What happens inside a caterpillar's cocoon? Scientists got to watch the whole process with the help of X-ray 3D scanning technology. In the video above, you can watch a caterpillar turn into a butterfly. Over the course of 16 days its breathing tubes (shown in blue) and its digestive system (shown in red) change shape and position within the body, while other structures grow from scratch.

Ed Yong has a great story to go with this, too. All about why it's important to actually watch the process happening in a single caterpillar, instead of just relying on the data scientists have collected from years of dissecting different caterpillars at different stages in the transformation.

The Golden Ratio — that geometric expression of the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, etc.) — has influenced the way master painters created art and can be spotted occurring naturally in the seed arrangement on the face of a sunflower. But its serendipitous appearances aren't nearly as frequent as pop culture would have you believe, writes Samuel Arbesman at The Nautilus. In fact, one of the most common examples of mathematical perfection — the chambered nautilus shell — actually isn't. Even math can become part of the myths we tell ourselves as we try to create meaning in the universe.

Image: Golden Ratio, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from ernestduffoo's photostream

Ambergris is often referred to as "whale vomit", but that's not really correct. A more accurate analogy would be to say that ambergris is like the whale equivalent of a hairball. It's produced in the whale digestive tract, possibly to protect intestines from the sharp, pointy beaks of squid — you'll often find squid beaks embedded in the stuff. Most of it gets pooped out. But the big chunks of ambergris have to exit the other direction. In the human world, these lumps — which have the consistency of soft rock or thickly packed potting soil — are famous because we use them to make things like perfume. The ambergris washes up on beaches, people collect it, and sell it to make cosmetics.

Anyway, that's what usually happens. Recently, a dead sperm whale washed up on a beach in Holland and the conservationists who dissected it found a huge quantity of ambergris in the animal's intestines.

That news made me realize that I'd never actually seen a picture of ambergris before, so I went hunting around to see what the stuff looked like. That's a photo of a lump of ambergris, above. But it's not really indicative of what ambergris looks like all the time. In fact, as far as I can tell, the stuff comes in a wide variety of shapes and colors — ranging from stuff that looks like small brown pebbles to yellow-green globs covered in bubbly nodules. The diversity is worth perusing. This website, for a company that buys and sells ambergris, has several nice photos. And Google image search turned up a plethora of pics that really capture how different one lump of ambergris can be from another.

Photo: Gilles San Martin (cc)

Can the eaten eat back?

The darkling beetle, small and shy with an understated matte-black carapace, is better known as its adolescent self, the mealworm. Mealworms and their darkling cousins the superworms are popular “live feeders”—food for pet reptiles and amphibians that won’t eat prey that’s already dead. For years, a disconcerting rumor has bounced around the “herp” (as in, herpetofauna) community. Heed the words of Fishguy2727, posting on Aquaticcommunity.com: “I have talked to a number of people who have FIRST-HAND watched with their own eyes as the animal ate a mealworm ... and within ten to twenty seconds the mealworm is chewing out of the animal’s stomach.”

I heard about the phenomenon SECOND-HAND from wildlife biologist Tom Pitchford. The mealworm came to mind when I asked Tom whether he knew of any nonparasitic creature that could survive in a stomach for any length of time. He had heard that some online herp forums recommend crushing mealworms’ heads prior to serving. “While the insect is in its death throes, the lizard will come over and eat it.”

Mealworm ranchers scoff. “This is an old wives tale,” says Wormman.com. The owner of Bassetts Cricket (and mealworm) Ranch told me that a slice of carrot, for a mealworm, is a two-day project. “They can’t eat out,” he said. (Though obviously enough people worry about it that it has its own verb form.) But mealworm sellers have a financial stake in the matter. What do reptile and amphibian dealers say? Carlos Haslam, manager of the East Bay Vivarium, a reptile and amphibian store not far from my home, told me that in his forty years in the business, he has not seen the phenomenon nor heard a customer report it happening. He pointed out that lizards chew their food before swallowing. Frogs don’t, but lizards do. And most of the stories are about lizards. Fishguy2727 takes no comfort. “Just because 1,000 people have not had it happen to them does not mean it is impossible. There is no doubt that this can happen.”

As so often is the case with apocryphal tales like this, finding someone who knows someone who’s seen it is easy. Less easy is tracking down an actual eyewitness. One who claims to have seen is John Gray, the animal care technician at the Tracy Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno. His boss, Richard Tracy, is a physiological ecologist. He predicts hotspots of future extinction, with reptiles and amphibians as his focus. Eighteen lizards, forty toads, and fifty frogs are under John Gray’s care, but he has not seen it happen to any of them. It happened to a fence lizard he caught in his backyard as a twelve-year-old. He recalls feeding a superworm to his new pet in the evening, and finding the lizard dead the next morning with the superworm “hanging out of its side.”

Tracy is skeptical. He has a theory that the story took root in the public’s consciousness with the 1979 release of Alien, a film in which the title character hatches inside one of the crew and breaks through the skin of the man’s abdomen during a meeting. He questions Gray’s memory. Who can recall, with dependable accuracy, the details of an event that happened thirty years ago? One of the mealworm’s natural behaviors is to crawl underneath things. “Mealworms prefer darkness and to have their body in contact with an object,” says the University of Arizona Darkling Beetle/Mealworm Information sheet, under the heading “Interesting Behaviors.” The sheet’s authors make no mention of mealworms eating their way out of stomachs, which would, you’d think, qualify as interesting behavior. As with the post-laxative stomach slug and snake sightings of yesteryear, it seems more likely that the worm was already on the scene, seeking darkness and framed by happenstance.

Mary Roach's Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal is available from Amazon.

However, like most people who work with captive reptiles and amphibians, Tracy has trouble completely dismissing the stories. He’s going to do what experimental biologists do in situations like this: experiment.

Professor Tracy has borrowed an endoscope. It is slimmer than most because it was designed to look up urethras. The scope belonged to a urologist whose daughter studied tortoises at the University of Nevada. He lent it to her to look inside tortoise burrows, and she has lent it to Tracy to watch mealworms inside stomachs. What goes around comes around, and up and in and through.

Tracy has no funding for the experiment, just enthusiasm. He calls up colleagues and acquaintances and tells them what he’s fixing to do, and they jump on board with offers to help. Walt Mandeville, the university veterinarian, has volunteered to do the sedating. Tracy’s grad student Lee Lemenager will be manning the endoscope. Lee has the kind of face that children draw when they first begin to draw faces, everything round and benign. Earlier in the day when he dripped gastric acid on a superworm, it seemed like a friendly thing to do.

