Don the down-coat. Pack the parka. Meet the early morning mist.
If you are lucky – and I was early Monday morning – you’ll see some wispy clouds evaporate over the water, hear the different birdcalls and have the wetlands practically to yourself.
Well, the birds were naturally on location. Pretty active, too, fighting the lingering cold and scoring on breakfast. Red-tailed hawk preening…
The diffuse light blocked out the harshness of the world and gave rise to thoughts about peace against the backdrop of war.
And talking about war and peace, have you ever considered why so few birds are equipped with weapons? I mean, snakes have fangs, tigers have teeth, elephants, narwhales and walruses have tusks, deer have antlers, bees have stingers – a whole arsenal of martial gear can be found in nature. The occasional evening spent in front of PBS’s NOVA programs about animal warfare confirms this.
Scientists have devoted their lives to figuring out the evolutionary pressure behind this all, notably Douglas Emlen, who wrote one of the best overviews in the field, Animal Weapons, the Evolution of Battle. Here is a short review of the book which includes this:
“Throughout the book, Emlen’s demonstrations of the many parallels between human and animal weapons are fascinating, even when the possibilities are frightening. “I stand awed and shaken,” he writes, “thrilled by the parallels and, at the same time, terrified by the prospects.”
Back to birds, though, who have not participated in the arms race. The reason? They practically get all they want or need by flashing colors, elaborate dancing, song competition and only occasional claws, pecking or spores. (I’m summarizing what I read here.)
The REAL reason? Flight. Anything that flies has to worry about weight. Flying consumes much more energy than movement on the ground or in water, and energy need increases with added weight, even tiny bits. We have indeed mathematical models of flight that spell out in detail how leg or wing spurs, no matter how small, increase fuel cost in untenable ways (given that fuel acquisition itself – searching for food – costs energy as well,) particularly for smaller birds.
(A funky comparison from the article: United Airlines started printing its inflight magazine on lighter paper to reduce the weight of a typical flight by about 11 pounds, or 0.01% of an airplane’s empty weight. Through this tiny decrease, the company cut its annual fuel use by 170,000 gallons, saving US$290,000 yearly. Think through this with today’s news about gas prices….)
Spurs, then, are primarily found on land fowl and in fewer than 2% of all avian species. And beaks used for fighting are rare as well, given that any injury to them might compromise the ability to feed – a direct threat to survival. Yes, some raptors fight with their talons, but overall, we are seeing a peaceable kingdom, if interrupted by screaming matches over territorial rights..
Evolution, you botched this. Should have provided mankind with wings!!
Swallows already returned, harbingers of renewal.
Killdeer twittered.
Hummingbird glowed.
The morning softness continued, sun broke through clouds.
Later the rain set in. What better reminder of “teaching our troubled souls… to heal.”
Mother rain, manifold, measureless, falling on fallow, on field and forest, on house-roof, low hovel, high tower, downwelling waters all-washing, wider than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster than countrysides, calming, recalling: return to us, teaching our troubled souls in your ceaseless descent to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root, to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the sea.
Dia de los Muertos ended yesterday, and you, dear reader, might have detected that issues related to death was the theme of the last two blogs. I had originally thought I might round this up into a trio with a discussion of the Cotard Delusion, a rare neuropsychiatric condition where people believe they are actually dead. Commonly referred to as The Walking Dead Syndrome, patients often starve themselves because they assume a dead body needs no food. Given yesterday’s election outcomes such state might hold its own temptations…
But then I thought we need something more cheerful. Therefore let’s focus on the fact that for some species there is an innate behavior that allows them to escape death, at least temporarily, if they are lucky.
The fancy word for it is thanatosis, or death-feigning, colloquially people call it playing possum. Scientists currently researching this behavior most often refer to it as tonic immobility (TI.) What are we talking about? A large number of species exhibit multiple signs of “being dead” late in the sequence of predation, when they have no other way out, flight obstructed, and contact with their predator already in process. It is a behavior that evolved, not something learned along the way, and it can be found in vertebrates like mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, as well as in invertebrates like crustaceans, insects, spiders, butterflies, beetles, ants, bees and wasps.
Prey displays not just a state of stillness (a defense mechanism that is also widespread usually to avoid detection by predators in the first place,) but multiple other signs that are usually associated with death or dying: reduced breathing rates, lowered heart rate, tongue protrusion, urinating and defecating, and setting the eyes wide open. If this state, often held up for hours on end, results in the predator leaving its prey alone, the animal, absent of injuries, can return to its normal existence. In addition, some animals, frogs for example, make themselves extra small so that they are swallowed whole by snakes, and will be regurgitated intact when they secret substances that have the predator throw up. Others, like grasshoppers, make themselves extra large, with their spines exposed, which make them much harder or impossible to be swallowed by frogs who have a limited range for mouth openings.
So how is self-preservation achieved? One possible answer – and there is really not that much knowledge around given that research has only recently started to tackle these questions – is predators’ aversion to long-dead animals, since they might be associated with bacterial pathogens that are best avoided. Recognizing the signs of death might lead to that reaction (suggesting not much else is going on cognitively, since a minute ago that same animal was still very much alive. As an aside: some philosophers are arguing that predators have a concept of death, loosely defined as knowledge of non-functionality and irreversibility. That’s like saying the thermostat on your wall has a concept of temperature, when all it does is recognize a particular state – above or below a certain degree – to kick heat on or off.)
