We're all winners! - The Lane Anderson Award for Science Writing

By Claire Eamer

On September 15, I attended a very nice dinner in a very, very nice heritage house in Toronto - and got a very, very, very nice surprise. My book, Before the World Was Ready, Stories of Daring Genius in Science, published by Annick Press, won the 2013 Lane Anderson Award for science writing for young readers.

The Lane Anderson Award is a relatively new award honouring the very best science writing in Canada, both in the adult and young reader categories. It was created and is supported by the Fitzhenry Family Foundation. The official website says, "Each award will be determined on the relevance of its content to the importance of science in today’s world, and the author’s ability to connect the topic to the interests of the general trade reader."

It's an honour - a huge honour. And there's money attached, which is unusual and extremely welcome in the world of book writing.

Now, I knew my book was on the three-book short list - that's why I was at the dinner - but my bets were on another of the shortlisted books. However, I was the only one of the three who could attend the ceremony. We all know or know of each other - that's the nature of kids' science writing in Canada - so we decided to put together a short, joint statement of appreciation, with a bit from each of us.

And here it is - from nominees Jude Isabella, Daniel Loxton, and me, Claire Eamer:

Science writers – and especially children’s science writers – carry collegiality to an extreme. All three of the finalists for the children’s book award would jointly like to thank you for this opportunity and for your recognition of the importance of good, accessible science information that fosters science literacy in both adults and children.

From Jude, who wanted to emphasize the contribution of her long-time Kids Can Press editor, Val Wyatt: “She’s been at it for over 30 years and to me this nomination is a testament to Val’s huge impact on science writing for kids in Canada. There’s just so many writers today that are writing and winning awards and everything that wouldn’t be where they are without Val. She’s just legendary.”

From Daniel: “I'm tremendously grateful not only to the Fitzhenry Family Foundation and the judges for this nomination, but to Kids Can Press and my editor Valerie Wyatt for making this book possible in the first place. To Val especially. It's simply not possible to overstate the importance of a good editor in the life of a writer, and Val is the best.”

From Claire: “In addition to the praise of editors, including my editors at Annick Press, I’d like to add my appreciation for the illustrators of these books – including the astonishing Sa Boothroyd, who illustrated Before the World Was Ready. They grab the attention of kids and keep them reading through what is often pretty complex information.”

And here are the three short-listed books:

Before the World Was Ready, Stories of Daring Genius in Science (Annick Press), by Claire Eamer

Chitchat: Celebrating the World's Languages (Kids Can Press), by Jude Isabella

Pterosaur Trouble (Kids Can Press), by Daniel Loxton

Talking to Your Dog is Not As Crazy As You Think

by L E Carmichael

Any dog owner will tell you that their pet understands them - recognizes words, follows commands, and somehow knows when they need a sympathetic snuggle.  Scientists call this communicative skill and intelligence "social cognition."  It's the set of knowledge and behaviours that animals - including humans - need in order to survive in social groups.  In the case of the dog, humans are a natural part of that social group, and language is one of the major ways humans communicate.  Use of human language by dogs is a developing field of study.

Thanks to Othal via Wikimedia Commons for this
gorgeous border collie photo!

Take Rico, for example.  Rico's owners claimed that the border collie knew the names of 200 objects, and would retrieve each item on request.  Scientists were skeptical at first - after all, a horse known as "Clever Hans" wasn't actually counting, but reading his trainer's body language.  However, when Rico had to go into a separate room to find the toy his owner asked for, where he couldn't receive any additional clues, he still got it right 37 out of 40 times.  

Rico's vocabulary, though on par with trained apes, dolphins, and parrots, wasn't that interesting to scientists.  What they wanted to understand was how Rico learned the names of new objects.  They placed unfamiliar items in the room with toys that he knew, then asked him to retrieve using a brand new word.  Seven out of 10 times, Rico brought the new object.  He was using exclusion learning - "I know the names of all of these things, but mom used a different word, and therefore...."  This "fast mapping" is the same technique human children use during language learning, and Rico's success rate was comparable to that of an average 3-year-old.

Scientists have shown that when humans generalize new words to categories of objects, they do so based on shape, rather than size or texture.  For example, if shown a ball for the first time, kids will extend that label to other spherical objects.  Similarities in size and texture are less important - a golf ball and a whiffle ball are both balls.  Would the same true for dogs?

A second border collie, Gable, was taught that the word "dax" represented a small, fuzzy, U-shaped object.  He was then asked to identify the dax among objects with different sizes, shapes or textures.  Unlike people, Gable generalized the word dax to objects the same size, not shape, as the original.  He also used texture as an indicator.  

