Here’s a set of NASA pictures of Ham and a brief history of animals in space.

Kandula was born at the zoo in 2001. One of the highlights of my journalism career was in the summer of 2002, as an intern at NPR. Kandula was about seven months old and I got to go into the elephant enclosure and follow him around with a mic to get sounds of him playing in the water. SO CUTE. Here’s the story about elephant lungs.

My favorite line in the study was in the part about how they got the chimps to take part in the experiments. The authors wrote: “If a chimpanzee declined to participate that day, her test was rescheduled for another day.” These chimps live outdoors in a research colony in Georgia. On a day when the researchers were planning to work with a particular chimp, they’d open the door of the research building and call her name. The chimps think experiments are fun, but sometimes they just don’t feel like it – if there’s nice weather, say, or some interesting social interaction they don’t want to miss out on. And if that happens, well, they just don’t participate that day.

Read it 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.

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

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

The book, Unlikely Friendships: 47 Remarkable Stories from the Animal Kingdom, is about animals that are buddies. There’s a monkey that befriends a kitten, a hippo that follows a tortoise around, a snake that hangs out with a hamster – all sorts of good stuff. Sure, it’s not investigative journalism, but who doesn’t want to read about a monkey that adopts a kitten?

Jenny’s a beautiful writer, and I can’t wait to read the book myself – I just added one more sale to those Amazon stats.

Here’s a nice item about the book in today’s issue of Parade.

To accompany this story, I submit a completely unrelated, yet charming, photograph of a dog. Her name, for your information, is Hamburglar.

photo: me

The sign by the door tells you you’re getting “PREHISTORICAL, MINERALOGICAL AND PETROLOGICAL, ZOOLOGICAL, OSTEOLOGICAL, PALEONTOLOGICAL, ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS, THE NATIONAL MUSEUM LIBRARY.” So right away you know this is a museum to be reckoned with. And then you go inside, buy your ticket, and approach the collections from the bottom of this grand stairway:

Then imagine your excitement when you enter the first gallery of minerals and it looks like this:

The old wooden cases! The endless ranks of rocks, labeled only in Czech and completely uninterpreted!

My boyfriend and I had fun figuring out what the minerals were – some, like “kuprit” and “zinkit” were pretty easy, but we had trouble with “zlato” – the team was split between gold and pyrite. (It was gold; pyrite is “pyrit.”) “Smithsonit” was quite self-explanatory. Most I probably wouldn’t know in English, either, like “diopsid” and “smaragd” and “axinit.” We went from there into a room of meteorites (chondrites is “chondrity”), also displayed in beautiful wooden cabinets – which, the English sign told me, were designed by the architect of the National Museum building and a professor of mineralogy. The cases were installed soon after the building was completed in 1891.

The fun of working out what the minerals are is fairly representative of the kind of fun you can have in the National Museum in Prague. Now, you know I love my natural history museums, and this one is lovely. It’s great at one of the functions of natural history museums: displaying cool stuff. But it scores low on another function: educating the visitor. The schoolkids we saw wandering through looked pretty universally bored, with the exception of these girls:

The zoology halls were redone in the 60s – note the somewhat more modern-looking cases. Here’s a closer look over one girl’s shoulder:

Other exhibits in the museum included fossils, birds, reptiles, and an exhibit on Czech fairy tales that was really quite hard to follow if you are not familiar with (a) Czech fairy tales and (b) Czech.

The exhibit was kind of exciting to walk through, because it was modern and was done to feel like a forest and villages and such, so it had dim lighting, ramps and passageways, and a very different feel than the glass-cases-in-large-rooms aesthetic of the rest of the museum. There were even labels in English, but we couldn’t quite figure out what was going on; the exhibit appeared to be blending artifacts from the tribes that lived in the area thousands of years ago with the tales that Czech children grow up with, and it just didn’t make a lot of sense to a person who didn’t grow up with those stories.

I think that’s enough Czech natural history for one day. More soon.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

photos: me