Lane Anderson Award Winner Is Life-long Giraffe Fan

The winner of the 2016 Lane Anderson award for excellence in Canadian science writing for youth is Anne Innis Dagg, for her book 5 Giraffes, published by Fitzhenry & Whiteside. This is her account of how she came to study giraffe. -CE

By Anne Innis Dagg

When I was three years old, my mother took me on a trip from our home in Toronto to Chicago where we visited the Brookfield Zoo. I was mesmerized by the giraffe! So much so that I decided I would study them in Africa when I grew up.

At the University of Toronto, I enrolled in biology and for four years learned a great deal, but nothing about my favourite animal. When I graduated I wrote to as many sources as I could think of in Africa to see if anyone would like a young woman to come and watch giraffe near them, but with no success. I then decided to do a year of graduate work and try again the following year, in 1956.

This time I was successful! I was able to live on the grounds of a huge cattle farm that had 95 giraffe on its property, coming and going as they wished. By watching them from the tiny second-hand car I had bought, I was able to document what they did each day. The extensive scientific paper I wrote was apparently the first to be published about the behaviour of any wild animal living in Africa.

Since then I have been able to study giraffe in many other ways, such as their gaits, their spotting, and their behaviour in zoos. I have also written books about giraffe and about my adventures with them. In 2018, there should be a movie about my life with this wonderful animal!

For my book 5 Giraffes, of course, I had to choose individuals from a variety of different backgrounds and places. I belong to a group of scientists who are devoted to this animal, which is in danger of extinction, so this was easily done. They gave me lots of possibilities, from which I chose the five – three of the giraffes lived in zoos, one is a dominant male in Kenya, and the last is a female of another race, also in Kenya, who grieved for days when her youngster died.

Then I added other chapters that deal with a variety of ways in which giraffe differ from other animals. For example, their legs are so long that they have unusual gaits. The females are sociable, moving usually in small groups, while the large males are more likely to be solitary. Giraffe have evolved ways to “beat the heat” on hot days and to obtain moisture from leaves where there is no water.

Writing 5 Giraffes was a wonderful chance for me to recall the amazing way in which giraffe have evolved to live in Africa.

Photos courtesy of Anne Innis Dagg.

In Honour of Saint Patrick's Day - SNAKES!

By Claire Eamer

This day, March 17, is St. Patrick's Day, celebrated around the world by the Irish, the formerly Irish, the wannabe-Irish, and beer drinkers of all persuasions. It's generally marked by a lot of green - green clothing, green-dyed flowers, green-dominated parades, and that abomination - green beer.

But no snakes. Snakes almost certainly don't celebrate St. Patrick's Day (even though many of them are noticeably and naturally green). After all, St. Patrick is famous for driving the snakes out of Ireland. But did he?

A green tree python relaxes in comfort, using its own
body as furniture.

Sadly for legend, Ireland was snake-deprived long before St. Patrick arrived more than 1500 years ago. The cold temperatures and ice sheets of the last major glaciation drove snakes and other reptiles south. When the world warmed up about 10,000 years ago and the snakes moved back north, they were blocked by the cold waters of the Irish Sea. The few snakes that made it that far north simply settled down among the forests and hills of Britain and left the island of Ireland alone.

The Irish probably don't regret the lack of snakes, but they might be missing something. Snakes are amazing and quite beautiful. A few years ago, I wrote a book about animals adapting to extreme habitats (Lizards in the Sky: Animals Where You Least Expect Them) - and one of my favourite examples was the flying snakes of Southeast Asia.

The elegant rainbow boa is popular among collectors.

"Flying snakes?!?" you ask. (Well, most people ask that.) Really and truly! A small group of snakes in the jungles of Malaysia and Borneo has developed the ability to glide through the air. They fling themselves from a high branch, flatten out their bodies, and swim through the air in a wriggly glide. The most accomplished species, the paradise tree snake, has been seen to glide more than 20 metres - far enough to take it safely over a five-lane highway with room to spare.

And then there are the swimming snakes. "No, no... not swimming snakes too!" you cry. (I'm sure I heard you cry that.) Yup. Sea snakes, in fact.

Snakes taste tiny bits of scent in the air with their
tongues. The two forks of the tongue give the snake
a sort of stereo smelling capacity so it can tell
which direction the smell comes from.

Actually, sea snakes are quite common in the warm waters of the Indian and Pacific oceans, but most of them stay in the shallows close to shore.

