Grandma’s Pregnancy Test and the Extinction of Species

An African clawed frog, the species that introduced the chytrid fungus to the world. (Photo: H. Krisp/Wikimedia Commons)

Ever since The Hot Zone became a non-fiction bestseller 20 years ago, people have been fretting about the likelihood that an emerging pathogen could cause a global pandemic, killing tens of millions of humans. But they seldom pause to consider that it is already happening in the animal world—or that the pandemic that’s now decimating frogs and other amphibians provides a perfect model for how it could also happen to us.

The pathogen this time is the chytrid fungus, which has raced around the world over the past two decades, and now afflicts more than 500 amphibian species in 52 countries. When spores of this fungus penetrate a victim’s skin, a slough of dead cells builds up on the surface, blocking respiration. The electrolytes go out of balance. The brain swells. The frog sits with its legs skewed out oddly to the sides. Death soon follows, often for an entire community of amphibians around a pond or wetland. The chorus of peepers goes silent.

“I can’t think of another disease on the planet more significant than this amphibian disease,” says Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based group focused on the role of the wildlife trade in the introduction of dangerous pathogens. “No disease of humans has ever wiped us out.” But he estimates that the chytrid fungus pandemic has already caused the extinction of more than 100 species, including the golden toad in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, the gastric brooding frog in Queensland, Australia, and 20 or 30 species of brilliantly colored Harlequin frogs in Central and South America. “And it’s still causing extinctions.”

A paper being published today in the science journal PLOS ONE adds new evidence to the story of how innocent and even seemingly humane missteps unleashed this killer on the amphibian world. Maybe it’s best to start with our own families: For anyone born from the 1920s up until the late 1970s, the way our mothers generally got the happy news of our impending arrival was by way of the African clawed frog, an East African species in the genus Xenopus.  … click here to read the rest of the story.

Madness in the Village of Elephants

Andrea Turkalo at the observation post that has now become a firing line.

In the forest clearing locals call the “Village of Elephants,” or Dzanga Bai, 17 heavily armed men arrived this past Wednesday, May 8, with AK-47s. They were bound for the observation tower where tourists in the Central African Republic have often come to admire the forest elephants, and where researchers have worked to decipher the language of elephants for more than 20 years.

It was over in a few horrific minutes.

When guards who had previously been disarmed by rebel forces went back yesterday, May 9, they counted the butchered carcasses of 26 elephants killed for their ivory, including four babies.

The killing happened in the Dzanga-Sangha Protected Area, in the southwest corner of the country, on the border with Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Dzanga Bai itself is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2010, the CBS show 60 Minutes described it as “one of the most magical places on Earth.”

At least for the moment,                … to read the full story click here.

Jurassic Park and the Fear of Feathers

Anchiornis huxleyi in full feather (Illustration: Michael DiGiorgio)

The much-delayed Jurassic Park 4 sequel was delayed again early this week, and it’s tempting to imagine that animal science might be the reason. (Okay, tempting and really, really stupid, but indulge me for a bit.) This lucrative movie franchise dates back 20 years now, to 1993, which is like saying it started somewhere in the Cenozoic as far as our understanding of dinosaurs goes.

When the original Jurassic Park was still in its first theatrical run, paleontologists were already digging up what has since become a gaudy parade of fossils demonstrating that dinosaurs were in fact frequently tricked out with feathers, feather-like filaments, and even a three-inch-thick coating of “dino fuzz.”

Universal Pictures grudgingly acknowledged this new science when it released Jurassic Park III in 2001. Like an anxious parent in the Punk Rock era, it allowed Velociraptor to flaunt a miserable little mohawk of about a dozen filaments sprouting out of the top of its head. 

But otherwise the franchise has conformed to the stereotype of dinosaurs as scaly, naked red-eyed monsters. And for an obvious reason: A Tyrannosaurus rex that looked like Big Bird might not have audiences wetting their pants in the balcony, or opening their wallets at the box office. So back in March, Colin Trevorrow, tapped as the latest director in the series, tweeted:  “No feathers. #JP4”

But maybe now he’s gone back for a re-think.

