For today’s Welt I wrote about colorblind monkeys – scientists cured them of their colorblindness with gene therapy. “Cured” is kind of a silly word in this case. The males of this species naturally don’t see red and green, so it’s not like they have something wrong with them that needs to be fixed. So, more accurately: Scientists gave monkeys a gene for a pigment they didn’t have, and now the little guys see colors like we do.
Aww, lookit the cute li’l monkey doing the test! He’s supposed to find the pink dots among the gray dots. If he gets it right he gets a drop of grape juice.
The monkeys in the study are squirrel monkeys. Isn’t that a cute name? It sounds tiny and adorable, and like it would enjoy hopping around in trees, which I think is a fairly accurate description of the species. So, guess what the German word for them is? Totenkopfaffen. Death’s-head monkey. Yipe.
Progress update: I actually wrote this story in German, rather than writing in English and translating. And it ran in TWO newspapers today. Woo. I’ve mostly written for Die Welt so far, but the science section also supplies stories for Welt am Sonntag (the Sunday edition) and Berliner Morgenpost.
Photo Credit: Neitz Laboratory
A historic moment: for the first time, one of the stories I wrote for National Geographic is available online! It’s about a species of lemur called the silky sifaka. “Silky sifaka” is fun to say. Hear some of the silky sifaka’s amusing vocalizations here, on the researcher’s website.
Isn’t this the best idea for a blog? It’s ZooBorns – about new baby animals at zoos around the world. Zoos always send out press releases when their animals have adorable new offspring. Press releases with pictures. Which are adorable. Zoo PR people: they know what they’re doing.
This baby is a Cape porcupine at Zoo Basel in Switzerland.
Apparently now I’m not just any old science writer, I’m a biomechanics writer. First it was how snakes move, then why birds have trouble when they get big, and today, the third story that cements the trend: how dogs avoid popping wheelies.
I think the lab that did the dog work has the coolest lab excursions – they go to the greyhound track. Usually they’re there during the day, when you can get video of one dog at a time in good light, and without having to worry about the stands being full of excitable gamblers. They set up the cameras pretty far away so they can get the dogs doing the whole straightaway in one shot.
“It is quite a different experience when it’s dark and you stand right up by the track,” says zoologist Jim Usherwood, one of the authors. “On race night with a beer in your hand, you can get 10 feet away from a greyhound going full pelt and say, ‘That animal really is flying.’”
I asked him what their top speed was, and he said about 19 meters per second (ah, physicists). Google tells me that is over 42 miles an hour. Yeah, that’s fast.
As the scientist standing at the window next to me said a few minutes ago: “They wouldn’t show *this* on Deadliest Catch, would they?” The Bering Sea is absolutely dead calm. It looks like a pond, only flatter.
You can see a whale surface a mile away, because there is nothing between here and there. I’ve only seen two whales, a pair of humpbacks after lunch, but other people have seen minke whales and a fin whale today. I also saw some Steller’s sea lions swimming in the distance and a whole bunch of far-off harbor porpoises, and I have high hopes for orcas. I mean, what I *want* is humpbacks leaping over the bow, but I’ll take orcas.
I was interviewing a scientist when Chris got the page about the humpbacks and I dragged her up to the bridge with me to see what was going on. It worked out well, that bit of multi-tasking – we saw whales and I learned some basic physical oceanography, all at the same time.
We’re out of the ice for the last time. We’ll be back in port on Tuesday.
There are good strong laws about not getting too close to marine mammals, and hey, the Coast Guard, they’re not seal-killers. So the people on the bridge are always keeping a good watch for seals. For a grownup, they can figure it’s going to jump off the ice and swim away, but they have to steer away from the babies that are too little to swim.
Tonight there was this one grownup seal that kept not swimming away, and when it got close someone realized it was dead, and there was a gull eating it, and also we were going to run right over it. The piece of ice with the dead seal disappeared under the bow and reappeared a little later closer to the back of the ship, without the seal.
That gull was having the best day ever, right? Whole dead seal to itself. And then this giant ship comes by and knocks his dinner into the water. Imagine what that gull told its friends later. “Seriously, guys. It was THIS BIG. No, really!”
Look at this sign I saw in Baltimore over the weekend. Heh.
Hey, another story! This one’s about a National Geographic grantee who’s studying a bunch of mongooses in a national park in Botswana who get the human version of tuberculosis. Which, it turns out, is really bad for mongooses.
When she found TB in mongooses a few years ago, it was the first time anyone had confirmed a human disease in free-ranging wildlife. This is one of those “firsts” where you have to pay attention to the adjectives. Domesticated animals and zoo animals are already known to get human diseases. (It’s still a big deal, though – made quite a splash in the epidemiology world a few years back.)
This story made me wonder about the plural of mongoose. My Webster’s New World Dictionary only gives one plural: mongooses. My Webster’s New Collegiate lists mongooses first, but also mongeese. And when the vet who actually did the research talks about them, she uses mongoose as the singular and plural. I settled on mongooses and the copy editors at National Geographic News seem to agree with me.
