Insects — worthy of more respect

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, insects, ecology, entomology

To a first approximation, the average animal on Earth seems to be an ant of medium size, a little smaller than a rice grain. According to Steve Nicholls, as he writes in Alien Worlds: How Insects Conquered the Earth & Why Their Fate Will Determine Our Future, ants make up one-third of the total biomass of all insects (p. 439). The total biomass of insects, around one billion tons, equals the total mass of all humans plus all domestic animals.

As these leafcutter ants illustrate, insects were farming millions of years before humans began doing so. Leafcutter ants chew up leaves to grow nutritious fungi. Other insects carry out similar kinds of agriculture. 

Insects, again illustrated by ants, also took up ranching long, long ago. As we see here, these ants guard and "pasture" aphids and drink the honeydew they provide (others care for mealybugs).

Alien Worlds is a heavy book; the paper is supercalendered, meaning it is loaded with clay to make photographs look better. It is also more dense. This 500-page book, which doesn't look much larger than a typical novel, weighs almost three pounds; the novel would weigh a pound and a half. The quality of the images makes it all worth it.

About a third of the "real estate" of the pages consists of eye-popping photos. Mr. Nicholls is a documentarist who has traveled the world preparing programs, and he has a wealth of material on which to rely. I'll resist the temptation to scan a bunch of the pictures, and just tantalize you with one, this Hummingbird Clearwing moth, Hemaris thysbe, feeding. It is a type of hawk moth, and is about this size. This image is cropped from one page of a two-page spread showing two of these moths feeding.

The obligatory historical review in the first few chapters presents the place of insects in the arthropod phylum, a basic history of their development, and discusses some of the reasons that they became the most successful class of animals (basically: extreme flexibility of foods and conditions they can endure).

Those who are familiar with biological classification can skip a few paragraphs to the arrow below. Biological entities are named with two Latin or Latinized words, such as Tyrannosaurus rex or Homo sapiens, and the words are (or ought to be) italicized whenever possible. The first word of the scientific name, the capitalized word, is the Genus, and the second, uncapitalized word is the Species. Homo is a genus of primates that presently includes only the species sapiens, but in the past there were other species such as neanderthalensis and ergaster. A scientific name, the genus and species, must be unique, to avoid confusion.

The plural of genus is genera and the plural of species is species (no inflection); they are Latin plurals. The hierarchy of major groupings is, from top down:

• Kingdom – There are 5 or 6; here we are interested in Animalia, the kingdom of animals.
• Phylum – There are about 40 phyla of animals. Most of the creatures people call "animals" are in the phylum Vertebrata, animals with backbones. Earthworms are in the phylum Annelida. Insects and related creatures are in the phylum Arthropoda.
• Class – In the Arthropoda there are five classes. More on that below. Insect species make up about 70% of the total.
• Order – The class Insecta includes 29 orders. For example, Lepidoptera includes the moths and butterflies, and Hymenoptera includes wasps, bees, and ants.
• Family – Too many to count, and the number changes almost weekly as naturalists find new species and taxonomists (systematists) regroup existing ones.
• Genus 
• Species

The phylum Arthropoda has these groups:

These are not exactly the classes. Chelicerata, Crustacea and Insecta are classes. The myriapods are made up of two primary classes, Diplopoda (millipedes) and Chilopoda (centipedes), plus a few very minor but very distinct classes. The extinct class Trilobitomorpha  rounds out the bunch. All the living classes include members that live on land; the little "pillbugs" or wood lice, for example are crustaceans, related more to crabs than to insects.

→OK. The author, having brought the evolution of insects and their arthropod kin up to date, dwells for a chapter on the co-development of insects (and some other arthropods such as ants) and flowers. The rest of the book works its way up the ladder of social organization, finishing with bees, wasps and termites. A major aim of the author is to show how insects are integrated into every aspect of life, and how much of our "civilized" lifestyle depends on them. A few tidbits:

• Do you like almonds, a trendy superfood? Honeybees pollinate them, and the almond groves of central California need to have millions of beehives trucked in to provide a sufficient number of bees. Although other species of bee are good pollinators—sometimes working five times as hard—only honeybees exist in numbers sufficient to pollinate the almond crop. About half our plant foods require pollination by bees.
• Dung beetles and related beetles and other insects keep us from being awash in cow poop.
• Burying beetles (sexton beetles) and other members of the "cleanup squad" dispose of the bodies of little animals that die "out there", and the remains of larger animals after vultures and coyotes have picked their skeletons almost clean.
• In many cultures insects or their larvae are a necessary food item.

Another couple of interesting items: Firstly, tool use. Some insects use pebbles or bits of twig, though these behavior probably evolved and don't seem to be learned as cultural attainments the way tools are used and learned by various birds and mammals. Secondly, language. I think most of us know about "waggle dancing", a communication method among bees, to indicate the direction and distance to a productive patch of flowers. Many insects also communicate by sound, although none have a humanlike vocal apparatus. Most insect sounds are stridulation, the rubbing of legs or wings against other body parts, which makes sounds that are often amplified by resonance. Apparently, bess beetles in particular use different sounds for different purposes. These beetles are 1-1.5 inch (25-40 mm) in size, usually shiny and black, but they are seldom seen because they tunnel in rotting wood. One North American species, Odontotaenius disjunctus, makes seven distinct sounds, combined into as many as 13 utterances for different contexts (such as "food here" or "danger"). The beginnings of language? The author doesn't mention if these "words" are learned, but does tell us that each species has its own dialect.

Many have noticed that taking a drive in the countryside can now be done without the need to clean your car's windshield every 50 miles or so. When I was a child this was not so. This is often decried as an indicator that insects are in steep decline. They probably are, but I wonder to what extent we killed off all the low-flying ones, and if cars were 20 feet taller, maybe there are still plenty of critters in fight to run into. However, cars and their windshields aren't much of a culprit. Habitat destruction and overuse of pesticides take a much greater toll. I find it quite distressing to see farm after farm and orchard after orchard being sold to developers, who build housing developments or even mini-towns complete with apartments and retail outlets and office plazas. In my view, turning agricultural land into hardscape is criminal. Mr. Nicholls probably believes this also, though he doesn't state it the same way.

Besides the visual appeal of hundreds of photos, the discussions and explanations are enjoyable and impel one right along through this briefest of summaries of the vast subject of insect lore.

================

If you don't care about errata, you can stop already. I am a compulsive proofreader, so I noticed a few things, a few more than I find normal:

First and foremost, discussing insect sizes, which range from 0.129 mm for a species of fairyfly (a tiny wasp) to 110 mm for the largest species of goliath beetle (stick insects can get 2-3 times this long, but they weigh much less), he states in page 45, "The size range of insects covers only three orders of magnitude, small compared to fish, for example, whose size range covers eight orders of magnitude." This is just nuts. Eight orders of magnitude is a range of 100 million to one. If the smallest fish is 1 mm in size (it's larger than that), then is the largest fish 100 km in length? He seems to have used the lengths of insects, but the weights of fishes. Let's investigate.

• Fairyfly length and weight: 0.129 mm and 25 micrograms (0.000025 g).
• Goliath beetle length and weight: 110 mm and 100 g (larva) or 60 g (adult).
• Dwarf goby length and weight: 7.9 mm and 60 g.
• Whale shark length and weight: 18 m and 20,000 kg (18,000 mm and 20 million g)
• Orders of magnitude for these insects: log(110/0.129) = 2.93, which is close to 3 for length; log(100/0.000025) = 6.6, so between 6 and 7 orders of magnitude for weight.
• Orders of magnitude for fishes: log(18,000/7.9) = 3.4, or something over 3 for length; log(20,000,000/60) = 5.5, so between 5 and 6 orders of magnitude for weight.

All this indicates that the extrema for length are in the range of three orders of magnitude for both fish and insects, and the extrema for weight are in the range of six orders of magnitude for both, with the insects having a greater range of weights! I have no idea where "eight" came from. This is worse than a simple cross-category error.

Lesser items that ought to have been caught by a copy editor:

• p125: The word for a gripping tool is "vise". The word "vice" was used, an error I see frequently, but "vice" is a sinful tendency such as over-drinking.
• pp200 and 305: At the beginning of a sentence, the starting letter was not capitalized.
• pp211 and 432: The footnote is a copy of the one on the prior page.
• p422-3: The phrase in parentheses "(soccer against)" should be "(soccer again)", as he'd made a comment about soccer a few sentences earlier. 