The exception is the yellow-bellied sea snake, which is born at sea and lives there its entire life. Coolest fact? The yellow-bellied sea snake can tie itself in a knot. It loops around itself into a simple knot and runs the loop from one end of its body to the other to scrape off parasites and dead scales.

See what you're missing, Ireland?

Claire Eamer likes strange animals and weird facts and science of almost any kind. Her latest book is What a Waste! Where Does Garbage Go? (Annick Press, 2017).

Margriet Ruurs on the Galapagos Islands

By Claire Eamer

Our buddy and occasional Sci/Why blogger, Margriet Ruurs and her husband Kees have just completed an amazing trip to the Galapagos Islands, famed for the role they played in Darwin's understanding of evolution. Margriet is blogging about the experience - with beautiful photographs - on their Globetrotting Grandparents site, and I highly recommend following the series of posts. She has promised to write a post for Sci/Why eventually, but in the meanwhile you can enjoy her adventure - currently featuring blue-footed boobies and magnificent frigate birds.

A Day in the Life of a Park Ranger

Note: Canadian parks generally have park wardens rather than park rangers, the term used in the United States. Apart from the difference in name, the job is much the same on both sides of the border. If you go to a park this summer, watch for the park rangers or park wardens - and remember the Oregon park rangers described here by author Margriet Ruurs. -CE

If you are interested in science - biology, ecology, being outdoors and leading a life of adventure - you might want to consider a career as a Park Ranger. Park Rangers, or wardens, manage wildlife, the environment, but also people who visit parks and interact with wild animals.

When Julie goes to work, she doesn’t know what will happen that day. Some days she drives her truck through the park to make sure everything is okay. Or she glides across the lake in her kayak to check the water depth and quality. Other days she has to cut down a tree that poses a danger to campers, writes a ticket to someone who broke the law or sits behind her desk to do paperwork.

Julie knows one thing for certain: no day on the job is ever the same!

Julie has been a Park Ranger for almost 20 years. When she was a kid, Julie loved to go camping with her family. It was back then that she decided that she would like nothing better than to work in the outdoors. “If you like camping and hiking and boating, there’s no better job!” she says.

Park Rangers learn about law enforcement and help to ensure that park visitors respect and learn about their natural environment. “Park Rangers are a kind of policeman in the outdoors,” Julie says. She helps to protect wildlife, such as bears or bobcats, that may live in the park and makes sure that both people and wildlife are safe.

Not everything about the job is exciting: Park Rangers may also have to paint picnic shelters and tables, clean outhouses and fire pits. Some Park Rangers work in Historic Parks that preserve an important historic place for the future.

Doug is one of Julie’s colleagues. He works at a historic heritage park. Here he shows a family how an old grist mill uses the power of water to grind flour in the olden days. Interpretation of nature or history, and teaching people how to interact with their environment can be a big part of the job of a Park Ranger.

At night, Julie often patrols campgrounds. She walks around with another ranger. They chat with the campers while making sure that they treat their environment with respect. Often Julie works long days and, by the time she crawls into bed, she is tired but happy to be a Park Ranger.

What she likes best about her job is that no two days are ever the same. “I love the variety!” Julie smiles. Who knows what tomorrow may bring!

Become a Junior Park Ranger

In American parks, if you are interested in protecting wildlife and learning more about natural areas, you can become a Junior Ranger. Many State and National Parks have Junior Ranger Programs. You can participate in special programs such as interpretive hikes and campfire programs. Often, you will get a special certificate or badge.

Most parks have special programs in the summer:

• In Grand Canyon National Park, you get a special handbook for Junior Rangers that will help you to learn about the environment. 
• Louisiana State Parks will give you a special punch card to get punched each time you visit a State Park’s event. After three punches, you will receive a Junior Ranger Handbook full of activities. Once you complete the activities, you receive a special Junior Ranger patch, a certificate and a personalized letter from the Director of State Parks in Louisiana.
• In Yellowstone National Park, you can even go on a Junior Ranger snowshoe hike in the winter.

Be a Web Ranger or an Xplorer

If you can’t visit a Park in person, the U.S. National Park Service offers a “Web Rangers” site where you can learn about dinosaurs' diets, turtles in Florida and cave drawings made by Native Americans hundreds of years ago.

In Canada you can sign up for the Xplorers program before visiting a National Park.

All photos by Margriet Ruurs.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!! (Well, several winners, actually.)

By Claire Eamer

Every now and then, we have to boast about the amazing awesomeness of the Sci/Why crew. After all, somebody's gotta do it. Why not one of us?

