With Earth Day coming up on April 22, the local market in Trenton, Maine is already doing its part to boost environmentalism.

Sweet Incentive

April 8, 2011

What Is that Crud on the Trees? That may not be the best way to word a scientific question, but the black, crusty growth on the limbs of some of our small trees is certainly worthy of the word crud. Here's a photo:

The growth is something called black knot. It most commonly affects cherry, plum and apricot trees and is caused by a fungus. If you see it on trees near you, don't ignore it. It weakens, stunts, disfigures and eventually kills trees. Horticulturists suggest pruning knot-covered branches before spring, when the knots (also called galls) expel spores that spread the fungus. Cut each branch off at least four inches below the knot and burn the branch.

Getting back to the headline, the editor in me is compelled to note that crud comes from a word that means " to congeal." That is also the root of the word curd. So Little Miss Muffet's famous curds and whey might have been described by a more caustic poet as "crud and milky cheese water." And, realizing that, Little Missy would have been frightened away long before the spider ever came along.

Answers to Last Puzzlers:
1) The world’s fastest two-legged animal (top speed: 40 mph) is an ostrich.

2) A slug moves at a peak velocity of .03 mph, slightly slower than the giant tortoise (.13 mph) and the three-toed sloth (.15 mph). The speedster is the starfish, which can move across the ocean bottom at up to 8 mph.

Today's Puzzlers:
1) Unscramble these into nature-related words:
a) egipam
b) broslatas
c) mintaus
d) spootuc
e) erotosit

2) As a tribute to Henry Dudeney, the British mathematician and creator of math and logic puzzles who would have turned 154 on Sunday, here is one of his brain-teasers: A man went into a bank to cash a check. In handing over the money, the cashier, by mistake, gave him dollars for cents and cents for dollars. He pocketed the money without examining it, and spent a nickel on his way home. He then found that he possessed exactly twice the amount of his check. He had no money in his pocket before going into the bank. What was the exact amount of the check?

Birthdays:
Ponce de Leon, the Spanish explorer whose failed quest for a fountain of youth led the way for countless scientists and charlatans to devote their lives to (not) finding other anti-aging elixirs, might have turned 551 on Friday (his birth date is sort of a guess). He discovered the Gulf Stream (which became a speedy highway for Spanish ships), gave Florida its name and was somewhat less ruthless than some other conquerors, though he supposedly had a vicious dog that was the equal of 50 soldiers. Funny, I used to have to ride my bicycle by that dog's house when I was a kid.

Theobald Boehm, the German musician who invented (or at least perfected) the modern concert flute, would have been 217 on Saturday. The son of a goldsmith, he made experimental flutes out of gold, silver, nickel, cooper and wood, putting the fingering holes in different positions and making the holes larger than on traditional flutes. Once he settled on the the model he liked, his flutes quickly became the standard, and his design principles were later applied to other wind instruments.

Jim Fowler, the Georgia-born zoologist who hosted Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on TV, turns 79 on Saturday. You might have seen some of his comical adventures bringing animals onto the Johnny Carson show:

John Claudius Loudon, the Scottish naturalist and landscape designer who was one of the first garden-magazine editors (and no doubt the first who had an opium habit), would have been 228 on Friday. Loudon influenced the look of British gardens and cemeteries, helped spread knowledge of good farming practices and planned some of London's green spaces even as he became hooked on drugs to deal with lifelong pain from rheumatism and arthritis. A botched surgery to repair a broken right arm forced him to have the arm amputated at the shoulder and learn to sketch his garden designs left-handed. He did just that, and eventually got the opium monkey off his back.

David Helvarg, the New York-born journalist and environmental activist, turns 60 on Sunday. The founder of the Blue Frontier Campaign, a lobbying group that works to protect the world's oceans, and a board member of Reef Relief, he has written about (and produced documentaries on) science, the environment, war and AIDS. In one of his memorable pieces, headlined "SpongeBob and Friends: Splendor in the Kelp," he responded to preacher's kooky allegations that the popular cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants was promoting a homosexual agenda by offering an amusing look at the sexual activities of ocean creatures. Hervarg pointed out that "the oceans that cover 71% of our planet are rife with reproductive strategies and behaviors that would make Caligula, or even Bill Clinton, blush."

