March/April 2021. Vol. 42, No. 2 Discover

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DEMENTIA MYSTERY SOLVED p.22

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SCIENCE

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HUNTING THE FIRST STARS p.52 SECRETS OF URBAN WILDLIFE p.46

MARCH/APRIL 2021

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MARCH/APRIL 2021 VOL. 42, NO. 2

COVER: MIXMIKE/GETTY. THIS PAGE FROM TOP: SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; MATT KNOTH/SHUTTERSTOCK

CONTENTS

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How oral tradition is guiding archaeology and uncovering climate history in Alaska — and beyond.

One ecologist is studying how a city’s legacy of racism affects urban wildlife.

JONATHON KEATS

52

Speaking the Past

In the Company of Coyotes

38

LEAH SHAFFER

Seeking Lost Light

COVER STORY

When Shame Goes Viral This ancient social emotion has always been complex. The internet poured fuel on it. Then came social media.

The earliest stars were different than the ones we see in the sky today. That’s what makes them so hard to find. EMMA CHAPMAN

TIMOTHY MEINCH

p. 46

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COLUMNS & DEPARTMENTS

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Feeling the power of online shaming firsthand.

Bye-Bye, Brain

VITAL SIGNS

8

Inbox Our readers react to mangroves, feral chickens and robots vs. humans as space explorers.

She was a high-powered attorney at the peak of success. But when this 50-something started to experience confusion and memory loss, it didn’t take long for everything to come crashing down. DAVID COX

26 HOT SCIENCE

OUT THERE PAGE 11

Take a look at what’s going on inside a dog’s brain, what an artificial intelligence takeover would look like, the peacock spider’s mating dance, one solution for recycling e-waste, what to read this month and more!

Medicine for Mars Shipping drugs to the Red Planet would be costly and impractical. But what if the astronauts could grow their own pharmacy once they got there?

PLANET EARTH

The Land of the Living Snowflakes One of America’s rarest birds lives on Alaska’s loneliest island. Scientists are finally exploring their private kingdom. JAKE BUEHLER

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#SCIENCEIRL In rare spots around the globe, the nighttime sea shimmers with light. WILSON CHAPMAN

58

HISTORY LESSONS

Norse hunters forged a lucrative D I S C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

62

ARIA ALAMALHODAEI

The Walrus Economy 4

ZACH ZORICH

NASA

Editor’s Note

ivory market in harsh climates. Why didn’t their success last?

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Shame on Me

Y

ears ago, when the web was younger, Twitter wasn’t even a thing and blogging was the rage, I was playing around in the blogosphere and one day posted a few drawings made by my son, who was 5 or 6 at the time. Friends left enthusiastic comments, as you do. Then the grandparents got wind of this and they wanted to see ALL the drawings. So, I created a new blog exclusively devoted to my little artist. People told people and next thing you know, the adorable little art blog got a mention on one of the most popular websites of the day. Thousands — tens of thousands — of people flocked to the blog. Comments were kind, until one well-meaning someone suggested I put my son’s art on T-shirts and sell them. I had no intention of doing anything of the sort, but that didn’t matter. Someone misread the comment, assumed I was selling T-shirts and took me to task for exploiting my kid and making a fast buck off of his sudden internet fame. Well. Things got ugly fast. In the space of a day, I went from an indulgent dad to a monster parent running a one-child sweat shop. People who didn’t know me called me every name in the book; some threatened to call social services, or the police, or my boss. Others claimed my son didn’t exist at all and that I was some kind of con man. All of these concerned citizens told me how ashamed I should feel to invent and/or exploit my son. I actually started to feel ashamed, even though I wasn’t guilty of anything (except perhaps extravagant naivete). Luckily, by the end of the week, people found a new outrage to fuss over and my brief and bitter taste of cyberbullying was over. It left an impression, though, I’ll tell you that. Mostly, I was horrified. But I was also awestruck by how quickly a group of people could wield the old cudgel of shame, and by how impactful this ancient social tool still is. I’m sure many of you have experienced it for yourself, suffering much more than I ever did. Shame is a potent weapon, folks, as Timothy Meinch’s story on page 38 illustrates. If you must use it, use it wisely. As for my son? He never saw the threats or nasty comments. He shamelessly continued to pursue his art in life and in school. In fact, he graduated college this semester, so yes, he exists. I’ve got the tuition bills to prove it. I don’t know. Maybe I should have sold T-shirts.

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(“Man vs. Mangroves,” November 2020)

Over the last 12,000 years, sea level has risen almost 400 feet. Mangroves have adjusted to that quite well, so I think another foot or two shouldn’t be a problem for mangroves.  Steve Allexan Vero Beach, Fla. Author Allison Whitten responds:

Great point, but mangroves and their ecosystems have actually been strongly impacted by sea-level rise in the last 12,000 years. That’s why the researchers in the Science study analyzed mangrove survival between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, when sea levels were rising even faster than today due to melting glaciers. They found that about a quarter of an inch of rise per year was the limit for mangroves before the forests were forced to move inland or risked drowning. And, a big problem today is that extensive human development along the coasts means that mangroves won’t be able to move inland if this rate of sea level rise is reached as a result of high emissions in the next 30 years.

EXPLOITATION OR EXPECTATION? (“More Than Child’s Play,” July/August 2020)

I found the article “More Than Child’s Play” fascinating. It’s hard to imagine 3- to 4-year-olds holding torches! The ancient mining society was pretty different from ours, and yet I don’t think the two choices posited in the article — participation or exploitation — are enough. What about expectation? Just as we expect our kids

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to help with daily chores, the ancient miners expected theirs to contribute to the family’s livelihood. It’s understandable — though I’m quite grateful for modern child labor laws.  Whitney Gilbert Elsberry, Mo.

THE (DANGEROUS) SOUND OF SILENCE (“Sound Off,” September/ October 2020)

I was especially interested in “Sound Off,” having worked

ALL THEY’RE CRACKED UP TO BE (“Where the Wild Things Crow,” November 2020)

As a resident of chicken-rich Hawaii, I enjoyed your story. As much as my experience with feral chickens overlaps with Gering’s, mine differs in that I’ve had close, petlike relationships with feral chickens who’ve taken up residence in our yard over the last two decades. Also missing in Gering’s story is how wonderful it can be to find delicious, often organic eggs delivered (literally, in our case, once a day) on or near your doorstep. Janice Palma-Glennie Kailua-Kona, Hawaii

29% 71% HUMANS

ROBOTS

We asked our Facebook followers: Are humans or robots better fit for exploring space? Chang-Boe Hsieh: Robots are much better for the early exploring stage. After the technology’s maturity, humans are indispensable. Ki Khan: Robots can crashland on asteroids! Robots 100%. CW Jorden: Cats. Cats are better. You can send mine. And the dog. And two rabbits. You know what, send my daughter too. And my wife. I need a break. You know what, I’ll just go. Men, men should explore space. Can I take bourbon? Esther Hazleton: Humans, they make connections a robot never would, but they are more fragile. Andrew Lee Smith: Superaugmented humans or cyborgs are the only answer. Andris Rubenis: It should not be an either/or issue. Humans and robots ought to be considered as complementary facets for space exploration.

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through the problem some 40 years ago when I built the Briggs & Stratton Hybrid Electric. It was a multimode hybrid with all-electric option that we used for publicity showings and special events. We soon learned that pedestrians “looked” with their ears, some seeking to be the first EV pedestrian victims in 50 years. We experimented with sounds, including the annoying back-up alarms used on trucks and construction equipment. Ultimately, we found that activating an auxiliary cooling fan (made from a Shop-Vac unit) when we were in public spaces seemed to work best. It was barely audible, but the vacuum-cleaner sound seemed to alert nearby pedestrians to turn and look for its source — and not step in front of it. Doug Janisch Mequon, Wis.

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HOT SCIENCE TH E L AT E ST N E WS A N D NOT E S AI’S FUTURE • DANCING SPIDERS • MINI RECYCLERS NANO DEFENSE AGAINST BACTERIA • BOOK REVIEWS

INSIDE THE CANINE MIND It’s hard to look at this picture and not melt at these sweet faces. But would these dogs react the same way to a photo of your face? A team of researchers is using a fMRI machine to find out. The group, from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, screened 20 dogs and 30 humans. They showed the participants videos of pups and people alike — some faces, some the backs of heads — and scanned their brains to examine how each processed what they saw. Both species displayed similar brain patterns when it came to seeing their own species. But dogs responded the same to a face as they did to a head; only the humans preferred faces. — WILSON CHAPMAN; IMAGE BY ENIKŐ KUBINYI/EÖTVÖS LORÁND UNIVERSITY MARCH/APR I L 2 02 1 . D IS C OV ER

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HOT SCIENCE

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BIG IDEA

Embracing the Singularity SOMEDAY SOON, COMPUTERS COULD ATTAIN SUPERINTELLIGENCE AND REVOLT. BUT FUTURIST NICK BOSTROM SEES A FUTURE THAT’S FAR LESS GRIM.

E

13_PHUNKOD/SHUTTERSTOCK

ver since computers took shape — first filling rooms, then office desks, then pockets — they have been designed by human minds. Over the years, plenty of people have asked: What would happen if computers designed themselves?

Someday soon, an intelligent computer might create a machine far more powerful than itself. That new computer would likely make another, even more powerful, and so on. Machine intelligence would ride an exponential upward curve, attaining heights of cognition inconceivable to humans. This, broadly speaking, is the singularity. The term dates back over 50 years, when scientists were just beginning to tinker with binary code and the circuitry that made basic computing possible. Even then, the singularity was a formidable proposition. Superintelligent computers might leap forward from nanotechnology to immersive virtual reality to superluminal space travel. Instead of being left behind with our puny, cell-based brains, humans might merge themselves with AI, augmenting our brains with circuits, or even digitally uploading our minds to outlive our bodies. The result would be a supercharged humanity, capable of thinking at the speed of light and free of biological concerns. Philosopher Nick Bostrom thinks this halcyon world could bring a new age entirely. “It might be that, in this world, we would all be more like children in a giant Disneyland — maintained not by humans, but by these machines that we have created,” says Bostrom, the director of Oxford

University’s Future of Humanity Institute and the author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Depending on where you stand, this might sound like a utopian fantasy, or a dystopian nightmare. Bostrom is well aware of this. He’s been thinking about the emergence of superintelligent AI for decades, and he’s intimately familiar with the risks such creations entail. There’s the classic sci-fi nightmare of a robot revolution, of course, where machines decide they’d rather be in control of the Earth. But perhaps more likely is the possibility that the moral code of a superintelligent AI — whatever that may be — simply doesn’t line up with our own. An AI responsible for fleets of self-driving cars or the distribution of medical supplies could cause havoc if it fails to value human life the same way we do. The problem of AI alignment, as it’s called, has taken on new urgency in recent years, due in part to the work of futurists like Bostrom. If we cannot control a superintelligent AI, then our fate could hinge on whether future machine intelligences think like us. On that front, Bostrom reminds us that there are efforts underway to “design the AI in such a way that it would in fact choose things that are beneficial for humans,

and would choose to ask us for clarification when it is uncertain what we intended.” There are ways we might teach human morality to a nascent superintelligence. Machinelearning algorithms could be taught to recognize human value systems, much like they are trained on databases of images and texts today. Or, different AIs could

The result would be a supercharged humanity, capable of thinking at the speed of light and free of biological concerns.

debate each other, overseen by a human moderator, to build better models of human preferences. But morality cuts both ways. There may soon be a day, Bostrom says, when we’ll need to consider not just how an AI feels about us, but simply how it feels. “If we have machine intelligences that become artificial, digital minds,” he continues, “then it also becomes an ethical matter [of] how we affect them.” In this age of conscious machines, humans may just have a newfound moral obligation to treat digital beings with respect. Call it the 21st-century Golden Rule. — NATHANIEL SCHARPING

MARCH/APR I L 2 02 1 . D I S C OVER

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HOT SCIENCE

GALLERY

Maratus volans, the “flying” peacock spider (right and inset, with furled fan).

Dream Weaver IN THE AUSTRALIAN spring of 2005, photographer Jürgen Otto encountered his first peacock spider. “I almost stepped on it,” he recalls. “It leapt off — but not before I snapped a photo.” It was a male Maratus volans, then just one of seven named species of peacock spider. Endemic to Australia, peacock spiders are part of the largest spider family, Salticidae (jumping spiders). And they are active predators — meaning they hunt their prey, rather than ensnaring it in a web. Jumping spiders are instantly recognizable by their quartet

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of forward-facing eyes, and peacock spiders, specifically, by their dramatic abdomens and courtship displays. What stunned Otto was the “strikingly colorful” abdomen, flattened and spread like a fan, which had been widely assumed — since the species was first described in 1874 — to allow the spiders to fly. Spurred by mounting evidence to the contrary, Otto set off to dispel the myth. Fifteen years later, what he’s recorded is far more spectacular: The peacock spiders’ dance is now appreciated as one of the most mesmeric and sophisticated courtship rituals in the animal kingdom.

