Sinking & Shipwrecked
Today I finished the first draft of Shipwrecked on Dry Land! So that’s why I haven’t been writing here much; I’ve been buckling down to work on the documentary itself.
Meanwhile, here’s a story I just did for the Oakland Standard, which is a project from the Oakland Museum of California. It’s about Drawbridge, a ghost town that’s sinking into the San Francisco Bay.
Mice Make Trouble in the Farallones
The Farallon Islands have been crawling with house mice for years. They may have stowed away on boats and ridden out to the islands as early as the 1800s. Mice can be annoying or — if they’re your pets — cute, but in the Farallones they’re causing problems on a life-and-death scale.
“People on the island talk about how the ground moves because there’s so many mice,” explains Brad Keitt, the Director of Conservation for Island Conservation. The non-native mice attract burrowing owls, which would normally stop by the island for a meal, then head out. But the mouse bounty has caused them to extend their stay. And when the mouse population falls in the winter, the owls switch to eating birds, including the ashy storm-petrel, an endangered species that only nests on islands off the coast of California.
I wrote this for KQED’s news blog, News Fix, so read the rest there.
But before you go, let me take a moment to link to two excellent blogs by people who actually get to spend time on the islands (the Farallons are closed to the public): Los Farallones and Farallon Photo a Day.
Search for ET life goes into hibernation
The California Report had a good story this afternoon about SETI losing funding. It comes complete with references and sound from the movie Contact. SETI is based in Mountain View, CA, and its Allen Telescope Array, which it co-manages with Cal is up near Lassen. But the Allen Array has been shut off as of last month because of state and federal budget cuts.
I’d never thought much about the search for alien life–I kind of categorized it with UFOs and Area 51–until reading Remarkable Creatures by Sean B. Carroll. It’s about the scientists who discovered evolution and human origins and the adventures they took to make those discoveries, from Darwin to Svante Pääbo. I love that book!
I hope I won’t give anything away by quoting from the part that changed my mind about extraterrestrial life.
…it is worth asking, now that we have a solid grasp of evolution and our origins, are there other open questions of a similar magnitude to those that have occupied the last 150 years?
I submit that the outstanding issue, and perhaps the greatest mystery of mysteries and question of questions, is the ultimate matter of origins–the origin of life in the universe and on Earth.
Are there other worlds that could carry life?
I don’t know if this is a very mainstream opinion. I assume it’s not, based on there not being, for instance, many university departments dedicated to it. But for now, the search for the answer to the question, “Are there other worlds that could carry life?” has been made more difficult with the “hibernation” of SETI’s Allen Telescope Array.
Probability model of bin Laden;s current location based on distance-decay theory at a global spatial scale. MIT International Review
This blog so rarely crosses paths with major global political events. Imagine my confusion and bewilderment when I got an email from a colleague that said something like, “this made me think of you,” and then had a link to a Fox news article. Actually, I thought her email account had been hacked, but I clicked the link anyway. I’m such a gullible sucker! (Thanks/hi Julia S.!)
Anyway, the news was that UCLA geography undergrads had written a paper in 2009 attempting to predict where bin Laden was hiding. And they used the theory of island biogeography to do it. They ended up not being right. But they were close enough for people to remember the paper and start writing about it again this week. Different outlets did this with varying degrees of breathlessness and accuracy.
What I’m curious about is, has island biogeography been used that way before? Has it ever effectively been used that way?
And lo, there is a place to ask those questions. The World’s science forum is taking questions for one of the UCLA professors, Thomas Gillespie.
If you want to read more,
- Here’s the paper itself [pdf].
- Science’s blog, Science Insider wrote it up.
- Knight Science Journalism Tracker questioned that post, and added a little perspective.
- NPR talked to Gillespie for their blog, the Two Way.
Isolating
Jonathan Franzen, in the April 18 New Yorker–the “journeys” issue–has a long essay (sorry, you have to buy it or visit a library) about boredom, Robinson Crusoe, David Foster Wallace, and a visit to Alejandro Selkirk Island, a remote island off the coast of Chile, also known as Masafuera, home to the endemic Masafuera rayadito. He’s trying to battle his own boredom and come to grips with Wallace’s suicide. And he’s trying to see the rare rayadito.
Simply knowing that the bird was on the island made the island interesting to me. When I go looking for new bird species, I’m searching for a mostly lost authenticity, for the remnants of a world now largely overrun by human beings but still beautifully indifferent to us; to glimpse a rare bird somehow persisting in its life of breeding and feeding is an enduring transcendent delight.
I won’t tell you what happens next! It’s an adventure!
Addendum (May 3): I thought about adding some other thoughts the night I wrote this, then decided not to. But I’ve changed my mind. So:
I still won’t tell you exactly what happens next. But there is one thing that bugged me. After searching for the rayadito, Franzen goes back to Robinson Crusoe Island, another island in the same archipelago, but a little less remote. He’s feeling, basically, cranky about being there.
Before leaving for Masafuera, I’d already seen Robinson’s two endemic land-bird species, and the prospect of another week there, with no chance of seeing something new, seemed suffocatingly boring–an exercise in deprivation from the very busyness that I’d been intent on fleeing, a busyness whose pleasurability I appreciated only now.
The essay is partially about boredom. So I get that here he’s really describing the feeling, and how it can affect how you see the world. But it’s just so petulant, and it puts the first quote in a less-pleasant light. He’s saying the delight in seeing these species can only be had once. And that’s just a shame. Compare that to the delight John Muir feels upon encountering everything in nature, like this line, which I love, from My First Summer in the Sierra:
Saw a common house fly and a grasshopper and a brown bear.
Muir’s out in the Sierra seeing Yosemite and giant sequoias, but to him the house fly is worth noting, too.