Life In Slow Motion

April 6, 2011

I love super slow-motion. The video above uses it to show nature's fastest tongue and fastest punch, and also the physics of a bursting water balloon. The range of speeds found in animals and even plants (what grows faster, your toenails or a cactus?) reminds me of the light spectrum: With the naked eye, you can't see what's happening at either extreme end of it.

Notebook friend John Krug inspired me to think about this topic by sending me a link to a brighten-your-day video (below, in orange type) that was posted by a website enticingly named Visual News: The Cure for Eyeball Boredom. The video is of a creative, slow-motion Japanese dance group made up of young men in business suits. Their performance is meant to be an inspirational statement in response to their country's earthquake and tsunami. You'll enjoy watching it, I think. And though the accompanying song on the video is only a pop tune, it is a catchy one. Here is the link to click on:

http://www.visualnews.com/2011/04/01/slow-motion-dancing-for-japan/

History note: Slow motion film projection was invented more than a century ago by August Musger, an Austrian priest and physicist. Sadly for Musger, he didn't pay all the patent fees for his 1904 invention, so a company swooped in and stole the idea. Two modern companies, ABC and Sony, are credited with inventing super slow motion, which debuted on ABC's broadcast of the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.

Electricity from Play Dough?
I'm not going all video on you, but this four-minute TED talk will show you a remarkable property of Play Dough—and when was the last time you learned science through a piece of dough? Don't answer, just click:

CSI: New Jersey
The following animal mystery was sent in by Pamelia's brother, Scott, who lives in New Jersey. He's eager for any of you CSI nature investigators to offer a solution:

"One morning this winter we noticed two large areas of smashed down snow in the back yard. They were circles about 4 feet in diameter, as if something large had bedded down there. We thought maybe a deer had decided it was good place to spend the night. But we didn't see tracks leading to or from the area at all. There was about 20 feet of clear, untouched snow between the areas and the edge of the woods. Sometimes a mystery is a mystery, so we forgot about them as more snows fell.

"Eventually, when the snow melted we discovered parts of a skeleton of what I believe was a raccoon. It was mostly intact (not scattered), so I don't think it was the victim of violence or a late night snack for whatever eats raccoons on cold winter nights in NJ. At the same time, it seemed like a strange place for an animal to go to die since it was in the wide open."

Any ideas on who or what caused the big packed-down snow circles?

Answers to Last Puzzlers:
1) Alligators live in the wild only in the U.S. and China
2) Word Jumbles:
a) nuthatch (chathunt)
b) locust (scluto)
c) wolverine (viewnoler)
d) chestnut (schteunt)

Today's Puzzlers:
1) What is the world's fastest two-legged animal (top speed: 40 mph)?
2) Match these animals to the speed at which they travel
a) three-toed sloth 1) 8 mph
b) giant tortoise 2) .03 mph
c) slug 3) .13 mph d) starfish 4) .15 mph

Birthday:
Samuel Cate Prescott, the New Hampshire-born MIT professor who made canned goods (among other products) safe to eat and helped create the field of food science, would have been 139 years old on Tuesday. Prescott worked with canned clams and lobster in developing higher-temperature processing, and launched the scientific journal Food Research.

Philip Gosse, the self-taught English naturalist who invented the home aquarium, would have been 201 on Wednesday. Though he long has been lampooned for a preposterous book he wrote trying to explain that the hundreds of millions of years of geological history of the Earth were an illusion (a hypothesis he linked to an explanation of why Adam in the Bible had a navel even though he wasn't born from a mother), he was a marine biologist and entomologist of some seriousness who collected samples in places from Newfoundland to Jamaica. (I say "some" seriousness; he was also fascinated by the genitalia of butterflies.) Gosse developed a formula for making artificial seawater and wrote a book on how to construct and maintain aquariums, which led to a popular boom in keeping and studying small ocean creatures.

Anthony Fokker—no, not the movie character played by Ben Stiller; that was Gaylord Focker—the Dutch airplane developer whose aircraft were made famous by the Germans (including the Red Baron) in World War I, would have been 121 on Wednesday. Unfortunately, Fokker also invented the device that allowed machine guns to shoot through a spinning propeller without hitting it.

I should add that 102 years ago today, Robert Peary and Matthew Hensen became the first people ever to reach the North Pole. And Peary was, for a good portion of his life, a Mainer—a graduate of Portland High and Bowdoin College. Bowdoin now has an Arctic Museum and Study Center named for him.