No bugs, no us

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, ecology, insects, polemics

I've been reading a lot of natural history lately. It is one of my great loves. Having read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson when it appeared in 1962 (I was 14), when I saw Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse by Dave Goulson, I just had to read it. Goulson's message is as timely and urgent for our generation as Carson's was for its time. Perhaps it is more urgent.

I think to most people, all the little creepy-crawlies—insects, spiders, centipedes, and so forth—are "bugs", to be squashed or sprayed with something immediately upon detection. The primary impetus and funding for research about insects and related animals is aimed at killing them, mainly supported by the pesticide industry.

Dr. Goulson wants to reset our understanding of insects (et cetera). Perhaps some large number of people realize that bees and other pollinating insects are "good". Their understanding of insect benefits stops there. I wonder, though, how many stop to think what we would miss if the bees vanished.

I got this image from a page at Izismile.com titled Imagine Our World Without Insects. They have short pieces about 8 kinds of insects, including cockroaches (most roach species speed up the recycling of nitrogen in forests) and ants (although many ants eat seeds, many of the seeds they carry are dispersed, spreading plants faster).

Fun fact: According to Dr. E.O. Wilson, the world famous "ant man", ants are the only major group of insects that don't carry any diseases. They are so beneficial, he claims it is OK to let them invade your kitchen; they will kill and eat many other kinds of small insects that DO carry disease, making your house a healthier place to live.

At the end of the Izismile page, they picture mosquitos, saying they can't think of anything good about them. I can: Food for bats and fireflies and many, many species of small bird. Some species of hummingbird eat mostly mosquitoes and gnats. They are not all nectar-sippers.

Much of Silent Earth records what we have been doing with insects. Mostly, killing them. As a matter of fact, the number of insects on Earth today is about 1/10th what it was when I was a child. And the use of DDT had already reduced them, as Ms Carson outlined in Silent Spring. Have you heard of the "windshield indicator"? In the 1960's and before, taking a road trip required a stop every 50-100 miles to wash the dead insects off the windshield, and sometimes out of the grille. Not any more.

The core conclusion of both books is the same: There is no "focused" insecticide. Every insecticide kills every kind of insect. DDT was intended to kill flies. It also killed bees, and even birds, indirectly. Modern pesticides may be less lethal to birds and mammals, but they have already gone a long way towards making many beneficial insects extinct. Sadly, flies and other "more pesky pests" seem to develop resistance to pesticides more rapidly than wholly beneficial insects. If we manage to make all insects extinct, the last ones to go will be flies.

Further, if we manage to make all insects extinct, we are next on the list. Their "ecosystem services" are not well known, but they are worth tens of trillions. Maybe much, much more. We truly cannot exist without insects.

Can this juggernaut be turned? Possibly. In time? possibly. There are no guarantees.

The buck stops in the blubber

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, whales, ecology, environmentalism, pollution

A few years ago a half-grown humpback whale died in Delaware Bay and washed ashore near one of the little towns that are scattered along the shoreline. The Fish & Wildlife service soon found a more out-of-the-way place to take it, and towed the body there, using a tractor and nylon straps to pull it fully onto the shore. The body was 37 feet long and weighed about 16 tons, which is rather emaciated; a healthy humpback this length weighs closer to 20 tons. The curators from the Delaware Museum of Natural History "visited" the remains over the winter, when the smell was less, although the flesh had not yet all rotted away. A year later they organized a field trip for some of us to see the skeleton, now nearly flesh-free.

This is one of my colleagues from the museum next to the remains. About half of the skeleton is shown in this photo; the skull is to the right. You can see that, even in this rather small whale, the vertebrae are 2-3 feet (a little under a meter) across. A few ribs show.

Almost another year later the museum received permission to collect the skull, some vertebrae, and the bones of a flipper. A shed was built to house the remains, which were brought into it late in 2018. I took this photo from the door to the shed. One of the long jaw bones is on the left; its opposite number was carried off by someone before our visit the prior year. If the museum decides to put the skull on display, the remaining jawbone can be scanned and a mirror-image duplicate can be 3D printed.

There was still quite an oily smell about it in 2018. It takes years for all the oily material in the bones to either rot away or leak out and evaporate.

Fathoms: The World in the Whale, by Rebecca Giggs, begins with the story of her visit to a dying humpback whale near her home in Australia. I am not sure what I was expecting when I checked out the book; I should have been wise enough to expect a very environmentalist tone, particularly from someone who is probably a younger member of the X generation.

The book's chapters each have a subject, but the subjects are secondary to the overall theme, which is introduced on page 47, where a word that is new to me, and to most of us I reckon, is defined: defaunation. If you know that "fauna" refers to animal life, the word defines itself as the removal of animal life. The whales are harbinger species, and their downfall portends the general downfall of everything. It is happening all around us, but most people don't notice.

Some of us have lived long enough to remember very noisy Spring and Summer mornings, with dozens of species of birds singing their territorial songs. Our family lived in Sandusky, Ohio in the early 1960's. The southern shore of Lake Erie, from Cleveland westward to Toledo, and around the tip of the lake, is a concentrating flyway for songbird migration, so the morning chorus was very intense. These days, although I live under one of the East Coast flyways, the morning chorus is pretty, but quite "thin" by comparison; I seldom hear more than four species. Ms Giggs also points out that, in her lifetime (perhaps half of mine), the level of splatter on car windshields has dropped almost to nothing. I do remember that on road trips my Dad allowed for a stop every hour to clean the windshield and the grille. We didn't even try taking road trips during the heavy grasshopper and locust season of midsummer! Now when my wife and I drive from near Philadelphia to the town near Cleveland where some relatives live, we don't need to clean until the end, when we wipe off the remains of half a dozen insects at most.

Some species of whale are verified to live 200 years or longer. That means that some "pod elders" may remember the decades of intense whaling that they managed to survive. I suspect they also find the ocean as comparatively voiceless as I find a modern Spring morning. Whales communicate over hundreds to thousands of miles, and the enchanting (to us) "songs" of the humpbacks are just one version of their globe-spanning conversations. But voiceless doesn't mean silent. The thrum of a 50,000 horsepower engine driving a supertanker or container ship fills an entire ocean—yes, even the mighty Pacific—with noise that causes the whales to lower the pitch of their voices. Lower pitch travels farther, and engine noise has a higher pitch. Even when they do that, thousand-mile "gossip" just isn't happening any more. In most of the seas, the whales can hear each other "only" 100-200 miles away. You might say, as we humans have globalized electronic dating, "swiping" Tinder profiles from anywhere on Earth, we have crippled the water-borne Tinder that whales were using to find mates, at a time when there are fewer mates to find.

Just by the way, there are 770 supertankers and more than 5,200 container ships in operation, nearly all of them on the move nearly all the time. Their combined engine power is about 300 million horsepower. The fuel they burn is many times as polluting as gasoline. A container ship is how the rubber ducky made it from China to your bathtub.

Speaking of pollution, whales are also great concentrators of waterborne pollution. Their prey are polluted, no matter where on earth they may be. Many common pollutants are oil-soluble so they wind up in the blubber. While that means the whale is somewhat protected from adverse effects from those pollutants, when a whale dies, not from whaling but in the ocean, its blubber is the first thing to be eaten by an enormous number of scavenging organisms, all of which concentrate the stuff even further. People are also affected, some directly. The author tells of Inuit women, who eat a lot of whale blubber in the winter, when you need a fatty diet just to keep from freezing: their breast milk is so contaminated that, if they pump it into a jar, it would be illegal to carry across a state line. For that matter, most beached whales now must be treated like toxic waste!

The "Save the Whale" efforts that began in the 1970's have ironically saved them but not their environment. On the first Earth Day in 1970 (51 years ago this coming Thursday) nobody dreamed that the oceans would be filled with ships powered by 50,000 hp engines, ships that would outnumber some of the species of remaining whale! There are less than 400 northern right whales alive today, though most other species number in the tens of thousands to a quarter million or more. But most species of large whale were hunted down to populations of less than 1,000 by the 1920's to the 1960's. That cluster of population bottlenecks is in itself a great risk to the existing whales. Less genetic diversity results in greater susceptibility to diseases, for example.

