Natural History articles from September 2002

Natural History archives from September 2002

Waiting to inhale. (Up Front).
September 1, 2002... Many years ago, a friend invited me for a midwinter visit to her rented beach cottage on a Caribbean island. It was to be my first experience of non-temperate-zone nature. I planned to swim out into the turquoise waters and observe the bright...

Wasp roundup. (Letters).
September 1, 2002... Joe Coelho's article about cicada killers ("Spurred On to Greater Depths," 7/02-8/02) intrigued me because I was absolutely terrorized by these giant wasps as a child growing up in New Jersey. Are they poisonous? Do they sting? If so, how easy...

Not quite ubiquitous. (Letters).
September 1, 2002... I was interested in the article "Avian Quick-Change Artists" (6/02) because house finches are the most common finches at my parents' bird feeders. But according to the maps in the article, we live in a part of the country where the finches...

New identity. (Letters).
September 1, 2002... The last photo accompanying "Little Loggers Make a Big Difference" (5/02) shows a kestrel attacking what is the longest-tailed, biggest-eyed "vole" I ever saw. No doubt a mutant--or a vole mimicking a mouse in good Darwinian style. Keith...

Movie rebuff. (Letters).
September 1, 2002... I enjoyed Neil deGrasse Tyson's recounting of some of Hollywood's astronomical howlers ("Universe," 6/02). But I'm afraid Mr. Tyson made a howler of his own in writing about the movie Titanic. Yes, producer James Cameron was correct in not...

Shedding light. (Letters).
September 1, 2002... I would like to clear up a misconception in Charles Liu's article "Good Morning, Starshine" (7/02-8/02): that when the universe was young, both ultraviolet and "visible" light were absorbed by hydrogen atoms. It is true that before the hydrogen...

Young Naturalist Awards 2002. (At The Museum).
September 1, 2002... For the American Museum of Natural History's fifth annual Young Naturalist Awards, students in grades 7 through 12 were invited to embark on an expedition that focused on a topic in biology, earth science, or astronomy and to document and...

Sexy bile. (Samplings).
September 1, 2002... Sex pheromones--chemicals released into the environment that attract members of the opposite sex--are well known in insects. Vertebrates, too, can broadcast chemical siren songs, but only at short range--or so it was thought until the recent...

Bird sees, bird sings. (Samplings).
September 1, 2002... The morning burst of birdsong is called the dawn chorus. One feature of this chorus is the consistent order in which various species begin to sing. Robins, for example, always start singing earlier than house sparrows. The reason for this order...

High-altitude fireworks. (Samplings).
September 1, 2002... For the first time, an electric discharge has been seen stretching all the way from the tops of thunderclouds (approximately ten miles above Earth) to the bottom of the ionosphere (about forty-four miles up). The phenomenon was videotaped by a...

Itsy-bitsy suitor. (Samplings).
September 1, 2002... If you compare your ability to run up a slope with that of a child, or your tree-climbing prowess with that of a squirrel, a biophysical truth will quickly become evident: smaller bodies fight gravity more easily than bigger ones. Three...

With or without. (Samplings).
September 1, 2002... The eel catfish (Channallabes apus), which lives in the rainforests of central Africa, spends its time slithering under the mud. This fish can detect worms that lie just beneath the surface of very moist soil and it comes up to eat them. C....

Experiment of the month.
September 1, 2002... In the Red Sea, stony corals such as Stylophora pistillata and Seriatopora hystrix grow relatively tall and slender when attached to horizontal surfaces but stouter when growing sideways from vertical rock walls or the flanks of sunken ships....

Alive and whale: a missing cetacean resurfaces in the Tropics. (Findings).
September 1, 2002... It had to be out there somewhere. It wasn't just a set of car keys that had gone missing--somehow an entire species of whale had been lost for more than a century. The story picks up in 1882 with a worn skull found on a beach in...

When a star isn't born: billions of brown dwarfs illuminate our galaxy--softly. (Out There).
September 1, 2002... Picture a cloud of hydrogen gas trillions of miles across (the Milky Way contains thousands of them). As the atoms and molecules stream and swift about, the thicker clumps of gas in the cloud slowly collapse in on themselves. After many...

