The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010 Read online

  The evidence for calving at the Costa Rica Dome proved more elusive, but after many fruitless days, it arrived finally, to starboard, by way of a mother and her calf.

  The pair were moving slowly, spending a lot of time at the surface. The mother surprised us by allowing her calf to turn toward Pacific Storm. A mother whale often interposes herself between her calf and potential danger, but this mother was an easygoing, Montessori sort of parent, and she let her baby explore.

  John Calambokidis drove Squall out to snap surface pictures for photo identification. Nicklin and cameraman Ernie Kovacs grabbed their gear and went along. On nearing the whales, they pulled on their fins and slipped overboard. At first they saw nothing through their dive masks but blue. Then Kovacs, looking for the youngster, was startled to see it pass, maybe five feet below his fins. This whale was just a baby, yet its blue back seemed to pass under him endlessly. The calf, gliding by Nicklin, rolled slightly to bring an eye to bear on him. It peered into the glass orb of the camera housing, and Nicklin's shutter winked back.

  After twenty-one days at the Costa Rica Dome, we could stay no longer and turned north for Acapulco.

  On the voyage home, we took stock. There had been disappointments: we wished we had satellite-tagged more whales, had seen more calves, had experienced more underwater encounters with blue whales. We were sorry not to have glimpsed whale 4172, the white bull. But for the most part we were satisfied.

  In three weeks spent crisscrossing the dome, we had succeeded in finding three whales satellite-tagged in California and tracked down here. Each time we homed in on the transmissions of one of these telemetric whales, we had found it in the company of "clean" whales. Satellite-tagging had proved itself an efficient method for locating concentrations of the untagged. We had satellite-tagged three new blue whales (but one tag failed to transmit), affixed acoustic tags to six more, and photo-identified about seventy. Thirteen of those seventy were from California. The voyage proved that the dome is visited by large numbers of blue whales. We saw many threesomes, the romantic triangles of the blue whale, and we witnessed much boisterous courtship behavior, all suggesting that the dome is a mating ground. We demonstrated beyond a doubt that blue whales do feed here in the winter. With sonobuoys and acoustic tags, we eavesdropped on A and B calls of the blue whale song and on the D calls whales make between bouts of feeding, and thus began notation of the winter music in this patch of ocean.

  The news from the dome is good.

  The grandest creature in all creation has been hunted by our kind, the thinking ape, to near extinction. Its numbers still are low, but it was hard not to feel optimistic. In my bunk with Nicklin's laptop, lingering over his digital portraits of the curious calf, I thought I could read, in its strange visage, a gargantuan impishness. I found this cheering. The young do give us hope.

  On the voyage home, we found time for reflection, and I understood why the blue whale's flukeprint so mesmerized me each time I saw it at the dome. That big, circular slick is the signature of the species, the John Hancock of flukeprints, outsize and insistent. It jumps out boldly from the parchment. Its uncanny persistence on the sea's surface, defying the choppiness, is a good omen. Appearing at the dome, this winter haven, it suggests that the blue whale might after all defy the chop of history.

  "Still here!" the flukeprint says.

  JANE GOODALL The Lazarus Effect

  FROM Discover

  IN 2008, DURING MY LECTURE TOUR in Australia, a very large, very black, very friendly Lord Howe Island stick insect (Dryococelus australis) crawled across my hands, my face, and my head. The encounter sent shivers up my spine—knowing, as I did, the incredible story of how it came to be there.

  The forests of Lord Howe Island, about three hundred miles off the coast of New South Wales, Australia, were the only known home of the Lord Howe Island phasmid, also called a stick insect or walking stick—a creature about the size of a large cigar, four or five inches long and half an inch wide. In 1918 black rats arrived on the island after a shipwreck, relentlessly adapting to their new environment and probably finding easy and delicious prey in the giant phasmid, which lacked wings. At some point in the 1920s, the Lord Howe Island phasmid was presumed extinct.

  Then, in 1964, rock climbers found the dried-out remains of a giant stick insect on Ball's Pyramid, an 1,800-foot-tall spire of volcanic rock fourteen miles from Lord Howe Island. Five years later, other rock climbers found two other dried bodies incorporated into a bird's nest on a remote pinnacle of the spire, a place almost entirely without vegetation. It seemed impossible that a large, forest-loving vegetarian insect could be surviving in such a bleak environment. And so biologists ignored these reports until, in February 2001, a small group of people—David Priddel, the senior research scientist of the Department of Environment and Climate Change in New South Wales, his colleague Nicholas Carlile, and two other intrepid souls—decided to settle the matter once and for all.

  The seas around Ball's Pyramid are rough, and the team of three men and one woman had to leap from their small boat onto the rocks. ("Swimming would have been much easier, but there are too many sharks," Carlile said.) They put up a small camp and set off to climb about 500 feet up the spire of rock where the main vegetative patches clung to life. They searched thoroughly but found nothing other than some big crickets, and eventually the heat and lack of water drove them back down. Then, in a crevice 225 feet above the sea, they came upon another tiny patch of comparatively lush vegetation, dominated by a single melaleuca bush. Here they found the fresh droppings of some large insect.

