Attending a Dissection

Whenever I think I know a lot about a subject, something happens that makes me realize how little I actually know. I had a moment like last Tuesday when I went to the American Museum of Natural History to watch William Mauck III, the ornithology-laboratory supervisor at AMNH, dissect, clean and stuff a raven before it entered the collections at the museum. Mauck normally would prepare the bird alone in the lab, but this week he did the work in front of one of AMNH’s afterschool classes and a few guests like myself.

Raven pre-dissection. Photo credit: Sandra Lewocki

Anatomy is one of my favorite subjects, and I know a little about birds, so I expected what I would see during the dissection to be familiar. Mauck skinned the raven and showed us the bird’s now skinless abdomen, and I saw what I expected - large pectoral muscles and some fat stored in the clavicular region. After we all got a good look, Mauck proceeded to cut open the abdomen to get tissue samples and see what the stomach contents were.

First cuts into the raven. Photo credit: Sandra Lewocki

As he sliced open the body, all of us were shocked by what we found.

Raven being skinned. Photo credit: Sandra Lewocki

Six eggs were inside our raven! The eggs were in varying stages of development. The most developed egg had a thin shell around it while the other five did not. Since the bird had been in the freezer for so long, the eggs were hard and we got to see them clearly, which is rare. Even Mauck, who prepares birds all the time, was surprised. He said that normally you don’t see many eggs, and if you do, they tend to pop into a gooey mess right away.

The most developed egg and its shell. Photo credit: Sandra Lewocki

I knew birds laid eggs, of course, but I never thought about how that happened. Mauck explained to us that bird genitalia is completely different than that of mammals. Both male and female birds of most species reproduce, urinate, defecate, and, if female, lay eggs through the same opening called the cloaca.

During mating season, the cloaca swells, and male birds temporarily store sperm in their cloaca. While bird courtship is notoriously long and involved, actual intercourse is short, taking about a minute. During mating, the male bird balances on top of the female, who moves her tail out of the way, allowing the male to briefly touch his sperm-saturated cloaca to hers, just long enough for sperm transfer. (Aquatic bird anatomy and intercourse is slightly different.) The sperm enter the female’s sperm-storage tubules and will then fertilize eggs as ovulation occurs. Birds may mate several times during the season to increase chance of fertilization as only1-2% of sperm that enter the female’s cloaca make it to the sperm-storage tubules.

The raven and its eggs. Photo credit: Sandra Lewocki

Female birds only have one ovary and oviduct, usually the left one, with the exception of raptors which have two. No one knows why they have only one, but it means most birds can only lay one egg per day. Once the females have sperm to fertilize their eggs, eggs develop in an assembly line. First the newly-fertilized egg is released from a follicle of the ovary to the oviduct. In the oviduct, layers of yolk are formed to provide food for the young embryo. Then the egg goes to the isthmus where the shell membranes are formed. Once that’s done, the egg moves to the uterus where the hard calcified shell is made. Colors or patterns are also added in the uterus. Finally the egg travels out the cloaca and is laid.

Egg development in the body is extremely fast, taking about 24 hours per egg. Most of the embryotic development happens outside the mother’s body, after the egg is laid. Laying eggs rather than carrying their young inside the mother’s body works well for birds since it keeps the mother from becoming too weighed down to fly.

Diagram by blog author

The raven we dissected in the AMNH classroom had one large egg with a thin shell and several eggs in earlier stages of development without shells. The raven died at a bird rehab facility near Berkeley, California of a broken wing before it could lay the eggs. The bird’s life ended, but the dissection doesn’t mark the end of the story or the end of our study - the skin and tissue samples will be kept at AMNH for researchers to learn from, both now and in the future.

Book Review: Six Easy Pieces

Author's own image.

As much as I enjoy science I’ll admit when I first started trying to decipher my physics textbook I was pretty discouraged. Instead of finding myself intrigued by how physics explains the world around us, I was confused by complicated formulas, or caught up in the busy-work of adding vector quantities.

