The Water is Not Fine

Anyone who has ventured alone in remote and difficult corners of the planet knows that discovering new species entails a considerable dose of danger and also tedium, wonder and also absurdity, discomfort and also loneliness.  My book The Species Seekers is full of such stories, but I just came across a couple that ended up on the cutting room floor:

Fossil-hunter Louis Leakey described the experience of sharing a water hole with large animals at his camp in East Africa’s Olduvai Gorge this way:  “We could never get rid of the taste of rhino urine even after filtering the water through charcoal and boiling it and using it in tea with lemon.”

And botanist Joseph Banks contemplated his own death in a ship, The Endeavour, hung up on the Great Barrier Reef, in June 1770: 

“The most critical part of our distress now approached … if (as was probable) she should make more water when hauld off she must sink and we well knew that our boats were not capable of carrying us all ashore, so that some, probably the most of us, must be drownd:  a better fate maybe than those would have who should get ashore without arms to defend themselves…”

The indomitable Capt. James Cook eventually managed by considerable effort to get Endeavour off the reef and into a safe harbor for repairs, and Banks made it back to London alive.

As to the taste of rhino urine, I am pretty sure Leakey just learned to live with it.

Heroes and Villains in the War on Rhinos

Park rangers are the unsung heroes in the war on wildlife–underpaid, overworked, and routinely at risk to their lives, especially in areas where poachers do their dark work.  When I was in South Africa early this year,  a section ranger (who asks to be unnamed) at  Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park in KwaZulu-Natal, told me about arresting one of the notorious Van Deventer brothers in 2006.   “I was standing in front of the vehicle with a semi-automatic weapon saying, ‘Get out of the car!’” she said.  “And he was reaching for something under the seat.  The guy I was with reached in and snatched him out of the car.  It turned out there was a .38 snub-nosed under the seat that he was trying to reach.”

Later, Van Deventer told police that he’d already been to prison once and was determined never to go back.   It’s not clear if he was intending kill the ranger or himself.  In any case, one brother ended up with a five-year jail sentence, and the other got 10.  “These two brothers were responsible for the deaths of 25 rhinos,” said the ranger.

Now they are speaking out about their crimes, probably in a bid for early parole.  Here’s the report from investigative journalist Ian Michler:

The poachers
We never liked doing what we did and telling our story will help the public be aware of how to catch other poachers,’ says Rhino One, the name the older brother goes by in prison. ‘We are relieved it’s over because we were always stressed. I lost perspective on life,’ added Rhino Two, his younger brother. Involved from the very beginning, Rhino Two is serving a

Financial Lessons from Nature: A Follow-Up.

For some reason, a lot of visitors to this site seem to be checking out my NPR commentary that aired on November 18, 2008, about lessons learned from the natural world for dealing with the financial crisis.  Here was my key piece of advice:

I saw forest fire ravage Yellowstone in 1988.  It looked like the end of the world then, too.   But when I went back a few years later, the blackened areas were flourishing with new growth.  The same thing happens when financial markets go up in flames.  Buck up your courage, buy some stock, and the grass can be green again for us, too.

So, to quote Sarah Palin, how’s that workin’  out for ya?

Next day the Dow-Jones Industrial Average closed at 7997.   If you had suddenly realized–Eureka!–that Mother Nature is the master investor and put all your money into an index fund that day, you would now be up better than 60 percent. (The Dow closed yesterday at 12,261.)

So did I follow my own advice?  A little.  I invested some of my retirement funds around then, and it has paid off.  Unfortunately, I have no clue what Mother Nature says about when to sell.

Why Shyness and Introversion are Normal

 

Pumpkinseed sunfish: Better shy or sunny? (Image by jeffcurrier.com)

In her New York Times article about our tendency to regard shyness and introversion as  diseases, to be treated with antidepressants, writer Susan Cain takes some examples form the natural world:

We even find “introverts” in the animal kingdom, where 15 percent to 20 percent of many species are watchful, slow-to-warm-up types who stick to the sidelines (sometimes called “sitters”) while the other 80 percent are “rovers” who sally forth without paying much attention to their surroundings. Sitters and rovers favor different survival strategies, which could be summed up as the sitter’s “Look before you leap” versus the rover’s inclination to “Just do it!” Each strategy reaps different rewards.

IN an illustrative experiment, David Sloan Wilson, a Binghamton evolutionary biologist, dropped metal traps into a pond of pumpkinseed sunfish. The “rover” fish couldn’t help but

D.H. Lawrence on Jabbing, Terrifying Monsters

The hummingbirds are just starting to migrate back to New England.  You can read about their fierce, frantic lives in my book Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time.   And while you are waiting for your copy to arrive, this perfect, unsentimental poem by D.H. Lawrence seems like the right way to celebrate:

Humming Bird

by D.H. Lawrence

I can imagine, in some otherworld

Primeval-dumb, far back

In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,

Humming-birds raced down the avenues.

