Richard Conniff's Blog, page 11

As Climate Change Bears Down, Do We Relocate Threatened Species?

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(Photo: Frans Lanting)

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

On a knob of rock in New Zealand’s Cook Strait known as North Brother Island, a population of the lizard-like creature called the tuatara is quickly becoming all male. When scientists first noticed the imbalance in the late 1990s, the sex-ratio was already 62.4 percent male, and it has rapidly worsened since then, to more than 70 percent. Researchers say climate change is the cause: ground temperature determines the sex of tuatara embryos, with cooler temperatures favoring females and warmer ones favoring males.  When climate pushes the sex ratio to 85 percent male, the North Brother Island tuataras will slip inescapably into what biologists call the extinction vortex.

So what should conservationists do? For the tuatara and many other species threatened by climate change, relocating them to places they have never lived before–a practice known as assisted colonization—is beginning to seem like the only option. “We’d prefer to do something a little more natural,” says Jessica Hellman, a lepidopterist at Notre Dame, who was among the first researchers to put the assisted colonization idea up for discussion. That is, it would be better for species to shift their ranges on their own, using natural corridors to find new homes as their old ones become less habitable. But for many island and mountain species, long distance moves were never an option in the first place, says Hellman. In other cases, old corridors no longer exist, because human development has fragmented them.

The idea of assisted colonization as a conservation tactic has elicited fierce criticism, however, because of its potential to wreak ecological havoc on both the relocated species and on the destination habitat. Conservationists have up to now also been inclined by their culture to be against assisted colonization. Many of them have devoted their lives to putting species back where they used to live 100 or 200 years ago—gray wolves in Yellowstone, or bison on the Great Plains. Imagining new places where they might live in some unknowable future can feel like heresy.

But as the likely devastation from climate change has become more apparent, criticism has given way to guidelines on how and when to move species–and to increasing, if uneasy, acceptance. A recent survey of 2300 biodiversity scientists in the online journal Elementa found that most supported assisted colonization under certain limited conditions—notably where it is the only way to prevent extinction, and where the risk to the destination habitat is small or nonexistent.

EVACUATION PLANNING

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Gilbert’s potoroo

The need to plan what could be, in essence, emergency evacuations became painfully evident this past December when a wildfire devastated the habitat of one of the world’s most endangered mammals–a small, kangaroo-like marsupial called  the Gilbert’s potoroo–in drought-stricken Western Australia. The fire killed 15 of the 20 potoroo in the reserve where the species had been rediscovered in 1995 after having previously been considered extinct for more than a century. Loss of that habitat would have been an automatic sentence to extinction–except that, in the aftermath of the rediscovery, conservationists had established a separate colony on a nearby island.

The potoroo was translocated within its original home range, which is much less controversial than moving a species into a new area.  Conservationists elsewhere have also begun buying time in that fashion: In the Florida Keys, for instance, researchers have already relocated populations of key deer and the tree-like key

cactus to upland areas, to give them a few more decades of suitable habitat as sea levels rise. For Australia’s Bramble Cay melomys, a small rodent, it is already too late for that kind of delaying tactic. In June, University of Queensland researchers announced that the species had vanished after repeated inundations of its island home.  They described the event as  probably “the first recorded mammalian extinction due to anthropogenic climate change.”

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Western swamp tortoise

Thus, the best hope for other species may lie beyond their traditional home range. For instance, the marsh where Australia’s critically endangered western swamp tortoise lives outside Perth faces the triple threat of climate change, urban expansion, and the city’s relentless drawing down of the underlying aquifer. The University of Queensland’s Tracy Rout and her colleagues have used a supercomputer to sort through 13,000 potential relocation sites around the region. Further work on the ground has narrowed the list to several sites a few hours south of the city with hydrology and other conditions likely to remain suitable in the drier climate 30 or 50 years from now. Assuming they receive the necessary permissions, researchers will drive south with a load of captive-reared tortoises as early as August 2016 to begin introducing them to their new homes. (UPDATE: Done.]

Other researchers are debating where to move Australia’s critically endangered mountain pygmy possum. It’s a measure of the complexity of such moves that they might also have to relocate its preferred food, the Bogong moth. The alpine habitat for both species is warming so fast that simply moving uphill will no longer be possible.

LAG TIME

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Marbled white butterfly

The use of assisted colonization as a tool for addressing climate change isn’t entirely new. Stephen J. Willis, an ecologist at Durham University in northern England, and Jane K. Hill, now at the University of York, tried it experimentally beginning in 2000. “We had been looking at climate change impacts” on British butterfly species, including the relatively common marbled whites and little skippers, said Hill, “and we saw there was some suitable climate north of their normal range they hadn’t reached.”

That’s because of a phenomenon called “migration lag.” Even when natural corridors survive intact, species tend to lag behind the pace of climate change. That kind of delay might be predictable for trees and other less mobile species. But studies in Europe have found that even birds and many mammal species also lag behind changes in climate, perhaps because they depend on slower-moving vegetation and habitat types. The gap between “climate velocity” and “biotic velocity” can be insuperable. Joshua Lawler at the University of Washington projects, for instance, that South America’s yellow-banded poison dart frogs will need to hop hundreds of kilometers to the southwest to find suitable habitat later in this century.

When Willis and Hill noticed that marbled whites and little skipper butterflies were climate laggards, they set out to help them catch up. “We did it as a demonstration, as a good case study,” said Hill. They obtained the necessary permissions because the habitats for the proposed relocations were relatively restricted, in quarries and urbanized areas, and because other species there were already known to be compatible. They released the marbled whites 65 kilometers north of their traditional home range, and the little skippers 35 kilometers north. Both populations seem to be thriving in their new homes, Willis said recently. But he added that the developing guidelines for assisted migration “are all saying the right thing, that you need to take a cautious, reserved approach. You don’t want to be introducing the next rabbit into Australia.”

HAZARDS OF RELOCATION

Translocating any species is inevitably fraught with risk. In a 2009 critique, McGill University’s Anthony Ricciardi and Daniel Simberloff of the University of Kentucky urged conservationists not to play “ecological roulette” and warned that proponents have “grossly underestimated” just how difficult it is to forecast the impacts of introducing species to a habitat, even with the most cautious and nuanced analysis.

Ricciardi pointed to Newfoundland’s 1963 decision to introduce red squirrels into its black spruce forests, with the idea that they would provide a new food source for pine martens. The martens, weasel-like creatures then in decline, turned out to have no appetite for squirrels. The spruce cones, which had evolved squirrel-free for 9000 years, had no means to protect themselves from the squirrels. And the Newfoundland crossbill, a subspecies that had evolved to depend on those same cones, collapsed in the face of new competition. It’s now endangered–and a case study of how the best intentions can go horribly wrong when people move species outside their historic range.

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(Photo: Eric Wilson)

There may be ways to minimize the likelihood of such disastrous outcomes, however. Nathalie Pettorelli of the London Zoological Society and her colleagues set out to exactly that in a 2013 study of New Zealand’s hihi. It’s beautiful yellow-and-black bird, with a hovering flight, and 34 million years of evolution separate from its nearest living relative. But it survives in just five isolated habitats on the North Island, where conservationists provide support with the sort of sugar feeders commonly used in North America for hummingbirds. Even so, Pettorelli and her co-authors found that climate change in the coming decades will make that northern habitat largely unsuitable for the hihi.  On the other hand, the shift will open up habitat in the South Island, outside the hihi’s historical range.

“We were not looking to say when or how or where to move the hihi,” said Pettorelli. That’s the job of local managers. But the researchers thought they could provide a methodology for making such decisions carefully. They started by breaking out a half-dozen separate ways things can go wrong for a translocation habitat—including negative effects on other species (“ecological risk”), introduction of new pathogens (“disease risk”), the possibility of spreading beyond the intended range and outcompeting native species (“invasive risk”), hybridization with a related species (“gene escape risk”), and costs to human residents (“socio-economic risk”). They also factored in a host of climate factors, such as how dry it gets in the dry season and how rainfall varies over the course of the year,  in old and potential new habitats, to make their models as precise as possible.

“We need to increase collaboration between people on the ground making the decision and the scientists,” says Pettorelli. “A lot of people want to work together but don’t know how to do it, don’t have connections to work together.” Even now, “a lot of management decisions are taken without consideration of what science is available and how to make use of it.” The point of the exercise was to show them how. As a result, conservationists have now established a new hihi population on the South Island.

SHELTER IN PLACE

And yet even proponents of assisted colonization worry they may be getting ahead of themselves. Sometimes the “do no harm” option can work out just fine. Species can sometimes adapt surprisingly quickly. In the Rocky Mountains west of Denver, for instance, certain flowers with deep pollen tubes have become scarcer as temperatures have risen. So bumblebees that had evolved long tongues to feed on them are now reversing the process, losing a quarter of their tongue length over the past 50 years to feed on the flowers that are still there.

Species can also turn out to be resilient in ways we might not expect. In southern Australia in 2010, for instance, researchers working on a commercial lobster fishery translocated 10,000 southern rock lobsters from deep water. But instead of moving them poleward to establish outpost populations in colder waters, they moved them closer to the equator, to see how the species would handle the warmer conditions predicted in the near future. Counterintuitively, the lobsters went on to grow at four times the rate seen at their site of origin and to boost their output by 35,000 eggs a year. They were more adaptable to temperature change than expected, and there was more for them to eat.

