Paramaribo Walkabout (Carefully)

Paramaribo street scene

Getting ready to fly out to Palumeu, and off the grid, first thing tomorrow, if weather allows.  (It’s been raining heavily so far.)  I did some last minute shopping (umbrella!) and visited some of the main attractions of the city this morning.

Paramaribo is no place for pedestrians.  In the old city, full of colonial era wooden houses built in a Dutch style, most houses have a second story balcony over the sidewalk, but also a stoop projecting out to the curb.  So you have to go continually up and down if you want to stay under the shelter of the balcony.  Or you get forced out into the rain and the traffic.  Cars park everywhere on the sidewalks, but if you go into the street, the drivers act as if you are unimaginably out of order and they generally move to summary execution.

Still, plenty to see, particularly the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul, a nineteenth-century Gothic cathedral, with all the familiar details, the carved bases and capitals, the second-story colonnaded gallery, the groined ceilings–but all in wood.  A delicate band box for the temporary storage of souls.  Said to be the largest wood structure in the Western Hemisphere, 161 feet long by 54 wide, built out of rain forest and struggling with every water stain and rusting nail to get back to it.  (Think about the termites!)  It was pouring rain out, but I also had the illusion the walls were almost translucent, so the sun could glow through on bright days.

I took some photos with my iPhone:

Kickstarter for a Species Seeker

I’m borrowing this, with thanks, from Bug Girl’s Blog because it’s a great cause.  I’ve traveled with Brian Fisher and his team as they hunted for new ant species in Madagascar, and they do great work.  You can read that story here and in my book Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time.  I’m also a fan of Kickstarter, the fundraising site for creative projects.  My daughter recently raised funds there to do an art project about my father as an Outsider Artist.  So it’s great to hear that crowdsource project funding has now come to science, too:

Earlier this week, the internets were buzzing with a claim that Kickstarter is funding more projects than the National Endowment for the Arts.  It turns out that may not be strictly true, but it certainly is true that a lot of cool projects are being crowd-sourced that otherwise would never have made it off the ground.

I’ve mentioned some insecty Kickstarter projects before, like Meet The Beetle (a film about an endangered tiger beetle).  Unfortunately, Kickstarter is limited to arts and humanities. But now the concept of crowdsourcing has been harnessed for science!

Petridish.org is so new it hardly has a bacterial film growing on its website yet. Its first science crowd-sourcing project involves two awesome things: Insects and Madagascar.

“Unique” doesn’t begin to describe Madagascar. This giant island split from the African Continent over 160 million years ago, and over 90% of it’s mammal and reptile species occur no where else in the world.  Deforestation and erosion are critical threats to the island’s ecosystems, and many native species are endangered.

Brian Fisher, one of the folks behind AntWeb, is leading a project to document the ant species of a high remote preserve.   You might be wondering why you should care about ants in Madagascar.  You may especially be wondering this because you have figured out that at some point later in this post I’m going to hit you up for a donation.  I really like this statement from AntWeb that puts ants in context:

“At this moment, more than one thousand trillion ants are scurrying all over the Earth. If every human climbed aboard one side of a scale, and every ant crawled onto the other side, the scale would just about balance.”

Ants probably move more earth and recycle more dead things yearly than a whole army of human undertakers with bulldozers ever could.  Ants are a critical part of making the world’s living systems function.  The project description:

“Ants are the glue that hold forests together. But Madagascar’s hotspots of biodiversity are vanishing, and along with them unknown species. An estimated 40 percent of the island’s species, in fact, have already perished through human encroachment.

Pyramica hoplites stalks other insects in the leaf litter like a miniature jaguar. "If your sister goes to the corner for a glass of milk and never comes back, it's Pyramica that got her," says Fisher.

While ants aren’t as popular as furry and feathery animals, the insects turn over forest soil, breakdown debris, disperse crucial nutrients and otherwise support an unimaginable number of species both up, down and across the food chain. The insects are also a growing resource for antimicrobial and antifungal compound discovery, as many ants manufacture such chemicals to ward off disease and even farm food.

I need to reach one of the last standing pristine forests, called the Kasijy, before nearby populations burn them down to raise cattle. Researchers have visited the remote site only a handful of times because it’s a rugged, canyon-filled landscape resting on high blocks of limestone and sedimentary rock.Because Kasijy is so pristine, it also serves as a crucial data point of what Madagascar used to be like before the advent of modern civilization. The region and other forests are great places to understand the ongoing impacts of climate change on highly specialized ecosystems.

My expedition aims to:

• Inventory Kasijy’s untold new species and document their roles in a pristine natural ecosystem.
• Understand the biodiversity patterns of Madagascar and resolve our “bioilliteracy” of the Kasijy forest.
• Set up more robust conservation plans for the island.
• Raise awareness of Madagascar’s natural wonders and its ongoing plight.”

There are 39 days left to fund this project–I hope you can spare a dollar or two to help a researcher out!  Note that a large gift gets you acknowledged in any manuscripts published from this research.

And for a mere $5000, you can buy scientific immortality with your name, or the name of a friend or loved one, on one of Fisher’s new species.  Whatever you give, Fisher will not waste your money.  When I was there, we jumped a freight train to get to a research site, and he seemed to live on rice, a little chicken, and a horrible tea made from the burnt leavings at the bottom of the rice pot.

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

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.”

 

Did Pretty Shells Cost Them a Continent?

