It’s been over half century since researchers dreamt up the idea that grandmothers exist chiefly to enable their children to have their own children, thereby increasing the genetic fitness of the family lineage. In the 1980s, Kristen Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, bolstered this so-called “grandmother hypothesis” with her studies of the Hadza tribe of Tanzania, hunter gatherers who rely heavily on the foraging of fruit, nuts and tubers. Hawks found that the thriving of a first-born Hadza child correlated with the extent of its mother’s foraging efforts. But a second born child’s health—and that of its siblings–seemed to depend more on the foraging efforts of its grandmother. The more grandmothers stepped in to feed and care for the family, scientists postulated, the better able were mothers to birth more children at shorter intervals. So it seemed woman survived beyond their fertile years in order to maximize the fecundity of their daughters and daughters-in-law and therefore their line’s evolutionary fitness. (Curiously, further research suggested that the grandfather’s contributions to the children’s well-being did not contribute to said fitness.)
Not surprisingly, not everyone bought this theory. In fact, some scientists considered it just another Just-So Story built on post-hoc assumptions that, while compelling, lacked sufficient supporting evidence.
It’s been 15 years since my one and only contribution to the Confluence Project, an achievement I savour to this day. The goal of the online repository is ambitious, but seemingly simple: to store photos—and perhaps a little travel story—from the intersection of every integer degree of longitude and latitude in the world. So far, 6,594 of these confluences have been recorded, but there are still almost 10,000 to go, even discounting the oceans they don’t expect people to reach.
Nunavut, Canada’s Inuit territory, holds hundreds of confluences, but only a handful have been visited. On the evening of March 10, 2007, the week of polar sunrise, I happened to pass near the confluence of the 80th degree North latitude and the 86th degree West longitude. I was visiting the Eureka High Arctic Weather Station on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, the northernmost civilian outpost in the world. Its military counterpart Alert is the northernmost continuously inhabited place, bar none, and that’s on the same island, just a few fjords further north.
My purpose at Eureka was to write a profile of the Polar Environmental Research Lab, which lay one mile North-West of this particular confluence. Polar sunrise is a particularly interesting time for atmospheric scientists, because they can get readings of the ozone layer after a whole winter of minimal interactions with sunlight, hence the timing of my visit. It also meant the temperature was -46 degrees Celsius.
Skull of a North American river otter (Lontra canadensis)
This post first ran in July 2019.
In 2015, Sarah Grimes picked up this river otter’s carcass on
a rugged beach covered in tumbled sea glass. She removed its skin and flesh and
soaked its bones first in warm water, then Borax. She kept each section of the
skeleton — legs, paws, spine – in a separate mesh bag so the bones wouldn’t
get mixed up. Then she cleaned the bones and put the skeleton back together, a
process called rearticulation.
Grimes is the Marine Mammal Stranding Coordinator for the Noyo Center for Marine
Science in Fort Bragg, California. She is trained and permitted to pick up
dead sea mammals and judge how they died. This river otter looked thin, and
probably starved to death – its displaced hip joint would have made it
difficult to swim. “Poor little nugget,” she said, showing me where the otter’s
leg once attached to the rest of the skeleton.
Last weekend I went to the zoo, something I hadn’t done in at least two years and probably much longer. A friend was visiting with her kid, a zoo enthusiast who’d been looking forward to it for weeks.
While at the zoo we saw many wondrous things. Two Asian elephants. A number of surprisingly giant pandas. The murky shadow of a red panda, eating behind a window with too much glare. A couple of river otters, swimming laps in their water. A shockingly fast-moving sloth, roaming the branches of its enclosure. The orangutans high overhead on their tightrope.
But the animal that I keep thinking about? The naked mole-rat. The National Zoo has two colonies of these odd, non-furry critters on display, with their big teeth and their wrinkly skin.
They maybe aren’t the nicest to look at. Not as cute as the wee monkeys that surround them in the Small Mammal House, that’s for sure. My friend’s kid was soon ready to move on. “Helen used to study ants, and these are the mammal version of ants,” his mom explained.
Last week: kind of a weird one. It was windy, which always makes more than the air feel unsettled. One afternoon a neighbor knocked on the door to say a skunk was stumbling around in the front yard in broad daylight. An hour earlier, one of my kids ran into a pole and went to urgent care.
That same morning, when I came into the kitchen, my husband said not to let the dog out. There was a baby bird that wasn’t doing well. Outside two scrub jays hovered nearby, hopping from a planter box to a chair to a fuzzy ball of feathers that had tucked itself next to a succulent. The night before that and two blocks over, a group of guys who came to steal a catalytic converter and went on to threaten the neighbors, who had to take cover in their house as the guys smashed in all their windows.
Should we do something? I asked my husband. This was about the bird. He shook his head.
I do not like doing nothing. I have trouble getting my hair cut because it seems like too long a time to sit there, doing nothing. If someone wants to go somewhere or do something, I get off the phone and sign up for the camp, I make reservations, I book plane tickets. This occasionally gets me in trouble; I also have a lot of split ends. Still, it feels productive.
I did not feel productive when there was a dying bird sitting outside the door and all I could do is peer through the glass. I did not feel productive when watching a skunk’s odd wander through the yard. I did not feel productive when my son held an ice pack over his eye and fell asleep on a beanbag chair. “I just read, because I couldn’t do anything else. I read all afternoon!” I wailed to my husband. When I heard that the cops came dismissed the neighbors’ broken glass and the shattered peace, at least I could feel angry, which doesn’t feel productive but feels like something.
