Today is the 20th anniversary of the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl. National Geographic had a nice overview article in their April issue. Human impacts have been documented, but what about the impact on wildlife? Some reports have portrayed the huge exclusion zone as something of a park, teeming with wildlife.  In fact, few if any studies have been done evaluating the effects of the disaster on population densities of common plants or animals [1].

Some of the most extensive studies have been done on Barn Swallows (Hirundo rustica).  Some findings include:

• At Chernobyl, Barn Swallows have a tenfold increase in albinisim, usually in the plumage of the head. It is persisting, and the similarity in the albinism of parents and their chicks indicates it is a germline mutation [1,2].
• Albinism is associated with smaller body size.
• There has been a fivefold increase in the asymmetry of the long tail feathers.

These mutations may seem insignificant, but that’s not the case. The albinism is due to a reduction in carotenoid pigments, which are important in the coloration of feathers.  Carotenoids are not only feather pigments, they are antioxidants that enhance the immune system.  Albinistic/small bodied Barn Swallows had decreased survivorship, likely due to a reduction in the free radical scavenging function of the carotenoids. Survivorship has decreased 24% for males and 57% for females.

Tail length and symmetry are also important to Barn Swallows. Long-tailed males with symmetrical tails are most appealing to females.  The tail feathers serve as status signals, indicating prime health, and these males are most successful in mating. Barn Swallows may have an increased need for antioxidants at Chernobyl, leaving little left for development of plumage signals.

Other findings:

• There is a high level of sperm mutation in Chernobyl Barn Swallows. [3]
• There are many non-breeding birds in the population, 23% versus nearly zero at control sites. Radiation has somehow caused the birds to lose their motivation to breed. [4]
• For birds that do breed, reproductive success is lower, with reduced clutch size and hatching success. [4]

Barn Swallows breeding at Chernobyl are migratory, wintering in Africa. While there is site fidelity in Barn Swallows and other species, the authors of the Barn Swallow studies note,

“Mutations with slightly negative fitness effects could easily be exported out of the contaminated areas via organism migration, with consequences for populations that have not been directly exposed to radiation from the disaster.”

What about other birds?  This web site discusses increased radioactivity in European Robins (Erithacus rubecula) collected in The Netherlands, presumably having migrated through the fallout area, after the accident. A paper that examined reproductive success of a variety of birds on the west coast of the U.S. discussed a mysterious, widespread breeding failure in over 40 species of birds in northern California in 1986 that coincided with the passage of the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl.  While there was no direct evidence that the radioactivity was the cause of the failure, the circumstantial evidence was both interesting and compelling [5].

As the world is faced with a real and pressing need for alternative energy, the long-lasting impacts of the Chernobyl accident give us pause when considering nuclear power. I believe that in the last twenty years, we’ve developed better and safer technology for nuclear power plants. It may well be that the risk of an accident is far less than the sure risks of continuing to use fossil fuels. A big sticking point for me is our continued inability to figure out what to do with spent nuclear fuel.  Our energy gluttony has led us down many sad roads.  I can only hope we don’t travel down this one ever again.

[1] Møller A. P. and T. A. Mousseau.  2006.  Biological consequences of Chernobyl: 20 years on.  Trends in Ecology and Evolution 21: 200-207.

[2] Møller A. P. and T. A. Mousseau. 2001. Albinism and phenotype of barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) from Chernobyl. Evolution 55:2097-2104.

[3] Møller A. P., P. Surai, and T. A. Mousseau. 2005. Antioxidants, radiation, and mutation as revealed by sperm abnormality in barn swallows from Chernobyl. Proc. of Royal Society B 272:247-252.

[4] Møller, A. P., T. A. Mousseau, G. Milinevsky, A. Peklo, E. Pysanets and T. Szép. 2005. Condition, reproduction and survival of barn swallows from Chernobyl. Journal of Animal Ecology 74: 1102-1111.

[5] DeSante, D.F. and G. R. Guepel.  1987. Landbird productivity in central coastal California: the relationship to annual rainfall, and a reproductive failure in 1986.  Condor 89:636-653.

New paper: Møller, A. P., T. A. Mousseau, F. de Lope, and N. Saino. 2007.  Elevated frequency of abnormalities in barn swallows from Chernobyl. Biology Letters 3:414-417. (abstract)

I’ve been convinced of the reality and seriousness of global warming for a long time.  But in spite of my interest and my personal commitment to a climate-preserving lifestyle, even I have reached the saturation point when it comes to new research, articles, and documentaries on this topic.  So it was with more of a sense of duty than a sense of eager anticipation that I picked up the book Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change.