The sky in September.
September 1, 2002... Mercury spends most of September too near the Sun to be seen from Earth. On the 27th it reaches inferior conjunction. Venus begins September shining low in the west-southwest after sundown, less than 1[degrees] from Spica, in Virgo, and...

Fat heads sink ships; protected by an internal "fender," a sperm whale can deliver a killing blow with its head. (Biomechanics).
September 1, 2002... In 1851 an enraged sperm whale smashed into the bow of the whaling ship Ann Alexander, causing it to sink in just minutes. The event resulted in a big boost in sales for the just-published Moby-Dick, Herman Melville's fictional account of a...

Their game is mud; skipping and jumping across the shore at low tide, mudskippers give new meaning to the phrase "fish out of water.".
September 1, 2002... The coastal mangrove forests and mudflats of northeastern Australia are rather inconvenient places to visit. Occupied by man-eating crocodiles and bloodsucking insects, and offering only a muddy quagmire for footing, the habitat definitely...

Once upon a milkweed: in this complex community, one insect's poison may be another's meal.
September 1, 2002... Snap a milkweed stem, and your fingertips will quickly be covered by the white sap for which the plant is named. This is no mother's milk, however, but a latex exuded by specialized structures, called laticifers, that are found throughout the...

Recording the spirit world: contemporary Inuit prints and drawings depict the animism at the heart and soul of a lost hunting culture.
September 1, 2002... In those days they had no doctors or nurses. Or expert people like zoologists to say why the animals were scarce," recounts Bibian Neeveeovak of Taloyoak, today believed to be the oldest person residing on the coast of the Canadian Arctic...

Caution: species crossing; hybridization often results in deformation and death, but sometimes it gives birth to new species.
September 1, 2002... What do you get if you cross a carrier pigeon with a woodpecker? Or a bear with a vampire? Riddles like these can be heard in schoolyards and at children's parties all over the world. Science fiction, too, employs hybrids--offspring from the...

One touch of venom: a box jellyfish is a killer without peer.
September 1, 2002... Found in the waters off northern Australia, the box jellyfish Chironex fleckeri is not the only marine invertebrate to use venom, but it is the possessor of arguably the most lethal venom in the world. In the past half century, sixty-five...

The trail to Palm Canyon: set aside for sheep, an Arizona refuge also shelters some unexpected plants. (This Land).
September 1, 2002... About fifty miles northeast of Yuma, Arizona, and largely surrounded by an army proving ground, the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge embraces a thousand-square-mile area, most of which is classified as wilderness. The terrain includes the dry,...

The future: perfect or posthuman? Two scientists different visions of a bioengineered world.
September 1, 2002... Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, by Francis Fukuyama (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future, by Gregory Stock (Houghton Mifflin) Book titles are frequently...

Bookshelf.
September 1, 2002... As hurricane season approaches, we would do well to remember past weather events by reading Willie Drye's Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 (National Geographic Society) and David Toomey's Stormchasers: The Hurricane Hunters...

Photographing Navajos. (Photography).
September 1, 2002... John Collier Jr. on the Reservation, 1948-1953, essays by C. Stewart Doty, Dale S. Mudge, and Herbert John Benally; photographs by John Collier Jr. (University of New Mexico Press) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

You are here. (nature.net).
September 1, 2002... After years of studying what happened in the first second after the big bang, British astrophysicist Richard Powell decided to create a Web site showing how we fit into the cosmos. "I wanted to see for myself what the universe looked like, and...

Crowning gory. (The Natural Moment).
September 1, 2002... Come September, a bull moose has more than a few clues that autumn and its imperatives are near. Days are shorter, air cooler, antlers itchier. After casting off the old set in winter, bulls sprout new antlers, channeling minerals--mostly...

Beyond the pale. (Endpaper).
September 1, 2002... In a large garden in a small town in central Scotland, I breed several types of tortoises--a feat deemed well-nigh impossible by some of my southern English colleagues, who consider Scotland to be just a stone's throw from the Arctic Circle. My...