Predicting that sort of resilience is a challenge. When researchers recently examined how 155 species of British butterflies and moths fared over 40 years of climate change, they found that roughly half seemed to do better, and half worse. Different factors mattered for different species, with some sensitive to summer temperatures, others to winter temperatures, some to spring rainfall, and so on almost ad infinitum. “It turns out that these 155 different species of butterflies and moth have almost 155 different ‘opinions’ on how much the climate has changed, and whether it has got better or worse,” says Chris D. Thomas of the University of York

MAKING HARD DECISIONS

Where does all this uncertainty leave a species like the tuatara? Tuatara males can breed every year, while the North Brother females can produce a clutch of eggs only once every nine years. That means the females suffer constant mating harassment, which rapidly erodes their ability to stay healthy–a problem that is worsening as the sex ration of the population skews toward males.

Because North Brother Island offers no shade, and hardly any nooks and crannies, to reduce this effect, the 500 or so tuatara there have become a bellwether for how a rapidly warming planet will affect the entire species. Already pushed off the mainland onto a handful of islands, the 100,000 remaining tuatara are the last survivors from 200 million years of evolution.

Nicola Mitchell of the University of Western Australia recently co-authored an article listing the various management options on North Brother. All the parties that care about the tuatara—scientists, government managers, and the Maori, for whom it is a cultural totem—could band together to remove unneeded structures and open up nesting sites on cooler faces of the islands. Or they could send in researchers to find eggs and use captive incubation to achieve the right temperatures for an equal gender mix. Alternatively, they could restore gender balance by protecting female hatchlings and adding them to the population while removing excess adult males.

“But these are all really difficult things to do,” said Mitchell, who spent two summers on the island searching for nests. “There are so few females nesting each year, and they’re very secretive and hard to find.” Plus every trip to North Brother Island involves a helicopter from downtown Wellington, a budget killer. Moreover, there are already insurance populations of the same subspecies, though a different genetic group, on nearby islands. So the most pragmatic solution may be to regard the North Brother Island tuatara however reluctantly as a sacrifice population. That is, scientists might just want to wait and watch how things work out on their own.

 

Not so long ago, conservation biology was about trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces missing, and that was hard enough. Now it’s as if someone—all of us—have kicked the jigsaw puzzle into the sky, and the trick for biologists is to put it together again while it is not just airborne, but caught in shifting winds. Also it’s starting to rain. Or, wait, maybe it will never rain again. And here is a species you care about passionately. Maybe it’s some lizardy thing, or an insect, or even a snake, but you care as if it were a big-eyed puppy at the pound with no time left, and nobody else to take it home. So here are the five things you could do to make the difference between survival and oblivion. Only one of them will save the day. It’s not an emotional decision, but time is running out.

Quick! Choose.

END

NOTE:  Scientific American chose a different ending. I think I prefer the one above, but again, it’s a bit of a toss-up.  Here’s how the published version ended:

Ultimately such decisions will boil down to how comfortable conservation biologists and society as a whole feel about meddling with nature to decide which species survive and which species die out. “When does it feel like you’re working with natural processes? And when does it feel like gardening?” muses Notre Dame’s Hellman. “You can’t garden all of biodiversity.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

ALTERNATE ENDING

THE PERIL

This Year’s Worst-Timed Science Study Examines Sex with Immature Females

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If only scientists had better control over publication dates, this new study might not have seen the light just now, in the year of Harvey Weinstein, Dustin Hoffman, and oh-so-many others.  Published this week in the journal Scientific Reports, it’s a finding that males seeking sex with immature females aren’t necessary engaged in coercion and don’t seem to impose any cost on their partners.

OK, the researchers are talking about redback spiders, not humans.

And lest readers think it’s a good idea to follow examples from the natural world, the press release for the study also notes that these are “one of few arachnids that engage in sexual cannibalism while mating. In fact, males have been observed to actively assist in being cannibalized by doing somersaults to place their abdomen over the adult female’s mouth.”

Still, we’re not all that far out of Harvey Weinstein territory, are we?  (He’d have used a body double for the somersault.)

What’s especially interesting, according to the press release from the University of Toronto, is that “some male redback spiders will avoid being cannibalized by mating with immature females that are not experienced in eating their partners.”

Researchers Luciana Baruffaldi and Maydianne C.B. Andrade wondered if it was coercive sex and how it affected the immature females.

“Here we show,” they report, “that a damaging mating tactic, apparently adaptive for males, is not coercive for females. Adult male Latrodectus spiders mate with immature females after tearing the exoskeleton covering the female’s recently-developed reproductive tract, which can cause haemolymph bleeding.” The males also skip some of the courtship behaviors they would display to mature females, and the immature females engage in “elevated deterrent behavioural responses.”

These deterrent behaviors take energy and increase the female’s risk of predation or other damage, but they “may evolve if they allow avoidance of costly matings with coercive males.” So far, so good.

Then the co-authors add the genuinely disturbing–even creepy–thought that “these behaviours may also be a mechanism of female choice if persistent or physically powerful males are superior mates.” It’s disturbing, it seems to me, because it inadvertently echoes the common notion among human males that a female saying “no” is actually a female engaging in combatively flirtatious resistance, en route to “yes.” One can especially imagine the Donald Trumps and Harvey Weinsteins of the world disbelieving “no” based on the assumption that they are clearly superior males.

Still in the creepy vein, the co-authors go on to argue that “it is not possible to distinguish the function of female deterrent behaviours only by observation. By extension, it [is] not possible to determine whether matings are coercive based on female responses. The critical question is whether or not females suffer net fitness deficits when they mate with males that use coercive tactics.”

In this case, says Baruffaldi, “this early mating may be good for female redback spiders because in nature they’re at risk of not finding a mate at all.”

“Not finding a mate at all” might sound pretty good, in the circumstances. But the press release also notes that “unmated females have shorter lifespans than mated females, likely the result of having eggs that have to be maintained that can be a drain on their resources.”

The whole thing has a familiar ring to it: “Have sex with me, I’m your only chance.” It’s also a reminder of just how cruel the natural world can be. Cruel to the males, too, I suppose, who otherwise risk being cannibalized during sex.

The unfortunately timed University of Toronto study is part of a growing body of research on coercive sex in the animal world. But here is a hint of hope to grasp onto as we race to the end of a horrible year:  The co-authors suggest that scientists may have overestimated the prevalence of sexual conflict in the natural world, because over-reliance on studies of insects skewed their thinking. (The Natural History of Rape was the title of one controversial book on the topic, published in 2000.) As researchers have begun to look at a more diverse study species, they are finding less evidence of sexual interactions resulting in harm to females.

Coming up with a bottom line on a behavior that runs from fruitflies to the President of the United States may seem unlikely. But here’s my candidate: The phrase “casual sex” could just be the dumbest oxymoron ever invented, for redback spiders and human beings alike.

 

 

Memorial for a Teacher: Vincent Scully

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In the late 1960s,  I attended an all-boy parochial high school in Newark, N.J., an uninspiring and sometimes  brutal experience. Then, by some miracle, I was admitted to Yale in April, 1969, and began my undergraduate years that September. What made me recognize it was a miracle was a mid-day lecture, delivered twice a week, in the darkened Yale Law School auditorium, by a brilliant teacher named Vincent Scully. He ranged nimbly–no lyrically–across an entire planet’s worth of art and architecture, and carried us along on the wave of his oratory. Over the course of that semester, he also taught us to step out of ourselves and learn to see the world for ourselves, in a new way, with our own yes and emotions. 

I still think of my debt to him almost every day. 

Scully died November 30, at 97. Here’s a profile of him I wrote in 2008. It was a final chance to go back to those same lectures and see again the transformation generations of students experienced in the class known to students as “Darkness at Noon.”

by Richard Conniff/Yale Alumni Magazine

[image error]At 11:35 on a Monday morning, Vincent Scully walks to the lectern and glances at his watch. As always at the start of a talk, he’s a little tense, like an actor wound up before a play. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he begins, “you will remember the last time I talked to you about…” The lights of the lecture hall go dark and slides appear on the big screen behind him. His voice is soft and hesitant at first, probing for the way forward. He does not use notes or deliver quite the same lecture twice, even after 60 years. But the words soon catch on the flow of images, and that voice, gentle one moment, all gravel and tumult the next, begins to draw his audience with him.

Part of the Scully legend is that he once got so carried away during a lecture that he fell off the stage.

Names and dates to be memorized do not figure largely in what follows. Scully’s goal is to open his students’ eyes, by showing them how he sees and thus how they can begin to see for themselves. So it’s not just an Ionic column, mid-sixth century B.C., up there on the screen. Nor do the volutes of the capital look to him, as others have proposed, like the ringlets of a woman’s hair. Instead, Scully points out how the slender, fluted columns rise like jets of water, lifting the broad horizontal entablature of the temple, then flowing out to either side. “You can make that shape with a paddle in the water,” he says, of the scrolls on the capital. “It’s geometric. It’s hydraulic.”