This is the one book everybody needs to read about global warming. Author Elizabeth Kolbert has taken an enormous, complex subject and boiled it down to the essential facts, choosing some of the most dramatic findings to illustrate the catastrophe. Her approach of going in the field with climate scientists was more successful than I might have guess it would be.  A lot of scientists (most?) tend to give overly complicated or obtuse explanations, but Kolbert managed to find the ones that were able to sum up their findings in blunt, pithy quotable comments and analogies.  I won’t give any spoilers here — read the book.

As a writer who tends to get bogged down in details when trying to explain knotty processes, I have huge admiration for Kolbert’s concise, straightforward, and unambiguous treatment of climate change. Field Notes from a Catastrophe is convincing, sobering, and extremely readable, even for the global warming-weary.  Get a copy.  When you’re done, send it to your favorite climate change skeptic.  If all your friends are already convinced, send it to the White House. They really need it.

Dark-eyed Juncos (Junco hyemalis), are common little sparrows throughout much of North America.  This species generally breeds at high latitudes (e.g., across Canada), or further south at higher altitudes (usually over 1500 feet/460 m).  There it nests in coniferous forests, typically on the ground (as in the photo).

Last week I read an interesting paper from Trends in Ecology and Evolution, on urban ecological processes [1].  One example in the paper was the rapid adaptation of juncos to an urban environment, in San Diego, CA. Normally juncos are winter visitors to coastal parts of San Diego County, but retreat into coniferous or live oak woodlands in the mountains during the nesting season.  In the early 1980s, juncos began sticking around the University of California-San Diego campus (actually in La Jolla, altitude 13 feet/4 m).  There is now an established resident breeding population of about 70 pairs of juncos in a one square mile (2.5 sq km) area centered on campus, about 43 miles (70 km) from the nearest nesting population.

Behavioral changes
Ground nesting birds by necessity need to be secretive and conceal their nests.  On the 19,000-student UCSD campus, juncos also construct nests on the ivy growing on campus buildings, in light fixtures, in enclosed courtyards, in flower pots, on trellises, and, in the remarkable photo in the article, at least once in a bicycle helmet sitting on the back of a bike in a garage!

The behavior of the birds has changed in other ways. In the mountains, snow may postpone the breeding season until as late as June. Thus, the birds at the higher altitudes raise one or rarely two broods a year. Juncos on the UCSD campus have taken advantage of the mild coastal climate, and raise up to four broods a year [2]. These juncos are also less aggressive than their mountain counterparts.

Morphological changes
The UCSD juncos have shorter wings and shorter tails than the montane source population, and have about 22% less white in their outer tail feathers.  Migratory populations of songbirds tend to have longer wings, so the shortened wing length is likely an adaptation the sedentary nature of the UCSD junco population [3].

The white in the outer tail feathers of juncos serves several purposes.  One is that it is a status signal.  More white both signals sexual fitness in males, and social dominance in both sexes.  It is believed that the reduction in the white is a result of sexual selection, in that females of the UCSD population value a studly male less than they do a male that helps raise all those young. And signaling dominance may be not be very important to these less aggressive birds, contributing to the reduction in the amount of white in the tail [4,5].

Banding and genetic studies have examined immigration rates, survival rates, and other demographic features of this population. The juncos on the UCSD campus are not just a set of random wintering birds that stays each year to nest. The immigration rate is too low to maintain the population at the 140 or so birds at which it has stabilized. The UCSD population relies on the extra chicks produced by the longer breeding season.

DNA tests indicate that these physical traits — size and reduced white in the tail — are unlikely to be due to genetic drift or “founder effect,” where there is a loss of genetic diversity in a population founded by a few individuals.  Instead, these unique characteristics are adaptations to their new, urban environment, and they evolved in fewer than 20 years.

[1] Shocat, E., P. S. Warren, S. H. Faeth, N. E. McIntyre, and D. Hope. 2006. From patterns to emerging processes in mechanic urban ecology. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 21:186-191.

[2] Yeh, P.J. and T. D. Price. 2004. Adaptive pheontypic plasticity and the successful colonization of a novel environment. American Naturalist 164:531-542.

[3] Rasner, C. A., P. Yeh, L. S. Eggert, K. E. Hunt, D. S. Woodruff, and T. D. Price. 2004.  Genetic and morphological evolution following a founder event in the dark-eyed junco, Junco hyemalis thurberi. Molecular Ecology 13:671-681.