Before anything had a soul,

While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,

This little bit chipped off in brilliance

And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

I believe there were no flowers, then,

In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.

I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.

Probably he was big

As mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big.

Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.

We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time,

Luckily for us.

The Best Rx: Facing Up to Mistakes

A study from Johns Hopkins reveals that the father of successful neurosurgery, Harvey Cushing, a driven, egotistical figure, was nonetheless also routinely frank about admitting his mistakes.  I profiled Cushing recently (see below) and was also struck that, apart from being meticulously careful in his work, he also relied on methodical record-keeping and self-criticism to improve his results.  In the new study, medical student Katherine Latimer and her co-authors

… were surprised by Cushing’s frank and copious documentation of his own shortcomings. His notes acknowledged mistakes that may have resulted in patients’ deaths, as well as those that didn’t seem to harm patients’ outcomes. They said the documentation took place in an era in which malpractice litigation was becoming a growing concern for doctors. Though malpractice penalties were substantially smaller in Cushing’s day, lawsuits presented a serious risk for physicians’ reputations, the authors noted.

The authors also emphasized that Cushing practiced in a time of enormous surgical innovation. For example, patient mortality from surgical treatment of brain tumors fell from 50 percent to 13 percent during his career. While some of this jump ahead was due to improving technology, the authors propose that part of the reason was open documentation of errors, which helped Cushing and other surgeons develop fixes to avoid them.

The Brain Cutter

Here’s my profile of Harvey Cushing, published recently in the Yale Alumni Magazine:

Deep beneath the stacks of the Yale medical school library, a kind of grotto venerates the human brain. It’s a memorial to an era when surgery on “the closed box” of the human skull was far more mysterious, even macabre, than it seems today. It’s also a celebration of one man who made it less so, essentially inventing modern brain surgery by his odd blend of audacity and painstaking care with scalpel, drill, saw, and clamp.

You get a hint of what lies beneath on the stairway down, where a large photograph from 1930 shows a 24-year-old surgical candidate in hospital pajama bottoms, facing the camera and displaying symptoms of the form of gigantism called acromegaly. Surgeon Harvey Cushing, Class of 1891, stands at his side. He is an older and much smaller man, facing the patient, one knee canted forward, one hand in the jacket pocket of a carefully tailored glen-check suit. With his other hand, he holds the giant delicately by two fingers, as if to lead him to his fate. (The patient, a farm laborer, had been told by another doctor that he would “die if anyone operated on his pituitary.” In fact,

The Father of All Wakeup Calls

Nice photo, read the story in the Daily Mail:

 

Elephant seal hello (photo by Vaclav Silha)

Fear and Herd Behavior

One of my editors, Fen Montaigne of Yale Environment 360 has a new book out about Adelie penguins.  It’s worth taking a look.

It also reminds me of a brief item I wrote about these penguins in my 2005 book The Ape in the Corner Office:

Fear of predators is one reason so many species practice herd behavior with such blind, fretful enthusiasm.

During a visit in the Antarctic, for instance, Peter Brueggeman of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography sat in the middle of an Adelie penguin traffic jam watching the birds dither at water’s edge.

“So what does it take for them to jump in?”  Brueggeman wondered, in his online journal.  “They watch the water and when a large group of penguins comes swimming into their immediate area, the Adelie penguins start getting very vocal.” They jostle, jockey for position, squabble, peck back and forth, bash one another with their flippers, and engage in raucous discussion, followed by “an immediate chain reaction of everyone rushing to jump in the pool all at the same time, no waiting …”

So is all this commotion just the usual mindless negativity, bickering, and herd behavior all too familiar in other two-legged species?

In fact, it is a question of life or death.  Hungry leopard seals and orca whales patrol these shorelines in search of penguins for dinner.  But penguins need to eat, too, and sooner or later, if they can muster the positivity offset, that means going into the water.   If there are already lots of penguins in the water, chances are that the coast is clear.  So the dithering crowd on shore all try to do the same thing, jumping in at the exact same moment.  Some of them may still get eaten.  But this is the reward for social conformity:

Chances are, it’ll happen to the other guy.

Talking About Doing Dumb Stuff

With apologies for the absence of posts lately, I have been working frantically finishing up a new book, The Species Seekers, due out from W.W. Norton in November.  I’ll put up a sample sometime soon.

Meanwhile, here’s a talk and slide show I gave recently at CCNY, about my current book, Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time:  My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals.