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Biology

Crows, Pursued.

I have written about crows before, describing my fascination with and admiration for corvids.

Les Corbeaux

New research results have the birds back on my mind, as did observing their antics during a short walk on the beach when the air cleared.

The newest neurobiological evidence claims that crows have a kind of consciousness previously believed to only exists in humans and macaque monkeys. Should we trust those claims? They are based on the the fact that the 1.5 billion neurons in a crow’s brain are architecturally arranged in similar ways as are our’s, and that they seem to fire in a similar manner to our’s when we consciously experience something or relate that we are experiencing something.

I am always weary of the “if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it must be a duck!” kind of arguments pursuing the quest to find ourselves in other forms of life. To equate forms of neuronal reactions to our human consciousness is a huge step; I would be much happier if people cautiously formulated that along a continuum of reacting to a stimulus directly on one end to having thoughts about one’s reaction, or being aware of one’s thoughts on the other end of the scale, some biological entities approach us more closely than others, but all in degrees.

There is no question that corvids are extremely smart, but why insist that their experience is the same as ours, when you are a scientist? Let’s leave that to the poets. And none has done a better job of pursuing crows as conscious, questing heroes than Ted Hughes in his book Crow, From the Life and Songs of a Crow (1970.) Recovering from the loss of his wife through suicide, he responded to the American artist Leonard Baskin’s request to write a collection that would complement Baskin’s crow-focussed artwork.

Crow, born from a nightmare in the story, is an ultimately inadequate hero on a quest. Lots of mythological and folkloric tidbits are woven into the narrative, and this little hero is very much like a traditional trickster, challenging, funny, amoral, sometimes destructive and always sharp.

Here is one of Hughes’ poems that fits perfectly with my recent observations of crows (and brought home how many birds I am sorely missing) at the edge of the ocean:

Aware of their thoughts or not, they sure know how to survive, and seem to have fun while at it. My kind of model!

Music today was inspired by Hughes’ book – the piece by Benjamin Dwyer is called Crow’s Vanity. For a bit more cheerful enjoyment let’s have Charlie Parker guide us into the weekend with Ornithology.

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Of Bloodlust and Shorebirds

There we were sitting outside on the deck having dinner. Halfway through, one of us who shall remain nameless, departed for the kitchen where he finished his plate without being constantly attacked by mosquitoes, at the cost of staring at the dirty dishes. “Where is my boy,”he moaned, “he used to be the mosquito magnet, so I could eat in peace. ”

Ever wondered how dangerous mosquitoes really are, beyond being an itch-producing nuisance? Turns out they are the most dangerous animals in the world – the females are feeding on vertebrate blood, necessary to make the eggs for their own reproduction, transmitting pathogens that are deadly: some species are a vector for malaria, others for dengue fever, yellow fever, chikungunya, and Zika. That used to be geographically constrained, but some of these mosquitoes have hitchhiked on container ships and airplanes to more temperate zones now as well. In fact some researchers believe they have killed half of all humans ever alive (debated, but not too much of an exaggeration – – in case you needed a downward comparison to the rotten Corona virus!) Here is the book about mosquitoes that tells you more.

Greater Yellow Legs

And ever wondered if it is really true that some people are more frequently bitten than others, and if so, why that should be? Looks like it is a fact that people differ in their attractiveness for mosquitoes, and much of it has to do with genetics. There seem to be some 7 spots on our DNA that can make us more or less susceptible to the flying plague, likely related to kinds of body odors that either seduce or repel. How do we know? Good old epidemiological studies, collecting data from tens of thousands of people who report how attractive or not they are to mosquitoes and then comparing their DNA for similarities and differences, isolating causal factors. Furthermore, good old twin studies – we can vary how alike subjects are (with most other factors being held constant,) and then exposing siblings, fraternal twins or identical twins to mosquitoes. If one twin is judged to be the best thing on the menu by the mosquitoes, they should show the same interest in the other twin, which they do, and do so particularly with identical twins, who of course share all their genes.

