Nature Is Vanishing from Kids’ Books

One of my favorite things when my children were young was reading them Where The Wild Things Are, over and over, with lots of sound effects for the wild ruckus among the animals.  But a new study, looking at Caldecott Prize winners from 1938 to 2008, suggests the natural world is vanishing from children’s books.   The study appears in February’s Sociological Inquiry, and gets a write up in USA Today:

•Early in the study period, built environments were the primary environments in about 35% of images. By the end of the study, they were primary environments about 55% of the time.

•Early in the study, natural environments were the primary environments about 40% of the time; by the end, roughly 25%.

Images of wild animals and domestic animals declined dramatically over time, says lead author Al Williams of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “The natural environment and wild animals have all but disappeared in these books.”

Co-author Chris Podeschi of Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania says, “This is just one sample of children’s books, but it suggests there may be a move away from the natural world as the population is increasingly isolated from these settings. This could translate into less concern about the environment.”

Not to mention the terrible loss to parents and young children.

You can read the full study here.

Among the One Percent, Look Twice Before Crossing

Shiny Cars, Scary Drivers

For cynics, this might come as unsurprising science.  But a new study shows that as social status rises, so does the propensity to commit unethical acts, like lying in a negotiation, cheating, stealing, and breaking the law while behind the wheel.   The study fits a long line of research by Dacher Keltner at the University of California in Berkeley.

I’ve written in the past about his “Cookie Monster” experiment for The New York Times.  For the new study, published Monday on PNAS:

Observers stood near the intersection, coded the
status of approaching vehicles, and recorded whether the driver
cut off other vehicles by crossing the intersection before waiting
their turn, a behavior that defies the California Vehicle Code. In
the present study, 12.4% of drivers cut in front of other vehicles.

But drivers of top status cars cut off other cars almost 30% of time, versus less than 10% for the lowest-status cars.

It was even worse for pedestrians:  Top status drivers cut off pedestrians 45% of the time, versus close to zero for the lowest-status drivers.

The study attributes the effect to multiple factors:

Upper-class individuals’ relative independence from others and increased privacy in their professions (3) may provide fewer structural constraints and decreased
perceptions of risk associated with committing unethical acts (8). The availability of resources to deal with the downstream costs of unethical behavior may increase the likelihood of such acts among the upper class. In addition, independent self-construals among the upper class (22) may shape feelings of entitlement
and inattention to the consequences of one’s actions on others (23). A reduced concern for others’ evaluations (24) and increased goal-focus (25) could further instigate unethical tendencies among upper-class individuals. Together, these factors may give rise to a set of culturally shared norms among upperclass
individuals that facilitates unethical behavior.

The bottom line:   If there’s a Mercedes or Escalade in the neighborhood, stand back from the curb and pray, while also watching your wallet.

Let’s call it “the Lizzie Grubman effect,” for the wealthy publicist who allegedly yelled “Fuck you, white trash” before backing her Mercedes into a crowd of pedestrians outside a Long Island nightclub.  (And true to the study’s theory about “downstream costs,” she got off with 37 days in jail.)

“High social class predicts increased unethical behavior,” by Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner

The Jabberwocky World

The March-April issue of Audubon magazine features this lovely illustration of a hydra, a monster from the Classical imagination, together with an excerpt from The Species Seekers, about the beginning of the age of discovery:

At the start, naturalists knew no more than a few thousand species, and often had the basic facts wrong. Even educated people still inhabited a jabberwocky world in which monsters abounded, and one species could slide uncertainly into another. Our own ancestors, just eight or ten generations ago, still thought that dog-headed humans lived in distant lands, probably based on early descriptions of baboons. When the fossil skeleton of a giant salamander turned up, a learned Swiss physician identified it as a sinner drowned in Noah’s Flood. Naturalists then could not even clearly distinguish some plants from animals and passionately debated whether one could transform into the other, and back again. (It’s a measure of the state of knowledge then that they thought of themselves simply as naturalists or “natural philosophers.” The words “scientist” and “biologist” did not yet exist.)