“And this is Frank and Terry, from OMED,” says Tracy as two more men show up in the lab. OMED of Nevada sells used medical equipment. “They lent us tens of thousands of dollars of video equipment that is forty years old and probably worthless. Welcome!” Tracy is one of those supremely likable professors whom students keep in touch with long after graduation. The back wall of the Tracy Laboratory is covered with photographic portraits he has taken of his grad students. His white hair suggests he may be closing in on retirement, but it is difficult to imagine him golfing or watching daytime television.

Tracy holds a bullfrog in sitting position while Lee feeds the scope into its mouth and down to the stomach. We aim to spy on a superworm swallowed less than two minutes ago. The endoscope, which is a flexible tube of fiber optics with a tiny camera and light at the end, is hooked up to a closed-circuit video monitor so that everyone can watch, and Tracy can film, what’s happening inside the stomach.

The frog is sedated but awake. It glows like a decorative table lamp, the kind that sets a mood but is not sufficient to read by. The screen on the monitor is solid pink: the view from inside a well-lit frog stomach. You don’t expect any part of a frog to be pink, but there it is, pink as Pepto-Bismol.

And then suddenly: brown. “There he is!” Lee focuses down on telltale bands of brown, tan, and black. The superworm is not moving. To see whether it’s even alive, Walt the veterinarian inserts a pair of biopsy forceps through the makeshift speculum that Lee slid down the frog’s esophagus at the beginning of the experiment. The jaws of the forceps gently squeeze the superworm’s midsection. It squirms, electing a spontaneous Broadway chorus: “It’s alive!”

“Is it chewing?” someone asks. As if by director’s cue, all heads lean in.

“That’s the tail,” says Walt the vet. Walt has a keen observational eye, honed by a span of years as a poultry inspector (“4.8 seconds per bird”).

Lee pulls back on the endoscope and works it over to the other end. The superworm’s mouthparts are still. Nothing is moving. Walt tells us about a phenomenon he calls the “blanket effect.” To calm a wild horse prior to treating it, a vet may herd the animal into a narrow chute lined with packing peanuts that gently presses in on its sides. It is the same principle behind swaddling an infant or hugging a distraught friend or dressing a thunder-phobic dog in an elasticized Thundershirt, available in pink, navy, and heather gray. Mercifully, stomach walls seem to act as a mealworm Thundershirt.

Before the superworm was presented to the frog, Lee looped a thread around its middle and secured it with surgical glue, so he could retrieve it later. Now that time has come. The frog surrenders its lunch seemingly without concern, and the superworm is left in a petri dish to recover. John Gray goes to get a chuckwalla, placing the superworm back behind the lizard’s teeth. Same result. The superworm quickly goes still but does not die.

One thing is clear from these experiments. Mealworms are not much troubled by gastric—that is, hydrochloric—acid. Many people, including myself when I began this book, think of hydrochloric acid more or less the way they think of sulfuric acid, the acid of batteries and drain cleaners and hateful men who wish to scar women’s faces. Sulfur likes to bind with proteins, radically altering their structure. If that structure is your skin, you come away from the experience disastrously altered. Hydrochloric acid isn’t as caustic.

For me the confusion can be traced to the movie Anaconda, the scene in which the giant snake rises from the water to regurgitate Jon Voight’s character, his face melted like wax. Some time back, I visited the lab of my favorite snake digestion expert Stephen Secor, the technical consultant on Anaconda. I told him I wanted to experience gastric acid, to get a sense of what it might feel like to be alive inside a stomach. He made me promise not to tell his wife, who oversees safety protocol for the university’s labs, and then he took a bottle of hydrochloric acid off a shelf and put a dab—five microliters—on my wrist. I braced for sharp heat, as from a drop of scalding water. It was a full minute before I felt anything at all, and then only a weak itch. He added another drop. At three minutes, the itch turned to mild irritation, which held more or less steady for twenty minutes, then faded to nothing. It left no mark.

But stomachs secrete more than a single drop of hydrochloric acid. And they keep on secreting, readjusting the pH as the digesting food buffers the acid. My guess is that the situation inside an actively secreting stomach lies somewhere between what occurred on my wrist and what happened to the Japanese factory worker who fell into a tank of hydrochloric acid seven feet deep. The case report states that his skin turned brown and the delicate tissue of his lungs and digestive organs underwent “dry coagulation necrosis.” Burning—whether from acid or from heat—denatures proteins. It changes their structure. It is denaturing that solidifies the boiling egg, that curdles milk, that distorts the burn victim’s skin. Inside a stomach, hydrochloric acid denatures edible proteins, making them easier for digestive enzymes to break down.

The effects of gastric acid are insidious but far from instantaneous, especially if the eaten entity is, like a superworm, protected by an exoskeleton. Crabs vomited after three hours in the stomach of the Asian crab-eating snake Fordonia leucobalia have been known to stand up and run away. I have an eyewitness for this: University of Cincinnati biologist Bruce Jayne. Jayne had “gently massaged” the snakes’ bellies to get them to surrender what they’d eaten, so he could tally it for his research. Because you can’t just ask them.

But without Bruce Jayne to massage the belly, without Lee Lemenager to pull the surgical thread, without God making the whale regurgitate, there would seem to be no way out.

Parasites are the exception. “Parasites bore all over the place,” says Professor Tracy. Some are equipped with a boring tooth, like a drill bit installed on the top of the head. “That’s what they’ve evolved to do. But these are mealworms, for crying out loud.” Larvae burrow, but they don’t bore. “How the hell would they know to tunnel out?” Walt the vet agrees. He is off and running with a story about the giant kidney worm, a parasite that bores out the entire organ and then exits the body through the urethra. He jerks his elbow toward the endoscope. “You could watch it coming with that scope.”

Tracy is going to give the superworms one last chance, the best possible chance, to see if they can chew their way to freedom. They will be put inside a dead stomach—one with no secretions and no muscle contractions.

Where do you find a stomach on a Thursday afternoon in Reno?

“Chinatown?” suggests someone.

“Costco?”

“Butcher Boys.” Tracy pulls his phone from a pocket. “Hello, I’m from the university”—the catchall preamble for unorthodox inquiries. “I’m wondering, is there any chance at all we could get a fish stomach from you?” Tracy waits while the man goes to ask someone and/or make twirling finger motions at his temple for the benefit of his coworkers. The lab falls quiet. The feeder crickets chirp in the next room. “No stomachs of anything? No. Okay.”

