Richard Conniff's Blog, page 44

In South Africa, Coffee with Friends

And a very vervet monkey morning to you.

I’m in the Durban area at the moment, working on a story about leopards.  These artful dodgers strolled into my room this morning to steal the sugar packets.

Why We Need to Save Wildlife to Save Ourselves

Cone snail shells: Not just something pretty to look at.

Midway through the new special issue of Science, about the global loss of wildlife, my heart caught on this idea: We now live with a steady, imperceptible loss “in people’s expectations of what the natural world around them should look like,” and “each generation grows up within a slightly more impoverished natural biodiversity.” It’s not just about elephants, rhinos, and other iconic species disappearing. It’s about the decline of everything.

When children go outdoors today—to the extent that they go outdoors at all—they see 35 percent fewer individual butterflies and moths than their parents would have seen 40 years ago, and 28 percent fewer individual vertebrates—meaning birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and fish.  It’s not quite a silent spring, just one that is becoming quieter with each passing year, insidiously, so we hardly notice. The Science authors dub this phenomenon “defaunation.” I prefer to think of it as “the great vanishing,” but either way it’s bad news.

Why don’t we do something about it? Wildlife conservation suffers under a misguided notion that it is a boutique issue. “Animals do matter to people,” according to one article in the Science special issue, “but on balance, they matter less than food, jobs, energy, money, and development. As long as we continue to view animals in ecosystems as irrelevant to these basic demands, animals will lose.”

That need not be as hopeless as it sounds, because the authors go on to remind us in alarming detail just how utterly

our economic and political well-being depend on keeping wildlife populations healthy. Insect pollinator populations, for instance, are now in free-fall. But they are essential for 75 percent of the world’s food crops.  Somewhat less obviously, native predators—mainly insects, birds, and bats—also provide natural pest control, worth an estimated $4.5 billion annually in the United States. Half our pharmaceuticals come from the natural world, many of them from wildlife. The fer-de-lance snake, for instance, gave us ACE inhibitors, our most effective medicine for heart disease. A deadly cone snail gave us a painkiller, called Prialt, that’s more potent than morphine and yet not addictive.

Much more directly, a billion of the world’s poorest people also depend on wildlife as their main source of animal protein, and 2.6 billion rely on seafood protein.  Failure to manage these resources so they will be available next year, and the year after, is a recipe for starvation, civil unrest, terrorism, and the collapse of economies, if not of civilization itself.

We may roll our eyes about ethical shoppers armed with their Monterey Bay Aquarium sustainable seafood guidelines. But illegal and unmanaged fisheries are anything but a boutique issue. On the contrary, when a weak government allowed foreign vessels to decimate the fisheries on the coast of Somalia, it turned former fishermen into pirates. That scenario is now being replayed in the West African nations of Benin, Senegal, and Nigeria. In Thailand, failure to manage the fisheries now forces boats to “travel farther, endure harsher conditions, search deeper, and fish for longer to obtain the types of harvests more readily available a generation ago,” according to the Science writers. Men—and children—who are essentially slaves “may remain at sea for several years without pay, forced to work 18- or 20-hour days. Starvation, physical abuse, and murder are common on these vessels.”

The Science authors outline some of the steps we can take to stop or even reverse this catastrophic pattern of decline. They say President Obama’s interagency task force on wildlife trafficking and the European and Asian “war on poachers” aren’t enough. That approach takes on crime and terrorism funded by wildlife trafficking, but it misses the basic conservation ecology. Among better solutions, the Science authors say, we should advocate giving fishermen and hunters exclusive rights to harvest grounds, so they will become invested in protecting long-term productivity. That’s worked with fisheries in Fiji and with community conservancies covering almost half the land area in the southeast African nation of Namibia.

The authors also propose more radical forms of species translocations. Conservationists in Australia and Asia have introduced populations of the kakapo, or owl parrot, to remote islands, to protect them from introduced mammalian predators on the mainland. Likewise, a population of disease-free Tasmanian devils is living outside its native range. In some cases where important species have gone extinct, it may help to introduce a substitute species that performs a similar ecological function. Aldabra giant tortoises, for instance, have now replaced an extinct Mauritian tortoise to restore grazing functions and seed dispersal of native large-seeded plants on that island.

Finally, the authors argue for “a new model of coexistence between predators and humans over large spatial scales,” and they cite as a model the recovery, in densely populated Europe, of golden jackals, gray wolves, Eurasian lynx, Iberian lynx, and wolverines.

One hitch may be that we don’t know which species we depend on, and we may not even recognize when some nematode, or beetle, or bat that is functionally more important than, say, the rhino, is disappearing.

Reading this special issue, I kept thinking of Prochlorococcus, an ocean microbe, which wasn’t even discovered by scientists until the 1980s. It produces 20 percent of the oxygen we breathe—one of every five breaths. That suggests why the authors believe that “the cryptic nature of defaunation has strong potential to soon become very non-cryptic, rivaling the impact of many other forms of global change”—think earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, even meteorites crashing down from space—“in terms of loss of ecosystem services essential for human well-being.”

In other words, it’s not just about saving wildlife. It’s about saving our world. It’s about saving ourselves.

