AMUR AMOUR

A baby Amur leopard was born last month in Serengeti Park in Hodenhagen, Germany. She made her first public appearance on Friday December 4.

Amurs, or Far East leopard have some very interesting characteristics. While their summer coats are about 2.5 inches long, their winter coats grow to 4 inches. A beautiful animal with widely spaced rosettes (“spots”) with thick border, Amurs have been reported to leap nearly 20 feet horizontally and 10 feet vertically in their pursuit of prey.

Unlike the better known African leopards, Amur leopards live in the temperate forests of Russia’s far eastern regions. Nearly 80% of their natural habitat has been destroyed during the past two decades. As a result, Amur leopards are critically endangered. It is estimated that less than 40 remain in the wild. At last count, there were 34.

Zoos may represent the last, and best hope, of preserving this magnificent species. This means that the final survivors will live in captivity.

Zoos often lead to conflicting thoughts and feelings in people. I know this is something some of us discussed during our visit to the Bronx Zoo. Given the critically endangered state of the Amur leopard – and other aniamals – what role do you think zoos should play in their preservation? Should the animals be placed on public display? Should they be maintained separately in more “respectful” environments?

Or should the last remaining members of the species be allowed to die in dignity in the last remaining vestiges of their natural environment?

BAD ECONOMY GOOD FOR GATORS

"Crocodile rockin' is something shocking, and your feet just can't keep still..." Elton John

Especially in those Crocs, made of real Croc. Get 'em while you can.

The New York Times reported that the downturn in the economy has had an unanticipated consequence on alligator farming. Sales of products that use alligator skin are down. Fashionistas who may have spend upwards of $12,000 on an alligator skin wristwatch strap in the past, are now hesitating. Times are tough all over I guess.

Alligator farming is tightly regulated by the US department of Wildlife to maintain a wild population of one to two million. Farmers must raise the alligators from birth, meaning that eggs have to be taken (stolen) from angry gator mommas in swampy areas who are fought off with long poles. The babies are expensive to raise, and as they get larger they frequently bite each other. Bites make their skin relatively worthless ("Yes madam, that is a scar on that handbag - hmm... perhaps I can let that one go for less, say, $5,000?"). Few make it past four feet in length before they are slaughtered.

Men enter the tanks and kill the gators with a quick, sharp stab through the head into the brain. The alligators are skinned, their meat is sent to restaurants and pet food manufacturers. For years, their skins were sent to one of about a dozen tanneries around the world that specialized in processing the leather of reptile "exotics" for fashion houses such as Hermes, Cartier, and of course, Gucci.

During the past decade, the fashion house Hermes has been buying many of the exotic tanneries. Hermes has fought for lower prices for the skin from farmers - often at prices below the cost of raising the alligators. At the same time, they have raised the market prices of tanned hides to ridiculously high levels. That "buy cheap, sell high" business strategy, in combination with the economic recession, has created a crash in the market for alligator goods. As one buyer for Neiman Marcus, the high end department store, is quoted as saying: "‘I’m not going to spend $4,000 for an alligator shoe.’ (Gee, and I thought I was the only one who thought such a thing.)

High prices, and the economic recession, have caused sales of alligator skin fashion accessories to fall dramatically. That's good for the gators, but not for the small farmers who raise them. Despite recent signs of an economic upturn, many alligator farms are closing do to losses of upwards of $15,000 a month. One farmer is opening up a tourist zoo along the highway. Others are leaving the industry altogether. It's hard to continue working on a farm that loses money while growing a crop that can bite your arm off.

I'm sure many of us wandered the dinosaur halls of the American Museum of Natural History thinking about how cool it would be if Jurassic Park were a reality. To be able to see the living, breathing bodies that brought movement to those fossilized bones we observed with wide eyes and slackened jaws. After reading this article, however I'm glad the big guys went extinct. It's both sad and demeaning to think how they too, would have wound up as fashion accessories.

"A T-Rex handbag, madame? Or perhaps I can interest the gentleman in a matched set of Stegosaurus luggage?"

We've had benefit concerts for farmers called "Farm Aid". Maybe its time for a benefit concert to help preserve the alligator population. We'll call it (pinky to mouth) - - - - Gator Aid.