John Gray lifts his head and says, in his quiet way, “I’ve got a dead leopard frog in the freezer.”

Everyone takes a break while Gray goes to defrost his frog under a warm tap. Walt entertains us with talk of an alternative-medicine experiment going on at the medical school—healers practicing Reiki on mice. Tracy walks next door to get a toad to show me, a new species he discovered doing fieldwork in Argentina. He returns with it in a glass dish, cradled against his belly. He looks like a kid standing in the kitchen with his cereal bowl. It’s a nice toad, less warty than some. I tell him this, and he seems pleased. “You could be the first person to like this species.” Second, I’m pretty sure.

“You could be the last too,” says Lee, more of a frog guy.

Gray rejoins the group with the defrosted leopard frog, now pinned in a dissecting tray. Lee snips up the midline of the belly and peels back the flaps of skin as if they were stage curtains. Professor Tracy slides a superworm into the stomach.

The 1925 essay “The Psychology of Animals Swallowed Alive” opens with the author sitting “in quiet contemplation digesting after dinner” and wondering whether animals that swallow their prey live¹ are “worried by the acrobatic effects of victims trying to escape.” If this leopard frog were alive, if frogs have the neurological wherewithal to worry, then the answer must be yes, they sometimes worry. The mealworm, with obvious worries of its own, animates the frog stomach like a sock puppet, arcing and straightening and squirming in the snug pink sac for fifty-five seconds. Then it stops completely. “Blanket effect,” says someone.

The superworm is extracted and set aside. Like the others, it is motionless but not dead. And as with all the earlier entrées, this one will wake up after half an hour or so outside the stomach and appear to be fully recovered. A second worm is left in place overnight, to rule out the possibility that superworms can shrug off the blanket effect and resume their efforts to escape. It is dead by morning. “There is no way in my mind that they can eat their way out of stomachs,” states Tracy.

Walt is not as sure. He was impressed by the vigor of the superworm’s struggle. “What if there were a weak spot in the stomach?” Might it be possible to escape a stomach by rupturing it with an especially forceful squirm?

That appears to be what was depicted in a photograph that went viral in 2005, of a dead python in a Florida swamp with the tail and hind legs of an alligator sticking out of its side.

“That’s what everyone was saying: that the alligator kicked its way out,” Stephen Secor told me. Secor had been flown out to the scene by a National Geographic television production team, who had hired him as an on-camera expert for a one-hour special spawned by the chimerical remains. Secor knew before he arrived that the dinner-kicking-its-way-out scenario was extremely unlikely. Pythons kill their prey before eating it. ² “And there’s no way stuff can move once it’s inside there.”

There was in fact a weak spot. Secor pointed to a printout of the photograph I’d brought with me when I visited his lab in late 2010. Two-thirds of the way down the python’s exterior is a patch of black (dead) tissue—a poorly healed wound from some earlier incident. The rupture of this wound, Secor thinks, was caused by an alligator, let’s call him alligator B, who attacked the python while he was digesting alligator A. The python broke open at the poorly healed wound, and A popped out. So it wasn’t, at the end of the day, a case of dinner exacting revenge from within. Just another dog-eat-dog day in the Everglades.

The other theory Stephen Secor debunked for the National Geographic program was that the alligator dinner was so enormous the python simply burst. “That,” he said, pointing to the meal in the famous photograph, “is nothing.” The python is built to accommodate prey many times wider and bulkier than itself. The esophagus is a thin, pink stretchable membrane, a biological bubble gum. Secor went over to his computer and pulled up a slide of a python engulfing the head, neck, and shoulders of an adult kangaroo. This was followed by a shot of a python with three-quarters of a gazelle “down in,” with only the hips and rear legs remaining al fresco. Pythons use their muscular coils to pull the prey apart, like taffy, so it’s narrower and easier to get down. And they don’t swallow in a single peristaltic wave of muscle contraction, as we do. They do what’s called a “ptergoid walk.” They inch their jaws along on the prey like marines on their bellies, moving forward by the elbows, left, right, left.

The other reason Secor could dismiss the bursting-stomach theory is that he knows exactly how much pressure that would take. “We sealed off the cloaca of a dead python and inserted an air line down the esophagus.” Probably much like you at this moment, Secor was “sick of listening to people talk about pythons bursting.” I would give you the citation for his experiment, but Secor did not publish a paper. It was “just a fun thing.” He pointed to my printout of the python-alligator photo. “It was a lot more pressure than could be generated from this.”

Biologists have a term for stretchy, accommodating digestive equipment: compliant. You’re planning on taking down an ibex? Yes. No problem. I can handle it. The compliant stomach is a physiological larder, a storage unit for the food that will sustain an animal over the days or weeks when prey are scarce or it’s off its game. It is the stomach of feast-or-famine. “The predator has a very compliant stomach,” says David Metz, a gastroenterologist with the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania who has studied people who compete in eating contests. “Think of the lion after the big meal, with its huge, distended belly. They can lie in the sun for the next few days, letting it all slowly get digested.” When you occupy the top spot on the food chain, you are free to lounge around with little concern over someone larger and stronger jumping you and eating you. The lion falls prey only to humans, in the form of hunters—and the occasional Mesopotamian vivisectionist.

In a 2006 issue of the Lebanese Medical Journal, Farid Haddad details the efforts of Ahmad ibn Aby al’Ash‘ath, a court physician in Iraq circa a.d. 950, to document the compliancy of a lion’s stomach. In his opening paragraph, Dr. Haddad notes that ’ash ‘ath means “disheveled.” It seems an unlikely name for a royal physician, but a brief spin through the man’s writings sheds some light: “When food enters the stomach . . . , its layers get stretched; I observed this in a live lion which I dissected in the presence of Prince Ghadanfar. . . . I proceeded to pour water in the lion’s mouth and continued to pour jug after jug in its throat; and we counted until the stomach filled up with about [5 gallons]. . . . I then cut open the stomach and let the water out; the stomach shrank and I could see the pylorus. God is my witness.”