The Man Who Saved The Dinosaurs

John Ostrom, in the field

In the summer of 1970, early in the research that would radically transform how we think about birds, dinosaurs, and the origins of animal flight, Yale paleontologist John H. Ostrom was traveling through Europe studying pterosaur fossils. His itinerary took him, in early September, to the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands. Ostrom, then 42, was an unprepossessing figure and the world’s leading authority on dinosaurs, and the museum curator was pleased to leave him alone with the twin halves of the limestone slab catalogued TM6928 and 29.

This fossil was a dinner plate–size muddle of limb fragments, vertebrae, and ribs preserved in limestone from the Solnhofen beds. It had been discovered near Riedenburg, Germany, in 1855 and named by the great nineteenth-century paleontologist Hermann von Meyer. Von Meyer later became famous for the first scientific description, in 1861, of Archaeopteryx. Coming just after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the unveiling of that 150-million-year-old urvogel, or archetypal primitive bird, made an international sensation. With Archaeopteryx, it seemed as if the proof of evolutionary theory had arrived, like the Ten Commandments, engraved in stone. But in 1857, the confusing fossil von Meyer was describing—the future TM6928 and 29—seemed like something far more ordinary: another pterosaur, a type of flying reptile. He dubbed it Pterodactylus crassipes.

That didn’t make sense to Ostrom as he puzzled over the ankles, toes, and arm bones of the fossil that day in 1970. He could envision the ways they might fit together just by examining the proportions of the bones and the shape of their articulations. But it wasn’t like any pterosaur he had ever seen. Ostrom had recently finished describing a remarkable dinosaur he had discovered a few years earlier in Montana. His monograph on Deinonychus included exquisitely detailed descriptions showing how the bone endings and attachments helped make these dinosaurs such fast, agile little killers. To Ostrom, the bones of the Teylers specimen looked an awful lot like those of Deinonychus. And there was something more.

Half of the Teylers specimen

Ostrom picked up one of the slabs, carried it over to the window, and held it up at an angle in the light. First one way, then the other. The late afternoon sun caught on some faint ridges. Ostrom was seeing, unmistakably, the clear impression of feathers. This fossil wasn’t Pterodactylus after all. It was another Archaeopteryx. In fact, it would have been the scientific world’s first Archaeopteryx, if von Meyer had gotten his taxonomy right.

In 1970, only three other specimens of Archaeopteryx were known to exist. But this was by no means the only thing that excited Ostrom at that moment. His mind was already ticking over about the resemblance to Deinonychus—and the unsettling idea that the wrist and shoulder bones of a primitive bird should be identical to those of a small meat-eating dinosaur.

To write a proper technical description, Ostrom needed to take the specimen home to the Peabody Museum at Yale for closer study. A crisis of conscience ensued: should he mislead the Teylers curator, telling him it was merely a pterosaur, only to make the great discovery back home? Or should he come out with the truth and risk that the museum would lock up these suddenly precious slabs of rock? Being a “squeaking honest” man, in the words of a former student, Ostrom confessed his belief that it was Archaeopteryx.

The curator immediately took back TM6928 and 29 and hurried out of the room. Ostrom slumped in his seat, despairing. A few minutes later, the curator returned with a shoebox tied up with string. He handed it to Ostrom, with the specimen inside, and, beaming, declared, “You have made our museum famous.” It was the beginning of something far bigger than either man could have guessed.

Part 2.

In the public imagination then, dinosaurs were plodding, thunderous monsters, cold-blooded and stupid. Even paleontologists had lost interest in these “symbols of obsolescence and hulking inefficiency,” Ostrom’s student Robert T. Bakker later wrote. “They did not appear to merit much serious study because they did not seem to go anywhere: no modern vertebrate groups were descended from them.”

But dinosaurs had begun to look a lot more interesting one afternoon in late August, 1964, near Bridger, Montana. Ostrom and his assistant Grant E. Meyer had been walking a landscape of prairie punctuated with rocky, eroding outcrops, considering sites for the following summer’s fieldwork, when they spotted a large, clawed dinosaur hand protruding from the earth on a slope just below them.

They scrambled down, dropped to their knees beside it, and because they hadn’t brought their toolkit, began digging excitedly with their hands, and then with their jackknives, turning up a scattering of the serrated teeth of a predator. Next day, returning with proper tools, they unearthed an astonishing foot. Two of three toes had ordinary claws. But from the innermost toe, a sharp sickle-shaped claw curved murderously up and out. It had a slashing arc, Ostrom later calculated, of 180 degrees. Hence the eventual name Deinonychus, or “terrible claw.”

Ostrom and his crew spent two full field seasons digging at the site and three years in study and reconstruction at the Peabody, working with more than a thousand bones from at least four individuals of the same species. Then in 1969, Ostrom announced what he called a “grandiose” conclusion: that foot was “perhaps the most revealing bit of anatomical evidence” in decades about how dinosaurs really behaved. In place of the plodding, cold-blooded dinosaur stereotype, Deinonychus “must have been a fleet-footed, highly predaceous, extremely agile, and very active animal, sensitive to many stimuli and quick in its responses,” Ostrom wrote.