  Back in camp, over supper, they discussed the situation. Priddel knew that stick insects were nocturnal and that the group would have a better chance of seeing them if they went back to that bush at night. Carlile and team member Dean Hiscox—a local ranger and expert rock climber—volunteered to make the almost suicidal climb in the dark. Finally they reached the vegetated area and saw one and then two enormous, shining, black-looking bodies spread out on the bush. "It felt like stepping back into the Jurassic age, when insects ruled the world," Carlile said.

  Early the next morning, the whole team climbed back up and made a thorough search. They found some frass (the proper terminology for insect poo) and about thirty eggs in the soil. They were all convinced that the only population in the world of Lord Howe Island's giant phasmid lived on that one melaleuca shrub.

  How did the little colony get to that isolated pillar of rock? Perhaps a female, full of eggs, had made the fourteen-mile journey from Lord Howe Island clinging to the leg of some seabird or floating on some vegetation after a storm. And once there, she had found the one and only suitable habitat on the entire pyramid, that little bush. The point is, she got there somehow. How her descendants survived for eighty years in that desolate environment we shall never know.

  As soon as they returned, the biologists got to work on a recovery plan for the stick insect. They faced many battles with bureaucracy, and two years elapsed before they had permission to return—and they were allowed to catch only four individuals. When they arrived, they found that there had been a big rockslide on Ball's Pyramid. How easily the entire population could have been wiped out during those two frustrating years. However, on Valen tine's Day in 2003, they found the colony still thriving on its one bush. To transport the incredibly rare insects, a special container had been prepared, and this presented a problem when they arrived in Australia. It was not long after 9/11, and security was very tight, yet the scientists had to convince officials not to open the precious box! One pair of insects went to a private breeder in Sydney, and the other two, Adam and Eve, went to the Melbourne Zoo. To everyone's delight and relief, Eve soon began laying pea-size eggs.

  Within two weeks of arriving in Australia, the pair in Sydney died and Eve became very, very sick. Patrick Honan, a member of the Invertebrate Conservation Breeding Group, worked every night for a month desperately trying to cure her. He scoured the Internet for help, but no one kn
ew anything about the veterinary care of giant stick insects! Eventually, based on gut instinct, Patrick concocted a mixture that included calcium and nectar and fed it to his patient, drop by drop, as she lay curled up in his hand. To his joy, she seemed to get better, and she laid eggs for a further eighteen months. But the only ones that hatched were the thirty or so that she had laid before she fell sick.

  In 2008, when I visited the Melbourne Zoo, Patrick showed me his rows of incubating eggs: 11,376 at the last count, with about 700 adults in the captive population. He showed me a photo of how they sleep at night, in pairs, the male with three of his legs protectively over the female beside him. As further insurance for the survival of the species, eggs are now being sent to other zoos and private breeders in Australia and overseas. The 200 eggs that were sent to the San Antonio Zoo in Texas have already begun to hatch.

  My second story is about a very small and very beautiful breed of horse and an American woman, Louise Firouz, who "discovered" and rescued the animals from obscurity in Iran. Louise had married a young man from the Iranian royal family, Narcy Firouz, and had become a princess. In 1957 the young couple established the Norouzabad Equestrian Center, where the wealthier Iranian families sent their children to learn to ride. But the horses were typically too big for the smaller children, including their own three. And so when, in 1965, Louise heard rumors of a small pony in the Elburz Mountains near the Caspian Sea, she determined to investigate. She set out on horseback with a few women friends, and she found the "ponies." They were being used as work animals, pulling carts, malnourished and covered with ticks.

  Almost at once Louise realized that these were not ponies at all—they had the distinctive gait, temperament, and facial bone structure of horses. Very small, narrow horses to be sure, standing just over forty inches, but horses for all that.

  As she pondered the nature of this little horse, Louise suddenly remembered seeing, on the walls of the ancient palace in Persepolis, relief carvings of a horse that looked very much like the one she had just found. The Lydian horse depicted in those carvings had the same small, prominent skull formation. With a sense of excitement, Louise began to wonder whether, hidden beneath the matted coats of these work animals, there was a true representative of the ancient lost breed of the royals, considered extinct for a thousand years. She found that there were still five purebred horses in the village, and she bought three of them. After extensive DNA testing, archaeozoologists and genetic specialists agreed with Louise that these animals were indeed Caspian horses, the ancestral form of the Arabian horse. What an incredible find!

  At first Louise and Narcy financed the breeding themselves, but then in 1970 a Royal Horse Society was formed in Iran. The society's mission was to protect Iran's native breeds, and it bought all of Louise's Caspian horses, which by then numbered twenty-three. Louise and Narcy then started a second, private herd near the Turkmenistan border. When two mares and a foal were killed by wolves, Louise, wanting to ensure that some of the horses would be kept safe, arranged for eight of them to be exported to Britain in 1977. The Royal Horse Society was angered, presumably because it had not been consulted. The society immediately banned all further exports of Caspian horses and began collecting all of the animals that remained in Iran, including all but one of the Firouzes' second herd.