Others suggests that death-feigning interrupts a set sequence in predatory behavior (the usual steps being detection, pursuit, subjugation, kill.) If the subjugation step is interrupted because something is immobile in front of you, the next step might not be executable.
It is also possible that predator animals are highly sensitive to moving targets. If there are salient alternatives all around (a bunch of prey trying to escape) the death-feigning animal might no longer capture the predator’s attention. If there are many fleeing prey to choose from there might also be an opportunity cost to spending time to figure out if the immobilized prey is really dead and ready to be lunch. There is evidence for all of these mechanisms, and they are likely working in a complimentary fashion.
Like all biologically driven behavior, there are costs and benefits attached. For some species, playing dead is the best attempt to survive when they are young and vulnerable. At later stages in development, they might switch to fight and flight mechanisms when they have gained sufficient strength to take the predator on. Death-feigning behavior can be bred into or out of species (for example birds held over centuries in captivity, where they encounter many fewer natural enemies, eventually loose TI behavior, compared to their cousins living in the wild.)
Look at the size of those leaves….
I find all this endlessly fascinating, particularly with an eye on whether humans should imitate that behavior when under attack in nature. Shall we say, it depends. If you are attacked by a bear in the wild, you have to first figure out what kind of bear it is. Playing possum seems to work with Grizzly bears, but with black bears one should fight back.(Ref.)
“To effectively play dead, you should wait until the bear has actually touched you. Bears are smart enough to know that you are faking it if they haven’t touched you and you suddenly collapse.
When trying to play dead, fall onto your stomach and use your arms to cover your head, using the ground to protect your face and stomach. Keep your legs spread wide apart to make yourself more difficult for the bear to move.
It is likely that the bear will try to flip you over or play with your body. If this happens, you should allow the bear to flip you, but roll all the way over so you end up face-down again.”
Okayyyyyyyy. One slight upside to the sad fact that my canoeing days are over: I don’t have to memorize the rules. Never mind experiencing the attack.
Here’s to escaping all kinds of predation so we can enjoy the good stuff a bit longer. Then again, today’s music reminds us that there is peace on the other side.
Photographs today are the opposite of playing dead – dying maple leaves are playing alive, with one last hurrah of color, pattern, and throwing themselves onto the wind, flying and fluttering in the air around us until they, too, come to rest.
I could not believe my eyes. I had stumbled upon a pod of pelicans in Forest Grove, not just in the air on their southwards migration, but actually resting among the unperturbed egrets.
Here they were preening, snoozing, fishing as a fleet. Their large beaks can be adjusted in size not to hold food, as is erroneously presumed, but to serve as a kind of fishing net, which is not exclusively used for fish, by the way. Pelicans do eat smaller birds as well, including pigeons…
Pelicans have played a role in Christian iconography ever since the 3rd century. Some strange story, in a tractate called Physiologus, started to make the rounds: pelican mothers were claimed to kill their rebellious offspring, and then pecking their own breasts to revive them with their blood after three days. Comparisons to salvation history ensued, human kind being punished by G-d for its disobedience, but then the Son redeeming folks with his blood.
Detail from the Salimbenis’ Crucifixion: The Pelican
The punitive part of the story was eventually dropped, and the redeeming part enhanced. The narrative influenced art throughout the Middle ages, with images of pelicans feeding their chicks as a symbol of G-d’s sacrifice for his flock. The paintings could be found on tabernacles and the top of crosses, as well as frescos of Crucifixion scenes.
“These legends may have arisen because the pelican used to suffer from a disease that left a red mark on its chest. Alternatively it may be that pelicans look as if they are stabbing themselves as they often press their bill into their chest to fully empty their pouch. Yet other possibilities are that they often rest their bills on their breasts, and that the Dalmatian pelican has a blood-red pouch in the early breeding season .” (Ref.)
The point, though, is that rebellion was flagged, punished, and resolved with the pointer to salvation through religious adherence.
The Pelican Symbol
Christianity was not the first religion to imbue pelicans with symbolic meaning. In Egypt the birds were thought to be divinity and guide the passage of lost souls through the underworld. However much they were worshipped in those ways, their treatment on earth was not exactly preferential. Pelican populations in this country have been endangered in a variety of ways since the 1880s in competition for fish. “They were clubbed and shot, their eggs and young were deliberately destroyed, and their feeding and nesting sites were degraded by water management schemes and wetland drainage. Even in the 21st century, an increase in the population of American white pelicans in southeastern Idaho in the US was seen to threaten the recreational cutthroattrout fishery there, leading to official attempts to reduce pelican numbers through systematic harassment and culling(Ref.)” Pesticides and oil spills affect them as well, as do hooks of discarded fishing lines.
I hung out with the birds for a while, watching how comfortable they are with each other and how quiet (it is only chicks who vocalize during nesting seasons.) Pelicans are quite social, they have communal courtship rituals, they nest in colonies, they hunt together and they often fish as a fleet.
They eventually took off, single birds rising, then forming groups, circling in formation trying to find the thermals that would lift them to traveling height.
The circles reminded me of another iconography of rebellion, one probably approved by pelicans prone to comradeship. I learned about these solidarity circles which somewhat protected rebels from persecution from comments by Nick Kapur, a Professor of History at Rutgers with a focus on Japan and East Asia.
“In Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1868), when impoverished peasants finally couldn’t take it anymore and decided to revolt, they would sign their list of demands with all their names in a big circle. They had specific reasons for doing this: First, this format expressed their solidarity and commitment to each other, like an endless ring that cannot not be broken.