The “dinosaur renaissance,” as Robert Bakker later dubbed it, had begun.

Part 3.

 

Bakker had been a student member of the 1964 Montana expedition, and he contributed a drawing to Ostrom’s paper showing a fleshed-out Deinonychus in full sprint. The “terrible claw” on the hind legs was lifted up and out of the way of its feet, keeping it sharp. That drawing would soon become the icon of the new dinosaur.

Bakker had latched onto many of Ostrom’s ideas as an undergraduate and, to Ostrom’s occasional chagrin, he ran with them. Bakker—“the infamous Bob Bakker,” as Peter Dodson, another former Ostrom student, says—became the outspoken advocate of dinosaurs as active, warm-blooded, and even “superior” animals. “Where John was cautious, Bob was evangelical,” Dodson and Philip Gingerich later wrote. “Each deserves considerable credit for revolutionizing our concept of dinosaurs.”

In his book The Riddle of the Dinosaur, science writer John Noble Wilford added that Bakker “was the young Turk whose views could be dismissed by established paleontologists. Ostrom, however, could not be ignored.” Late in 1969, Ostrom took the challenge directly to the North American Paleontological Convention in Chicago, declaring in a speech that there was “impressive, if not compelling” evidence “that many different kinds of ancient reptiles were characterized by mammalian or avian levels of metabolism.” Traditionalists in the audience responded, Bakker later recalled, with “shrieks of horror.” Their dusty museum pieces were threatening to come to life as real animals.

Part 4.

Ostrom went on, over the next half dozen years, to draw out the similarities between Deinonychus and Archaeopteryx specimens, including the Teylers fossil. Among the titles in a series of landmark papers he published: “The Ancestry of Birds,” “The Origin of Birds,” and “Archaeopteryx and the Origin of Flight.” The idea that birds had evolved from dinosaurs was not entirely new, as Ostrom pointed out. T. H. Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog,” had argued, for instance, that a link between the reptile-like bird Archaeopteryx and the bird-like reptile Compsognathus would close an evolutionary gap. But subsequent scientific opinion had shifted to the counter-argument—that the many similarities between birds and dinosaurs were merely instances of convergent or parallel evolution. Paleontologist Gerhard Heilmann’s 1926 book The Origin of Birds killed off the dinosaur connection seemingly forever. His argument came down to wishbones: Birds had what is properly known as a furcula. Dinosaurs didn’t even seem to have the collarbones, or clavicles, that fuse to form the furcula.

Ostrom pointed out that this was “negative evidence only and thus inconclusive.” A lot of biological features are missing from the fossil record, he noted, and that doesn’t make them any less real. Collarbones in particular are delicate and might easily not have survived, or not in any recognizable form. In any case, several dinosaurs with clavicles had already turned up before Heilmann published his book. Many more have come to light since then. Against this false negative, Ostrom laid out the positive evidence, listing more than 20 anatomical similarities between Archaeopteryx and various dinosaurs. It wasn’t just that Ostrom could not be ignored. He was far too thorough and meticulous, and for 30 years too persistent in the face of his critics, for anyone to refute.

Though one or two holdouts still resist the idea, it is now widely accepted that birds evolved from the group of bipedal theropod dinosaurs that includes Deinonychus, Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor, and other familiar species. They are now all grouped together as Maniraptora, or “hand-snatchers,” a taxonomic classification named in 1986 by Jacques Gauthier (now a Peabody curator). The idea that birds are in fact living dinosaurs is so commonplace that the debate has largely turned to the question of why they were the only dinosaurs to survive the mass extinction of 65 million years ago.

Part 5.

Ostrom at the Yale Peabody Museum, near a Deinonychus in mid-leap. (Photo: The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History)

Ostrom gave up fieldwork in the 1970s because of a physical ailment. But he had always believed that “the best discoveries are made in museum storerooms,” and his own correct identification of TM6928 and 29 had been “a classic example of why a paleontologist or museum should not throw things away that can’t be absolutely classified as worthless.” Holed up in his paper-stacked office at the Peabody, studying fossils with his magnifying spectacles, he continued to publish important articles on dinosaurs, birds, and the evolution of avian flight.

As Ostrom quietly continued his work, the dinosaur renaissance spread out from that office to become a “dinosaurian flooding of popular consciousness,” as the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould later put it—with countless books, endless computer-generated dinosaurs on television, and multiple iterations of Jurassic Park, the last of these directly inspired by Ostrom and Deinonychus. The dinosaur renaissance also caused a debate that persists even now, among bemused paleontologists and parents alike, about why so many of our children are caught up in the raging, teeth-baring grip of full-on dinomania. (The short answer: John Ostrom.)

More significantly, Ostrom lived to see his ideas about the dinosaur origin of birds—and the feathered plumage of dinosaurs—vindicated by a series of remarkable fossils from northeastern China. These discoveries began in 1996, with Sinosauropteryx (“Chinese lizard wing”), a small theropod dinosaur with a mantle of short, dark, feather-like filaments on its back. (“I literally got weak in the knees when I first saw photos,” Ostrom told a reporter.) And it culminated in 2012 with the 3,100-pound Yutyrannus, a T. rex relative, only bigger, fiercer, and covered in tufts of long, filamentous feathers. Canadian researchers browsing through a museum collection of amber even found actual dinosaur feathers and downy “dino fuzz.”