He stands off to one side of the stage, the smudge of reflected light from the lectern making a ghostly presence of his reddened face and the pale double curve of the eyebrows. He cants himself toward the slides, and his hands reach out, turning and undulating, as if he means to conjure the image to life on the stage. When he shows the huge choir window behind the altar at Chartres, he remarks that you have to climb uphill to the cathedral, and still seem to be climbing once inside. “You get the feeling there’s a great tide coming. If you’ve ever rowed, and the tide changes …” Here he reaches out with both hands for imaginary oars and lays his back into it, as if toward the heavenly light behind the behind the altar.

The New Yorker once ran a profile of Scully, which ended with a scene of him rowing his Gloucester Gull out into the wild winter seas of Long Island Sound. He was roaring Homer in the original Greek, as the waves came rumbling “polyphloisboio” toward the bow, and then went sighing “thalasses, thalasses” beneath the boat. It was a portrait of the art historian as an old man, defiant, a little crazy, and clearly on the shortlist for the afterlife. But 28 years later, Scully is still out rowing in winter. (He uses a heavier boat now, a weathered old Bank dory evocative of that other Homer, Winslow.) At 87, he also still teaches the course for which he is famous, as much as for his 20 books, or for the criticism that has made him one of the most influential voices in modern architecture.

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(Photo: Michael Marsland)

For generations of Yale students in History of Art 112a, Scully’s voice rising from the front of a darkened auditorium has been their first real experience of art and architecture. It has always been a form of theater, one man on a stage serving up careful analysis, unabashed emotion, and an astonishing breadth of literary, mythological, and intellectual associations. The news of the day has often gotten mixed in, linking Picasso’s Guernica to the My Lai massacre, propaganda sculpted on the breastplate of Augustus to an American president boasting “Mission Accomplished.” (“Works of art stay the same,” Scully says, “but meanings drain in and out of them according to the experience of a generation.”)

In Scully’s prime, his theater was physical, too. He depended on an audiovisual assistant working as many as seven slide projectors at once, and he liked to prowl hungrily beneath the images. “Focus!” he’d cry. “Would you please get the focus? You’re making it worse. Focus, please.” Sometimes he rapped on the stage with his pointer to call up a new slide, and now and then, carried away with a thought, he flailed at an image on the screen until a snowfall of reflective particles came drifting down.

“My father started taking me to Yale games when I was about four years old.”

Once, driving home some emphatic idea about modern architecture, Scully ripped the screen with his pointer. He didn’t comment until several slides later, says Ned Cooke ’77, a student in that class and now a professor in the art history department. Then he deftly folded the rip into a discussion of surface and skin in a house by Le Corbusier. Part of the Scully legend is that he once got so carried away during a lecture about Frank Lloyd Wright that he fell off the stage, and climbed back up, bleeding but still on topic, to wild cheering from his students. (“I never really fell,” he confides now. “I miscalculated, and jumped.”)

He still has that performer’s instinct for the moment, making a strength even of his age. When the temple at Deir el-Bahri goes up on the screen, he begins to describe “the 18th-dynasty queen named …” but then stops and says, unembarrassed, “Ah, I’m so sorry. I don’t know.” He walks back to the lectern. “You will tell me the name, you know it.” A few voices call back to him, and he catches it. “Hatshepsut. I’m so sorry … one of those things.” Smiling now, he says, “You will have to carry me out in a moment.” The audience laughs, and he returns to his topic.

[image error]A menacing day in late November, the sky alternately luminescent and lowering. Scully and his wife, the architectural historian Catherine (nicknamed Tappy) Lynn ’81PhD, are headed for the Yale Bowl. Lynn drives. Scully declaims. “Watch out! Go, go! You, Tappy!” She is unperturbed. It would hardly be Scully without the passionate intensity, particularly not today, when Yale faces Harvard for the Ivy League title, and 60,000 people are due to attend. He has been dreaming darkly about this game, and losing sleep, all week. Just negotiating the traffic to the Bowl is a dire challenge. So when Lynn manages to cut off a Harvard man named Ted Kennedy at the gate to the VIP parking area, Scully is ferocious in triumph: “Look out!” he cries, as if to barbarian hordes surging down from the North, “We’re ruthless! We’ll mow you down! Oh, Tappy, you’re marvelous.”

“All the rest of Yale is a gentle tonal unity; the Beinecke’s area is one blinding white flash.”

It would be an understatement to call Scully a devoted fan. “I’m the twisted creature I am,” he says, “in part because my father started taking me to Yale games when I was about four years old. I remember everybody being taller than me, and my father lifting me up so I could see what was happening.” He doesn’t merely recall the career of Albie Booth ’32, Yale’s legendary 144-pound back; he holds a 77-year-old grudge over it. “This is one of the main reasons why I always hated Army,” he says. “Army threw the pass carefully to Booth, to be sure he got it, and then they got him. They all jumped on him. They broke his ribs. They gave him pleurisy. He was out for the rest of the season. And he died young; he was only about 45. Anyway, I always hated them.”

An old friend of Scully’s has e-mailed ahead to warn a visiting journalist what to expect: a single-minded focus on the game, punctuated by loud outbursts of strong feeling. But his friends understand “the exact titration of seriousness involved in any particular rant.” They also know that “he sees things quickly—almost before they happen. If he says ‘First Down,’ it IS first down. He is never wrong.”

Today, though, the gods send their blessings elsewhere, and everything is wrong. Approaching gate 16, Scully digs into his coat pocket and realizes that he has mistakenly brought the tickets for the previous game, when a lingering cold and heavy weather kept him home. “Oh, you have them, Vince, keep looking,” Lynn says, not falling for it. For 29 years now, he has been stopping at this gate and asking, “You brought the tickets, Tappy?” knowing perfectly well that they are in his pocket. But today they aren’t, and this is a game for which every VIP who ever slinked through New Haven has been angling all week for a seat in the Bowl. Scully and Lynn quickly decide to brazen it out, putting the journalist with the valid ticket in front and scuttling close behind. It works.

But the game is a debacle. Scully watches grimly, fists jammed into the pockets of his herringbone coat. He is well behaved, except perhaps when he is likening a crimson patch of Harvard fans across the stadium to a cancerous growth. Harvard runs the score up to 37-0, and Scully bursts out in the strangled laughter of the forsaken, then sinks back into his coat. Despair sends the brim of his canvas sunhat down to meet the tips of his upturned lapels.

He is seated with a cadre of old friends at midfield, surrounded by university administrators, major donors, and members of the Yale Corporation. Tens of thousands of fans on this side of the stadium would know his name and probably remember his class among the high points of their college education. He is a Sterling Professor (emeritus since 1991), Yale’s highest academic appointment, and Yale has named not one, but two endowed professorships in his honor. Still, Scully worries aloud about not having a ticket, as if someone might grab him by his J. Press collar and fling him back into the streets of New Haven.

And you get the feeling he almost likes it that way.

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Oldenburg with the original “Lipstick” in Beinecke Plaza

Scully’s relationship with Yale has always been both fiercely loyal and gleefully subversive, a schizophrenic triumph of the inside-outside man. He has at times admonished university officials, notably in the successful fight to prevent demolition of parts of the Divinity School in the late 1990s. He has also often twitted them.

In the 1960s, for instance, Scully and the sculptor Claes Oldenburg ’50 reconnoitered Beinecke Plaza one night when the library was new and the aesthetic pain still fresh. (“It hurts everything that was there before it,” he said at the time. “All the rest of Yale is a gentle tonal unity; the Beinecke’s area is one blinding white flash.”) The two of them decided the library looked like a table radio and the sunken sculpture garden like an ashtray. What it needed, Oldenburg suggested, was a big cigarette resting on the garden wall, to put everything in scale. “But the director of the Beinecke was a fanatic who thought we were all Maoists, so we didn’t dare do it,” Scully recalls. “There would have been blood probably.”

Instead, a group of students and faculty commissioned Oldenburg’s Lipstick (Ascending) On Caterpillar Tracks and placed it on the plaza as a platform for dissidents. Later, when university officials were inexplicably unthrilled, the sculpture ended up in the courtyard of Morse College, where Scully was master.

Scully says now that he never wanted to be “the company man.” Then he tells a favorite story, about a time he and the architect Robert Venturi were at the American Academy in Rome with Yale president Rick Levin. Venturi remarked that Scully had been the first member of the establishment to support his work, and Levin turned with eyes wide and said, “Member of the establishment! Are you kidding?” The exchange still makes Scully laugh. But later, he comes back to this idea of being the inside-outside man, as if troubled by it, to say, “Yale has always protected me.”

He grew up in New Haven, in a two-family house at 61 Derby Avenue, halfway between the campus and Yale Bowl. His father was a successful Chevrolet salesman until the Depression, and later served as president of the board of aldermen. His mother was a singer, whose piercing coloratura seems to have given him a lifelong ambivalence about music. Neither of them went to college. But Scully never considered that he would end up anywhere other than Yale.

After the first day of graduate school at Yale, Scully dropped out to become a fighter pilot.

He entered Phelps Gate in 1936, the shank of the Depression, and the experience sounds Dickensian now. He was just 16, a townie from an Irish Catholic family with no money. “I hadn’t gone to a prep school, I didn’t know the proper codes. I knew the dress code all right, but I couldn’t afford it.” As a scholarship student, he worked freshman year waiting on his wealthier classmates in Commons. “You said, ‘Will you have the meat of the day? Will you have the cold cuts?’ And I didn’t like it, I really didn’t like it. I felt a lot of snobbery. Whether real or imagined, it poisoned my years at Yale. I had a few friends, but not many. And I just never grew up enough. Properly.”