After his first encounter, it took nearly three years of scouring scrublands before Otto found his next Maratus male. Nearby, he spotted a subtle, brindle spider — and the male was transfixed. Could this be a female? Camera at the ready, Otto witnessed what was, “in all likelihood, a first for science.” We now know that a typical Maratus courtship begins when a male spots a female and declares his presence. He raises his third pair of legs, gloved in white, to the sky before dancing in a zigzag toward her, legs lifting and dropping, his entire being rattling in an M.C. Hammer-esque scuttle.

JÜRGEN OTTO (2)

HOW THE DANCE OF AUSTRALIA’S PEACOCK SPIDERS BEWITCHED A PHOTOGRAPHER-TURNED SCIENTIST.

A female Maratus aquilus being courted.

Female alert!

A Maratus unicup performance.

Each species of tiny peacock spider has a unique dramatic abdomen and courtship display.

JÜRGEN OTTO (5)

Maratus speciosus abdominal fan bearing “super black.”

With bravado matched only by grit, he is not dissuaded by her lack of interest. When she’s not watching, he switches to syncopated abdominal vibrations. If he unduly persists, she might mimic the dance, perhaps insinuating that she is a rival male. (In at least one species, Maratus vespertilio, territorial males will engage in ritualized but harmless fighting called “hopping contests,” reminiscent of puppies jostling with their own reflection.) If she’s hungry, a female may attempt to kill a male with a lethal pounce. But a courting male — whose dexterity is heightened by the charge of lust — can sidestep the blow. A curious female may investigate the miragelike fan: It’s a jarring distortion of reality — is it food? A predator? Or something else? To human onlookers, for instance, the patterned Maratus volans fan appears like the primal

Maratus personatus.

abstraction of a spider, but how does it appear to her? “One perhaps imitates a wasp face; another species, an owl; but we just don’t know what she is thinking,” says Otto. “Maybe she sees beauty. It could just be fashion. What do people think when they see bell-bottom trousers?” He denies her curiosity, waving his fan right and left to obscure the compelling image, a move that might force her closer for a better view. “He’s no machine” or robot running a program, Otto says. “People coo at these spiders’ colors, their cuteness, but we underestimate their intelligence.” When it is time, he will flourish his fan. Maratus fans are shimmering mosaics of scales that clash reds and yellows against blues, using sunlight to create rainbow hues and even “super black.” Super black is an effect created by unique scales whose microstructure extinguishes

over 99 percent of light to create surreal voids, making other colors appear more brilliant. If this courtship seduces her, his genes — and hers — will be passed on to their offspring. In doing so, she has ensured that her sons will carry on the dance, and her daughters the taste in partners. Zooming out, we can see how this dance has evolved through the cumulative scrutiny of female Maratus past. Over countless generations of sexual selection, they have inadvertently crafted, with ever-refining discernment, the very spell for their own bewitchment. This ritual has captivated more than spiders. Since Otto’s first encounter in 2005, the number of identified Maratus species has jumped from seven to 85. The last seven were added this year by 22-year-old Joseph Schubert. His first sighting: “It was like striking gold.” — JESSE HAWLEY

MARCH/APR I L 2 02 1 . D IS C OVER

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HOT SCIENCE

SOLUTIONS

Veena Sahajwalla launched a new way to recycle electronic waste that skips tons of transit and re-forms materials on-site. She’s since added plastics to the mix, and is expanding her microfactories across Australia.

Tiny Trash Factories NEW TECH TAKES ON RECYCLING AT THE MICRO SCALE. NOT ALL WASTE HAS TO GO TO WASTE. Most of the world’s 2.22 billion tons of annual trash ends up in landfills or open dumps. Veena Sahajwalla, a materials scientist and engineer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, has created a solution to our massive trash problem: waste microfactories. These little trash processors — some as small as 500 square feet — house a series of machines that recycle waste and transform it into new materials with thermal technology. The new all-inone approach could leave our current recycling processes in the dust. Sahajwalla launched the world’s first waste microfactory targeting electronic

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waste, or e-waste, in 2018 in Sydney. A second one began recycling plastics in 2019. Now, her lab group is working with university and industry partners to commercialize their patented Microfactorie technology. She says the small scale of the machines will make it easier for them to one day operate on renewable energy, unlike most large manufacturing plants. The approach will also allow cities to recycle waste into new products on location, avoiding the long, often international, high-emission treks between recycling processors and manufacturing plants. With a microfactory, gone are the days of needing separate facilities to collect and store materials, extract elements and produce new products.

Traditionally, recycling plants break down materials for reuse in similar products — like melting down plastic to make more plastic things. Her invention evolves this idea by taking materials from an old product and creating something different. “The kids don’t look like the parents,” she says. For example, the microfactories can break down old smartphones and computer monitors and extract silica (from the glass) and carbon (from the plastic casing), and then combine them into silicon carbide nanowires. This generates a common ceramic material with many industrial uses. Sahajwalla refers to this process as “the fourth R,” adding “re-form” to the common phrase “reduce, reuse, recycle.” In 2019, just 17.4 percent of e-waste was recycled, so the ability to re-form offers a crucial new development in the challenge recycling complex electronic devices. “[We] can do so much more with materials,” says Sahajwalla. “Traditional recycling has not worked for every recycling challenge.” She and her team are already working to install the next waste microfactory in the Australian town of Cootamundra by early 2021, with the goal of expanding around the country over the next few years. — ALLISON WHITTEN

ANNA KUCERA

These little trash processors — some as small as 500 square feet — house a series of machines that recycle waste and transform it into new materials.

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HOT SCIENCE

SNAPSHOT

BACTERIA BREAKDOWN This purple puff of an E. coli bacterium might appear as if it’s gently resting atop a cradle of gray nails, but look closely and you’ll see the spiked columns, called nanopillars, impaling its sides. These microscopic structures can be found on the wings of insects, including dragonflies and cicadas. Invading bacteria are stopped by the spikes, which cause the microbes to deform and ultimately die. Researchers studying the bacteriabreakdown process say creating artificial nanopillars could help design better surgical implants for humans, keeping bacteria at bay without the need for antibiotics. — JENNIFER WALTER; IMAGE BY PROFESSOR BO SU/UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL

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HOT SCIENCE

REVIEWS

More Pages to Turn

WHAT WE’RE READING

Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

Mind Thief: The Story of Alzheimer’s

By Michelle Nijhuis

By Han Yu

It’s tempting to think that humans have always cared about the survival of our fellow beasts and birds. But science writer Nijhuis argues that’s not the case — it’s only in the past 150 years or so that we’ve realized our ability to push other species to extinction and worked to counter that. In a far-ranging, powerfully written history of the conservation movement, Nijhuis chronicles figures from taxidermist William Temple Hornaday, who fought to preserve the country’s last free-roaming bison, to environmental writer Rachel Carson, who railed against the use of synthetic pesticides.

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ver since my grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, I’ve watched in horror as it has gradually robbed him of his memory and cognitive skills. As Yu notes, I’m far from alone — in the U.S., someone new develops the disease every 65 seconds. Currently, there is still no known prevention, treatment or cure. In Mind Thief, Yu unravels the thorny history behind our efforts to understand the mystifying ailment. She starts at the turn of the 19th century in Germany’s so-called Castle of the Insane, where Alois Alzheimer first met an important patient: a 50-something woman named Auguste Deter with a mysterious condition. After her death, Alzheimer found decaying neurons and tiny plaques in her brain. From there, Yu guides readers through reams of medical literature, loads of media hype and a smattering of theories on the disease’s causes. For years, I’ve actively avoided reading much about Alzheimer’s because the subject matter hits a little too close to home. But Yu captivates with gripping tales of individual trials and triumphs, from that first, fateful discovery to a botched vaccine attempt over a century later. Beyond that, her clear, concise explanations for concepts like amyloids, the proteins behind the disease’s hallmark plaques, are a master class in science writing. And when she does sparingly share personal tidbits — like recounting her uncle’s slow cognitive decline after being diagnosed with late-stage Alzheimer’s in China — it’s almost impossible not to get choked up. — ALEX ORLANDO

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A Thousand Ways Denied: The Environmental Legacy of Oil in Louisiana By John T. Arnold When Louisiana gained statehood in 1812, the U.S. unknowingly struck “black gold” alongside a bounty of other natural resources — like miles of timber forests and an expansive coastline — that have shaped the state’s future ever since. Arnold spins Louisiana’s multifaceted environmental heritage into a brisk, captivating yarn, spanning the discovery of its rich reserves to the oil industry’s role in the state’s land-loss crisis. Rich in detail and full of striking historical photography, this is a page-turner for history fanatics and stewards of the natural world alike. — A.O.

WATCH LIST Kiss the Ground Directed by Joshua Tickell and Rebecca Tickell The message of this star-studded documentary, now streaming on Netflix, is rock-solid: By regenerating our soils and their ability to sequester carbon, we can reverse the ravages of climate change. Yes, the celebrity cameos can be selfindulgent — looking at you, Tom Brady and Jason Mraz — and the peppy vibe a tad cringeworthy, like a sequence where “You Sexy Thing” provides the audio backdrop for an explainer on soil microbe diversity. But when the film’s vibrant visuals, simple ideas and clear science communication — alongside the experts themselves — take the stage, it’s fertile ground indeed. — A.O.

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VITAL SIGNS BY DAVID COX

SHE WAS A HIGH-POWERED ATTORNEY AT THE PEAK OF SUCCESS. BUT WHEN THIS 50-SOMETHING STARTED TO EXPERIENCE CONFUSION AND MEMORY LOSS, IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR EVERYTHING TO COME CRASHING DOWN. nne was in the prime of her career — a trial lawyer working as a partner for a major law firm in Cincinnati — when she began to lose her mind. A fitness enthusiast, Anne was only 50 when she realized something was amiss. “The first thing I noticed was that my hands would begin to shake while I was sitting at my desk,” she recalls. Perplexed, she went to see a neurologist at the Cleveland Clinic, who referred her for CT and MRI scans; both came back normal. She was given a diagnosis of essential tremor disorder, a progressive but not life-threatening condition. But within months, new symptoms began to appear: brain fog, memory loss, problems with reading and understanding even the simplest sentences. The work she had excelled at throughout her career quickly became impossible, and she would spend her days sitting staring vacantly into space. Looking back, she remembers feeling as if her brain were being slowly switched off. “My mind was just very groggy and gray,” she says. “I’d been at the top of the class all my life, getting full scholarships to

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A SURPRISING DISCOVERY As Brown and colleagues raced to identify the cause of this mysterious illness, Anne’s condition continued to deteriorate. A priest was summoned to give her the last rites. But as that ceremony was taking place, Brown made a surprising discovery: The levels of antibodies in Anne’s blood and spinal fluid were extremely high, a detail previously overlooked when doctors thought she had suffered a stroke. This suggested that her condition was being caused by a malfunctioning immune system, and the symptoms could potentially be reversed with steroid treatment. “Her MRI scan was essentially normal, but there were these various signs of autoimmunity,” he says. “So we started with steroid therapy, which led to a rather striking improvement.” Just a month after starting therapy,

KELLIE JAEGER/DISCOVER

Bye-Bye, Brain

Within months, new symptoms began to appear. She felt as if her brain were being slowly switched off.

school, and all of a sudden I couldn’t read a map. It was horrible. I couldn’t find words [or] remember anything. My husband said that often I’d just sit and zone out.” Soon, she began having seizures. After one particular incident, Anne was rushed to the hospital, where she remained in a coma for two days. Neurologists at the Cleveland Clinic initially suspected she had had a stroke. But they were left perplexed when all scans appeared normal. Desperate to find out what was wrong, her husband called one of her cousins, a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic. The cousin arranged for them to see Robert Brown, a neurologist who specializes in treating stroke patients. By the time she reached the clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, Anne was gravely ill and unable to even feed herself. “I remember it vividly,” says Brown. “When I saw her, it was quickly apparent that she had far more going on than a stroke. It was a progressive neurological disorder. She had tremors, seizures, cognitive impairment, issues with coordination and speech.” At that point, she’d been told no treatments were available — and she should get her affairs in order.

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(MS63) condition by NGC/PCGS 3 S ealed in protective holder 3 1883-O accounts for just 1.33% of all Morgans Struck Actual size is 38.1 mm

Morgans from the New Orleans Mint In 1859, Nevada’s Comstock Lode was discovered, and soon its rich silver ore made its way across the nation, including to the fabled New Orleans Mint, the only U.S. Mint branch to have served under the U.S. government, the State of Louisiana and the Confederacy. In 1883, some of that silver was struck into Morgan Silver Dollars, each featuring the mint’s iconic “O” mint mark. Now you have the chance to add these historic, 90% pure U.S. silver coins to your collection!

Scarce 1883-O Date The Morgan Silver Dollar was struck from 1878 to 1904, and again in 1921. In the 100 years since, most of these beautiful U.S. Silver Dollars have been worn out or melted down for their silver. It’s estimated that as little as 15% of all Morgans struck exist today in any condition. Even fewer come from this particular mintage. Here’s the breakdown: in 1883, just 4.33% of the total Morgan series was struck. Less than a third of those coins came from New Orleans. In the end, the 1883-O Morgan Silver Dollar accounts for just 1.33% of the entire series—and that’s before the mass meltings that have left so few coins for collectors to secure. And we can expect that even fewer of the survivors are of collector grade...

