Natural History articles from October 2002

Natural History archives from October 2002

The big picture. (Up Front).(how sciences influenced society)
October 1, 2002... Working at Natural History magazine for eighteen years has been nothing less than a re-education for me, not because it immersed me in new scientific findings (though it did that, of course) but because it slowly and surely revised my view of...

Meteors and magnitudes. (Letters).
October 1, 2002... I found Alan Burdick's "Now Hear This" column on noisy meteors ("Psst! Sounds Like a Meteor," 7/02-8/02) especially interesting, because years ago I saw and heard a very bright meteor while camping on a beach in Florida. It came out of the west...

Knock, knock. (Letters).
October 1, 2002... In Adam Summers's "Biomechanics" column about sperm whales ("Fat Heads Sink Ships," 9/02), he addresses the question of why a whale would seek out a collision with a ship. According to historians, whalers once called sperm whales "carpenter...

Spare that cicada killer. (Letters).
October 1, 2002... I saw the September "Letters" and began a mad search for the preceding issue with Joe Coelho's story on cicada killers ("Findings," 7/02-8/02). I had been introduced to cicada killer wasps at a campground in Pennsylvania just two weeks earlier....

Ninja turtles. (Letters).
October 1, 2002... H. Robert Bustard's description of the tortoise that learned to escape over a wooden barrier ("Endpaper," 9/02) gave me a sense of deja vu. We have a Russian tortoise that did the same thing, even though she has just a stump of a left rear leg...

Tern, tern, tern: since 1969 Helen Hays, the tern lady of Great Gull Island, has helped conserve thousands of seabirds. (At The Museum).
October 1, 2002... On May 22 I joined a small group from the American Museum of Natural History in a motor launch at Niantic, Connecticut. We chugged across Long Island Sound to Great Gull Island, a bird sanctuary jointly operated by the Museum and the Linnaean...

Museum events in October.
October 1, 2002... INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE MUSEUM Lecture 10/2 (Reports From the Field series): "Peterson Field Guides: The Legacy." Ornithologist Noble S. Proctor, Southern Connecticut State University. Orientation Theater (fourth floor), 7:00-8:30 P.M. ...

On a wing: get ready to join the fall migration. From Panama to the Poconos, a birdwatcher's guide to exciting autumn destinations....(Special Advertising Section).
October 1, 2002... Panama Home to 10,000 varieties of plants and almost 1,000 species of birds--more than in North America and Europe combined--Panama is a birder's paradise. THIS BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY and its diverse ecosystems--from highland cloud forests...

Accounting for taste. (Samplings).(how food habits of vultures affect their appearance)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... People who consider the carrion-eating habits of vultures disgusting might want to stop reading right now. The Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus), not content with rotten meat, also consumes cow and sheep feces. A good explanation has...

Of a right mind to fight. (Samplings).(lizard behavior)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... A male tree lizard is sunning itself on a rock by the side of U.S. Highway 80 in New Mexico. Suddenly a competitor, another male, appears a few feet away. Never mind that this intruder is in fact introduced by an experimenter working behind the...

New NARCS? (Samplings).(rats used as detectors of contraband)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... Another animal could soon join sniffer dogs in the business of contraband detection. Rats have good noses, too, and as demonstrated by James Otto, of the University of Baltimore, and Michael F. Brown and William Long III, of Villanova...

Sounds like trouble. (Samplings).(how frogs react to fire)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... In Africa, terrestrial animals respond in one of two ways to advancing savanna fires: by burrowing into the ground or running for their lives. For those who try to flee but aren't very fast, a little forewarning can mean the difference between...

Experiment of the month. (Samplings).(fiddler crab behavior)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... When attacked by a predator, a group of animals often becomes more compact as each individual tries to reach the relative safety of the center. Well documented in vertebrates, this so-called selfish herd effect has now been reported for an...

Sewage treatment. (Samplings).(aphid behavior)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... Aphids are well known for their production of honeydew, a sugary liquid excreted in great abundance by these sap-feeding insects. Free-living aphids need not worry about waste disposal: they can flick the honeydew away, give it to ants that...

Getting a head in the world: when the naidid worm reproduces, it grows a new front for its back half and a new tail for its front. (Findings).
October 1, 2002... We peer down at the tiny worm wriggling under the lens of our microscope. Four black eyes peer up at us: two from the creature's head and two from its... other head. Two-headed worms are common in our lab, and they're common outside the lab as...