Naturalist Billy Helprin with deer vertebrae that he found along our route. Was this a death by natural causes? The investigator thought not.

CSI: Maine

April 2, 2011

What went on inside the layer of snow that covered Maine all winter? Lots of desperate nibbling and escape-tunneling and hiding from would-be killers. Call in the investigators!

On our first nature walk of the spring, at the Babson Creek preserve in Somesville, naturalist Billy Helprin of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust crouched down like a good CSI sleuth and examined evidence. He pointed to the gnawed bark on several young bushes and trees. An animal did this, he told us. What type, you ask? Cue the theme song from the CSI television series:

Who are you? You are a meadow vole. Meadow voles are also known as field mice, which makes them sound less like on-the-lam CSI suspects and more like cute E.B. White characters.

Beneath the snow, voles had been gnawing the bark of these young dogwoods. But deer also had been chewing off the tips of branches—leaving a different type of evidence.

In truth, of course, they are neither. Though many fruit farmers see them as pests who damage orchard trees, meadow voles are a crucial part of the eco-system. As tunnel-diggers they turn over soil, scatter grass seeds and fertilizer with their droppings and spread a secret ingredient that is essential to plant growth—mycorrhizal fungi, which has a symbiotic relationship with plant roots and helps those roots absorb minerals and water. And—CSI plot twist—meadow voles have a valid reason to hide under snow and soil. They are, if you will, sympathetic characters constantly under attack from murderous predators (a.k.a., naturally hungry meat-eaters) such as snakes, foxes, owls and hawks.

The dangerous-looking suspect: a meadow vole

Our walk with Billy had many other highlights, including his unearthing of bones from a deer carcass. His assessment of the forensic evidence: The deer was a male who had been struck by a car on a nearby road and had hobbled to this spot to die. (The four-doored perpetrator is still at large.) Billy pointed out branches that other deer had bitten off, noting that those branches were torn off, not cleanly snipped. That's because deer don't have upper incisors; they hold the branch between their lower incisors and a tough pad at the top of their mouth and saw/tug it off.

The air was alive with bird songs. Among the many species we saw or listened to were common mergansers, juncos, hairy woodpeckers, song sparrows, nuthatches, black ducks, mallards, blue jays and chickadees. Billy suggested we become CSI associates by keeping an eye in the months ahead on an osprey nest built atop a dead tree and alerting us to the fact that the salt marsh at the Babson Creek preserve is home to a hard-to-spot species called the Nelson's sharp-tailed sparrow.

The real point being that any of us can be a nature investigator just by taking a moment to look at things more closely when we walk outside.

Smear Campaign

I couldn't resist passing along this anti-vole propaganda poster, clearly the work of vole predators trying to play up the threat they face from mouse insurgents. It may be the product of either owl things considered or, more likely, fox news.

Answers to the Last Puzzlers:
1) I'm still trying to figure out what that small Italian bird is. We need some help here, ornithologists.
2) That large black-and-white duck is a common eider
3) Here are the unscrambled words:
a) butterfly (tutyrfbel)
b) dandelion (onidanlde)
c) gravity (vigyrat)
d) python (hyntop)
e) cottontail (aloctnitot)

Today's Puzzlers:
1) Alligators live in the wild in only two countries on Earth. Which two?
a) U.S. and Panama
b) U.S. and China
c) U.S. and Uganda
d) U.S. and Venezuela

2) More words from nature to unscramble:
a) chathunt
b) scluto
c) viewnoler
d) schteunt

Birthdays:
Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize-winning founder of Africa's Green Belt Movement and the first East African woman ever to earn a Ph.D., turned 71 on Friday. Her organization focuses on environmental conservation, especially of trees (of which it has planted more than 30 million), and also on women's rights. Despite death threats, she was a leader in opening Kenya to more open, multiparty elections. Her Nobel citation cited "her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace."

John Burroughs, the upstate New York-born naturalist and one of America's greatest nature essayists, would have turned 174 years old on Sunday. A farm upbringing cultivated his love of nature and rural settings, as did hiking in the Catskills. Burroughs became tremendously popular in his own day for his writing, which he pursued even while working as a federal bank examiner. He was friends with the likes of Walt Whitman, Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir and Thomas Edison. Burroughs once said, "Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all—that has been my religion," but also noted, "Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral."