The Jurassic Park movie franchise (with the fourth installment now in production) continues to hold out for scaly, reptilian dinosaurs, to the chagrin of better-informed children in the audience. But scientific and popular renderings of many dinosaur species now look as ornately feathered as faux Indians at Mardi Gras. On Ostrom’s death in 2005, age 77, the Los Angeles Times wrote that he had “almost single-handedly convinced the scientific community that birds are descended from dinosaurs.” “John Ostrom,” the Sunday Times (London) added, “did more than anyone else to make dinosaurs interesting, real, and visceral.”

When NPR’s All Things Considered marked the occasion by interviewing Ostrom’s first research student, Bob Bakker, the paleontological world held its breath for a moment, recalling the troubled relationship between these two allies in the dinosaur renaissance. But when asked how important Ostrom had been to dinosaur paleontology, Bakker graciously commented: “Nobody was more important.”

Eight years before his death, Ostrom himself had already published what was his own best epitaph, in the view of the Peabody’s Daniel Brinkman. In “a last word” to a paper called “How Bird Flight Might Have Come About,” Ostrom wrote: “The missing, unknowable fossil record can never be allowed to stifle our curiosity.”

Part 6.

There is one more piece of this story that’s never been told in print: heading back to his hotel with the Teylers specimen that day in 1970, having discovered the first new Archaeopteryx in 24 years, Ostrom had to stop at a public restroom. Afterward, he continued on his route, perhaps caught up in contemplating the struggle and the triumphs ahead.

Suddenly, to his horror, he realized that he was empty-handed.

He had left the shoebox containing not just the fossil, but also his destiny, the fame of the Teylers Museum, the course of paleontology for decades to come, and the not-yet-imagined dinosaur dreams of untold armies of dinosaur enthusiasts, perched, abandoned, on a wash basin in a public restroom. Ostrom frantically retraced his footsteps—and found the shoebox untouched. He snatched it up and clutched it to his breast all the way back to the hotel, and to New Haven. And thus John H. Ostrom saved the future for dinosaurs.

 

 

Spider Web Heaven

I’m on vacation now, but this struck me as one of the prettiest spider webs I’ve ever seen. In Madison, Wisconsin. You can see the owner in the funnel just to left of middle fence post. (Photo: Richard Conniff)

Fine Perfumes of the Animal World

(Illustration: Christelle Enault)

My latest for The New York Times, where I am now a contributing opinion writer:

One of the odder things about perfumes is how much they have depended over the centuries on the scent of other animals — for instance, ambergris, a fatty excretion of the sperm whale, or the musk from the anal sacs of a civet. In concentration, some of these scents are unpleasant, even noxious. One component of civet is skatole, literally the smell of animal feces. Why not just make up a cologne called “Hyraceum — the Ultimate Code of Seduction,” advertised in a suitably libidinous whisper? The fine print would reveal that Hyraceum comes from the petrified excrement of the Cape hyrax. (Oh, but it turns out Hyraceum actually exists, at a very reasonable $60 an ounce.)

We are by no means the only species trying to smell like something (anything) other than ourselves. The caterpillar of South Africa’s Zulu Blue butterfly, for instance, mimics the chemical scent that ants use to recognize their own brood. So the gullible ants carry the caterpillar into their nest, and don’t seem to notice when it proceeds to devour the very ant brood it has been mimicking.

Orchids are also wicked olfactory deceivers. They need to attract wasps, bees and other insects to spread their pollen. So some orchid species have evolved the shape and coloration of specific female insects — and also release chemicals that duplicate the come-hither perfume of the females they mimic. (It’s interspecies cross-dressing — and, wait, do I hear a Broadway musical?)

The duped males respond at first with clumsy groping and then quickly proceed to copulation, sometimes to the point of ejaculation. It gets more interesting: Some male wasps actually seem to prefer the scent of make-believe females. They will break away from a real female to have sex with a flower.

This effect of inducing others to drop everything and pay attention to me-me-me is apparently what we hope for with our own perfumes and colognes, at least to judge by the advertising. But scientists and perfumers seem to know remarkably little about which scent compounds — noxious or otherwise — produce particular effects, or why. We don’t seem to respond like those species in which a specific scent automatically elicits a fixed behavioral response, said Pamela Dalton, a scent researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

Or at least we’re not aware if something like that is happening. A 2003 study at Monell found that scent samples from human males caused a neuroendocrine response in women, changing the length and timing of the menstrual cycle. Male scent also made the women less tense and more relaxed, at least when they didn’t know that what they were smelling was a man. (More predictably, a study this year reported that the scent of male, but not female, experimenters left lab rats feeling a stress level roughly equivalent to being restrained in a tube for 15 minutes.)

Ms. Dalton theorized that early perfumers might have adapted the sometimes unpleasant odors of other species as a way of taking on their power. Something like that certainly happens in the animal world.

