Helen FieldsScience Writer

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

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.

If you’ve been meaning to see the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef at the Smithsonian, you only have a few more days; it closes this Sunday, April 24th.

It’s surprising how much a bunch of knotted yarn can look like a real live coral reef.

If you miss it in D.C., there will be other reefs in other places, though who knows if my five pieces will ever appear again. Watch this page for a list of upcoming appearances. (Part of it will be in New York from May.)

photo: me

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.

I couldn’t resist going back to the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef this weekend. And my mom said she hadn’t realized from my previous pictures quite how big it is. So here’s another picture, with a gaggle of Japanese teenagers for scale:

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

For ScienceNOW this week I wrote about a giant virus that lives in the ocean. Viruses are generally thought of as teeny little things that can’t do much for themselves, but this one has 730,000 base pairs of DNA – more than some bacteria – and has genes that encode for a lot of the machinery of protein-making. That is wacky. It’s bigger than some bacteria, too. That’s significant because bacteria are alive, but viruses aren’t. The newly described virus is called Cafeteria roenbergensis virus because it infects a single-celled organism called Cafeteria roenbergensis. Here’s my very short story.

Viruses are pretty neat. Look at this picture. The big round gray thing is one individual Cafeteria roenbergensis. (The host.) See all the little hexagons inside? Those are the virus.

photo by M.G. Fischer

At last, the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef has opened at the natural history museum! You may recall, I was crocheting some pieces for this exhibit over the summer – this is what they looked like – and dropped them off at a local yarn store in August. The show opened earlier this month, and last Thursday I went down to see my work in the Smithsonian.

The coral reef is at the back of the museum’s Ocean Hall. The organizers took all the individual pieces, submitted by crafters like me, from all kinds of yarns and done in all sorts of ways, and assembled them into one three-dimensional, multi-colored extravaganza of coral. It’s stunning. I walked around it for about 20 minutes, and while I was there several tourists stopped to admire it, then exclaim at the fact that it was made of yarn. (Most of them misidentified it as knitting, but oh well, guess you can’t expect everyone to know the difference. Or read the signs.)

Here’s what the whole reef looks like:

The genesis of the reef is a little complicated – I’ll try to give the short version. A mathematician who knits figured out that the easiest way to model hyperbolic shapes is to crochet them. Hyperbolic geometry is a kind of geometry that describes sort of ruffly space, like a leaf of kale or a piece of coral. A pair of sisters were crocheting these models in brightly colored yarn and noticed that the pile of objects looked kind of like a coral reef. Ta-da! The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef was born. Read about it here.

I walked up to it and saw one of my pieces immediately. Can you spot it in the picture below? (Refresh your memory here.)

It took me longer to find the others, but I eventually located four out of five. Another one is in this picture. It’s a little harder to pick out:

The above picture is from the “toxic” section of the reef, crocheted mostly out of trash. People used plastic bags, soda can tabs, and other unsavory materials. The piece of mine I couldn’t find was made out of audiotape. It turns out a lot of people had that idea. I think I found it, but I’m not sure. It could’ve been someone else’s cleverly crocheted audiotape.

My work is part of the Smithsonian Community Reef – called that because it’s made by crafty types like me. The exhibit includes several displays from other iterations of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, but the community reef is the centerpiece and the best-looking part, I thought. It’s on display through April 24, 2011. Look for my name in the list of contributors! Ok, it looks like this:

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

My coral reef is finished! I dropped it off at Now and Then, a store in Takoma Park, Md., that sells yarn (and lots of other neat stuff).

The only addition since my last update is the brown-black one at top left – that’s the tape from one audio cassette. It is not the easiest material in the world to crochet with. The finished product sure is neat, though!