This is not a happy book. The outlook for whales may be better than it was half a century ago, but the picture is still not rosy. I can't predict what the future holds, but a book like this is sobering, and may motivate some, at least, to drive even more toward a planet that is safer for both whales and people.

The new normal arrives about twice per generation

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ecology, limnology, great lakes

My family moved to a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio in 1961. One of the first things we did was ride a tour boat up the Cuyahoga River. The tour operator proudly showed how the thoroughly channeled, and very twisty, river had been scooped out here (and cemented in) and patched there (and cemented in) so that ore boats could just barely be eased around corners and bends that sometimes exceeded 180 degrees. He showed off more than 100 bridges across the Cuyahoga that had various ways of turning, tilting and lifting out of the way when a ship came through.

He also, almost casually, mentioned that the oily sludge atop the river was about four inches thick. We could smell it; it was the backdrop to the whole cruise. I remember Dad leaning over to us, sotto voce, "This could burn!" Eight years later it did burn. What none of us learned until much later was that the June,1969 Cuyahoga River fire, which motivated the legislation that became the Clean Water Act, was only the latest of thirteen fires over 101 years. Yes, the Cuyahoga River first caught fire in 1868.

The Great Lakes, Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, are really a sort of "northern ocean". When I tell people I have lived on all four coasts of the U.S., it takes most of them a while to realize that the "third coast" is the Gulf Coast. Only one has thought it through and asked which of the Great Lakes I'd resided at.

In The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, Dan Egan chronicles the repeated environmental insults that these "unassailable" lakes have endured. The century-long "fire season" was not the first. Canals linking the lakes to the sea were first constructed in 1783, 85 years before the first fire on the Cuyahoga. The most famous, the Erie Canal, links the Hudson River to the Niagara River above the falls, near Buffalo, New York. It allows barge traffic to bypass the rapid-strewn St. Lawrence River and Niagara Falls, to get to Lake Erie.

Prior to 1825, when the Erie Canal opened, the great lakes were ecologically isolated, mainly by gravity. The rapids along the St. Lawrence River prevent even mighty salmon from reaching Lake Ontario, and Niagara Falls effectively blockades upstream motion by downstream species. Once canal and lock systems were completed, allowing large ships to be lifted as much as 600 feet to reach Lake Superior, they could bring cargo in and out. Their unintended cargo was devastating to the lakes. Some creatures such as the sea lamprey could swim up the canals and through the locks on their own. Others, such as shellfish, traveled as larvae in the ballast water that all ships carry to keep their balance.

Take a close look at these museum specimens. The small shells are about 12-15 mm long, smaller than one of my thumbnails. They are Zebra Mussels, Dreissena polymorpha (Pallas, 1771). They are native to the Ukraine and southern Russia. Looking carefully you can see the stripes and zigzag lines that give them their name. The specimen on the right is attached to the shell of another, native freshwater bivalve.

In 1988, two zebra mussel shells were found in Lake St. Clair, between Lake Erie and Lake Huron. Soon, they were to be found throughout the great lakes. At first, it was thought that they would not infest the deepest part of the lakes because they are not found deeper than about 30 meters. Then a second, related species the Quagga Mussel, Dreissena bugensis Andrusov, 1897, was found. They live deeper down, all the way to the bottom of the deepest part of Lake Superior, 406 m (1,332 ft). (A quagga is an extinct relative of the zebra.)

The portion of this museum tray outlined in blue shows the specimens of zebra mussel in the collection of the Delaware Museum of Natural History. The few older specimens are from Crimea. All the newer ones are from Europe and the U.S., primarily the great lakes.

The list of insults to the great lakes' ecology is long, and it is likely that Dan Egan hasn't covered each and every one. But he has covered all the critical ones:

• After lampreys came, most of the lake trout died out. An effective poison was developed to "control" lamprey populations, but it was too late for the trout. An east coast herring had also sneaked in, and here they were called alewives. They had boom-bust cycles that left millions or billions dead on the beaches.
• Two species of salmon were introduced purposely to prey on alewives and also to provide sport fishermen some excitement. Nothing fights like a salmon.
• Zebra and quagga mussels are just two of the invasive shellfish. Others are less troublesome, but there are dozens of them. A fish from Russia, the roundhead goby, also made its way over, and they prey on these mussels.
• Another species related to lake trout can prey on gobies. It has become established and, while it doesn't have the fight of a salmon, is a fun catch and good eating.
• The aforementioned fires, and not only on the Cuyahoga River.
• Prior to the introduction of second- and third-level sewage treatment, when we lived there, Cleveland's "sewage treatment system" consisted of a big pipe five miles long that discharged right into the lake. Cleveland was not alone. Only when there was an offshore breeze was it sort of safe to swim off the beaches of Cedar Point. Onshore breezes could bring undigested turds ashore.
• The Chicago Ship Canal siphons some of Lake Michigan into the Mississippi River watershed, also carrying away Chicago's sewage. St. Louis fought several lawsuits before Chicago was forced to quite literally clean up its act.
• Envious eyes are frequently cast on "all that water", particularly during droughts, which by definition, happen about half the time in any particular place! A city, county or state gets used to fully using the available water in good years, then goes crying for alternatives to fill the gap when things are more "normal". Climate change may make the great lakes even wetter, but the extremes from driest to wettest are likely to be greater than now, and it will just establish a new baseline.
• Dredging and blasting for ship channels between Huron and Erie has led the level of Lake Huron to decrease by a couple of feet. The "new" channel bottom is softer than the old, and eroding fast. The drawdown will certainly increase.

As long as the stewardship of such resources is in the hands of people who have to run for election every two to four to six years, things can't get much better. Political decision makers have a short memory.

This book is as fascinating as any novel. Sometimes I found myself saying, "What??" Each generation finds a new way to make things worse. The lakes are resilient. They can recover, slowly, to a new ecological balance, if allowed to do so. But we don't have much capacity to leave things alone.

The bird, the crab, the eggs, the blood, and the ends of the earth

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, horseshoe crabs, red knots, migration, ecology, environment

For anyone who lives along Delaware Bay or the Delaware River, there are two main choices for a day at the beach or shore. The local terms are "Delaware beach" and "Jersey shore". Having sampled both, I found I love the northern beaches of Delaware the best. Beach towns and parks from Rehoboth Beach down to Fenwick Island, and on to Ocean City, MD, are great fun, but we enjoy Cape Henlopen, Delaware's northernmost Atlantic beach, the most.

Those who visit the Cape in late Spring, near the full moon in May or earliest June, can witness an amazing spectacle right out of the geologic past: the spawning of the horseshoe crabs. These trilobite-like critters, bigger than dinner plates, and little changed in bodily form for 400 million years, crawl ashore by the thousands to mate and lay eggs in the sand. Right along with them, running among them, little sandpipers called Red Knots pick and probe in the sand for the nourishing eggs. Knots are not the only egg-eating shorebirds, but at times they are the most numerous, as this photo shows.

At both Cape Henlopen and Cape May, NJ, and at many sandy beaches that line Delaware Bay, crabs lay eggs and shorebirds feed frantically. The Knots are particularly frantic. They've just crossed the western Atlantic from northeastern South America, and they have several thousand more miles to go to their Arctic breeding grounds. They have an amazing weight-gain and muscle-building metabolism that allows them to eat half their weight daily, and to double their weight, mainly by adding flight muscle and a layer of fat, in just a couple of weeks. They will lose most of that added weight flying 3,000 or more miles north by mid-June.

The Western Atlantic Flyway for Red Knots begins at Tierra del Fuego, Chile, the "uttermost part of the Earth" at the southern tip of South America. It ends at the other "uttermost part of the Earth" in northern Canada. That is, in the March-to-July time frame. Six months later, it is the same route in reverse.

Think of it: little birds that weigh only a couple of ounces, fueled by a few ounces of shellfish (on South American coasts) and horseshoe crab eggs (on North American coasts), make a journey that we bulky humans find harrowing and quite expensive (at current Coach rates, flying from Punta Arenas, Chile to Iqaluit, Canada costs $2,625 one way, with four stops to change planes). The birds do this twice yearly.