But perhaps more importantly, the usual way daimyo lords dealt with peasant revolts was torturing and executing the ringleaders but letting everyone else live. After all, they needed peasants to till the fields! By signing in a circle, nobody could tell who the leaders were.”
Apparently, these kinds of circular documents – now known as Round Robins – could also be found in 17th century French petitions to the Crown, in the British Royal Navy when sailors petitioned officers, and in the Spanish American War with demands that embarrassed then President McKinley.
Here’s to pelicans’ unity, robins’ evasiveness, to solidarity and rebels of all kinds! And nature’s endless ability to lift my spirits with surprises.
Music today by an adventurous young artist who is performing Edward Lear’s poem about pelicans (Pelican Chorus) in a Hungarian bath house.
On those days where my body is off and my brain stuck in first gear, I have to practically force myself to go out for a walk. I’m so glad I did this last Saturday, one of those days, and chanced on a garden planted for butterflies while walking along the tree-shaded streets of the Irvington neighborhood.
As luck would have it, the owner of the property, attired in a butterfly sweatshirt that distracted from her porcelain features and clear blue eyes, was out there weeding and perfectly happy to show this stranger around.
Ida Galash has been interested in butterflies all of her life, a passion that led to the decision to plant a serious butterfly garden about 2 years ago. It hosts zinnias, dahlias, Japanese anemones, fuchsias, coneflowers, lantanas, fig tree, roses, crepe myrtle bushes and so many more, arranged with an artistic eye.
The crucial ingredient is, of course, milkweed. This plant is the singular food source for Monarch caterpillars, and it comes in a variety of shapes and forms. Poisonous to the core, it took one of those evolutionary miracles that the monarchs adapted to this plant by only three simple genetic mutations, storing its toxin in their body as a defense against birds.
My luck in finding this garden pales compared to the owner’s when a monarch actually deposited eggs in her garden some weeks ago.
Or maybe it was not luck but nature’s grateful reciprocity towards someone who has become a guardian of dwindling resources in a world where monarch butterfly habitat disappears by the minute. Between climate change, forest fires and ever-more built-up environments, the butterflies are under enormous stress in their migrations.
Ida carefully collected the eggs, sharing them with another monarch enthusiast and protected them against predators and suddenly cool nights in various forms of shelter. They did hatch after a few days and the larva (caterpillars) happily munched on freshly provided milkweed leaves.
Two weeks later they attached themselves to a leaf or stem via little threads of silk that they spin and then the metamorphosis into a gold-flecked chrysalis began. Eventually a fully formed butterfly will emerge, about 10-15 days later.
Here is the chrysalis.
During the course of a summer there will be 4 generations of monarchs going through this cycle, with all but the last one having an average life span of about 6 weeks. The 4th generation, emerging from eggs usually laid in September or October, will live many months, enough to migrate to California or Mexico to survive the winters in warmer weather, before it returns to the NorthWest in early summer.
If it returns. Monarchs, although weighing less than a paperclip, make their way South and back along three butterfly “highways,” but the numbers are steadily falling. It is not just the loss of their habitats, which have been subsumed by intensive monoculture, orchards, vineyards and farms, but also the decline of species of the milkweed plant, the only one that can sustain their breeding. Pesticide use has decimated them. Warming ocean waters intensify hurricanes that kill the monarchs on their flight. Trees used for roosting are sickened by unusual heat and diseases that flourish with climate change, or logged for insatiable commercial interest.
If you want to read a spirited book about their quirks and voyages, borrow a copy of Wendy William’s The Language of Butterflies – How Thieves, Hoarders, Scientists, and Other Obsessives Unlocked the Secrets of the World’s Favorite Insect.
If you want to read an intensely moving essay about conservationists and their fight for the survival of monarchs, check out the attachment below. It is long, but worth it, and includes for us Oregonians a depiction of a local miracle: a female monarch defied the “disperse your eggs widely” rule and laid some 600 eggs in one garden in Brookings, OR. Over the next months they counted 2700 in that yard, and more than 5000 across the small town.
Individual actions matter, whether planting a garden with the appropriate habitat, or helping others to do so. I found various suggestions on this informative website. In general you can think about distributing seed packages to Halloween trick or treaters, to schools, to restaurants or any community organization. You can also spread the seeds in public areas in hopes some will take, rewilding, in some ways, what was once the natural habitat. You can get kits and together with your children grow butterflies at home and release them after they emerge. You can fill goodie bags for wedding guests with seed packages instead of chachkas. More tips can be found on the Portland Monarchs FB site, where I also discovered this visual time line:
And all this can be done in the relative safety of these Northwest parts. Actually, I should not treat the topic of safety lightly. As it turns out numerous key figures in the preservation movement for monarch butterflies have been either threatened severely or killed outright last year.
“Mariana Treviño-Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, has endured months of escalating rape and death threats in response to her butterfly conservation work along the Rio Grande. The center is an ecological mecca and home to 240 species of butterflies, a third of the total found within the United States…she has found herself in the crosshairs of white nationalists hellbent on erecting a border wall…By the time of a restraining order, though, Build the Wall’s three-and-a-half-mile “border” wall in Mission was well under way, and the National Butterfly Center estimates that for every mile of barrier, twenty acres of habitat are obliterated. The sanctuary’s ecological value exceeds the life within its boundaries, for it serves as a vital natural corridor, not least for monarchs on the move. The towering wall and razed habitat threaten far more than human and butterfly migrants. If the Rio Grande floods—as it did in 2018 when the river rose sixteen feet overnight—fleeing wildlife such as bobcat, coatimundis, and peccaries will literally hit a wall and drown en masse.” (Ref.)