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VITAL SIGNS

neurologists pinpoint the cause of Anne’s illness. Physicians who suspect that someone might have autoimmune dementia can refer them to specialist clinics to receive one of these tests.

says Brown, Anne’s cognition became remarkably clearer. She was able to think and respond, her tremors were nearly gone, and she told her doctors that all her symptoms had started to melt away. Over the coming weeks, and several doses of IV steroids later, Anne was able to walk, talk and eat by herself again. It turned out that she had autoimmune dementia, a type of dementia so little known that, at the time, few neurologists on the planet had even heard of it. But over the past decade, interest in this condition has soared. To date, out of more than 200 different subtypes of dementia, it is one of the only forms that can be completely cured.

THE CURABLE DEMENTIA Autoimmune dementia is characterized by symptoms like memory loss and confusion — similar to symptoms of more common dementias such as Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia. While most dementias are caused by a progressive, neurodegenerative disease, autoimmune dementia occurs when antibodies, generated by an overactive immune response to stress or infection, mistakenly bind to neuronal proteins in the brain. As a result, the disease progression tends to be much faster, with patients also experiencing more unusual symptoms, such as seizures. The condition was first diagnosed in the 1960s by British neurologist Walter Russell Brain. He noticed that a number of people suffering from an autoimmune disease that attacked their thyroids also had memory loss and cognitive decline. Brain found that many of them improved with steroid treatment. But, nearly 60 years later, autoimmune dementia still remains underrecognized. Some neurologists believe that a small proportion of people in nursing homes who have the condition are mistaken for people with incurable dementia. The fact that they can be successfully treated means identifying them is vital. Over the past 15 years, researchers at Mayo and a handful of clinics in the U.K. and Spain have begun working on developing more precise diagnostics for autoimmune dementia. These are based on identifying certain neuronal antibodies associated with the disease; recognizing these types eventually helped

24

D IS C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

Out of more than 200 different subtypes of dementia, Anne’s illness was one of the only forms that can be completely cured.

Research is still ongoing into the best treatment regiments for autoimmune dementia patients. Like many others, Anne kept relapsing even after several rounds of steroids, before she was given an experimental treatment called intravenous immunoglobulin — infusions of blood plasma from healthy donors. These infusions helped neutralize the disease-causing antibodies. Eventually, she recovered enough to return to work. “I went back to a small law firm at first, so I didn’t have the pressure, and then I went to work at a major corporation, and I’ve had no problems at all,” Anne says. “Now, more than 10 years on, they say I’m cured.” For Brown, it remains one of the most remarkable cases of his career as a neurologist. “I remember it so vividly,” he says. “It was such a remarkable improvement when you consider how ominous things looked at one stage.” All in all, the entire ordeal lasted two years. Of that time, Anne remembers very little. Much of her knowledge of what happened comes from her husband, her daughter, or the doctors who treated her. “There are large gaps of it missing,” she says. “It’s like that whole couple of years are gone, or are very fragmented in my mind.” The experience did help Anne reevaluate many of her life choices, though. When she returned to the legal world, she made a conscious decision to no longer work on major trials, noting that she often used to work 80 hours a week before the illness struck. But looking back, she is still bewildered at just how rapidly her life fell apart. “People who meet me today think I’m your average working attorney,” she says. “They have no idea. It’s a truly miraculous story. I literally went from having one foot in the grave to being totally fine again.” D David Cox is a freelance health writer and former neuroscientist. The cases described in Vital Signs are real, but names and certain details have been changed.

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A practical habitat is just one challenge for a manned Mars mission. Getting medicine there might be even trickier.

SHIPPING DRUGS TO THE RED PLANET WOULD BE COSTLY AND IMPRACTICAL. BUT WHAT IF THE ASTRONAUTS COULD GROW THEIR OWN PHARMACY ONCE THEY GOT THERE?

S

cience fiction writers have been dreaming of a crewed mission to Mars for over a century. But it wasn’t until Wernher von Braun published the English translation of his book, The Mars Project, in 1953 that the idea was plucked out of the realm of fiction and into reality. The Mars Project makes an impressive case for the technical feasibility of getting to Mars, outlining with extraordinary specificity how 10 space vehicles, each manned with 70 people and using conventional propellant, could achieve a round-trip voyage to the Red Planet. Although science has developed considerably since the book was published, challenges still remain, from designing a breathable habitat to growing nutritious food. But there’s another issue that a NASA research project called the Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space (CUBES) has been working on since 2017, one that is as essential to the long-term success of an off-planet human settlement as air or food: treating illness. It’s a tricky problem that doesn’t have an easy answer. What about packing the shuttle full of medicine? This might seem like

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Spacecraft that have landed on Mars have taken the better part of a year to get there. That’s far too long to deliver urgent, lifesaving meds.

a realistic solution at first glance, but astronauts can’t know in advance all of the ways they could get sick. There are some known risks to sending human life to Mars, such as the effects of the planet’s lower gravity on bone density and muscle mass or potential exposure to cosmic radiation as astronauts leave the protective cover of Earth’s atmosphere. But packing medicines for every contingency would be expensive and take up precious cargo space. Nor could astronauts depend on timely shipments from Earth, due to the long distance between our planet and Mars. The spacecraft that have landed on Mars have taken the better part of a year to get there. Perseverance, the most recent robotic rover sent to Mars on July 30, 2020, is expected to land by the time you read this: more than 200 days after launch. That’s far too long to deliver urgent, lifesaving medications or supplies.

SYNTHETIC SOLUTIONS Rather than sending astronauts into space with a costly and finite stock of medicines, scientists have approached the problem a little differently. What if astronauts could manufacture on Mars what they need?

FROM TOP: NASA; NASA/JPL-CALTECH

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This is one of the solutions that CUBES, a Space Technology Research Institute established by NASA in February 2017, is attempting to develop. And it is doing so using the tools and techniques of synthetic biology — a scientific field that uses engineering to build new biological organisms on demand. “If we could have programmable life make things for us, then we don’t have to account for every possibility before we go, because life is programmable in ways that other things aren’t,” says Adam Arkin, director of CUBES. Arkin has spent his career investigating how, as he puts it, “to build things out of life,” by developing more sustainable biomanufacturing systems. Mars presented an ideally challenging environment for these aspirations; after all, it’s an unpredictable, extreme environment where humans must, by necessity, expend every resource available to them. “If we could build something that could be grown, essentially, as a factory, we could reduce the costs and increase the efficiency and resiliency once you [are on Mars],” he says.

PROGRAMMABLE PLANTS The “factories” Arkin envisions could include technology to program plants, such as lettuce and spinach, and microbes, such as spirulina, to produce stable drug therapies. One of four divisions in CUBES, the Food and Pharmaceuticals Synthesis Division (FPSD) is exploring a few different methods to best leverage naturally occurring organisms for pharmaceutical production. For example, there is the seed stock model: Seeds from a plant that has been genetically modified to produce a

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Above: A NASA concept for growing veggies off-world. Below: Introducing new DNA using bacteria such as Agrobacterium tumefaciens could cause plants to produce a therapeutic protein they would never otherwise create.

target molecule (a medicine), are sent on the spacecraft with the astronauts. Then, once a human colony has been established on Mars, settlers could grow these plants and either directly consume the plant to get the medicine, or extract the medicinal component, purify it, and inject it as we do with many drugs on Earth. In order to produce these plants, the FPSD is using an older technique called agrobacterium transformation, a process in which bacteria called Agrobacterium tumefaciens is used as a vehicle to deliver a DNA expression system into the plant genome. By introducing new DNA into the target plant, scientists are able to induce the plant to produce a therapeutic protein that it wouldn’t otherwise. Another method involves synthesizing genes that code for whatever drug an astronaut may need on Mars, or selecting from a kind of DNA library, then injecting genes directly into the plant. “When you’re talking about synthetic biology, one of the powerful things about it is you can synthesize DNA for a variety of purposes. So, having a gene synthesis capability on-planet I think would be a very valuable tool,” says Karen McDonald, head of the FPSD and a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Davis. Once synthesized, the genes could be directly introduced into plants on demand using a tool called a gene gun, a ballistic device that shoots particles of DNA onto the surface of a leaf with such force that it penetrates the plant’s cell wall, allowing the genetic material to be introduced into the organism. What does this look like in practice? One of the division’s main projects is to produce a protein peptide in lettuce plants that could be used to treat osteopenia or osteoporosis using agrobacterium transformation. By propagating the plant through multiple generations, researchers will be able to select for the lines that produce the most stable amounts of the drug from one generation to the next. They’re also looking at other leafy greens, such as spinach, as potential platforms for drugs. Not only have these plants been frequently used in NASA experiments, they also have a very high harvest index, meaning that most or all of the plant can be consumed for food, which makes them likely candidates for a mission to Mars. But the work is not without its challenges,

FROM TOP: NASA; DENNIS KUNKEL MICROSCOPY/SCIENCE SOURCE. OPPOSITE PAGE: DENIS POGOSTIN/SHUTTERSTOCK

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THE NEXT PLANET “As engineers, we work with designing systems under constraints,” McDonald says. “But the constraints that we are dealing with here on Earth are nothing like the constraints that you might have in a Mars mission.” Her team faces two connected challenges: perfecting methods to cheaply and efficiently extract from plants and purify compounds that are safe for the astronauts to inject, and determining how much of the medication would actually make it into the bloodstream. McDonald says astronauts may need to bring some diagnostic equipment to ensure the medicine is purified and safe to consume. Although CUBES has its sights set on the stars, this work has important questions for life on Earth, too. Arkin says it’s unlikely — and ill-advised, from a health and safety standpoint — that this technology will eliminate the large-scale production of pharmaceuticals here on Earth. But that doesn’t mean that CUBES’ research doesn’t have the potential to radically disrupt the way we eat and grow things here, particularly in the coming decades as climate change intensifies, the global population increases, and our natural resources continue to diminish. “[CUBES] was about the idea that, yes, Mars is the next planet we might visit, but our planet is changing at such a high rate that we have to deal with the ‘next planet’ here as well,” Arkin says. “And if we can build an autotrophic self-building factory that can support 10 people for food and fuel and pharmaceuticals and building materials, from carbon dioxide and light and waste, that would be a huge benefit to mankind everywhere. It would set us up for our next planet here.” D Aria Alamalhodaei is a freelance writer based in Montana.

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HOW ORAL TRADITION IS GUIDING ARCHAEOLOGY AND UNCOVERING CLIMATE HISTORY IN ALASKA — AND BEYOND. BY JONATHON KEATS

O

n the Copper River in south-central Alaska, a celebrated chief named Łtaxda’x (EL-tax-da) once owned a dish hewn from the horn of a giant moose. When Łtaxda’x died, four brothers fought over this ceremonial platter of the Raven clan. According to some tellings of the ancient story, one brother who lost gathered the people who sided with him and led them away from their ancestral home into the unknown. They journeyed for many years, crossing a glacier and nearly starving. When they followed what looked

like a rabbit on the snowy horizon, it turned out to be the distant peak of Mount St. Elias. From the top, they could see the deep blue sea, and they built their home on an island. They prospered under the protection of the mountain with the glacier spirit that adopted them and taught them how to hunt seals living there. Their village, Tlákw.aan (KLAK-wan), grew to have so many people that smoke from hearthfires hung over the houses. These clouds led to an incident remembered by their descendants even today — generations after they abandoned Tlákw.aan and built a town on the nearby Yakutat mainland

Hubbard Glacier marks the north end of Disenchantment Bay within Yakutat Bay in southeastern Alaska. The Yakutat Tlingit people have hunted seals in these waters for hundreds of years.

the (350 miles from Anchorage in present-day Alaska). “It’s said that there was so much smoke coming up from the houses that Raven choked and fell from the sky,” says Aron Crowell, director of the Alaska division of the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center. Raven is a supernatural being in Indigenous cultures of Alaska — including the Yakutat Tlingit who identify Łtaxda’x as a forebear. The winged creature performs cosmological feats, such as releasing the sun, moon and stars into the heavens. (An image of Raven by a Tlingit artist was recently selected to appear on a U.S. stamp in 2021.) Many of his exploits

illustrate morals that have educated generations of children through tales told aloud by their elders. Oral traditions of this kind are found in all cultures, and have served as a basis for written texts such as the Judeo-Christian Bible. Even when writing becomes predominant, oral traditions persist, as any child who has ever heard a bedtime story can attest. Crowell knows the Indigenous Raven stories nearly as well as the people raised on them. He is also deeply familiar with Yakutat Bay on the Gulf of Alaska, where the Tlingit people claim to have been guided by the spirit of Mount St. Elias, the mountain that

first appeared as a rabbit. As an archaeologist, Crowell has found copper artifacts on the land the Tlingit still occupy, and has seen trace metal analyses that prove the alloy originated a couple of hundred miles away on the Copper River. Guided by oral legends, Crowell’s findings revealed that the migration story of the Tlingit ancestors is essentially true. His research, conducted with partners from local communities, is revealing the history of Alaskan settlement, buttressing Native claims to their rightful territories and providing new insights into historical climate fluctuations that may help people cope with environmental changes to come. Other researchers are also enlisting oral tradition to study places such as Australia, where narratives may have been passed down since the last Ice Age. An important piece of the past remains present for these researchers with a receptive ear. Results are proving that to be a good scientist is to be a good listener.