For instance, some squirrels chew on the shed skins of rattlesnakes, their ancient enemies, then lick the smell onto their own bodies. Concentrating the scent around the tail may mask the strong odor of the anal glands and thus reduce the likelihood of detection. Or the squirrels may just be trying to trick rattlesnakes into thinking they have entered the territory of another snake. Shaking the tail or lifting the snake-scented hairs on their backs may be an effective way to disperse the warning scent.

Similarly, our beloved pet dogs are notorious for rolling in rotted fish, excrement, smelly seaweed or just about any other foul substance they can find.

The dog sniffer and scholar Stanley Coren argues that this dismaying behavior is about disguise: In the wild, canines are predators, and smelling like dogs, jackals or wolves would provide advance warning to their usual antelope prey. Perfuming themselves with antelope dung or carrion, on the other hand, might make it easier for them to sneak undetected within attacking distance.

Mr. Coren cannot help himself, though, from offering an alternative explanation with considerable appeal but “no scientific merit whatsoever.” Your whimsical, sensation-craving dog may roll in filth simply as “an expression of the same misbegotten sense of aesthetics that causes human beings to wear overly loud and colorful Hawaiian shirts.” Or maybe Axe cologne.

My own theory is a little different, and it has to do with the stinky behavior of spotted hyenas. They seem to roll in carrion and other horrible animal-based smells mainly because it wins them lots of curious sniffing and grooming from other hyenas. In effect, smelling that way makes them more popular. Noxious odors are a way of attracting attention, and perhaps they function the same way in our own perfumes and colognes.

Perfumers would no doubt vehemently argue otherwise. What a civet or skatole does is “nothing short of magic,” one of them writes. It transforms everything it touches “to produce a pleasant and singularly attractive scent.” But what if those scents actually linger there subliminally, unchanged, below our ability to be aware of what we are smelling?

A study in the journal Science early this year reported that humans can in theory distinguish a trillion different scents, and it’s hardly surprising to think that we could detect even trace amounts of the natural odors of mammalian bodies. In perfume, maybe that just wakes up our jaded nostrils and makes us pay attention to those gorgeous floral notes the perfumers like to go on about. Maybe, as Yeats suggested, fair really does need foul, and the baser elements in a perfume or cologne are essential to its erotic appeal.

In any case, it reminds us — reassuringly, I think — that we are animals. So by all means, lay on the perfume and cologne. Wear it in confidence, knowing that you and your dubiously anointed dog share one very special thing in common.

Slime Busters: Grazing Caribbean Coral Reefs Back to Health

(Photo: Wild Horizon/Getty)

 

My latest for Takepart.

When people talk about “keystone” species, they’re generally thinking about predators that shape the behavior of every other creature in their habitat, or about prey that serve as dinner for the entire neighborhood. But a new report on the collapse of coral reefs across the Caribbean is a reminder that entire ecosystems can depend on species that do little more than graze.

The report, Status and Trends of Caribbean Coral Reefs: 1970-2012, published by a consortium of global conservation groups, focuses on the 50 percent decline in Caribbean coral reefs over the past four decades. It concludes that protecting and restoring populations of two competing grazers—parrotfish and sea urchins—could be the key to saving what’s left of one of the most beloved and economically important seascapes on the planet.

Other studies have generally assumed that climate change and coral bleaching were the major causes of coral reef decline—and they are clearly a part of the problem. But “this study brings some very encouraging news,” says Carl Gustaf Lundin of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “The fate of Caribbean corals is not beyond our control, and there are some very concrete steps that we can take to help them recover.”

Why on earth would a couple of humble grazers make such a big difference? In the past, relentless feeding by parrotfish and sea urchins on any form of plant life kept habitat open for corals and prevented algae from smothering them. “Perhaps the most striking aspect of plant life on a coral reef is the general lack of it,” marine biologist Sylvia Earle declared in a 1972 article about the Caribbean.

But Earle was describing what has become a “forgotten world,” according to the new report. That’s because a two-stage attack has dramatically altered the coral reef ecosystem. First, the uncontrolled human harvesting of parrotfish has driven this major coral reef grazer to the brink of extinction in many areas. Nobody recognized the devastating effect of this loss at first. Then, in 1983, the second stage of the attack hit: An unidentified disease killed off 97 percent of the remaining major grazer, the sea urchins. (They have begun to recover, but a 2011 study in Puerto Rico found that sea urchin densities were still substantially below what they had been before 1983.) Without these two main grazers, algae and large seaweeds proliferated—call it “the sliming of the Caribbean”—and corals declined.

The new report is the work of 90 experts who spent three years analyzing more than 35,000 surveys—including studies of corals, seaweeds, grazing sea urchins, and fish—conducted since 1970 at 90 locations around the Caribbean. Past studies of coral reef decline have generally looked only at the corals themselves. They also tended to lump together data from multiple habitats, including shallow lagoons and deep-sea reefs. The new report aimed instead to parse out the effects in distinct reef locations and consider the effects of multiple species.

To the surprise of the researchers, the healthiest remaining coral reefs turned up where there were still vigorous populations of grazing parrotfish. Those are mainly areas—like Bermuda, Bonaire, and the U.S. Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary—where governments have banned or restricted fishing practices that harm parrotfish, including spearfishing and the use of traps. Areas that failed to protect parrotfish—including Jamaica, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the entire Florida Reef Tract from Miami to Key West—suffered severe coral reef losses.