Why should I care about physics anyway? I wanted to understand the point of these formulas, but my textbook didn’t help me. I put it aside for a while and picked up a smaller book, Six Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman. When I started reading the first chapter, I was relived. There wasn’t any jargon or complex equations, just the central ideas of physics explained in a way that I could understand. Even though the title of Feynman’s book is Six Easy Pieces, it wasn’t easy in a dumbed down sort of way. This book made me think, or maybe I should say it allowed me to think, since the way Feynman explained physics gave me the information I needed to begin to understand how the laws of physics influence our world.

Feynman wrote about physics like they were the most fascinating thing in the world. I caught some of his enthusiasm myself. Now that I understand why the formulas I struggled with are useful, I’m ready to go back to them. Learning anything is much easier if it’s intriguing and understandable.

Here are a few things I learned from Six Easy Pieces that made me think.

• All other scientific disciplines can fundamentally be explained by physics.
•  We don’t really know what energy is, even though we defined multiple types of energy and came up with properties of energy
•  Gravity doesn’t really pull objects downward, it just pulls them away from the straight path they would travel on if unimpeded.
• Particles on a small scale (like electrons and protons) move in strange ways that are hard to make sense of since we’re so used to “normal” large-scale motion. However, familiar large-scale motion only acts the way it does thanks to the unfamiliar motion of small-scale particles.
• Quantum mechanics (a division of physics devoted to studying the motion of atomic and sub-atomic particles) only makes sense if uncertainty is involved. What we don’t know is what makes quantum mechanics make sense.
•  Particles and waves on a large scale move in obviously different ways. But, on a small scale what we thought were particles (like electrons) end up to work like waves and what we thought we waves (like light) end up to work like particles. Everything in the subatomic world becomes a sort of mixture of particle-like and wave-like qualities.

If you are interested in physics, but don’t want with jargon and equations, Six Easy Pieces is a great book to read.

I’m always on the lookout for science books that are interesting to read. If you have any recommendations please let me know!

We Need Bacteria

Food allergies are on the rise. If we can eradicate smallpox, why are people becoming fatally ill when exposed to food that’s supposed to be good for them? Are we forgetting about some vital aspect of human health?

I learned from Dr. Jack Gilbert at the American Museum of Natural History’s Teen SciCafe, that yes we are neglecting an important aspect of human health.

Well, it’s not exactly human health that we’re forgetting about but the health of the millions of microbes that cover our skin and inhabit every organ of our bodies except the brain. Yes, bacteria are everywhere, and yes they are good for us.

Peanut butter toast and milk, standard snack or a potential hazard?

In our society we are taught that bacteria are bad and we must kill them with soap. While this is true about some bacteria, there are many other microbes that we need to survive.

 Dr. Jack Gilbert and his colleagues have studied differences in sterile mice (mice never exposed to any bacteria) and normal mice (teeming with bacteria). They found sterile mice’s organs wouldn’t develop properly, they had no fight or flight response to stressful situations, and these mice had severe food allergies. When these sterile mice were treated with good bacteria, they regained their fight or flight response and became tolerant of foods that once poisoned them.

Bacteria are amazing, they’ve been on earth for 3.8 billion years, far longer than we have. We evolved to live with and depend on bacteria. Each of us have our own unique microbe colony which influences many bodily functions from weight gain, to food tolerance, to mental health.

Okay, now we know there’s a link between bacteria and health, now what do we do?

Can we use our knowledge to help decrease risk of food allergies? According to Dr. Gilbert the answer is yes, but we might have to change the way the medical field functions. The nature of our modern, western, medical field is one-size-fits-all. We want easy treatments that work the same way on everyone. But, everyone has a unique microbe colony. Treatments that work for me based off my microbe colony might not work for you. Now that we can figure out people’s microbiomes and understand what they mean, it might be time to go back to personalized medicine.

Dr. Gilbert and his colleagues have worked with more personalized microbe therapy for children with food allergies by introducing butyrate-producing bacteria to their intestines. The bacteria helped the children to handle trigger foods better and reduced the severity of the children’s reactions, or even ended the reactions all together.