A Hollywood velociraptor

Here’s where the fossil evidence currently stands, as outlined by Julia Clarke, a University of Texas paleontologist who is also the author of an article “Feathers Before Flight,” appearing today, May 9, in the journal Science: Paleontologists have been thinking about the connection between dinosaurs and living birds since the discovery of the fossil bird Archaeopteryx back in 1861, and especially since 1970, when John Ostrom at Yale University pointed out the many similarities between bird skeletons and those of the Theropoda dinosaurs, including T. rex and Velociraptor.

The current revolution began in the mid-1990s, when  … to read the full article click here.

The Body Eclectic on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Microb

On “Washington Journal” this morning, Greta Brawner interviewed me about my microbiome story in the May issue of Smithsonian.  You can see the show here.  Look carefully and see me not smile for 42 minutes!

Shape Shifter

 

(Photo: Cally Harper)

Tongues can do delightful and astonishing things. I am thinking of the way a frog fires its sticky tongue halfway across the universe to snag a passing insect (see below). Or how an alligator snapping turtle wriggles its tongue like a worm as a dinner invitation to fish. And now the Pallas’s long-tongued bat (Glossophaga sorcina) joins this elite club of astonishing animal tongue artists.

These bats, found from Argentina to northern Mexico, and sometimes into Arizona and New Mexico, have the fastest metabolism ever recorded in a mammal, says a 2007 study in the journal Nature. They burn half their body fat each day, and have to make up for it at night by consuming as much as 150 percent of their body weight in nectar from flowers. And of course, they have to do it on the wing. According to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the secret to its success is a remarkable ability to change the shape of its tongue into a hemodynamic—or blood-swollen—“nectar mop.”

When lead author Cally Harper, a doctoral candidate in biomechanics at Brown University in Rhode Island, began her study, specialists already knew that bats of this species have an unusual fringe of hair-like structures around the tip of the tongue.  They assumed these were useful for collecting nectar—but passively, like raking icing off a cake using your fingernails. Biologists also knew that these bats have enlarged blood vessels in their tongues. But they didn’t know what to make of them. Harper had a hunch that the two features might be connected, especially since …  Read the full article here.

A Forgotten Pioneer of Vaccines

Jeryl Lynn Hilleman with her sister, Kirsten, in 1966 as a doctor gave her the mumps vaccine developed by their father.

This is a piece I wrote for today’s New York Times.  It briefly appeared in the the front page online, then the world righted itself, and it gave way to an item about Ru Paul, and then one about Madonna.

We live in an epidemiological bubble and are for the most part blissfully unaware of it. Diseases that were routine hazards of childhood for many Americans living today now seem like ancient history. And where every mother could once identify measles in a heartbeat, even the best  hospitals have to call in their eldest staffers to ask: “Is this what we think it is?”

To a remarkable extent, we owe our well-being, and in many cases our lives, to the work of one man and to events that happened 50 years ago this spring.

At 1 a.m. on March 21, 1963, an intense, irascible but modest Merck scientist named Maurice R. Hilleman was asleep at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Lafayette Hill when his 5-year-old daughter, Jeryl Lynn, woke him with a sore throat. Dr. Hilleman felt the side of her face and then the telltale lump beneath the jaw. He tucked her back into bed, about the only treatment anyone could offer at the time.

For most children, mumps was a nuisance disease, nothing worse than a painful swelling of the salivary glands. But Dr. Hilleman knew it could sometimes leave a child deaf or otherwise permanently impaired.

He alerted the housekeeper that he was going out (his wife had recently died of breast cancer) and then drove 20 minutes to pick up proper sampling equipment from his laboratory. Back at the house, he woke Jeryl Lynn long enough to swab the back of her throat and immerse the specimen in a nutrient broth. Then he drove back to store it in the laboratory freezer.

The name Maurice Hilleman may not ring a bell. But today 95 percent of American children receive the M.M.R. — the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella  that Dr. Hilleman invented, starting with the mumps strain he collected that night from his daughter.