LEARNING FROM ORAL TRADITION In 2011, Crowell traveled to Knight Island on Yakutat Bay, where a

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ARON CROWELL

small settlement had been excavated in 1952. The settlement was thought to be Tlákw.aan, but there weren’t enough hearths to disorient a honeybee, let alone fell the mystical Raven. Crowell surmised that most of the village had not yet been uncovered. With shovels and a bevy of students — some from the Tlingit community — he began excavating. They discovered that the Knight Island sediment hid an entire 500-year-old village. “These stories are carrying forward eyewitness information from the past,” says Crowell, seated in the Arctic Studies Center’s Alaska headquarters. Crowell is lean with a tidy gray beard and hair just long enough to let you know he’d rather be outdoors. He gazes out on the drab Anchorage skyline, then back at a bank of file cabinets containing thousands of pages of transcript. “From oral tradition, we know who lived in a place and why they were there and where they came from.” The potential of oral tradition to locate artifacts of the past, and to reveal their significance, has made Crowell into a kind of intellectual cross-athlete. He combines archaeology, anthropology, linguistics and climate science — and a Local students assisted with the excavation of the ancient village site on North Knight Island in 2014.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: LHBOUCAULT/DREAMSTIME. ILLUSTRATIONS: EMILY KEARNEY-WILLIAMS (2). PHOTOS: SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (4)

Kai Monture (right) and Aron Crowell assist Tlingit elder Lena Farkas on a visit to historic Keik’uliyáa seal camp in Disenchantment Bay.

Kai Monture watches Hubbard Glacier, known as Sit’ Tlein in the Tlingit language.

commitment to open-mindedness. This mix of disciplines has proven to be especially potent in Indigenous contexts because oral tradition is often central to Native communities, which have been marginalized for centuries by Western science and society. “It’s about decolonizing anthropology,” says Crowell. “It’s part of a larger story of anthropologists and archaeologists reconnecting with Indigenous peoples on an equal basis.” He isn’t alone in this mission. “It’s very powerful for Native peoples’ point of view to be respected, to see that our knowledge is just as valid as Western science,” says Judith Ramos, a member of the Yakutat Tlingit clan and an anthropologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She has worked alongside Crowell as a co-investigator on the Yakutat Bay project. “Indigenous knowledge can enrich scientific knowledge. They can be mutually enriching.”

WEEDING RACIST ROOTS “Indian tradition is historically worthless,” declared Robert Lowie in the prestigious Journal of American Folk-Lore in 1917. Lowie was a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, and considered a leading authority on Indigenous history throughout the first half of the 20th century, a time when racism was as commonplace as tweed. Lowie’s work as an anthropologist had led him to question the accuracy of oral traditions, and to scorn what he called the “primitive tribes” that espoused them. As an example, he cited an Assiniboine legend in which humans and horses are both created at the beginning of time. He claimed the elders should know better, given that horses had only recently been introduced to North America. Lowie was hardly alone in his derision. But even in the early 20th century, the methodology that Crowell uses successfully

From top: An ancient Tlingit story tells of the day when Raven fell from the sky, choking on a cloud of smoke rising ‘ from the village of Tlakw.aan. Traditional Yakutat hunters, circa A.D. 1600, pursue a seal near Hubbard Glacier.

MARCH/APR I L 2 0 2 1 . D I S C OV ER

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“IT’S ABOUT DECOLONIZING ANTHROPOLOGY. IT’S PART OF A LARGER STORY OF ANTHROPOLOGISTS RECONNECTING WITH INDIGENOUS PEOPLES ON AN EQUAL BASIS.” — ARON CROWELL

today was emerging through the work of a young anthropologist named Frederica de Laguna. De Laguna began her research with the ambition of solving what was then called the “Eskimo problem” — determining where Inuit culture originated, and how the Inuit descended from Paleolithic peoples. But fieldLeft: A copper-bladed knife used to work she began in the 1930s skin seals. Right: This 500-year-old instilled in her a skepticism barbed arrow point came from the toward overarching theories. Tlákw.aan village site. Instead of trying to compare Inuit art to Paleolithic objects, she began talking to people, collecting their memories. She visited Greenland and the Yukon, and spoke to some of the last surviving members of the ancient Eyak tribe on the Copper River. Her deepest and longest lasting engagement, however, was with the Tlingit of Yakutat Bay, which are not part of the Inuit tribes farther north. Over five years in the early 1950s, de Laguna lived with the Tlingit and collected their stories, many of which had never been written down. Her research led to a 1,400-page English-language monograph published by the Smithsonian Institution, still used as a standard reference by the tribe. De Laguna is also the one who, guided by oral traditions, led the first excavation of Knight Island and found traces of Tlákw.aan. Crowell remembers working with de Laguna on a Kodiak Island excavation in the 1980s, when she was in her late 70s and celebrated as a dean of Alaskan anthropology. Her method stood in contrast to Lowie, who “felt that things very quickly became mythologized, and the transmission was very unreliable,” Crowell says. De Laguna, by contrast, “took oral traditions very seriously, and applied archaeology to verify them.”

Deeming her a pioneer and an inspiration for his work, Crowell considers de Laguna’s success to be an outcome of her interest in archaeology, linguistics and anthropology. “She felt that she needed to be adept in all of those fields,” he says, “and to tie things together holistically.”

WHEN LISTENING BECOMES DIGGING On a large round table at the Arctic Studies Center, Crowell is arranging gear for an expedition. He stuffs professional video cameras and microphones, cables and batteries into packs, intended to capture every nuance of his subjects’ speech as well as gestures used during ceremonies or out on a hunt. “There’s sort of a Hollywood production kind of aspect to launching a big field project,” he says. The mixture of cameras and shovels reflects Crowell’s polymath background. Taking undergraduate anthropology classes at George Washington University in the mid-1970s, he was invited to spend a summer doing fieldwork in Labrador with a team from the National Museum of Natural History. Following a harrowing journey by small boat on an ocean teeming with icebergs, he began excavating a 7,000-year-old Indigenous settlement on the Arctic coast. “I was totally hooked,” he recalls. He might have gone back the following summer — and spent his whole career digging up remnants of extinct civilizations — had one of his anthropology professors not turned him around and put him on a plane to Botswana. They were excavating a Middle Stone Age site, but it turned out that many of the prehistoric hunting techniques were still practiced, so he turned to local inhabitants for interviews.

THE “FLOATING” FORT UNEARTHED Climate change has had a dramatic effect on the lives of Alaska Natives since

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (3)

the land was first populated. The conditions of the Arctic have amplified the impact of events such as the Little Ice Age — a 300-year temperature drop that started around the year 1500 — as well as human-influenced global warming today. Memories of many of these changes were passed on by native tribes because subsistence living amidst glaciers is harshly unforgiving. Oral traditions and even place names recorded key climate events because knowledge of them could forewarn future generations. Over the past couple of decades, Crowell has concentrated on coastal archaeology, interested in the combination of ethnic diversity and environmental peril. In addition to

Yakutat territory, he has spent time in Glacier Bay farther to the southeast, where his archaeological investigations have connected oral traditions to changes in relative sea level caused by the vast weight of glaciers compressing the land. Ultimately, they found a lost fort said in oral tradition to have been the site of the first war of the world. According to legend, the fort “floated,” leading to its abandonment. Radiocarbon dating

showed that the oldest parts of the structure were built a thousand years ago — when the region’s first compound bows fundamentally changed the nature of warfare — and the location is consistent with land that would have been flooded during the Little Ice Age. “The head of the Hoonah Indian Association took elders and students to the site,” Crowell says. “It’s very powerful from the point of view of the people who live in these communities and have learned this oral tradition, but feel that that knowledge has never been respected.” It’s equally powerful for the scientists, who get to witness an ancient fort brought back to life. — J.K. MARCH/APR I L 2 02 1 . D IS C OVER

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“You would ask them, ‘What do these archaeological remains mean?’ ” Crowell says. “It was a matter of going back into the ancient past by looking at contemporary knowledge.” Crowell arrived in Alaska by way of his work in Labrador. The archaeologist who had brought him to the Arctic as an undergraduate, William Fitzhugh, was running the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center, and wanted to open an Alaska field office. Crowell’s combination of interests, experiences and a Ph.D. made him the ideal candidate. Over the next couple decades, he took up where de Laguna had left off in terms of connecting archaeology with oral tradition, with the benefit of new tools (such as radiocarbon dating). In keeping with the zeitgeist, he also brought an interest in connecting these fields to our changing climate.

CLIMATES AND SPIRITS In 2011, George Ramos, a Tlingit elder (the father of Judith Ramos), proposed to Crowell that the Arctic Studies Center search for seal-hunting camps on the Yakutat Bay. “My dad was

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an expert in seal hunting,” Judith says. He knew of many sealhunting camps from traditional names of places and stories. The camps were sacred because of their association with the spirits of ancestors who lived there, but many of the camps could no longer be located. The locations were also of interest to scientists seeking to understand climate history in the region, since each marked the ground closest to seal rookeries at the foot of Hubbard Glacier. George and his wife Elaine Abraham, a Tlingit clan mother and founder of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska, joined Crowell as co-investigators. They led a multi-year effort to preserve on video all the oral traditions about sealing. Judith joined them with a particular interest in seal hunting. When her parents died several years ago, she took their place as Crowell’s main collaborator. “We don’t have any elders left,” says Judith. The vast trove of video offers one way for Yakutat culture to mitigate this loss. Another is the physical landscape itself. One of the most significant finds beyond Knight Island is

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

The late George Ramos, a Tlingit elder, points to nesting kittiwake birds, moments before collecting eggs (a favorite Tlingit food).

a camp that is not only remembered in oral tradition but also visually documented by a scientific expedition. In the summer of 1899, the railroad magnate Edward Harriman funded a sea voyage up the Alaska coast, and famed photographer Edward Curtis documented a Yakutat hunting camp with many tents and smokehouses. Just four months after their visit, two major earthquakes radically altered the landscape. The camp was uplifted so far from the water that it had to be abandoned. The forest engulfed the old settlement over the next century. “We spent a week thrashing around in the alder brush,” Crowell recalls. “We couldn’t see anything.” At last, a colleague’s metal detector started pinging as it swept over some rifle cartridges. The team carefully cleared away the overgrowth. They found everything to be exactly where it had been at the turn of the century. “You could compare it to Pompeii,” Crowell says. The camp was rediscovered shortly before Elaine Abraham and George Ramos died, allowing them to participate in a tobacco-burning ritual honoring the spirits of the drowned. The oral traditions they documented explained many of the discoveries, such as buried clusters of tiny moccasin beads. Passed-down memories of camp life tell of women stashing their beadwork before butchering seals hauled in by the hunters. The memories explain the beads, and the beads validate the memories, more evidence that oral tradition can inform archaeology and the climate history associated with it.

HOW OLD IS TOO OLD? Marine biologists are also learning to listen. For example, they’re gleaning insight from Judith Ramos’ survey of tribal memories about seal hunting. The survey showed how extraction of seals has been self-regulated by oral traditions about seals giving their lives only if hunters respect the meat. Killing without need is taboo for the Tlingit. This has led other researchers to investigate potential causes of recent population decline, including the routes of cruise ships — work that could inform governmental regulations that protect the seals and preserve the traditional Yakutat diet. Contending with environmental change may in fact be a major reason why oral tradition is so reliable, maintaining fidelity over many generations. “When you’re passing on stories, you are preparing your children and their children and future generations to cope with the future and everything the future might throw up to confront them and to challenge their

Judith Ramos, holding a .22-caliber rifle, waits for seals in Disenchantment Bay with her late father George Ramos.

survival,” says Patrick Nunn, a geographer at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. Nunn has documented Australian Aboriginal oral traditions that he claims appear to be more than 10,000 years old in some cases. He believes some of these stories about coastal drowning describe the rapid melting of glaciers and rising sea levels at the end of the Pleistocene. “One-off events like this are important to know about, in case they happen again,” he says. Even Crowell is wary of such extreme durability of memory. “To me, it just comes down to the number of generations, and what communication scientists would call information decay,” he says. “But I have an open mind about it. “From my own work in Alaska, it’s clear that there is verifiable information going back 1,000 years, maybe 2,000,” Crowell says. If he succeeds in his work, the ancient stories might endure for thousands of years more into the future. D Jonathon Keats is a contributing editor to Discover. His most recent book is You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future.

