The Long Now of the Tiburón Bighorn

By: | March 21, 2014

Bighorn skull on Tiburon IslandIn the spring of 2012, botanist and graduate student Benjamin Wilder was camping on Tiburón Island, a large island in the Gulf of California whose flora he has studied for most of a decade.

Wilder wanted to find out more about the evolutionary history of the plants on Tiburón, so he was looking for fossil woodrat middens—piles of vegetation and other debris collected by woodrats, glued together with woodrat pee, and cached away for tens of thousands of years. For scientists, woodrat middens are like care packages from the past.

In a shallow cave in the foothills of the Sierra Kunkaak, Wilder, a lab mate, and two friends from the local Seri community found something that resembled a midden, but didn’t look quite right: It had a lot of dung in it, and not many plants. Wilder took it back to Tucson, Arizona, and showed it to his mentor Julio Betancourt, who recognized it with a look and a sniff. “That’s bighorn sheep dung,” he said. Its identity was confirmed by DNA analysis, and when samples were radiocarbon dated, they turned out to be 1,500 years old.

Which was, as far as anyone knew, impossible.

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Guest Post: I Walked Across the Hudson River

By: | March 19, 2014

Ice yacht

Several times a week, I drive over a Hudson River bridge to pick up my daughter from her school in Troy, NY, and bring her back home to the Albany side. Back and forth I go, and every time my eye wanders to the frozen surface below. Even when it’s dark and there’s nothing to see, I look down and sense the expanse.

I’m not quite sure how the idea crept into my mind, but once there, it lodged and grew. Could I walk across the Hudson? It’s been a very cold winter. Not just cold, but consistently cold. The river’s surface has been solid since the new year. It easily held up the 20 inches of snow we got in mid-February. It sported puddles on the ice when temperatures hit 50 degrees about a week later.

I wondered and daydreamed and fantasized. At some point I realized that there must be others out there, thinking the same thing, feeling the same pull. That’s when I started to scheme. Perhaps there was a secret place where people walked on the river. Perhaps there was a wacky upstate New York event celebrating a frozen winter. Perhaps I could really do this. Continue reading →

Interview with Will Storr: Disputable Sources

By: | March 18, 2014

Star Wars ConventionAnn:  Will Storr is a phenomenon.*  His specialty is writing good stories about people in bad places.  He’s got a story in Matter about an extremely unpleasant disease called Morgellons.  People with Morgellons have terrible itches, then tiny fibers creep out of their skin and make oozy sores.  The disease sounds like a horror story out of Darwin’s parasitic wasps which lay their eggs in other insects that the hatchling wasps then eat from the inside out.  And sure enough, the usual medical diagnosis isn’t Morgellons but DOP, delusions of parasitosis. The disease, according to the doctors, belongs to the mind part of the mind-body split.  I read Will’s story after the great Ginny Hughes wrote on Twitter that somebody should interview him about how a writer works with sources who are what? bug-nuts? victims of unimaginative docs? unreliable? anyway, sources with whom a writer isn’t sure he shares a reality.  But maybe Will himself should describe these sources who after all, are fellow humans.

Will:  The Morgellons piece is an extract from my latest book, which begins with me spending some time with a creationist who’s determined to prove to me, using the methods of science, that the earth is only 6000 years old. The thing about that guy – and about many of the people I’ve written about over the years – is that he wasn’t crazy. He was living an orderly, successful life. He was happy (as happy as any of us, anyway). There was no evidence of pathology, as far as I could tell. Also – he wasn’t stupid. So if he’s not crazy and not stupid – how the hell did he come to believe what he does?   Continue reading →

Do Penguins Need Sweaters?

By: | March 17, 2014

jumperpenguinI’m a lover of science and a devoted knitter. Science-related projects that appear on the internet and have to do with yarn find their way into my inbox. That means I am aware of the project in Glasgow to knit microbes for elementary schools. I am in love with that shawl that depicts the night sky in silver beads. The knitted version of a dissected rat with its innards showing? Yep, seen it. Also the frog.

Proof that I’m doing something right in my life: When my friends see a knitted piece of science, they think of me. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 15, 2014

shutterstock mooseMarch 10 – 14

This week, Christie told us that story she doesn’t tell. Then lots of other people flocked to the comments to tell theirs.

Guest poster Daniel O’Connell asked if there’s gold in them thar evolutionary hills.

Cameron wondered if deep-sea species will be soon be forced to have their own reality show.

Moose as invasive species? Yes, Jessa said, and there is only one apex predator who can take them down.

And Roberta mourned the remipede, a strange crustacean only discovered 35 years ago, but one that might not be around much longer.

 

A tiny cave creature, eyeless and deadly

By: | March 14, 2014

Remipede

Joey Pakes was swimming in a cave in Mexico on July 4, 2008 when she spotted her first remipede. Pakes, a graduate student in biology at UC Berkeley, had seen pictures of these aquatic centipede-like creatures before. But when she encountered one in the wild, the experience was completely different. “They’re such graceful animals,” she recalls. “It stopped me and I felt a certain high… I coudn’t scream or go ‘Oh wow, look at this’ because I was underwater. So I was just really happy, and I just shared it with myself and watched it as long as I could. That was my Fourth of July.”

Remipedes are pale, leggy crustaceans, no more than a couple inches long, that dwell in caves filled with layers of saltwater and freshwater. Because these caves are completely dark, remipedes have no eyes. They often swim on their backs, paddling their many legs; their name comes from the Latin word for “oar-footed.”

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Attack of the Killer Moose

By: | March 13, 2014

shutterstock moose2

“Did I ever tell you about the time I got charged by a moose?”

We were at the point in our camping trip where everyone was dusting off their close-encounters-with-wildlife stories.

“Now, Davis, don’t tell that story or we’re going to get into an argument,” warned his wife.

“She was downwind of the bear spray when I let it off,” explained Davis, not particularly apologetically.

Every Newfoundlander has a story or two about the danger of moose, the dominant ungulate on the island. There is roughly one moose for every three people there – the most intense moose density in the world – and the population continues to grow despite 22,000 being harvested yearly during hunting season.

Though bulls become curious and aggressive during rutting season in September, the biggest hazard is not of the charging, snorting variety. Continue reading →