Helen FieldsScience Writer

The tayra is a three-foot-long weasel relative that lives in Central and South America. Last week I wrote a story for ScienceNOW about how they cache unripe plantains, then go back and eat them when they’re ripe. Read the story here.

It’s not clear whether this means tayras are really thinking about planning for the future, or whether they’re just doing something that they have learned will be useful later.

Here’s what one of my sources, Mathias Osvath, says about the difference between associative learning and planning: “If you have associatively learned something, like, ‘If I push the red button I will be rewarded,’ then that is of course an act for the future. But it does not include anything cognitive, more than the learning mechanism…. True planning is when you shut your eyes and you think about what you will have for lunch tomorrow.” Which are they doing? Nobody knows.

Like I said in yesterday’s story, North Atlantic right whales are already getting a lot of help to reduce their chances of getting killed by ships.

At certain times of year, ships have to slow down when they’re going through right whale habitat. For example, they have to go slow off Georgia in the winter, when moms and babies are hanging out, and off Boston when the whales are feeding there in the spring. The whales aren’t totally lockstep about their migration, but they are more likely to be in some places than others at particular times of year.

One of the niftier items I mentioned in the story is the buoys in the Boston shipping lanes that listen for right whales. If a buoy hears a right whale call, they send it back to shore where a human checks it, then somehow the information gets out to ships.

You can see this for yourself – the Right Whale Listening Network has a nice website that shows which buoys are active right now and which of those have heard a whale in the last 24 hours. Right now I see one red whale outline out east of Cape Cod. The buoys in Cape Cod Bay aren’t working because there aren’t as many right whales in the area at this time of year.

photo: NOAA

Right whales aren’t one of the better-known whales. They aren’t as charismatic as humpbacks or orcas, or as ginormous as blue whales. One story about where they got their name is that they were the “right whale” for whalers – not only are they coastal and slow-moving, but they float when they’re dead, which is a useful characteristic if you’re trying to manage their carcass from a ship.

The main thing I knew about right whales before I started to interview people about them yesterday was that they get hit by ships. North Atlantic right whales migrate up and down the coast of the Eastern U.S. and ships go in and out of the Eastern U.S., so they’re pretty much doomed to cross paths. And I’m sure most ships’ captains don’t want to kill whales. Today I wrote a story for ScienceNOW about one of the reasons why right whales get hit by ships. Read it here.

photo: NOAA

Last fall, I spent a few days at a conference at Yale, which included a neat field trip that I have been woefully slow to blog about. It was a trip to the library at the Yale School of Medicine, which includes a historical library and a collection of brains. (More on the brains later.) First: old books at the Medical Historical Library.

They showed us many fabulous old books, which I would remember more about if I had written this eight months ago like I should have. I can tell you that among them was a nifty volume called Yaggy’s Anatomical Study, copyrighted 1885 in Chicago, Illinois (with patents granted in 1886). It came in several sections, for different parts of the body. The largest was a torso, with flaps. First you lift up the muscles,  then the front of the ribcage:

…then the lungs, the heart, and onward until you see the back of the body cavity. Another section had an arm and a leg, with different flaps showing how the blood vessels and bones and muscles are situated. One page shows three views of a stomach; the last is captioned “a stomach, after ten or fifteen days continuous drinking.” It doesn’t look very healthy. Something to do with a temperance campaign, I guess.

Speaking of health campaigns, they also showed us a set of posters printed in 1928 for a Soviet public health campaign, warning women about the dangers of veneral disease. Like this one:

It’s titled “Gonorrhea can Deprive a Woman of the Joy of Motherhood.” See how sad she is? It’s because she has gonorrhea and can’t have children. The set of posters was meant to be taken around to instruct people on public health. They’ve digitized the whole album – you can see it here.

Here’s another one, because it’s always fun to mix ideology and public health:

The caption, according to the online album: “Capitalism generates the causes of prostitution: lack of rights, material want, homelessness.” (The next one, helpfully, says that with socialistic development, “improvement of women’s labor qualifications, involvement of women in political and social affairs, protection of women and children removes the causes of prostitution.”)

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Remember the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef? It’s an ongoing project – they’ll keep mounting exhibits of parts of it in different places. Right now there’s a show in Pasadena. But I heard good news recently about the Smithsonian Community Reef, the part that I contributed to. It’s going on display at the Putnam Museum in Davenport, Iowa, and will stay up for five years. (So there’s plenty of time to plan your vacation to Eastern Iowa.) Read about it here.