Deborah Cramer, as she writes in The Narrow Edge: A Tiny Bird, an Ancient Crab, and an Epic Journey, made that trip just once, to see the Red Knot in all its habitats. The airline fares were the least of the expenses. There are no hotels near Bahia Lomas, and it takes almost as long to go that last 80 miles (130 km) from Punta Arenas by truck and boat, as it took to get to Punta Arenas from Massachusetts. She had to depend on an invitation from scientists who take advantage of an oil company's camp. Similar "camp-out" style dwellings awaited her on Southampton Island, in northern Hudson Bay, Canada. I presume she had hotels to stay in along the Delaware Bay and other mid-journey stopovers.

The book's entertaining travelogue provides one level of reading pleasure. But most importantly, it shows the interlocking lives of creatures of air and sea that actually affect human health throughout the world. Horseshoe crabs, it turns out, are a bountiful source of several benefits, and the most important is safeguarding our medicines.

Several generations ago, horseshoe crabs were harvested by the millions for bait and fertilizer. Better sources of fertilizer since the mid-1900's reduced the carnage somewhat, but by then their population was probably no more than 5% of what it had been. Their spawning runs were once legendary, with their little green eggs feeding tens to hundreds of millions of shorebirds, and still lying in heaps along the beaches. The shore birds now, seemingly abundant to our impoverished eyes, number less than a percent what they once did. Not only are there fewer crabs, they lay fewer eggs, ultimately because of a curious property of their blue blood.

Horseshoe crabs, and large arthropods in general, do not have as sophisticated an immune system as we and all mammals have. But horseshoe crabs in particular have a very sensitive clotting factor that engulfs certain bacteria, called gram negative bacilli, and deactivates the toxins they release. The metabolic products of gram negative bacteria are toxic to us, and cause fevers in even very small amounts. Their presence indicates bacterial contamination of medical products, so it is important that every IV kit, every serum, vaccine and other injectable medication be tested. Once there was a "rabbit test", but now the clotting factor in the blood of horseshoe crabs is used; it works ten times better.

Horseshoe crabs are captured, bled of about 1/3 of their blood, and returned to their native waters. A product called LAL is isolated from the blood, which is blue because rather than the iron in our kind of blood, theirs contains copper. Every time you've had a needle stuck in you for any reason, somewhere along the way the IV or hypo kit, and probably the medication also, were tested with LAL. Without it, about a third of the time the treatment itself would cause a fever lasting a day or two, and possibly a deadly reaction.

Female horseshoe crabs are bigger than their mates, so you can get more blood from them. But a crab that has been bled will be disoriented for days or weeks when she is returned to the sea, and will usually produce fewer eggs that year. A certain number are known to die before they are returned. Even more must be dying after return. A century ago, the usual sight was that each female crab was accompanied by one or sometimes two males as she came ashore to lay her eggs. Now it is common to see four to six males surrounding each female.

States such as North Carolina have banned the taking of horseshoe crabs for any reason other than this medical one. Nobody really needs them for bait any more, but some fishermen find it\\they are easier to gather than other bait fish, so there is legislative resistance to similar bans elsewhere. Researchers have devised several ways to use LAL that are from four to twenty times more efficient. But until the FDA (and similar bodies in other nations) rules upon the new tests, it is illegal to use them.

We soon may have no choice. Horseshoe crabs' numbers continue to decrease throughout the western Atlantic. A similar Asian crab species apparently cannot be used to produce LAL because of other toxins in its blood. And the birds? They are of no use to the crab. But they are of use to us. Their abundance, or scarcity, is a signal we had best not ignore. As the population of crabs declines, so does that of many species of shore bird, not just the Knots. And other populations are also affected. Large fish and seals that eat horseshoe crabs have turned in desperation to other prey, such as the famed Delaware Blue Crab. The price of Blue Crabs is increasing as a result. So it the price of your medicine, as it gets harder to gather enough crabs to meet an ever increasing demand for LAL, particularly as China Westernizes its economy and culture.

Doing something the cheapest way is not always, or even usually, the right way. Horseshoe crabs may be OK as a bait fish, but there are numerous alternatives. When the health of every human depends on them, is it permissible to use them for bait? Researchers find it hard to synthesize LAL, but it ought not be impossible. Sure, it'll cost a few millions to produce the first gram of synthetic LAL, but once the method is known, the price will drop and drop until it is cheaper than drawing blue blood from crabs. But will that price cutoff be reached because technology improves, or because crab capture and bleeding become so costly that natural LAL drives the cost of an IV kit to $1,000 and a flu shot is not $35 but $350?

And what of the birds? Will the loss of the Red Knot matter? Did the loss of the Passenger Pigeon matter? After 1914, when Martha the pigeon died, this marvelous bird species was lost forever. What else happened? At one time, they ate so many acorns and other forest nuts that there were fewer mice and other seed-eating small mammals. Now instead of millions of pigeons, we have billions more mice. One critter that inhabits mice is the "deer tick". So there are many, many more of them. Young ticks feast on mouse blood. Then they drop off and molt a time or two. Next they look for a larger host. They usually find deer, but a human will do. Then what happens? Lyme disease! Lyme disease was almost unknown before 1970. That shows that the burgeoning mouse numbers are only part of the equation. More and more suburbs being built into forests is another.

We don't know what other links are in the chain that includes Red Knots and Horseshoe Crabs. It is more of a mesh, anyway, like chain mail. Life is an unending Tetris game. Blocks drop and we fend them off. So does every other species. Eventually the stack fills the box and it is "Game Over". For many species, we are part of that Tetris game, not only adding extra falling blocks, but throwing them down faster and faster. Every species lost is irretrievable. You may not see the beauty in the horseshoe crab, but to the right kind of eye, the crab and the bird have equal beauty, and they are both of great value.

To regain a river

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, teaching novels, ecology, watersheds, citizen science

The Brandywine River Watershed encompasses 324 square miles (840 square km) and is home to a quarter million people. I am not one of them; I live just outside the watershed, though I am in the larger composite watershed of the Delaware River. (This image is from the Delaware Watersheds site maintained by the University of Delaware)

On a few occasions my family and I have joined with other families to take a canoe trip down a few miles of the river, from the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, PA to Thompson's Bridge in northern DE. We were advised to avoid ingesting any of the water, and to "do" this trip only once or twice yearly, because the river is polluted. South of Thompson's Bridge, I have seen signs warning anglers not to eat any fish they catch.

Some tributaries upstream of the lower main stem of the river are in even worse shape. How can this be? Another map, from the Red Streams Blue Program, gives a clue (the main stem quality is not shown). The tributaries with fair or good water quality presently outnumber those in the worst shape. It illustrates the adage, "The solution to pollution is dilution." But that can only go so far.

The lovely book Sweet Water Hunt by Connie Nye is the first novel I have seen with a Dewey Decimal number (577.64). Ms Nye used an adventure/detective narrative to create a text in water quality monitoring that is pitched at middle school students and their teachers and parents. Young Wyatt Nystrom, his cousin and some friends, and their parents, get involved with the colorful "Dr, Flo", a UD professor, to solve a mystery found in an old tennis ball Wyatt's dog finds in the Brandywine River.

The lesson of the book is clear. Every substance that falls to the ground within a watershed eventually flows into the river, unless it is diverted or converted to something else along the way. There is much in the book about the water treatment plants in various cities and towns, particularly Wilmington, DE, where Wyatt's father works. A few times there is mention that the treatment plants expel the treated water downstream of their host cities. I wonder what would result if they were required to expel it upstream? Would they invest in even better cleansing methods? (Some European countries have such laws.)

By the time Brandywine River water reaches Wilmington, it has a history, the history of everything that has happened upstream in the watershed. It sends this "experienced" water into the Christina River, and thence into the Delaware River. This is the story of every watershed, everywhere on Earth. If the people living in a watershed do nothing to treat their wastes, the river becomes an open sewer.

I recall living in Cleveland, OH in 1961, when the Cuyahoga River was capped with 4" (100mm) of oily sludge. A few years later the sludge caught on fire and destroyed a number of bridges. At the time, Cleveland's sewer system simply fed pipes that took the waste 5 miles out into Lake Erie. The west end of the lake was effectively dead, and it wasn't safe to swim if the wind was from the north. A great deal of cleaning up has happened since!