  Then came the 1979 Islamic revolution. Because of their connections with the royal family, the Firouzes were imprisoned. Narcy was jailed for six months, but Louise for only a few weeks, for she remembered advice given to her by a friend: that if she went to prison, she should go on a hunger strike. This worked, but during that time most of the Caspian horses were auctioned for use as beasts of burden or slaughtered for meat.

  Still passionate about saving her beloved Caspian horses, Louise managed to rescue some of those that remained from starvation and slaughter and established, for the third time, a small herd in Iran. And once again she managed to export some of them to safety.

  The last such effort was in the early 1990s, when Louise sent seven horses on a dangerous journey to the United Kingdom. They had to pass through the Belarus war zone, where bandits attacked and robbed the convoy. The horses arrived safely, but it had been a costly business. Soon after, in 1994, Louise's husband died, and she could no longer afford her breeding program.

  With Iran's many political upheavals—the overthrow of the shah, the Iran-Iraq war, the very real threat of famine—as well as the Caspian's former association with royalty—the fate of these horses was ever in the balance. One moment they were considered a national treasure, the next they were seized as wartime food. But thanks to Louise Firouz, who had exported a total of nine stallions and seventeen mares, the future of this ancient line has been ensured. Today they can be found in England, France, Australia, Scandinavia, New Zealand, and the United States.

  DAVID QUAMMEN Darwin's First Clues

  FROM National Geographic

  THE JOURNEY OF YOUNG CHARLES DARWIN aboard His Majesty's Ship Beagle, during the years 1831–36, is one of the best known and most neatly mythologized episodes in the history of science. As the legend goes, Darwin sailed as ship's naturalist on the Beagle, visited the Galápagos archipelago in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and there beheld giant tortoises and finches. The finches, many species of them, were distinguishable by differently shaped beaks, suggesting adaptations to particular diets. The tortoises, island by island, carried differently shaped shells.

  These clues from the Galápagos led Darwin (immediately? long afterward? here the mythic story is vague) to conclude that Earth's living diversity has arisen by an organic process of descent with modification—evolution, as it's now known—and that natural selection is the mechanism. He wrote a book called The Origin of Species and persuaded everyone, except the Anglican Church establishment, that it was so.

  Well, yes and no. This cartoonish account of the Beagle voyage and its consequences contains a fair bit of truth, but it also confuses, distorts, and omits much. For instance, the finches weren't as illuminating as the diversity of the islands' mockingbirds, at least initially, and Darwin couldn't make sense of them until a bird expert back in England helped. The Galápagos stopover was a brief anomaly near the end of an expedition devoted mostly to surveying the South American coastline. Darwin hadn't signed on to the Beagle as its official naturalist; he was a twenty-two-year-old Cambridge graduate pointed rather indifferently toward a career as a country clergyman, invited on the voyage as a dining companion for the captain, a mercurial young aristocrat named Robert Fitzroy. Darwin did assume the role of naturalist, and thought of himself that way, as time went on. But his theory developed slowly, secretively, and The Origin of Species (full title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) didn't appear until 1859. Many scientists, along with some Victorian clergymen, resisted its evidence and arguments for decades afterward. The reality of evolution became widely accepted during Darwin's lifetime, but his particular theory—with natural selection as prime cause—didn't triumph until about 1940, after it had been successfully integrated with genetics.

  Apart from those clarifications, the most interesting point missed by the simplified tale is this: Darwin's first real clue toward evolution came not in the Galápagos but three years before, on a blustery beach along the north coast of Argentina. And it didn't take the form of a bird's beak. It wasn't even a living creature. It was a trove of fossils. Never mind the notion of Darwin's finches. For a fresh view of the Beagle voyage, start with Darwin's armadillos and giant sloths.

  In September 1832, during the first year of its mission, the Beagle anchored near Bahía Blanca, a settlement at the head of a bay about four hundred miles southwest of Buenos Aires. A certain General Rosas was waging a genocidal war against the Indians, and Bahía Blanca stood as a fortified outpost, occupied mostly by soldiers. For more than a month the Beagle remained in that area, some of its crew occupied with surveying, others assigned t
o shore duties—digging a well, gathering firewood, hunting for meat. The landscape round about was classic Argentine Pampas, fertile grassland, giving way to grass-anchored sand dunes along the coast. The hunters brought back deer, agoutis, and other game, including several armadillos and a large flightless bird Darwin loosely called an "ostrich." Of course it wasn't an ostrich (which is native to Africa and, formerly, the Middle East); it was a rhea, specifically Rhea americana, ostrichlike in appearance but endemic to South America and the heaviest bird on the continent.

  "What we had for dinner to day would sound very odd in England," Darwin wrote in his diary on September 18, reveling in the exoticism of his new regimen: "Ostrich dumpling & Armadilloes." He was out for a romping adventure, not just a natural history field trip, and his shipboard diary (later transformed into a travel book that came to be known as The Voyage of the Beagle) reflects his attention to cultures, peoples, and politics as well as to science. The red meat of the big bird resembled beef, he recorded. The armadillos, peeled out of their shells, tasted and looked like ducks. His culinary experiences here on the Pampas, and later in Patagonia, besides being part of his voracious tour of discovery, would eventually play a role in his evolutionary thinking.