Helen FieldsScience Writer

Last week, I wrote for ScienceNOW about a way of estimating how many species of arthropods there are in the tropics. Arthropods are bugs, basically – insects, spiders, and other crunchy things. Entomologists throw around numbers for this – sometimes as high as 30 or 100 million, usually more in the a-few-million range. The paper I wrote about tries to come up with a better estimate, using a method called uncertainty modeling that you can read about in my story.

Entomologists base all of these numbers on beetles. Basically, they’re coming up with some kind of number – don’t ask me about units – that describes to what extent beetles specialize on a tree species. Like, do beetles generally eat the leaves (buds, pollen, whatever) of only one species, or can they eat stuff from a lot of different kind of trees? You do a bunch of field work, come up with a number for that, then wrangle it through an equation that corrects for things like the fact that not all beetles are herbivores or live in trees and not all arthropods are beetles.

This meant a lot of math. This is some of what I had to puzzle out so I could write the story:

Hello, universe? I quit ecology. I am a journalist now. I understood there would be no further math. (Ok, this was actually kind of fun.)

Art: I scanned a little section of my written-on copy of the paper.

And, finally, an extra-cool feature of the American Museum of Natural History: It connects right up to a subway station. So if you’re going on a rainy day, you don’t even have to go outside. Unless you’re me, you fail to locate the underground entrance to the museum, and you go out the wrong exit of the subway station into the rain. That’s ok – it feels a little more impressive to go in through the big doors on Central Park West.

It’s a cool subway station, with decorations that relate to its location. The downtown platform has bronze casts of fossils, and the uptown platform has beautiful mosaics. The definitive blogging about this subway station has been done by Grrlscientist. She wrote about the history of the station (here) and then took pictures of most of the art (here). But here are some of my pictures.

You can’t really tell on this picture, but that whale tail connects to a whale body on the floor.

On the stairs up to the uptown platform:

And the other set of stairs:

I missed a train because I was trying to get a good picture of people going down those stairs.

And, finally, lookit this cute snail:

Aww. Snail.

Well, I think that is now all I have to say about AMNH for now. I’m ready to go back – I never got to a lot of the museum.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Today I went on an outing of the D.C. Science Writers Association to Patuxent River Park – a local park along the Patuxent River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. We got a little archaeology tour and a boat trip. And a baby bird. Oh yes – a baby bird. That’s the part that’s supposed to keep you reading to the end.

My half of the group started with an archaeology tour of a place called Mount Calvert. “Mount” is, of course, a completely silly term in that part of the world. Yes, it is higher than the water. It’s even higher than some of the nearby land. But not by much.

It has a long and cool history. American Indians lived there thousands of years ago. In 1684, it became an English colonial town; in 1699, it was made the county seat of Prince George’s County, a position it held for just a few decades, but enough to litter the ground with colonial trash. Hardly anybody lived there; it was basically the place where you went because the court was in session. (The bars were also in session.) After the county seat was moved, Mount Calvert reverted to agriculture and was a tobacco plantation, worked by slave labor.

The plantation house from 1789 is still standing, with a little display inside on some of the items archaeologists have found there. It’s a lovely brick Federalist house. Being on a little rise does give them a bit of a view down the Patuxent toward the Bay.

Archaeologists were at work outside. The whole area is divided into a grid (with giant nails marking the corners). As they dig down, they dump shovelfuls of soil into a sieve to see what’s in them – the occasional bit of pipestem or a nail, but mostly rocks. In this pit, they’ve gotten through the loose soil and are now poking around trying to find the postholes from some old buildings.

Someone asked what they do when they’re done with one of the holes. They fill it in, but first, they often go to the bank, get a roll of 2010 pennies, and scatter them around so future generations of archaeologists will know they’ve been there. How cute is that?

Here’s some of the stuff they’ve dug up – presumably thrown away by residents, not buried by jokester archaeologists:

That’s a couple of pipestem fragments, a hand-forged nail, and a chunk of prehistoric pottery.

For the next stage of the trip, we left archaeology and turned to nature, with a boat tour of a little creek that feeds into the Patuxent. It’s a lovely place – all that water and all that sky, with a strip of green in between.