There were six movie theaters in downtown New Haven then, and Scully visited a different one each night. On the seventh night, “I had to decide which one to see a second time.” Asked how long that went on, he answers in a burst of laughter, “Four years!” Fencing was Scully’s other undergraduate diversion. His mask and epee now decorate the front hall of his house, on either side of a bust of Julius Caesar.

Scully majored in English, building up the store of literary associations that resonate through his lectures today. But the dry discipline of the New Criticism had infiltrated the English department then, and he didn’t much like it. “I wrote a stupid senior essay—you can see how decadent I was—on the influence of Swinburne on Baudelaire, or vice versa, and it was very bad.” He bailed out of a playwriting course in the last semester of senior year and switched to an introductory course in art history, where a future mentor, George Hamilton ’32, ’42PhD, gave him an A+. The English department kept its hold on him a little longer. But after the first day of graduate school at Yale, he dropped out to become a fighter pilot.

Scully entered the Army Air Corps in November, 1940, and flew a PT-17 Stearman biplane, “wonderful aircraft, open cockpit, white scarf.” He laughs. “You know, Dawn Patrol. Errol Flynn. Who knows what all crap.” Unfortunately, he couldn’t fly (“I had no sense”), and he could not get past his flight instructor’s southern accent (“He’d tell me to do this and I’d do something else”). There were two runways and, coming in to land after a check ride once, Scully headed for the wrong one. “He went, ‘Naaaggh! You want to go to the other one.’ So, I had been told by a Navy pilot how to sideslip. You weren’t allowed to do that in the Army. Cross-control. And I did. I slipped perfectly into the other lane and landed it. Instead of being pleased with me, he was terrified. He thought, ‘God, I’m going to die.’” Scully washed out.

He became a Marine instead and served during World War II in both the Pacific and Mediterranean, rising to the rank of major. But it is the one thing in his life he will not discuss. Asked about seeing action, Scully says, “Saw some. The war was such a complicated thing for me, and very painful to remember. I don’t mean to give the impression that such terrible things happened to me. It’s not like that. It’s just all painful. You don’t mind?”

He came back to Yale afterward feeling that architecture and art were solid, living things. “I was ready. Soaked it up. Ah, god, I loved it! I never enjoyed anything as much as graduate school, and everybody used to tell me how awful graduate school was.” George Hamilton urged him to do his thesis on the Hudson River painters. But Scully had already begun teaching architecture to undergraduates in 1947, and a photograph of McKim, Mead, and White’s Low House captured his imagination instead. It led him to Newport, Rhode Island, where he identified two distinctively American styles of domestic architecture. Scully’s terms for them, the “stick style” and the “shingle style,” instantly became a part of the architectural vocabulary, “invested with meaning,” in the words of one scholarly article, “by his compelling arguments and extraordinary powers of description.” He earned his doctorate in three-and-a-half years, joined the art history faculty at Yale, and quickly published two prize-winning books out of his Newport research.

Scully had married during the war, to an art history major from Wellesley named Nancy Keith, and they soon had three sons. They decided to build a home outside New Haven. Scully went to Frank Lloyd Wright for the plan. He was caught up, at the time, in the heroic idea of the modernist architect driven by his artistic vision, and Wright seemed like the most heroic of them all. But Scully being Scully, he also noted borrowings in some of Wright’s early designs.

“I asked him what he thought about Bruce Price—didn’t he like that work he’d done at Tuxedo Park? He looked at me. He knew exactly what I was talking about. He said, ‘Son, architecture began when I began building houses out there on the prairie.’” Scully cackles softly at the memory. “What a confidence man, what a crook! He was great, really.” In the end, Wright’s plan proved too expensive for a junior faculty member to build. Scully paid the fee, and then designed his own glass-walled house in the woods.

At the same time that he was championing modernist architecture, Scully immersed himself in ancient Greece. He likens himself now to anthropologists who “go all over the world to many different times and places. They’re after behavioral patterns. So am I.” Going to Greece, he says, “was the great opening for me, when I had my religious experience with Greek temples. I saw the sacred landscape, the sacred buildings. I saw the relationship between the two. It changed my life.”

Scully’s book The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods argued that the Greeks had conceived and planned their temples in relation to landscapes reflecting the characteristics of specific gods. One critic praised it as the “most distinguished book of its kind” since Ruskin’s Stones of Venice and marveled that “it has taken two centuries of staring at ruins and rummaging amongst fallen stones for an architectural historian to raise his eyes at last to the horizon and see the Greek temple in its totality … an inseparable whole, whereby earth, temple, and god are but one.” But classicists cold-shouldered the interloper. One complained about a lack of written evidence and argued that it would have been hard to site a temple in the Mediterranean without some connection to the ubiquitous conical mounds and cleft mountains.

Scully began to see buildings almost as living creatures.

Back at Yale, Scully’s relationship with the art history department was sometimes combative. “I don’t know how much love there was, but there was plenty of hate,” he recalls. The department when he joined it “was like a South American army. They were all generals except me. I was the only private.” Many of them had come from privileged backgrounds and pursued traditional scholarly specialties. Scully, the abrasive newcomer, the townie, seemed to be ranging across the entire world, particularly when another of his books, Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy, became a standard text in the field. His viewpoint was “so synoptic, so well read, bringing together so many diverse strains, with such a keen eye,” says his student and longtime friend Robert A. M. Stern ’65MArch, now dean of the Yale School of Architecture, that very few people could live up to it. Worse, Scully always got applauded when he took his turn team-teaching the introductory history of art course. His colleagues generally didn’t. (“And, I mean, that’s bad stuff,” Scully says.)

Then in the early 1960s, Scully’s marriage came to an abrupt end, and the bitter divorce disrupted not just the two families involved, but also the art history department. Scully’s wife had been well liked within the department, one survivor of the era recalls, and people didn’t understand why he “got involved with this other person.” They particularly didn’t understand because the “other person” was the wife of a junior faculty member in art history. Some of Scully’s colleagues shunned the couple because they were “living in sin,” in the parlance of the day. “The whole thing was terrible,” Scully says now. “It was bad in every way.” In 1965, Marian LaFollette Wohl would become his second wife; their daughter was born the next year. That marriage also broke up, in the 1970s.

[image error]A slide goes up on the screen. The lofty entry hall of the Laurentian Library in Florence, with Michelangelo’s celebrated stairway “coming lava-like, flowing down at you.” Other art historians would use a term like “mannerism” for the play of classical forms here. But Scully is more interested in how the building makes people feel. He asks his listeners to imagine themselves as scholars entering this three-story antechamber, craning their heads up to the reading room on the second floor, its doorway framed by towering pilasters. “That’s where all the precious books are. That’s where you’re going to work.” But first you have to deal with a stairway like “an escalator coming down against you, as you go up. You’re looking up and it looks as if those big pilasters are going to tumble right out of the wall and fall on your head as in an earthquake.”

Scully chewed out the whole audience for its middle-class sense of values.

Michelangelo’s meaning, says Scully, has to do with “the difficulty of getting to work” for the human scholar. Once you’ve fought your way up to the reading room, those pilasters no longer threaten, he says, but now stand beside you protectively, “like soldiers.” And when you finish your work and come back out, the whole glory of the entry room is “at your level, like a great blast of trumpets for you. ‘Hooray, I’ve done it, I found the footnote.’ And I do think, exaggerated as it sounds, the life of the mind, its victories, are really embodied here, the terror of it, the hardness of it, and the glory of it at the end.”

Scully doesn’t mind if students disagree with a particular interpretation; his purpose is mainly to give them the faith that interpretation is possible. “When students start, it’s like theater,” he says. “They have to develop a suspension of disbelief, because they’re not having these experiences you’re describing. They have to have faith in your having them—that it’s possible to have them. And then they pretend to have them, and then they have them. That’s how it works.” Early on he decided that team-teaching was the wrong way to inspire that faith. “One person has to do it,” he says. By the mid-1960s, Scully was back in good standing in the art history department, buoyed by his popularity with students and his international reputation as an architecture critic. He pushed to end team-teaching, and took over the introductory course for himself.

In the early days, says Scully, he trained himself not merely to experience art, but to empathize with it, pushing past the merely intellectual or cultural associations to perceive things “at some sub-cultural level” having to do with fear and aggression, “lights darks, bigs littles, ups downs.” He looked for Jungian archetypes. Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, makes liberal use of the death-and-resurrection archetype, “where you go in a low dark space, you’re pressed, and then you’re released into light.” Scully began to see art, and particularly buildings, almost as living creatures, with emotional lives that jostle back and forth with our own.

Scully knows why architects do irrational things.