Scientists believe that humans rely on shape because, in general, vision is our dominant sense.  It's less clear why dogs may be relying on different indicators, but the results suggest that there could be fundamental differences in the way dogs and people learn and understand language.  Which makes it even more incredible that we manage to communicate at all!

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The video of Gable is from: van der Zee et al (2012) Word Generalization by a Dog (Canis familiaris): Is Shape Important? PLOS ONE: e49382.  You can find more videos at the article's home page.

A Tribute to Scavengers and Decomposers

by Jan Thornhill

I visited a school a few days ago to talk about my books and, as usual, passed around the contents of my “museum-in-a-bag,” a collection of, among other things, skulls, dinosaur bones, desiccated insects, snake skins, feathers, and a mummified bat and two hummingbirds. The children are always very careful with my treasures, but that day my white-tailed deer skull finally snapped in half. I wasn’t exactly surprised, since this particular skull has been handled by at least 5,000 kids over the past few years. Besides, I can always glue it back together again. I’d like to save it, though, because, like many of the things in my bag, the deer skull has a story.

White-tailed deer skeleton (Jan Thornhill)

I found it, along with most of the rest of the deer’s skeleton behind a fence on my road. It’s not hard to imagine how the animal died: I’m sure someone struck it by accident with their car. Though mortally injured, it must have managed to make two great bounds, one to get off the road and the other to get over the fence. The person who hit it must have been relieved to see it disappear into the brush as he or she drove away. But then, alone, the deer collapsed and died.

A year earlier, I had looked for puffballs in exactly the same spot in late autumn. There were no deer remains then, so the longest it could have been hidden there was twelve months. Amazingly, other than a few wisps of hair and a couple of snippets of dried skin, the skeleton was completely clean – clean enough that I had no qualms about bringing it home.

So who do I have to thank for cleaning those bones for me? Scavengers and decomposers, that’s who – my favorite characters in the food chain.

I was quite sure a coyote must have visited the corpse of the deer shortly after it died since the bones of two of its legs were missing. The coyote is the only animal in my neighborhood that is strong enough to drag away such large parts. Though they’re predators, and often hunt for food, coyotes are also such frequent scavengers that they’ve developed a special receptor in their brains that makes them immediately throw up anything that is dangerously rotten. So a coyote wouldn’t have had to feed on the carcass immediately, especially if the deer had died in the cold of winter.

Coyote feeding on elk carcass (Courtesy Bryan Harry, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)

Turkey vulture

Other scavenging mammals, such as foxes and skunks, might also have visited the corpse, as well as birds, such as crows and vultures. Our local turkey vulture is one of the few large animals that is a dedicated scavenger, which means that its only food is carrion, or already dead or decaying flesh. They’re perfect for this job: they have an extremely well-developed sense of smell that allows them to home in on food that's miles away; their bald heads reduce the amount of rotting matter that might stick to them; strong acids in their digestive tracts destroy harmful bacteria; and their urine is also very acidic – and here’s the best part – so they pee down their legs to let the acid destroy nasty bacteria clinging to them. 

As well as being fed upon by these larger animals, in the warmer months corpses attract an amazing number of insects. A variety of flies are lured by the smell of death and lay their eggs. Their larvae, or maggots, are voracious carrion feeders. Flesh-eating beetle larvae continue the job and, later, other beetles with specialized mouth parts show up to feast on tough skin and ligaments, followed by moths that eat fur and hair. These insects all arrive at such specific stages of decomposition that forensic entomologists, scientists who study the insects that are found on or near dead things, can use their knowledge of this progression to determine the time of death when the remains of a human are found.

Close-up of a blowfly maggot (Eye of Science)

Throughout this whole process bacteria are active, gobbling up the corpse from within. These bacteria produce gases as a waste product, and it’s these gases that are responsible for the putrid odors that waft off rotting animals. Humans are naturally revolted by these smells, which is a good thing. If we weren’t disgusted by the smell of decomposition, we might be tempted to eat food that has gone bad and get sick from the bacteria growing on it. Interestingly, almost everyone in the world says the same thing when confronted by these smells, some version of “Yuck!” or “Ick!” This verbal gagging is so natural and so universal that some people think it might be the way that human language began.

My tip to anyone who finds an animal skull (or other bones) and wants to bring it home, is to use your eyes and nose. If it looks gross and smells disgusting, leave it where it is. Mark the location and return in a few months. More often than not, scavengers and decomposers will have completely cleaned it up for you.

You can find out lots more about death and decomposition in my book: I Found a Dead Bird: The Kids’ Guide to the Cycle of Life & Death (Maple Tree Press)

Here’s a fun, time-lapse video showing a watermelon decomposing over 35 days: http://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/12926682492