Some 700 miles south, two butterfly preservationists were actually killed. Homero Gómez González, who managed Mexico’s El Rosario Monarch Butterfly Preserve, got in the way of illegal logging – the desirable oyamel firs down south anchor the butterflies’ life cycle and are already stressed by climate disruption – as well as clandestine avocado growing, making enemies of those who saw potential earnings dwindle.
Raúl Hernández Romero, who worked as an ecotourist guide in a section of the vast Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve that UNESCO declared a world heritage site in 2008 and who vocally denounced logging as well, was stabbed to death in the same week. Both murders occurred in the Mexican state of Michoacán, directly west of Mexico City. Michoacán is home to the world’s largest monarch roosts, but it is also a hotspot for violence stemming from organized crime.
They are not the only ones. The annual report of Defending Tomorrow chronicles the persecution and assassination of environmental defenders worldwide. The international organization focusses on abusive actors, misuse of power and financial flows, but also now on the climate crisis. In 2019 Mexico ranked as one of the most dangerous societies in which to take a stand for environmental and human rights.
The threat to butterflies really comes from all angles. Let’s give them a hand. Or a plant, as the case may be. Got milkweed?
O patient creature with a peasant face, Burnt by the summer sun, begrimed with stains, And standing humbly in the dingy lanes! There seems a mystery in thy work and place, Which crowns thee with significance and grace; Whose is the milk that fills thy faithful veins? What royal nursling comes at night and drains Unscorned the food of the plebeian race? By day I mark no living thing which rests On thee, save butterflies of gold and brown, Who turn from flowers that are more fair, more sweet, And, crowding eagerly, sink fluttering down, And hang, like jewels flashing in the heat, Upon thy splendid rounded purple breasts.
Photograph from poison control website.
What I saw in real life across the last weeks were a California Sister, an Admiral and a Western Swallowtail if I read the guide books correctly.
Here sings Schubert’s butterfly. And here are hands made by Chopin to flutter like a butterfly.
Over the years I have come back to photographing and writing about sunflowers, just as practically every painter I’ve encountered has included them in their work. I’ve linked them to Blake’s poetry and described the history of their distribution across the world, religious twists included. What is it that draws us to them? Their saturated-color beauty when viewed en masse, their wondrous patterns when viewed in isolation, their ability to signal full, brilliant life as well as elegant decay?
I was thinking of that when encountering a sunflower maze on Sauvies Island last week, your’s to explore if you are willing to enter a farm store and pay $5 for the pleasure. I declined – still staying out of stores, even when wearing a mask and fully vaccinated – and proceeded to just walk around the perimeters.
Some of today’s photographs are from that occasion, others I’ve gathered over time. They were chosen with a focus on pattern, something photography is singularly able to capture when reduced to black & white, in contrast to the magic worked by painters with colors and looser depictions. I thought it would be fun to juxtapose the two – color and pattern – and also remind ourselves that there are interesting sunflower paintings beyond Van Gogh (and even for him some that are lesser known but just as fascinating.)
Let’s start with the Dutch, then, and marvel at the use of color that captures the radiance of these flowers.
Abraham Brueghel added the flower almost like an after thought in the background of the painting.
Abraham Brueghel A still life of fruit and flowers in a footed gadrooned silver vase with a spaniel 1685
His landsman a few centuries later became famous for his favorite subject.
Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Sunflowers Arles, January 1889 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
My preferred of his depictions, however, is this, so fluid and alive even with hints of decay, like little suns floating on water.
Vincent Van Gogh Sunflowers 1887
Paul Gauguin was drawn to the subject as well, but this portrait of his friend Van Gogh is probably one more familiar to viewers than his still-life.
Paul Gauguin Vincent van Gogh painting sunflower 1888
This was the caption from the van Gogh museum site:
Was Van Gogh really painting a vase of sunflowers when his friend Gauguin produced this portrait of him? No, he can’t have been: it was December and far too late in the year for sunflowers. But it’s quite probable that Van Gogh painted a copy of one of his own sunflower pictures around this time. The landscape in the background is also fictional: unlike Van Gogh, Gauguin liked to work from his imagination. They often argued about this. This painting refers to their disagreement.
Later, Van Gogh wrote about this portrait: ‘My face has lit up a lot since, but it was indeed me, extremely tired and charged with electricity as I was then.’
Diego Rivera, on the other hand, painted sunflowers that are said to reference the style of the greats before him, with, some speculate, a bit of irony. Tahitian beauty with the flower of the Americas?
Diego Rivera Sunflowers, 1921
A spoof of the Impressionist’s short vibrant brush strokes, vividly displayed behind the girl in the painting?
1941
My favorite of his are these sunflowers that seem to provide a shelter, and also act like interested on-lookers, fascinated by the fate of that poor dismembered doll.