BOLSTERING CLAIMS TO LAND

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

The Yakutat Tlingit have been trying to legally reclaim land since the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) was passed in 1971. Several attempts were denied because the Bureau of Land Management would not accept oral tradition as proof that the area was tribal territory. Presentday excavations by Aron Crowell and

others could help make the tribal case irrefutable. “Oral history and even the broader field of anthropology have had a history of being treated as potentially suspect,” says ANSCSA Program Manager Kenneth Pratt of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Concerning his specific work in land claims, he says, “the agency’s

attitude toward Alaska Native oral traditions has changed for the better.” In fact, Pratt considers oral tradition to be central to the future validation of land claims. “Oftentimes the only way you are going to be able to adequately document the history of Native use and the cultural significance of certain sites is through oral history,” he says. — J.K. MARCH/APR I L 2 02 1 . D IS C OVER

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WHEN

SHAME GOES

VIRAL THIS ANCIENT SOCIAL EMOTION HAS ALWAYS BEEN COMPLEX. THE INTERNET POURED FUEL ON IT. THEN CAME SOCIAL MEDIA. BY TIMOTHY MEINCH

Emojis and social media didn’t birth the proverbial facepalm. But the internet has opened a new frontier for public shaming.

WHEN MONICA LEWINSKY EMERGED IN 2014 AFTER A DECADE OF QUIET EXISTENCE, SHE HAD A MESSAGE TO SHARE. SHE ALSO HAD A MASTER’S DEGREE IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, EARNED IN LONDON WHERE SHE HUNKERED DOWN FOR GRAD SCHOOL. VANITY FAIR PRINTED HER EXCLUSIVE FIRST-PERSON COMEBACK STORY IN 2014. THEN SHE TOOK

the stage to tell of life after becoming “that woman” in one of history’s most widely broadcast sex scandals: “I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one, worldwide,” Lewinsky says in her 2015 TED Talk, which now has more than 18 million views. “I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on the global scale, almost instantaneously.” The infamous 1998 incident with President Bill Clinton occurred at the dawn of the internet age — a fact not lost on Lewinsky, who says her name has appeared in “almost 40 rap songs.” Her actions as a 24-year-old intern went viral pre-social media. In recent years, the rise of Facebook and Twitter, and the potential for public shaming on the internet, motivated Lewinsky to speak up. “A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a commodity, and shame is an industry,” she says in the video. One can only speculate whether Lewinsky would have been met with criticism or empathy on today’s digital stage. In some cases, this internet-based outrage culture results in positive change. It has exposed grave offenses, elevated political movements and toppled abusers in the U.S. and beyond. Hollywood giant Harvey Weinstein, for example, was ousted, charged and imprisoned on the heels of the widely broadcast #MeToo campaign. For better or worse, the internet and social media have significantly amplified humanity’s means of public shaming, taking victims from the town square to a global network of connected screens. “The internet now allows hundreds or thousands of people to participate in collective shaming, in a way that wasn’t possible before,” says Takuya Sawaoka, a social psychologist and research Organized public shaming dates back more than 1,000 years, with the pillory designed specifically to make a spectacle out of society’s offensive characters.

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director at OpenMind, a psychology-based educational platform. The result is a steady flow of new names and targets — both high-profile and everyday citizens — flooding our media feeds and rage cycle. Some call it cancel culture; others embrace it as a social reckoning. Whatever you call this new wave of public shaming, researchers are evaluating whether the ancient emotion is benefiting or harming humans today — and to what extent. The results may hold some keys to our collective future.

THE ROOTS OF HUMILIATION Long before the internet, people who violated moral codes in a society would get fastened to a pillar, stocks or pillory, a device in which the offender’s head and hands were locked

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Monica Lewinsky was a 24-year-old intern when her scandal with Bill Clinton — then president of the United States — went viral in 1998. She says public shaming changed her life forever. Since then, social media has slung shame at countless other targets.

in a wooden frame. The masses would gather to taunt and jeer them, hurling rotten food at their heads along with insulting words. This dual punishment and spectacle — aptly named pillorying — started more than 1,000 years ago in parts of Europe. And it lasted well into the 19th century, when, you could say, it got canceled. “It’s worth noting that this practice was eventually outlawed because it became regarded to be too cruel,” Sawaoka says. England fully abolished the pillory by 1837, along with many nearby countries and most U.S. territories by that time. The state of Delaware was a last holdout in the Western world, outlawing it as recently as 1905. Whether or not it involves a literal pillory, shame has generally run parallel with human civilization and social order through the ages. Some anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists make the case that shame is universal and biological, as an evolved mechanism to ensure our survival. The idea is that adaptations favoring group cooperation and mutual aid stretch as far back as early human foragers, according to a 2018 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers suggested that feelings of shame in an individual are nature’s way of “encoding the social cost” of certain behaviors — such as stealing. The study tested this idea in 15 remote, independent communities around the world and found the same patterns in each. Considering how societies are built on norms and hierarchy, a 2020 study published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience framed shame as “an evolved disease avoidance architecture” wherein the emotion helps to protect individuals from undesirable social circumstances, such as being an outsider to a group. The study presented some evidence that shame may be linked to disgust — in this

case, disgust directed at the self as a source of contamination for the group. While experts continue to probe the origins of shame, many contemporary psychologists classify it as a selfconscious, moral emotion associated with feelings of powerlessness, worthlessness and other psychological turmoil in the individual. “Maybe it’s this thing that came from group-level processes and certainly had its benefit. But it really can wreak havoc on the individual level and make things worse,” says Michael Slepian, a social psychologist at Columbia University. Slepian’s work builds on a popular theory in psychology that guilt, when compared to its relative, shame, takes on a distinct role in the human psyche. Essentially, guilt stirs feelings of regret or remorse toward a specific incident or behavior that has affected someone else. Shame, on the other hand, brings up broader feelings of worthlessness and self-judgment. “That’s the key distinction between guilt and shame,” says Carnegie Mellon University organizational psychologist Taya Cohen. “ ‘You did a bad thing,’ vs. ‘You are a bad person.’ ” For example, if you post an angry rant about a friend on social media, you might feel guilty and later apologize. A so-called shame response to the same situation would make you feel like a horrible, worthless person. Slepian says he questions whether there is any healthy place for shame today: “I don’t know whether making people feel small and powerless and helpless is ever a good thing.”

SLINGING SHAME Just as Lewinsky was patient zero for instant global humiliation, Justine Sacco in 2013 became a poster child for viral Twitter shaming, now common practice on a platform built for rapid-fire input (often criticism) from MARCH/APR I L 2 02 1 . D IS C OV ER

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DIGITAL SHAME

SOME ARGUE SHAME can be a forceful tool for change when wielded against powerful figures and institutions. But when it’s weaponized against others in shared digital spaces, these same tactics can morph into insidious behaviors, like cyberbullying or online harassment. Getting called out, insulted or bullied isn’t exactly new. But the internet’s ability to amplify and permanently document those messages is. And this tool is now in the hands of most young people: A 2020 report by the Cyberbullying Research Center shows that 95 percent of U.S. teens are online, most tweens (ages 9 through 12) have personal devices and 9 out of 10 of them used social media or gaming apps in the past year. Here’s how experts recommend guiding kids and teens through this digital landscape.

1

Think before you post. In the digital age, what we share can become permanent. It’s also a way of presenting ourselves to others, says web safety expert Nancy Willard, author of Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats. In short, consider what your social media footprint says about you. “Write down the key words that you would like other people to use

Social media sites, such as Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, can be common avenues for cyberbullying.

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when they describe you,” Willard says. “Then, when you’re posting something, [ask yourself], ‘Does that reflect those qualities?’ ”

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Work through scenarios in advance. If someone lashes out at you online, says Justin W. Patchin, codirector of the Cyberbullying Research Center, you might feel the desire — even the

need — to respond. Instead, parents and educators should consider helping their kids prepare for such situations beforehand. “Give them a situation,” he says, “to just practice those skills of deflecting, ignoring or [even] making a joke of it.”

3

Stop and stay calm. It’s easy for even subtle digital clashes to make your blood boil. “If you’re upset, realize that the threat response center of your brain has taken over,” Willard says. “Unfortunately, when this happens, your emotional regulation and your thinking centers go offline.” But there are ways to remain zen. Take some deep breaths. Step away from the keyboard. Go for a walk outside.

4

Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. If you’re being belittled online, it may say more about the other person than it does about you, says psychologist Sherry Turkle, founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self and author of The Empathy Diaries. “If you can keep that in mind,” she says, “then the whole experience will seem less bewildering to you, emotionally.”

5

Empower yourself with tools. If you do find yourself, or your child, being cyberbullied, often the tech itself can provide a number of simple ways to respond: Blocking the offender. Reporting hurtful exchanges. Taking screenshots. Saving message threads. Patchin says having that evidence can help if the behaviors do escalate beyond one hurtful offense to repeated, long-standing harassment. “It’s a lot easier for authorities to get involved when they can see exactly what’s going on,” he says. — ALEX ORLANDO

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DEALING WITH

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In recent years, multiple national protests and civil rights rallies emerged from hashtags, such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, that spread primarily via social media platforms online.

the masses. Minutes before boarding an 11-hour flight to South Africa, Sacco posted a tweet (to her 170 followers) that permanently changed her life: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” By the time Sacco landed, tens of thousands of people had responded to and shared her tweet. The hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet went viral around the world, with a barrage of criticism calling her racist. The moment was fueled in part by the fact that she was airborne and would remain oblivious to the fallout until she reconnected to the internet. She also worked as a senior communications director, which created the perfect storm of irony and internet memes. Sacco was immediately fired from her job, and became the subject of endless articles and a book. One of the overwhelming questions in her case, and many similar instances, is to what degree any single blunder should define a person’s reputation. And when does Twitter shaming — or any pile-on of criticism toward someone — become bullying? As you might expect, it’s complicated. “One of the

problems with [social media] is that it’s devoid of context,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Northeastern University and author of How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. This is compounded by the fact that social media doesn’t always allow for the same back-and-forth discourse that people use in real life to talk about their problems. Instead, platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are mostly designed for broadcasting, she says, rather than actual communication and exchange between people: “It’s mostly about speaking, and it’s not very much about listening.” However, public moral outrage is not always aimed at reforming a specific offender. The goal might be solidarity with a victim, group or cause, and shifting cultural values in anyone witnessing the outrage. “The person who has done [the offense], say, Harvey Weinstein, may be a lost cause,” Cohen explains. “But, by making him an example, it sets the standards for our society. Moral codes. What is acceptable and non-acceptable behavior.”

PUBLIC MORAL OUTRAGE IS NOT ALWAYS AIMED AT REFORMING A SPECIFIC OFFENDER. THE GOAL MIGHT BE SOLIDARITY WITH A VICTIM, GROUP OR CAUSE, AND SHIFTING CULTURAL VALUES. MARCH/APR I L 2 0 2 1 . D IS C OV ER

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Feldman Barrett’s research has dug deep into the specific cultural context where emotions play out. She rejects the popular notion that feelings of guilt are universally healthier than shame, calling this a “very Western view.” Instead, she says shame means something different in more collectivist societies, like those found in the East, versus individualist cultures in the West. “The American way tends to be: ‘You’re a piece of s--- for what you did. You should feel really bad about what you said, maybe to the point of being worthless,’ ” Feldman Barrett says. “I think the way that shame is wielded right now in this American way is meant to punish.” By contrast, shame in some cultures — like in Japan, Taiwan or some parts of Africa — is not about blame or punishment. In Taiwan, according to a 2019 paper in Frontiers in Psychology, children are often shamed as an expression of love and moral guidance. “It’s about connection, and repairing and honoring a relationship,” Feldman Barrett says.

STIRRING OUTRAGE

RESEARCHERS IDENTIFIED “THE PARADOX OF VIRAL OUTRAGE.” ESSENTIALLY, WHEN ONLINE SHAMING PILES UP, IT CAN TRIGGER SYMPATHY TOWARD THE OFFENDER, EVEN WHEN THEIR REMARK OR MISSTEP WAS GRAVE. 44

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The Twitter and social media masses often rally against racism, sexism and other behavior rooted in bigotry. If you examine cultural movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, you’ll find specific offenders being shamed along with challenges to broader organizations, like police departments or political parties. Some research shows that collective anger can also be a unifying and effective force for systemic change. Outrage may even be necessary, suggests Victoria Spring, a postdoc fellow studying moral emotions at New York University. “Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were both angry about racism. Gandhi was angry about British imperialism in India,” Spring says. “All of them were outraged about injustice, and they were able to transform that into activism.” King even made a call to “awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor”

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A single social media post can quickly reach millions of people around the globe. Humans are still figuring out how to wield and navigate this phenomenon.

in his 1957 speech, “The Power of Nonviolence,” as a means to reconcile with them. Spring highlighted collective action as one common outcome of outrage in a 2018 paper published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Researchers found a compelling example of this in a 2011 study when they observed how women exposed to hostile sexism rallied to participate in collective action for equal salaries. Meanwhile, exposure to “benevolent sexism,” or affectionate and chivalrous forms of male dominance, decreased women’s intentions to engage in political action, according to the study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Spring says social media does seem to complicate our relationship with outrage, likely because humans are still figuring out how to leverage the phenomena of having such a vast audience: “We’re constantly weighing the costs and benefits of saying something or not saying something.” In related work, Sawaoka and colleagues recently identified what they call “the paradox of viral outrage” in a 2018 paper in Psychological Science. That work showed how the pile-on effect of online shaming can actually trigger

sympathy toward an offender, even when their remark or misstep was grave. “We find that the more people who participate in collective shaming, the more this shaming can start to look like bullying,” Sawaoka says. Commenters who criticized the initial offense were also viewed more negatively when they were seen alongside a barrage of other shaming replies. “The exponential dynamics of internet postings make this expression of legitimate individual outrage appear excessive and unjust,” wrote the researchers. Online shaming can become ever-more complex when the target is the culture at large. Or, say, the history of racism and slavery in the U.S. Exposing these matters and their effects can spark an array of reactions in individuals. “If I identify as an American, and I believe America is great, then it’s very difficult to acknowledge something that runs counter to that identity,” Cohen says. “People will do whatever they can to avoid acknowledging that.” They may even turn to shaming people on the internet. It’s a vicious cycle. D Timothy Meinch is features editor at Discover. MARCH/APR I L 2 02 1 . D IS C OVER

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One ecologist is studying how a city’s legacy of racism affects urban wildlife.