Sandpiper

Mosquitoes also go for carbon dioxide, so if your metabolism is up, you exercised, you’re pregnant, they come for you. I forget the names of the other volatiles that either attract or deter the pest, but researchers believe that heredity of your deliciousness to stingers is comparable to that for height or IQ.

Killdear lined up

A lot of research on this topic is coming out of New Mexico, with work on all aspects of mosquito lives and troubles done by the Hansen Lab. One of the things they explore has certainly applications for our household: what can you use to repel them, short of poisoning yourself and your environment with DEET or other similarly toxic chemicals? They found that peppermint and lemongrass oil were effective for 30 min. Spearmint and garlic oil had a strong initial effect, however, both lost their efficacy at 30 min. Cinnamon oil was effective in significantly reducing mosquito attraction for 1.5 h.

Muskrat eying the duck….

You know what to apply or burn or drip around you now. Happy al fresco dining!

Time spent photographing critters and shorebirds at inland ponds this week required long sleeves and constant cursing: the insects were out at the edge of the water and no wind to blow them away. But it was worth to see the many killdeers, sand pipers and greater yellow legs feasting on – potentially – mosquitoes.

Cabbage Butterfly

And whole swarms of mosquitoes can be heard in this music, Crumb’s Music for a summer evening.

Red-winged Blackbird

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Moss Musings and Lichen Lament

This is the time for wildflower hikes, more to be found every single week. It is also the time where there is enough moisture and warmth in the air that mosses and lichens awake from potential dormancy and fill the world with green, or, for that matter, orange, yellow, white and black, depending on the species.

The distinction between mosses and lichens, at my pay grade, is simple. One is a plant and the other a sandwich. Or so claim the teaching materials trying to instruct grade schoolers about their environment. Mosses are multicellular organisms that are able to use photosynthesis, like any other plant. They can’t transport moisture though, and thus need to stay close to the surface to absorb it.

Lichen, in contrast. are a mix of different organisms, one enveloping the other, thus the metaphor. The assembly consists of fungi fused with algae or cyanobacteria, and, only recently discovered, yeast. The individual ingredients benefit each other – the algae provide food for the fungus via photosynthesis and the fungal layer protects the algae from drying out, or being damaged by the sun. The yeast, as it turns out, produces noxious stuff that keeps animals from eating certain lichen. The resulting intact surfaces of lichen carpets help to keep things where they’re supposed to be, sort of gluing them down.

Most interestingly, lichens are a superb bioindicator – another sentinel warning us of environmental danger and destruction. “Because lichens have no specialized protective barriers, they also readily absorb contaminants and are among the first organisms to die when pollution increases, making them good sentinels for air quality.” They are sensitive to acid rain (the culprit being sulfur dioxide, from coal plants or long range industrial emissions.) They also get hurt by ammonia and nitrates used in agriculture, and they accumulate metals from power plant emissions. When they die off, we know WE are in trouble.



The US Forest Service has had a bio-monitoring program for lichen since the 1990s,

http://gis.nacse.org/lichenair/

“in which scientists record census data on the diversity and abundance of lichens in thousands of designated survey plots across the country. They collect some samples and send them off to a lab for elemental analysis to identify the type and amount of pollutants. The data help federal agencies set pollution targets and map out areas where the targets are not being met, and they also help state and federal agencies that review emissions permit applications and existing regulations.”

https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i46/meet-the-sentinels.html

Who wants to bet that under the current administration pollution targets are changing, regulations are shifted – or for that matter, whole programs like these are terminated? Luckily, lichen are ubiquitous, and one or another of the up to 17.000 species will survive in regions where none of us would. We are the ones that will pay the health and environmental cost in our areas, when pollution is again unchecked.

In any case, I find all this fascinating; if you don’t, perhaps you can at least enjoy the beauty of these lifeforms as they cling to the surfaces around us.