Sophie Germain, the French mathematician and physicist, would have turned 235 on Friday. Hers is a story of overcoming the pervasive gender bias of her era. Her parents didn't want her to pursue math and science (women didn't do those things), but she struck up correspondence with eminent figures in those fields and eventually made breakthroughs in "elasticity theory," which relates to how objects deform and stress under certain conditions. If her work fell a notch below that of history's greatest mathematicians, it was not for any failing on her part. As one modern critic of her work put it, "All the evidence argues that Sophie Germain had a mathematical brilliance that never reached fruition due to a lack of rigorous training available only to men."

Mark Catesby, the English naturalist who published the first illustrated book on the flora and fauna of North America, would have been 329 last week. The volume was called the Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands and included plates such as the one below.

Postscript
I can't sign off without adding our voice to the many condemning Bob Parsons, the publicity-seeking CEO of the company Go Daddy, for not only shooting elephants in Africa but also posting graphic images of it on his blog and claiming that he was being a humanitarian by helping Zimbabwean farmers whose crops an elephant had allegedly been damaging. First, as we've learned through decades of conservation work, there are plenty of solutions to such a problem that don't involve killing a highly intelligent, sensitive mammal whose population has dwindled. The number of options is even larger for a multi-millionaire such as Parsons, who has instead made himself into a caricature of an egotistical, ignorant big-game hunter. His lack of remorse—indeed, his defiance—has me rooting for rival NameCheap.com, which is offering a special to Go Daddy customers who want to switch online-name services and have part of their fee go to save elephants.

Ninety Seconds on Mercury

March 31, 2011

Here's a new, first-ever look at Mercury from an up-close NASA spacecraft. Mercury is about the size of our moon, with temperatures ranging from roughly 800 degrees Fahrenheit to minus-280 degrees Fahrenheit. It orbits the Sun every 88 days but revolves very slowly—only once every 58.6 days. So one Mercury "day" lasts almost as long as two Earth months. Because gravity is less powerful on Mercury, a 200-pound Earthling standing on its surface would weigh only 76 pounds...before being incinerated or turned into a freeze-dried block of human ice.

Another Maine National Park?
In case you missed it, here is a link to a story from this week on Roxanne Quimby and her plans of donating 70,000 acres of land in northern Maine for the creation of what she hopes will become Maine Woods National Park: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42295096/ns/us_news-giving/

Out Like a Lion
Speaking of Maine, for those of you who aren't up here but live vicariously through the Notebook blog, I will note that March is departing and April arriving with a large snowstorm that will begin tonight. Yesterday Pamelia and visiting Notebook contributor Haley Harwood took advantage of the outgoing month's farewell rays to do a few minutes of Down East-style sunbathing near our house.

Answer to the Last Puzzler:
1) The weight would rise.
2) There were originally 27 potatoes on the platter.

Today's Puzzlers:

1) Artist Margaret Krug sent along the photo of the bird above, which greeted her at the Uffizi art museum in Florence. This is an open-book quiz question: Can you identify the bird?

2) I mentioned the above water bird in a recent blog post. Can you identify the species? (Small hint: This photo was taken at our house, by bird expert Pat Johnson.)

3) Unscramble these into words that describe things found in nature:
a) tutyrfbel
b) onidanlde
c) vigyrat
d) hyntop
e) aloctnitot

Birthdays:
Nikolai Przewalski, the Russian geographer and explorer who first identified many plant and animal species, including the famous breed of wild horse that now bears his name, would have been 172 today. Przewalski found his now extremely rare type of horse in Mongolia.

Crawford Long, the U.S. doctor who was the first physician to use ether on patients undergoing surgery, would have turned 169 yesterday. If you ever complain about the harsh world we live in, just read an account of what surgery was like in the days before modern anaesthesia.

Part of the American robin flock that showed up in our part of Maine this past week.

Aristotle's Robin and Joe Torre's Heron

March 29, 2011

Like the rest of us, scientists make mistakes. They—or their successors—catch the errors over time, because science is a process of testing and retesting to make sure that propositions are true.