The other day, my boyfriend and I were very amused by the billboards we saw along the road into Pittsburgh. “RAPTORS!” proclaimed one. “PENGUINS!” said another. These billboards were advertising the National Aviary, which happened to be near our hotel, so we dropped by the next morning.

An aviary, if you’re not familiar with the term, is like a zoo for birds. The National Aviary has about 150 species of birds. There was also the occasional mammal – I spotted a mouse in one cage (ok, that was not part of the display) and a sloth in another (pretty sure that was intentional), but otherwise, it’s all birds. A few are in individual cages. The bald eagle and Steller’s sea eagle each gets its own spot, open to the sky. Most are grouped together in larger habitats, like a tropical rainforest and a grassland.

One of our first stops was feeding time at the lorikeet cage. Lorikeets are noisy little parrots that like nectar. At feeding time, you can buy a little cup for $3. Or you can let someone else do it and take pictures of them:

One of my favorite birds was this one, which wanders around the rainforest room. Shortly before I took this picture, it flew up to a branch where a bunch of ibises were making an awful racket, sidled up to them, and made this pose:

It worked – they shut up and flew away. But the most remarkable thing about this bird is that it’s a Victoria crowned pigeon, native to New Guinea. The pigeons most of us know the best are filthy-looking birds that walk around in cities, but really the pigeons and doves make up quite a lovely and diverse group. There are hundreds of species. Many have beautiful colors. This one has crazy head-feathers and is the size of a chicken. It’s not the pigeons’ fault someone domesticated them and let them take over the world’s cities. And I must admit, I like the city ones, too. They’re funny.

The wetlands display included quite a few flamingos:

Fun fact: Flamingos get their color from their diet. In the wild, they eat pink food and extract it that way, but in captivity, they’re normally fed some kind of color supplement.

I found the whole aviary experience delightful. We were there on a weekday, which meant it was overrun with tiny children, which was part of the fun. Near the penguin exhibit, my walking was temporarily impeded by a girl, about three, who was having, really, the only appropriate reaction to this stuff: pulling on her father’s hand, pointing, and screaming, “DADDY! DUCK! DUCK! DUCK!” (You can see the ducks and the penguins on the aviary’s Penguin Cam.)

We particularly enjoyed the bird show “Wings!” It cost $5 extra, and it was so worth it. For about 20 minutes, we learned about birds and habitat conservation and – ok, mostly, birds flew around and it was so cool. The macaws showed off their climbing skills. A whole bunch of vultures flew right over my head, raising quite a wind. There were live people talking, but also a video that introduced the show and each bird’s habitat. Birds flew in either from over a wall or from cages up near the ceiling that were wired to open at certain times.

The show was fun, partly because birds are awesome and it’s impressive to see them up close, and partly because it had a toe firmly over the line that divides tasteful from cheesy. The last bird, a bald eagle, came out to “God Bless the U.S.A.” I think it actually struck a dramatic pose on the line “I’m proud to be an American.” At the end of its segment, it showed off its wings in front of a fireworks display on the screen.

Actually, even better than that was what happened after the show. They brought out a very disheveled-looking parrot with a special skill. This picture is terrible, but I have to share:

Her special skill is accepting dollar bills and putting them in the donation box. Don’t worry, I think the dishevelment is from molting, not disease. (I hope so, anyway.) She looked so pleased with herself. I was able to resist on this visit, but the next time I go, I’m taking a stack of one-dollar bills.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Recently everybody I know has started moving into my apartment building. Ok, not really everybody. But a friend from college moved in, then a friend from grad school. Another friend from college is moving in next month. None of these people are totally dying to live near me; they’re all just moving to D.C. and needed a nice place to live. My building is nice, and they’d all heard about it from me.

Then the other day I was walking along a basement hallway and who did I see? A former college roommate. She’d just moved in, too.

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

I just came across something I totally forgot I’d written: why bats don’t like to fly in the rain. (It takes more energy to fly when their fur is wet.)

Here’s my conclusion after visiting the Mayflower II and Plimoth Plantation: Living history is not an efficient way to get information across.

I started my exploration of the big tourist attraction in Plymouth, Massachusetts, with the Mayflower II. It’s a replica of the Mayflower that was built in the 50s and sailed across the ocean from England to here. On the ship, it’s some day in March, and this guy – some kind of officer – is waiting to tell you about the ship.