It was by no means his only contribution. At Dr. Hilleman’s death in 2005, other researchers credited him with having saved more lives than any other scientist in the 20th century. Over his career, he devised or substantially improved more than 25 vaccines, including 9 of the 14 now routinely recommended for children.

“One person did that!” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a longtime friend of Dr. Hilleman’s and now director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Truly amazing.”

As a young man in Montana, Maurice Hilleman had intended only to become a manager at the J..C. Penney store. He turned out not to have the perfect retail personality. (Asked later in life what he was proudest of in his career, he replied, “Being able to survive while being a bastard.”)

He went on to spend most of his career at Merck, but the corporate personality also eluded him. He had a sailor’s vocabulary, and his brand of peer review often included the phrase

Attack of the Killer Shrimp

Come closer, see how pretty I am. (Photo: Michael Bok)

This is my latest post for TakePart:

One day early this year, on the Connecticut beach where I have walked most days for the past 15 years, I came across an animal I’d never seen before, washed up in the seaweed. At first, a neighbor and I thought it might be an immature lobster. It was about eight inches long, with a greenish-gray segmented carapace, and goggle eyes mounted on stalks. But in place of a lobster’s formidable claws, it seemed to have only a couple of feathery antennae.

So: Lobster-like, but lame.

Lord, were we ever wrong. It was in fact one of the most violent creatures on Earth, “enchantingly violent,” in the words of a biologist who studies them, violent enough to bring to mind the old “Jaws” soundtrack (DUNT-dunt, DUNT-dunt) and the teaser line: “You’ll never go in the water again!”

It was a mantis shrimp, so named because many people think they look like a cross between a preying mantis and a shrimp, though they are actually members of their own crustacean order, the Stomatopoda. There are about 400 species of mantis shrimp and they inhabit coastlines worldwide, leading mostly solitary lives, typically burrowing in mud and silt on the sea floor, or hiding out in rocky formations.

But let’s get to the violence.  Click hear to read the rest of the story.

Antibiotic Resistance Spills Over to Wildlife

Banded mongoose at Botswana’s Chobe National Park

For the next few months, many posts from Strange Behaviors will also be appearing at TakePart, the web site for Participant Pictures (“An Inconvenient Truth,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Lincoln,” and many more).  I’ll start those posts here and then give you a link to jump to the body of the story at Take Part.  Here’s the first such item:

Banded mongooses don’t get the love like their celebrated cousins the meerkats. Their eyes aren’t quite as soulful, and they don’t spend as much time standing around on their hind legs looking human. Even so, these small, highly social creatures are a favorite with visitors to sub-Saharan Africa, nosing around the camp in small groups, searching for beetles, millipedes, and other choice foods. But now, improbably, banded mongooses have turned up in the middle of a global health crisis.

It is, on the surface, a familiar story about the greatest miracle drugs in modern medicine: Massive overuse of antibiotics has rapidly caused bacteria to develop resistance, meaning that many human illnesses, from a common urinary tract infection to tuberculosis, are becoming difficult or impossible to treat. Antibiotic resistance is so widespread that, according to new research, it occurs even in wildlife living in a national park in southern Africa.

The new study, published last week in the scientific journal EcoHealth, raises questions about overuse of antibiotics, the hidden costs of ecotourism, and the need for more careful management of protected wildlife areas. Diseases spilling over from animals to humans have “the potential to spark a global pandemic,” according to the authors, and the new data add the alarming prospect that some emerging pathogen—the next SARS or swine flu—may be resistant to antibiotic treatment from Day One.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

How to Destroy a Mainland Madagascar

This is a review I wrote for the Wall Street Journal:

Gold Rush in the Jungle

By Dan Drollette Jr.
(Crown, 310 pages, $25)

If you delight, as I do, in strange, colorful animals, and like to see a lot of them at the same time, the usual strategy is to visit islands, where isolation has a way of breeding eccentricity. But over the past few decades, Vietnam has revealed itself, improbably, as a sort of mainland Madagascar. It is a mother lode of newly described species, many of them upland refugees in a region cut off from mainland Asia during the ice age.