WHAT MAKES THE COUNTRY MOUSE DIFFERENT FROM THE CITY MOUSE? Christopher Schell is a wildlife ecologist who has been curious about this dynamic his entire career. Though he specializes in coyotes instead of mice, the question remains the same. Schell, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Tacoma, is also

BY LEAH SHAFFER

Camera traps snap a photo when they sense movement. Placed in city parks and other green spaces, these photos give researchers like Schell important information about who lives in town.

Q

What got you interested in urban ecology?

I’m from Los Angeles, and seeing coyotes in the street — raccoons as well, even deer — was pretty common. But I didn’t know anybody who was an ecologist; I didn’t know anybody who was a professor. I thought that I was going to be a veterinarian. But when I went to college, I had the opportunity to have so many experiences related to ecology, conservation and animal behavior. I had this immersive experience that allowed me to do my own research with spiders in the Dominican Republic. I was researching two species, a tarantula and an orb weaver, that lived near the townships that we students were staying in. Thinking about how their behaviors differed in their different environments was really interesting to me. This idea has been driving me ever since.

Q

What are you working on now?

A lot of the work I do now is trying to understand within-city variation [variation from neighborhood to neighborhood within the same city]. Most of the organisms that live across socioeconomic gradients experience different environmental stressors.

Q

Stressors like what?

Industries disposed of pollutants in the most impoverished neighborhoods where many Black and brown communities were relegated during the redlining of the early 20th century. Cancer Alley [in Louisiana] is perhaps the best example of a place where you have so many petrochemical industries close to predominantly Black communities. My work now looks at how those different historical and contemporary processes have biological impacts. This includes thinking about how an individual animal’s behavior is influenced by what neighborhood they live in, all the way up to the community

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level. Even up to the global level, I’m thinking about how racial and economic inequality are detrimentally affecting our planet.

Q

You mentioned redlining — can you explain that a bit?

Q

How does your research with coyotes and other urban wildlife tie into all this?

Redlining was a federal program from the 1930s to 1968. The government mapped out cities and put red lines around neighborhoods that they deemed hazardous. [See page 50.] The result was to segregate where Black and white people and Black and Latinx people would live in cities. Today, we can see how different neighborhoods influence where tree cover, vegetation cover, vegetation density and tree biodiversity is greatest. It often tends to be greatest in areas which were the predominantly white, predominantly wealthy neighborhoods. Even though redlining was abolished, we still have lingering effects that are persistent on the landscape.

When I’m thinking about how different inequities in the landscape may influence different animals, I instantly start to think about how different communities interact with the organisms, and whether or not the habitat conditions are able to support those organisms. Species like raccoons or squirrels or rats are found in many different regions of the city regardless of the wealth of regions. So then we can start to interrogate the mechanisms that influence behavior. One of the biggest mechanisms is likely diet. You can imagine that the diet of a raccoon that lives in a wealthier neighborhood with a lot of vegetation is going to be closer to what a raccoon would eat in a non-urban environment, because that habitat can sustain a greater diversity of species that the raccoon would eat. You likely would see that raccoons that live in those areas tend to eat more natural food: berries, invertebrates, stuff like that. In the alternate direction, you may expect in low-income neighborhoods where there is less vegetation and less species diversity, they may be eating more anthropogenic food subsidies — that is, people food. The alternative, though, could be that in these wealthier neighborhoods, even though the resources exist for animals to eat more natural foods, they still may be eating more food subsidies and that may be influencing their behavior.

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part of a growing roster of scientists exploring how structural racism, segregation and poverty play a role in shaping the behavior of urban wildlife. Though this aspect of urban ecology is still in its infancy, Schell is taking an interdisciplinary approach to better understand the future of ecosystems in cities — all while encouraging more scientists of color to join the field.

“WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE PROFOUND IMPACTS THAT RACIAL INEQUALITY, SYSTEMIC RACISM AND SOCIAL INJUSTICE HAVE ON SHAPING OUR NATURAL LANDSCAPE.”

QUINN RUSSELL BROWN

Q

So how does an animal’s diet impact its behavior?

Our leading hypothesis is that food influences many physiological mechanisms that are connected directly to behavior. Think about the old adage that you are what you eat. Imagine if you wake up in the morning and you eat eggs and toast for breakfast versus if you eat a bowl of Lucky Charms. You know you’re going to be hungry 30 minutes after you eat that bowl of Lucky Charms, but with the eggs and toast, you may be good until at least noon. It’s the same thing for any urban animal. If they’re eating more processed, low-protein, low-quality foods that are from people, then they may be more likely to get hungrier faster, which means they may be more likely to perform riskier behaviors, like approach areas with more humans.

Q

You’ve done studies that found coyotes become bolder around humans over time. Can you talk about that research?

Our biggest study, published in 2018, was about coyote puppies and how their parents’ experience with people over time translates into changes in the puppies’ behavior. We studied captive coyotes at the facility headed by the National Wildlife Research Center, and found these drastic behavioral differences between a coyote pair’s first and second litter of puppies. Puppies that were in that first set of litters tended to be less bold; they were less likely to eat food in front of a human observer. By the second litter, puppies at that same age just didn’t care. By the time they were 15 weeks old, they were starting to eat food while the observer was walking out of the pen. MARCH/APR I L 2 02 1 . D IS C OV ER

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Q

So you found subsequent generations of puppies become bolder as their parents become more accustomed to humans?

Right. You can imagine, if a puppy is using its experiences to navigate its environment and there’s no disadvantage to getting slightly closer to a person in order to gain the reward of more food, then those developmental experiences will persist into adulthood. One of our upcoming studies looks at those coyote litters a year later and sees whether or not those behaviors hold over time. The short answer is yes, they do.

Q

Beyond diet, what are some other examples of how different neighborhoods can impact wildlife?

There are different ways. For one, redlining has affected transportation infrastructure, which influences where the density of cars, and therefore wildlife-vehicle collisions, are. This begs questions like, if you increase transportation infrastructure — public transportation in particular — for disenfranchised or marginalized communities, do you

see decreases in collisions? What about reductions in air pollutants? The number of questions we can ask are endless, but honestly, people haven’t been thinking about them before because the folks who have been asking questions, the majority of the time, have been older white men. They’re not living in the parts of the city that are being the most impacted by these landscape-level effects.

Q

How can ecologists set out to answer those questions?

One of the biggest recommendations we make is reconsidering the way we conceptualize urban conservation. Same goes for just conservation generally. We need to understand the profound impacts that racial inequality, systemic racism and social injustice have on shaping our natural landscape. There are several studies that show the influence of economic inequality on biodiversity loss. When thinking about the ways in which we do our research, how we think about conservation, or connections between natural world and the social world, they’re

REDLINING AND ECOSYSTEMS In the 1930s, the United States Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) established a system to give lenders a way to rank a neighborhood’s risk for investment. Those neighborhoods designated as “minimal risk” were colored green on maps and graded A, while lowest-grade D neighborhoods were shaded red and deemed “hazardous.” The racial and

ethnic identity of the people within those neighborhoods was a major factor in those risk calculations. An area with Black, Latino or ethnic minority residents would be shaded red, in effect denying those places access to business and home loans for decades. This practice, later dubbed redlining, was a key drivers of segregation and concentrated poverty in cities.

Where there is wealth, there are other resources, particularly more green space from lawns and parks, and wealthy neighborhoods are less likely to bear the burden of pollution. All this affects not only the humans of a city but the wildlife as well. Understanding that impact is a growing research area of urban ecology. — L.S.

Map source: Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, accessed November 30, 2020, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/.

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Christopher Schell checks a camera trap near Tacoma, Washington. The data he downloads will reveal activity patterns of local animals.

not silos. And that’s something that needs to fundamentally change before we don’t have the ability to change it.

moving. Luckily, the cop was like, “I’m really curious, what are you guys doing?”

Q

Q

As a Black scientist, do you experience racism in the field?

Normally, I’ll go out with other people, either with my students or staff. Having folks come with me is fantastic, but also provides some backup — to know that I have somebody watching me while I’m out in the field because of the fact that we could feasibly have run-ins with police. That’s happened before. Before I came out to University of Washington Tacoma, I was doing my post-doc at Colorado State University with Lisa Angeloni and Stewart Breck. One time when I was out in the field with Stewart, we were trapping and collaring a coyote pretty late at night. We were getting his vitals while he was anesthetized, putting the collar on, collecting hair samples for hormonal analysis. As we’re processing the animal, a car is slowly rolling up on us and then turns on their incredibly bright lights. We eventually find out, this is a cop and he’s curious about what is going on. But we had just anesthetized the animal — it can wake up if it senses any sudden movements or sounds. So we have an animal on the table, and we’re thinking, Please, just ask us the question, turn off the lights and keep it

Is it hard to recruit Black scientists to ecology and biology?

It may be better than it used to be, but we have so far to go. There’s more interest because there’s more representation — there’s more people that look like me in the field — but even with more candidates, there still may be barriers that are systemic. We can pique interest, but if we don’t work on the systemic barriers that constrain certain folks from participating in the field, then the change is going to remain very slow. I grew up in Los Angeles and I grew up around Black communities, and being familiar with and comfortable in these communities is something that I think is a strength for Black biologists. It’s a great way for us to also increase our representation in our field, which I revel in. Working more in that concrete jungle is a form of ownership of a field that Black scientists have been contributing to, but sometimes are not seen in the pages of our textbooks. It’s us being able to very legitimately take back that narrative of conservation and ecology by understanding the city in ways that say, when urban ecology first started, the majority white scientists weren’t necessarily thinking about. D Leah Shaffer is a freelance science journalist based in St. Louis. MARCH/APR I L 2 02 1 . D IS C OVER

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SEEKING LOST LIGHT The earliest stars were different than the ones we see in the sky today. That’s what makes them so hard to find. BY EMMA CHAPMAN ILLUSTRATIONS BY TERRI FIELD

I

never wanted to be an astrophysicist. While a lot of my colleagues were looking through amateur telescopes, I was dreaming of decoding hieroglyphics and brushing off hidden artifacts in newly discovered Ancient Egyptian tombs. As is the case with most young Egyptophiles, for me there was one story that captured the excitement of Ancient Egyptian discoveries more than any other: the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. In November 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter held up a candle and peered through a small drill hole in the tomb door. His patron, Lord Carnarvon, asked him if he could see anything, to which Carter, struck dumb with amazement, could only reply, “Yes, wonderful things, wonderful things!” He recounted later that, in the dim candlelight, “details of the room emerged slowly from the mist ... strange animals, statues and gold — everywhere, the glint of gold.” The unveiling of Tutankhamun’s final resting place was exceptional because of how rare an occurrence it was. Most times when a tomb was “discovered,” grave robbers had found it first, sometimes thousands of years before. Ancient Egyptians realized pretty quickly that if you mark the spot where you buried the treasure with a gigantic pyramid, the treasure would not remain buried for long. They began to secrete their kings, queens and the accompanying treasure underground, but even that wasn’t enough to keep their MARCH/APR I L 2 0 2 1 . D IS C OVER

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treasures safe, making Tutankhamun a rare exception. It might seem strange, but the search for ancient tombs is comparable to our search for the first stars. The universe has changed so much since those first stars were laid to rest. The pristine environments in which they formed were raided, polluted by interloping young stars and their messy supernovae, leaving little scope for undiscovered stellar tombs. Population III stars, as these first stars are known, were ancient beasts of mammoth proportion, up to several hundred times the mass of our sun. They lived fast, with lifetimes of only a few million years compared to the

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10-billion-year lifetimes of less massive stars such as our sun. The same diversity of lifetimes in anthropology would be equivalent to finding an early humanoid species that aged and died only three days after birth. And yet, in such short lifetimes, those stars are the ones most responsible for changing the universe. As they roared to life, they illuminated the universe, irradiating it and seeding it with metals that could then form stars, planets and us. To date, astronomers still haven’t located a Population III star. So, where are they? The limitations of our tools, as well as pollution in the galaxy, has made the search for these ancient artifacts difficult. But some promising finds have

been made in recent years — pointing us to the descendants of Population III stars, and one day, hopefully, to the origins themselves.