Music today shall be Mahler’s 3rd – probably of his symphonies the closest to nature, in its description of glory and wrath, both. That should make your morning lively!!

Bonus: some daily wildlife!

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Wanted: Time Machine

One of my many reactions to the events of these long weeks has been: let me run away!  Won’t do, of course, but a woman can dream. Dreams that include a variety of travel companions who strike me as people I’d love to run away with and learn from.

One of them is Jeanne Baret, who was the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, although she had to do it as a man. Well, dressing, looking and acting like a man.

Born into a poor, illiterate family in France in 1740, she was trained as a herbalist to be a healer, eventually becoming an expert botanist. During her foraging outdoors she met recently widowed naturalist Philibert Commerçon. Soon they would share a bed as well as their passion for the world of plants.

In 1766, on the recommendation of the famous botanist Linneaus, Admiral Louis-Antoine de Bougainville hired Commerçon for his expedition exploring the new world. The latter took his lover on board, disguised as a man since the French Navy did not permit women on their vessels. Baret took care to bind her breasts, never undress in public and she slept in his cabin. More importantly, though she did all the work required by one hired as assistant (or beast of burden), hacking her way through jungles, carrying the heavy wooden botany presses, the containers filled with specimen, facing unknown dangers in a new world, while traveling on  a small supply ship for three years.

She was the one who discovered the bougainvillea named in honor of the ship’s commander. A commander who secretly admired her, but also took care to stress that this was not to be a model, once she was discovered.

Baret, with tears in her eyes, admitted that she was a girl, that she had misled her master by appearing before him in men’s clothing at Rochefort at the time of boarding…that moreover when she came on board she knew that it was a question of circumnavigating the world and this voyage had excited her curiosity. She will be the only one of her sex to do this and I admire her determination…The Court will, I think, forgive her for these infractions to the ordinances. Her example will hardly be contagious. She is neither ugly nor pretty and is not yet 25.
Louis Antoine de Bougainville, Journal, 28-29 May 1768

 

Rumors had, of course, flown about that she was not a man. For a while she countered them with tales of having been castrated while imprisoned earlier. But eventually she was discovered while exploring in Tahiti, or so the tale goes – there seems to be a bit of fudging of the truth to preserve her honor and that of the captain who would otherwise have been liable in court – crew members actually forcibly stripped her in New Ireland. She and her lover ended up in Mauritius working for the French East India Company establishing a botanic garden. When he died a few years later, she was thrown out and never saw the collection again that she had helped to build. A genus named after her, Baretia, was soon reclassified and renamed Quivisia.

 

Upon return to France she spent years in litigation to receive some of her lover’s estate that he had promised; an annual state pension on account of her services (petitioned for by her former captain!) saved her until her death in 1807. Only in 2012 was a new species of night shade, Solanum Baretiae, found in Equador and Peru, named after her. The woman had pluck, was driven, did not give up, and followed her passion. My kind of travel companion, although I probably would not have been able to keep up with her, ever.

Here is her story in some detail:

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/01/23/145664873/the-first-woman-to-go-round-the-world-did-it-as-a-man

And here is a link to the botanical description of the new species named in her honor – don’t waste time to read it, just marvel with me at the conventions of scientific writing that are now adopted by botany, while Baret counted leaves and risked her life…

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3254248/

And tomatoes are of course part of the nightshade family.

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93 Degrees

Hot enough to flee the city and go to the beach. A long and leisurely drive along US Highway 30, the Old St. Helens Road,  gives you enough time to listen to a Radiolab podcast that reveals the most amazing story.

(I, by the way, usually do not listen to podcasts or books on tape. Part of that has to do with the fact that I associate taped narrative with all the times I was hospitalized as a child or teenager and could not even hold a book. So they would set me up with tape recordings, TVs were not present in pediatric wards. These days I also find that I am just impatient – I read fast, and admit to skipping, and listening slows me down to a degree that makes me twitchy.)