The report proposes a series of actions to slow or stop coral reef decline. They come down to a single basic idea: Bring back the grazers. But the Caribbean coral reefs span 38 separate and more or less quarrelsome countries, and getting them to act in unison will require a major effort. To encourage action, the report points out that coral reefs generate more than $3 billion a year for local economies from tourism and fisheries, and more than a hundred times that amount in other goods and services.

Maybe, though, acting in unison isn’t what it will take to de-slime the Caribbean. The forward-thinking countries may just recognize that the coral reefs—and their grazers—are key to their economies and take action on their own. Barbuda, for instance, is now considering a ban on all harvesting of parrotfish and sea urchins, with one-third of its waters to be set aside as marine reserves.

Countries that act to restore their grazers are likelier to end up with the coral reefs, the tourists, and the money. But what about the other countries?

They’ll have the slime.

Dollars for Duck Penises: Why Taxpayer-Funded Basic Science Matters

(Photo: Michal Cizek/Getty Images)

In 2009, a presidential wannabe named Bobby Jindal stood before the cameras to denounce the federal government for frivolous spending, and he got off what passes among politicians for a clever sound bite, targeting a $140 million science program to monitor volcanoes: “Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.”

Jindal was apparently too young to remember the Mount Saint Helens eruption in 1980, which flattened a blast zone 19 miles out from the volcano, killed 57 people, and caused $2.7 billion in damage. (Oh, it happened in some place called Washington. Never mind.) Though he is governor of Louisiana, Jindal also seemed to be unaware that studying potential natural disasters is a good way to save lives and minimize destruction.

This is how it always seems to go with lamebrain politicians and the scientists struggling to understand the natural world. But nobody gets it worse than scientists who study animal behavior, probably because the subject matter is both so familiar and so easy to make sound completely absurd. Or as University of Massachusetts biologist Patricia Brennan puts it, “Most people know about ducks; most people know about penises. You put the two together, and it sounds silly. That’s just how it goes.”

Brennan speaks from painful experience. Last year, when Republicans in Congress shut down federal spending, her National Science Foundation–funded research on sexual conflict came under withering attack: “Feds Fund Vital Study on Snail Sex and Duck Penises,” one typical headline announced. Meanwhile, “White House Tours Still Canceled Over Lack of Funds.”

But Brennan fought back, defending her research in a widely read article on Slate. “Basic research has to be funded by the government rather than private investors,” she wrote, “because there are no immediate profits to be derived from it.” Yet the entire National Science Foundation budget costs the American public only about $20 a person, versus upward of $2,000 a person for the military budget. Her own work on genital morphology in ducks was a way to understand “one of the few vertebrate species other than humans that form pair bonds and exhibit violent sexual coercion.” (Though she didn’t say so, it’s the sort of study the military, which has its own problems with sexual coercion and which understands the value of basic research, might well have funded.)

Now Brennan and two coauthors are laying out an agenda for other behavioral scientists to explain and defend their own work. Writing in the journal Animal Behaviour, they argue that simply lying low and letting the storm pass over is a mistake: Silence can look like “implicit acceptance that there is something wrong with your project,” and that risks further eroding public confidence in science at large.

Among the “talking points” they suggest: The federal government funds only about a quarter of all U.S. science, but this “guarantees that at least some of our discoveries are free of special interests.” Because no one knows what basic science will turn out to be useful, the funding agency must cast a wide net, and it needs to expect that there’s rarely going to be a straight line from basic science to everyday applications.  The “potential economic gains” are “unpredictable and generally long term.”

The coauthors tell a brief story about one such case of unpredictable economic gains.  In 1975, U.S. Sen. William Proxmire singled out the taxpayer-funded work of a researcher named E.F. Knipling for ridicule, awarding him one of his early Golden Fleece Awards. Knipling’s study of “the sex life of parasitic screwworm flies” sounded even dumber than studying duck penises. But that research, paid for by a $250,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, now produces an annual benefit of $1 billion a year for U.S. cattle ranchers. (The technique Knipling developed for releasing sterilized male insects has also dramatically reduced populations of a host of other agricultural pests.)

Likewise, Proxmire and other politicians would surely have run to the nearest camera if they knew in the 1960s that the NSF was paying for a scientist named Tom Brock to study the microbiological life in thermal ponds in Yellowstone National Park. That work resulted in the discovery of Thermus aquaticus living in the scalding hot mud of Mushroom Spring. Other scientists figured out how to use a product of this species, Taq polymerase, which today is an essential ingredient in any DNA test for any purpose anywhere in the world. The economic gains are beyond price.

But maybe I shouldn’t be too quick to call all politicians lamebrain. In 2012, a few renegade members of Congress banded together to create the Golden Goose Award. At a time when federal spending for scientific research is under furious attack, the award means to remind Congress itself that this research has a history of producing “life-saving medicines and treatments; game-changing social and behavioral insights; and major technological advances related to national security, energy, the environment, communications, and public health,” leading to “economic growth through the creation of new industries or companies.”