[image error]His students—as many as 500 in a semester—loved it. The cover of an undergraduate magazine once featured Scully’s head on Superman’s body, over the inevitable headline, “Able to leap tall buildings with a single bound.” They also often came away changed for life, even when they did not realize it. It would show up years later, when they found themselves in front of Donatello’s St. George, and Scully’s voice suddenly resonated from some forgotten corner of their brains (“paranoid modern man… nobody going to assault him”). It showed up when they built a dream house and consciously sited it toward some sacred mountain in the distance. Scully was never easy, never, as one former student puts it, “the tender, loving, nurturing soul.” The historian David McCullough ’55 recalls one class in the early 1950s, when a Mexican peasant turned up asleep in the foreground of an archeological slide, and someone in the audience started to laugh. Scully “took the pointer and banged it down on the stage and said, ‘Turn up the lights.’ Then he chewed out the whole audience for its middle-class sense of values. How dared we laugh at that man, what did we know about his life, the work he did, the fatigue he might have been feeling? And then he left the room, he was so mad. It was unforgettable.”

But McCullough also recalls walking with Scully on campus one time when he stopped to point out the way the afternoon light fell on Strathcona tower. “He said, ‘Look at that! That’s what architects work with, not stone or glass, but light.’ I can’t look at light on a building to this day without thinking of that moment.” McCullough credits Scully with introducing him to the Brooklyn Bridge as a work of art, eventually leading him to write his book The Great Bridge. Likewise, the designer Maya Lin ’81, ’86MArch, was inspired by Scully’s description of the Lutyens memorial in Thiepval, France, commemorating the soldiers who died in

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Scully in 1995 at Vietnam Veterans Memorial designed by his student Maya Lin (Photo: Frank Johnston, WaPo)

the trenches of the Somme. It helped shape her thinking about her Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the mall in Washington, DC.

Scully’s ideas have also changed the American landscape through his many close relationships with the architects he has backed, including Robert Venturi and Louis Kahn, and with those he has taught at the Yale School of Architecture, including Robert A. M. Stern, Charles Gwathmey ’62BArch, and New Urbanism pioneers Andres Duany ’74MArch and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk ’74MArch. “All my early houses in the shingle style are without question the result of his books, his writing, and what he said in class,” says Stern. “He opened my eyes to the possibilities of recovering this tradition of buildings which goes back to the 1870s.” Design partners Duany and Plater-Zyberk likewise credit Scully with helping them appreciate ordinary vernacular houses on the streets of New Haven, at a time when more conventional critics would not even have classed such buildings as architecture. His teaching, says Plater-Zyberk, “allowed us to develop a project like Seaside,” the traditionalist Florida community that launched the New Urbanism movement in the 1980s.

Norman Mailer said of Scully, “He’s a better writer than me, but I know more about architecture.”

Scully’s relationships with architects have always gone beyond the intellectual to the sub-cultural, and when they talk about him now, tangled teacher-student, critic-artist emotions often flash by just below the surface. Plater-Zyberk admits that Scully once declined to provide an introduction to a book she and Duany had written because “it wasn’t good enough,” leading them to do a complete revise. Charles Gwathmey recounts Scully’s response to his preliminary elevations for an addition, now under construction, to Paul Rudolph’s corrugated concrete Art & Architecture building at Yale: “He said, ‘You should do the whole thing in glass, make it all glass,’ and I said, ‘Vince, I can’t believe you’d say that.’ It was definitely a Scully moment, I can tell you. Just right at you, boom!” Gwathmey went back and rethought his plans (though not in glass).

“Vincent Scully sees things in our buildings more clearly than we do ourselves,” says Stern, “and he’s not given to holding back.” Scully “knows how architects create, how they think, how they’re threatened by each other, why they do irrational things,” says Duany. He sees how they influence one another and also how they “swerve to disguise influences.” The result is that “he doesn’t just change architectural history, he changes architecture itself.” Philip Johnson once called Scully “the most influential architectural teacher ever,” and Stern adds, a little ruefully, “We’re all still trying to figure out how we can please Vince. We’re still doing it for him.”

Having grown up a mile to one side of the New Haven Green, Scully now lives a mile to the other, off Whitney Avenue out beyond the Peabody Museum, in a modest wood-frame house behind a scrim of birch trees. A big husky named Aldo (after Scully’s late friend, the architect Aldo Rossi) presides there, occupying most of a small couch in the bay window of the front room, stately and territorial, two paws up on one arm. From childhood, says Scully, “I always had dogs, and I used to run my dogs,” on Edgewood Avenue, where the grassy median was planted after an Olmsted design, with a double row of elm trees. “So it was like a great cathedral,” with tree trunks like Gothic columns and the branches forming the ribs of a vaulted ceiling.

When he wasn’t immersed in a book, Scully spent much of his childhood in Edgewood Park, skating, sledding, or playing sports. (He still keeps his tattered leather football helmet in the room where he writes.) He also wandered the city on foot or by trolley. In memory, New Haven can sound improbably idyllic: “The summer trolleys were open and they had cane seats, and it was so tropical, and you just sat in the open or hung on the sides, and kids ran alongside.” But Scully uses a plainer term for it: “decent urbanism” was simply normal then.

Scully’s deep attachment to New Haven has always shaped his thinking about architecture—most notably in the 1960s, when he suddenly realized that the modernist architects and planners he had passionately advocated were tearing decent urbanism to shreds and paving it under. The turning point for him came in 1964 when Architectural Forum reprinted a diatribe by Norman Mailer against modernist architecture (“the first art to be engulfed by the totalitarians … beheads individuality … blinds vision … deadens instinct … obliterates the past”). At the request of the editors, Scully produced a feisty rebuttal to Mailer’s “lazy, pot-boiling paragraphs.” To Mailer’s yearning for old styles, Scully replied, “Why couldn’t The Naked and the Dead have been another Chanson de Roland?” And he ended with the moral, “A little horseshit never hurt anybody. Look at Mailer.” The combat was gleeful on both sides. (According to Scully, Mailer later remarked, “He’s a better writer than me, but I know more about architecture.”) But Scully also came away haunted for life, he says, by Mailer’s argument that the work of the heroic modern architect was leaving us “isolated in the empty landscapes of psychosis.”

Scully had already seen it for himself at Beinecke Plaza and in the “fat, wide slab” of the Pan Am building by Walter Gropius, which had recently killed the view down Park Avenue in Manhattan. But Mailer’s “exact and terrible phrase” made him step back and see the problem whole. At about that time, highways were beginning to cut through New Haven, including one proposed connector that would have sent six lanes down Trumbull Street to loop around the city and back to Route 95, leaving the Yale campus and the New Haven Green in the position of the island at Indianapolis Raceway. Scully helped kill that plan and also worked on a successful campaign to halt the demolition of historic buildings on the Green.

At about that time, Bob Stern, then a student at the School of Architecture, introduced Scully to the work of Robert Venturi. Scully ended up writing the foreword to Venturi’s “gentle manifesto,” Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. In place of the clean sweep being inflicted on cities by modernists, Venturi embraced the “messy vitality” of the built environment. Instead of ego-driven architectural statements, he wanted buildings to pay attention to context, to respect or at least acknowledge the past, and to accommodate human needs. Scully liked everything about this manifesto except perhaps the gentle part. He called Venturi’s book “the most necessary antidote to that cataclysmic purism of contemporary urban renewal which has presently brought so many cities to the brink of catastrophe.”

The “contextual” approach, which Scully called the “architecture of community,” became the key to his architectural thinking and opened the way to the New Urbanism in the 1980s. In time, he would go on to attack even his old heroes, founders of modernism like Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, for “despising the structure of the traditional city” and “being determined to outrage it as much as possible in their individual buildings.” He was sounding, as the Harvard art historian Neil Levine ’75PhD, a former student, puts it, “almost as categorical as Mailer.”

Scully characteristically admitted what he saw as his own past errors. “One thing I will never forget,” says Andres Duany, was a lecture in which the image on the screen was a grand old Victorian building, which Scully had once been happy to see the city of New Haven demolish. “And now he looked at the slide and said, ‘Oh, my God, how I regret that! But we hated Victorians then.’” Scully taught his students, Duany adds, to love architecture “for the quality, not for the ideology.”

For the past 16 years, Scully and Catherine Lynn have spent most spring semesters at the University of Miami, where Plater-Zyberk is dean of the School of Architecture. Scully teaches modern architecture; Lynn teaches architectural preservation. They own a house in Coral Gables. He rows there on the canals, where the main hazard is that basking manatees will go sighing “thalasses, thalasses” beneath the keel. Apart from the effects of exercise, Duany attributes Scully’s persistent vitality to Lynn. They met when she came to Yale as an art history graduate student in 1978, and they married in 1980. “He wouldn’t be as alive, as exciting, without her. She is a colleague, not just a wife. They write together, and edit each other’s articles.” With the architectural critic Paul Goldberger ’72 and Erik Vogt ’99MEnvD, they co-authored a 2004 book, Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism. (It had originally been intended for Yale’s Tercentennial celebration in 2001 but arrived late, and perhaps just as well, since it was characteristically not all that flattering.)

“Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t like last classes, this one least of all.”

In addition to the two endowed Yale professorships, Scully has been honored by the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, which in 1999 established the Vincent Scully Prize for achievement in architecture and urban design. (Recipients have included Jane Jacobs and Prince Charles.) In 2004, Scully received the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor in the arts. (In the official photograph, he smiles wanly beside a beaming President George W. Bush ’68.)

