Natural History articles from May 2001

Natural History archives from May 2001

Others' Day.(difficulty of child-rearing)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... Probably because I grew up in a part of the world where most families were small and nuclear, I often heard friends remark that nothing in their experience--not the baby-sitting jobs, certainly not complaints from their own overworked mothers,...

LETTERS.(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2001... A Larva By Any Other Name On page 56 of "A World Apart," by Gregory A. Wray (3/01), two photographs illustrate the drastic morphological change that occurs in a snail at metamorphosis. Unfortunately, the photographs are of two decidedly...

IN SUM.(brood parasitism in ducks)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... SIS'S CHICKS Brood parasitism--tricking another mother into incubating one's eggs--is particularly common in ducks. A female duck simply lays her eggs in the nest of another duck, leaving the host mother to care for them. It's a good deal for...

Tiny Conspiracies.(quorum sensing in bacteria)
May 1, 2001... Cell-to-cell communication allows bacteria to coordinate their activity. Bacteria have adapted to a huge range of environments on earth, surviving and multiplying in and on plants and animals, in rock layers deep beneath the surface, in...

SCENIC BYWAYS.(travel destinations in Canada and United States)
May 1, 2001... Take the road less traveled. New Brunswick Adventure in the Wake of Natural Wonder! Welcome to New Brunswick, Canada, where you can experience one of the marine wonders of the world. This is New Brunswick, Canada's Bay of Fundy-WOW! In...

The Two Centuries of Caddo Lake.
May 1, 2001... A wetland shared by Texas and Lousiana has earned international recognition. About 200 years ago, a huge logjam formed in the Red River where it flows through northwestern Louisiana. Because of the buildup of logs, the river spilled into...

The Mysterious Side of Mercury.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... The MESSENGER launch in 2004 promises to lead us out of the dark. The dark side of the Moon? Been there, done that. Another dark side in our solar system, however, is beckoning to some astronomers today, much as the Moon's did to an earlier...

THE SKY IN MAY.
May 1, 2001... Mercury is just above the west-northwestern horizon at midtwilight, climbing higher night after night. For observers at temperate northern latitudes, mid-May offers the year's best chance to see Mercury. It's at greatest eastern elongation from...

Riding the Witches'-Broom.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... A tree's contorted response to infection may be a boon to forest animals. I was tagging along wire friends on a "hay ride" through Colorado's Arapaho National Forest when the old wrangler at the reins suddenly pulled his team to a halt....

Cosmic Plasma.
May 1, 2001... There's a lot of it out there but, thankfully, not too much of it down here. Only rarely does the medical doctor's vocabulary overlap with that of the astrophysicist. The human skull has two "orbits," the round cavities where your two...

Mothers and Others.(cooperative breeding)
May 1, 2001... FROM QUEEN BEES TO ELEPHANT MATRIARCHS, MANY ANIMAL MOTHERS ARE ASSISTED BY OTHERS IN REARING OFFSPRING. ANTHROPOLOGIST SARAH BLAFFER HRDY MAINTAINS THAT OUR HUMAN ANCESTORS, TOO, WERE "COOPERATIVE BREEDERS"--A MODE OF LIFE THAT ENABLED THEM TO...

New Zealand Sweet Stakes.
May 1, 2001... Sugar was a shared resource in a forest community until a greedy newcomer moved in. Biologist E. O. Wilson has called invertebrates "little things that run the world," because of their numbers, variety, and influence on larger organisms...

The Rewards of Chance.
May 1, 2001... Thanks to the random movements of agitated molecules, biological rubber allows clams to open wide and insects to fly efficiently. Sometimes the most profound messages in biology reside in the most pedestrian creatures. Consider the lowly...

The Genome Writ Large.
May 1, 2001... A new exhibition unravels the wonder, the promise, and the potential dangers of human DNA research. This past February 12, Charles Darwin's birthday, two versions of the human genome were announced--one produced by a public organization,...

The Cichlid Fishes: Nature's Grand Experiment in Evolution.(Review)
May 1, 2001... The Cichlid Fishes: Nature's Grand Experiment in Evolution, by George W. Barlow (Perseus Publishing, 2001; $28) Almost all living things, even the obscure and distinctly unromantic, have their human enthusiasts. Fleas have their Rothschild;...

Trilobitophilia.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... For nearly 300 million years, trilobites flourished in the world's oceans. It took the worst mass extinction, at the end of the Permian Period, to stop their long run. Just as dinosaurs and mammals are icons for the following eras, these...

BOOKSHELF.(Review)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... The Biodiversity Crisis: Losing What Counts, edited by Michael J. Novacek, $19.95; Earth: Inside and Out, edited by Edmond A. Mathez, $19.95; and Cosmic Horizons: Astronomy at the Cutting Edge, edited by Steven Soter and Neil de Grasse Tyson,...

Circle of Life.(reproduction of scolopendrids)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... Last July, white strolling through mixed hemlock-hardwood forest in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, photographer John Serrao gently turned over a rotting log. To his delight, he was treated to a rare glimpse of arthropod maternal behavior: a...

Celle Fantastyk.
May 1, 2001... Once, finding himself bleeding profusely after a bad fall, the naturalist Loren Eiseley apologized to his doomed blood cells: "Oh, don't go. I'm sorry." The words were spoken to no one, he wrote, but addressed to all the "crawling, living,...