Diego Rivera Sunflowers 1943
They are certainly supportive of humankind in many ways. Their seeds are edible and they are rich in vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, iron and protein. They also act as decontaminators of toxic soil. Sunflowers are so called hyperaccumulators of dangerous heavy metals, extracting in particular radioactive metals, like cesium-137 and strontium-90 from the soil into their stem, leaves and flower head. Sunflower fields have become one way of trying to clean up the results of nuclear disasters, from Chernobyl to Fukushima (although, in the latter case, the wrong species of sunflower was planted, absorbing much less than desired. Pollute and learn.) When the sunflowers in the radiation areas are grown up and before birds become radioactive by eating the seeds, they are harvested and safely disposed of through pyrolysis. This process burns off all of the organic carbon in the plant while leaving the radioactive metals behind. These metals are then vitrified into pyrex glass and stored in a shielded container underground. No wonder the nuclear disarmament movement chose the sunflower as its symbol.
They also absorb some of the most common metal pollutants on our planet, such as cadmium, nickel, zinc, and lead, and so are used these days to clean up industrial pollution sites across the U.S., helping to considerably lower the cost of cleaning toxic soil.
On to the post- impressionists. Sunflowers by Gustav Klimt become more stylized, with a flowery pattern dominating the painting and the configuration foreshadowing his famous “The Kiss.”
Gustav Klimt Sunflower 1906
Egon Schiele returned to the plant over and over again, with most renditions expressing his familiar tendency towards the morbid. This one is still lovely.
Egon Schiele Sunflower 1909Egon Schiele Autumn Sun 1914
Moving on, there is David Hockney. Not to my taste, but I was amused to learn what other, more educated critics saw in it.
What you don’t see in the interiors you see in the fields: young sunflowers are heliotropic, their heads move with the sun so that they expose themselves to maximum light and warmth which attracts pollinators necessary for reproduction. Ever wondered howthey do this, since they don’t have muscles to move their heads? It’s actually an amazing process. Put into simplified terms, their stems grow both at night and during the day. But at night the west side of the stem grows much faster making the head flop eastward in the morning. During the day the opposite is true: the east side of the stem grows more so that by dusk the sunflower head turns westward catching the last of the warming rays. When they are fully grown they end in an eastward looking position to be ready for the sun at earliest possible time. How on earth does nature come up with these tricks????
My favorite still-life for last: Piet Mondrian, who else.
Piet Mondrian Still Life with Sunflower, 1907
Nature’s soothing greens brought inside, the sun’s light seemingly caught and distributed by the flower head, for a soft, shiny day. Wishing us all one of those.
Music today is from Russia. 17th century Tsar, Peter the Great, introduced the sunflower to this country. Suddenly an oil-rich plant, formerly unknown to the Russian Orthodox church, was available to skirt the restrictions assigned to Lent, the season of fasting. The primary rule was to give up sources of fat, both animal and vegetable, with precise designation of exactly which fat rich foods were forbidden. Farmers everywhere began to grow the sunflower since its oils and seed, not on that list, were soon highly coveted during these lean times.
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways — the point, however, is to change it.” Happy birthday, Karl Marx!
Today’s missive is sent to you by the “totally useless facts that are nonetheless interesting”- department of Heuer’s brain. It won’t change the world, but then I don’t have to try to do that every single day….
Lots of chatter in the media about how many people have gone grey or even white during the last year of Covid-induced isolation. Stress? Unavailability of hair dye? Presence of decisions to chuck the hair dye while in semi-privacy during the time of annoying grey hair roots? Normal processes of aging? Take your pick.
(Photographs, from 2 days ago, were chosen to depict white in all its pigment-free beauty in the floral world…)
My hair turned greyish-white almost two decades ago, with the original blond color gone down the drain with the rest of the actual hair during chemotherapy. It was somewhat expected since cell damage incurred by chemo was surely systemic. Why should the stem cells surrounding the hair follicles be exempt? It didn’t bug me much – in contrast to the fact that my 2021 medical adventures have led to severe hair loss, which bugs me to no end. Oh, vanity.
It was certainly not the “turned white overnight” experience, also known as the Marie Antoinette effect, after the lore that the doomed aristocrat had a sudden loss of hair color before her execution. The medical literature, if perused across the last 200 years, contains about 87 or so reports of these kinds of cases, some observed by doctors, some handed down by self report. Some are coming directly from contemporary witnesses, as this journalist writing up her own story quite recently. In a wonderfully dry humor kind of way, I might add.
So what’s going on with those 100.00 hair follicles on our scalp? We no longer have to resort to spooky interpretations. A Harvard research team recently published an article in Nature that explains how we lose the pigment production that gives our hair its color.
Aging is indeed a major factor – the responsible cells for pigmentation die off, and hair that grows without color simply appears white. But stress does a number as well, although in ways different from what was hypothesized along the way.
Early on it was believed that perhaps stress-induced immune system attacks might kill off the melanocyte stem cells. Nope.
Perhaps elevated levels of the stress-hormone cortisol doing the damage? Nope.
The culprit was found within the sympathetic nervous system – a system that contains nerves to help us navigate danger, often by releasing norepinephrine which strengthens the flight or fight responses. These high levels of norepinephrine, instead of stimulating a few of the pigment-producing stem cells, triggered basically all of them, to the point where they spent all their energy, with none left to continue to do the job since we have only so many of them in our reservoir.
Bye, bye pigment. Hello gray hair. Now it’s the luck of the draw if you live in a society that abhors aging and its visible signs, or that reveres the signs of aging as evidence for wisdom to be shared.
As an added personal observation from someone who is quite visually oriented – gray hair looks so much better than dyed hair on older people for one simple reason: it is less contrasty with aging skin that has also lost some of its bloom, and can appear waxy when set off by dark locks. Just saying…..