Scully tells a story about an honor that, though less formal, was plainly more thrilling. It’s also, as it happens, a story about male rivalries, and marriage. In the mid-1990s, a 90th birthday party for Philip Johnson, the doyen of the architectural world, took place at the Four Seasons in New York. Jackie Onassis was greeting guests at the top of the stairs when the Scullys arrived with the architect Michael Graves. After they’d passed by, “Michael and I were like, Wo-o-o-o-o-w. She turns. Looks at you. She used to focus—focus, that’s what she’d do.”

Later, Scully and Lynn found themselves directed to the head table, where Onassis, who knew Scully’s work, beckoned for him to sit beside her. Scully proceeded to entertain her through much of the party, on topics from architecture to a Kipling verse about a dog named “Monsieur Bouvier de Brie.” Meanwhile, the guest of honor, neglected on Jackie’s other side, “was getting madder and madder at me. She was talking to me all the time. She wasn’t talking to Philip. So when it came time for Philip to take a bow he said, ‘Now I want everybody in this room who’s an architect to join me here. I don’t want anybody who’s not an architect. I don’t want anybody who writes about architecture. I want the architects.’” The memory of it makes Scully laugh.

Later, on the walk home, when he was still hovering a foot or two above the pavement, it dawned on him that his wife might also, perhaps, be mad. But Lynn merely patted him on the forearm and said, in a tone of affectionate irony, “Don’t worry, Vince. It would be un-American to resist Jackie Kennedy.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Scully is saying, as the auditorium lights go dim. “I don’t like last classes, this one least of all. I’ve been teaching at Yale for 61 years.” Here his voice trembles, then gravels down into the sort of cough meant to conceal emotion. “But I’ve enjoyed this class more than any other. Part of that’s due to you, and I owe you thanks for your attentiveness. The other reason I like this one most is that I feel for the first time in all those years I’m beginning to get it right.” He gets a laugh, but also means it. “Sometimes they say the mathematician is brightest in his twenties, but that’s not true for us,” for humanists. “We slowly grow and then, just at the time when we think, ‘Yes, we know,’ then it’s too late. It’s too late for us, but not maybe for the next generation.”

The lecture is about Michelangelo and he begins with the way the artist, young as he was, could express the “real affection, real sorrow, real love” in his Pieta: the “wonderful, simple movement” of the mother’s right knee hiking up and lifting the body, one arm reaching behind, the fingers pressing into the slack flesh of the rib cage, while the upraised palm of her other hand says, “This is my dead child.” He moves on to Michelangelo’s David, commissioned by the city fathers of Florence, and focuses on how the artist exaggerates the right arm, “the one that’s going to do the business,” clutching the stone with which to slay Goliath. The two sculptures, carved at almost the same time, depict, says Scully, the artist’s two great loves, Christ and the Republic of Florence. “He cares about Florence. He cares for the fact that it is a republic. And when it falls under a Medici tyranny, his heart dissolves with sorrow.”

He moves to a side view of the David and points out the face, contorted with “doubt, irresolution,” and “baser emotions—fear, disgust, revulsion.” Scully, a soldier once himself, shows how, from the side, David’s body doesn’t convey “any sense of young manhood stretched, young and tight and resolute. It’s like a stalk, the head looks too big, and it’s as if he’s asking the fundamental sculptural question: Must you act? What have I got against the giant? What is this act that I must commit?”

The lecture circles around, through Michelangelo’s architecture, back to a final sculpture that the artist struggled with until the day of his death, at 89. The slide on the screen shows a half-formed work in which “this shaky-legged Christ is falling back in the arms of his mother,” and the two of them seem to be “melting into each other, dying away at one time, into one flesh.” The “wonderful dexterity” of the artist’s youth has vanished, Scully says, and “now here at the very end he’s using the crudest sculptural tools. He’s trying to make it breathe. He’s trying to breathe himself, I suppose. Everything about it has to do with death”—of Christ, the Virgin, and the artist. But again Scully moves the audience around to the side, to see how the long, loose arm of Christ forms an arc, and the intractable stone seems to move with it “into pure spirit,” and thus he leaves his students with an image not of death, but of art overcoming it to form “one great neoplatonic circle in the sky.”

The applause begins and Scully thanks his listeners two or three times. Then he does something no one in this class has seen thus far: instead of staying by the stage to speak with students and visitors, his usual practice, he steps away from the lectern and strides resolutely to the back of the room. People look around, as if to ask whether this is, after all, the end. But later, Scully explains that it’s the way he finishes every semester, walking out of the room and back into the streets of New Haven. “You don’t want to stand there like the royal family acknowledging applause. It’s too disgusting.”

Leaving is simply the best way to make them stop clapping.

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(Photo: Mary Ellen Mark)

Eggs in a Basket: Fossil Find Opens Up Lost World of Pterosaurs

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With apologies, I have been delayed in posting several articles I published previously this year. Attempting to update now.

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

Thanks in part to an abundance of fossil discoveries in recent decades, scientists now recognize more than 200 species of pterosaur—the winged reptiles that dominated the world’s skies for 160 million years. But almost nothing is known about how they bred or how their young developed. As recently as 2014 the available scientific evidence on those topics added up to a grand total of just three pterosaur eggs, all badly flattened.

That dramatically changes with the description in this week’s Science of a sandstone block containing at least 215 fossilized eggs of a Cretaceous era pterosaur, Hamipterus tianshanensis. Many are preserved in three dimensions, and at least 16 contain partial embryonic remains.

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Paleontologists Alexander Kellner and Xiaolin Wang

A research team led by Xiaolin Wang of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing discovered the eggs, embedded in a rock slab more than three square meters in area, at a dig in northwestern China. Analysis of sediments in the find suggests “that events of high energy such as storms passed over a nesting site” by an ancient lake, the co-authors write, causing the egg mass to float “for a short period of time, becoming concentrated and eventually buried.”

Preservation of any pterosaur fossil is exceptional, partly because their bones were so thin. Extreme scarcity is even more the case for fossilized remains of their soft, pliable eggs, leading pterosaur experts not involved in the new find to call it “a pretty amazing fossil,” and “just phenomenal.” It’s “one of the most extraordinary aggregations of fossils I’ve seen,” says pterosaur specialist David Unwin of the University of Leicester. “What really impresses me is that it captures almost an entire life history: eggs, hatchlings, juveniles, sub-adults and adults.  Just to assemble that kind of evidence for any kind of vertebrate species is very difficult and very rare, and that you have it all on a contiguous piece of rock is impressive.”

The eggs in the slab are torn and filled with sandstone—but that helped preserve them three-dimensionally. According to co-author Shunxing Jiang, also of the IVPP, the slab represents only a partial excavation of a field site where researchers can see eight layers of pterosaur bones, four of them including eggs. Those layers indicate that pterosaurs of this species returned to the same nesting site over long periods of time.

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Other tantalizing behavioral clues also show up in the slab. “The large number of eggs indicates that they belonged to several clutches and were laid by different females,” the co-authors write, implying that Hamipterusprobably nested in colonies. Contrary to the popular image of pterosaurs as solitary predators, they add, “gregarious behavior might have been widespread”—at least among species that occurred, like Hamipterus, relatively late in the long evolutionary history of pterosaurs.

The co-authors also make the controversial argument that pterosaurs may have been unable to fly as hatchlings and “probably needed some parental care.”  They base that argument on examination of the bones of individual embryos in the new find, using computed tomography scanning and other methods. This indicated that the forelimbs of individuals identified as near hatching were less developed than their hind limbs. In particular, “the humerus is very different from the humerus we see in adults” and lacks attachment points for the most important wing muscles, says co-author Taissa Rodrigues of Brazil’s Federal University of Espírito Santo. If hatchlings could not fly, they would have been unable to feed themselves. “So perhaps they were not very precocious,” Rodrigues says.

Other researchers question that argument. “I think they have fundamentally misinterpreted that,” Unwin says. The individuals the co-authors identify as near hatching were “probably mid-term, not ready to hatch by any stretch of the imagination,” based on their lack of teeth and “relatively poor level of ossification,” Unwin adds. The co-authors would have done better, he says, to focus on evidence in the slab about the early development of the pterosaur embryos:   “Until recently we would have said we’re never going to have that kind of evidence, and now, wow, we have it.”

Michael Habib, an expert in biomechanics at the University of Southern California, thinks the co-authors were “probably correct” to argue that the pterosaur hatchlings were unable to fly. But he adds, “there is a difference between being developmentally less mature and being mechanically less robust.” That is, hatchling pterosaurs might well have had less-developed forelimbs than hind limbs—but they might still have been able to fly, given their low body weight. “The question is whether they have wings that can withstand the mechanical load of flight,” Habib says, adding that the co-authors “haven’t done that calculation yet.”

Regardless of such arguments about interpretation, Habib says, “this is a phenomenal specimen, and it’s going to be a gold mine of information about nest structure and development in pterosaurs.”

Dinosaurs Just Get Fluffier by the Day

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Anchiornis huxleyi revised (Illustration: Rebecca Gelernter)

In my book House of Lost Worlds, I wrote about how a team of researchers used trace chemical elements in a fossil to create the first representation of a primitive dinosaur in its actual colors.

Now one of those researchers, Jakob Vinther at the University of Bristol, has refined that picture based on the discovery of a “primitive feather form consisting of a short quill with long, independent, flexible barbs erupting from the quill at low angles.”

