Natural History back issues from April 2006:
I Spy
Apr 01, 2006; ... Enthroned on a golden flower, a female crab spider holds dominion over most visitors that stop to rest or refuel. But there's not much pomp: no intricate web, no hairy legs, no red hourglass. Instead, the spider-weighing in at about 0.005 ounce-hides in ambush among the corridors of her petal ...
LETTERS
Apr 01, 2006; ... Weevil Evil Robert W. Jones's fascinating article on the boll weevil, "March of the Weevils" [2/06], recalls the lines from an old blues song describing with chilling effect what the weevil did to African-American farmers in the South: Boll weevil told the farmer, "You'll ...
TEXAS
Apr 01, 2006; ... APRIL, WHEN THE LONE STAR STATE IS ABLOOM WITH WILDFLOWERS, IS A PERFECT TIME TO ENJOY ITS CITIES OR DO SOME SPECTACULAR BIRDWATCHING. YOUR VISIT TO TEXAS MAY START OUT IN Dallas, a thriving metropolis that began with a sinpie log cabin built in 1841, or in Houston, the states largest ...
BUFFALO BILL'S CODY/YELLOWSTONE COUNTRY
Apr 01, 2006; ... PARK COUNTY, IN NORTHWEST WYOMING, is Buffalo Bill's Cody/Yellowstone Country. In 1896 -loi. William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody founded Cody, the heart of this county, which still maintains a true Western flavor. To learn about Buffalo Bill and local history, take Cody's trolley tour. Cody is the ...
PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND
Apr 01, 2006; ... WHAT IF THE WORLD HAD BEEN TO PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND? THIS GENTLE ISLAND OFF CANADA'S EAST COAST IS A SPECIAL PLACE WHERE ROLLING FARM FIELDS SPILL INTO THE SEA AND THE BRILLIANT COLORS OF THE LANDSCAPE GLOW IN OCEAN AIR. A VISIT TO OUR ISLAND REMINDS YOU OF the important things in life; ...
ISLAND PRESS
Apr 01, 2006; ... WHILE IN FILM SCHOOL, ERIC DINERSTEIN-WHO BY his own admission was "training to be the anti-Thoreau"-was captivated by a little green heron. He spent the next 30 years exploring the natural world, traveling to all ends of the Earth to discover and protect wildlife. Now the chief scientist at the ...
Fish Story
Apr 01, 2006; ... Most anyone who's ever put on a mask and flippers knows the thrill of tropical reef snorkeling. You've slathered on j the SPF 45, rubbed spit and seawater into your mask to clear the view, waded into the warm, clear waters off the beach, and kicked across the lagoon to the reef. The underwater ...
SOME NATURAL WONDERS IN NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR
Apr 01, 2006; ... NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR IS AN EDGY PLACE. LOCATED ON THE EASTERN EDGE OF NORTH AMERICA, IT'S WHERE BIRDS, BERGS, AND WHALES SHARE SPACE IN THE OCEAN. WHALES MIGRATE NORTH AS BERGS DRIFT south, their paths crossing beneath the gaze of millions of seabirds. Sometimes you can see all ...
A Very Dry White
Apr 01, 2006; ... The ancient Egyptians loved their wine. They buried their dead with wine-filled amphorae, or clay vessels, to ensure a comfortable afterlife, and they painted scenes of viticulture and winemaking on the walls of tombs. But what varieties did they enjoy? Written records and the dark color of ...
NEW BRUNSWICK A WORLD OF WONDER!
Apr 01, 2006; ... IT HAPPENS HERE IN NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA'S BAY OF FUNDY, ONE OF THE MARINE WONDERS OF THE WORLD. FIND YOURSELF AMONG THREE-HUNDRED-million-year-old plant fossils embedded in some of the oldest visible rock on Earth. The natural wonders here are like nothing you've seen before. The worlds ...
NEW MEXICO
Apr 01, 2006; ... FROM HOT SPRINGS HIGH IN THE MOUNTAINS TO THE WORLD'S LARGEST DEPOSIT OF GYPSUM SAND, NEW MEXICO IS INTRIGUING TO THOSE WITH A PASSION FOR NATURAL HISTORY. NEW MEXICO IS FAMOUS FOR ITS ANCIENT past. It is where dinosaurs once roamed, and where the Anasazi built their unique cliff-side ...
