Natural History articles from March 2002

Natural History archives from March 2002

On earth and in the heavens. (Up Front).
March 1, 2002... Like many people, I have found myself inexplicably moved by displays of color in the natural world. I have been stopped in my tracks by the sight of a purple iris in the woods. By the milky green of spring's first oak leaves, the soft browns on...

Before and after. (Letters).
March 1, 2002... I thoroughly enjoyed reading Robert M. Sapolsky's article "What Do Females Want?" ("Findings," 12/01-1/02), on female mate choice. But I wonder why he focused all of his attention on precopulatory choice, considering the fact that much recent...

The Moon and Saturn. (Letters).
March 1, 2002... In "The Sky in February" (2/02), Joe Rao writes about Saturn's occultation: "Saturn becomes obscured by the Moon's dark portion and reappears about an hour later from behind its bright limb. Depending on one's location, the Moon takes between...

Simply connect. (Letters).
March 1, 2002... What a sweet, utterly beautiful irony that in the same issue (2/02), Aparna Sreenivasan ("Keeping Up With the Cones") should write so well on Geerat Vermeij's first professional love--mollusks--and Vermeij ("Why Are There No Lobsters on Land or...

Match point. (Letters).
March 1, 2002... In her article about Margaret Mead entitled "American Icon" ("At the Museum" 12/01-1/02), Nancy C. Lutkehaus says that in a 1995 AMNH publication, Mead was listed as one of the institution's treasures, "no. 38, right between the Folsom Point...

Crows show the right stuff. (In Sum).(New Caledonian crows)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... CROWS SHOW THE RIGHT STUFF The recent discovery of a right-side visual preference in a species of crow has challenged the belief that we're the only creature with a predictable--and overwhelming--bent for taking one side. Certain populations of...

New light on UV. (In Sum).(effects of ultraviolet radiation on Hypericum calycinum)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... NEW LIGHT ON UV When we look at Hypericum calycinum--a flower in the Saint-John's-wort family--we see a uniformly yellow blossom. When insects look at it, they see a patterned blossom. Made by ultraviolet-absorbing pigments, such patterns are...

Crusty crustacean. (In Sum).(discovery of Crustacea fossils)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... CRUSTY CRUSTACEAN Crustaceans are a large and Varied crew, with some 39,000 species living today and many more known from their fossil remains. The oldest fossil crustaceans date back to the Late Cambrian Epoch, between 512 and 505 million...

Animal magnetism. (In Sum).(navigation of sea turtles)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... ANIMAL MAGNETISM As soon as they dig themselves out of their sandy nests on the shores of eastern Florida, hatchling loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) set out on a 9,000-mile journey Lasting anywhere from six to twelve years. Migrating...

Smells like home.(how wasp Polistes sulcifer adopts odors)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... SMELLS LIKE HOME Fish and houseguests supposedly stink after three days. Yet in that same interval, the parasitic wasp Polistes sulcifer can take over the home of a closely related species, adopting an odor that pleases its hosts. Native to the...

The bug that lays the golden eggs: an insect's odd looks are nothing compared with its odd behavior. (Findings).(golden egg bug)
March 1, 2002... Stretching from the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean Sea, the Catalonian region of northeastern Spain is a sunlit land of flowering meadows and rocky crags, vineyards and ancient fieldstone walls, lollipop-like pines and spreading cork oaks. But...

Life lines in the sand: after winter rain, arroyos become the desert's green arteries. (In The Field).(Sonoran Desert environment)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The people of the Sonoran Desert have a name for winter rains. Las equipatas, they call them. Unlike the violent thunderstorms of summer, which squander water in widely scattered torrents, these gentler rains come in a procession of "little...

Colors of the cosmos: red, green, and blue may mean one thing to a scientist and something different to everybody else. (Universe).
March 1, 2002... Only a few objects in Earth's nighttime sky emit or reflect enough light to trigger our retinas' color-sensitive cones. The red planet Mars can do it. So can the blue supergiant star Rigel (Orion's left kneecap) and the red supergiant...

