.M. and becomes most grazes Regulus, passing just 0.06 new on the 14th at 10:29 a.m. It

degree (about an eighth the diameter Mars is in conjunction with the Sun waxes to first quarter on the 21st at

of the fLiU Moon) south of the star. on the 15th and cannot readily be 11:54 A.M. and to fuU on the 28th at For most viewers in the Western seen until the end of October. 9:09 A.M. That fuU Moon is known Hemisphere, Mercury has already as the harvest Moon: the fuU Moon

begun to recede from the star by the Jupiter, too, is lost in the glare of the closest to the autumnal equinox in

time the planet rises, though it is still Sun during September and reaches the Northern Hemisphere.

less than half the Moon's disk away. conjunction with our star on the 21st.

Speedy Mercury is easUy visible as late The equinox takes place at 12:30 P.M.

as the 19th; as it nears the Sun on the Saturn starts the month paired with on the 22nd. The Sun crosses the ce-

sky, it brightens to magnitude —1.2. blazing Venus. On the 1st, look to- lestial equator from north to south as

Thereafter, the planet rises invisibly in ward the east-northeast soon after 3 it traces its apparent annual path

the glare of the morning. A.M.; Saturn is a couple of degrees against the background of stars. Au- above and to the left of Venus. Even tumn begins in the Northern Hemi- Venus rises about 3 A.M., some two farther above and to the left of this sphere, spring in the Southern.

hours before the first light of dawn, planetary pair are Castor and Pollux, and shines near the much dimmer the bright twin stars of the constella- All exact times are given in eastern day- Saturn as the month begins. For sky- tion Gemini. Saturn shines at magni- light time.

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parent stars. Direct images would greatly expand our understanding of these plan- Picturing Planets ets, revealing their mass, composition, and whether they have atmospheres that

could possibly harbor life there. And Dr. Strange new worlds. They're out there, but has any- m i Oppenheimer's camera will be ready for one actually seen a planet beyond our solar system? stellar close-ups. That is, it can sift out Dr. Oppenheimer (right) Ben Oppenheimer, a postdoctoral fellow at the Jupiter-sized planets as near to their stars and colleague American Museum of Natural History, aims to be the as Earth is to the Sun. Previous corona-

first. He has built a camera, called the Lyot Project Corona- graphs could only see larger brown dwarfs (a.k.a. "failed stars") graph, that blots out the blinding rays of stars so their orbiting and other companions orbiting stars at greater distances. planets can be directly imaged. In the coming months. Dr. Oppenheimer will focus on the This spring, he and his colleagues installed the camera on parent stars of presumed planets that are within 100 light-

a sophisticated U.S. Air Force telescope at the top of Haleakala, years of Earth. Like his Museum colleagues in search of organ- a dormant volcano on Maui. The $2 million coronagraph was isms on our planet, he hopes to track dovrai these elusive Earth

funded by the National Science Foundation, National Aero- cousins and explore their horizons. When it comes to strange

nautics and Space Administration, and private donors. new worlds, you have to see it to believe it. In the past decade, scientists have indirectly detected more The Lyot Project was supported in part by Hilary Lipsitz, Charlene and Anthony than 100 planets by observing their "wobble" effect on their Marshall, and Cordelia Corp.

High School Science Research Program

When asked what they gorillas in an effort to analyze It is a selective, intensive whales for the last year in did on their summer their family relationships. program in which students the Museum's molecular vacations, the high school Wendy is just one of the commit to at least two years, laboratories. Others are col-

interns working at the Ameri- 60 interns participating in including summers. Students lecting frozen tissue sam- can Museum of Natural His- the Museum's High School declare a "major" related to ples for the Museum's Am-

tory will have some amazing Science Research Program an area of Museum special- brose Monell Collection for jobs to describe. For example, (HSSRP), an early training ization, such as genetics, as- Molecular and Microbial Re-

instead of serving up fries or ground for high school trophysics, anthropology, or search, updating the online

ringing up retail sales like sophomores and juniors, biodiversity, and then follow database showing the evolu- some of her classmates, many of them city kids reflect- up with a year of preparation tionary relationships be- racial in con- tween different bird species, Wendy Guillen, 15, mingled ing the great ethnic and that includes courses

with monkeys this August at diversity of New York City, in- tent and research techniques. and investigating Meso-

the Sedgewick County Zoo in terested in pursuing careers in Most of the students partici- amerlcan artifacts from the Wichita, Kansas, working research science. The HSSRP pate in ongoing scientific re- Museum's vaults that have with Museum scientists on students work side-by-side search, like Lawrence Lin, 17, never been studied. behavioral and genetic stud- with Museum professionals a junior at Bronx High School The High School Science Research ies involving groups of chim- and top scientists on a wide of Science who has been Program is supported in part by the panzees, orangutans, and range of exciting projects. analyzing the DNA of gray Lita Annenberg Hazen Foundation.