And here is a song about all the things that are worse than gray hair during the process of getting old. Luckily for us, it is in French, so you don’t have to get depressed on a sunny, warm Wednesday morning. But if you insist, here is the version with english subtitles.
One of my lasting childhood memories involves standing in front of huge European cathedrals. My mother would explain to me that they were built across centuries, often by generations of masons within one family, given that trades were handed down from father to son. A strange thing to think that you would not see the completion of your work, but others related to you might. And then the endless dragging through pews and naves and side altars would commence…. (For the record, there isn’t a cathedral I have left out in all of my adult travels – clearly I was hooked.)
The memory was triggered by reading about a parallel development in science. What would you call a scientific experiment that lasted 142 years, so far? I call it old. And remarkable. And astounding.
William Beal, photograph from MSU archives
Started in 1879 by a botanist at the campus of what is now Michigan State University, the experiment is ongoing, tended by subsequent generations of scientists, and planned to last another 80 years. What could it be?
William Beal, a frequent correspondent with Charles Darwin, was interested in how long seeds would last in the soil until they could no longer germinate – a question pressing for agricultural farmers weeding their fields. To find out how long dormancy could last, he buried 20 bottles, each with 1,050 seeds from 21 species, the bottles uncorked and placed with the neck downward to avoid accumulation of water. All weeds!
Photographs today are of some of these – and no, I did not have the patience to label them all.
Buried in a secret location, the bottles remained undisturbed. Opened first every 5 years, then 10, then 20 years, to make the experiment last, one bottle was removed from the cache at a time, brought to the lab for germination under favorable conditions, and nowadays for cell structure analysis with the tools of genetic research. During the latest round they removed some seeds of Setaria glauca— a species of millet, which hasn’t sprouted in the experiment since 1914 — for genetic analysis of DNA and RNA. It allows scientists to find out whether the seeds’ machinery has degraded or persisted, how damaged the genetic material is and what processes may still be possible even if germination isn’t. (Ref.)
From Beal on down, each researcher entrusted with the map for the location chose a scientist from another generation to carry on. This year it has been more than one successor, given the fear that a single person might fall prey to illness or accident, and also included, for the first time ever, women. Maybe there is progress after all….
When bottle # 15 was removed in the year 2000, Verbascum blattaria, a splay-leaved, yellow-flowered herb, seemed to be the most viable. Nearly half the Verbascum seeds bloomed, even though they’d been dormant for 121 years. Its common name is Moth mullein (so named because of the resemblance of its flowers’ stamen to a moth’s antennae.) (See image below.)
After a treatment with cold, simulating a second winter, a single seedling of Malva pusilla sprouted as well – you know it as small mallow.
This year’s bottle (one year delayed due to the pandemic) was removed on April 15th. So far one seed has sprouted, still waiting on a full report. The scientific interest has, of course, expanded over the century, away from the question of weeds’ effects on agriculture, towards the preservation of species under changing climate conditions. (I wrote a short bit about that here 4 years ago.) Next to dooms-day prevention seed vaults, Indigenous food sovereignty projects are a also increasingly focused on seed viability research.
“The soil seed banks underlying different habitats are “great unknowns” in restoration ecology, as experts try to promote native species while fending off invasive ones, said Lars Brudvig, an assistant professor at Michigan State and another member of the Beal seed experiment team. In some cases, seeds of endangered or long-lost plants may even be hiding out in the soil.“
Next step in this experiment? Expose the seeds to smoke. It might trigger germination in plants that thrive after wildfires. The fireweed seeds included by Beal in the samples have never once sprouted. Maybe this is what will do the trick. Other than that? Wait for 19 years to exhume the next bottle. We’ll be old. Well, ancient, really.
Today’s song is called Through the Woods – the nightly adventure of the seed-searching ministry of William Beal, in my imagination. The musician, Yasmine Williams, is a young artist who is changing the way of traditional guitar playing.
On a personal note, since I mentioned the Indigenous food sovereignty project above: wild rice harvesting is threatened by the Enbridge Line 3 Oil Pipeline approved in Minnesota’s Wild Rice Region. As I have written here before, I am part of a documentary project that tackles the issues of Climate Resistance, spearheaded by indigenous leadership. On May 6th, 6-7:30 PM we have a webinar, Climate Resistance: Art, Action and Allyship.
Hosted by Portland State University, the panel includes artists, activists and an attorney who bring their wisdom and knowledge to the Necessity film project– a two-part documentary that features Indigneous leadership in responding to the climate crisis and shows how activists are using legal tactics, including the necessity defense, in the fight to save the planet.
Registered attendees will receive a link to watch Necessity Part I: Oil, Water and Climate Resistance with their donation, and will also get a link to the panel five days before the May 6th event. Contributions to this event support Necessity Part II, currently in post-production.
Tickets are available via Eventbrite and more information about the project at our website and on social media @necessitythemovie.
(The Eventbrite site will give you a choice of dates – just click on one that works for you and from then on things are straightforward – zoom ticket will be delivered to your email.)
I overheard that someone whose name shall no longer be mentioned, asked for 2 billion dollars to establish his presidential library. Hah!
That made me think of libraries in general, how I miss to be able to browse them in person. Nowhere in all of Portland was I so regularly surrounded by a truly multi-cultural environment. My neighborhood library had lots of patrons from the nearby mosque and synagogue, has a great section of Spanish language books for the Latino community and the friendliest help ever to guide novices with computer use, frequented by visibly old(er) people, young job seekers and language learners alike. Lots of languages could be heard from mothers shushing to their children during story time.
