Natural History articles from September 2006

Natural History archives from September 2006

Gotcha!(THE NATURAL MOMENT)(swamp ecology)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Precisely because they are full of pitfalls, swamps offer splendid refuge to those adept at sidestepping sinkholes. For dragonflies and other insects, a watery pit makes a good breeding site, and a thin skin of marshy soil makes for an easy...

Life support.(UP FRONT)(Editorial)
September 1, 2006... Quick--name an important mammal of the African savanna. If you re like me, you probably thought of the lion, the cheetah, the hyena, or any of several other toothy carnivores. But supporting many of those impressive creatures is the herbivore...

Infinite multiverse.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2006... Alex Vilenkin's article, "Beyond the Big Bang" [7-8/06], is stimulating and fantastic at the same time. The mind boggles at the thought that there are replica worlds in an infinite number of universes created by "eternal inflation." How...

Collateral damage.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2006... David Barraclough's article, "Bushels of Bots" [6/06], noted that every large animal species (including the rhinoceros) hosts several endemic species of parasites and commensals, such as flukes, protists, roundworms, and tapeworms. When a host...

Sharp medicine.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2006... In his article on porcupine quills ["Smart Weapons," 3/06], Uldis Roze measured the large force needed to pull a quill out of an animal's skin. I, too, have had the discomfort of watching a young veterinarian pull quills out of the long nose of...

Runaway inflation?(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2006... In Robert H. Mohlenbrock's article, "Along the Pothole Trails" [6/06], an extra zero has crept into the text. In describing Interstate State Park, he states that Lake Superior is 1,000 miles away. According to my trusty road atlas, and my...

Correction.(LETTERS)(Correction notice)
September 1, 2006... The locator map that accompanies Robert H. Mohlenbrock's article, "Along the Pothole Trails" [6/06], incorrectly places the area of detail. The area is north of St. Paul, Minnesota, not south.

Cooked fish and fowl.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... It's no secret that Earth's warming climate is imperiling many denizens of the maritime north. Two new studies show its effect on the breeding behavior of the Atlantic cod and a common seabird known as the Arctic tern. Cod populations have...

What's in a mane?(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... African lions have been classified into as many as twenty-three subspecies, many of them on the basis of variations in the appearance of the males' manes. Some populations have an extensive coverage of long, dark hair, whereas others have...

Written in stone.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... A dogma of the Earth sciences may be on shaky ground. Geologic hotspots--long thought to be relatively fixed points beneath Earth's shifting tectonic surface--are themselves moving around. Hotspots are areas of long-term volcanic activity...

Many like it hot.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Warmth and water do more than just make plants grow quickly. In the tropics, it seems, evolution itself proceeds at a faster pace than it does in temperate zones. Shane Wright, a biogeographer at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and...

Who needs sex?(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Sex is an evolutionary conundrum. If the point of sex, as most biologists believe, is to propagate your genes, parthenogenesis, in which females' eggs develop into young without fertilization by males, would seem to beat sexual reproduction...

Walkabout.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... About 5,000 years ago, after nearly thirty millennia in Australia, Aborigines began traveling a great deal throughout the continent and sharpening their tool-making skills. Was it a baby boom that prompted their cultural transformation, as some...

Side benefits.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Like right- or left-handed people, most animals seem to favor one side of their bodies for certain tasks. Lateralized behavior is a sign that the animals' brains are lateralized as well. But is there any benefit to having a lateralized brain? A...

Baby bat chat.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... "Goo-goo ga-ga" is an important step for a baby learning the intricacies of human language. Babies babble away with complete disregard for social context, happily practicing the sounds they will need to speak as adults. Only a handful of other...

Burgers and flies.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Grab that flyswatter! Public-health entomologists have discovered antibiotic-resistant bacteria lurking in the guts of houseflies buzzing around fast-food joints. Ludek Zurek and Lilia Macovei of Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas,...

Shocking Truths: if you break the sound barrier, you can make quite a stir.
September 1, 2006... No matter what the threshold of your sensibilities, modern life can be shocking. A passenger cursing loudly in a crowded subway car may shock your sense of propriety. War profiteering may shock your sense of ethics. Torture may shock your sense...

By a whisker: hairs (and steel wires) enable rats (and robots) to glean information about their surroundings in remarkable detail.(BIOMECHANICS)
September 1, 2006... When we were children, my siblings and I spent summers in the woods of northern Canada. Sleeping in a rustic cabin, and listening to mice scamper across the rafters just above us, my fondest dream was that one of the rodents would stumble and...

Wildebeests of the Serengeti: migrating in great numbers, the signature antelope of the African savanna must dodge predators, drought, and human development. On the side, it shapes its own habitat.
September 1, 2006... I often write, as I do here, on behalf of the wildebeest, or gnu: an antelope often portrayed as a homely, clownish creature put together out of spare parts. In fact, from a biological and ecological standpoint, the animal is a "keystone"...