Interleavings: hardwood and coniferous forests rub shoulders in Michigan's Lower Peninsula. (This Land).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... While driving north from Lansing in Michigan's Lower Peninsula, my wife, Beverly, and I passed the town of Clare, which a billboard proclaimed to be the "Gateway to the North." As if to confirm this, after a few miles the vegetation suddenly...

Baseball's reliquary: the oddly possible hybrid of shrine and university. (At The Museum).(history of baseball and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum)
March 1, 2002... Baseball did not win its central place in America's heart and culture because the sport, in a silliness of common parlance, "imitates life" or stands as a symbol for larger truths and trends of human existence. Rather, baseball became America's...

Museum events in March.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... "BASEBALL AS AMERICA" Exhibition opens 3/16 in Gallery 3 and continues through 8/18/02. Screenings 3/16, 3/31: Program of baseball shorts, including Mickey's Nine (1927), Boulevardier From the Bronx (1936), and Oompahs (1951)....

Seeing red...and yellow...and green...and: we owe our appreciation of color--what it is and how we perceive it--to scientists and artists. Do we also have some hungry primate ancestors to thank for the great pleasure it brings us?(Cover Story)
March 1, 2002... When the sun shines through a rain-darkened sky, one of nature s most celebrated wonders is revealed. In the arch that curves from the earth to the heavens, we can read the origin of colors. Sunlight seems to take on the color of anything it...

Say it with bowers: if male bowerbirds build it, females will come. But in the mountains of New Guinea, one species is sending mixed messages.
March 1, 2002... The first Westerners to penetrate the rugged interior of New Guinea encountered a world of plants and animals new to them. One of the earliest European naturalists to explore the inland mountains was Odoardo Beccari, who set out in 1872 to...

A short history of muscle-powered machines: what goes around comes around--and does useful work.
March 1, 2002... Today we have machines for making people move in place: run, walk uphill, push pedals back and forth or up and down, row, ski, or even climb a never-ending staircase. Machines that are designed to waste energy and that usually rely on still...

One giant leap for wormkind: some microscopic nematodes jump for their supper. (Biomechanics).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Many creatures--snakes, most fishes, some lizards, and all worms--have mastered the neat trick of getting around without benefit of appendages. Not even the aerial realm is free of the limbless: there are jumping vipers in South America, flying...

Rhymes with June and Spoon: how well do you really know the moon? (Celestial Events).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... There's a moon in the sky / It's called the moon." These lyrics from a late 1970s song by the B-52s might have been deliberately dopey, but they happen to capture a couple of truths about Earth's only natural satellite (aside from the fact that...

The sky in March.(watching the planets)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Mercury is approaching the Sun and is increasingly difficult to see. By the end of the first week of March, the -0.1 magnitude planet rises less than an hour before dawn; thereafter it is hidden in the Sun's glare. Venus hovers nearly due...

Salt: a World History. (Review: the spice of life).
March 1, 2002... Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky (Walker and Company, 2002; $28) Salt is a pillar of nature; without it, life is impossible. We may think of salt primarily as a minor and optional condiment, something so trivial that many...

Drought watch. (nature.net).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Our attention in Afghanistan has been focused on the war and the removal of the terrorists harbored there. But some of the suffering in that distant country comes from an entirely different kind of threat: persistent drought. As one starving...

Bookshelf.(Brief Review)
March 1, 2002... Among the Bears: Raising Orphan Cubs in the Wild, by Benjamin Kilham and Ed Gray (Henry Holt, 2002; $26) Kilham's account of orphaned black bear cubs, raised by him in New Hampshire's woodlands, overturns some of our long-held assumptions...

Head start. (The Natural Moment).(skin shedding in snakes)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The lowland rainforests of the Indonesian island of Java are perfect places for an arboreal, leaf-green snake to ply its predatory trade. Silently guiding through the trees or swimming in forest streams, it hunts for birds, frogs, lizards, and...

Beastly fun. (Endpaper).(animals in ancient Egypt)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Of all the civilizations of the ancient world, none seems to have enjoyed such a close and significant relationship with the animal realm as that of the ancient Egyptians. The vivid scenes that decorate the mastabas, or funerary chapels, of the...