Natural History articles from June 2009

Natural History archives from June 2009

The natural moment: angling without an angle.(THE NATURAL EXPLANATION)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the style of a lone, languid fisherman who infrequently casts a line, the typical anglerfish hunts by the motto, If you bait and wait, they will come. For most, that bait is conveniently built-in, near the mouth:...

Muscle bound.(nature.net)(physiology of giraffes)(Brief article)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] My children tease me about my "fear" of giraffes. It all started after I visited the popular exhibition "Body Worlds," the creation of German anatomist Gunther von Hagens (www.bodyworlds.com/ en.html). Even after...

Beauty before brains.(WORD EXCHANGE)(Correction notice)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The credit for photographer Thomas Vignaud, who took the opening image for "Brains of Beauties," by Paul S. Katz [5/09], was inadvertently omitted. With 10 million times the neurons of sea slugs, the editors can...

Linguistic dinosaurs.(WORD EXCHANGE)(Editorial)
June 1, 2009... Olivia Judson will be taking a break from her "Life Zone" column; along with her audience, we look forward to her return. Meanwhile, a reader questioned Judson's assertion that "birds are dinosaurs: they are descended from a dinosaur lineage"...

Fireproofing for a flame.(SAMPLINGS)(bowerbirds)(Brief article)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] To beguile females, some males build mansions, others build bowers. Male great bowerbirds (Chlamydera nuchalis) of northern Australia erect two walls of twigs partially flanking a six-foot-long passageway that they...

Special-occasion dress.(SAMPLINGS)(caecilians)(Brief article)
June 1, 2009... Caecilians are legless tropical amphibians that live mostly underground. Yet some of them sport bright stripes or solids in shades of yellow, pink, or blue--surprising, since visual signals aren't much use in their dark tunnels. The reason...

Going steady.(SAMPLINGS)(metallogorgia melanotrichos)(Brief article)
June 1, 2009... The deep-sea coral Metallogorgia melanotrichos resembles a tree inspired by Dr. Seuss, with pink leaves and a long, thin trunk. Within that cotton-candy canopy, every coral harbors a single brittle star, Ophiocreas oedipus. Both species have...

Botanic mechanics.(SAMPLINGS)(grass seeds)(Brief article)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The seeds of many grasses are remarkable little mechanical devices. Each seed's hull has one or more bristle-like projections called awns, covered with tiny barbs pointing away from the seed. When a seed is partly...

Detour on the silk road.(SAMPLINGS)(sericulture)(Brief article)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Your silk scarf or tie winds a long way back in history. By 1600 B.C., and possibly a millennium earlier, the Chinese had domesticated a wild silk moth, Bombyx mandarina, into B. mori, and had begun making fabric...

Misaligned by power lines.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2009... To aesthetes, high-voltage power lines are a blight on the rural landscape. But zoologists at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany welcome them as a tool for testing the power of large ruminants to perceive Earth's magnetic field. ...

Mum's the word.(SAMPLINGS)(rhesus monkeys)(Brief article)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When baby rhesus monkeys want to suckle, they do what human infants do: cry, cry, cry. Mothers often give in, naturally. When they don't, the babies' cries get on everyone's nerves-sometimes with nasty consequences....

Aphid sandbag brigade.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Social aphids have a soldier caste whose recruits may tackle civic projects as well as military operations. Take Nipponaphis monzeni, which induces tree twigs to grow hollow, woody balls called "galls." The aphid...

Dust up.(THE WARMING EARTH)(surface temperature of the tropical North Atlantic Ocean)(Brief article)
June 1, 2009... The surface temperature of the tropical North Atlantic Ocean--between Senegal and the Lesser Antilles--has risen faster than that of any other tropical ocean basin. it's been warming by about one-half a Fahrenheit degree per decade since 1980....

The good, the bad, and the oily: finding beauty in an unlikely place: cholesterol.(MEDICAL EXAMINER)
June 1, 2009... The poet Lord Byron--vain, athletic, and often cruel- was characteristically scornful of people whose bodies were swathed in too much fat. He called corpulence the "oily dropsy." His biting description was quoted by the great physician William...