PLASTIC GARBAGE PART 2

I hope you had an enjoyable weekend. I know I did. I went down to Boston to visit my son at school, and spent the night with my sister before we get together again this week for Thanksgiving.

I stopped for gas on the way out of Boston, on Boylston Street, right outside of Fenway Park. I took this photo while I was pumping my gas. The image of plants of questionable health surrounded by an island of plastic bottles was pretty disturbing. Particularly because some trash cans were readily available just to the left of the pump. Add to that the gasoline price chart hovering over it all - reminding us of the ugly side of fossil fuels, and the use of oil in the manufacturing of plastic. (In fact a study out of Sweden suggest that there is a strong link between the use of oil to manufacture plastic and global warming - everything is interconnected.)

I think we all felt a little overwhelmed last week when we discussed the floating island of trash in the Pacific. There was this sense of impotence; what could we, as individuals do about a problem so vast and so distant? This little mess made me realize - more that ever - that we truly can make a difference through small, individual actions. After taking the picture, I disposed of the trash in the container. On the drive home, I stopped along I89 to pick up some trash someone had thoughtlessly tossed out of their car. These are small actions all of us can do, to make our immediate environment a little nice, a little cleaner, and a little more beautiful.

Keep this in mind the next time you see a scrap of paper, or a wrapper of some kind lying on the ground somewhere around our beautiful campus. Don't take the beauty that surround us for granted. Be a part in maintaining the beauty of your immediate surroundings.

This action may not seem as dramatic as cleaning up the Pacific Ocean. But it will have an immediate, noticeable impact on our little community and environment. And who knows - if you spread the word, perhaps a new movement will be born.

THE PACIFIC OCEAN: THE WORLD'S GARBAGE DUMP

There is a stretch of "plastic-soup" that starts about 500 miles off the California coast, and continues west past Hawaii, extending nearly to Japan. Covering a length of ocean nearly twice the size of the United States, and in places nearly twice the size of Texas in width, this plastic island - not quite thick enough to walk on, but thick enough to serve as a raft of sorts - is made up of our plastic garbage. Gallon milk jugs, plastic wrappers, plastic shells that surround virtually every product we buy - millions of tons of plastic, held in place for the ever moving ocean currents.

For us, it's out of sight, out of mind. But not for the wild life.

Enter Chris Jordan. Jordan is a nature photographer "best known for his large-scale images of excess, rendering unimaginable statistics like the millions of pieces of plastic dumped into the ocean each hour". Pictured above is one image from Jordan's photo essay on the effects of the plastic dump on the birds of the Midway Atoll - an island located in the center of the Pacific garbage patch. I suggest you double click on the image to get a really good look at it.

The birds on the island eat the plastic, perhaps mistaking the fragments for the floating bells of ocean jellies ("Jellyfish"). Inevitably, the plastic clogs their esophagus, their gut, and digestive tract resulting in the birds' deaths.

Jordan's photo essay documents the decaying bodies of the birds, without moving a single feather - recording their final image just as he finds them on the island. Decaying flesh amidst a whorl of feather and hollow bone, and a body full of plastic.

To put this in some kind of perspective, you should know that this island is located in the middle of a remote marine sanctuary, dedicated to the preservation of marine life. It is located about halfway across the ocean. The closest continental land is approximately 2,000 miles away.

You can't get much further from human presence than this spot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Yet there we are. The Human Stain. Our signature, found in the middle of a dead baby bird, on a remote island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Koyaanisqatsi.

LIVES OF A CELL

Sophomores read Lewis Thomas' classic essay Lives Of A Cell this weekend. In this essay, Thomas reflects on the precise mechanism of cell dynamics - how the structure of molecules and organelles relates to their specific functions.

At the end of the essay Thomas jolts the reader with a question that initially seems preposterous: Is our planet, the earth, most like a single self-contained cell?

Is it a question of proportion? Are the organisms that inhabit the biosphere analogous to the molecules and organelles that transport, communicate, package, send, receive, read, translate, tranmit, decode, and create new material within the cell?

