Helen FieldsScience Writer

A lot of endurance athletes have some kind of training regimen that includes being at high altitudes. When you’re at high altitudes, there’s not very much oxygen. That stimulates your body to make extra red blood cells and otherwise adapt to hypoxia. It’s the same kind of benefit cyclists get from blood doping (only it’s not against the rules). Blood doping, in case you need a review – I did – is when you get yourself extra blood, either by taking someone else’s, banking your own and injecting it before a competition, or taking erythropoeitin (EPO) to stimulate red blood cell production.

This week for ScienceNOW, I wrote about a study on people who have a particular genetic mutation that means their bodies always act like they’re low on oxygen. It might help suggest an upper limit to how much benefit athletes can get out of staying at high altitude.

A number of national teams spent time at high elevations before the World Cup – but that may have had more to do with acclimitization, because four of the nine stadiums are over 4,000 feet. If you’re going to run for an hour and a half plus possible extra time at 5,500 feet, you don’t want it be your first day after coming up from sea level.

For the latest issue of Science, I wrote a short item about giraffes. People have said for a long time that giraffes are the only mammals that can’t swim, but nobody had actually tested this. Zoos aren’t interested in having their prized African mammals tossed in the water, just to see what happens. So the researchers I wrote about used computers to build a virtual giraffe, then flood it. It wasn’t graceful, but it ought to be able to float and therefore to swim, they concluded.

In a year and a half as a full-time freelancer, writing articles all the time, this is the third piece I’ve had come out in print. I mean, actual paper that you can hold in your hands. (The others were in AAA Living magazine and The Chronicle of Higher Education.) Everything else has been online only. That says a lot about the changing media world, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, that means it’s a little inconvenient to read this one – you need to find a paper copy of the June 25 issue of Science, or, if you’re a subscriber, you can read it here.

Photo: Patrick Giraud

Ecologists have struggled for years with the question of why tropical forests are so diverse. There are all kinds of hypotheses going around out there – I read papers on many of them in a class in the fall of 1996 and must admit, I’ve forgotten them. Except for one, because I just had to relearn it: Baby trees can’t grow too close to other trees of the same species, because if they do, their enemies – insect herbivores, viruses, whatever – will find them. So if I’m a tree of species X, I won’t do as well near another tree of species X, because special disease Y that only likes tree species X will find me and kill me. If all the species have the same problem, they all have to be spaced out and leave open space for other species to fill. Result: diversity.

Of course, this hypothesis is also proposed for trees in temperate forests, so I still don’t know why they’re less diverse.

But anyway. Today for ScienceNOW I wrote about a related hypothesis, about why some trees are common and some are rare: Maybe the common ones are able to get common because they’re not as susceptible to natural enemies. Maybe they’re more resistant to disease or herbivores or something, so they can survive the experience of being close to another tree of the same species.

For the paper I wrote about today, the researchers took advantage of a giant, long-term forest plot on Barro Colorado Island, a Smithsonian research site in Panama. In the early 1980s, a team laid out a 50-hectare plot and mapped every tree with a diameter of one centimeter or larger. The plot has almost 350 species of trees and shrubs.

In 2001, they took it a step further. A team of field assistants worked for 10 months to mark 20,000 one-meter-squared subplots. In each one, they measured every seedling that was 20 cm or taller and marked it with a bird band from a company that supplies poultry farms – chicken bands are made for mucky, organic environments. “The numbers really hold up in the tropics,” says ecologist Liza Comita, of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. Every year or so, the seedlings are censused again.

She used those data to look at seedling survival over five years, and found…well, I don’t want to give away the ending. Read my story here. Credit for the funny headline goes to editor Mitch Leslie.

Photo: Liza Comita

A few weeks ago I got a call from Haley Smith Kingsland, a student at Stanford who was getting ready to be the blogger for a research cruise on the USCGC Healy. She was looking for advice, based on my six weeks on the Healy last year. So, after a winter getting gussied up in dry dock, Healy is out on the ocean again. This cruise started in Dutch Harbor last week, and they’ve already gone up through the Bering Strait to the Arctic. The science mission has something to do with figuring out how climate change will affect the Arctic ecosystem.

Read Haley’s one-woman blog here. It’s all her – the pictures, the writing, everything. Whew. She’s also tweeting and writing on her own blog (in theory, anyway – she hasn’t posted since heading up to Alaska).

In other cruise news, some of the folks who I was on the Healy with last year are out in the Bering Sea right now on the R/V Thompson; read chief scientist Dave Shull’s blog posts. You may remember him from the epic tales Under the Ice and The Story of Thorium.