The Red Streams Blue Program aims to continue cleanup and treatment efforts in this one small watershed. The book shows how even young children can assess the water quality in a stream, using a census of macroinvertebrates. These are insect larvae, worms and mollusks big enough to identify without magnification. They vary in sensitivity to pollution, so a simple scoring method yields a numerical result. I had an enjoyable read, and I sorta wished our son was 12 again, so we could go try out the methods.

Managing the unmanageable wildernesses

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ecology, endangered species, wildlife management

We might joke about our favorite oxymorons, such as Jumbo Shrimp, Objective Opinion, or Act Naturally (a wink and nod to Ringo), but the most tragic is Wildlife Management. Frankly, if it is managed, it isn't wild. A landscape designer can produce a "naturalistic garden" using a couple dozen species of trees, shrubs and low plants. It looks delightfully wild, yet is entirely designed. A half-acre woods near my home has at least 45 tree species that I can recognize—including at least six kinds each of oak and maple—, and many more species of shrub and undergrowth, from skunk cabbage to poison ivy and Virginia creeper. Nature is complex.

Compare these two polar bears:

I suppose I could claim they are the same bear at different times, but no, the one on the left is in Alaska, near the northern edge of North America, well fed in late Winter, and the other is in the area of Churchill, Manitoba on Hudson Bay, near the southern limit of polar bear range, approaching starvation while waiting for ice to form in the Fall. If the current climate warming continues, and the Arctic becomes ice-free, in another decade or so the Alaskan bears will be in as much trouble as those of southern Hudson Bay.

Polar bears were the first of three species that Jon Mooallem followed and studied while preparing to write Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America. Three animals, a bear, a butterfly, and a bird. Three time scales of "management". For all the subspecies of polar bear, Ursus maritimus, the danger has been perceived only for a couple of decades. For the butterfly, Lange's Metalmark, Apodemia mormo langei, which is a subspecies of the Mormon metalmark, "management" of its habitat has been going on for decades. The bird, the whooping crane, Grus americana, neared extinction in the 1940s and has rebounded to nearly 300 birds.

The Churchill area polar bears have become quite a tourist attraction. I suppose early in the on-land season, when they come off the remnants of the ice well-fed and fat, they are good-looking bears. Then they must fast until the ice re-forms in Autumn, and many lose half their weight. As Spring thaw works its way earlier, and the Fall freeze later, the number that simply starve each Summer is increasing. This presents a quandary to conservationists. Should they feed the bears? If they do, are they wild any more? And will not the easier life, by dialing back natural selection, weaken the population as a whole?

Hah! Look at the human race. Most Westerners, living an easy life compared to the poor 2/3 of humanity, are clearly weaker and less "fit" in a Darwinian sense than their ancestors of just a couple centuries ago. I fear the result of something like a "limited nuclear exchange", which will result in the destruction of most of our electronic "crutches". If your house or apartment building lost all utilities for, say, five years, and your cell phone had burned out in the EMP, how would you fare?

We do need to do something about carbon emissions, and in my view, shifting toward using more natural gas (methane) and less coal, while we use those sources of energy to develop low- and non-carbon sources, makes the most sense. Here is the chemistry:

• Coal burning: 2CH (average composition) + 1.5O₂ → 2CO₂ + H₂O
• Methane burning: CH₄ + 2O₂ → CO₂ + 2H₂O

Simply put, coal is about 7.5% hydrogen and methane is about 25% hydrogen. Burning that hydrogen produces lots of energy without adding any CO₂ to the atmosphere. Methane is a "halfway there" energy source. It has been said that if we actually stopped burning all fossil fuels today, it would take a generation for the atmosphere to return to a pre-industrial level. This chart hints at a more optimistic prediction:

The yearly uptick in the Northern Hemisphere air mass is from Winter heating, including lots of coal burning. The downtick is from the relatively smaller Northern energy use during Summer. This rapid response (about 2%) strongly hints that any genuine reduction in carbon use would be quickly reflected in the CO₂ level of the atmosphere. Thus, to whatever level our use of carbon fuels is affecting the current warming cycle, to that extent it could shift, and shift quickly.

But changing carbon use will take time. Solar power does not yet provide more than 1% of electricity generation, and wind is approaching 6%. It will take combined non-carbon sourcing to approach 33%, to make a significant shift in CO₂ production, because energy use continues to climb.

The polar bear, as a truly wild species, may be doomed. Can we turn them into a managed species during a meltdown, and successfully restore them to truly wild status, in, say, 100-200 years? Maybe. In the meantime, the warming has also allowed northern grizzly bears to move into the southern parts of the polar bears' Summer range. Interbreeding has been recorded. I think the consensus term for resulting hybrid bears is pizzlies. By the time a managed white bear is ready to be returned to the wild, they may have to compete with a beige population of omnivorous bears that out-compete them in all seasons! Then what? Which bear will that generation "favor" over the other? And how will it be accomplished? Open hunting season on the disfavored bear?

On to the butterfly. This is a Lange's metalmark, feeding on its host plant the naked-stem buckwheat. The caterpillars will eat only this plant's leaves. This particular subspecies of the Mormon metalmark is one of a very few endangered species that are insects. This image is roughly life size (photo by Mike Kepka of the San Francisco Chronicle).

This poor little butterfly is known only from the Antioch Dunes Wildlife Refuge, a 55-acre area on the San Joaquin River in California. The "dunes" exist no longer. A quirk of the wind had piled up a lovely landscape of shifting sand dunes in the area, and they have been mined for sand for at least 70 years. More recently, a gypsum wallboard plant was constructed right in the middle of the area, before it was designated a Refuge, taking up about a quarter of the area. This aerial image shows the scene:

The entire refuge is about 1,100 m long, from WNW to ESE, and less than 300 m across. The buckwheat does not do well in competition with plants that have been invading since the shifting sand was all removed. There has been a series of 1-day counts by teams of volunteers for many years. A couple of generations ago, Lange found thousands of the butterflies here. A generation ago, there were a few hundred, then later 100 or so. The last couple of years, the count has been about 25-35.

The author notes that the actual identity of this butterfly is troublesome. Members of another subspecies of the Mormon metalmark look almost identical and feed on the same host plant, yet genetic studies indicate they are not as closely related as a different subspecies that actually looks somewhat different and is lighter in color. The scientific identity and the political identity of the species are quite different.

Mooallem participated in one of the counts. He wonders how a group of amateurs, most of them first-timers with a short introduction to pictures of the butterfly, can accurately find and count them. I think he need not worry. I recall taking our son fossil hunting with a rock club when he was 4. The leader of the expedition took a moment at the entrance to the quarry to show us the kinds of fossils we might find. He pointed out a particular brachiopod shell, saying, "This one is pretty rare. We might find one or two today." Our son looked at it for a moment and trotted off. Within half an hour he brought back six of them. We all kidded that it was because his eyes were closer to the ground than the rest of us. But then, by the end of the day most of us had found at least one.

It may be that as I write an early count is taking place that will find no butterflies at all. Or they may find 40 or more. A recent news note states that the public will be allowed to enter the refuge for the first time in many years this Summer. Will this help or hinder conservation efforts? Opinions differ.

This is one major point the author brought out in all sections of the book. Opinions differ. Contentions abound among "the good guys", those who are trying to save each of these species. This was most evident in the third section, about the whooping crane.

The related sand hill crane, a popular subject of photographers visiting Nebraska, is a gregarious bird, doesn't seem much affected by moderate amounts of human contact, and migrates as a flock, in which the young follow all the flock to learn the way. Not so the whooper. They are typically edgier, stay farther apart most of the time, and the young will follow only their parents to learn a migration route. Thus an effort to introduce a new population of the birds, that live farther east and fly from Wisconsin to Florida, has been particularly hard.

In recent years a team has been raising crane chicks while wearing special suits—and never speaking near them—and training them to use the new migration path using ultralight airplanes, on which the chicks are imprinted when young. It was hard to tell, but the people seem to outnumber the birds. This "eastern flock" may be approaching 100 birds, but something the "crane people" haven't been able to teach them is how to care for an egg or raise a chick. If I read right, not one chick has been hatched, raised, shown the new migration route by its parents, and grown to adulthood. One and one only was raised and shown the migration, but died the same year.