In any case, I make exceptions if I am told by a trustworthy source, now paddling his canoe, that I HAVE to listen to this or that recording. And so I stumbled onto this modern medical miracle, a feel-good-story if there ever was one.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/fronads

Here is the short version: Women who undergo chemotherapy or radiation usually lose their fertility, the ovaries get poisoned, fried or otherwise shut down. Freezing eggs beforehand is not an option – they contain so much liquid that gets crystallized by freezing that it bursts the ovum.

Several years back a doctor in NYC experimented with the removal of one of the ovaries of a young woman about to undergo serious chemo for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Her survival chances were slim, but she clung to the promise that if she was cancer free 2 years after treatment, they would re-implant the ovary. Which she was and they did – putting it for easy access right under her belly button, assuming that they would harvest eggs for IVF from there, should it kick back into action. In other instances they implant the tissue into your arm. Go figure.

Imagine everyone’s surprise when she got pregnant the old-fashioned way.  Not once but three times across the next several years. And she is not the only one; by now there are over 100 children born with this type of implantation, all without IVF.

So what’s happening here? They still don’t know, but two major theories are offered, one stranger than the other. Either the implanted ovary starts ovulating and somehow the egg migrates into the bloodstream and finds its way to the niche where it belongs, locating the fallopian tubes and moving into the uterus. Or the hormonal set-up from the implanted ovarian tissue triggers something in the system, bringing the seemingly destroyed ovary that is still down in the original  place back to life and pumping. In either case, it is miraculous.

Once you are at the beach you can photograph crabs (the German name Krebs denotes both the crustacean and cancer), cool off, and think about the mysteries of science……

….or about the fact that if all these miracle children learn not to giggle, they can partake in Haydn’s Kindersynfonie  ….

 

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Hide and Seek

On Monday we mentioned evidence that face recognition follows different rules than other forms of recognition and is served by specialized brain tissue. But what are those rules?

The first part of the answer lies in the fact that we don’t recognized faces by looking at the individual features. Instead, we recognize faces by perceiving complex relationships – the spacing of the eyes relative to the length of the nose and so on.

Common sense says that you best disguise a face by changing or hiding the features (unless you have access to a costume featured  in today’s cover ….). It turns out, though, that you can much more successfully disguise someone by changing familiar proportions into something else. For example, a hat pulled low, a cap or bandana, or bangs added, hiding the forhead and therefore changing the face height, are extremely effective as a disguise.

But it is not just the relationships. People recognize faces by comparing the relationships of the face in question to their understanding of an average or typical face with its relationships. As a result, people are actually more successful in recognizing portraits that distort the face, slightly exaggerating the ways in which the face differs from the average face. You can take this too far, and lose recognition, but a slight charicature helps recognition.

In fact, with a bit of computer manipulation you an distort a photograph by slightly exaggerating the relationships. You then show people the actual (accurate!) photograph of someone and then the distorted one and ask them which photo is a better likeness. People choose the exaggerated photo, apparently thinking that the inaccurate image is more accurate.

Of course, caricatures are perhaps more common in editorial cartoons than in fine art. However, modern portraiture has really committed to showing the essence of a person rather than his or her photographic likeness. Maybe then, the modern artists are more sensitive to psychological mechanisms and less to the demands of visual accuracy.

https://www.wired.com/2011/07/ff_caricature/.

 

 

 

 

I came across an article about (gorgeous)photographs of transgender people who seem to exaggerate stereotypic notions of femininity or masculinity in terms of outfits, make-up, body shapes and musculature. I wonder if we are seeing a parallel here with regard to being recognizable – given how little society recognizes them, in every meaning of the word, maybe slight caricature is the visual equivalent of “woman!”  or “man!”  – just wondering.

http://hyperallergic.com/357978/photographic-portraits-of-transgender-life-in-the-west-village/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Photographic%20Portraits%20of%20Transgender%20Life%20in%20the%20West%20Village&utm_content=Photographic%20Portraits%20of%20Transgender%20Life%20in%20the%20West%20Village+CID_02932d0611b8b29450010cedb98b119e&utm_source=HyperallergicNewsletter&utm_term=Read%20More