It is also amazing how much access libraries provide to things you did not even know existed. I recently learned of the Smithsonian Libraries Website, for example. They have, among other offers, a Digital Collections link where you can access over 35,000 digitized books and manuscripts (available in either our Digital Library or as part of the Biodiversity Heritage Library) as well as digitized photo collections, ephemera, and seed catalogs. If you open this link you get an idea of the mind-boggling breadth of the collections. The Image galleries alone are worth a visit.
I mean, how can you not get sucked into topics like the Historical Trade Literature for Sewing Machines that opens with the advertisement below from the Standard Sewing Machine Company in Cleveland, Ohio?
How about a dishwasher? A washing machine? Guaranteed childcare?.
What brought me, specifically, to the Biodiversity Heritage Library was the incomparable Maria Popova introducing an interesting naturalist in one of her latest blogs. George Perry, together with his engraver John Clarke, published Conchology, or, The natural history of shells at the beginning of the 19th century. If you click the picture at the very end of the blog, you get to marvel at the beauty and detailedness of their work. (Somehow when you open that website it does not allow you to get back to my writing. That’s why I put it at the end.)
The drawings are testimony to a man’s passion for exploring invertebrates and leaving us with a record of nature as it once existed. Paving the way for Darwin, some decades later.
Not much is known about Perry, other than that he lived in or near London, England, and had two exquisite books to his name, the one introduced here and anther one, Arcana – or the museum of natural history,(1810) which included animals of many species.
Conchology (1811) shows only shells, printed by an expensive hand-colored aquatint process, with little text other than an index and an introduction. Perry was a remarkable artist, but not all drawings in the folio are by him, and some which he drew were copied (with acknowledgment) by him from other artists. He sourced his shells in various collections, from 29 private collectors and museums, as well as his own.
The folio was neglected, maligned, ridiculed, partly by professional jealousy, partly because some of the engraver had added fantasy elements of detail and color, partly because people hated the way he named the specimens. There were established, competing camps of naturalists who despised each other and it seems Perry had the bad luck to not fully belonging to either as well as being held responsible of what his engraver had thought to add. (Ref.)
I can’t judge the scientific quality of the work, obviously. I can just revel in the beauty. Brought straight to you by the efforts of a library to implement its mission, and draw from its immense holdings and archives.
Now what was that about a presidential library?
Photographs today are not from collections and museums, but straight from the beaches at Astoria, Manzanita and Newport, OR.
“A ray of sunshine” is one way to describe a bit of good news. I saw that sunny yellow reflected in the gold medal recently awarded to a brave rat.
You read that right, I am reporting on Magawa, the HeroRat. To date he has found 39 landmines and 28 items of unexploded ordnance in Cambodia. Over the past 4 years he has helped clear over 141,000 square meters of land (the equivalent of twenty football fields), allowing local communities to live, work and play without fear of losing life or limb.
Actually I am introducing a general program, APOPO, that breeds and trains rats for multiple important purposes: detecting landmines, identifying tuberculosis in people, and sniffing out illegally trafficked wildlife. APOPO is an acronym from Dutch which stands for “Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling“, or in English, Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development. The idea to use rats was born in the mid 1990s in Holland, the choice to train African Giant Pouched rats based on their longevity and origins in Africa where the work was to be done.
Rats get rewarded with treats like ripe, yellow bananas when they detect the correct scent (associated with explosives, or TB or pangolins, one of the most smuggled endangered species) in the lab. Eventually they will do the same in the field, with a speed that escapes their human counter parts, and with more accuracy in detection, as it turns out. Rats can check on 100 TB samples in 20 minutes, for example, which would take 4 days to be done by a doctor with a microscope. You can watch them here.
In 2000, APOPO established office and training facilities in Tanzania, and started developing what would be the most extensive training minefield in Africa in collaboration with local universities and the people defence forces. A year later they were approved by The Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD) and expanded to teach the rats to smell remote explosive, and soon started research into detecting tuberculosis via scent. In 2004 the first 11 rats passed International Mine Action Standards accreditation and began to operate in multiple countries in Africa and later Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. By 2015 a country like Mozambique was cleared of all landmines! By 2017 the mine action was invited to Colombia, South America.
Since the APOPO TB-detection research program began in 2007, the rats have checked more than 680.000 patient samples. They discovered 18.300 missed cases, helping not just those patients but preventing another 150,000 likely new infections. APOPO’s programs work within government health systems to support over 100 partner clinics in Tanzania, Mozambique and Ethiopia in their fight against TB. They find both, cases that have been missed – according to estimates of the World Health Organization (WHO), about half of the TB patients in these countries are ‘missed’ – and find TB among non-symptomatic but high-risk population ( like prison inmates.)
I think it is phenomenal to see something this life-saving to develop from the idea of a single person to a global organization in 2 decades. They surely had a lot of help on the way, from educational institutions to stay agencies to business initiatives to NGOs – individuals can and have helped, too – you can adopt a rat to support the program, for example.
It also stands in stark contrast to using animals to enact warfare in the first place. As I learned at the dinner table last night, when talking about today’s subject, B.F. Skinner spearheaded Project Pigeon during WW II. It aimed at using pigeons to guide missiles to their respective targets but apparently never took off. Video describing the idea can be found in this link.