The agriculturally informed reader may be unimpressed by the five-gallon capacity of the lion’s tank. A cow’s rumen—the largest of its four stomach compartments—is the size of a thirty-gallon trash can. Why should this be, when all a ruminant needs to do to get dinner is lower its head and graze? When food carpets the land from hoof to horizon, famine isn’t a concern. So why the massive intake? The answer lies in the relatively low nutritional value of the ruminant diet. It is not merely the size of the cow’s rumen that resembles a garbage can, it is the contents. The first place I visited for this book was the University of California at Davis, where animal science professor Ed DePeters and his colleagues test organic waste by-products to see whether they might make good cattle feed. With the help of a fistulated cow, DePeters has tested the digestibility of almond hulls, pomegranate scrap, lemon pulp, tomato seeds, and cotton seed hulls. He is a modern-day William Beaumont, lowering mesh bags of experimental foods into the rumen, and then pulling them out by a string at intervals to see what remains. The day I visited, they had been testing prune pits from nearby Yuba City, “the prune capital of the world.”³

Cows, by virtue of the plentiful and varied bacteria in their rumen, are able to derive energy from things that would pass through a human undigested. The prune pit has a hard, nutritionally blank hull, but the embryo inside provides protein and fat. Rumen bacteria can break down the hull and free these nutrients, though it takes them a few days. DePeters showed me one of the mesh bags. “Sometimes I put a midterm exam in there,” he said. Cows can’t digest wood pulp. “I tell my students, ‘The cow didn’t digest that material any better than you did.’”

“We’ve done cloth from a plant in Petaluma that was making cotton towels. All the small linters that didn’t get into the towels? You can feed ’em. They can break it down. They get energy from it. It’s just slower.” As with hay and grass, it takes a sizable serving of tea towel for a cow to get its RDA—hence the enormous volume of the rumen. DePeters speculates that there’s another reason for the huge capacity of the rumen. Ruminants graze on the open plain, easily visible and vulnerable to predators. “So they’ll go out and graze and take in a lot, then go and hide somewhere to ruminate and digest.” The rumen is a built-in to-go box.

DePeters took me to visit one of the fistulated cows. Escorted by an entourage of large flies, we made our way through a grid of muddy corrals. I was in kitten heels and a skirt, a fact from which DePeters, in filth-encrusted rubber boots and worn T-shirt, derived lasting merriment. DePeters is tanned and tall, with a wiry build. His hair is the same reflective silver of the screeching aluminum gates. It works well with his eye color, the deep dusty blue of scrub-jay plumage.

Cow 101.5 was getting a hose bath from one of DePeters’s students, Ariel. Ariel and her array of piercings posed a welcome challenge to the stereotype of the conservative male ag major. We stood by, watching and waving away flies. I like the look of cows: the art-directed hide, their hips under their skin, the meditative sideways metronomics of the jaw.

The fistulated—or “holey,” as the students like to say—cow has been an ag-school standard for decades. My husband Ed recalls, as a child, hearing from his dad about the cow at Rutgers with “a window in its side.” The operation is simple. The bottom of a coffee can is traced with chalk on the cow, a topical anesthetic applied, and the circle cut from the hide, along with a matching opening in the rumen. The two holes are stitched together and the hole is outfitted with a plastic stopper. It is little more barbaric than the earlobe plugs of my local Peet’s barista or Ariel’s facial adornments. “The animal rights people come out here expecting a glass window with a sash and sill,” said DePeters. He handed me a protective plastic veterinary sleeve that extended to my shoulder and directed me to position myself to the side of the opening. When a fistulated cow coughs, if it has been eating, wet plant matter sometimes blows out of the hole.

DePeters took some photographs of me with my right arm in 101.5. The cow appears unmoved. I look like I’ve seen God. I was in all the way to my armpit and still could not reach the bottom of the rumen. I could feel strong, steady squeezes and movements, almost more industrial than biological. I felt like I’d stuck my arm into a fermentation vat with an automated mixing paddle at the bottom, and I basically had.

Ancient man was omnivorous—a scavenger as much as a predator. Often enough, his steak dinner was shared with millions of potentially harmful bacteria. Thus the human stomach, unlike the ruminant’s, concerns itself with disinfection more than holding capacity. But even scavenged meals were sporadic, and some degree of storage was needed. How compliant is the human stomach? That depends on what you use it for.

Endnotes

1 Those of you who swallow oysters without chewing them may be curious as to the fate of your appetizers. Mollusk scientist Steve Geiger surmised that a cleanly shucked oyster could likely survive a matter of minutes inside the stomach. Oysters can “switch over to anaerobic” and get by without oxygen, but the temperature in a stomach is far too warm. I asked Geiger, who works for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, about the oyster’s emotional state during its final moments inside a person. He replied that the oyster, from his understanding, is “pretty low on the scale.” While a scallop, by comparison, has eyes and a primitive neural network at its disposal, the adult oyster makes do with a few ganglia. And mercifully, it is likely to go into shock almost immediately because of the low pH of the stomach. Researchers who need to sedate crustaceans use seltzer water because of its low pH. Geiger imagined it would have a similar effect on bivalves. But you might like to chew them nonetheless, because they’re tastier that way.

2 How remains a matter of debate. I had heard that pythons suffocate prey by tightening on its exhale and preventing further inhales. Secor says no; prey passes out too quickly for that to be the explanation. “You’d still have oxygen circulating in the blood, like you’re holding your breath.” He thinks it’s more likely that the constriction shuts off blood flow, more like strangulation than suffocation. An experiment was planned at UCLA but nixed by the animal care committee. Secor would volunteer himself. “I think we’d all like to have a giant snake constrict us in a controlled situation and see what happens—could we still inhale?” It’s possible he’s a little nuts. But in a good way.

3 Excuse me, I mean the Dried Plum Capital of the World. The change was made official in 1988, as part of an effort to liberate the fruit from its reputation as a geriatric stool softener. Yuba City has Vancouver, Washington, to blame for that. The original Prune Capital of the World, Vancouver was the home of the Prunarians, a group of civic-minded prune boosters who, back in the 1920s, touted the laxative effects of dried plums. The Prunarians also sponsored an annual prune festival and parade. A 1919 photo reveals a distinct lack of festiveness and pruniness. Eight men in beige uniforms stand in a row across the width of a rain-soaked pavement. A ninth stands on his own just ahead of the row, similarly attired. Presumably he is their leader, though you expect a little foofaraw from an entity known as the Big Prune. Or the Big Dried Plum, as Yuba City would like you to call him.