~AlTr.sr.^-^;^!f.r'-: A young visitor to the special exhibi-

tion Frogs: A Chorus of Colors gets

up close and personal with a bright

blue dart poison frog. But she's not

In danger—dart poison frogs In the

wild are rendered toxic by their diet,

and in captivity are fed a controlled

diet that makes them harmless.

Frogs features over 200 live frogs

and remains on view at the

Museum until January 9, 2005.

The Earth Machine

One hundred sixty-eight imposing rock speci- extends the science presented in the Cottesman Hall mens greet visitors to the Museum's Cottes- of Planet Earth, which was curated by Drs. Mathez, man Hall of Planet Earth. Gaze upon towering sul- Webster, and other Museum geologists. Full of pho- fide chimneys from the deep ocean, a striking tographs and interspersed with tales of how rock 2.7-billion-year-old red and black banded iron for- samples were brought from the Juan de Fuca Ridge in mation that records a distant era when the atmos- the northeast Pacific Ocean; Mauritania; Hawaii; and phere contained no oxygen, and a massive speci- "Rockopolis," California, to the Museum, the book men of shiny black volcanic obsidian. Run your describes for the general reader how Earth works, hand across giant pieces of polished rock that re- from its core out to the far reaches of the atmosphere. semble fancy kitchen countertops but tell the So if you're the type who wonders what climates story of Earth. were like in times past, why some volcanoes erupt Then, delve into The Earth Machine: The Science ofa Dynamic explosively while others just simmer along, how ancient mi- Planet (Columbia University Press), by Edmond A. Mathez, Cura- crobes influenced the evolution of our planet, or why there are tor in the Museum's Department of Earth and Planeta^ Sciences oceans on Earth but not on Mars or Venus, this book is your en- Division of Physical Sciences, and James D. Webster, Chairman gaging and scientific tour guide, escorting you from the Cottes- and Curator in the same department. The book is based on and man Hall of Planet Earth to the corners of the globe.

In June 2004, using the latest

digital x-ray technology, scien-

tists peeked under the skin of

the African elephants in the

Akeley Hall of African Mam-

mals to see how the interior

scaffolding of wood and metal

is holding up, in the last phase

of an extensive conservation

survey of the hall funded by

a Getty Conservation Grant.

The contents of these paces are provided to Natural History et the American Museum of Natural History. Museum Events American Museum S Natural History ^

Loori, is the abbot of Zen from the encroachment of

g Mountain Monastery, which mining and cattle ranching.

1 he founded in 1980 in Mt. p Tremper, New York. FIELD TRIP Fall Bird Walks in 5 Vital Variety: Central Park S A Visual Celebration Eight weekly sessions

i of Invertebrate Biodiversity start September 7, 8, and g. g Through Spring 200^ Invertebrates, which constitute more than 80 percent of Earth's known species and play

a critical role in the survival of humankind, are the subject of these extraordinarily beautiful

Mexican dumpy frog close-up photographs.

This exhibition is made possible by the generosity of the Arthur Ross Foundation. EXHIBITIONS New York City's World Trade WORKSHOP

Frogs: A Chorus of Colors Center on February 26, 1993, Animal Drawing

Through January g, 200^ and September n, 2001, cre- LECTURES Eight Thursdays, g/y-n/iS, This delightful exhibition ate a powerful and poignant Secret Life of Lobsters y:oo-g:oo p.m. introduces visitors to the memorial. Tuesday, g/21, y:oo-8:}o p.m. Dioramas, dinosaurs, and colorful and richly diverse Made possible by/thanks to; Lower journalist and former fisher- more provide the inspiration Manhattan Development Corporation; world of frogs, with over 200 man Trevor Corson paints an for this intensive drawing class. White & Case LLP; Toys'R'Us; 92nd Street live specimens thriving in Y; Jewish Community Center Metro West; intimate portrait of a Maine Sid jacobson Community Center; re-created habitats. The Jewish lobstering community strug- FAMILY AND Family and Children's Agency, Inc.; exhibition explores the biology Stamford Jewish Community Center. gling to save both its way of CHILDREN'S PROGRAMS of these popular amphibians, life and the lobsters it Signed Tour: their importance to ecosys- Art in Nature: depends on. Hall of Asian Mammals tems, and the threats they The Photographs Saturday, g/u, 1:4^ p.m. face in the world's changing ofJohn Daido Loori NOVA: Origins A simultaneously signed and environments. Wednesday, g/22, '/:00 p.m. spoken tour for the