Citizen Baudin

In 1800, two French ships re-named the Géographe and the Naturaliste set out from Le Havre, France, under the command of Capt. Nicolas Baudin, with 23 scientists aboard in addition to crew.  They were bound for the unknown coast of Australia.  The British, fearing that the French had colonial ambitions there, soon sent out a rival expedition under the command of Matthew Flinders.

Baudin’s expedition sent home a spectacular assortment of species, including 144 new birds, surveyed parts of the coast of Australia, and eventually made peaceful contact with Flinders in what is now Encounter Bay.  But his company bickered childishly, according to Encountering Terra Australis, a history of the rival voyages.  In the past, such voyages had been under the command of aristocrats, and old attitudes persisted after the French Revolution.  Baudin’s naval officers were indignant about serving under a captain of humble social background.

The scientists meanwhile squabbled about access to resources and about getting proper credit for

Peron

their work. At one point, zoologist François Péron presented himself to Baudin dripping with blood, from a fight with the ship’s surgeon over which of them should get the “glory” of dissecting a shark.  Péron lost and whined that the surgeon had stolen the shark’s heart.  Not content to be merely a zoologist, Péron also played at being a spy, making a crude survey of British defenses at Port Jackson (now Sydney) and urging French authorities to destroy the colony as a way of snuffing out British imperial ambitions in Australia.

Citizen Baudin didn’t suffer from the common tendency of naval officers to regard scientists as a nuisance (though in this case it would have been understandable); he was a naturalist himself.  But instead of capitalizing on their good fortune, one naturalist complained that Baudin “would prefer to discover a new mollusk than a new landmass.” And at Encounter Bay, a disgruntled French officer told the British “if we had not been kept so long picking up shells and catching butterflies at Van Diemen’s Land [now Tasmania], you would not have discovered the south coast before us.”

###

Find out more in chapter three of The Species Seekers:  Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth.

Helicopter Crash Takes Ocean Cinematographer

With regret, I am adding a new name to the Wall of the Dead.  Today’s New York Times reports that Mike DeGruy, a great cinematographer of the natural world,  has died.  We worked for National Geographic Television at about the same time, though not together.  Here’s the obituary, with a last paragraph that says a lot about personal courage:

Mike deGruy, an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and marine biologist who through the lens of his submersible cameras transported viewers to the deepest crags of the oceans and face to face with swirling, pulsing sea creatures, died on Saturday in a helicopter crash in Australia. He was 60.

National Geographic, for which Mr. deGruy made many television documentaries, said in a statement that he and Andrew Wight, a pilot and also a filmmaker, were killed when their Robinson R44 helicopter went down shortly after takeoff from an airstrip in Jasper’s Brush, 80 miles south of Sydney.

In more than two-dozen documentaries over three decades, Mr. deGruy (pronounced de-GREE) filmed killer whales snatching sea lion pups off the beaches of Patagonia; lobsters migrating in the Bahamas; tiger sharks feeding on

Women Among the Early Biological Explorers

Not only was there a shortage of women collectors in my book The Species Seekers, but I also left out most of the botanical explorers.  Partly that’s just because I prefer writing about animals, and there weren’t a lot of women out collecting animals before the twentieth century.

But Susan Branson’s article from the new history web site Common-Place begins to correct both omissions.  Here’s an excerpt:

Merian

Women clearly were interested in botany. Whether or not botany was deemed to be a suitable occupation for women is another matter. Two gendered portrayals of female practitioners in the early eighteenth century show how some men depicted such women. German Naturalist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian, who travelled to Surinam in 1699 with her daughter, produced a comprehensive volume, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, on the insects and flora of the colony. Merian was knowledgeable and thorough: she bred insects so she could illustrate each stage of the life cycle. A portrait painted during her lifetime shows her as a scholar, surrounded by instruments, books and the insects she studied. Yet the frontispiece to an edition of her work published after her death shows Merian seated calmly at a table while at her feet, mischievous putti rummage through collections of flora and other study objects. Alan Bewell has suggested that this maternal, rather than scientific, depiction of Merian may have “reduc[ed] social anxieties raised by the unconventional aspects of Merian’s life by [intimating] that ultimately her primary commitment as a female naturalist was to

Nibbles & Poisons: A Marriage

Jameson and Friend

This is a nice press release from Wichita State, and with a decent punch line:

Deep in the corridors of Wichita State University’s Hubbard Hall, two Biological Sciences faculty are intertwined in a sometimes contentious relationship.

Associate professor Mary Liz Jameson is a biodiversity scientist. Her research focuses on the science of insects, specifically beetles.

Associate professor Leland Russell is a plant population and community ecologist. His research focuses on the effects that herbivores, such as beetles, have on plants.

Jameson and Russell are married. One studies beetles. The other studies plants.

Beetles eat plants. Plants can poison beetles.

Can this relationship be saved?

O.k., I’m going to skip all the cutesy marital sweet talk, and probably antagonize botanists by omitting much further discussion of Russell and his plants.  (If you truly insist, you can find all that stuff here.)  But I like what it says about Jameson and of course also her beetles, as well as her husband’s anxieties that she might name a new species after him (you can also check out her full bio here) :

She has discovered and named 37 new species of scarab beetles through her research in places such as Sumatra, Peru, Honduras, the Soloman Islands and Thailand. Jameson has also had several species actually named in her honor.

“Species are the pieces of the puzzle that help us to understand how all of the components of life on Earth work together,” she said. “Scientists have named about 1.8 million species on Earth, but millions more remain to be described.”

She has yet to name a newly discovered species after Russell, but said