Mary Roach is the author of four previous books, including Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, and Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. She lives in Oakland, California. Her Twitter feed: @mary_roach

]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/04/01/dinners-revenge-mealworms.html/feed 6 http://boingboing.net/2013/03/15/the-scientific-field-with-the.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/15/the-scientific-field-with-the.html#comments Fri, 15 Mar 2013 16:40:37 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=219047 they die interestingly. Some recent causes of death in this scientific field include: Elephant charge, being eaten by caimans (assumed), and the plague. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/15/the-scientific-field-with-the.html/feed 4 http://boingboing.net/2013/03/12/surviving-a-massive-wildfire.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/12/surviving-a-massive-wildfire.html#comments Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:14:37 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=218157 Frank Bures tells the story of two kayakers caught in the inferno. Includes some amazing photos taken by one of the kayakers. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/12/surviving-a-massive-wildfire.html/feed 2 http://boingboing.net/2013/03/09/brazilian-birds-ambient-inter.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/09/brazilian-birds-ambient-inter.html#comments Sat, 09 Mar 2013 17:06:39 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=217684

My new ambient-sound-while-working internet radio jam: Brazilian Birds.

(Photo: Toucan eye, a Creative Commons image from doug88888's photostream)]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/09/brazilian-birds-ambient-inter.html/feed 10 http://boingboing.net/2013/03/06/meet-pando-the-worlds-oldes.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/06/meet-pando-the-worlds-oldes.html#comments Wed, 06 Mar 2013 16:43:11 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=216922 Tremble before Pando. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/06/meet-pando-the-worlds-oldes.html/feed 29 http://boingboing.net/2013/03/06/ant-wars-battle-of-the-invasi.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/06/ant-wars-battle-of-the-invasi.html#comments Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:16:58 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=216875

There's a war on in America, pitting invasive ant against invasive ant in a fight to the finish. It's sort of like Alien vs. Predator, in a way, because whoever wins ... we lose. Argentine ants (the reigning champions) have wiped out native ant species in many of the environments they've invaded over the years, affecting the survival of other animals that used to feed on those ants. Worse, they have a fondness for certain agricultural pests, like aphids. In places with lots of Argentine ants, aphids do very well — and plants do worse.

But now the Argentines are facing a serious challenge in the form of Asian needle ants, another invasive species that — for reasons nobody really understands — have suddenly gone from minor player to major threat in the last decade. The big downside to Asian needle ants: They sting. They sting us. And, right now, it looks like they're winning.

John Roach tells the story at NBC News. But you can get a good idea of what this matchup looks like by checking out the work of insect photographer Alex Wild. That's his picture above, showing an Argentine ant on the left and an Asian needle ant on the right.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/06/ant-wars-battle-of-the-invasi.html/feed 17 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/06/i-will-trade-you-12-sheep-for.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/06/i-will-trade-you-12-sheep-for.html#comments Wed, 06 Feb 2013 21:35:43 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=211445 What would Settlers of Catan be like if you added oil wells to the already potent resource mix of sheep, wood, ore, brick, and grain? The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds out when reporter Ann Griswold sits in on a game of Catan: Oil Springs. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/06/i-will-trade-you-12-sheep-for.html/feed 3 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/05/medical-cures-from-the-mouth-o.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/05/medical-cures-from-the-mouth-o.html#comments Tue, 05 Feb 2013 18:36:41 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=211054

Here, scientists suck all the dignity out of a Jameson’s mamba — a snake capable of killing a human in just a few, painful hours. The photo is part of a story in the February issue of National Geographic, exploring the potential medical uses of venom. There are also more photos. And you will meet cobra farmers.

© Mattias Klum /National Geographic

]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/05/medical-cures-from-the-mouth-o.html/feed 4 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/17/wtf-evolution.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/17/wtf-evolution.html#comments Thu, 17 Jan 2013 21:24:29 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=206414 helpful critiques of some of the weirder parts of nature. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/17/wtf-evolution.html/feed 11 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/02/crime-against-nature-beautifu.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/02/crime-against-nature-beautifu.html#comments Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:31:13 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=203692

This is a book about "doin' what comes naturally". Which is to say, sex. But what kind of sex? With whom? And to what purpose? At what point do things like gender expression, sex, reproduction, and child-rearing stop being "normal and natural" and start being something weird that humans do because we are diverse/perverted/sinful/creative (depending on your personal point of view)?

In reality, the word "natural" is mainly how we tell each other which behaviors and traits are the socially correct ones. Calling something natural is often more about specific human cultural standards than it is about what actually happens in nature. Crime Against Nature is artist Gwenn Seemel's attempt to correct that mistake. Filled with gorgeous, Klimt-esque illustrations, Seemel's book shows readers just how diverse nature can be and just how often it fails to conform to our ideas of what is normal — from girls who are bigger and tougher than boys; to boys who give birth; to boys and girls that don't have sex or reproduce at all (and don't seem to mind one bit).

The issues at play here are hefty and potentially uncomfortable, but the book itself is light, playful, and pleasantly un-preachy. It's also set up in a way that allows it to evolve with kids as their reading skills improve — pairing simple statements like "Boys can be the pretty ones" with longer but still easy-to-read paragraphs explaining, for instance, the most recent scientific theories about why male peacocks are so much more colorful than females.

Overall, the book is a great reminder that there are lots of ways to be a girl and lots of ways to be a boy. Nature is chock full of role models for every kid (and every adult). Just because you don't conform to the version of your gender that you see on TV it doesn't mean that you're defective. Last month, my husband and I navigated aisle after aisle of noxiously gendered toys, trying to find things for our niece and nephew that reflected those individual kids, rather than telling them who they were supposed to be and what they were supposed to like. In a world where even Legos come in pink boxes (with instructions for building cute little houses) and blue boxes (with instructions for building race cars), Crime Against Nature is a much-needed breath of fresh air.

You can buy a print version of Crime Against Nature from Gwenn Seemel for $32.

Alternately, you can download the digital version for free (or for a donation of your choice!)

]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/02/crime-against-nature-beautifu.html/feed 8 http://boingboing.net/2012/12/28/sand-spider-builds-a-burrow.html http://boingboing.net/2012/12/28/sand-spider-builds-a-burrow.html#comments Fri, 28 Dec 2012 19:07:59 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=203099

Six-eyed sand spiders make their living by hiding, burrowing into the sand where they lie in wait of passing prey. Given that, it's a bit surprising how ... cute ... the process of burrowing looks. All I could think while watching this video was, "Awww, who's a happy spider?"

Via Brian Malow

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/12/28/sand-spider-builds-a-burrow.html/feed 13 http://boingboing.net/2012/12/07/what-birds-are-doing-with-your.html http://boingboing.net/2012/12/07/what-birds-are-doing-with-your.html#comments Fri, 07 Dec 2012 21:44:29 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=199132

Nicotine is one of nature's bug zappers. Seriously. Lots of plants have evolved to produce bug-repelling chemicals as part of their defense mechanisms and tobacco happens to be one of those plants.