That would have had the effect of making Anchiornis, a crow-size dinosaur, fluffier than modern flying birds, “whose feathers have tightly-zipped vanes forming continuous surfaces,” according to a University of Bristol press release. “Anchiornis‘s unzipped feathers might have affected the animal’s ability to control its temperature and repel water …”

The newly described quills might also have increased drag and inhibited the ability of Anchiornis to form a suitable surface for lift. To compensate, the species “packed multiple rows of long feathers into the wing, unlike modern birds.” Anchiornis and other para-avians also had two sets of wings.

Illustrator Rebecca Gelernter of nearbirdstudios.com put the re-imagined Anchiornis on paper, including a revised position, not perched on top of a tree, but “climbing in the manner of hoatzin chicks, the only living bird whose juveniles retain a relic of their dinosaurian past, a functional claw.”

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Anchiornis huxleyi in a prior representation (Illustration: Michael DiGiorgio)

I Shop At Companies That Do Bad Stuff

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

[image error]On the list of companies I dislike, Amazon ranks near the top, for putting bookstores out of business everywhere and destroying the ability of authors and publishers to earn a living. Having fed itself to monstrous size on such small potatoes, the company has now moved on to gut the rest of Main Street retail and cut the heart out of communities everywhere.

And yet I shop at Amazon. My lame excuse is that it’s now a 25-minute drive to the nearest independent bookstore, it’s convenient to have a book turn up at my door, and the price looks right.

This inconsistency isn’t just an issue for left-leaners like me. Starbucks faced a right-wing boycott early this year when it responded to President Trump’s immigration ban with a pledge to hire 10,000 refugees. But new research by Brayden King at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management shows “zero [image error]correlation” between public commitments to that boycott and subsequent purchasing behavior by pro-Trump consumers. That is, our failure to vote with our wallets crosses political lines. (United at last!)

Withholding our cash from companies that cause harm or behave badly is one of the few avenues of protest we have as consumers. So why are we so bad at boycotting?

There are hundreds of explanations for our inconsistency, according to Julie Irwin, a professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, Austin, who studies ethical consumerism. “It’s just really hard to think about this stuff,” she said. “It’s uncomfortable; people need to get on with their day. It’s [image error]not that they don’t care. People who care more are often more inconsistent with their values. It just upsets them more.”

One problem with boycotts is that they generally start with a company employee blurting out some egregious offense to our sensibilities. Usually it’s the dimwit chief executive opening his mouth to expose his reptilian brain. Think about Guido Barilla publicly scoffing in 2013 at the notion that his company, the world’s largest pasta maker, would ever feature a same-sex family in its advertising. Or recollect almost anything that the former Uber boss Travis Kalanick has ever said or done.

The resulting boycotts may seem effective. Mr. Kalanick was out of a job soon after the #DeleteUber campaign early this year. And the furor against Barilla didn’t just elicit a mortified apology from Mr. Barilla. His company also undertook enough remedial action to earn a 100 rating just a year later in the Human Rights Campaign’s annual Corporate Equality Index. (It’s still at 100 today.) But these success stories typically have less to do with consumer purchasing power than with the sharp bite of bad publicity.

Outrageous remarks by executives tend, in any case, to be largely a distraction. They catch our attention and trigger our emotions. Meanwhile, we get bored and look away from the dull crimes companies commit every day, like Wells Fargo foisting phony accounts and unwanted auto insurance on its customers. Like Mylan gouging patients and government health care programs with a 500 percent markup on EpiPens. Like Volkswagen selling “clean diesel” cars that ran clean only long enough to fool emissions testing equipment. Like Exxon funding climate change disinformation. We are terrible, that is, at boycotting business as usual.

Ms. Irwin admits, for instance, to having test-driven an Audi, manufactured by Volkswagen, after the 2015 revelation that the company systematically cheated its customers on “clean” diesel: “The sales guy said, ‘What do you think?’ and I said, ‘I like it. But I’m mad at you guys,” and he said, ‘No, that was VW.’ He was trying to help me have that cognitive inconsistency, because we like to have these excuses so we don’t have to worry about it.”

She didn’t buy it. But plenty of other customers did. Heavy discounting helped make scandal-ridden Volkswagen the world’s largest automaker in 2016. We do better, Ms. Irwin says, when our ethical issues happen to line up with things we don’t actually like. “Then we can say, ‘Oh, I never eat liver,’ ” she said.

So how do we make our boycotts more effective? How do we avoid wasting energy on the foot-in-mouth moments of dunderheaded executives and instead act on weightier issues? One answer is to accept that boycotts are about publicity, not consumer choice, and advertise wonky ethical positions like any other product: in vivid emotional terms.

The film “Blackfish” didn’t just attack SeaWorld for keeping orca whales in captivity. It made Tilikum, taken from the wild in 1983 and kept in captivity until his death early this year, the personification — the whale-ification — of that issue. Likewise, Jimmy Kimmel didn’t just add another set of charts to the health insurance debate. He held up a picture of his infant son born with a heart defect and reshaped the debate in terms of how proposed changes would affect kids like his.

Large-scale institutional forces can also ameliorate the frustrated consumer’s abiding sense of inconsistency. I can’t swear off heating oil just yet, but I can support the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has persuaded institutions worth $5.5 trillion to shed at least some fossil fuel investments. I can also divest individually, in my retirement account, with the help of socially responsible mutual funds, which have lately proliferated, some with impressive results. (The website Fossil Free Funds allows investors to scan their holdings for hidden fossil fuel investments. And it’s not just about climate change: A start-up called Motif Investing now also enables investors to construct a portfolio aligned more or less precisely with their individual values.)

Am I actually doing these things? Only partly. I have begun the process with my retirement account and will complete it by year’s end.

I’m not under the delusion that the investment choices of people like me are going to cause financial harm to socially irresponsible companies, any more than participating in a boycott would. But I like the idea of helping to move those companies into the pariah class.

It’s partly about helping me sleep better. But mostly, it’s about making the managers of those companies sleep worse.

 

Our Love for Exotic Pets is Emptying the Natural World

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Fennec fox belongs in the Sahara, not your living room.

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

Conservation biologist David S. Wilcove was on a birding trip to Sumatra in 2012 when he began to notice that house after house in every village he visited had cages hanging outside, inhabited by the sort of wild birds he had expected to see in the forest. Nationwide, one in five households keeps birds as pets. That got him thinking, “What is this doing to the birds?”

Wilcove, who teaches at Princeton University, made a detour to the Pramuka bird market in Jakarta, Southeast Asia’s largest market for birds and other wildlife, from fruit bats to macaques. “It was this sort of Wal-Mart-size space filled with hundreds of stalls,” he recalls, “each stall of which was filled with hundreds of birds. An awful lot of them were in very poor condition, with signs of disease, feathers frayed, behaving listlessly–or thrashing around in their cages, because a lot of these are wild birds that are not at all suited to living as caged birds.” Some were species that even zoos with highly trained professional staff cannot maintain in captivity; they would die soon after purchase, “the cut flower syndrome,” he remarks. “It was really a shocking site. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Research by Wilcove and his colleagues subsequently linked demand for birds in Indonesia’s pet marketplace to the decline of numerous species in the . Prices in the pet market, they suggested, in a 2015 study in Biological Conservation, can even serve as an alarm system for species declines that might not show up in field studies until years later, if at all. Thus when the average price for a white-rumped shama, a popular species in Indonesian songbird competitions, shot up 1500 percent from 2013  to 2015, it tipped conservationists off for the first time that these birds are vanishing from the wild.

Follow-up field studies in Indonesia by co-author Bert Harris, now at the Rainforest Trust, found no trace of shamas even in national parks and in forests five kilometers from the nearest roads. Buyers were paying especially high prices for distinctive island populations, some of them likely unrecognized species or sub-species. The pet trade, says Wilcove, thus has “the potential to drive species to extinction even when they have suitable habitat, and drive them to extinction without anyone being aware of it.”

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The problem isn’t, however, just about birds. Nor is it limited to Indonesia. Though some developing nations have become notorious for wildlife trafficking, the trade in wild-caught pets is driven at least as much by demand from collectors in the United States and Europe. U.S. home aquariums, for example …

To read the full story, please support print journalism (which supports my work) and pick up a copy of the October issue of Scientific American.

 

Giants in the Earth: How Mammoths Changed Our World

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(Illustration: National Geographic)

by Richard Conniff/The Wall Street Journal

‘Discovering the Mammoth’ is one of those books that make you wonder about the author as much as about his topic. John J. McKay writes that he got started with a single blog post aiming to establish “a chronology of what was known about mammoths and when.” Or rather, he got started because he noticed, while indulging his “great love of conspiracy theories and fringe ideas,” that “lost history theories”—think Atlantis, flood geology and rogue planets—“all used frozen mammoths as proof positive of their ideas.”

[image error]Mr. McKay, who describes himself on his blog as “an underemployed, grumpy, and aging liberal who lives in the Great Northwest”—that is, Alaska—soon began obsessively collecting facts about these great, hairy pachyderms. He became the “mammoth guy” to his neighbors and apparently also to his long-suffering (now ex-) wife.

The resulting book is unfortunately more the chronology that Mr. McKay set out to write in the first place and less the thrilling “Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science” touted in the subtitle. Mr. McKay’s background as a technical writer shows in his clear sentences, with one carefully authenticated fact logically following another from beginning to end. It also shows, however, in the absence of color, scene setting or a driving narrative arc. And yet I found the book oddly compelling.