Bacteria aren’t the cure-all but it’s about time they get attention. At the Teen SciCafe hosted by American Museum of Natural History, microbes were put in the spotlight thanks to Dr. Gilbert’s lecture. We also got to try out a new student designed card game called Gutsy all about microbes in the gut. The card game was the perfect way to set the mood for microbe talk. Now I’m very excited about bacteria! Improving microbial health can have big impacts, such as reducing risk of food allergies, but doesn’t have to be complicated, just spending more time outdoors and eating food rich in good bacteria can improve your microbiome. (Sauerkraut anyone?)

What Does it Mean to Go Green?

Sunrise at Black Rock Forest

Going green is all the rage these days. People are becoming more aware of the environment, and that’s a good thing, but do we really understand what it means to go green?

Summer Sunset  on the Hudson

You may remember the climate-change march that took place in New York City in September, 2014. Hundreds of people marched through the streets to raise awareness about the environment. After the climate-change march, garbage left behind by the participants overflowed trash cans and spilled into the street. This made me think about how wanting to be environmentally friendly and actually helping the earth are two completely different things. Instead of just thinking “the environment is in danger, big companies are messing it up.” I started to think “the environment is in danger, and how can I help save it?”

View at Black Rock Forest

Helping the earth starts with awareness. Most people, like myself, are aware of the negative changes going on in earth’s atmosphere. Let’s use the knowledge we have, instead of denying climate change like the Koch Brothers and Exxon (ExxonMobil) do. Now that I’m aware of the environment, I try to consider how my actions can positively or negatively affect the earth.

Summer Sunrise

Humans have harmed the environment in countless ways. We’ve covered everything with pesticides, cut down forests, spewed greenhouse gases into the environment, filled our oceans with plastic, and polluted areas with nuclear waste. Now the arctic is warming, storms are brewing, and species are going extinct. If this keeps up the earth may become uninhabitable, at least for humans. It’s easy to blame all these problems on big corporations and dismiss them, but I think there are many steps all of us can take to become more green.

.

Shaw Road

I started with becoming more aware of the waste I produce. Plastics don’t biodegrade well, so before I buy something covered in plastic, I question whether or not I really need it. I also started thinking about where the items I buy are coming from. Factories in poor countries where workers are forced to work in horrible conditions, don’t tend to have good environmental policies. When I can I try to buy less, or support eco-friendly companies. The key is not to be greenwashed, that is, tricked into buying products advertised as green that really aren’t.

Fall Sky

There are many other ways to help the environment too, such as using public transportation rather than driving, being energy efficient, buying sustainably produced food, recycling, and composting food waste. Demonstrations like the climate change march can sway world leaders into making better decisions, and that’s a great thing, but it’s not the only way we slow climate change. I found once I got into an environmentally healthy mindset I started to find more and more simple ways I could help the earth. If we all work together to change for the better, change will come. Here’s to saving the earth!

Winter on the Hudson

An Ether Monument?

While wandering the Boston Common last month, I saw a picturesque monument dedicated to ether. I was surprised to see a monument for ether, a colorless liquid that causes unconsciousness and has hypnotic effects. I thought of ether as a popular recreational drug from the 19^th century, hardly something worth a memorializing with a statue.

The momument

It ends up that ether has been around for a while, it was discovered in 1275, and has been used for a few different purposes. The monument also has quite a history.

In the 1840s, a practicing dentist from Boston who never managed to finish medical school experimented with different drugs to use as anesthetics. This man was William Morton and he tried everything - from alcohol to opium- to lessen his patients’ pain. Alcohol was largely ineffective and opium had too many side effects. After seeing his former business partner Horace Wells’ limited success with nitrous oxide as a staple anesthetic, Morton decided to experiment with ether.

First Morton tried topical application of ether, which reduced the pain but didn’t end it completely. Next he experimented with inhalation of a mixture of ether and opium, which also wasn’t ideal. Last of all he tried inhalation of pure ether, and this was the winner. After inhaling ether, the patient went unconscious and felt no pain whatsoever during the operation. Ether is transmitted to the blood stream through the lungs so the effect is almost instantaneous. Ether’s influence tends to only last about half an hour, unlike opium. (One patient of Morton’s didn’t recover from the opium used during her operation for a week!)