The various groups that coordinate all this effort seem to spend half their effort disputing and working at cross-purposes. The same human nature that led some to endanger these birds in the first place is still present in the helpers. These folks may have a longer view when it comes to trying to gain a longer future for the birds, but they are as short-sighted as anyone else about fund raising and funds allocation and prioritizing all the needed tasks. The last ultralight armada may have already flown. When the book was written, there was very little optimism that the program would continue. I guess the success of the "eastern flock" of whooping cranes now depends on a small number of mated pairs figuring out how to raise chicks to maturity.

The whooping crane is a big, beautiful bird. These are in Texas. They may be more adaptable than people give them credit for. The book includes a number of stories of cranes that got "off program". After all the care the group went to, keeping them from human contact, some found their way to yards with bird feeders or to farms where crop remnants could be gleaned. In the eyes of some this "ruined" their wildness.

Gimme a break! The next door neighbor has a bird feeder. Cardinals we see in our yard sometimes eat there. I grew sunflowers for the Great Sunflower Project for a few years. I saw my first goldfinches when they came to my sunflowers. Are these birds damaged by getting within a couple meters of a human? More to the point, though, are such stories signs that the crane is more diverse than they thought, or is it that they are changing in the face of the changing conditions. Are they still the same bird that existed under this name 150 years ago?

There would be a problem if young cranes imprinted on humans. They'd have problems courting and mating, for example. Not realizing the beautiful crane nearby was the intended partner, one might have eyes only for other humans. But once they have grown past adolescence, they'd do well to get used to a world full of humans. We're everywhere. ("And that's the problem!" some anti-human eco-crazies shout. They rant about the need to "cull" the human race by some 50-90%. Well, the feeling is mutual. I want them dead as much as they want me dead. Watch your back, dude! There were no such eco-crazies recorded in Wild Ones.)

I find less reassurance than the author does. Einstein wrote, "The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the level of thinking we were at when we created them." That could be expanded to, unless we ourselves change, we will seldom see problems we've created and will be unable to solve those we do see.

Try this for one minute: Take out a watch that shows seconds. If you are at rest, you are probably taking a breath every 5 seconds, or 12 per minute. For the next 32 seconds, take a breath every 4 seconds exactly (that's 8 breaths), then for the following 28 seconds, a breath only every 7 seconds (that's 4 more). For that first minute, it is probably not too hard. Try another minute, then another. Nobody I know can make it to 5 minutes. You are still taking 12 breaths every minute, but you are actively managing your breathing rate. It also takes up all your attention and you will be unable to do anything else such as read or even converse with someone. This is analogous to trying to manage nature.

I once wrote a short-short, which I'll pare down even farther:

Young Tom is now enamored with power. He speaks of it all the time. He yammers while I look about and study, and consider. I must care for the needs of my people. While he speaks of this plan and that project, I beckon and lead him to the river bed, where I move a few stones. We leave. The next rain will be diverted, just a bit. In time, the river will shift its course.

When we have the wisdom to read a river's future in the lay of the stones, we'll be able to make the small changes that amount to the best way to make changes worth making.

A classic that will never go out of date

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ecology, naturalists, advocacy

(For the record, I read most of a book on investing, and it was so poor I decided not to review it. Thus the delay for this book, which is shorter than most.)

I just finished reading A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. In case anyone doesn't know, the volume includes Sketches Here and There plus The Upshot. I suppose it is a bit odd that I had not read it before, as I have read Thoreau's Walden and a couple of writings by John Muir. This book outclasses Walden by a large margin.

I suppose Sand County has been reviewed hundreds of times in the 66 years since it was published, so I feel little need to plow worn-out ground. But a few things struck me with sufficient force that they require comment.

In the essay "Prairie Birthday" he writes of the annual blooming of Silphium, seen here, in mid-July. In the

1940s he could find it only in one small abandoned graveyard, and at the end of the essay he notes that the graveyard has been "developed" and the plant is now probably extinct in Wisconsin. This image shows a low-growing planting; this perennial can reach two meters. From the comments at Rob's Plants, it is apparently still found in Vermont and environs. I was particularly struck by the plainness with which Leopold reported the demise of the plant and the yard in which it grew. His is not to castigate, but to unflinchingly report.

Later in the same essay he writes, "…it comes to pass that farms are good in proportion to the poverty of their floras." Having kept a record of the species he has seen blooming in two areas—one his farm and the other the campus where he taught—he noted that the former hosted 226 flowering species, the latter, but 120.

In the essay "Marshland Elegy" his penultimate paragraph reads, "Thus always does history, whether of marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value of these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondls, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish." This may be the truest and saddest ecological statement in print.

In the essay "Green Lagoons", one of the Sketches, he writes in a similar vein, more tersely, "Man always kills the things he loves, and so we pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?"

I find it strange that land is being developed at a clip greater than the increase in population. Here are before-and-after satellite images (clipped from Google Earth), one just about 20 years ago, the other earlier this year:

The two neighborhoods thus constructed, not more than a few miles from where I live, quite overloaded the school seen at upper right in both images, so a couple of miles away a new one was built. I know, continued construction is good for the jobs market, but the number of unused homes in the US has reached more than 14 million (11% of the total), quite an incredible number! Having lived most of my life in rural areas, I consider it tantamount to a capital crime to put houses on land that can grow crops, or even worse, shelter wild things. It is even more criminal to do so when there are a few million acres of land under millions of homes that nobody lives in. Hey out there! Remodeling is construction work also.

A final note. I am so poor at both fishing and hunting that I never enjoyed either activity. Leopold excelled at both, and writes of them with lyrical fervor. It touched my heart. He deeply understood all the motives that a person could have toward the land and its denizens. I wonder if any of today's "environmentalists" either hunt or fish. Yet I am distrustful of most "sport" hunters and fishermen. I favor both activities only if you eat everything you kill. But I think it is not true "sport" unless you do all your sport hunting naked with only a knife in hand, and all your sport fishing with your bare hands. I suspect Leopold would be at least mildly supportive of such a view.

Bath toys in the biggest bath available

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ecology, pollution, quests

About eight years ago Donovan Hohn became intrigued with the spill, in January 1992, of thousands of floating bath toys from a container ship into the northern Pacific Ocean. Initially thinking he could interview a few people and write an interesting article about it, he wound up quitting his teaching job and spent big chunks of the following four years traversing the planet in search of this latter-day "toy story" and of the toys themselves. His book details his travels: Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them.

The toys that were lost were equal numbers of four varieties, 7,200 each of yellow ducks, red beavers, green frogs and blue turtles. Somehow, the duckies became the iconic representatives of them all. As this image shows, floating toys of all kinds have been lost in shipping accidents and wash up on "trash beaches" that are particularly prone to collecting flotsam. These particular toys were produced by The First Years and were called Floatees. The small duck below center of this image is the most like a Floatee, but it is not clear that it is the genuine article.

Most of the Floatees have never been found. Yet this unintended experiment in current tracking has been helpful to oceanographers that study the currents that circle within ocean basins and also flow between them.

This map, from the Wikimedia Commons, shows the likely current directions as deduced by Curtis Ebbesmeyer from reports of Floatees that were collected or spotted. Now that nearly twenty years has passed since the toys were exposed to the elements, it is a race against time whether any more will be found.

As the author found from keeping a plastic Floatee in his freezer for a few months, they become brittle and prone to breaking into pieces. Those that made it into warmer climes were sun-bleached and then degraded, and have also been breaking up. In gyres such as the North Pacific "Garbage Patch", the plastic that has been collecting there is mostly not intact, but is in little bits. Most plastic lost at sea is in the form of pea-sized "nurbles" that are used to mold things. All these bits circle the seas and collect in the centers of gyres. Their density ranges from a few per cubit meter to a few hundred per cubic meter. This seemingly low density makes it hard to spot the Garbage Patch visually. But there are a lot of cubic meters out there, and the plastic mass is in the millions of tons.

Somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 containers are lost at sea every year, and each is the size of a semi trailer, holding up to forty tons of cargo. That comes to as much as a quarter million tons or more of cargo lost yearly. Much of that is nurbles on the way to China or plastic toys on their way back to America.

To elucidate such facts, the author first visited certain Alaskan beaches where the Floatees were first reported. These trips comprise the second and third chapters of the book. He also visited a toy factory in southern China, then managed to obtain passage on a container ship as it sailed from Pusan, Korea to Seattle, Washington.

In his chapter on this cruise, he records a few helpful coordinates. These are marked on this image as red pins. The green line is the great circle route between the two harbors, and is a straight line on this projection. The image below shows a more conventional view of the great circle and of the ship's route, which is quite a bit to the south.

The great circle route is not precisely navigable, and for this reason, and to avoid the worst winter storms, once the ships leave the Japan Sea they stay south of the various archipelagoes along the route.

This doesn't keep them from losing cargo. Studies of the dynamics of these "Panamax" ships (meaning too large to pass through the Panama Canal) indicate that nonlinear effects of wave motions can cause them to suddenly tilt from side to side as much as 40°, which is almost certain to set loose some of the containers on board. On the author's cruise, he experienced only a rather mild storm, which was enough to make him hurl his lunch, but didn't cause any loss of cargo. This is the "normal" situation, or bath toys would be a lot more expensive!

It may seem that a lot of cargo is being lost, but it is a small percentage of total shipping. The insurance underwriters have so far been willing to carry on shouldering such losses (for suitable premiums, of course).

In his last chase, two chapters' worth, the author sailed on a research cruise through the Northwest Passage, on an icebreaker. He had quite a gaggle of scientists along for stimulating conversation. Few were interested in his quest for Floatees, however. While becoming one of a select few who have sailed the Northwest Passage and lived to tell the tale, he left posters in all the settlements where the ship docked, the kind of poster with little tags telling how to contact him. Unsurprisingly, he has not heard from anyone. By 2007, few Floatees were expected to be sufficiently intact to be recognized if one does come ashore. Along the way he helped one scientist launch more durable bottles containing notes with contact information, for a continuing study of polar currents. As long as you don't launch a glass bottle against the side of an iceberg and shatter it, it is likely to last many years and eventually wash up somewhere. Bottle launching is still more effective than computer modeling, primarily because we don't yet know enough about the oceans to accurately model their currents on any except the hugest of scales.

What resulted from the author's quest? He wound up with a fresh Floatee given him by Dr. Ebbesmeyer (who expects its eventual return), and a weathered one he found in Alaska. He attained a much greater appreciation of the sheer size of our planet. It is amazing that a little yellow duckie and a few thousand of its fellows can help us understand a little about what makes the oceans tick.

Ecology of the Dinos

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, palaeontology, dinosaurs, ecology

I began reading this book before the one I reviewed two days ago, but got bogged down and set it aside while finishing that one. Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life by Scott D. Sampson is a big book with a lot to say. Though there are copious illustrations, there is still a ton of text.

There are also a number of good ideas. Dr. Sampson dwells on the relationships among dinosaurs and with the plants and animals about them for about half the book. Some of his writing got me thinking along the lines I explored in yesterday's post.

I happened across the online article by Mike Taylor, Sauropods Held Their Necks Erect, which included this screen shot from Walking With Dinosaurs by the BBC. While the sauropods are shown here walking "horizontally", Taylor reasons that they used a posture more like a giraffe. With trees blocking one's view, it is likely one would see at most one or two small herds of sauropods at a time.

The first part of Dinosaur Odyssey goes over earth history, the geologic time scale, and other obligatory material for a book on the Mesozoic animals. I've read so many such treatments that I wound up skipping a lot. But I don't begrudge its presence; if this book is the first dinosaur book a precocious middle-schooler reads, the discussion will be helpful and necessary.

More than any other book I've read, though, this one details the ecological relationships of dinosaurs and their place in our history…and in our present: birds are dinosaurs, taxonomically. They continue the ecological success of creatures that dominated terrestrial landscapes for 160 million years—until the K-T extinction—and bring it forward another 65 million years to the present. Bird species outnumber mammal species two-to-one, and it was only after humans got into South America some 13,000 years ago that the reign of flightless "terror birds" as dominant large vertebrates came to an end.

The author makes an interesting case in favor of dinosaurs, at least some of them, being "mesothermic", not ectotherms like modern lizards, but not quite wholly endothermic like modern birds and mammals. Indeed, many bird species can regulate their body temperature downward to save energy when they can't feed. Hummingbirds do so at night, for example. Many birds do this, but very few mammals, and not as completely. There appear to me to be two styles of endothermy, which probably evolved separately.

Now, if dinosaurs were mesothermic, particularly the predatory ones, a given landscape could support more of them. A fully endothermic tyrannosaur, weighing as much as a large bull elephant, would need between twenty and fifty times the area to feed in as an elephant needs, because its energy supply is one step removed from the herbivory the elephant employs. It takes ten to twenty pounds of good-quality feed to produce one pound of cow or elephant; herbivorous dinosaurs were probably similar.

Also, it takes five to ten pounds of the herbivore's meat to yield one pound of predator. But day-to-day energy use depends on metabolism. Comparing two modern, similar-sized beasts: a well-fed lion can go two or three days until the next kill. A well-fed Komodo dragon can last a month. Thermal strategy dictates efficiency.

Bringing us the scenarios of dinosaur ecology requires weaving together, not just biological strands, but also palaeogeography and plate tectonics, the rise and fall of oceans, and even cosmology, for it was a cosmic event that killed all the dinosaur lineages except the birds.

The author closes the book with an epilogue, musing about using dinosaurs as a vehicle to better teach biology, ecology, evolution, and scientific principles in general. He also proposes them as the "poster children" for a grand story that teaches us better stewardship of the planet. He repeats what is well known in some circles, that we are in the midst of a human-driven great extinction that could be as severe as the one that ended the "age of Dinosaurs" and ushered in this mammal-dominated one (though remember there are twice as many birds). It doesn't have to be this way, but we seem to be like someone riding in a taxicab whose driver is drunk or insane, and the door won't open. Those of us who care haven't been able to do much about it. I hope a book like this can be a positive influence.

Mesozoic herds

kw: musings, dinosaurs, ecology

I am reading a book, not done yet, about dinosaurs and how they fit into the ecologies of their times. I'll make a couple observations while I am thinking of them.

When Charles Darwin visited Patagonia while voyaging on The Beagle, he observed a modern bone bed where two streams came together, and compared its seeming richness with a landscape containing scattered herbivores. He remarked about the concentrating effect of the rains washing corpses or skeletons of the animals together. We need only recall that, while a cow or llama may be able to live for ten, twenty, even thirty years, most live three or four years before disease or predation does them in. On a particular square mile of the prairie, it only takes one or two of the few dozen animals that die every year to wash into the stream bed, to produce a mighty bone pile in just a thousand years.

I have visited two semi-recent fossil bone beds, La Brea Tar Pit in Los Angeles, California, and the Mammoth Site near Hot Springs, South Dakota. Both of these were active as animal traps for thousands of years. I don't find it surprising that each has a few hundred mammoth skeletons; I find it surprising that there are not more of them. Most of the mammoths that died in the environs of these "traps" did not wind up in them. Yet they are considered marvels of fossil richness.

Consider an area such as Dinosaur National Monument (or, indeed, the entire Four Corners region), where animal remains were protected and fossilized over a span of a few million years. We need to remember that the animals found in them did not die all at once, but over the whole time span. There are really very, very few places of "mass killings". Where they do occur, we still find evidence that there was after-death concentration of remains, such as by fluvial gathering into stream beds or pools.

The really giant animals of the Mesozoic needed large ranges to support their feeding. In the grass-rich Badlands of South Dakota and Nebraska today, it takes fifty acres to support one 300 kg (650 lb) cow. If 50-ton sauropods were warm blooded, how many acres did each require? Several thousand? Even in richer grasslands such as in Iowa (pre-Corn), one would need ten acres per cow, and perhaps 1,500 per adult sauropod (that's over two square miles, or about ten square km).

But did sauropods have a similar energy requirement per pound of weight as a cow, even assuming they were endotherms? Probably less, so let us posit a food need of the growth of one square mile of Iowa prairie per animal.