Change in the air: songbirds with divergent migratory patterns may be a rare example of a hotly debated way of forming new species.
September 1, 2006... On a winter day in 1961, a cat prowling the Irish city of Dublin stalked a European blackcap, a small, gray warbler with a flute-like song. The cat got lucky--and so did I. Shortly after the cat captured the bird, a passerby chanced on the...

Song lines.
September 1, 2006... Assailed by the piercing, seemingly nonstop demands of a wailing newborn, what mother has not wished, at least for a moment, that she could outsource her childrearing to some kind neighbor? Wouldn't it be nice to fly off for a week, a...

Living the high life: the mountaintop environment of the Andes harbors a Noah's ark of previously undocumented species.(Geographic overview)(Travel narrative)
September 1, 2006... Wind-driven hail lashes Preston Sowell and me as we top a 17,500-foot ridge in Peru's Cordillera Vilcanota. An avalanche thunders from a slope above--or was that real thunder? This close to the clouds, it can be hard to tell. I'm gasping in the...

Over the hills and through the woods: the Maine way into the White Mountains.(THIS LAND)(Geographic overview)
September 1, 2006... Although most of White Mountain National Forest is in New Hampshire, its easternmost arm, comprising more than sixty-five square miles, lies in western Maine. More than a third of the Maine portion is designated the Caribou-Speckled Mountain...

"The Busiest Man in England": The Life of Joseph Paxton, Gardener, Architect, and Victorian Visionary.(Book review)
September 1, 2006... "The Busiest Man in England": A Life of Joseph Paxton, Garden Architect, and Victorian Visionary by Kate Colquhoun David R. Godine, Publisher, 2006; $30.00 Among the great engineering marvels of the 1800s, surely the Crystal Palace ranked...

Tasmanian Devil: A Unique and Threatened Animal.(Book review)
September 1, 2006... Tasmanian Devil: A Unique and Threatened Animal by David Owen and David Pemberton Allen & Unwin, 2006; $24.95 Whoever coined the phrase "big things come in small packages" may have been thinking of the Tasmanian devil. Although the little...

A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland Voyage along the Yukon River.(Book review)
September 1, 2006... A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland Voyage Along the Yukon River by Dan O'Neill Counterpoint, 2006; $24.95 Leaving Dawson by as Alaskan writer Dan O Neill did one fine August day in 2001, you can travel downstream eighty-five miles on the Yukon...

Noble gas.(nature.net)(helium)
September 1, 2006... Ever wondered how many helium balloons it would take to lift yourself off the ground? If sanity has kept you from finding out, you'll enjoy Jeff Whitehead's video of a safely tethered helium flyer in the crucial experiment...

Celestial MUSYC: cosmic ABCs keep astronomers spellbound.(OUT THERE)
September 1, 2006... Acronyms are everywhere, alphabetically infecting daily life, IMHO (in my humble opinion). So perhaps we astronomers can be forgiven for sliding down the slippery slope of cryptic capital letters: MHD (magnetohydrodynamics), SETI (search for...

The sky in September.
September 1, 2006... Mercury is at superior conjunction (beyond the Sun as seen from Earth) on September 1, and enters the evening sky. Unfortunately for observers in the Northern Hemisphere, Mercury lies well south of the Sun, toward the west-southwest at sunset,...

Biodiversity near and far.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)
September 1, 2006... From Central Park to Southeast Asia, the Museum's conservation efforts are truly global in scope. Consider Vietnam: A Natural History (Yale University Press), the fruit of a conservation biology research and training project begun by AMNH's...

Lizards & Snakes: Alive!(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)
September 1, 2006... Through January 7, 2007 More than 60 live animals shed light on the often-overlooked world of lizards and snakes in the AMNH's latest captivating exhibition, Lizards & Snakes: Alive! Camouflaging themselves in their re-created habitats;...

Liz Johnson: manager, Metropolitan Biodiversity Program Center for Biodiversity and Conservation.(PEOPLE AT THE AMNH)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... If anyone can coax city dwellers to appreciate worms and other woodland creatures in the world hidden underfoot, it's Liz Johnson, Manager of the Metropolitan Biodiversity Program for the Museum's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation. Her...

Ancient "web site" holds clues to insect evolution.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Entomologists have long suspected that spiders' eat,ing habits played a role in early insect evolution but proof was elusive, given the rarity of fossilized spiders or their silk. Until now. A pencil-thin rod of amber found in Spain has...

Taking the show on the road.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Millions of visitors to Manhattan enjoy the American Museum of Natural History's special and permanent exhibitions each year. But there are also millions of people who never come to New York City who take advantage of the Museum's unique...

Museum events: American Museum of Natural History.(Calendar)
September 1, 2006... EXHIBITIONS Lizards & Snakes: Alive! Through January 7, 2007 Live lizards and snakes are the center of attention in this engaging exhibition that explores these creatures' remarkable adaptations. Fossil specimens, life-size...

Where the river stops running.(ENDPAPER)
September 1, 2006... Home was on a broad ridge where the river began. You couldn't see rippling pools, waterfalls, or rapids there. In fact, you couldn't even find our spring unless you looked for it. My family's land was high in the watershed, stitched into...