Frogs: A Chorus of Colors is presented with This PBS miniseries explores whole family. appreciation to Clyde Peeling's Reptiland. the origins of the universe, our

solar system, and life on Earth. Space Explorers: Constel- Fall Colors across Clips from the show and a lations of the Fall Sky

North America discussion are hosted by Neil Tuesday, g/14, 4:^0-^4^ p.m. Opens September 2^ deCrasse Tyson, Frederick P. (Ages 10 and up) The fiery colors of autumn Rose Director of the Hayden An in-depth look at the stars come to life in these images by Planetarium. of autumn in the Hayden

^~ DHARMA COMMUNICATIONS, Anthony E. Cook, taken as he nrruwiArmU/5 Planetarium. ^^^^ photographer- journeyed from the northern JOHN DAIDO LOORI Dawid Kruiper tundra of Alaska and Canada Through January 9, 200^ Sunday, g/26, 2:00 p.m. Dr. Nebula's Laboratory: to the deep southern bayous These striking abstract photo- Dawid Kruiper, traditional Light and Optics of Louisiana. graphs reveal hidden treasures leader of South Africa's Sunday, g/ig, 2:00-^:00 p.m.

and explore notions of scale in Xhomani Bushmen, shares (Ages 4 and up, each child with Art for Heart the dramatic land- and the story of his trip across one adult)

Through September 26 seascape of Point Lobos State the United States and its Dr. Nebula's apprentice

Paintings by children who k ;t Reserve in California. The mission —to raise awareness Scooter "illuminates" the loved ones in the attacks on photographer, John Daido of the threats his people face mysteries of light and optics. HAYDEN PLANETARIUM NASA's Eyes on The Search for Life: PROGRAMS the Universe Are We Alone? INFORMATION Six Mondays, g/21-io/ig, Narrated by Harrison Ford Call 212-769-5100 or visit

6:]0-8:}0 p.m. Made possible through the generous www.amnh.org. support of Swiss Re. With telescopes observing across the spectrum—optical, TICKETS AND X-ray, and infrared—NASA LARGE-FORMAT FILMS REGISTRATION has opened up the heavens LeFrak Theater Call 212-769-5200, to researchers around Bugs! Monday-Friday, A glowing aurora on Jupiter NASA/ESA, JOHN CLARKE the world. This live-action rain 9:00 a.m. -5:00 p.m., (UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN) forest adventure follows or visit wwAA/.amnh.org. TUESDAYS IN THE DOME Which End Is Up? the dramatic lives of a A service charge may apply Virtual Universe Telescopes for Beginners praying mantis and a grace- The Lives of Stars Four Wednesdays, g/ig-io/io, ful butterfly and ends All programs are subject

Tuesday, g/y, 6:]o-'/:]o p.m. 6:}o-8:^o p.m. with their inevitable to change. Learn which binoculars or encounter.

This Just In. . . telescope is right for you

September's Hot Topics and your needs in four easy Lewis

Tuesday, g/21, 6:]o-y:]o p.m. sessions. Great Journey West William Clark through the Relive the historic journey of uncharted West. Celestial Highlights PLANETARIUM SHOWS Morning Planet Parade SonicVision Tuesday, g/28, G-.jo-y.^op.m. Fridays and Saturdays, y.jo, 8:jo, and g:}op.m. COURSES Hypnotic visuals and rhythms Matter and Motion take viewers on an unforget-

14 Thursdays, g/i-u/g, table ride through fantastical 6:]o-8:}o p.m. dreamspace.

A college-level introduction SonicVision is made possible by generous sponsorship and technology support to the cosmos that explores from Sun Microsystems, Inc. the basic physics of the universe and how it applies Passport to the Universe to the frontier of modern Narrated by Tom Hanks astronomical research.

Starry Nights Become a Member of the American Museum of Natural History Live Jazz As a Museum Member you will be among the first to embark on new journeys to explore the natural world Friday, 9/3 and the cultures of humanity You'll enjoy: 5:30 and 7:00 p.m. Unlimited free general • Free subscription Rose Center admission to the Museum to Natural History for Earth and Space and special exhibitions, magazine and to Rotunda, and discounts on Space our newsletter Shows and IMAX®fllms Eric Reed Invitations to Members- Ensemble Discounts in the Museum only special events, Shop, restaurants, and on parties, and exhibition program tickets previews Starry Nights is made possible by Lead Sponsor Verizon and Associate Sponsors CenterCare Health Plan and Constellation For further information, call 212-769-5606 NewEnergy. or visit www.amnh.org.