Among the first recipients was Tom Brock and his Taq polymerase. A few years from now—who knows?—the winner could be Patricia Brennan and those duck penises.

How Tiny Brains Accomplish Amazing Stuff

Serial thinkers (Photo: Ali Jarekji/Reuters)

Here’s a conundrum: Insects have microscopically tiny brains and yet manage some astonishingly intelligent behaviors. Human brains, on the other hand, are massive enough to make our heads fall forward onto our desks, and yet we seem to use them mainly to find new ways to be stupid.  (I am going on personal experience here.)

Honeybees, for instance, have only a million neurons in their brains, versus an estimated 85 billion neurons in a human brain. And yet the bees in a colony have to forage over an area of several square kilometers, according to the authors of a 2009 study in Current Biology, memorizing the location of flowers, sorting out which ones are more rewarding at particular times of day, then linking them in a flight pattern that’s stable and repeatable. It requires “learning landmark sequences and linking vector instructions to landmarks,” as well as “cognitive abilities previously attributed exclusively to ‘higher’ vertebrates, including, for example, simple forms of rule learning and categorization.” Meanwhile, on a typical morning the average human is still struggling to lift that massive brain off the pillow.

A honeybee must manage its daily foraging even when it isn’t driven by hunger, because its job is to gather nectar not just for itself but for the entire colony.  When it comes back to the hive, fully burdened, it may need to do a waggle dance to communicate the location of a new food source to its mates. Having done all this, it may also need to tend to the housework—building, maintaining, and defending a large, complex hive.

So how do they manage it? For a new study in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Vivek Nityananda and his coauthors set up a chamber with six tiny perches, three of them containing the sugar reward honeybees crave and three containing quinine, which makes honeybees gag. To find the reward, a bee had to choose among the signals posted behind each perch. That could mean recognizing that a simple diagonal line indicated sugar, or it might entail distinguishing between two similar colors or shapes—one for sugar, the other for quinine. Just to keep things interesting, the researchers flashed these signals briefly on an LCD computer screen for 100 milliseconds, 50 milliseconds, or 25 milliseconds.

With the simple diagonal, the bees did just fine at finding the sugar, even when they had only 25 milliseconds to make their choice. But with the more complicated signals, they were befuddled at high speed. Humans and monkeys, by contrast, are capable of “ultra-fast categorization” of complex scenes, even with a glance lasting just six milliseconds. In other words, we win. (Just don’t ask us to find the honey.)

The difference suggests something about how our brains and theirs work.

We can take a single snapshot of a scene, then analyze it “off-line,” using the parallel processing powers of our larger brains. Insects don’t have that capacity, so they need to do their analysis by continuous “on-line” sampling of the scene. When approaching a target, a bee has to engage in “systematic side to side scanning movements” of its entire body, a behavior known as “peering.” Bees that are immobilized become visually impaired.

“Bees can see images quickly, and store them in memory,” writes Jamie Theobald, a biologist at Florida International University, “but may be required to physically move their eyes around in order to explore the subtle spatial content. This is a limitation, but may better accommodate an insect brain.” Sampling one slice of an image at a time may be “an important strategy that allows bees to solve complex visual problems” through serial processing, even though they lack the brain capacity to analyze a whole stored image through parallel processing.

The new study doesn’t tell the whole story. We still don’t know how honeybees map out those complex foraging routes. But what we know is impressive enough, and it reminds us that being really smart—“I’m a member of Mensa International,” “I scored genius level on the IQ test,” “I had a perfect score on the SAT”—isn’t something to brag about.

What matters is how you use what you’ve got.

When Do Animals Feel the Beat?

When researchers reported early this year that they had managed to get captive bonobo apes to pick up a beat and play along briefly on a drum, it was merely the latest entry in what has begun to look like a multi-species musical extravaganza. Just in the past year or so, scientists have given us a California sea lion bobbing its head to Earth Wind and Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland” and a chimpanzee in Japan spontaneously playing a piano keyboard in time with a simple beat. Before that, a study reported that romantically-inclined mosquitoes harmonize the whining of their wingbeats. Think: The Animals, Part II.

The study of animal musicality, and ours, goes back at least to Charles Darwin. He noted that rhythm is everywhere in the biological world, from the beating of hearts to the synchronized flashing of fireflies, leading naturally, he thought, to the rise of music. Scientific interest in music began to increase with the discovery of whale songs in the 1960s, and has grown dramatically in this century, thanks partly to new imaging technologies for viewing how the brains of various species respond to music.

Some scientists believe we would see musicality in the animal world more often if we looked more carefully. For instance, says University of North Carolina researcher Patricia Gray, getting bonobos to pick up the beat required accommodating their preferred tempo (fast) and creating a social situation with plenty of vocal encouragement. It also demanded a custom drum indestructible to curious fingers and able to withstand “some major jumping on the drumhead, be peed on, chewed, and hosed down.”