Is it all merely a question of scale and frame of reference? Are we the fleas on the elephant - incapable of seeing the whole resulting from the sum of its parts?

Sophomores typically find it a difficult concept to fathom. The earth? A cell? How can that possibly be?

Watching this video, in which digital animation recreates some familiar structures and functions of a cell - reading the genetic code, building proteins at the ribosome, the Golgi packaging the proteins in vesicles, moving these proteins through the cell membrane, and transporting them throughout the body - made me think once again of Thomas' koan (mind puzzle). For if the earth is indeed a single "cell" in a macro-universe, what is the the entire "organism"?

What hope is there for us to see, let alone comprehend, the elephant as a whole? And if we do, will we understand it, or will it forever be a mystery?

I look forward to reading your reflections on this.

CHIMERAS

Let me show you something interesting just before we move away from botany and into Zoology. A few weeks ago, a gardener in Devon, England was harvesting apples from his apple trees and was stunned to discover the apple pictured above. This Golden Delicious apple looks like half of a red apple was attached to half of a green apple. So perfect is the division in color, that some might be tempted to declare it a hoax. But this of course is not the case. The explanation is much more interesting - and bizarre.

This stunning apple is the result of a genetic mutation - a 1,000,000 to 1 occurrence that scientists call a chimera (KI - mera). In Greek mythology, Chimeras were monsters made up of parts from different animals. There are chimeras in the natural world, but they are not made up of parts from different animals. They are made from different combinations of genetic information from the same parents of an animal. Or in this case, a plant.

Chimeras form following the moment of fertilization. Two eggs are fertilized by two sperm, and form two zygotes. Normally, two zygotes will go on to form two distinct individuals. In rare cases though, the two zygotes fuse into a single mega-zygote that goes on to form a single individual containing all of the genetic information from two sperm (or in the case of our apple, two pollen spores) and two eggs. After the resulting zygote's first cell division from one cell to two cells, all future populations of cells and tissue will contain the genetic material and characteristics of the original set of parential genetic material that it has developed from. One side will show characterstics from sperm/egg combo 1, and the other side will result from sperm/egg combo 2. Two cells "split down the middle" so to speak. Then they continue to divide: four, eight, sixteen, thirty two - etc. Up through the creation of an entire organism.

Just to address the question on everyone's mind, no, this does not occur in humans. People are not split down the middle, i.e., brown hair/red hair, light complexion/dark complexion. (Though there are rare instances when odd things do occur. More on that at a later point.....)

Chimeras are indeed rare, but not unheard of. Several years ago while spending a summer in Maine, I visited the "Oceanarium" in Bar Harbor. The prize of that summer's catch was a lobster that had the typical lobster coloring along one side of its body, and a blue color along the other half of its body. The division in coloration ran lengthwise from the head to the tail. This chimera was a star attraction at the Oceanarium, and even made it into the national news. The odds of finding a completely blue lobster are about 2,000,000:1. The odds of finding a chimera in a lobster population is about 1,000,000:1. What were the odds of finding this blue chimera lobster? I'll let you do the math. The probability was small indeed. Even smaller if you figure in the odds of catching it. But even unimaginably small probabilities do make themselves seen when populations are large enough. And in a world that is connected electronically, these discoveries become known and shared instantaineously between continents.

Chimeras serve no adaptive purpose. They are simply the result of random genetic mutations and combinations. Sometimes, 1,000,000 to 1 odds become an individual's 100%.

The Wild Things

I’ve been thinking a lot about our trip to NYC since getting back. It really was a lot of fun; very enjoyable, and so many things to think about and reflect on. There were many highlights for me; I certainly won’t forget the “wows” when everyone got their initial glimpse of the Apatosaurus and T. rex skeletons. (Similar responses were noted at the Hall Of Oceans, for the model of the Blue Whale) Certainly the rhinosaurus, and gorillas at the zoo are always thrilling. And I'll always have many fond amusing memories just from our travels together. Blue Jay carrying his dinner proudly over to my table to share that he got his New York steak, and Caleigh texting Maggie – one seat away in the movie theater for example. Some moments gave me new insights into students. Lui looking at the Indian brass and artwork reflecting on her semester in Ledoc and saying how it was “weird…now I understand what this stuff means” and Caleigh, applying her knowledge of equine care to the giraffes; observing and hypothesizing that they might need medical care. Ben, whose interest in everything herpetological was exceeded only by his interest in anything edible. And rest assured I will never look at Capt. James T. Kirk in quite the same way again.

