Helen FieldsScience Writer

A friend pointed out this nifty link to me: an artist who makes life-sized crochet versions of animals. Crochet + taxidermy = crochetdermy. Clever, eh?

The writer seems to think “knit” and “crochet” can be used interchangeably, but as far as I can tell from the pictures, these are all crocheted.

Here’s that sea chanty, “Rolling Down to Old Maui,” sung by the great Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers:

“We’re homeward bound from the Arctic ground, rolling down to old Maui.” The sailors have been catching whales in the Arctic, which had to be just awful work, and they’re pretty excited to be going to enjoy the tropical pleasures of Maui. Kamchatka is the wayyyy Eastern bit of Russia that dangles down between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea. It’s one of the places where humpbacks go in the summer to feed. (I think they would have been catching other kinds of whales, there, too.) A slightly different version of the lyrics is here.

I have a thing about whales. They’re so big, and interesting, and mysterious. For a long time, the only things we knew about them were what we could see them doing at the surface of their world. And they do a lot of interesting things at the surface – breathing, jumping, tail-slapping – but it’s by no means all of their lives. They’re also cool because they’re like us – they’re mammals, they have babies, they feed them milk – and yet they’re so different from us. And they were hunted near to extinction because they’re so very useful. Whale oil is great stuff, and baleen was quite useful, too. (In umbrellas and corsets and such things.)

So two weeks ago, when I was in Maui for a story, I stopped in at the Old Lahaina Courthouse to see their display on whaling. Maui was an important stop for whalers. They left New England on years-long voyages to catch whales and stopped in at this tropical paradise to load up on supplies (potatoes, goats) and catch up on the fun (booze, ladies) they’d been deprived of at sea. There’s even a sea chanty called “Rolling Down to Old Maui.”

The display at the courthouse was a bit slim, but here are some cool items:

Those long things are called spades; they were used for cutting up whales. They’re resting in a pot used for melting down the blubber. Whale oil was used for things like lubricating sewing machines:

and lighting lighthouses:

This one used to be in the lighthouse on Hana, at the southwestern tip of Maui.

So, I wouldn’t recommend a special trip to Maui to see the Old Lahaina Courthouse, but I’d certainly stop in if you’re in the area, say, at one of the whalewatching tours that leave from the harbor across the street. That’s a somewhat nicer way to chase whales. The courthouse is right behind this awesome banyan tree, which takes up an entire block.

That’s the trunk in the background – it was planted in 1873. The aerial roots all came in later, reaching down from the branches to the ground. I sat under it for a while writing postcards, and a group of Japanese tourists gathered around me. I wonder where they are now?

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

photos: me.

This weekend the AAAS meeting is in town. Hordes of scientists and science writers have descended on D.C. for a weekend of general science. It’s good times – lots of interesting ideas flying around and tons of colleagues to hang out with.

Friday I wrote about bilingual babies. The idea of someone being bilingual at eight months may seem a bit nutty, but apparently it’s true – babies are born with a basic sense of the language or languages they heard in utero, and they keep developing their knowledge from there. I wrote before about a study that found that babies cry differently depending on the language they’re growing up with – read about that here.

Today I happened to be talking to someone about bonobos and wondered later if I could see any at my local zoo. I can’t – the only great apes they have there are western lowland gorillas and orangutans. There aren’t very many in captivity, it turns out. San Diego, Milwaukee, and Columbus have them, and that might be it in the U.S. The population in Columbus just increased by one at the end of the year, with a new baby. Bonobos are closely related to chimps and humans. They’ve gotten a lot of attention as the “hippie ape” because they settle conflicts with sex instead of violence.

While I was poking around, trying to figure out where they live, I discovered that the Milwaukee Zoo sells bonobo paintings. Zoos do a lot of things to keep their animals entertained, especially the smarter ones, and at Milwaukee, that includes letting the bonobos mess around with paints.

I like this trend of animal art. The most famous, I think, is elephant paintings. There was a video going around for a while of an elephant painting…an elephant. Elephants don’t actually know how to make 2-D representations of things they see. They’re trained to make the right set of strokes on paper. But still, it’s awfully cool that you can buy something an elephant painted and have it shipped from Thailand. Actually, you have more than one option, if that is the kind of thing you are into.

By far my favorite thing in the world of animal painting, though, because it’s got the least evidence of intentionality by the artist, is something I saw at the gift shop of the National Aquarium in Washington. They were selling art that was made by dipping turtles in paint and letting them walk around on paper. Or canvas. I forget. Either way: That is funny.

I’d been to the Cal Academy in San Francisco once or twice before, but it was about a decade ago, and I didn’t remember much other than a bunch of fish. So I went into this expecting your basic natural history museum experience, which after a year of examining natural history museums I can boil down to two elements: stuffed animals and rocks.