 

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Body Shapes

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The New York Times provided a fun little exercise of guessing type of olympic sport associated with certain body shapes some days back. For some reason the link does not like to be posted, so you are on your own finding it in the NYT archives…

However, it made me think of body shapes in general and the eternal question why women try to conform to any particular era’s expectations of looks. The link below gives you a recap of the shifts occurring only during the last 100 years – often with funny comments attached. http://greatist.com/grow/100-years-womens-body-image  I particularly liked the quote from Tina Fey in Bossypants: “Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits.”

All of this would be, of course, just another nutty social convention, if it weren’t for the psychological and sometimes physiological cost attached to it for those who cannot escape the pressure to conform. Eating disorders have skyrocketed during times when extremes of thins were in fashion (for girls and boys, both – see report on gender, comorbidity and mortality rates (scary!) here: https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/prevalence-and-correlates-eating-disorders-adolescents) and culturally defined ideals have excluded minorities, whose shapes of course never ruled the day.

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If you google female body shapes you get mostly porn or self help tips for, and I quote, “beauty and eternal sexiness.” Here is a slightly more scientific account: http://theconversation.com/is-there-really-a-single-ideal-body-shape-for-women-38432

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Let’s hope the olympic sports men and women provide some different focus!

 

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The Zika Virus (again)

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I mistakenly sent this draft out before finishing it on Sunday. Maybe it’s the heat that makes me so incompetent a n d  cranky. Add to that reading about nasty viruses here to stay. Add to that selected phrases on the history of the virus penned in the World Health Organization’s report  – in its entirety here:

http://www.portal.pmnch.org/emergencies/zika-virus/articles/one-year-outbreak/en/

And I quote: “One year into the Zika outbreak: how an obscure disease became a global health emergency.” One year? That thing has been around – documented – since 1947. True outbreaks, when hopping from Africa to Micronesia and then French Polynesia, occurred around 2013/14, with 70% of the population of some islands infected. Guillain-Barré syndrome, a debilitating neurological disorder caused by the – now probably mutated virus – already documented. (Microcephaly, the birth defect, also found in retrospective research – nobody associated it with Zika at the times.) But now it hits countries we travel to or live in….it reached Brazil in 2014 with the World Sprint championship canoe races.

Late 2014 we have an explosion of cases all across Brazil. Within a year, the virus had been detected in nearly every country or territory infested with Aedes aegypti, the principal mosquito species that transmits Zika, dengue, and chikungunya. People’s lack of immunity and the behavior of the day-feeding, water breeding mosquito contribute. And I quote: “The mosquitos flourish in the litter, open ditches, clogged drains, containers for water storage, old tyre dumps, and crowded flimsy dwellings typically seen in urban and periurban areas where population growth has outstripped the capacity to construct essential infrastructure, like piped water and sanitation.” Population growth outstripped capacity for infrastructure? Hello? What about lack of funding and political will for emptying shantytowns and building safe environments?

Ok, let’s be fair. After the report prominently mentions that caring for a child with microcephaly costs $10,000.000 for a lifetime it acknowledges that in most countries this burden falls on the poor who have no access to healthcare in the first place and need to store water in containers, the ideal breeding grounds for mosquitos.

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And here we see it in Puerto Rico and Florida, http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/zika-virus-outbreak/u-s-declares-health-emergency-puerto-rico-due-zika-virus-n630131 – states, incidentally, that rely economically on a tourist industry. Any bets on travel plan changes?

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The GMO Controversy

· The Myth of Frankenfood ·

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And you thought you’d be safe from politics for a bit. We have to tackle the question of genetically modified organisms, though, when we think about our agrarian food supply, don’t we? There are so many myths floating around and, admittedly, it is such a complex topic that it is hard to figure out what to think.