That would all change, as a small band of explorers set out to break through the mystery and confusion. The great age of discovery about the natural world was a period of less than 200 years, from the eighteenth century into the twentieth. It got its start in 1735, when the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus invented a system for identifying and classifying species. He was a charismatic teacher, both ribald and full of religious fervor for the wonders of the natural world. His words inspired 19 of his own students to undertake voyages of exploration. Half of these “apostles,” as he called them, would die overseas in the service of his mission. Explorers from other nations, also inspired by Linnaeus, soon followed, taking the hunt for new species to the farthest ends of the Earth. They made the discovery of species one of the most important and enduring achievements of the colonial era.That word “discovery” may stick momentarily in the modern reader’s craw. Local people had often known many of these “new” species for thousands of years and in far more intimate detail than any newcomer could hope to achieve. But done properly, the process of collecting a species and describing it in scientific terms made that knowledge available everywhere. Making it available in Europe was, to be sure, the primary objective. But in the process, the species seekers introduced humanity for the first time to our fellow travelers on this planet, from beetles to blue-footed boobies. And gradually we stumbled from the security of a world centered on our species, created for our comfort and salvation, to a world in which we are one among many species.

It would be difficult to overstate how profoundly the species seekers changed the world along the way. Many of us are alive today, for instance, because naturalists identified obscure species that later turned out to cause malaria, yellow fever, typhus, and other epidemic diseases. (This is one of the recurring lessons from the history of species discovery: Useless knowledge has an insidious way of leading people in useful directions. Many mothers would despair, for instance, to have a child make a career out of the study of Chinese horseshoe bats of the genus Rhinolophus. But the subject took on global importance when these bats turned out to be the source of SARS, or sudden acute respiratory syndrome, which threatened to become pandemic.)

The discovery of species also shifted the foundations of knowledge and belief. Though early species seekers typically set out to glorify God by celebrating his Creation, the paradoxical outcome of their work was

Insect Paranoia

I was visiting author and entomologist May Berenbaum recently at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and her collection of old insecticides caught my eye

Feds Bust U.S. Rhino Horn Smuggling Ring

The L.A. Times reports on the arrests today of a ring of U.S.-based rhinoceros horn smugglers.  Here’s an excerpt:

The arrests and seizures sprang from an 18-month investigation, called Operation Crash, so-named because “crash” is another name for a herd of rhinos, said Edward Grace, deputy chief of law enforcement for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The undercover operation was forced into the open when accused trafficker Wade Steffen of Hico, Texas, and his wife and mother were stopped by Transportation Security Administration officials at Long Beach Airport on Feb. 9 with $337,000 in their carry-on luggage, authorities said. A TSA officer found $20,000 in $100-bill bundles in Molly Steffen’s purse. “That money is not mine,” Molly Steffen said, according to a federal affidavit. “I assume my husband put it in my purse.”

Merrily Steffen, the mother, allowed officers to view the pictures on the memory card of a camera she was carrying, according to the affidavit. It contained images of “stacks of $100 bills bound with rubber bands” and “rhinoceros horns being weighed on scales.”

Wade Steffen is incarcerated in Texas. Neither his wife nor his mother was arrested.

During their probe, wildlife officials had intercepted at least 18 shipments of rhino horns from the Steffen family and the owner of a Missouri auction house that trades in live and stuffed exotic animals, court records show. The packages were opened, the horns were identified by scientists and the items were repackaged and sent along to Kha’s export business or Nguyen’s nail shop, then presumably smuggled out of the country, according to law enforcement sources and court records.

Investigators tracked the movements of hundreds of thousands of dollars though bank wire transfers, including to accounts in China, and travel records of suspects who flew between Los Angeles and Asia, as well as between California, Texas and Missouri.

Read the full article here.  The US Fish & Wildlife press release follows after the break:

Many Years of Thought????

I can’t quite get over this pair of emails I received yesterday from a publicist, especially the idea that someone claiming to have spent “many years of thought and a decade of researching and writing”  would somehow end up putting his byline on someone else’s work.  (Update:  The publicist now claims it was entirely her fault.  More at end of article) :

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 4:04 PM, Liz Mensching <lmensching@bohlsengroup.com>  wrote:

>     Please disregard the message below, sent earlier today. It contains a copyrighted article by Michael Shermer from the Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2008. I’m sorry for any inconvenience.
>
>
>
>     ORIGINAL MESSAGE
>
>     The following article is ready to run as is or with edits. The author, Oliver Deehan, is available for interview opportunities and copies of his book, To Find the Way of Love, are available upon request.
>
>     Thanks for your time,
>     Liz Mensching
>     lmensching@bohlsengroup.com | 317.602.7137
>
>
>     Becoming a Type 1 Civilization
>     By Oliver Deehan
>
>     Our civilization is fast approaching a tipping point. Humans will have to make the transition from nonrenewable fossil fuels as the primary source of energy to renewable sources that will allow us to flourish in the future. Failure to make that transformation will doom us to the

The Collecting Life

Too often, people send me names of naturalists to be added to the Wall of the Dead.  (Josh Nove is the latest, added this morning.) But this time, a son has written to ask that his father be removed from the list.  Here’s the original entry:

Van Gelder, Richard G. (1928-1994), prominent mammalogist with the American Museum of Natural History, died, age 65, either from acute monocytic leukemia or, as friends recall, from falciparium malaria acquired in Kenya.