Detecting illness by scent has become a hot topic in scientific study in general, with the hopes of finding helpful markers for diagnosis that avoid intrusive procedures for diseases as varied as cancer, Parkinson’s Disease, asthma and traumatic brain injury. Not all done by rats, of course. Dogs are involved, and electronic “noses,” devices that pick up and analyze scent.
I like to think of it though as if it looks like we’re moving from smelling a rat to have one smell us!
Since I don’t have my own photographs of banana loving rats (rats today are from the APOPO website), I’ll make do with random yellows from my archive that might deliver tasty bits to rats – sunflowers, canola, corn, pears, some odds and ends.
Music depicts rats in a variety of ways….
words by Carl Sandburg : There was a gray rat looked at me with green eyes out of a rathole. “Hello, rat,” I said “Is there any chance for me to get on to the language of the rats?” And the green eyes blinked at me, blinked from a gray rat’s rathole.
Rats away opens the second movement. Hear them scurry!
Two articles caught my attention last week, reporting on people who at first glance could not be more different. The first appeared in the New York Times, The Social Life of Forests, and (re)introduced Suzanne Simard, a scientist who looks at forest ecosystems. You might have encountered her if you followed my earlier recommendation to read Richard Power’s The Overstory, one of my favorite books of recent years. She was the model for one of the prominent characters in the novel.
What could a contemporary professor of forest ecology and a 19th century artist and writer known prominently for his wall paper designs possibly have in common? Lots, I tell you!
Both devoted their lives to exploring new directions in their respective fields, Simard as a researcher who ventures daringly (and brilliantly) far from the main stream science at times, Morris as an artist who is now known as a founding father of the British Arts and Craft movement which upended the trend towards industrialization and mass production in the Great Britain of the 1800s.
Both can be counted as ardent environmentalists.
And, importantly for my spontaneous linking the two in my mind after reading these pieces, both make us see, keenly, the interconnectedness of things in nature as much as in our social, political, and economic lives. Interconnectedness can be a boon, when all pieces work together for maximum achievement, and it can be a bust, if some random (or not so random) interruption paralyzes the system as a whole.
The NYT article is an easy read, and reveals some astonishing scientific findings in everyday language. (It also reinforces things we have learned form another book about the secret life of trees, which is reviewed here.) Among other things,
“….Simard has discovered that fungal threads link nearly every tree in a forest — even trees of different species. Carbon, water, nutrients, alarm signals and hormones can pass from tree to tree through these subterranean circuits. Resources tend to flow from the oldest and biggest trees to the youngest and smallest. Chemical alarm signals generated by one tree prepare nearby trees for danger. Seedlings severed from the forest’s underground lifelines are much more likely to die than their networked counterparts. And if a tree is on the brink of death, it sometimes bequeaths a substantial share of its carbon to its neighbors.”
Underground fungal networks that improve the overall health of the forest system by re-directing needed resources are, of course, affected by indiscriminate logging, or other forms of environmental degradation. William Morris thought the same to be true for art when the benefits it bestows on a given society are endangered. Environmental degradation, either in the literal sense of destroying the beauty and health of nature, or in the figurative sense of our lives being accosted by industrialization and labor exploitation, was the main culprit in his view when it came to the disappearance of art in everyday life.
If you have the time and interest, here is a prescient lecture that Morris gave on the relationship between destroying the earth, undermining its beauty and the pernicious effects of wage labor, all of which alienates humans from their creative capacities. In general, he believed that “art was man’s expression in his joy of labor,” art encompassing not just the intellectual achievements of a chosen few, but the daily beautification of one’s environment that across centuries was part of society’s existence.
He implored us “to take in not only painting and sculpture, and architecture, but the shapes and colors of all household goods, nay, even the arrangement of the fields for tillage and pasture, the management of towns and of our highways of all kinds; in a word, to extend to the aspect of the externals of our life.” That could be accomplished by a medieval potter’s careful decorations, a glass blower’s feel for form, a cottage gardener’s lush color schemes up to the hand-pressed paper, hand-printed and colored designs of Morris’ famous tapestries. The very ideas of combining the higher arts with applied art eventually found their homes in the German Bauhaus in the 1920s and its contemporary Russian twin, Vkhutemas, the most fascinating art school you have never heard of. The workshops had artistic and industrial faculties; the art faculty taught courses in graphics, sculpture and architecture while the industrial faculty taught courses in printing, textiles, ceramics, woodworking, and metalworking.
By no means did Morris imply that industrialization and machine production were the causal agent in the disappearance of daily creativity. It was the fact that only capital, not laborers benefitted from the automization and speed of production, workers receiving no increased leisure time to use for creative activities to make up for the increasingly non-creative work serving the machines. His writings on socialist models to remedy the unfairness were astoundingly clear-sighted and pragmatic.
He was also quite the character, which, as you all know by now, always excites me. A rich Bourgeois drawn to Ruskin and Marx, an artist and successful business man who marries a working class girl who happens to be his painting model, leaves him for his best friend and then they all manage to establish a menage à trois, a risk taker who late in life shifts gear from designing pretty things (if you like flowery wall paper) to establishing a printing press – it’s all pretty fascinating. Details here.
For a final bit of reading on new claims about the ultimate biological interconnectedness, the Gaia Hypothesis, go here. Would love to know what either Simard or Morris or for that matter Darwin would have thought about this view of an evolving planet.
Photographs of Pacific Northwest forests from this spring. Wallpaper has to wait….