Boston Common

After his success with ether, Morton developed a special device for ether inhalation he called a “letheon inhaler.” In 1846 Morton removed Gilbert Abbott’s vascular tumor in his jaw at the Massachusetts General Hospital’s operating theatre. Morton administered ether, and Abbott felt no pain throughout the operation.

People were impressed with the remarkable success of ether and in 1866, Thomas Lee, a retired merchant, suggested that the city of Boston build a monument on the Boston Common dedicated to the first use of ether as an anesthetic in 1846. The city agreed and the monument still stands there to this day.

Me in front of the ether monument

While Morton was adamant that he was the first person to use ether as an anesthetic, this may have not actually been the case. Ether began being used in medical treatment in 1794, and was widely used for recreational purposes in the 1800s. Morton spent most of his life in disputes with medical men about ether use. I would guess that Morton probably wasn’t the first one to use ether as an anesthetic, though he did popularize its use. Thankfully he did! Imagine surgery without anesthesia – it would be extremely painful. While ether isn’t used as an anesthetic anymore, Morton’s work no doubt helped anesthetics become a staple during medical operations, and that is well worth a memorial.

Let's Talk About Dioramas

What makes a science museum come to life? Art museums have it easy, as art tends to be naturally eye-catching. How can museums make science intriguing right off the bat? I believe one answer is in dioramas depicting the natural world.

Diorama background by Francis Lee Jaques from the Whitney Bird Hall at AMNH

Dioramas combine art with nature and make science museums come to life. They tell a story and allow the visitors to experience the drama of nature in places they may never visit and see animals they may never have a chance to view in their natural habitat. Dioramas are great works of art, but their artists remain virtually unknown as the focus is on the natural world, not the artistry of the painted backdrop. I, however, find the artists to be just as interesting as the subjects of the dioramas themselves. Today I’d like to focus on a particular diorama artist, Francis Lee Jaques, who was known for his excellent skills as an artist … and for his difficult personality.

Diorama background by Francis Lee Jaques from the Whitney Bird Hall at AMNH

Francis Lee Jaques drew nature, specifically birds, ever since he was a child, but he didn’t originally peruse a career as an artist. In 1917, after he had already worked as a lumberjack, electrician, and railroad fireman, Jaques enlisted in the army in San Francisco. While in California, he visited the California Academy of Sciences and became interested in becoming a museum artist. Jaques was an ambitious man and he wasn’t about to apply to just any humble museum. To start off his career, he applied for a job at the University Museum of Minnesota. Jaques sent a letter to one of the curators to say that he thought the curator’s exhibition photos were flat and in need of retouching, and that he Jaques was the man for the job. Jaques was not hired.

Diorama background by Francis Lee Jaques from the Whitney Bird Hall at AMNH

Jaques was completely undeterred and sent off an application and some of his paintings to Frank Chapman the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. This was a daring move since Jaques had no introduction to the influential Chapman. Still, Jaques’ art was impressive enough that Chapman convinced James L. Clark, the head of exhibitions, to hire Jaques without so much as an interview. In 1924 Jaques packed up and moved to NYC for his new job.

Diorama background by Francis Lee Jaques from the Whitney Bird Hall at AMNH

Jaques proved to be a remarkable artist known for producing quality work in a short amount of time. As a child Jaques spent much of his time outdoors drawing and hunting with his father. This outdoor experience allowed him to help scientists with their field work when he accompanied them on field expeditions.

Diorama background by Francis Lee Jaques from the Whitney Bird Hall at AMNH

Jaques was far from perfect, and his main weaknesses were being rude, blunt, and grudge holding. He started fights with Chapman over his pay and vacation hours, with Clark over the design of the North American Mammal Hall, and with James Perry Wilson, another diorama artist, over practically anything. Wilson was a quiet man who lived with his mother and went to classical music concerts alone. Jaques made fun of Wilson’s odd habits and noted that Wilson used his brain, but in strange ways like figuring out where to stand on the train platform in order it get a good seat on the train. All Wilson ever said about Jaques was that his painted birds were sometimes too large, a true observation.