The most informative, reasoned, understandable treatment of the issue that I have found can be read here:

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-gmo-controversy/

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It does not touch the question of whether or not GMO foods should be labeled. I am all in favor of that since I think it is important to make informed decisions – even if the organic food folks are now a bit worried that people who read “NO GMO” labels of non-organic food will feel they are making a healthy decision and need not spend more to buy organic. I don’t care if the GMO industry wants no labels because an ignorant public has bought into fear mongering – that’s their problem.

DSC_0693 copyThere seems to be no evidence whatsoever at this point that GMO engineered food is bad for you or for the animals fed with it. People have crossbred for centuries, and now they are doing it more efficiently and with required hoops of testing. What is the net environmental impact, you might ask? Do herbicide resistant crops increase the use of herbicides? Yes they do, but they also reduce the need for tilling the soil, which is bad for it and releases CO2 into the environment. It becomes a question of agricultural diversification – if you plant a mix of GMO and non-GMO crops you are ahead in terms of producing more food and doing so economically, without hurting the environment. The same is true for insecticide engineered crops: they reduce the need to spray those poisons, but they might increase the number of resistant bugs. Note that BT, the insecticide from a bacterium that has been added, is widely used by organic farmers in its original form since it is deemed environmentally safe. Again, sustainable strategies would call for a mix of both kinds of crops.DSC_0864 copy

In addition to increasing our chances of feeding a starving population in the future, GMO crops could already have a major impact. Take Golden Rice, for example, rice with inserted beta-carotene. It would solve the Vitamin A deficiency problem for millions of children, who go blind or die from not having enough of it. Nitrogen fixation is another plus of the GM technology – plants get it from the soil, depleting it and requiring expensive and environmentally burdening fertilization. If corn and wheat could fix their own nitrogen there could be a huge increase in staple foods for a hungry world. Why, then, are we so very much opposed?

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And here a beauty from van Gogh’s wheat field series:Vincent_van_Gogh,_Wheat_Field,_June_1888,_Oil_on_canvas

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Linnaeus’ Desire

· Tulips Galore ·

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A few years back I worked on a montage series called Linnaeus’ Desire. You can see some samples on my other website www.friderikeheuer.com. This series paid hommage to the 18th century Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus. He was the first to frame principles for defining natural genera and species of organisms and to create a uniform system for naming them (binomial nomenclature.)

In particular, it was the botanical section of Systema Naturae that built Linnaeus’s scientific reputation. After reading essays on sexual reproduction in plants by Vaillant and by German botanist Rudolph Jacob Camerarius, Linnaeus had become convinced of the idea that all organisms reproduce sexually. As a result, he expected each plant to possess male and female sexual organs (stamens and pistils), or “husbands and wives,” as he also put it.

This “sexual system,” as Linnaeus called it, became extremely popular, though certainly not only because of its practicality but also because of its erotic connotations and its allusions to contemporary gender relations. You could now talk sex when you pretended to talk about gardens!

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French political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the system for his “Huit lettres élémentaires sur la botanique à Madame Delessert” (1772; “Eight Letters on the Elements of Botany Addressed to Madame Delessert”). English physician Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, used Linnaeus’s sexual system for his poem “The Botanic Garden” (1789), which caused an uproar among contemporaries for its explicit passages. My montages combined photographs of plants with representations of the human body, hoping to recapture some of Linnaeus’ passionate imagination.

Tulips lend themselves to illustrate Linnaeus’ points; in addition, the desire for them – Tulpenwoede or tulip mania – caused something akin to a sexual frenzy, and ruined many a Dutch life in the 1600s due to failed market speculation. High noon in the tulip fields…..(yes, your’s truly.)

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Or so I thought, until I read this, realizing now how capitalism’s mechanisms struck once again…..

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/economic-history

 

Here is Jan Brueghel the Younger delivering a satire on tulip speculation: count the monkeys….1c886c3380a77a03c98870150f22b778

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