Just to get totally over the top here, I’ll end with Emily Dickinson:
In the name of the Bee— And of the Butterfly— And of the Breeze— Amen!
What a Galapagos island sounds like
Earlier this week I got to interview Peter and Rosemary Grant, the biologists who have spent the last 39 years studying Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands. On the tiny island of Daphne Major, they’ve watched evolution in action.
Daphne Major by Flickr user sataylor pix.
One of the things I asked them was what the island sounds like. Here’s their answer.
Notes from the Real Thing
I love the New York Times‘ Scientist at Work blog, which hosts reports from scientists in far flung parts of the world. Chris Filardi of the American Museum of Natural History just wrapped up a series of posts about evolution on the Solomon Islands, and there’s a slide show from the trip up on the site now.
This is from the introduction to the slide show.
For biologists, islands have always been illuminating places. In part, this reflects both the relative simplicity of island ecosystems and also the richly unique, and sometimes bizarre, turns that life takes on islands – think parrots behaving like big rodents, massive dragonlike lizards and miniature hippos, giant flightless dodo birds and tiny ground-foraging bats.
It’s so cool to read about work like this as it’s happening, on the ground. The scientific adventure is definitely my favorite genre.
The mismeasure of the dodo
Painting by the Mughal artist Ustad Mansur from c 1625.
Brian Switek wrote an essay on the dodo last week on his blog Laelaps over at Wired Science. He looks at depictions of the dodo, traces the reasons why we think it looks the way we think it looks, describes what 17th century scientists thought it looked like, and what current dodo researchers have found. I’ll quote a little here, but really, I recommend just going and reading the thing.
I hate to say it, but the dodo looked as if it deserved extinction. What other fate could there have been for such a foolish-looking ground pigeon? A grotesque, tubby creature with huge nostrils and a ridiculous little poof of tail feathers, Raphus cucullatus had the air of a bird that stood still with a blank stare as the scythe of extinction lopped off its head.
But the dodo I have always known is not a true reflection of the bird. Notes, skeletal scraps, a disregard for soft-tissue anatomy, and a bit of artistic license created this symbol of extinction. The dodo looked so stupid because we made it so.
The dodo went extinct in recent human history, and it went extinct because of humans. Switek says, “The Age of Exploration both discovered and wiped out the dodo,” which pretty much sums it up for the dodo and for species–especially species on islands–all over the newly-explored world. The poor maligned dodo had a reputation not only as being dumb-looking, but as being just plain dumb. (This it also shared with other species on islands. For example, Darwin generously described the marine iguanas on the Galapagos as “disgusting clumsy Lizards,” and found them quite approachable). The dodo wasn’t dumb; it just hadn’t evolved alongside humans. And so when humans did come along, it wasn’t equipped to survive their hunger or their hobbies.
The dodo’s not like the Baiji, the Chinese river dolphin which the world basically watched disappear, or the Thylacine, which you can actually watch on YouTube. On the other hand, it didn’t evolve into a now-extant species, or succumb to ancient climate change or a meteor. And for that reason it feels stingingly recent, an extinction as much on our shoulders as the extinction of the Xerces blue.
Climate change is complicated
A paper came out a few days ago in the journal Science that explains that plants in California–contrary to what you might expect based on climate change predictions–have been shifting downhill. This paper got a lot of coverage already, so I’ll just quickly summarize it, and add a few thoughts.
The paper’s title basically explains it all anyway: “Changes in Climatic Water Balance Drive Downhill Shifts in Plant Species’ Optimum Elevations.” The authors, from University of Montana, University of Idaho, and UC Davis, surveyed plants roughly along the coast starting just north of Santa Barbara all the way up to Oregon, going inland as far as I-5, and then looping over to include the Klamath Mountains, then south again to include the Sierra (or you could say, it’s a big upside-down “U” around the Central Valley). They found that plants are following precipitation downhill, rather than following temperatures uphill.
It’s a reminder that climate change doesn’t only affect temperature, and that looking on different levels, from a large, landscape-wide perspective down to a hillside, can result in different projections.
Even looking at temperature alone doesn’t necessarily predict uphill movement. On a small scale, in some places, it could actually get cooler lower down and warmer higher up, what’s referred to as an inversion. I’ve written about that before, about how it applies to pikas.
The paper is behind a paywall, though you can pay for one-off access to read it, if you’d like. I also recommend Knight Science Journalism Tracker’s take on it (really, I recommend his take on just about everything).
Migrations
There’s a lot of traffic in California in the winter.
Photo of sandhill cranes at the Woodbridge Ecological Reserve by Flickr user lorises.
Sandhill cranes are wading around in the Central Valley. They migrate here from Canada and Alaska or from the Northwest and the Great Lakes, depending on the subspecies. I’m going to try and go see them before they head back to their summer breeding grounds. Also, Lodi hosts an annual Sandhill crane festival! Missed it this year, but mark your calendars.
This one’s by me. Look, off in the distance, a fluke!
Gray whales are heading South along the coast right now, working on their record-holding migration (the longest? one of the longest? of any mammal). You can often see them from the shore. Around here, Point Reyes and Big Sur are good spots. Look, Monterey County has a handy map. Gray whales almost went extinct; I get all emotional about it.
Monarch butterflies in Pismo Beach by Flickr user Steve Corey.
Monarch butterflies are up from Mexico. They’re in Santa Cruz, the East Bay, San Diego, Ventura, Pacific Grove, and Pismo Beach until March when they start heading South again. I’ve never seen them, and plan to this month. Also, check out the Life segment about monarch butterflies.
The elephant seals are large and in charge in places like Ano Nuevo State Park and down around San Simeon. I took this picture near the Piedras Blancas Lighthouse in October, when there were mostly just females napping and juvenile males practice fighting. By now the beach is covered in huge, bellowing males.