Mr. McKay makes the case that, beginning about 1600, mammoths and their mastodon cousins, appearing in bits and pieces from beneath the ice and earth, became “a focusing problem for a scientific revolution.” They were the starting point for sweeping changes in geology and comparative anatomy and in the ways we think about life on Earth.

Scholars could reason their way around previous out-of-place discoveries like fossil seashells found on mountaintops, Mr. McKay writes. But “the remains of unrecognizable land animals, especially large ones, were a tougher problem.” Most European naturalists in the 1600s had only the vaguest awareness of living tropical elephants, and they had no obvious way to connect them to these puzzling ancient creatures. “Unraveling that mystery required the development of a new, specialized intellectual toolkit,” Mr. McKay writes. “Unthinkable ideas such as extinction and a history of the earth itself separate from, and older than, human history needed to be embraced.” Though Mr. McKay does not put it in so many words, mammoths were the beginning of the end for the biblical view of Earth history.

The initial response to the discovery of mammoth and mastodon remains was, however, entirely orthodox. With Genesis 6:4 firmly in mind (“There were giants in the earth in those days”), most Europeans took them for the bones of such “mighty men.” A discovery in southern France in 1613, for instance, resulted in a “true history of the life, death, and bones of Giant Theutobochus, King of Teutons,” slain in battle with the Roman consul Marius and buried in a 30-foot-long tomb. Likewise, when a tooth weighing almost 5 pounds turned up a century later in Claverack, N.Y., the Puritan minister Cotton Mather boasted that this American discovery made Goliath and other Old World giants look like mere pygmies. Other, more naturalistically inclined, scholars thought mammoths emerging from Siberian ice were the remains of huge, burrowing rodents that lived underground and died on exposure to air.

The gentry coveted “unicorn” ivory as an antidote to poisoning, and at “the peak of the poison panic in the mid-sixteenth century,” Mr. McKay writes, exotic ivory fetched 10 times the price of gold. At first, mammoth, walrus and narwhal ivory got mixed together without distinction. But the word “mammoth,” from an indigenous Siberian word meaning “earth horn,” gradually gained currency in Europe. The trade in mammoth ivory for carved objects also boomed. Mr. McKay quotes one estimate that, by 1840, Siberia had already exported the tusks of 20,000 mammoths. (That trade is still thriving today at a reported rate of 60 tons of mammoth ivory a year.)

The intellectual problem with mammoths arose because Western thinking had no conception of a species becoming extinct. Instead, the “great chain of being” progressed link by link from the lowliest worm up to humans, everything in its place and each species essential to the unity of the whole. “From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike,” Alexander Pope wrote, “Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.”

The German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz flirted with the idea of extinction at the end of the 17th century but could bring himself to argue only that species could change form to some degree. Or as Mr. McKay puts it, “a cold-adapted elephant had the same relation to a tropical elephant as a shepherd dog to a terrier.” A century later, beginning in the mid-1790s, the French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier finally assembled the evidence to distinguish carefully among elephants both living and dead. He made extinction an irrevocable fact of life. Cuvier, now considered the father of paleontology, demonstrated that whole worlds of species had lived and died before us. It was a radical turning point in our conception of the world and of our own place in it. It was also the essential preamble to Charles Darwin’s subsequent idea of evolution by natural selection.

Mr. McKay doesn’t spend much time on the American side of the story, which is a pity. To understand just how thoroughly mammoths and mastodons shaped our own sense of ourselves as a nation, readers might enjoy Paul Semonin’s “American Monster” (2000). But Mr. McKay fills in the European background in admirable detail. In an afterword, he notes that early humans on many continents lived with mammoths and other probiscideans, hunted them for food, and used their bones and hide for shelter, tools and early art. We may even have followed them out of Africa and watched what plants they ate in new habitats before sampling them ourselves. Mammoths, elephants and their kin, John McKay suggests, helped make us who we are.

—Mr. Conniff is the author, most recently, of “House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth”

Getting Inside a Tyrannosaur’s Head

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(Photo: DOE/Los Alamos National Laboratory)

 

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratry have used their unique neutron-imaging and high-energy X-ray capabilities to expose the inner structures of a 74-million-year-old fossil skull. The skull belonged to  tyrannosauroid dinosaur known as the Bisti Beast, or more formally as Bistahieversor sealeyi.  The image is the highest-resolution scan of tyrannosaur skull ever done.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

 The results add a new piece to the puzzle of how these bone-crushing top predators evolved over millions of years.

“Normally, we look at a variety of thick, dense objects at Los Alamos for defense programs, but the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science was interested in imaging a very large fossil to learn about what’s inside,” said Ron Nelson, of the Laboratory’s Physics Division. Nelson was part of a team that included staff from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the museum, the University of New Mexico and the University of Edinburgh. “It turns out that high energy neutrons are an interesting and unique way to image something of this size.”

The results helped the team determine the skull’s sinus and cranial structure. Initial viewing of the computed tomography (CT) slices showed preservation of un-erupted teeth, the brain cavity, internal structure in some bones, sinus cavities, pathways of some nerves and blood vessels, and other anatomical structures.

These imaging techniques have revolutionized the study of paleontology over the past decade, allowing paleontologists to gain essential insights into the anatomy, development and preservation of important specimens.

The 40-inch skull was found in 1996 in the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness Area near Farmington, N.M.  To peer inside the bone, the Los Alamos team combined neutron and X-ray CT to extract anatomical information without the risk of damaging the irreplaceable fossil. Los Alamos is one of a few places in the world that can perform both methods on samples ranging from the very small to the very large scale.

The thickness of the skull required higher energy X-rays than those typically available to adequately penetrate the fossil. The Lab’s microtron electron accelerator produced sufficiently high-energy X-rays.

To provide an alternate view inside the skull, the team also used a newly developed, high-energy neutron imaging technique with neutrons produced by the proton accelerator at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE). The neutrons interact with the nuclei rather than the electrons in the skull, as X-rays do, and thus have different elemental sensitivity. This provides complementary information to that obtained with X-rays.

The team’s study illuminates the Bisti Beast’s place in the evolutionary tree that culminated in Tyrannosaurus rex.

“The CT scans help us figure out how the different species within the T. rex family related to each other and how they evolved,” said Thomas Williamson, curator of Paleontology at the New Mexico museum. “The Bistahieversor represents the most basal tyrannosaur to have the big-headed, bone-crushing adaptations and almost certainly the small forelimbs. It was living alongside species more closely related to T. rex, the biggest and most derived tyrannosaur of all, which lived about 66 million years ago. Bistahieversor lived almost 10 million years before T. rex, but it also was a surviving member of a lineage that retained many of the primitive features from even farther back closer to when tyrannosaurs underwent their transition to bone-crushing.”

The Bisti Beast skull is the largest object to date for which full, high-resolution neutron and X-ray CT scans have been performed at the Laboratory.  It required innovations both to image the entire skull and to handle the image reconstruction from the resulting large data sets.

This work advances the state of the art in imaging capabilities at the Laboratory and is already proving useful in imaging larger programmatic items related to the Laboratory’s national security mission.

Just an afterthought, but that last paragraph suggests that a victim of a previous mass extinction may yet provide the means for the next big extinction, by nuclear Armageddon.

Got Drinking Water? Watch Climate Change Turn It Toxic.

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The algae bloom that ate Lake St. Clair. (Photo: NASA/NOAA)

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

It is a painful lesson of our time that the things we depend on to make our lives more comfortable can also kill us. Our addiction to fossils fuels is the obvious example, as we come to terms with the slow motion catastrophe of climate change. But we are addicted to nitrogen, too, in the fertilizers that feed us, and it now appears that the combination of climate change and nitrogen pollution is multiplying the possibilities for wrecking the world around us.

A new study in Science projects that climate change will increase the amount of nitrogen ending up in U.S. rivers and other waterways by 19 percent on average over the remainder of the century — and much more in hard-hit areas, notably the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin (up 24 percent) and the Northeast (up 28 percent). That’s not counting likely increases in nitrogen inputs from more intensive agriculture, or from increased human population.

Instead, Stanford University researcher Eva Sinha and her co-authors simply took historical records of nitrogen runoff as a result of rainstorms over the past few decades, recorded by the U.S. Geological Survey. Then, assuming for the sake of argument that there will be no change in the amount of nitrogen being added to the environment, they calculated how much additional nitrogen would be leached out of farm fields and washed down rivers solely because of extreme weather events and increased total rainfall predicted in most climate change scenarios. The bottom line: “Anticipated changes in future precipitation patterns alone will lead to large and robust increases in watershed-scale nitrogen fluxes by the end of the century for the business-as-usual scenario.”

But the business-as-usual scenario is of course already in trouble, even without climate change. Headlines have tended to fixate on the Gulf of Mexico “dead zone” produced by nitrogen flushed down the Mississippi River from the cornfields of the upper Midwest. (This year’s “dead zone” is the largest ever, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced last week.) But the problem is already much broader than that, says senior author Anna M. Michalak, also of Stanford, citing a series of recent incidents caused by nitrogen pollution. Last summer, for instance, a 33-square-mile algae bloom …   click here to read the full article.