But Gordon Van Gelder writes: “I’m emailing you to thank you for listing him, but I think he—like his idol, Charles Darwin—doesn’t belong on the list.”  The list memorializes naturalists who died in the course of their field research to discover and describe new species. But Richard Van Gelder “did in fact die at home from acute monocytic leukemia.  It is true that he contracted malaria during one of his trips to Kenya and it recurred several times, [but] that was in the 1980s.“

Richard is, however, clearly worth remembering in a context other than the Wall of the Dead.   Among his many achievements, he discovered a new species of vesper bat, commonly known as Van Gelder’s Bat.

Gordon kindly also sent along a description of the collecting life from his father’s unpublished memoir:

Mammal collecting is perhaps the most arduous of all the fields.  The entomologist can set up his nets and lights and run through the fields like my old friend “Madam Butterfly.”  When they catch something they pop it into a killing-jar and when it is dead they lay it out between soft cellulose sheets and take it home.  The rest of the preparation, mounting on pins, labeling, or making microscope slides of the specimen is done by their technicians.  The herpetologist goes around turning over logs and grabbing snakes and lizards or pops them with his .22 dust shot.  When he has a bag full he plunks them into alcohol and throws in a label. 

But mammalogists do most of their preparation in the field, and they also deal with some pretty big critters.  Each one has to be measured and weighed, and we usually pick them over for fleas and ticks (for our entomologist colleagues), and then we have to skin them and stuff them.  We don’t do taxidermy, but we make something called a study skin, that looks like some of the fluffy toys they sell in F.A.O. Schwarz.  Then

Did George Give Aid and Comfort to the Enemy?

In 1782, General George Washington sent a dozen men with wagons and tools north from West Point.  What was their mission?

1.  Collect dinosaur fossils.

2.  Build a bridge over the Fish Kill River.

3.  Dig up mastodon bones.

4.  Capture, hang, and bury the traitor Benedict Arnold.

And the answer is:

When the Urge to Discover Outlives the Ability

In the course of writing The Species Seekers, it often struck me how powerfully biological explorers felt the urge to discover, to delight, and to categorize.  To my regret, I could not find room for the following anecdote, told by an elderly naturalist who still felt that urge, but no longer had the means to gratify it, near the end of a life spent sorting out the minute differences among related insect species.

In Science magazine for November 4 1932, entomologist Leland O. Howard wrote that he could no longer read or work at the microscope.  Instead, “I have been interesting myself by watching my eye-spots—those fragile things that float before one’s eyes, apparently in space.  I have recognized three species of insects, two plainly, and the third rather dimly.”

One of them had “spotted wings and apparently the venation of a trypetid fly.”  Another looked like the pupa of Culex pipiens.  (“I can see the respiratory trumpets on the thorax and it is plainly Culicine—not Anopheline. “)

“Other biologists who have misused their eyes (as I have) may amuse themselves by classifying their eyespots…”

In a subsequent issue of Science, a retired corporate executive replied in the same fanciful spirit, “I have, in one of my eyes, a cross between a lizard and a turtle which suddenly jumps aside when I try to pin it down for Latin names.”

 

Victory to the Shaggy

Carpet shark swallows a bamboo shark whole (courtesy Tom Mannering)

We like to believe that victory belongs to the sleek and the strong.  But sometimes being shaggy and obscure works better.  Daniela Ceccarelli and David Williamson, from the  Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, were doing research on the Great Barrier Reef when they spotted the spectacle of one shark swallowing another whole.

Bamboo sharks, looking as slick and smooth as an Apple product, forage for food by nosing into nooks and crannies along the bottom.  Carpet sharks, by contrast, are shaggy, camouflaged creatures that lie on the bottom and do nothing.  (Think of them as Microsoft products.)

But when dinner comes to them, they snap it up.