METAL IN THE SKY The search shouldn’t be so hard. After all, the glint of starlight is hard to miss and we certainly aren’t short of places to search in the Milky Way. The prevalence of stars presents a problem, though, and searching for a Population III star among billions in the Milky Way is like searching for genuine Ancient Egyptian artifacts at a jumble sale in Texas. You might get lucky — but you’ll probably end up walking away dejected, wearing a battered, second-hand cowboy hat.

IT MIGHT SEEM STRANGE, BUT THE SEARCH FOR ANCIENT TOMBS IS COMPARABLE TO OUR SEARCH FOR THE FIRST STARS. THE UNIVERSE HAS CHANGED SO MUCH SINCE THOSE FIRST STARS WERE LAID TO REST.

To the human eye, a star born 13 billion years ago looks much the same as a star of similar mass born 4 billion years ago. But for astrophysicists, it’s important to determine a star’s metal content, since the first stars were free of metal. We assess the metal content by measuring what fraction of the star comprises a particular metal based on the strength of the metal absorption lines in the spectrum and comparing that fraction to the same quantity in the sun. An iron-poor star is composed of a lower fraction of iron than the sun, even if the star is very large and has a larger amount of iron in terms of mass or atoms. There are lots of metals to choose from, but iron produces strong

absorption lines, which are most easily measured by optical telescopes, and it turns out that iron is a good indicator of overall metallicity, too. Generally, if a star comprises a smaller fraction, or abundance, of iron than the sun, then we call it metal-poor, and anything with a larger fraction of iron is called metal-rich. The stars we see around us are metalrich because they formed from gas already seeded with metals by previous supernovae. Stars forming today typically have an overall metal content of about 2 percent by mass; only 2 percent, yet we call them metal-rich! It’s worth remembering that hydrogen will always be the main dish in a star, by far. The MARCH/APR I L 2 0 2 1 . D IS C OV ER

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difference between a Population III star and a star today is merely garnish, yet it makes all the difference. As we search for older and older generations of stars, the already low metal content decreases until we are dealing with extremely low metal fractions that require accompanying superlative labels. In fact, stellar archaeologists rarely get out of bed for any star unless it has less than 1/10,000th the iron fraction of the sun: ultra-metal-poor stars.

A HINT OF IRON As of mid-2020, only a handful of stars have been observed with an iron abundance below 1/10,000th. Technical limitations with a telescope or interference from other stars introduce convincing forgeries into our spectral lines, and the analysis carried out by stellar archaeologists to understand and remove this contamination is vital work. The current record holder for the most iron-poor star where an iron measurement has been made is SMSS J1605-1443. Discovered in 2018, this mega metal-poor halo star has less than 1/1,000,000th the solar iron fraction. This is exceedingly low, so is this our Population III star? Unfortunately, no, the levels of other heavy metals present in the spectrum are too high for this star to have created them all by itself — it has to have had help from a previous supernova seeding the cloud it is made from with a starter kit of those metals. It’s the equivalent of faking an Egyptian mummy almost perfectly, but leaving a smartwatch on its wrist. The levels of iron detected in SMSS J1605-1443 were low, but they were definitely there. However, there is one star where no iron has been detected at all and only an upper limit could be placed: SM0313-6708, observed in 2012. High-resolution spectroscopy of SM0313-6708 in 2013 revealed ... nothing much at all. Instead of a forest of absorption lines, this star revealed almost no activity and the presence of only four metals: lithium, carbon, magnesium and calcium. Everywhere we should have seen a dip relating to the presence of iron, there was just a fat line, indicating an absence of iron. With our technology, we cannot be absolutely

Copyright © Emma Chapman, 2/23/2021. This is an extract from First Light: Switching On Stars At the Dawn of Time, published by Bloomsbury Sigma on 2/23/2021 at $28.00.

certain that there isn’t a tiny dip hiding among the general noise of the signal. But we are sure that we are looking at a star at least 1/10,000,000th more iron-poor than the sun — and it could be far lower. This sounds pretty promising. We found a star that appears to have a total absence of iron, so surely this is our Population III star? Well, unfortunately, it’s another no. Only four metal elements may have been detected, but still the abundances found were large enough that they couldn’t have been produced purely by nuclear fusion within a first star. However, it’s agonizingly close. The metal levels detected in SM0313-6708 are so low that models show that it could have formed from a cloud enriched by just a single supernova. So, what we are looking at here is not a Population III star, but could well be a first descendent. Yet not all hope is lost.

A NEW HOPE? There is real hope that we will one day dig up a surviving Population III star. While the average Population III star is thought to have been tens to hundreds of times the mass of the sun, simulations show that a tail of low-mass stars was produced at the same time. The more massive a star, the shorter its life, so only stars 80 percent of the mass of the

sun or less would still be around today. Spotting them isn’t easy, but we think that the halo of the galaxy is a good place to look for them, because there is less contamination there by younger stars, and the older Population III stars will probably have meandered out of the disk and into the halo by now. The progress in stellar archaeology has been significant: Scientists have dug down to metallicities of 1/1,000,000th of the sun’s iron abundance, getting to the point where they are not detecting iron at all. As we develop more efficient technology to pick out the most promising candidate stars among the billions of options, the hope is that we will increase our sample size of metal-poor stars and draw more robust conclusions about the diversity of supernovae events that created them. But no matter how hard we search for some artifacts, we just cannot hope to find much more. Thousands of years of wear and tear destroy most fabrics, food and wooden tools. If a population of low-mass stars exists today, it is likely to be polluted, hidden from view, and there is an open question about whether we can ever circumvent that further than we already have. We may not have detected that very first star, the metal-free star, but we have detected what we think is the first descendent, the star that bridged the populations of metal-free and metalpoor stars. This is not a failure. While we would all love to meet Khufu and ask him how the Great Pyramid was built and where the treasures are buried, I’m sure we’d all settle for a chat with Cleopatra — though, saying that, one of my favorite facts about Ancient Egypt is that we are closer in time to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the pyramids. The future of stellar archaeology is far from over. It has just found its feet, and with the discovery of SM0313-6708, as we hold our candle up to the skies, we have seen the smallest glint of gold — or should I say iron? D Emma Chapman is an award-winning Royal Society Research Fellow in astrophysics, based at Imperial College London. She searches for the signals from the first stars using the largest radio telescopes in the world. MARCH/APR I L 2 02 1 . D IS C OVER

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BY ZACH ZORICH

of an increasingly unstable walrus ivory market. So what caused that collapse?

The Walrus Economy NORSE HUNTERS FORGED A LUCRATIVE IVORY MARKET IN HARSH CLIMATES. WHY DIDN’T THEIR SUCCESS LAST?

I

f you were a wealthy and pious noble person living in Europe 1,000 years ago, there would have been no better way to show off your fortune and your devotion to the Catholic Church than to commission the carving of some piece of holy paraphernalia out of walrus tusk ivory. The head of a bishop’s staff, a reliquary, and small sculptures depicting religious figures are among the hundreds of walrus ivory artifacts that have been found at medieval sites across Europe. Their discovery provides evidence of a trade network that once extended from the northern edges of North America to the Mediterranean. The trade was so lucrative that it became the economic mainstay of the Norse colonies in Greenland, which were first established in A.D. 985 and abandoned around 1450. Scholars have theorized that the Norse moved to Greenland specifically to hunt Atlantic walruses, and, until recently, had assumed that the settlers left centuries later because the climate was growing colder. But opinions are shifting: Studies published over the past five years have built a case that the colonies were abandoned not just due to climate change, but also because the bottom fell out

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Left: Perhaps the most famous example of medieval carved walrus ivory are the Lewis Chessmen. Right: The last written record of the Norse Greenlanders references a wedding in 1408 in Hvalsey Church.

The walrusivory trade was so lucrative that it became the economic mainstay of the Norse colonies in Greenland.

In 2014, a team of European scientists began investigating how important ivory from Greenland was to the medieval economy by analyzing walrus bone fragments dating to the medieval period, found at sites across Europe. “I really didn’t know where it would take us,” says James H. Barrett, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study, which was published in late 2019 in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews. Greenland wasn’t the only possible source for the walrus; he points out that it could have come from the north coast of Scandinavia or Iceland. Barrett’s team examined bones from 67 walrus snouts that had been excavated from medieval ivory workshops. Ivory hunters used axes to remove the walrus snout and both tusks together, shipping it as a single “package”; the

PHOTOS FROM LEFT: TRISTAN FEWINGS/GETTY IMAGES; DAVID DENNIS/SHUTTERSTOCK. MAP: JAY SMITH

TRACKING THE HUNTERS

Walrus snouts and tusks were shipped together as a single “package.” Excavations of medieval workshops uncovered the discarded, tuskless remains (left), which then could be used for isotope and DNA analysis.

snout was then discarded after the tusks were removed, leaving the bones behind for archaeologists to uncover. The researchers analyzed the ratio of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and hydrogen isotopes in 24 of these leftover bones. Throughout a walrus’ lifetime, their bones absorb isotopes from their environments, creating a chemical signature that reveals where they lived. The team also used ancient DNA from 25 of the bones to refine the results of their isotope analysis. Their tests showed that all the fragments — except those of one lone walrus that may have lived in Barents Sea north of Scandinavia — came from Greenland. Before 1150, the walrus bones came from places close to the main colonies, the Western and Eastern settlements. (See the map on page 58.) But the researchers’ findings show that, in the 1200s, the Norse began traveling farther and farther away from their homes to hunt. Barrett thinks the wealth

“The chances of it being viable as a long-term economic strategy is pretty slim.”

that walrus ivory brought to the Greenlanders went from being an economic blessing to a curse: By the end, to keep up their supply, hunters had to travel farther north than any European ever had before, ending up in northwestern Greenland and what is now Canada’s Ellesmere Island. “This really cranks up the amount of danger they are facing,” says Tom McGovern, an archaeologist from Hunter College in New York who was not part of Barrett’s research team, but has worked at sites across the North Atlantic since the 1970s. He points out that just north of what had been the major walrus-hunting ground at Disko Bay, on the west coast of Greenland, is a large peninsula; traveling the area would have exposed Norse sailors to harsh weather. Then they would have faced dangerous sailing or rowing through Melville Bay — records from 19th-century whaling ships reveal that the sea ice there was notoriously hazardous. The risk to the small boats the Norse were using would have been even worse. North of Melville Bay, the environment changes completely. The sea currents between northwest Greenland and Ellesmere Island keep the ocean ice-free, creating a kind of Arctic oasis known as the North Water Polynya. This patch of open ocean attracts a variety of birds and sea mammals — seals, whales, and, of course, walrus. “No one thought that the Norse were going that far north,” says McGovern. “I would have said probably on a stack of Bibles that it was very unlikely that the Norse were getting through Melville Bay, at least not on a regular basis. And now it seems like they were.” Barrett questions whether going to the North Water Polynya would have been sustainable. “The chances of it being viable as a long-term economic strategy is pretty slim,” he says. But it may have seemed like the only option to keep the ivory trade going.

A DYING TRADE By the middle of the 1200s, elephant ivory became increasingly prevalent in northwestern Europe. As

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DR JAMES H. BARRETT; COURTESY MUSÉES DU MANS; RICHARDJOHNSON/SHUTTERSTOCK

HISTORY LESSONS

FROM LEFT: MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE; PURCHASE, STARK AND MICHAEL WARD GIFT, JOSEPH PULITZER BEQUEST, AND PFEIFFER AND DODGE FUNDS, 1996

the kingdom of Aragon expanded across the Mediterranean Sea, conquering the Balearic Islands in 1231, ivory merchants regained access to the strait of Gibraltar. This made shipping goods between the Mediterranean and northern Europe much easier, says the University of Pennsylvania’s Sarah Guérin, an expert in the history of the elephant ivory trade. The larger elephant tusks coming from sub-Saharan Africa were more valuable than walrus tusks. That changed how ivory was being used, Guérin explains. “The price is coming down, so the material is not exclusively used for the most sacred purposes anymore,” she says, noting that secular luxury items such as writing tablets and mirror backs started to be made of ivory in the 13th and 14th centuries. Simultaneously, enameled decorations were becoming a fashionable replacement for ivories, driving the material’s prices down further. A church document from Norway dated 1282 even requests that ivory be converted to gold or silver coin to pay tithes, because it was no longer easy to get a good price for walrus tusk. Rather than abandon the trade altogether, the Norse Greenlanders seem to have worked harder than ever to get even more walrus ivory to sustain their economy, Barrett’s study shows. “It looked like the intensity of hunting was increasing at exactly that time when, according to traditional wisdom, it should have stopped or hugely decreased,” he says. The walrus bones that his team examined from this era were coming from smaller walruses, often females. While additional ivory from smaller and female walruses may have buoyed the trade in the short-term, the practice would have been far from sustainable in the long-term. The analysis suggests that the animals were being overhunted. The classic example of such a “resource curse” is the whaling trade. In the 18th century, McGovern says, whalers were hunting blue whales in the Atlantic Ocean where they were close to the cities that were the biggest markets for whale oil. But by the end of the 19th century, most of the large whales were gone. Whalers would instead voyage around the world, killing animals as small as porpoises and walruses for

their blubber. The falling price of ivory may have inflicted a similar resource curse on Greenland’s settlements; it’s a problem shared by many modern-day fisheries and other places that are dependent on natural resources for their economic survival, such as gold-, uranium- or coal-mining towns. Walrus-ivory carvings spanned the sacred and the secular: The ecclesiastical plaque at left features the figures of Christ, Mary and Peter, while the game piece at right is from a medieval precursor to backgammon.