[4] Balph, M. H., D. F. Balph, and H. C. Romesburg. 1979. Social status signalling in winter flocking birds: an examination of a current hypothesis.  Auk 96:78-93.

[5] Yeh, P. J. 2004.  Rapid evolution of a sexually selected trait following population establishment in a novel habitat. Evolution 58:166-174.

Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s landmark book about the ecological devastation of chemicals and pesticides, alerted the public to the lurking dangers of the toxins around them. Nearly 45 years later, reporter Marla Cone’s Silent Snow renders a very similar picture, only this time the dangers are piling up in an area that is hardly next door to many of us: the Arctic. And while far from the world’s population centers, the frightening poisoning of the top of the world has implications for the entire global community.

Cone is a prizewinning writer for the Los Angeles Times. Her reporting is excellent, her facts well-documented and
explanations concise, but her article-based journalism background was clear. This book read like a deep investigative piece that was stretched into a book. For example, one chapter on the cultural importance of traditional foods to Arctic people would have done the trick.  Yet she came back to this point many times, without bringing anything new to the topic, and it became redundant and distracting. I found that despite her efforts to relay personal stories in Silent Snow, Cone was unsuccessful in bringing much warmth or real humanity to the book. The subject matter and implications of Silent Snow are nearly as vital as those in Silent Spring, but Cone lacks the artistry and grace in her writing that made Carson’s work much more readable and classic.

Even with these shortcomings, which many readers won’t find as annoying as I did, Silent Snow is a compelling book. Cone clearly explains the seeming paradox of one of the world’s most remote and pristine-appearing places being one of the most contaminated by modern and industrial chemicals. (For the curious, PCBs, for example, that become vaporized travel on air currents and end up near the North Pole. When air temperature cools, toxins condense and fall to the ground. In warmer climates, they re-vaporize as temperatures rise, but about two-thirds of the PCBs that arrive in the Arctic stay in Arctic, often only moving as far as to the edge of the ice floes.)

She spends time going over the ethical health care dilemma faced by Canadian scientists. Do they warn native Arctic peoples to stop eating their traditional foods, which are responsible for toxin loads in some people that qualify their bodies as hazardous waste? Or do the health benefits of traditional foods, which have kept these populations virtually free of heart disease, for example, outweigh the risk from toxins?  This is complicated by the cultural importance of native foods, and the lack of affordable alternatives in a land where farming is impossible.

This neatly illustrates that the impacts of contamination are not limited to humans, because humans are at the end of the line of consumers in Arctic ecosystems. Studying wildlife in the Arctic is challenging to say the least, but Cone visits with scientists who have been working with seals, whales, and polar bears and trying to document the effects of chemical contamination on these and other creatures. One does not finish Silent Snow feeling any optimism for the fate of polar bears; if high toxin loads compromising their immune systems and altering their hormones don’t doom them, global warming will.

Finally, Cone describes various efforts (or lack thereof) of industrial nations to curb chemical contamination, and what the future might hold. Sympathetic while still being objective, accurate and authentic, Cone has written an important book that it a must-read. After reading it, the Arctic doesn’t seem so far away, but it’s enormous problems feel dangerously close — perhaps, after all, right next door.

This week I’ve been trying to finish up some especially obnoxious paperwork on a project before my field season begins in earnest.  Since I’m annoyed, I thought I’d take a little break and write about an annoying creature: the earwig.

I find earwigs just repugnant.  I don’t know why. While not attractive, they are less disgusting-looking than any number of other invertebrates that I don’t find objectionable.  Despite the ominous curving cerci (the forceps-like abdominal appendage), they are harmless.  The story that they get in your ears and bore into your head is an old wives’ tale.

There are several species of earwig in Michigan, but the most common is the European earwig, Forficula auricularia, a non-native species (I hesitate to name the other another exotic earwig found here, for fear of the Google traffic it will bring me, but, what the hell — it’s Labia minor).  European earwigs were introduced into North America around 1912, and they are now pretty ubiquitous in gardens and just about any other humid, mulchy place across the eastern U.S.  Their nastiest habit in my garden is rose petal munching.  All in all, pretty benign.

An old Michigan earwig fact sheet noted: “European earwigs can be kept in captivity with a minimum of care. Although few people are fond of earwigs, they can be interesting to watch and easy to care for.”  In the interest of full disclosure, the author of this page is a good friend of mine, and as such is pretty offbeat.  Still, I didn’t think he was so strange as to recommend earwig husbandry.