So when city-dwelling birds use the fluffy, nicotine-soaked material from discarded cigarette butts to build their nests it might not be the unmitigated ecological disaster that most of us imagine when we hear that "birds are building nests out of discarded cigarette butts". Researchers at Mexico’s Autonomous University of Tlaxcala think the nicotine in the cigarettes might help keep chicks healthy — essentially serving as an urban substitute for the parasite-repelling plants the birds would have used in the wild.

At Culturing Science, Hannah Waters explains the idea...

But birds are actually quite fond of the chemicals found in some smelly plants, otherwise known as aromatics, from which “essential oils” are derived. Aromatic plants produce these chemicals to defend themselves against insects and other animals that would take them for food—but birds have their own use for them. Some nest-building species, including starlings and blue tits, regularly replenish their nests with fresh aromatics, and scientists hypothesize that the birds use these chemicals as parenting tools.

How would plant-derived chemicals help birds raise their chicks? It’s possible that the chemicals boost the immune systems or development of the chicks so that they survive better after they leave the nest; this is known as the “drug hypothesis.” Alternatively, the “nest protection” hypothesis suggests that the plant chemicals act as insecticides, driving parasites and other harmful insects from the nest.

Nicotine is an insecticide, although we don’t often think of it that way. Tobacco plants generate nicotine because it defends against herbivorous beetles that would otherwise devour the plants–which means a smoker’s buzz is caused by a plant’s chemical defense mechanism. Some remnants of that insecticide remains in cigarette butts left in city streets, which are then transported into bird nests.

Read the full story

A house sparrow stands near a cigarette butt in Mexico City. Photo Credit: © Víctor Argaez

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/12/07/what-birds-are-doing-with-your.html/feed 36 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/29/maui-10000-feet-above-the-se.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/29/maui-10000-feet-above-the-se.html#comments Thu, 29 Nov 2012 12:33:43 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=197182 Boing Boing Flickr pool today, this stunning photograph by Carlos26 of mountains in Hawaii, some 10K ft. above sea level. Notice the clouds *below*. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/29/maui-10000-feet-above-the-se.html/feed 12 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/25/the-milky-way.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/25/the-milky-way.html#comments Sun, 25 Nov 2012 14:46:54 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=195987 wonderful night-sky photo shared in the BB Flickr Pool by Dave Hensley: "Unadjusted jpg made from 16bit/channel tiff created by a linux stacking script I wrote; operating on a series of images I captured over vacation."]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/25/the-milky-way.html/feed 8 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/12/why-do-trees-fall-over-in-a-st.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/12/why-do-trees-fall-over-in-a-st.html#comments Mon, 12 Nov 2012 22:34:45 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=193733

The more accurate version of this question would really be something like, "Why do some trees fall over in a storm while others stay standing?" The answer is more complex than a simple distinction between old, rotted, and weak vs. young, healthy, and strong. Instead, writes Mary Knudson at Scientific American blogs, trees fall because of their size, their species, and even the history of the human communities around them.

“Trees most at risk are those whose environment has recently changed (say in the last 5 – 10 years),” Smith says. When trees that were living in the midst of a forest lose the protection of a rim of trees and become stand-alones in new housing lots or become the edge trees of the forest, they are made more vulnerable to strong weather elements such as wind.

They also lose the physical protection of surrounding trees that had kept them from bending very far and breaking. Land clearing may wound a tree’s trunk or roots, “providing an opportunity for infection by wood decay fungi. Decay usually proceeds slowly, but can be significant 5-10 years after basal or root injury.” What humans do to the ground around trees — compacting soil, changing gradation and drainage “can kill roots and increase infection,” Smith warns.

Read the full piece at Scientific American Blogs

Image: West Philly Storm - Trees Down, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from kwbridge's photostream

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/12/why-do-trees-fall-over-in-a-st.html/feed 12 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/01/pssst-hey-kid-wanna-see-some.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/01/pssst-hey-kid-wanna-see-some.html#comments Thu, 01 Nov 2012 20:45:58 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=191647

Come on. It's for science.

In fact, it's meant to help people.

Researchers at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, put a dead pig in a shark-proof (and octopus-proof, as you'll see) cage and stuck it in the ocean in order to learn more about how human remains decompose underwater. That knowledge will help forensic scientists interpret crime scenes.

Most of the work is done by maggots known as sea lice, but towards the end, after the maggots have eaten the good bits, you can watch some fat, red shrimp move in to pick apart the cartilage.

Read the full story about this research at New Scientist

Via Deep Sea News

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/01/pssst-hey-kid-wanna-see-some.html/feed 13 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/27/the-life-and-death-of-a-125-ye.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/27/the-life-and-death-of-a-125-ye.html#comments Thu, 27 Sep 2012 14:36:27 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=183922

Standing, and Falling, two short films by Casimir Nozkowski about the life and death of a big, beautiful, very old tree.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/27/the-life-and-death-of-a-125-ye.html/feed 11 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/13/the-grisly-business-of-buffalo.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/13/the-grisly-business-of-buffalo.html#comments Thu, 13 Sep 2012 15:38:41 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=180804

By this point in your lives, most of you are by no doubt aware of the massive slaughter of buffalo that happened in the United States in the late 19th century. Across the plains, thousands of buffalo were killed every week during a brief period where the hides of these animals could fetch upwards of $10 a pop. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator only goes back to 1913, so it's hard for me to say what that's worth today. But we know from the context that even when the value of buffalo hides dropped to $1 each, the business of killing and skinning buffalo was still considered a damned fine living.)

You might think that the business ended there, with dead, skinned buffalo left to rot on the prairie. And you're sort of right. But, in a story at Bloomberg News, Tim Heffernan explains that, a few years later, those dead buffalo created another boom and bust industry—the bone collection business.

Animal bones were useful things in the 19th century. Dried and charred, they produced a substance called bone black. When coarsely crushed, it could filter impurities out of sugar-cane juice, leaving a clear liquid that evaporated to produce pure white sugar -- a lucrative industry. Bone black also made a useful pigment for paints, dyes and cosmetics, and acted as a dry lubricant for iron and steel forgings.

... And so the homesteaders gathered the buffalo bones. It was easy work: Children could do it. Carted to town, a ton of bones fetched a few dollars. Sent to rendering plants and furnaces in the big industrial cities, that same ton was worth between $18 and $27. Boiled, charred, crushed or powdered, it was worth as much as $60.