“There was a time when these tusks were as prized as gold.”

THE END OF AN ERA With the most important resource they depended on for their survival being overexploited, and the reward for their increasing risks plummeting, the Norse Greenland colonies may not have been able to support themselves. The colonists would have had to find a new way to make a living. No written records detail the end of the colonies. In 1721, when missionary Hans Egede established the first European settlement in Greenland since the end of the Norse colonies, he found the stone walls of abandoned buildings and a landscape populated by the Inuit people. It remains a mystery whether the Norse colonists sailed back to Europe or died off in the place where they had lived for nearly 500 years. In either case, it brought an end to an economic system that had previously thrived through harsh conditions. Despite that end, the impact that the Norse ivory hunters had on the medieval world impresses Mikkel Sørensen, an archaeologist at the University of Copenhagen. Walrus ivory was the backbone of the continental tithe economy, he says. “There was a time when these tusks were as prized as gold and being paid as tribute to the pope and Vatican.” D Zach Zorich is a Colorado-based freelance journalist and a contributing editor at Archaeology magazine. MARCH/APR I L 2 02 1 . D IS C OVER

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PLANET EARTH BY JAKE BUEHLER

The Land of the Living Snowflakes ONE OF AMERICA’S RAREST BIRDS LIVES ON ALASKA’S LONELIEST ISLAND. SCIENTISTS ARE FINALLY EXPLORING THEIR PRIVATE KINGDOM.

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t. Matthew Island sits alone in the frigid emptiness of the Bering Sea, like a great, gnarled stone thrown far from Alaska’s western coast. On these shores, the rhythmic lapping of brisk waves and a medley of tinny, chimelike songs are the only sounds rising above the island’s foggy, treeless crown. The songs come from male McKay’s buntings — brilliantly white birds that drift to the earth in graceful, sweeping arcs. The birds’ bewitching mating ritual and nesting occurs only here, in one of the most inaccessible places on the planet. Precious little is known about their world. Researchers are aiming to change that.

SECLUDED SNOWFLAKES The ornithological community’s knowledge of McKay’s buntings — the only bird with a range completely contained within Alaska’s borders — dates back to the birds’ discovery in 1879. Naturalist and author John Burroughs, while on an 1899 expedition to Alaska, was smitten with the male buntings’ displays over the tundra of Hall Island, a small satellite off St. Matthew’s Glory of Russia Cape. “Drifting over this marvelous carpet,” he wrote in 1901, “or

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The bewitching birds nest only here, in one of the most inaccessible places on the planet.

dropping down upon it from the air above was the hyperborean snowbird, white as a snowflake and with a song of great sweetness and power.” Named after naturalist Charles McKay, who first collected specimens of the bird, these buntings are so evocative of winter flurries that, for years, they were known as “McKay’s snowflakes.” “I actually like the original name better,” says Steven Matsuoka, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center, who studies the birds today. Since their formal description in the 1880s, these rarely seen birds have eluded in-depth study. At 32 miles long, St. Matthew Island is uninhabited, its undulating sea of cold-stunted grass and moss only broken by the ghostly tines of reindeer antlers affixed to bleached skulls. The introduced reindeer briefly crowded the island decades ago but have since died out, leaving ceaseless wind as the most frequent guest on the island. “Alaska’s noted for being a remote wilderness area, and even among Alaskans, St. Matthew is held in regard because it’s the hardest place to get to,” says Matsuoka. “There’s no regular air

RACHEL RICHARDSON (3)

A female McKay’s bunting with berrystained feathers poses post-meal (left). She lives on the secluded island of St. Matthew (above) with all the members of her species.

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service; it’s 250 kilometers [over 150 miles] from any settlements.” The island wilderness is so isolated that two decades passed between expeditions to the McKay’s buntings’ breeding grounds. In the early 1980s, researchers visited St. Matthew to learn about the birds’ nesting habits. Then, in 2003, another group of scientists returned to estimate the birds’ numbers. Results from these surveys suggested that there may be more than 30,000 McKay’s buntings — 10 times more than previously estimated, according to Matsuoka. Despite this, McKay’s buntings could be the rarest bird in North America, says Rachel Richardson, another wildlife biologist with the Alaska Science Center. The birds are potentially vulnerable, too, given that they depend on such a small island area for breeding. Evaluating possible threats — like invasive species and climate change — on this island is paramount for safeguarding these living snowflakes.

BERING SEA BOUND In the summer of 2018, another team of researchers — Richardson among them — returned to the breeding grounds, spending five weeks on St. Matthew studying the birds’ nesting habits and potential conservation threats. “Getting out to the islands is really no small feat,” says Richardson. The team had to access the buntings’ haven from an already far-flung locale: St. Paul, part of the desolate, volcanic Pribilof Islands, which are

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Even in summer, the Bering Sea (above right) can bring cold wind and rain, so shelter is essential (above left).

What seemed harsh and empty for researchers turned out to be lavish for Bering Sea wildlife.

a three- to four-hour plane ride from Anchorage. From there, Richardson and her colleagues boarded the R/V Tiĝlax (pronounced TEKH-la), a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service research vessel. After 28 hours of non-stop voyaging over whipping, 12-foot seas, the wind-carved undulations of St. Matthew and Hall Islands came into view. “That’s a pretty incredible thing to witness,” Richardson says. “Volcanic islands just pop up on the horizon.” On St. Matthew, an uninhabited wildlife refuge, no structures break the rolling expanse of low grasses and sedges. The team made camp with a series of weather-resistant tents, outfitted with kerosene heaters for warmth and propane stoves for cooking. They sheltered on the subArctic tundra, enduring rain, thick fog and wind. What seemed harsh and empty for the researchers turned out to be lavish for Bering Sea wildlife. They found spotted seals sprawled out in the shadow of towering sea cliffs, cacophonous seabird colonies and prowling Arctic and red foxes. But no creature was more abundant than the mouselike singing voles, darting through rocky fields of talus — jumbles of rock fragments broken off the surrounding cliffs. The tiny rodents pierced the air with alarm calls so frequently that it “almost feels like you have tinnitus walking around the island,” says Matsuoka. Those rock fields of the island are also the buntings’ domain. There, above the uneven terrain, the researchers watched the males perform. “It’s quite lovely,” says Richardson. The males flit upwards, locking their wings out flat and floating back down, singing all the while. “And they’ll do that over and over and over again, and each time they land, they usually land in the same spot.” In the week before the team settled on the island, they worked from the research vessel, taking a skiff

FROM TOP: RACHEL RICHARDSON (2); TXANBELIN/SHUTTERSTOCK

PLANET EARTH

to different stretches of craggy coast, walking across the breadth of St. Matthew, spotting the buntings and recording their locations with GPS to build a map of their habitats.  Thankfully, the white birds’ stark contrast against the brown and green tundra made them easy to identify and count.

RACHEL RICHARDSON (2)

NO RUBBLE LIKE HOME Beyond the headcount, more data was waiting beneath the team’s boots — in tiny nests filling crevices between the massive boulders. McKay’s buntings make excellent use of their austere surroundings, turning a forbidding tract of boulders into a nursery. To take a peek at these well-hidden sanctuaries without damaging them, Richardson and her colleagues got creative. They used borescope cameras — tiny LED cameras situated on the tip of long, flexible hoses, often used in plumbing to see in tight, winding places. After watching a bunting dive into the talus at a specific location, the researchers would feed the borescope into the rubble labyrinth to light up and view the nests. The team counted eggs and tracked the development of hatchlings without moving a single rock or touching any birds. Weeks of peering into St. Matthew’s talus fields gave the researchers new data on nest survival rates and breeding timing, which they compared with previous surveys. Very few of the nests failed in 2018 compared to 2003 and the 1980s reports; predators only devoured a small fraction of the hatchlings. This suggests that the island’s red foxes — thought to have colonized the island about 20 years ago — haven’t been hurting the birds’ numbers. Richardson says that the foxes can certainly dig and move some boulders to access nests, but nests deeper in the crevices may have an advantage — something the team wants to investigate in the future. Curiously, the buntings seem to be nesting earlier and earlier in the spring. In the 1980s, the median date that the birds laid their first egg was June 27. In 2018, that had shifted weeks earlier, to June 5. Warming of the Bering Sea may be to blame. “Climate would be one of the things that you would suspect,” Matsuoka says. He adds that the nesting habitat has apparently changed too, with past records showing buntings nesting on the beach and in driftwood logs, which was not the

Above: Along with Arctic foxes and singing voles, red foxes are among the only land-dwelling mammals on the island. Below: Researchers use borescope cameras to spy on the birds’ hidden nests in rock crevices.

case during recent visits. This may be because much more upland habitat is available now thanks to earlier snowmelt.

DRIFTING AHEAD When the team briefly returned to the island in summer 2019 to finish surveys, they noticed some buntings were still nesting as late as August — a period normally considered post-breeding season for Alaskan songbirds. Matsuoka says these birds are either re-nesting after an earlier failure or having a second nest in the same season. The latter scenario would be strange. “That’s fairly common in temperate and tropical systems,” he says. “It’s quite unusual in northern areas.” Going forward, the team hopes to make the bunting surveys far more regular, to better capture the population’s trajectory, and to figure out what the birds do in winter — other than sporadically turn up along Alaska’s sparsely inhabited western coastline. If the buntings are declining, filling in details about their annual life cycle could prove crucial. Gathering newer information on the buntings’ status, says Richardson, tells researchers more than just how the birds are faring. “It’s important to kind of get a handle on what’s going on with [the buntings] and really understand what’s happening in the Bering Sea region as it’s being faced with all of these rapid [climate] changes,” she says. It would be appropriate, after all, for the herald of a sweltering sea to be a living snowflake. D Jake Buehler is a science writer and journalist based on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where he reports on the wild, weird and unsung branches of the tree of life. MARCH/APR I L 2 02 1 . D IS C OV ER

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#ScienceIRL BY WILSON CHAPMAN 

IN RARE SPOTS AROUND THE GLOBE, THE NIGHTTIME SEA SHIMMERS WITH LIGHT.

DISCOVER (ISSN 0274-7529, USPS# 555-190) is published eight times per year (January/ February, March/April, May, June, July/August, September/October, November and December). Vol. 42, no. 2. Published by Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Periodical postage paid at Waukesha, WI, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to DISCOVER, P.O. Box 8520, Big Sandy, TX 75755. Canada Publication Agreement # 40010760. Back issues available. All rights reserved. Nothing herein contained may be reproduced without written permission of Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 531871612. Printed in the U.S.A.

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ou’ve likely heard of sea creatures that glow underwater. What about the sea itself appearing to glow in the dark? This fantasy-like spectacle is commonly called bioluminescence. And you can observe the phenomenon in places around the world. Technically, the water itself isn’t glowing, says marine biologist Michael Latz. The sparkle effect comes from a type of tiny algae known as dinoflagellates. These single-celled organisms, often invisible by day, emit light when disturbed by motion — like crashing waves, the swipe of your hand or a paddle gliding through the water. Exceptionally high concentrations are on display nearly year-round in rare areas known as bioluminescent bays, or simply bio bays. Dinoflagellates tend to concentrate in these

D IS C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

shallower and semi-enclosed spots, preventing the organisms from getting flushed out into open water. Mangrove trees often flank the bodies of water, providing rich habitat for nutrients that sustain dinoflagellates. Latz says bio bays are vulnerable to outside disturbance. Mosquito Bay in Vieques, Puerto Rico, for example, went dark for seven months following Hurricane Maria. Latz is now studying what helped the dinoflagellates reemerge in that habitat: “They are sensitive ecosystems. They’re vulnerable

to the effects of our changing climate.” Travelers can find several wellknown bio bays glowing nearly year-round in the Caribbean: Luminous Lagoon in Jamaica, Bio Bay in the Cayman Islands, Salt River Bay in St. Croix, and three in Puerto Rico, including Mosquito Bay. Halong Bay in Vietnam is another notable spot, as well as Jervis Bay, known for spectacular but less-frequent bioluminescence. In some places, visitors can book nighttime ecotours by kayak and carve a trail of light through the sea.  D

SCIENCE IN REAL LIFE We want to see your awe-inspiring photos. Tag #ScienceIRL and @Discover.Magazine on Instagram to share encounters with science in your cities, nature, the arts and beyond.

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To truly see bioluminescence, you must be there. But skilled photographers with the right gear can offer a glimpse: Alfia Rapicano used a six-second shutter speed to capture this moment at Jervis Bay in Australia.

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