Made in India
Apr 01, 2006; ... A dizzying variety of cultures and languages flourish among India's billion-plus residents. Did the differences arise among the descendants of that nation's first settlers, who likely arrived in South Asia from Africa more than 40,000 years ago, or do they reflect subsequent waves of ...
Ocean Genome
Apr 01, 2006; ... Microscopic life thrives in the open ocean, where it plays a key role in the complex flux of matter and energy. Yet its ecology remains poorly understood. At the ALOHA oceanographic station, sixty miles north of the island of Oahu, in HawaPi, microbial oceanographers Edward F. DeLong of ...
EGYPT
Apr 01, 2006; ... EGYPT IS ONE OF THE WORLD'S OLDEST CIVILIZATIONS-ITS HISTORY GOES BACK SOME 5,000 YEARS-AND PROBABLY ONE OF THE OLDEST VACATION DESTINATIONS, TOO. ITS MOST FAMOUS SITE IS PROBABLY THE Great Pyramids of Giza (including the Great Sphinx and the pyramid of Khufu), but there are about a ...
Sing It to Me
Apr 01, 2006; ... Young male zebra finches learn to sing by listening to adult tutors-often their fathers-and by rehearsing endlessly. To get a tune just right, a young bird must compare the sounds it makes with its memories of the songs its tutor sang. The memories-or "sound templates" for bird-song-must be ...
ORIENT LINES
Apr 01, 2006; ... ORIENT LINES, THE DESTINATION CRUISE specialist, offers extraordinary vacations to every part of the world. Its flagship, the Marco Polo, carries over 800 passengers on journeys of luxury and discovery; every modern convenience is provided, and guest lecturers are on board to enhance the ...
Impermafrost
Apr 01, 2006; ... People living in the Far North have often built their homes on solidly frozen earth. But their heirs may have to contend with wildly listing floors. Permafrost-soil frozen for two or more years, with a thin top layer that may seasonally thawmakes up about a quarter of the land area in the ...
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Apr 01, 2006; ... OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS is the world's largest university press. Its publications are written at a variety of levels, for a wide range of audiences in almost every academic discipline. Brian Pagan's From Stonehenge to Samarkand is a history of our fascination with antiquity, captured in the ...
Cloudy Skies
Apr 01, 2006; ... Cars, planes, trucks, and trains are infamous air polluters, but ships are often overlooked. Yet increased shipping in recent decades has led to a dramatic rise in ships' fuel consumption, which more than quadrupled between 1950 and 2001. Now, the effects of the ships' correspondingly increased ...
Millipede Soccer
Apr 01, 2006; ... For the coati, a small mammal that ranges from the southwestern United States to South America, few snacks are more tempting than a juicy millipede. But something unpleasant stands in the way of an easy meal: evolution has equipped the millipede with chemical defenses that deter most predators ....
Secrets of the Sacred Lotus
Apr 01, 2006; ... For the lotus leaf being dirt-free means shunning water with a rough, waxy surface. According to my wife, I can't see dirt. I'm oblivious to disorder, she says, blind to dust, ignorant about the positive effects of a good vacuum cleaner. Truth be told, more pressing things always do seem ...
Time Dilation
Apr 01, 2006; ... Like every other living thing, we humans and our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees, have "junk" DNA. It probably doesn't code for anything functional, but it sure is useful to evolutionary biologists. Because mutations within noncoding DNA are not exposed to the rigors of natural selection, ...
Survival of the Rarest
Apr 01, 2006; ... Tropical forests may be more resilient than their reputations would have you believe. The forests appear to bolster the tree species most vulnerable to extinction: the rare ones. Christopher Wills, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, San Diego, led a study in which ...
Fish Story in Reverse
Apr 01, 2006; ... In January, ichthyologists announced they'd discovered the world's smallest vertebrate. One female Paedocypris progenetica, a carp relative from Indonesian swamps, measured just 7.9 millimeters. That's not so small, countered Theodore Pietsch, an ichthyologist at the University of Washington in ...