We saw a beaver lodge, lots of herons, and quite a crop of ospreys.

The guy who lead the boat tour, naturalist Greg Kearns, has been working at this park for decades. His job is park stuff – renting out kayaks and driving the boat and whatnot – but he’s also spent a lot of time making the area welcoming to ospreys. Ospreys are eagles that fish. They’re big. They have a wing span on the order of five feet. They’re supposed to nest in trees, but these days, they mostly nest on handy little nest platforms that humans build for them. So this creek is full of this guy’s platforms. At this time of year, the moms are sitting on the eggs. Both parents take care of the babies. This nest had two adults sitting on it:

Can you see their two heads sticking up? Actually, you can see a lot of the body of the one on the right; the other head is just to the left of that. (The thing poking up on the left is part of the nest.) Kearns is involved in bigger osprey-saving programs, too; he’s sent osprey chicks off to other states to help get populations back. Ospreys, like all birds of prey, were in a lot of trouble for a while there because of DDT. But now they’re back. I saw one fishing in the Tidal Basin when I went to look at the cherry blossoms.

So we’re going along, seeing all these ospreys sitting on their nests. With binoculars, I could see their big yellow eyes up close. But then we came up to this one nest, and he said, oh, that one’s got eggs – he checks them all regularly. Since it was high tide, he could take the pontoon boat right up to the nest. He stopped the boat, climbed up on a bench, reached his arm in, and pulled out…this:

It’s a baby osprey! Hatching!! Saying “peep”! It’s been living off the yolk its whole life. It just has to do that for a little longer – tomorrow it should finish hatching and be ready for fish. You can see its little white egg tooth, the spot on the beak that birds use to break out of its shell. The mother flew around being annoyed while we were checking out her baby, but Kearns said they aren’t particularly bothered about people. Indeed, she landed on the nest again right after we left.

UPDATE: I added the naturalist’s name.

According to this wire story, an Australian physicist was the first person to notice a mistake in many dictionary definitions of a siphon. In case you’re wondering: when you’re using a siphon, it’s gravity that moves liquid from one place to another, not atmospheric pressure. The story says he found the mistake in the Oxford English Dictionary, and has yet to find a dictionary that gets it right.

I checked the row of dictionaries next to me and got – well, mostly words for “siphon” in different languages (Siphon; hevert; siphon; サイフォン) and a tip on usage (siphon, not syphon). My main English dictionary didn’t mention the kind of pressure. But my second-choice English dictionary and my medical dictionary both said the liquid is moved by atmospheric pressure. How about that? The guy was right.

I don’t think of a dictionary as a place where you’d find science errors, but of course that thing is full of science, from aardvark to zymogen. Looking for mistakes in the OED could be a whole new hobby for scientists.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York: Way too much museum to fit in one blog post. Here’s my first post about the visit.

Next topic: Butterflies. This is a trend at natural history museums these days, apparently, or at least the two big natural history museums I’m familiar with. They set up a shed in an unpopular gallery (poor unpopular galleries) and fit it out for butterflies. It costs extra on top of museum admission, and it’s one of the things I got into free because the communications office set me up with an admission voucher.

You go in through double doors and discover: people. And also butterflies. They do timed entries so it can’t get too crowded. I was nervous the whole time about stepping on a butterfly. I mean, what’s to stop them from landing in the path? You also see heat and humidity, or you would if they were visible. This place is set up for tropical bugs.

My favorite was the blue morpho, a butterfly I saw in Costa Rica many years ago. I took a picture but it doesn’t really do it justice – they’re these enormous insects, the size of your hand when the wings are open. The undersides of the wings are brown, but when they fly, they flash a beautiful shiny iridescent blue. It’s a wonderful sight when a blue morpho flits by in the rainforest.

Butterfly exhibits cost extra because they’re a lot of work to maintain. Butterflies don’t live long, so the museum has to keep getting new pupae. These are raised from eggs at butterfly farms in Florida, Costa Rica, and other tropical places. As soon as the caterpillars hit the pupal stage, the farmers pack them up and ship them off.