I got half of that. They do have a hall of dead stuffed mammals – with, bonus, live penguins. But rocks were sorely lacking. There was a dinosaur in the entrance hall and an exhibit on climate change, but basically, this is a museum about biology. Which is fine. I like biology. In fact, it’s my favorite. But I was disappointed they didn’t have a broader reach.

Oh, and there’s a planetarium, but since you have to pick up special passes that run out if you want to see a planetarium show, I don’t think it really counts. And actually I didn’t even know I was entitled to one of those tickets until just now, when I read it on the website – I assumed they cost extra. Nice job with the communications, Cal Academy.

This looks how I always imagined the moon would look if it weren’t lame and dusty and gray:

But it’s not some kind of futuristic outer space pod station thing, it’s the roof of the museum. The Cal Academy has gotten a lot of attention for their “living roof” with native plants – unlike the imported European grasses that cover California’s hillsides, these don’t turn brown in summer. The domes cover the planetarium and the rainforest exhibit, and the hatches can be raised for ventilation. Read about some of the building’s green features in this cool graphic from Wired. The roof was my favorite part of the museum – I made a second stop up there before we left.

So here’s what it looks like underneath one of those domes:

That’s a rainforest in a globe. You have to go through multiple doors, like an airlock, to make darn sure you’re not releasing any of the rainforest denizens into the California environment. Inside are trees, vines, lots of cute chirpy birds, a macaw, butterflies, bromeliads, and fish. When you’re done winding your way up through the ramps in the rainforest, you take an elevator down below the floor, to the basement aquarium – including the fish you were looking down on moments before:

Several of the aquaria are open at the top, so from the ground level, you can also look down on a coral reef and an aquarium that represents the California coast.

In honor of the holiday (this was December 20th) there were several special displays – a little portable planetarium with a show about the northern lights, some stuffed polar animals, and these two bored-looking reindeer:

You’ll be glad to know the reindeer poop was being used to fertilize the plants in nearby Rhododendron Dell. The museum sits in the middle of Golden Gate Park.

So, I enjoyed it. Particularly the roof. But I was shocked by the $30 ticket price,  the highest I’ve paid in my museum tourist expeditions. Of course, I’m spoiled by the Smithsonian, where admission is free. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, you can pay $32 for admission and all the extras – special exhibits, like the butterflies, IMAX movies, and so on. But you also had the option of paying $16 (or less – it’s a suggested donation) to see the permanent exhibitions, which includes tons of rocks, dinosaurs, and other amazing stuff.

And in any case, I do wish they’d mentioned that my ticket covered a planetarium show. Apparently I’m still irritated about that.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

The Macy’s near Union Square in San Francisco has kittens in its display windows at Christmas time. It’s an ASPCA fundraiser or something. Whatever. KITTENS.

I prefer kittens on the other side of glass, where they can’t make me sneeze.

Male chimps compete to set up dominance hierarchies. The males on top – the alphas and other high-ranking males – get the most access to females. Wednesday for ScienceNOW I wrote about a study on what this means for their testosterone levels and their parasite load. Read it here.

For an item this short, I don’t usually need to talk to the researchers, but in this case I called up the first author because I couldn’t find a copy of the paper. This study involved picking up fresh chimp poop, which I gather is a pretty common way to study non-human primates. (I don’t think they appreciate having blood drawn.) He told me they have to dry the poop in the field, and at the time they were doing this study, they were doing it with a little portable oven. The smell? “It’s not cookies,” he said.

My post about visiting the natural history museum at Yale inspired a friend of mine from college to blog about ivory, and how you can forget it’s made by animals.

Yesterday for ScienceNOW I wrote about a study of primate poop. (Heh.) Ok, the fact that it’s about poop is amusing, but it’s also interesting science. The researchers were interested in the makeup of the microbial community in primates; they had fecal samples from some gorillas (of both species), a handful of chimps from each of three subspecies, and two humans, for a total of 26. All of the animals lived in the wild.

The researchers took each poop sample and did some genetic magic to figure out what the different microbial communities looked like – like, what the relative abundance of different species are. Then they compared the communities from different individuals and used those comparisons to group the animals into trees. So, if I have 10 of species A and a million of species B, and you have 12 of species of A and a million of species B, but a gorilla has 10 million of species A and none of species B, you and I will be grouped together and the gorilla will be separate from us.

(I made up these numbers, and the real calculations are more complicated ’cause they involve way more than two species. But anyway.)

This magic produced a tree that looks kind of like a family tree but is a tree of microbial communities. But here’s the thing: It looks just like the primate family tree. Chimps look like each other, humans and chimps look more like each other than gorillas; same is true of our microbial communities.

This is kind of wacky, because there’s no particular reason to think that microbial communities should look similar in closely related species. I mean, we aren’t sharing a lot of bacteria with chimps in our daily lives, and we have pretty different diets. So, kinda funky. And it suggests that diet is less important as a determinant of the gut microbial community than people thought.

Read about it here.