Musk Ox diorama background by Francis Lee Jaques from the North American Mammal Hall at AMNH

Jaques worked for AMNH for 18 years and produced many beautiful works of art, but he did not end his stay there on a good note. In 1957 the museum decided Jaques’ work was too stylized and they had another artist, Matthew Kalmenoff, to retouch parts of the Glacier Park Timberland diorama. When Jaques found out, he immediately quit his job and never set foot in AMNH again. 

Diorama background by Francis Lee Jaques from The Minnesota Museum of Mining

Jaques did work with museums other than AMNH including The National Museum of Wildlife Art, The Minnesota Museum of Mining, and The Bell Museum of Natural History. Jaques may have been a difficult person to work with, but his artwork continues to inspire visitors every day.

Diorama background by Francis Lee Jaques from The Minnesota Museum of Mining

Diorama background by Francis Lee Jaques from The Minnesota Museum of Mining

Close up of the Musk Ox diorama background

Are Old Methods of Food Preservation Still Necessary?

Refrigeration is something we take for granted today to the point where I often forget not everyone in the past had this luxury. Some people still don’t. In the past, people came up with other ways to preserve food such as canning, pickling, and fermenting. Today, those of us in the developed world can preserve our fresh fruits and veggies for longer and thanks to international trade, can buy a variety of produce all year round, so why should we bother using these “outdated” methods of preservation?

I recently attended Boston’s Third Annual Fermentation Festival, and I’m sure everyone there would argue strongly that yes, fermentation is something we need to keep doing.

Amanda Feifer, a speaker at the festival, talked about why fermentation is beneficial to us today. In her talk she focused on fermentation of vegetables (lactic acid fermentation) not yeast fermentation, and I this post I am going to do so as well.

Homemade fermented sauerkraut

All vegetables and fruits come with a layer of bacteria on them, some “good” and some “bad” bacteria. The bad bacteria (such as Pectobacterium carotovorum) cause rotting, but the good ones will allow the food to ferment. Unlike vinegar based pickling or canning, which preserve food by creating a sterile environment where no bacteria can grow, fermentation is all about cultivating the right bacteria. By right bacteria, I mean lactic acid bacteria.

Lactic acid bacteria eat the starches in food and produce acid as waste. This acidic environment kills all the rest of the bad bacteria, preventing the food from rotting.

Plate of fermented pickles to judge at the festival

The job of fermenters is to give the lactic acid bacteria a head start. To do this, they place the food they want to ferment in a salty brine. Lactic acid bacteria don’t mind the salt, but the bacteria that cause rotting are halophobic (salt fearing), and will start to die. The lactic acid bacteria then start creating a more and more acidic environment to the point where it is too acidic for the first strain of bacteria. The first strain then dies off and a new strain of lactic acid bacteria take over and continue to lower the pH and increase acidity. This process is quite effective at preventing rotting, as Amanda Feifer explained, and no one is ever know to have fallen ill from eating fermented food. This may be because bad ferments have obviously gone wrong and no one in their right mind would eat them, but still ferments are actually safer than most food.

Pickle judging

But since refrigeration can prevent rotting too, what’s the point of eating this acidic and pungent food? Luckily for us aficionados of fermentation, there are many health benefits to eating ferments. Lactic acid bacteria are probiotic and the fermentation process makes B vitamins, preserves C vitamins, and cultivates enzymes. Actually microbiologists, like Benjamin Wolfe, are still working on understanding everything going on in ferments and why it’s good for us. There’s a bunch of unknown processes going on in one jar of seemingly simple sauerkraut. In addition to all the health benefits, known and unknown, there is one last reason to eat fermented food, and that’s because it tastes good.

 

Homemade cherry jam, dill pickles, and bread and butter pickles

Canned food and vinegar-based pickles are also delicious, but neither have the same health benefits as ferments. Canned food and vinegar pickles have a longer shelf life than fermented foods, but they are harder to make and more likely to go wrong. I still don’t see canned foods and vinegar pickles going out of fashion soon because of refrigeration, mainly because people like tradition. We want to eat toast and fruit jelly for breakfast and have a pickle on our sandwich whether or not we have to preserve cucumbers and berries anymore. I, for one, will continue to eat and make all types of preserved foods, canned, pickled, and fermented, with gusto!