Insect development is the most amazing thing. That little white butterfly there used to be a caterpillar. It made a chrysalis, then it sat inside, broke itself down, and grew its adult body. It made *wings* for goodness’ sake. And little spindly legs. Think how different that is from a caterpillar. That is wild.

Look, you can see the butterflies’ mouthparts sucking the juice out of the orange:

The mouthpiece is the second long skinny thing from the left on the front butterfly. When a butterfly isn’t using its mouth, it keeps it rolled up in a neat spiral.

I think this is a monarch butterfly. I like how it’s posing against the background of a classic museum floor.

This sign by the exit made me paranoid:

I mean, I didn’t have anyone with me who could check the back of my head. It turned out they had a big mirror and a butterfly net between the two sets of exit doors, so I could determine that I didn’t have any hitchhikers.

I’m not sure the butterfly exhibit would be worth the extra cost of admission. It’s just a bunch of bugs flying around. And I say that as a person who loves bugs. Once I got in there and established that there were butterflies, there wasn’t really much to do other than go around trying to take pictures of them, and the fluorescent lighting made the pictures come out with strange colors. Kids seemed to be pretty excited about the exhibit, though.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

A few weeks ago when I went to the National Aquarium in Washington, I got quite a surprise: this guy, staring me down from inside his tank.

He’s a northern snakehead, a kind of invasive fish who made quite a splash when they showed up in the Potomac River a few years back. Such a big splash that Smithsonian magazine went looking for someone funny and local to write a story about snakeheads for them, and ended up with me. Here’s the story.

You should go read it, but, to summarize, I went looking for snakeheads with the Virginia fish and game folks, a professional bass fisherman (sponsored by “Team Spouse”), and some guys with a boat, and the only snakeheads I saw were dead at the natural history museum. It was the summer of 2004, and they just weren’t that established in the Potomac yet.

So I was excited to see one in the flesh at the aquarium. They’re pretty well settled into the river now. This one was collected from the river when the Virginia fish and game folks were out on one of their sampling expeditions. Ok, ok, if you insist, here’s another picture:

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

It’s the thing I didn’t realize about getting older: life gets better. Nobody really knows why, but a lead theory is that the older you get, the better you are at letting stuff go. You know who you are, you know what you’re doing and who you care about, and you know what you don’t really have to worry about anymore. Psychologists and old people have known about life getting better for a while; a giant new phone survey confirmed it, and I wrote about it for ScienceNOW.

I went to nerd heaven on Wednesday. I was in New York for a meeting, so I decided this was my big chance to see the American Museum of Natural History. This is the museum that scientists from New York talk about when you ask why they’re scientists. It’s full of rocks and bones and stuff, and I had never seen it.

First, a disclosure statement: I got into the museum free. Theoretically, anyone can do this. The museum admission fee ($16 adult, $9 kids) is actually just a suggested donation – you could walk up to the cashier, say, “Hi, I’m not paying!” and get a ticket. But that takes some nerve. I got a voucher from the communications office because I’m a journalist, and my ticket included entry to a couple of things you really do have to pay for.

But I’m pretty sure that even if I hadn’t gotten in for free, I would still think this museum was awesome. ‘Cause it is. Awesome. One blog post can not come close to doing justice. It is a darn big museum. Here are some selected highlights.

First: If I were a kid growing up in New York, I would want to become a mineralogist. The minerals are displayed in this crazy room in the back of the museum, with all different levels and ramps and stairs and carpeted places to sit. I kind of wanted to move in.

I didn’t want to move in anymore after it was invaded by actual children who are growing up in New York. Golly, school groups can make a lot of noise. This leads to one of my useful tips on this museum: Weekdays are good, but weekdays after 2 are better.

One of the biggest dang things is a model of a blue whale. Can you imagine if you were snorkeling or scuba diving and you saw one of these? Wow.

They were setting up some kind of party underneath the whale. I wonder how the whale feels about that.