New Moon
Apr 01, 2006; ... The Moon reveals just one side to its admirers on Earth, yet our satellite seems an object with a thousand faces. It smiles with romantic light and winks at armchair space travelers. For me, most of all, it is the place where the Apollo 11 astronauts set foot in 1969, when I was eight. But as an ...
Green Fingers
Apr 01, 2006; ... A woodland revives among the glacier-carved lakes of central New York. In 1891 President Benjamin Harrison signed legislation authorizing the establishment of national forests in the United States. Since that time, 155 national forests have been designated, scattered within the ...
When the Moon Hits Your Eye
Apr 01, 2006; ... More knowledge and better data only deepen the beguiling appeal of the best-known object in the night sky. Countless cultures have spun countless tales about Earth's nearest neighbor in space. To the ancient Greeks, the Moon was a pale-faced young woman riding across the sky in a ...
The Biggest Fish
Apr 01, 2006; ... Unraveling the mysteries of the whale shark One hot, windless May morning, five of my colleagues and I boarded our small research boat and motored out into the waters of Western Australia's Ningaloo Reef. We were searching for whale sharks-the world's largest fish-hoping to attach ...
THE SKY IN APRIL
Apr 01, 2006; ... On April 8, one day after passing aphelion (its farthest point from the Sun), Mercury reaches its greatest western elongation. One might hope for good viewing, since the planet attains its greatest possible angular separation from the Sun-twenty-eight degrees. But for observers at mid-northern ...
New Book on AMNH Dioramas: Windows on Nature
Apr 01, 2006; ... The American Museum of Natural History in partnership with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., has published the first and definitive book on the Museum's famous habitat dioramas. Titled Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History and authored by Stephen C. Quinn, ...
Alaska's Underground Frontier
Apr 01, 2006; ... An observatory that looks down-not up-at the planet's microbial diversity The workboat I'm riding whips down the Tanana River in the interior of Alaska, just west of Fairbanks. Rains in the past two weeks have made the Tanana high and swift in its rush to meet the Yukon River, on its way ...
BOOKSHELF
Apr 01, 2006; ... BOOKSHELF Chasing Spring: An American Journey Through a Changing Season by Bmce Stutz Scribner, 2006; $24.00 At the beginning of this spring-chasing journey, set in 2004, neither Bruce Stutz nor his automobile is a good bet to finish a three-month odyssey across the continent and up to ...
Chernobyl Paradox
Apr 01, 2006; ... Twenty years ago, on April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station exploded and burned, spewing radiation around the globe and blanketing large swaths of what was then the Soviet Union with heavy contamination. Ever since that day, the word "Chernobyl" has become a synonym for ...
PEOPLE AT THE AMNH
Apr 01, 2006; ... Craig Chesek Senior Photographer Department of Communications When Craig Chesek first saw an ad for a photographer specializing in shooting gems, minerals, and artifacts, he responded quickly. The job description closely fit his interests and background as a commercial ...
Crash!
Apr 01, 2006; ... A close encounter of the cometary kind The term "astrogeology" (from the Greek for "star" and "earth") is either an overgeneralization or an oxymoron. If you're an astrogeologist, do you study Earth, or the universe beyond Earth, or both? And if you study both, what else is left? So, ...
Moveable Museum Fleet Expands
Apr 01, 2006; ... Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries is the latest addition to the Museum's fleet of Moveable Museums-converted recreational vehicles outfitted as state-ofthe-art, walk-in exhibition spaces. This newest Moveable complements the Museum's recent special exhibition of the same name, focusing ...
The Butterfly Conservatory
Apr 01, 2006; ... The perennially popular Butterfly Conservatory has been extended and will now be on view until June 23! Visitors can stroll among up to 500 live butterflies while learning about their life cycle and conservation ...
Museum Events
Apr 01, 2006; ... AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY www.amnh.org EXHIBITIONS Darwin Through August 20, 2006 Featuring live animals, actual fossil specimens collected by Charles Darwin, and manuscripts, this magnificent exhibition offers visitors a comprehensive, engaging ...