This guy was great. He told us about conditions on the ship, about where people stayed, about how he was ready to go back home and he was supposed to be back in England last fall, but then they got stuck here over the winter, and so on. Another guy was belowdecks, telling us why he’d come over. (To teach the pilgrims, who were not actually called pilgrims, something useful. Maybe fishing? I don’t remember.)

The Mayflower II was kind of museumlike. There were displays on the dock about the pilgrims – what do you call them if you don’t call them pilgrims? Emigrants? There were displays on the docks about the emigrants, where they came from in England, why they’d been in the Netherlands before they emigrated, what they ate on board, and so on. That was pretty informative.

But over at the main museum, the Plimoth Plantation, the informativeness level tanked. Plimoth Plantation is a recreation of the first settlement, a few miles away. The year is 1627, seven years after the emigrants – colonists? Let’s call them colonists.  Seven years after the colonists landed. So they’ve settled in and they’re raking hay and hanging about in houses telling you things.

Here’s the thing. I am curious about the colonists. Like, you know, what crops they grew. What they died of. How many children they had. I don’t know, whatever. But the only way to learn anything is to seek out one of the costumed living history people – which was kind of hard – and ask them questions.

I don’t want to have to interview people in a museum. It’s awkward. If you asked a person a question, we learned, he might talk at you for 10 minutes on vaguely related topics, or he might look at you like you were crazy because you’d used some word his character didn’t understand.

So from one of the living history guys we came across, we learned about their theology, in more detail than I could handle, and from another, I got condescended to for my ignorance.

I’m not really sure what I wanted to know. I wanted the museum to decide that for me. It was like playing a game where there was information I was supposed to find out, but I didn’t know what it was or how to get it. Like Myst.

There were some signs, to tell you what part of the plantation you were entering. The largest section of Plimoth Plantation is the 1627 English Village. There’s also the Wampanoag Homesite, which represents the native people who lived in the area before the colonists arrived. The  people who work there are Native Americans who aren’t playing historical characters. Instead, they talk from a modern perspective. Before you go into the Wampanoag Homesite, you see this sign:

It’s pretty depressing that in the 21st century, you have to tell people not to use the word “squaws.” Also, the sign says to avoid “Native American” and “Indian” and instead say “Native People.” I would like to note that the only Wampanoag Homesite staffer we heard talk at length referred to Native People as “Indians.”

He and the other people working in the Wampanoag Homesite didn’t appear to be offended by us. They appeared to be bored. One guy did a little introduction to the house he was sitting in, which was informative but bored-sounding, and when people asked questions, his answers sounded not only bored, but also dismissive. We kept going up to different staffers and hoping that one would not be bored, and being disappointed.

So, to sum up, for $30, I got the sort of amusing experience of hearing bored people answering questions and chatty people going off on long tangents, when what I really wanted was some nice informative signs.

But then I enjoy clunky old natural history museums – if your primary goal is to learn things, you probably should skip the one in Prague, which I adored – so maybe there are tourists who similarly enjoy having awkward conversations with people in historical costumes?

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

There’s a nice article in Slate about Ravelry, the social network for knitters.

The best social network you’ve (probably) never heard of is one-five-hundredth the size of Facebook. It has no video chat feature, it doesn’t let you check in to your favorite restaurant, and there are no games. The company that runs it has just four employees, one of whom is responsible for programming the entire operation. It has never taken any venture capital money and has no plans to go public. Despite these apparent shortcomings, the site’s members absolutely adore it.

My friend Lila told me about Ravelry soon after I started knitting, and wow, it’s amazing. I use it to catalog all my projects, so if I was really happy with that hat I made for Joanna and I want to make another one, I can go back and see what size needles I used. (4.)

I also use it to look for patterns – a couple of years ago I bought the yarn for this scarf, then when I wanted to start it last week I just searched for “scarf” on Ravelry, and it was the first one in the search results, out of 21,962. (If you go look at the guy’s blog post you’ll see why. It’s stunning.)

I’m sure this sort of site could be useful in other areas, too – the writer of the Slate piece mentions cooking, but there are so many hobbies where you can imagine people using a linked database.

Oh, and if you want to be friends on Ravelry, I am hey-helen. (Unlike this website, which is heyhelen. I wish I’d signed up on Ravelry as heyhelen…but I’ve been on there longer than I’ve had this URL.)