The day we found the universe: January 1, 1925: Edwin Hubble's close observation of the Cepheids revealed that our galaxy is not alone.(CELEBRATING ASTRONOMY)(Reprint)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The twenties were not just roaring, they were blazing. Moviegoers flocked to the cinema to watch Moses part the Red Sea in Cecil B. DeMille's silent epic The Ten Commandments. Majestic ocean liners crossed the...

Splendid isolation: South America was an island for millions of years, fostering an evolutionary explosion of unique mammal species.(Cover story)
June 1, 2009... MENTION Australia, and kangaroos, koalas, and platypuses spring instantly to mind. Madagascar? Lemurs, of course! What about South America's native mammals? Llamas, alpacas, and jaguars, right? Think again. Like many familiar South American...

Talon hunt: updated by modern-day economics and science, the "sport of kings" retains its ancient fascination.
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Kit-chup! Tom Cullen calls, approaching his aviary. The sun warms a March afternoon; raptor breeding season has just begun. Stray Feathers and dry...

Science en masse: modern astronomy proceeds with telescopes, computers--and lots of eyeballs.(OUT THERE)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The size of the observable universe, with its roughly 100 billion galaxies, each containing billions of interesting objects such as stars, planets, nebulae, and black holes, is one of astronomy's greatest assets....

Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones.(Book review)
June 1, 2009... Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones by Gary Y. Okihiro University of California Press, 2009; 255 pages, $24.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] To know the pineapple is to love it. This is one of the most...

Opening Goliath: Banger and Discovery in Caving.(Book review)
June 1, 2009... Opening Goliath: Banger and Discovery in Caving by Cary J. Griffith Borealis Books, 2009; 294 pages, $27.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Claustrophobes beware: the key scenes in outdoor-adventure writer Cary J. Griffith's...

Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science.(Book review)
June 1, 2009... Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science by Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano Smithsonian Books/Collins, 2009; 286 pages, $26.99 ...

A is for Akeley and apes.(MEMORABILIA)(Carl E. Akeley)(In memoriam)
June 1, 2009... Hired by Chicago's Field Museum to create a series of dioramas of North American mammals, Carl E. Akeley (1864-1926) pioneered a new method of taxidermy. He measured an animal's muscles and bones when it was freshly skinned, then modeled its...

Goblins on the march: Utah does the hoodoo very well.(THIS LAND)(Goblin Valley State Park)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In southeastern Utah, west of the Green River, a tributary of the Colorado, and east of a prominent ridge known as the San Rafael Reef, red rock buttes stand like wayward ships lost in a sagebrush sea. The marine...

Skylog.(planet Venus)
June 1, 2009... Because, Venus's orbit is smaller than Earth s, we see that planet go through phases as it swings around the Sun. On June 5, Venus will be at its greatest western elongation--that is, as far west of the Sun as it can get from our point of view....

Uncharted territory: Lang and Chapin's historic Congo expedition.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Herbert Lang and James Chapin)
June 1, 2009... "The country is very rough all the way, but... as one gets farther and farther from Matadi, the vegetation increases, until most of the valleys have patches of forest. The course of the railroad is extraordinarily tortuous... [the train]...

Journey to Mecca.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Ibn Battuta)(Brief article)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] While Marco Polo remains famous as one of the world's greatest travelers, lesser-known Ibn Battuta journeyed over three times as far. In 1325, Ibn Battuta set out on what would become a 5,000-mile pilgrimage from his...

Identification day.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(identifying specimens by museum scientists)(Brief article)
June 1, 2009... Calling all treasure hunters! On Saturday, June 13, satisfy your curiosity about that odd flea-market find or basement discovery when Identification Day returns to the Museum as the latest installment in the Milstein Science Series. Museum...

At the museum: American Museum of Natural History.
June 1, 2009... EXHIBITIONS Extreme Mammals: The Biggest, Smallest, and Most Amazing Mammals of All Time Through January 3, 2010 Explore the surprising and sometimes bizarre world of extinct and living mammals. Extreme Mammals is organized...

Sweetness and mites.(ENDPAPER)
June 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] They live inside monkey lungs, snail slime, sea snake nostrils, and human hair follicles: mites, invertebrates in the superorder Acari. There are about 50,000 named species of them, and probably a million more yet to...