Of course, sauropods didn't eat grass. Grasses hadn't evolved yet. Perhaps their fare was richer than modern grasses. I think it may have been, because with grasses came a big change in the atmosphere: ultra-low carbon dioxide.

Prior to the evolution of grasses and other plants that use C4 photosynthesis, the amount of CO2 was never less than 1000ppm. C3 (and CAM) photosystems can't draw down CO2 below that point. But an atmosphere like that would facilitate heavier cover by shrubs and other small plants.

Today's CO2 level of 380ppm, while well above the 260ppm of the 1820s, is much less than the optimal level for the growth of leafy plants. Experiments with boosting CO2 to 580ppm have shown that most plants grow faster and more succulent; they'd be better eating!

I conclude that, while Mesozoic environments may have been more productive than modern ones, due to increased CO2, they were probably no more than twice as productive. Of course, that is comparing any area to itself under the different conditions, and with a different array of herbivore food.

So if it took a few hundred acres to feed each large sauropod, how big could their herds have been? It all depends on how far such a super-elephant can walk in a day. A dozen cattle on a square mile of Nebraska prairie need to keep on the move. After cropping the grass in one area, they can't return for a couple of weeks (let's ignore the winter situation for this exercise). So if they form a single herd, and I have observed that a herd of a dozen is quite common, they need to cover the whole square mile in two weeks, walking 6-10 miles daily (While we might model a cow's motions as a plowman's row-turn-row, they operate more randomly and thus cover even more ground).

Now if each sauropod needs a square mile or more, a herd of a dozen might need 15-20 square miles. Their long necks are a benefit here, as they reduce the walking needed to browse the trees and shrubs (remember there's no grass). It is possible that they need walk no further than a cow does, each day. It also means, however, that the herd spends most of its time spaced two neck-lengths apart, for more efficient "mowing". I consider that reasonable. Let us also remember that their mode of feeding was more like an elephant's, stripping the trees to neck-height in addition to slurping up all the shrubbery.

With all this in mind, I imagine this kind of scene, as a Mesozoic rancher on horseback. I can see a sauropod from ten miles away, so I can survey all the herds in an area of 300 square miles (1,200 sq km). That land area supports a few hundred of them, but in loose clumps here and there, perhaps in 20-30 "small" herds. They'd need to take turns going over to the river for a drink. Taking large herds of cattle to a river creates an awful, muddy mess. When left to themselves, they go at more scattered times. Dinosaurs ought to have developed/evolved similar habits.

If I am instead on foot, so I cannot see more than three miles (though I might see a sauropod's up-stretched neck from six or eight or ten miles away), I can still see as many as 30 animals, though the nearest is probably half a mile away, and for safety's sake, I hope so! The more immediate risk would be falling into a dino-sized "pie", which could weigh several times as much as me…but monster feces is better left to another riff.

Keystone predators run the ecology

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ecology, predators, extinction

Prior to about 1965, when we visited California we would always spend one day at the tide pools near Newport Beach or Laguna. We typically collected some of the empty shells, and one time we took home a few starfish, killing and preserving them with salt. The common starfish Pisaster ochraceous is a big, strong sea star, up to a foot across. We learned not to bother the ones that were humped up over a mussel; such a one was busy pulling the shellfish open to eat it.

After 1967, when I moved to California, I found that most of the tide pools had been closed to collecting. A few years later, many of them were closed to all foot traffic. They were being "loved to death" by too many visitors. The amount of collecting had messed up the ecology, and later just the things killed by being walked on continued to mess it up.

Unbeknownst to me, Robert T. Paine had already established that the removal of starfish from tidal rocks and pools seriously damages the entire ecology. By removing all the stars from one pool and leaving the one next to it alone, he found that the mussels in the pool without starfish spread to take over the whole pool, driving out every other species. A healthy pool that includes starfish has dozens of species of animals and algae. While it may seem that Pisaster is a disaster for mussels, it is necessary for a balanced ecology in the intertidal zone.

Thirty years later in Yellowstone National Park, wolves were returned to the Park in 1995 after nearly seventy years of exile (the last Yellowstone wolves were trapped in 1926). During those seven decades the Park's population of elk increased by a factor of between ten and 100, and other changes occurred in synchrony: streams became muddy, aspen and willow stands shrank, and large areas took on a clipped aspect.

The return of wolf predation didn't do much to change elk numbers, not at first. But it sure changed elk behavior. Willow and aspen began to grow again at stream margins, particularly at the inside of bends, because these were places where an elk is less likely to be able to fight off or outrun a pack of wolves. The elk quickly learned to avoid such traps, even though their favorite foods began to grow there in abundance.

All this and more is described by William Stoltzenburg in Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators. The premise of the book is simple: the keystone species of nearly every ecological habitat is a scarce predator, whether starfish, wolf, orca, eagle or lion. If too many of these predators are removed, the ecology rebalances, typically by some formerly intermediate species increasing and most others vanishing.

This is strongly expressed by the example in the chapter titled "Little Monsters' Ball". A typical American suburb is dominated by "mesopredators" such as raccoons, rats, foxes and "outdoor" cats and dogs. Just house cats are thought to destroy a billion small mammals (mice, voles, and moles, for example) and half a billion songbirds each year across the U.S. For every "trophy" your cat brings to your door, one or two might have been eaten and one or two others were left to rot or left dying when the cat got tired of playing with it. Multiply by fifty million cats.

By contrast, in areas patrolled by coyotes, the cats (and dogs and rats and raccoons) spend more of their time staying out of the way of the "song dogs". In one study, 20% of coyote scat samples contained house cat remains. As a result, not only are there more small mammals and songbirds—five times as many—but there are also more butterflies and a wider variety of plants.

At one time, the American continent had a full measure of larger predators: pumas (AKA panthers), wolves, lynxes, bears, eagles and falcons. There were plenty of mesopredators such as raccoons, and large herds of grazers such as deer, but fewer of either than we see today. And there were lots of the littlest animals. At an even earlier time, there were a few of the largest predators: a larger lion, cave bears twelve feet tall, and saber-tooth cats, preying on even larger prey such as mammoths and giant sloths.

All the largest denizens of North America disappeared in suspicious synchrony with the invasion of the continent by Siberians more than 13,000 years ago. The "primeval" America reported by the Spanish and others after 1492 was actually impoverished compared to the America seen by those Siberians, who went on to become Cherokees, Apaches, Arapahoes, Navajos and others we used to call "Indians".

There is a move afoot to "rewild" America, to re-introduce elephants into the wilderness, and to restore many more former populations of wolves, mountain lions (puma or panther) and grizzlies. This doesn't go down well with Homo suburbica. The vast majority of Americans get just about all the "nature" they can handle from the occasional bee sting and spreading deer repellent around their gardens. They are actively hostile to the idea that they might one day have to be on guard for large predators roaming the woods right next to their neighborhoods.

A few years ago, there was a puma loose in northern Delaware and southeastern Pennsylvania. A few people got a thrill out of the idea. I remember seeing the tracks in the snow around a building near the one I work at, a building that housed laboratory animals. The big cat could smell the lab rats, but couldn't find a way in to get at them. The cat resided for a few days at a YMCA camp near Wilmington, but it was winter so no events were scheduled. I wonder what people would have done if a mountain lion strolled through during the peak of swimming and soccer season! The cat eventually strolled over into Maryland, and I haven't heard whether it is still on the loose.

The author notes that it is probably too late to recover America's lost ecological glory. With care, a couple hundred wolves can be tolerated at Yellowstone, a few dozen pumas in park areas outside San Diego, but the first time somebody's kid is eaten, all kinds of crap will hit the fan, and I suspect that a number of policies of the EPA will wind up in tatters. I don't see much chance for rewilding.

But we must take responsibility for what we have wrought. The single biggest ecological problem in America now is the huge herds of deer, that have no lions or wolves to regulate their numbers. I propose that it is the patriotic duty of Americans to lobby for full-year deer season and for $1 maximum for a deer license, to get licensed, and, with borrowed artillery if you don't own any, take at least one deer home every month and put it in the freezer. Only sworn vegetarians would be exempted from this duty. Venison is quite a bit healthier eating than beef.