... By the 1880s, however, a few reporters were expressing nervous awe at the scale of the cleansing, and even despair for what had been lost. In 1891, not 25 years after the slaughter began, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran a dispatch titled “Relics of the Buffalo.” The relics were the animals’ empty pathways and dust wallows, worn into the surface of the Manitoba plains over countless years. The bones, let alone the living creatures, were long gone.

It's a fascinating read. And to give you a more vivid idea of what this short-lived industry looked like at its height, I want to share a quote with you that Heffernan found in an August, 1891 issue of The San Francisco Chronicle. This quote isn't in his Bloomberg story. It also uses some derogatory language towards people of Native American ancestry. So you'll want to be aware of that going in. Despite that racism, I think it's worth posting here for the visual description of the bone business.

Reading this quote (and Heffernan's story) is where I, for the first time, got a real understanding of how insane the buffalo slaughter really was, and the impact it must have had on both Native American communities and the overall ecology of the West. To grasp the idea of millions of dead animals as more than a statistic, you have to "see" the aftermath.

From The San Francisco Chronicle, August 1891, in an article titled "Half-Breeds Scouring the Plains for Fertilizer Material":

"Scarcely a station along the road but has two or three pyramids of bones awaiting shipment. To the traveler they have the appearance at a distance of hills covered with snow, but upon closer examination the skulls, ribs, and other bones of human beings as well as animals are revealed in all their hideousness. These half-breeds have worked industriously at the gathering of the bones, as the absence of them on the prairies will attest. They are well paid for their work."

Read Tim Heffernan's story in Bloomberg News

Image: IMG_7329, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from beggs's photostream

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/13/the-grisly-business-of-buffalo.html/feed 32 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/27/cancer-threatens-tasmanian-dev.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/27/cancer-threatens-tasmanian-dev.html#comments Mon, 27 Aug 2012 16:49:12 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=178279

In the last 2 decades, some 85% of wild Tasmanian Devils have been wiped out. The primary cause isn't poachers or habitat destruction, but a bizarre kind of *contagious* cancer. "A recent epidemic disease, known as devil facial tumour disease, has brought an extremely rare, but equally devastating, set of circumstances together to threaten the devil population. Facial tumour disease, unlike every form of cancer known to affect humans, is transferred directly from devil to devil when they bite each other, which is 'something they do a lot during feeding or mating.'” ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/27/cancer-threatens-tasmanian-dev.html/feed 17 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/13/the-desert-that-creates-the-ra.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/13/the-desert-that-creates-the-ra.html#comments Mon, 13 Aug 2012 12:38:45 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=176132

This is probably the most amazing thing I learned all weekend. The Amazon rainforest—with all its plant and animal life, and all its astounding biodiversity—could not exist as we know it without the patch of African desert pictured above.

The rainforest is amazing, but the soil it produces isn't very nutrient rich. All the minerals and nutrients that fertilize the rainforest have to come from someplace else. Specifically: Africa. Scientists have known for a while that this natural fertilizer is crossing the Atlantic in the form of dust storms, but science writer Colin Schultz ran across a 2006 paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters that not only produces evidence for a much larger trans-oceanic transfer of dust than was previously assumed ... it also pinpoints the exact (and astoundingly small) location where all the fertilizer in the Amazon is coming from.

The research paper, itself, is pleasantly readable, as far as these things go, so I'm going to quote directly from it. One quick note before I launch into this quote. The authors are measuring the mass of the dust in teragrams (or Tg). As you're trying to wrap your head around this, it might be helpful to know that 1 Tg = 1 million tons.

A total of 140 (± 40) Tg is deposited in the Atlantic ocean and 50 (± 15) Tg reach and fertilize the Amazon basin. This is four times an older estimate, explaining a paradox regarding the source of nutrients to the Amazon forest. Swap et al suggested that while the source for minerals and nutrients in the Amazon is the dust from Africa, it was estimated that only 13 Tg of dust per year actually arrive in the Amazon. However, they pointed out that 50 Tg are needed to balance the Amazon nutrient budget.

Here we show a remarkable arrangement in nature in which the mineral dust arriving at the Amazon basin from the Sahara actually originates from a single source of only ~ 0.5% of the size of the Amazon: the Bodélé depression. Located northeast of Lake Chad (17°N, 18°E) near the northern border of the Sahel, it is known to be the most vigorous source for dust over the entire globe.

Basically, these 2006 calculations account for all the fertilization needs of the Amazon, while previous calculations left a weird gap in between the amount of dust the rainforest needed and the amount the scientists thought was getting there.

Also: The place the dust is coming from is a single, highly specific region. As Alexis Madrigal pointed out at The Atlantic, we're talking about a patch of desert only 1/3 the size of Florida supplying the nutrient needs of a jungle that is roughly the same size as all 48 contiguous United States. Mind, blown.

Read the full research paper at Environmental Research Letters

Check out The Atlantic's write up on this, including a satellite photo of the dust storms in question.

Follow the guy who started it all—the very smart, very entertaining, and very tall Colin Schultz

Via Bart King

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/13/the-desert-that-creates-the-ra.html/feed 54 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/21/how-not-to-conserve-wildlife.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/21/how-not-to-conserve-wildlife.html#comments Sat, 21 Jul 2012 17:31:16 +0000 Rob Beschizza http://boingboing.net/?p=172479 The Onion: Spain king ousted as honorary president of World Wildlife Fund branch after elephant hunt. [Wapo]]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/07/21/how-not-to-conserve-wildlife.html/feed 29 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/18/whale-shark-eats-all-the-fishe.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/18/whale-shark-eats-all-the-fishe.html#comments Wed, 18 Jul 2012 19:19:21 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=171857

Clever whale sharks have figured out that fishing nets contain a lot of tasty fish. More importantly, they've figured out that they can suck those fish out of the net through holes in the net material.

The downside: When the sharks swim into fishing areas, looking for nets to suck, they can end up caught in the nets themselves. Conservation International took this video, showing why the sharks are hanging out around nets to begin with, as part of a series of videos documenting new net designs that can keep the fishies in and the whale sharks out.