With the bird, I paced in the other room for most of the morning, not really able to settle, not unlike the two adult scrub jays that kept hopping close, hopping away. I looked up what to do with birds. This scrub jay was a fledgling–part fluff but mostly feather–curled in a ball with a beak at one end, its parents patrolling the perimeter. Nothing: that’s what I was supposed to do. I couldn’t feel angry. Doing nothing was boring enough that even if I had been angry (maybe at the guilty-looking neighborhood cat?), there was too much nothing to stay angry for long.
Finally, I had to leave. Out in the world, I read about a woman who flew around the Earth in an airplane over long stretches the nothingness of ice and ocean. I read about nacre, or mother-of-pearl, a slow accumulation of layers of calcium carbonate and organic protein inside a mollusk. The thickness or thinness of each layer affects future layers so that, when these layers form a pearl, the pearl ends up being nearly symmetrical. Nacre’s strength and lightness—so light it feels almost like nothing–might inspire future protective gear. I wished that my neighbors’ windows were made of mother of pearl, that maybe we all were, that tiny layers of nothing could insulate us, too.
When I came back, the bird was gone, no sign of left-behind feathers or blood. The scrub jays were still in the yard, but seemed less frantic. Once my son woke up, I told him that I thought the fledgling might have been all right after all. But still I have so many questions about when is the right time to do nothing, and the questions are piling up in layers, each one changed by what’s come before. Will all this nothing make me stronger, too? Somewhere inside my book, the plane was still flying over the ice, miles of what looks like nothing, still getting closer to where it began.
*
Image by Flickr user Tony Hisgett/Creative Commons license.
This post originally appeared on April 15, 2020. I’m republishing it today because 1) I’m deep into editing a book that includes a chapter on Wyoming’s mammal migrations, so mobile elk are top of mind; and 2) bands of elk have begun wandering through the fields near my house in Colorado. I’m not sure where they’re coming from, or where they’re headed, but it’s clearly the season for ungulate movement. If only one of them were satellite-collared…
Among my favorite forms of visual art is the wildlife movement map. (Yes, I’m a philistine.) I love the clustered territories formed by rival wolf packs, the filamentous corridors of migratory mule deer, the mystifying circuits of great white sharks. They are, first, aesthetically beautiful, both abstract and intricately structured, like a Jackson Pollock canvas.More than that, they reveal the hidden architecture of the wild world, a cryptic animal infrastructure that whispers across our own paved routes.We might all be homebound and stationary these days, but other creatures remain as wide-ranging as ever.
These maps have become such a staple of wildlife research that it’s easy to forget the sophisticated technology that underpins them.Modern GPS tracking units communicate with orbiting satellites, storing coordinates every few hours — in some cases, every few minutes. Like all tech, these remarkable devices are the products of decades of experimentation, iterative failure, and innovation. Recently I found myself wondering about the animal subjects who participated, unwillingly and unwittingly, in their development. Who was the first creature to wear a satellite collar, and how did it go?
That’s how I became acquainted with Monique the Space Elk.
Really, Monique was two elk, both of whom were outfitted with satellite collars in early 1970 — almost fifty years ago on the dot, in fact. The Moniques belonged to a migratory herd of 7,000 animals that wintered on the National Elk Refuge just south of Yellowstone National Park, and then went… well, no one quite knew where. Although John and Frank Craighead, twin brothers and legendary wildlife researchers, had long studied the region’s elk movements, their tracking methods were rudimentary. In the 1960s they’d fitted thousands of animals with color-coded necklaces, then hiked around Yellowstone searching for their bands. The herculean project revealed patches of habitat, but offered scant insight into how the animals moved between them — a Connect-the-Dots illustration with no dots connected.
Those gaps, the Craigheads vowed, would be filled in 1970. The previous year, they’d struck up a partnership with NASA to develop a newfangled elk tracking collar that would communicate with a weather satellite called the Nimbus 3. The collar cost $25,000, weighed 23 pounds — most of it a sheath of protective fiberglass — and would beam its wearer’s location and skin temperature, along with the ambient air temperature and light conditions, to the Nimbus every day.
A new era of wildlife biology had dawned. “The beauty of the experiment,” John Craighead told reporters in February 1970, “is that we can daily monitor elk at distant or remote locations where it might be impossible to go into the field and visually watch her.”
That information, Craighead added, wasn’t merely academic. The environmental movement was ascendant, the inaugural Earth Day just two months away. Satellite gathering, Craighead said, was “one of many research tools that scientists need if man is to prevent further global pollution of air and water and destruction of plant and animal life.” The Space Elk wouldn’t just carry a collar that weighed as much as a Boston terrier — she would bear the burden of planetary salvation.
Oh jeez I should not write about this. I don’t even want to. I’m doing it anyway. It’s this professional tension between senior women astronomers and junior women astronomers which I hear about it from the juniors, not a lot and never loudly, but intensely. I think — I think — I see both sides and I want these sides to see each other; because as the late Madeleine Albright said, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”
Let me start with an obvious fact that junior women astronomers thoroughly and completely understand: that they owe their relatively relatively (I said RELATIVELY) unsuppressed, un-sat-upon professional lives to the senior women astronomers who didn’t leave the field and didn’t quit reminding and arguing and legislating and didn’t give up, never gave up.
But here’s the tension. Senior women fought it out in one world and the juniors’ world is entirely different. Senior women, speaking from their world, tell the juniors things like, dress to not be noticed; be careful about taking a job offered as a spousal hire; have two things in your life, science and family, and don’t talk about the family; and if some guy makes a pass at you, shine it on, get over it. The juniors think they can dress professionally and still be noticeable; can be spousal hires; can talk about family and have lives and friends and hobbies; and if the guy doesn’t back off or even if he does, they can tell everybody about him, including his name. So far, so good; I wrote about this difference in the worlds a while ago.
That’s a reporter’s view from outside the two worlds. But I’ve lived in some of the same world as the senior women and see some of it, anyway, from the inside. Best to explain this with an anecdote.