Today I got an e-mail from a friend, with the subject “You know EVERYONE!”:

There’s one person at [place of work] who I like. Guess who it is?
[Person I know]. She says hi

(I don’t really know everybody, but I like to pretend I do. Read about it.)

This afternoon I was driving to have dinner with my family for Father’s Day. I wanted to turn right, but some teenagers were in the crosswalk. A black Prius had come from the other direction on the same road as me and was waiting to turn across the same crosswalk. That car got there first, so I was willing to let it go first when the pedestrians were gone. As it went by I saw the handicapped tag, and then I saw the driver. Hey, it’s Felipe! I went to elementary school (and middle school and high school) with his daughter and visited him and his wife in Mali in 2005. Ooooold friends. Driving on the same street as me.

The other day I was at the National Museum of Natural History and thought the elephant was looking particularly fine:

This enormous bull elephant was shot in Angola in 1955 by Hungarian big game hunter Josef J. Fénykövi. Read all about it on the museum’s website. It took 16 months to mount the skin for exhibition. Fun fact: the tusks are fiberglass casts. The real ones are in storage because they’re too heavy for this mount.

If you want a serious taste of a bygone era – you know, an era when someone sees the biggest elephant track ever and thinks, “I should shoot that” – read the account of the hunt Fénykövi wrote for Sports Illustrated.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Today on Science Careers – a part of the Science magazine website that’s about, you know, careers – I have a profile of Josh Cinner, a guy who studies coral reefs. Only he’s not a marine biologist. Tricky, eh? He’s a social scientist who has spent a lot of time in villages in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, asking people about their relationships with the coral reefs they fish, and he’s also worked in Kenya, Madagascar, the Seychelles, and other such exotic places.

My ploy to get Science to send me to the Seychelles failed, but otherwise I had a good time reporting this story. It was really interesting to talk to someone with such a different perspective on coral reefs. Cinner makes a point that’s obvious when you think about it, but I’d never thought of it before: if you want to manage fish, you actually have to manage people. The fish are going to do their thing. It’s the people you have to worry about.

One of the things Cinner says you have to find out when you’re deciding how to manage reefs is people’s beliefs about what affects the ocean. “Do they understand that human actions are a critical part of shaping the condition of the coral reef or do they think it’s some sort of supernatural power?” he asks. It makes a difference to how you try to manage the reef. If people believe that only the gods control the oceans, then all your talk about overfishing is going to go nowhere. “It’s like telling people in Australia, ‘Go fish the crap out of the reef, bomb it, do whatever you want, just make sure you pray beforehand.’ That’s as much sense as it makes to tell people to preserve reefs if their world view is that the only thing they can do to preserve it is to pray.”

Here’s the profile.

photo: Mila Zinkova

I know everybody. Ok, not really everybody. But for years, friends who go places with me have known that we will probably run into someone I know. It doesn’t matter where – festival, concert, national park, whatever. I don’t know if I know an abnormally large number of people, or if the people I know all have the exact same taste in events, or if I have unusual recall for familiar faces, or what. But I do know that my world gets brightened pretty regularly by running into people who I’m happy to see. (Fortunately, I also like most of the people I know.)

So my friend and neighbor Sheila suggested I blog about this. I’m skeptical – I mean, how interesting can it be? It also seems kind of self-aggrandizing. Omg, I’m so awesome! I know everybody! But the truth is, I might actually know everybody. And Sheila claims to really like these stories and to think they are worth blogging about. Also, almost every time we go to a restaurant or bar in the neighborhood, which is often, I see someone I know. So, here you go, Sheila.

This is actually a subset of the “I know everybody” genre of story – in which two other people discover that they both know me.

Earlier today, my friend MJ wrote to me on google chat:

We’re in [her employer]’s knitting club right now, and [she forgot to type the name, but it was Heather] said “I have a friend who’s knitting a stegosaurus”

I said “that must be Helen Fields”

Of course it was me. I know MJ professionally and Heather through Washington Revels. They both knew I was knitting a stegosaurus because I can’t help bragging on facebook about all my cool new knitting projects. (Stegosaurus pattern here.)

To make the world even smaller, I would like to point out that I knew both Heather and MJ’s significant others before I (or they) knew Heather or MJ. Heather’s husband went to high school with my brother; I was friends with MJ’s boyfriend in high school.

Update, 7/29: Here’s that stegosaurus.