Aristotle wasn't a scientist per se. He lived in the fourth century B.C., more than 2100 years before the word scientist was ever used. (Before then, people who studied the physical world were called natural philosophers.) But besides being Plato's most famous philosophy student, Aristotle was in effect the first great naturalist and scientist. He wrote a multi-volume history of animals and mused about all manner of natural phenomena. However, as I learned last fall while doing an article on North America's Pacific Flyway migration, Aristotle had an unusual theory about small birds. It came to mind the other day as I watched the first spring robins pecking in the grass here in Maine.

Aristotle had noticed that common redstarts, a bird he saw regularly in Greece in the summer and early autumn, disappeared as fall turned to winter. Coincidentally, that is when he would begin to see European robins, a somewhat similar-looking bird that also has a red-orange breast. He didn't realize that small birds migrate—an understandable mistake at a time when people never traveled far and had no way to know where birds went. He therefore came up with the hypothesis that each fall redstarts transformed (or "transmuted") themselves into European robins. To explain why other types of birds disappeared and were not replaced by similar-looking species, he suggested that those birds (including swallows, storks, kites and doves) hibernated for the winter in holes in trees or even under mud.

Aristotle regularly saw common redstarts like this one in Greece in the summer.

Those myths persisted for many centuries—well into the 19th century in the case of hibernation. Needless to say, if Aristotle had been able to use radar, bird banding, radio tracking transmitters and field reports from people around the world, as avian researchers can today, he would never have suggested that redstarts turn into robins. But he deserves credit for using his powers of observation. Those are the first tools of any naturalist or scientist. Observed Aristotle, "He who sees things grow from the beginning will have the best view of them."

The European robin, which is quite different from the American variety. The European robin is part of the flycatcher family; our robin is a thrush.

The Joe Torre of Birds
I recently finished reading an extremely entertaining book called A Supremely Bad Idea: Three Mad Birders and Their Quest to See It All, by Luke Dempsey. In recounting the travel and bird-watching adventures he shared with two friends, Dempsey, a New York-based book editor, mentions a sports chat he had with one of the friends while the trio was having lunch and watching the previous night's baseball highlights at a cafe near the Jay Norwood Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island in Florida. (More on Ding Darling at a future date.)

A black crowned night heron we saw last November at the Colusa National Wildlife Refuge in California.

The two men started discussing which New York Yankees resembled which types of birds. Keep in mind, this took place several years ago, so the team roster was different. The two men agreed that Yankees manager Joe Torre reminded them of the black-crowned night heron: "deliberate, glum but effective" and slugger Gary Sheffield was "a peregrine falcon, attacking the baseball the way the raptor falls on an oblivious passing duck."

Joe Torre, baseball's black-crowned heron?

It's a game that sparks the imagination of anyone who watches birds. Dempsey and his friend went on to compare Tom Wolfe, the ever white-suited author, to the snowy egret. I've occasionally compared myself to a dodo or a loon, and remember plenty of athlete-bird comparisons from years past, including former Dodgers relief pitcher Phil Regan (known as the Vulture because he would swoop in and devour the final batters in a game) and NFL linebacker Ted Hendricks (called the Mad Stork because he stood a gawky 6'7").

So put out plenty of seed for those spring migrants and turn on your sense of fun the next time you're bird-watching. Perhaps you'll see someone you recognize. Oh, and if you're about to remark that someone you know "eats like a bird," recall that that in the fuel-up weeks before they fly north or south, some migrants eat so much that they double their body weight.

Italy, Anyone?
I'm happy to report that artist and art historian Margaret Krug of Parsons The New School and American Artist magazine will return to The Naturalist's Notebook this July to give another one-day workshop. I'll offer details on that in an upcoming post, but in the meantime I wanted to let you know that the deadline is May 15 to sign up for Margaret's August "Painting on Panels" program at the Spannocchia Foundation estate in Italy. It's a fantastic program that Pamelia has taken many times. For more details, go to http://www.spannocchia.org/education/program.cfm?id=84 or http://www.margaretkrug.com.

One of Margaret's photos of the view from the villa at Spanocchia.

Weekly Nature Walks on Mount Desert Island
For those of you in Maine, naturalist Billy Helprin of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust has again begun hosting his weekly walks at the trust's Babson Creek Preserve in Somesville. From now through April 14, the walks will take place every Thursday from 3 to 4 p.m. After a one-week hiatus, they will resume on Thursday, April 28, but at the much earlier hour of 7:30 a.m. The hikes are relaxed and friendly and offer a mix of birding, botany and general exploration of the marvels of spring. We hope to see some of you there.