The contents of these paces are provided to Natural Histohy by the American Museum of Natural History. —

ENDPAPER

June. Also unique to Chicago was the lack of text- books, which were replaced by direct readings of the Mixing It Up great scholars and their commentators. In Nat. Sci. 2, that meant reading the work of Charles Darwin,

Gregor Mendel, J. B.S. Haldane, Julian Huxley. How I Became a Scientist I was sixteen when I met Sagan, and he was nearly five years my senior. Tail, handsome in a sort of ga- looty way, with a shock of brown-black hair, he cap-

By Lynn Margulis tivated me. I literally ran into him one day as I was bounding up the steps of Eckhart HaU, the math buUding. "Aren't you Lynn?" he asked. "Aren't you

survive my parents' squabbles, I invented a Carl Sagan?" I answered. Tomultiplicity of escapes. From age five, vi^hen At the time he was a graduate student in physics, my family moved to the South Side of poised to launch his stratospheric career. Although I

Chicago, I would lie in the cool grass patch that ex- was a mere girl and our attraction was the usual

tended from the traffic-ridden South Shore Drive to erotic one, his love for science was contagious. I our cracked sidewalk. In that tiny natural green belt, caught his passion.

with a view of the glorious Lake Michigan, I studied I accompanied Carl north to Wisconsin in Sep-

the frenetic conformity of ants on a sugar trail in the tember 1957, on the eve o{ Sputnik 1. There, as an grass, and sow bugs hidden under rocks. On my astronomy graduate student, he worked at the Uni-

belly on the turf, I plotted my escape into nature. versity of Chicago's observatory in Williams Bay. I From age ten, summer camps on Wisconsin lakes sought a hfe-sciences education seventy miles away,

enchanted me. At twelve I became infatuated with at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I science itself, when my studied the inheritance of organelles. The mitochon- seventeen-year-old camp dria and plastids reproduced on their own, outside

counselor began talk- the cell's nucleus. Were they somehow separate? Did ing about amoebas. Boy they have their own genes, their own natural history?

crazy as I was, I asked, My interests in the margins of the cell were com- "How can you tell males plemented by reading interests in the margins of

from females?" biology. There I found that my predecessors "You can't," she said. some of them, Uke the American Ivan WaUin, ma-

"It's a single cell. It has hgned and ignored, and others, such as Konstantin no sex." Merezhkovsky, taken seriously, but only in the "Then how does it Soviet Union—had previously postulated that or- The author, aged about twelve reproduce?" ganelles had evolved from bacteria that became "It splits in half," she said. trapped in larger cells. Now with my own eyes I Splits in half? How did she know? How could could see that they were right.

that be? Wouldn't it hurt? But in her answer I sus- Each cell in your body resembles an amoeba. But pected right then, right away, that my love of nature the oxygen-using parts, the mitochondria, derive could be augmented by inquiry. from bacteria. The ancient naturalists speculated Hating the reign of terror at Hyde Park High about mixed-up animals—chimeras, mermaids

School, I switched to the College of the University that combined parts offish, reptiles, birds, and mam-

of Chicago at age fourteen, as soon as I found out mals. Far more amazing than those imagined crea-

about their policy of equaUty based on test scores, tures are the hybrids of our own bodies. Each of us is regardless of creed, race, or age above fourteen. a colossus of nanobeasts, a coordinated bestiary with Two factors converted me to science: the Univer- abihties more diverse and precise in the aggregate sity of Chicago and Carl Sagan, who later became than those of any machine. my husband. Lynn Margulis is Distiiigiiislied University Professor in the The College of the University of Chicago was department of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, unique, as was its academic beacon, a course called Amiierst. Tliis essay was excerpted from Curious Minds: Natural Science 2. Tests were optional. So was all at- How a Child Becomes a Scientist, edited byJohn Brockman,

tendance in classes and laboratories. What counted u'hicli is being published this month by Pantheon Books. Copy-

were the six- to nine-hour fmal examinations in riglir ©2004 by John Brockman.

80 NATURAL HISTORY September 2004 Behind Sam Singh, master of a Shel countries we supply. Why? Because

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HE'S GIVEN PLANTS AND ANIMALS WHAT EVOLUTION DID NOT. AVOICE.

There's no greater voice for the preservation of nature than that of George Schaller of the

Wildlife Conservation Society. He's spent a lifetime protecting snow leopards in the Himalayas;

tigers in India; mountain gorillas and lions in Africa; jaguars in Brazil; and, more recently, the

Tibetan antelope, chiru, which was slaughtered to near extinction for its coat. His efforts

have helped establish wildlife preserves around the world. Of his quest to save our fragile

ecosystem, Schaller said it best: "Future generations must be inheritors, not just survivors.'

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