I couldn’t help, as I went through the museum, comparing it with my hometown natural history museum (the Smithsonian one). Like, we have this one big elephant in the rotunda. He is big, and he is awesome. And New York is like, “Whatever. We have a whole herd of elephants, and they’re not even important enough to be in our entrance hall.”

I like how the sign by the elephants says four of them were “collected” by Carl Akeley in the 1920s. I know, our relationship with nature was different then, and I suppose the dead, mounted carcasses of these elephants have several decades’ experience inspiring young people to scientific greatness, but come on. “Collected”? That sounds like he picked them off the savanna with a butterfly net.

The AMNH particularly excels in that standby of old-school natural history museums: the diorama. There are dioramas of everything. Asian mammals. African mammals. Birds. New York state environments. Neanderthals. There was even an extreme close-up diorama showing the soil surface, with an ant the size of a baby and a disturbingly oversized centipede. Here’s one from the hall of African mammals, featuring a pair of Greater Koodoos:

One of the things I like about the dioramas is that in addition to the sign telling you about the animals, there’s a second sign telling you about the environment they’re in. These guys live in scrub at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. A few years ago my natural history museum scrubbed its dioramas and remounted the mammals on their own, against mostly white backgrounds. It is a beautiful exhibit, but a different approach to talking about animals – more organized around evolution, less reference to environment.

The dinosaurs live on the top floor, where there is [gasp] natural light. Yeah, I know, every picture up to now has been kind of gloomy. That’s the nature of museums, I guess, or at least museums that are trying to preserve things when ultraviolet light is the enemy.

This Tyrannosaurus was remounted in recent years. In 1915, when the museum originally mounted it, scientists didn’t agree on how Tyrannosaurus stood. Some thought it stood like a bird, with head down and tail in the air; others thought it stood upright and dragged its tail. The museum had to pick one, so it went with the upright model. Since then, scientists have decided that would dislocate the neck bones (ow) so they’re leaning in the bird direction. It was remounted in 1992 to 1994 according to that hypothesis:

It’s kind of less threatening when it’s low to the ground, although…now that I think of it, that might just make me even easier to eat. Big, pointy teeth just above head level. Yikes. Good thing they’re extinct.

So like I said earlier, they don’t have a bull elephant in their entrance hall; instead, they have a crazy big dinosaur. Ok, they kind of made this up. The dinosaurs are all real, but they have no idea if a female Barosaurus was indeed capable of rearing up to defend her baby from an attacking Allosaurus. But what the hey, it looks cool and extends about 50 bazillion feet into the sky.

Really, there was so much to see at this museum, I’m saving bits of it for other blog posts. Something to look forward to!

UPDATE: Those other posts: Butterflies; Subway.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Someone bought a facebook ad to sell experts to people like me:

You know what? Thanks, random advertiser, but I can find my own experts. I wonder if there are reporters who use services like this? I find google gets me a long way.

For this week’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, I wrote a story about a molecular link between stress and death. The story is here. Ok, there’s a catch: You have to be a subscriber to read it, and I’m not 100% positive it’s worth $40. (It might be – the Chronicle’s got good stories.)

People have known for a long time that stress is bad for you. Having good social support isn’t just, you know, the reason to live, it’s also good for your health. The guy who did this study worked out a link in the biological chain between stress and death.

The molecule he was looking at is called a transcription factor. A transcription factor is a little protein that grabs onto a strand of DNA near a gene and says, “Hey, transcribe this gene!” In this case, the transcription factor is activated by a stress hormone and turns on a gene that makes a protein involved in inflammation, part of the immune response. Inflammation is fantastic for, like, healing cuts, but we modern humans tend to turn it on and leave it on, which leads to heart disease and other nasty stuff.

So that’s what the story’s about. This was my first time writing for the Chronicle – my editor there is a former colleague from U.S. News & World Report, and it was fun to be reunited for this story.

At the very least, you should look at the great portrait they took of the scientist. He works at UCLA, but he happened to be on campus at Stanford (my first grad school alma mater) the week they needed to take a picture of him, so this is a picture of him with one of the many Rodins that litter campus. Anyone recognize the sculpture? It’s reasonably famous.