Turns out that observing earwig family life, while not gripping, is at least a mildly intriguing. Females clean, rearrange, and defend their eggs.  For a short period, she will also bring food to the young nymphs, or regurgitate food for them.  These behaviors are fairly unusual in a non-social insect.

I’d be remiss writing about earwigs without mentioning the world’s largest species, at nearly 3.5 inches, the endangered (or extinct) Labidura herculeana. It is endemic to the U.K. island of St. Helena, where Napoleon Bonaparte spent his last years in exile. The last live St. Helena’s earwig was seen in 1967, but a piece of cerci was found in 1995, at which time St. Helena produced its second earwig postage stamp, shown here.  For you topical stamp collecting fans, there have been, somewhat remarkably, at least seven earwig stamps issued in the world, awaiting placement in your album.

Several further searches have failed to find any living L. herculeana on St. Helena. Like many islands, it has a high rate of endemism, including 49 endemic plants, 13 ferns, 400 invertebrates (check out the St. Helena spiky yellow wood louse), and 6 birds, only one of which survives today — the St. Helena Plover, a.k.a., Wirebird.  The unique flora and fauna have suffered from habitat destruction and introduced animals. In the case of the earwig, it is presumed that habitat loss, predation by rats, and competition from the introduced giant centipede Scolopendra morsitans contributed to its demise.  To add insult to injury, the struggling island endemics are now threatened by a new airport.  UPDATE: In late 2014, the St. Helena earwig was officially declared extinct.

My break time is over, and I’ve succeeded in not only distracting myself from my aggravating paperwork, but my venting has led me to a grudging appreciation of the order Dermaptera.  Although I still think they’re gross.

I know a lot of ornithologists, but I can’t think of any that look like celebrities.  Perhaps that makes Emmet (Bob) Blake unique.  He died in 1997, and was eulogized in an issue of the Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union.  It printed this photo:

I was so taken with the striking resemblance of Blake to Humphrey Bogart, that I put this picture in my lab next to the digital scale, with the caption, “Weigh it again, Sam.”

Heads up, people.  There’s a role in this for you.

We’ve all seen the 100 Things About Me meme.  I found the beginning of my list buried in my drafts folder. I am not satisfied with providing you with lame Things About Me such as the color of my eyes (bonus! brown) or my sign (bonus! Sagittarius).  Therefore, I only came up with 53 things about me.  I could leave it at that, but I thought, hey — maybe there are things my readers lay awake at night wondering about me.  Okay, that’s hard to imagine, but perhaps some of you had a fleeting curiosity about…something About Me.

So here are 53 things about me.  Your job is to read them, see which ones answered your burning questions About Me, and then post your own unanswered questions to me in the comments.  I’ll  compile my answers into another Things About Me post.  No essay questions, please.  Adult content permitted, but I reserve the right not to incriminate myself.

Ready?  Go…

1.  I have never been able to do a somersault.
2.  My middle toe is shorter than the toes on either side of it. (That makes it sound like I have only one foot.  You know what I mean.)
3.  I like to dunk potato chips in milk.
4.  Hockey is my favorite sport.
5.  I can be very antisocial.
6.  I love sushi.  Also lamb chops and Oreos.
7.  I once had a poem published in Rolling Stone.  (If I receive enough requests, I’ll reprint it here.  Fair warning: it was from my Richard Brautigan phase.)
8.  My first job was at a Waffle House.  Before I waited tables, I was very introverted.
9.  One of my few non-natural history hobbies is genealogy.  My mother is a direct descendant of one of the original French settlers of Canada, Mathurin Dube.
10. I have a really crappy sense of balance, and I can’t even stand on a curb and look through binoculars at the same time.
11. I’ve never wanted to have children.
12. I talk too fast and interrupt too much.
13. I am not superstitious.
14. I get frequent headaches.
15. I have never broken a bone or stayed overnight in a hospital.
16. I need a lot of sleep.
17. This is my second marriage.
18. I’ve spent time in therapy, and recommend it to most people.
19. I dislike more people than I like.
20. The first concert I went to was the band Boston.  The last was Sade.
21. I’ve had three nose operations to try to correct a deviated septum.  Only semi-successful.
22. I hate being cold.
23. I love lying in bed listening to the rain.
24. I worked for awhile in the banking industry.
25. I went to four colleges.
26. My parents were both 42 when I was born.
27. I love to see new places, but am anxiety-ridden about travel until I finally get on the plane.  Then I quit thinking about all the other things I should be doing besides jetting off somewhere.
28. I am extremely organized.  Okay, anal.
29. I have been a voracious reader ever since I was a young child.
30. I was raised Catholic, gave up on church as a teenager, studied world religions, and am now an atheist.
31. Most unusual pet: a pair of Flying Squirrels I rescued from a 5-gallon aquarium in a pet store.  I gave them an entire spare bedroom to themselves, and they slept in the curtain hems.
32. I’m really sarcastic.
33. I hate being late, or not knowing what time it is.
34. I make a lot of lists.
35. There is a constant running dialog in my head.
36. I won a regional young author’s award in grade school.
37. I love mysteries, especially British mysteries.
38. I am extremely introspective and self-analytical.
39. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 18.
40. I never go to movies.
41. I just got my first, very minuscule, cavity last year.
42. I hate to exercise.
43. I’ve owned three Camaros.  Now I don’t care about cars except for fuel efficiency and low emissions, and I drive a hybrid.
44. I have a large vocabulary, but I swear a lot.  Too much.
45. I hate the color orange.  My favorite colors are blue and green.
46. I don’t care for dogs.
47. I  won’t drink carbonated beverages.