One of our hikes at Babson Creek last year.

Answer to the Last Puzzler:
Turn one switch on for a minute or so, then turn it off. Turn a different switch on. Go upstairs. The non-illuminated light bulb that feels warm is linked to the first switch you turned on. The bulb that is still on is linked to the second switch you turned on. And the other bulb is connected to the third switch.

Today's Puzzler:
1) This one comes from Alice In Wonderland author Lewis Carroll, who was also a mathematician and logician and came up with many puzzles: A rope is hung over a frictionless pulley that is attached to a building. At one end of the rope is a weight. At the other end is a monkey. The weight and the monkey are perfectly in balance. What happens if the monkey starts climbing the rope? Will the weight rise, fall or remain in the same position?

2) This one is based on an ancient Hindu puzzle:
Three travelers stop at a tavern and order a platter of baked potatoes for dinner. When the tavern keeper brings the platter, all three men are asleep. The first man wakes up, eats one third of the potatoes and goes back to sleep. The second man wakes up and eats one third of the remaining potatoes and falls back asleep. The third man then wakes up and eats one third of the remaining potatoes and goes back to sleep. Eight potatoes are left. How many potatoes were originally on the platter?

Birthdays:
Vincent van Gogh, the sublime Dutch painter, would have turned 158 on Wednesday. For all the joy he brought future generations with his strong, colorful post-Impressionist works, he was little appreciated in his own lifetime. He suffered from numerous physical and mental ailments (none of which has been definitively diagnosed, but one of which may have poisoning from the lead paint he used) and took his own life at age 37. It is still being debated whether he cut off his left earlobe with a razor in a moment of self-torment after a fight with his friend and fellow painter Paul Gaugin or whether Gaugin lopped it off during the fight. Doesn't much matter. Very few of us have ever even learned to pronounce van Gogh's name correctly. For the record, here is the correct pronunciation:

Jethro Tull, the English agricultural inventor and namesake of the rock group, would have turned 337 on Wednesday. He invented the horse-drawn seed drill, which in the description of Notebook favorite Bill Bryson "allowed seeds to be planted directly into the soil rather than broadcast by hand. Seed was expensive, and Tull's new drill reduced the amount needed from three or four bushels per acre to under one; and because the seeds were planted at even depths in neat rows, more of them sprouted successfully, so yields improved dramatically." The Ian Anderson-led band, by the way, was named in its early days by an agent who happened to be an English history buff.

Brooke Astor, the New Hampshire-born philanthropist, would have been 109 today. She spent much of her time in Maine, not far from The Naturalist's Notebook, and showed extraordinary generosity to all sorts of organizations on Mount Desert Island, including public gardens and arts programs. She developed a love of nature while spending time with Buddhist monks in China as a child (her father was a Marine officer who served around the world) and never lost that appreciation.

The Asticou Azalea Garden (about 3 miles from the Notebook) was one of the beneficiaries of Brooke Astor's generosity.

Santorio Santorio, or Sanctorius of Padua, the Italian physician who originated the study of human metabolism, would have turned 450 today. He developed history's first medical machine (a pulse-measuring apparatus) and one of its first thermometers. He also is known for his meticulous research. Every day for 30 years he weighed himself, everything he ate and drank, and every bit of his feces and urine. He invented the concept of "insensible perspiration" to explain why the body didn't produce waste products as heavy as its food intake. Alas, that concept has gone the way of Aristotle's bird transmutation.

Santorio Santorio in his weighing chair.

A flashback to the 2009 edition of The Naturalist's Notebook and Pamelia's mom, who knew (even before the scientists did) the importance of playing and playfulness.

The Play's the Thing

March 26, 2011

More fun than a barrel of monkeys? How about a barrel of bonobos?

Bonobos have a female-dominated society for which the motto could be either Make love, not war or Girls just want to have fun.

Bonobos (once known as pygmy chimpanzees) are among the most playful of primates—and, along with common chimps, are the closest biological cousins of humans (their DNA and ours are almost 99 percent identical). We have a replica bonobo skeleton at The Naturalist's Notebook that, standing next to our replica human skeleton, makes the physical similarity quite clear.