I also appreciated how many of you commented on your enjoyment and appreciation of the dioramas. It was Chris’s succinct comment about the dioramas (he thought they were “wicked awesome”) that really set me off on a great deal of thought and reflection about them. I agree with Chris, they were “wicked awesome”. But I haven’t always felt that way.

I first saw the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History when I was a kid of maybe six or eight. Growing up in Brooklyn, I went on my own school field trips to the museum, and later as an adult I brought my own kids to the museum when they were about that same age. Throughout that period of time, I must admit that I never really cared much for the dioramas. I thought of them as being fairly dull and lifeless. Antique relics of a bygone era of museum science. (or art). The dioramas were designed to make exotic, foreign life forms accessible to the masses. Keep in mind that most people had never seen live giraffes, lions, or elephants until the 19th century. Looking at the dioramas as a kid (and as a young adult) I saw an antique exhibition of inanimate, rather than living, objects. Mere stuffed relics from a bygone era.

Returning to the museum with you, allowed me to re-visit and see these dioramas with new eyes (well, older ones anyhow). I now appreciated the tremendous artistic detail that went into each the recreation of each animal’s habitat in each diorama. I was stunned at how each diorama was designed to capture a dramatic moment in the narrative of the animals’ lives. Think about the Ostrich, its wings outstretched, protecting its young from predators. Or the Cheetahs on the prowl through the forest. The two male Alaska Moose, engaged in combat thrusting his rack into his competitor’s thorax. Mountain Gorillas, with the alpha male proudly beating his chest, re-asserting his dominance over his band, or troop. And the gentle Nile River ecosystem, with its animal communities all gathering to sip the precious liquid of life.

Looking at these dioramas now, I was re-awakened to their beauty, but I also experienced a new a sense of sadness. In a span fifty years, many of these creatures have become endangered. It now seems quite possible – if not probable – that some may become critically endangered, to the point of possible extinction. Many seem to be on the verge of disappearing from the earth. The Hall Of Oceans boasted in its diorama that the polar bear is the “top predator of this icy world”. But its world of ice is melting at an alarming rate – a rate far greater than recent predictions. And polar bears – while still plentiful – are facing extraordinarily adverse conditions, and may become extinct by the end of this century. Polar bears may live on frozen land, but they are land creatures - not sea creatures. Their habitat is melting away beneath them. Adrift on glaciers, polar bears struggle to swim increasingly long distances between arctic land masses. If a top predator disappears – even one that lords over an icy world - its surrounding ecosystem collapses along with it.

Perhaps one day one or more of you will return to the museum with your own students, or your own children. I suppose you will reminisce about our trip to New York way back in the year 2009. No doubt you’ll laugh at the quaint gasoline powered vehicles in which we drove down to the city, the flat screen upon which a “film” called Where The Wild Things Are was projected, and perhaps you'll even laugh at those little boxes called iPods that used to play your music. (How much longer before we all have our personalized playlists etched on a chip in our heads?)

Your students or children will no doubt also express amazement at the Apatosaurus and T. Rex skeletons. And as you make your way down from the fourth floor to the second and first floors that house the dioramas you will no doubt stop, and re-experience the wonder. But what will you say when the child you’re with asks you if you REALLY got to see a live gorilla or a giant white polar bear? How will you answer their questions about why they all died – or how people could have allowed them to disappear? Looking at all the technology that will no doubt surround you in the 21st century, how will you respond when they ask, “Why didn’t people do more to save them”?

What will go through your mind, 40 years from now, as you re-visit and gaze upon the same dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. What will it be like to be an adult, knowing that your childhood was the last during which kids grew up with the knowledge that somewhere in the world, in a place far, far away there existed a wondrous world of ice and mysterious forested jungle - places Where The Wild Things Were?