48. I stink at math.
49. My first aspiration as a child was to be a marine biologist.
50. I can’t swim.
51. In my world, the toilet paper should roll from the top.
52. I minored in sociology.
53. I live in an historic neighborhood.

A nice article in this morning’s New York Times, “A Weed, a Fly, a Mouse, and a Chain of Unintended Consequences,” gives another lesson of one of the hazards of using biological control — unanticipated ecological chain reactions.

The most common thing to go wrong when introducing one non-native organism to combat another is host-switching; I wrote about one example, parasitic flies introduced to control gypsy moths, which ended up attacking giant silk moths. The Times article gives other instances.

However, the article focuses on the introduction of a gall fly in the western U.S. to control Spotted Knapweed (Centaurea biebersteinii), a European weed species that is highly invasive.  The fly (Urophora sp.) lays its eggs in the flower head and the larvae feed on the seeds.

The crystal ball failed to foresee that mice would find these larvae excellent winter food.  All those larvae were readily available to mice in the knapweed seed heads, which stick up through the snow.  Mice populations have soared, and these mice can carry hantavirus.

The article goes on to outline the debate over using biocontrol agents, but I expect this story doesn’t really end with the concern over hantavirus.  Mice have pretty profound impacts on energy flows in ecosystems as seed dispersers or consumers, predators and prey.  I don’t think we’ve heard the last about how this change in mouse population dynamics impacts the environment.

More reading:

• Ortega, Y. K., D. E. Pearson, and K. S. McKelvey. 2004. Effects of biological control agents and exotic plant invasion on deer mouse populations. Ecological Applications 14:241-253.
• Pearson, D.E., K.S. McKelvey, and L. F. Ruggiero. 2000. Non-target effects of an introduced biological control agent on deer mouse ecology. Oecologia 122: 121–128.

Photo: Michael Shephard, USDA Forest Service.

Recently, we have been being warned left, right, and center that avian influenza H5N1 was likely to enter the United States via migratory birds this year (or this spring, or next week, depending on the tenor of the article). I concur that H5N1 may end up here sooner rather than later, but the probability is that it will spread to the U.S. in the same way it has spread to other most other countries: via poultry or poultry products.

While there are some bird species that do migrate from Europe and Asia to North America, in order for H5N1 to spread across the continent — a situation considered imminent in some reports — it would require that birds manage to survive a long migration infected with H5N1, that they readily infect North American birds, that these birds survive all summer, migrate themselves, infect other birds…you get the idea.  A big leap of faith (or fear).

A particularly annoying article ran a map, part of which is shown below. Using broad outlines of major flyways, this piece colored in some overlaps, and concluded there was a big area in Arctic Canada where infected birds would pass on H5N1 to birds that would migrate through Michigan.

I think this is a gross misrepresentation of flyway maps.  It’s like looking at one of those maps of airline routes in the back of an in-flight magazine:

And deciding there will be mid-air collisions all over the place.  Yes, it could happen, but it would take a pretty extraordinary sequence of events for it to occur.

Get a more reasonable view of the role of migratory birds in the spread of bird flu…

• Update: Great article in British Columbia’s The Tyee: “Wild claims about bird flu.”
• International Tribune article, “Don’t blame the wild birds,” by Wildlife Conservation Society veterinary specialists.
• BBC editorial, “Reality takes wing over bird flu,” by a BirdLife International director.
• New York Times article, “From the chickens’ perspective, the sky really is falling,” on poultry and wild birds.
• National Wildlife Health Center FAQ section on wild birds and H5N1
• At The Birdchaser.