Check out the rest of the video series

Via Charles Q. Choi

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/07/18/whale-shark-eats-all-the-fishe.html/feed 24 http://boingboing.net/2012/06/22/listen-to-the-sounds-of-nature.html http://boingboing.net/2012/06/22/listen-to-the-sounds-of-nature.html#comments Fri, 22 Jun 2012 12:25:46 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=167300 268 nature recordings made in the first half of the 20th century. The recordings date back to the 1930s and include the songs of birds, noises made by large vertebrates like camels and panda bears, and even full-environment background sounds like this 1938 recording of an Afrotropical environment. Jeezus, the jungle is loud. (Via Alice Bell)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/06/22/listen-to-the-sounds-of-nature.html/feed 2 http://boingboing.net/2012/06/21/narwhal-chaser.html http://boingboing.net/2012/06/21/narwhal-chaser.html#comments Thu, 21 Jun 2012 17:40:43 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=167224

Listening to Sir David Attenborough talk about narwhals is truly a soothing and rejuvenating experience. Good for whatever ails you.

Video Link

Via Explore and Maria Popova

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/06/21/narwhal-chaser.html/feed 12 http://boingboing.net/2012/05/31/the-butterflies-of-india-an-i.html http://boingboing.net/2012/05/31/the-butterflies-of-india-an-i.html#comments Fri, 01 Jun 2012 03:25:28 +0000 Avi Solomon http://boingboing.net/?p=164100

Isaac Kehimkar is an avid naturalist and the author of The Book of Indian Butterflies Isaac's photostream of Indian Butterflies is at Flickr.

Avi Solomon: What early influences drew you to the study of nature?

Isaac Kehimkar: I grew up in Deonar, a suburb of Mumbai. It was a time when black and white television had just started in India with only one channel and no video games in sight. But Nature offered so many options. Deonar was still green and water in the streams was sparkling clean. The Monsoons were my season and catching fish and crabs with local Koli and Agri boys in the rice fields was my favorite pastime. That's the time I even dared (rather foolishly) to catch snakes too! With the rains gone and rice harvested, cricket pitches were soon paved in the rice fields and we played cricket till the rains came again.

The house we lived had good lot of trees and my interest in gardening grew so much that I started a plant nursery. My parents encouraged me to keep pets and allowed me to do what made me happy. I had dogs, cats, rabbits, hens, ducks and fishes. Pets taught me to take responsibilities and learn to accept loss in life.

Avi: How did you become a Naturalist?

Isaac: Weak in maths, I could not go for science, so I graduated in Political Science and Psychology from Mumbai University. However, my affinity towards nature remained strong as ever. Soon after graduating I did a brief stint in selling cosmetics with Lakme.

My father advised me that it's more difficult to get a job that will give satisfaction and happiness than those which give higher salaries - money would come eventually, but it's difficult to be happy. I had the opportunity to join the Bombay Natural History Society as a volunteer in 1978 and chose a low-paying job there as Library Assistant. My mother had warned me that no girl would marry me with this meager salary, but I knew that BNHS was the place for me. Here I grew up while lapping up as much as I could from the library and learning from people like Dr. Salim Ali and Vyankatesh Madgulkar who often visited the BNHS library. "Sanctuary" magazine offered me good opportunities to hone my writing skills and I could publish several of my natural history photos and articles. I did a story on the butterfly lifecycle and I found it so fascinating that then onwards butterflies took over my life.

My books on Indian Wildflowers and Indian Butterflies were then published by the BNHS and Oxford University Press. The book on butterflies turned out to be the bestseller among BNHS publications. I now am the General Manager of Programs for the BNHS. I did marry and my family is very supportive of my endeavors!

Avi: Do any particular flowers and butterflies have special significance for you?

Isaac: Among flowers, it's the Brahma Kamal (Saussurea obvallata), that blooms in the Himalayas at 15000 ft. This flower represents the serene beauty of the Himalayas - placid and unruffled. I always tell people to visit the Himalayas atleast once in their lifetime—it's a great humbling experience in these mighty mountains.

A Himalayan butterfly is also my favorite. It is the regal Red Apollo (Parnassius epaphus) that flies above 10,000 ft in the drier cold desert regions of the Himalayas like Ladakh.

Avi: What are the challenges of studying butterflies in India?

Isaac: I have realized that India is truly an unique and diverse country with a amazing array of landscapes, people, animals, birds, insects and flowers. To really "see" India one lifetime is not enough. I have seen most of India while chasing butterflies. Tracking butterflies in Ladakh at 16000 ft was quite a breathless exercise and the enormity of the landscape is quite intimidating. So are the dense forests of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh in the northeast. The passion for these winged jewels overcomes all hurdles like blood-thirsty leeches, invisible nasty mites and angry elephants. More than these, I fear the man-made hurdles like political unrest or getting kidnapped in the northeast.

Now I am busy doing a new book on butterflies to cover 750 species out of the 1500 species of butterflies found in India. I am also keen on reaching out to lay people by popularizing the concept of butterfly gardens. I aim to use butterflies as a vehicle to achieve conservation goals by promoting butterfly farming for forests dwelling communities as an alternative and sustainable livelihood. India is one of the hot spots for butterflies in the world. England just has 47 species of butterflies and we have a rich heritage of 1500 species!

Avi: Butterflies are associated with reincarnation in Greek mythology. Did you find similar myths in India?

Isaac: Yes, in Hindu mythology there is a similar story: One day Brahma created the world—trees, waters, animals, fish, birds, plants and flowers. He loved them all, but most of all he loved the plants and the flowers that grew in it. Until, one day, to his horror he found all the plants stripped of their leaves. Brahma was very angry, and wanted to find the culprit. Finally a caterpillar confessed that he was so hungry that he could not resist the tender leaves.

Angry Brahma cursed the caterpillar saying "You shall become like a stone, with no legs to walk, no wings to fly and no jaws to eat. You will just hang there surrounded by the plants you like so much, but you will not be able to eat my plants again!" And the caterpillar hung there like a lifeless lump, with no legs and jaws for days. Unable to bear the caterpillar's fate, fellow creatures like the birds and animals requested Brahma to forgive the caterpillar. Brahma finally agreed and modified his curse to last only for a few days. The caterpillar touched Brahma's feet in gratitude.

Pleased with the caterpillar, Brahma granted him a boon that henceforth every caterpillar would go to sleep for a few days and wake up as a beautiful butterfly.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/31/the-butterflies-of-india-an-i.html/feed 1 http://boingboing.net/2012/05/31/lightning-rainbow.html http://boingboing.net/2012/05/31/lightning-rainbow.html#comments Thu, 31 May 2012 15:11:05 +0000 Rob Beschizza http://boingboing.net/?p=163845

A rainbow during storms in Haikou, the capital of China's Hainan province. Photo: China Daily/Reuters]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/31/lightning-rainbow.html/feed 15