Let there be dark: to keep the cosmos in view, sky watchers must fight to keep the Earth from being enveloped in a fog of artificial light. (Universe).
October 1, 2002... Astrophysics reigns as the most humbling of scientific disciplines. The astounding breadth and depth of the universe deflates our egos daily, and we are continually at the mercy of uncontrolled forces. A simple cloudy evening--one that would...

Can nature be declawed? Ecofeminists may be substituting one stereotype for another. (Ends & Means).
October 1, 2002... He stood outside the door of the museum, barefoot, very tan, and wearing only a faded pair of cutoffs. He was clutching a large bird to his chest. The bird was barely alive, its eyes shut, its black-and-white feathers moving slightly. "Can you...

Plains song: bison and life on the "American serengeti".(Excerpt)
October 1, 2002... After decades of field observation, zoologist Dale F. Lott turned to literary portraiture to capture what he had seen. What follows are sketches from Lott's American Bison, a book that captures far more of the natural and cultural history of...

The interpretation of genes: the "expression" of a genome is best understood as a dialogue with an organism's environment. That dialogue, not the genes alone, determines which ant becomes a queen, which fish becomes a male.
October 1, 2002... We sometimes think of the environment as "out there," a place separate from us, a place we can enter and leave at will. But the environment is, quite simply, the context for all of life; it is what makes us what we are. Plants in dry soil grow...

Trickle-down theory, Andean style: traditional irrigation practices provide a lesson in sharing.
October 1, 2002... As we looked out over a vast basin in the A southern Peruvian Andes, I asked my host the reason for the terracing I saw all around me. "The field always has to be flat so that the soil will absorb all the water," Eusebio Quispe told me. This...

Lip-o-suction: with teeth in its lips and its mouth open to 180[degrees], a hungry tadpole turns a scrape into a close shave. (Biomechanics).
October 1, 2002... Though the leap from frog to prince gets all the press, I would argue that the metamorphosis from tadpole to frog is just as impressive--even more so when you think about how often it has to happen. The transformation from frog to prince is no...

Starry weather: partly cloudy, with a chance of flares? (Out There).
October 1, 2002... Like all stars, the Sun is a seething ball of heat, light, and magnetic energy. Some of this energy regularly erupts from the Sun's surface, forming beautiful prominences, loops, and solar flares. Particularly powerful events eject millions of...

The sky in October.
October 1, 2002... Mercury rises ahead of the Sun all month. It's best seen during the second and third weeks of October, just above the eastern horizon about half an hour before sunrise. Also around this time, the much dimmer Mars is nearby. The two planets are...

A sudden death. (The Natural Moment).(water hole in Texas)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
October 1, 2002... Life tends to converge around water. In a desert, especially, a water hole can be a setting for congregation and confrontation, rest and action. Here the scene is a small pond in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, where photographer David...

Sifting truth from Pelee's ashes: how the real causes of a famous disaster, long misunderstood, became key elements in the modern science of volcanology.(Mount Pelee, Martinique)
October 1, 2002... On the morning of May 8, 1902, the volcano Mount Pelee, on the Caribbean island of Martinique, vomited a superheated cloud of gas loaded with dust and rock. The turbulent cloud, impelled by its own weight, raced down the mountain faster than a...

Bookshelf.(recommended books)(Bibliography)
October 1, 2002... Some of the fall's best reads involve quests. Japanese explorer Daisuke Takahashi has written In Search of Robinson Crusoe (Cooper Square Press), about his seven-year journey looking for traces of Daniel Defoe's real-life inspiration, Alexander...

Shifting ground. (nature.net).(web site about plate tectonics)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... Having studied geology in the early 1980s, I have trouble imagining the time, only a decade or so earlier, when plate tectonics--the unifying theory of our planet's inner workings--was not generally accepted. Perhaps that's why I so enjoyed the...

Bites of passage. (Endpaper).(man stung by bala ant while trying to study insect)
October 1, 2002... Costa Rica's La Selva Field Station is a gathering place for some of tropical biology's most brilliant minds. Its research facilities, which give easy access to the jungle, harbor lethal snakes, wild pigs, snapping turtles--and mad scientists....