Click on the above video (released last week by TED.com) for a lively description of bonobos at play by highly engaging Chilean primatologist Isabel Behncke Izquierdo. She studies bonobos in the wild in Congo, the only place in the world where those critically endangered great apes live. The video has a bit of sexual content, some of which is quite amusing.

If you don't have time for the video (and don't tell me you're not going to watch it after that last sentence), here's a snippet of an interview she did recently with businessweek.com:

Q: What can humans learn from the bonobo?
A: "Much! Three main aspects: playfulness, social tolerance, and female bonding.

"We have an extraordinary opportunity to learn from bonobos, more about our own evolutionary past on one hand, and on the other the incredible diversity of social organization in animals. Bonobos are our evolutionary cousins, that is, we share a common ancestor with them who lived approximately 6 million years ago. Since all the modern human ancestors are extinct, bonobos and chimpanzees are our living closest relatives, the best window we have into our past.

A 2010 Notebook shot: Our bonobo is on the right.

"Most of the narratives around human evolution have been informed by what we know from chimpanzees, not from bonobos—since we know relatively little about them and most studies come from captivity, not from the wild. Chimpanzees are well-known for being toolmakers, hunters, patriarchal, aggressive, political, and strongly hierarchical. Bonobos on the other hand are female-dominated, much more socially tolerant, with lessened and more flexible hierarchies, playful throughout their lives, peaceful both within and between groups.

"It then follows that if we were to learn only from chimpanzees, our ideas of our past would be heavily skewed; we would be missing essential and wonderful aspects of what makes us human."

Root Check
The English word play comes from the Dutch word pleien, which means "to dance, leap for joy and rejoice." Beyond that, no one's sure how it originated or came to refer to creating sounds with a musical instrument or acting out parts on stage. Hamlet's the one who said, "The play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King" (referring to his play-within-a-play, designed to reveal the treachery of the uncle who murdered his father).

I rather like a line uttered even earlier in history, one that still rings true to anyone who has ever engaged in golf, cards, pickup basketball or board games: "You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." That quotation comes from, uh, Play-toe.

Just One More...

Watch polar bears and dogs playing—a surprisingly common occurence when they're together...

Animal Cartoon of the Day
Two pigs, a mother and offspring, are looking down at a large piggy bank lying on the floor of their bedroom. Says the sow to the piglet: "You nickel and dimed your father to death!"

Answer to the Last Puzzler:
1) spider (persid)
2) granite (natrige)
3) cardinal (dicalarn)
4) swordfish (showisrfd)
5) sumac (mucas)
6) migration (intamigor)

Today's Puzzler:
You're looking at three light switches in the headquarters of the animal sanctuary. All are in the OFF position. Each switch controls 1 of 3 light bulbs on the floor above. You may turn any of the switches on but you may go upstairs only once to inspect the bulbs. How can you figure out which switch controls each bulb? (Conservation note: None of the bulbs is an energy-saving compact fluorescent.)

Birthdays:
David Suzuki, the Japanese-Canadian nature broadcaster and environmentalist, celebrated number 75 on Friday. His exuberance, intelligence and foresight are all on display in this interview:

Conrad Gesner, the Swiss naturalist who was both a pioneering botanist and a founder of modern zoology, would have turned 495 on Saturday. In an astonishing five-volume work, he described and illustrated all known animals. In his spare time he put together a bibliography of every book written by every writer who had ever lived. And he may have invented the pencil, though he more likely was just the first to document the existence of that writing instrument.

Wilhelm Roentgen, the German physicist who discovered X-rays (and, it should be noted, was an avid naturalist and mountaineer), would have been 166 on Sunday. He used the term X-ray because in mathematics X stands for an unknown. The first X-ray picture he took was of his wife's hand. When he saw the bones, he is said to have exclaimed, "I have seen my death!"

Leonard Nimoy, the Boston-born actor who played Mr. Spock on the original Star Trek and helped inspire untold numbers of young scientists, turns 80 today. He has joked about how little he actually knows about high-level science even though seemingly everyone who approaches him expects him to be an expert. He did, however, invent the Vulcan hand salute (below) that has become famous. He based it on his childhood memories of how kohanim (Jewish priests) held their hand when giving blessings. His Vulcan expression of good wishes—"Live long as prosper"—is an abbreviated version of one of those blessings.

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