Recent discoveries there include a tube-nosed bat named M. beelzebub for its devilish good looks, a walking catfish, a striped rabbit, and, just this year, a flying frog and a turquoise-headed crocodile lizard. The saola, a large forest-dwelling antelope first described in 1992, is so odd that it required the invention of a new genus, Pseudoryx. Since no one has been able to keep a saola alive in captivity, the species remains an enigma—and an enigma that is probably en route to extinction: Vietnam resembles Madagascar not just in the diversity of its wildlife but in its catastrophic rush to destroy it.

You might think that outsiders had already taken care of that. During what is known there as “the American War,” U.S. forces doused Vietnam with about 20 million gallons of herbicides and defoliants, destroying 7,700 square miles of forest. Earlier, in the French colonial era, a single big-game hunter in the Annamite Mountains gunned down 600 deer, 50 tigers and panthers, and 40 elephants (about as many as now survive in the entire nation).

But the era of mass extinctions has really taken off as Vietnam has developed into an economic powerhouse, with average annual GDP growth of 6.3% over the past dozen years. The rising middle class has so far developed an appetite for the natural world only in the most literal sense: The craving for exotic meats and traditional medicines often leads to what naturalists call “empty forest syndrome.” In 1992, for instance, Vietnam designated Cát Tiên National Park, north of Ho Chi Minh City, as a reserve for mainland Asia’s last population of Javan rhinos. But the government never provided adequate protection, particularly during a world-wide rhino-poaching crisis said to be largely driven by Vietnam itself. At Cát Tiên in 2010, poachers butchered the nation’s last surviving rhino for the imaginary medicinal value of its horn.

In “Gold Rush in the Jungle,” science writer Dan Drollette Jr. attempts to tell this story of discovery amid pell-mell destruction. He focuses primarily on the work of Tilo Nadler, an East German immigrant whose Endangered Primate Rescue Center south of Hanoi has become a final refuge for many species, including some rescued from Vietnam’s rampant illegal traffic in wildlife and some new species discovered by Mr. Nadler’s team.

Having started in 1993 with a few acres and a budget of just $20,000 a year, Mr. Nadler now maintains about 15 species in captivity, mainly highly endangered monkeys. To critics who argue for protecting whole habitats rather than plucking out a few charismatic species for captive breeding, Mr. Nadler replies: “The biggest problem in Vietnam is that

Her Last Chance at a Baby (Body Eclectic–Part 1)

(Illustration: Stephanie Dalton Cowan)

This is a piece I wrote for the May issue of Smithsonian Magazine, about life on the human body.

Of all the cases Barbara Warner has faced as a pediatrician specializing in newborns, the one that sticks hardest in her mind involved a couple who had been trying for years to have children. Finally, in 1997, the woman was pregnant. She was in her mid-40s. “This was her last chance,” says Warner. Then, too soon, she gave birth to twins. The first child died at two weeks of respiratory failure, at the time the most common killer of preterm babies.

A week later—it happened to be Thanksgiving Day—Warner folded down the blanket on the surviving twin, and even now she draws in her breath at the memory. The baby’s belly was reddened, shining and so swollen “you could have bounced a nickel off it.”

It was necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC, little known outside neonatal intensive care units, but dreaded there as a sudden, fast-moving bacterial inflammation of the gut. On the operating table, a surgeon opened the baby boy’s abdomen and immediately closed it again. The intestinal tract from stomach to rectum was already dead. Warner, in tears, returned the child to die in the arms of his shattered parents.

“It’s 15 years later, and there’s nothing new,” Warner says bleakly as she moves among her tiny patients, each one covered in tubes and bathed in soft violet light, in a clear plastic incubator. NEC is still one of the leading killers of preterm babies. But that may soon change, thanks to a startling new way of looking at who we are and how we live.

Over the past few years, advances in genetic technology have opened a window into the amazingly populous and powerful world of microbial life in and around the human body—the normal community of bacteria, fungi and viruses that makes up what scientists call the microbiome. It’s Big Science, involving vast international research partnerships, leading edge DNA sequencing technology and datasets on a scale to make supercomputers cringe. It also promises the biggest turnaround in medical thinking in 150 years, replacing the