But to demonstrate “beat entrainment,” says Aniruddth Patel at Tufts University, the bonobos, or the chimp at the piano, should be able to match varying tempos, without seeing the human who is setting the beat. That hasn’t happened so far in non-human primates. Contrary to Darwin, Patel theorizes that the ability to feel the beat in a flexible way occurs only in certain species—mainly birds, cetaceans, elephants, bats, and humans–where the evolution of complex vocal learning required key changes in brain structure. Patel’s theory predicts, for instance, dogs will never really get it. (“Freestyle dog” dancing may be a YouTube hit, but it doesn’t constitute “beat entrainment,” he says.)

One intriguing aspect of all this research is what it may say about our own ubiquitous and toe-tappingly irresistible musicality. As Darwin suggested, rhythmic communication appears to have come first for humans and served as an essential building block that made language possible. But the evolutionary biologist (and amateur musician) W. Tecumseh Fitch argues that language then rendered music and song secondary, even “‘living fossils’ of an earlier communicative stage of humanity.” That suggests why something “so apparently useless” attracts “so much of our time and interest, and seems to have such deep and powerful effects on our emotions.” Being sidelined–and made less purposeful than it is even for songbirds–has allowed music to become “a rich, unfettered playground for creative expression.”

Humans clearly yearn for other species to feel the beat as we do. Why else have there been 5.8 million YouTube views of Snowbell the Cockatoo bobbing his head and lifting his feet to the Back Street Boys? And new research may yet reveal that more species than we imagine feel the beat, or lift their hearts to a tune, almost as we do. But for now, this particularly delightful playground still seems to belong largely to us alone.

 

Bring Back Wolves … Everywhere

(Photo: Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

My latest for Takepart:

Pople have been suppressing predators since our terrified ancestors first banded together around campfires. Oddly, though, we only began to notice the catastrophic aftereffects in the 1960s. That’s when biologists first demonstrated that taking out a top predator has a knock-on effect for almost every plant and animal below it on the trophic ladder, or food web.

It’s called a “trophic cascade,” and when settlers eradicated wolves from the Lower 48, they set off a cascade on “a continental scale,” according to a new study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology. Where the wolf’s howl once could be heard from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico and from Cape Cod to the Olympic Peninsula, the night went silent. And coyotes, once confined to the Great Plains, were suddenly free to increase their populations almost astronomically, extending their range from coast to coast and north into Alaska.

Wolves out, coyotes in. Almost a wash, right?

On the contrary, coyotes are “mesopredators,” meaning midsize, and they favor smaller prey than do wolves. So the proliferation of coyotes caused a

corresponding decline in a host of other species, among them sandhill cranes, snowshoe hares, long-billed curlews, and yellow-bellied marmots. The replacement of wolves with coyotes is also a major reason black-footed ferrets, pygmy rabbits, San Joaquin kit fox, whooping cranes, and least terns are now endangered species.

The new study set out to examine the wolf-coyote dynamic on a much larger scale than previous studies. Oregon State University wildlife ecologists Thomas M. Newsome and William J. Ripple focused on fur-trapping records over the past few decades from wildlife management agencies in the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, an area of almost 600,000 square miles.

They were particularly interested in how the presence of wolves affected two competing mesopredators, coyotes and red foxes.

It turned out that the foxes outnumbered coyotes by about four to one when wolves were present, in the northern forests. On the other hand, where wolves had been driven out by humans, in the southern third of the study area, the coyotes outnumbered the foxes by about three to one. But the really interesting area was a 125-mile-long transition zone. There the wolves were still around but sporadically and at lower densities—too low to suppress the coyotes.

That matters, according to Newsome, because it means that undoing this particular trophic cascade may be more challenging than we imagine. It’s conventional wisdom among environmentalists that the restoration of wolves to Yellowstone National Park essentially “fixed” a broken environment, moving elk away from streams, freeing overgrazed aspen groves to regrow, and otherwise allowing the mix of species to recover to a more natural balance. But a controversial opinion piece in The New York Times this spring argued that this is mostly a myth. No environmental fix is that easy, especially not when it involves wolves. The new study reinforces that argument.

“If our interest is in the broader ecological effects of restoring wolves,” said Newsome in an interview, “this study suggests that they need to occur over large continuous areas at ecologically effective densities before they suppress coyotes.” Even around Yellowstone, much less in New England or the Southeast, human activities have altered the landscape irreparably and broken up suitable wolf habitat into small, often widely distributed patches. Newsome doesn’t think that’s cause to give up on wolf restoration. But it suggests that it will continue to be complicated, and that wildlife managers may need to target restorations carefully to achieve particular effects—for instance, to save a particular species—and think much bigger.

Newsome, a Fulbright Scholar visiting from Australia, also hopes to apply the large-scale analysis to the top predator back home. There the elimination of dingoes from huge areas has caused foxes and house cats to proliferate. That’s a major reason Australia has seen 29 mammal species—about 10 percent of its endemic mammals—go extinct over the past two centuries. He says there’s increasing interest in dingo recovery, not just as a way to protect other native species but also to control overabundant native herbivores, such as kangaroos, and nonnative pigs, goats, and rabbits.

Restoring any top predator means factoring in the negative effects on ranching and other human enterprises, said Newsome. It also means developing strategies for predators and livestock to coexist—for instance, by developing guardian dog programs for ranch animals. The new study makes clear that it also requires thinking about big landscapes. It’s not just about national parks anymore.

It’s about entire continents.