So - without further ado - let me announce that my colleague, L.E. Carmichael has won this year's Lane Anderson Award for the best Canadian youth science book published in 2014. Ta da! She earned the award with her book Fuzzy Forensics: DNA Fingerprinting Gets Wild.

Part mystery and part scientific guidebook, Fuzzy Forensics tells the story of cutting-edge science put to work to solve a wildlife crime, how the science works, and why wildlife crime is important. It's both fascinating and fun.



Pretty impressive, eh? But that's not the end of our amazing accomplishments.

In September, Sci/Why blogger and Science Lady, Shar Levine, was presented with a 2015 Alumni Honour Award by her alma mater, the University of Alberta, for her work in advocating for children's science literacy.

Shar's writing partner, Leslie Johnstone, is no slouch either. While Shar was being honoured at the University of Alberta, Leslie was named one of the 100 leaders in education in British Columbia by the University of British Columbia. Besides writing dozens of entertaining science books for kids, in partnership with Shar, Leslie has taught science at Point Grey Secondary School in Vancouver since 1988 and is currently acting vice principal and head of the science department there.

Congratulations to all of our winners!

Canadian Biodiversity Facility

This week while volunteering as a naturalist in Elk/Beaver Lake Nature Centre, I met a family that is having a Puffin Summer. Every day they go to Puffin Cam and then look up a new fact about puffins on the internet.

It used to be that you had to go to the library and find a book in order to learn about nature. How else could you identify what kind of butterfly you saw or what plant is growing behind your grandparents' woodshed? Now there are terrific online resources for people who love learning about the biological sciences! Of particular interest to Canadians is the Canadian Biodiversity Information Facility. The CBIF operates in support of the Global Biodiversity Facility, which has information on over a million and a half species.

Are you trying to find information on sapsuckers or ladyslippers, or other animals and plants? The CBIF is working to improve access to data on living things of interest to Canadians. On their website there are three tools to help users find the information they need:

• Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) is a catalogue of common and scientific names and their synonyms that will eventually include all species found in Canada, the United States and Mexico. I clicked on Search ITIS, then entered the common name "oystercatcher" into their simple form, and it came up with links to pages on many kinds of oystercatcher birds, and the scientific names for each kind. Here's a photo of this striking bird, with its bright eyes and bill and pink feet.
  

"Black Oystercatcher HMB RWD4" by DickDaniels (http://carolinabirds.org/) - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Oystercatcher_HMB_RWD4.jpg#/media/File:Black_Oystercatcher_HMB_RWD4.jpg

For the other two tools, you'll need the species name for the living thing you want to find.

• Species Access Network is the Canadian component of a global project to provide Internet access to information associated with the billions of specimens housed in the world's natural history collections.Users can search these collections by species name, source collection, collector, or location.
• Species Bank includes a collection of electronic resources that provide detailed information to support the identification of Canadian species including descriptive information, photographs, distribution maps, and more.
  

Now that it's summer, I hope you'll enjoy being out in the wide world, finding plants and animals in towns and in wild places. When you come back indoors, the CBIF website is a good place to learn about what you've found -- but no computer can substitute for breathing the same air as our animal and plant neighbours.

Elephants For Lunch

By Margriet Ruurs

I am in Zambia, Africa - on my first safari, in hopes of seeing big game in their own, natural environment.

An alternative to a game drive is to take a walking safari. Does a walking safari mean that you can run into lions?! In a way, it does.

So the guide takes us to an area where he feels we are unlikely to run into anything too big or too dangerous. It is not a long, arduous hike, but an interesting stroll through the African bush. The guide reads the ground like the pages of an open book.

“Look.” He points. “A hyena walked here. He was not in a rush because only the indentation of two middle claws shows.”

He also points out where baboons dined on the fibre of elephant dung. We see gorgeous round clay pots, broken open. They are the large balls that a dung beetle rolls through the mud.



Our guide shows us intricately woven weaverbird nests that always hang on the west side of a tree.

There’s even a bird called a tailorbird that stitches leaves together with real stitches.

A weaverbird nest.

We follow trails made by elephants and hippos, see a large flock of bright green love birds that look like the leaves of a tree flying off.

One afternoon, we have lunch at Track & Trail River Camp. They’ve set a little table for us and when I look up I spot an elephant. Then three more. They come within metres. From the safety of the kitchen door, we watch as they stroll past, right next to the bar.

We visit Chipembele Wildlife Centre, an impressive visitors’ centre set up and run by a British couple. They were both police officers in England, obsessed by Africa. Seventeen years ago they moved here, built a house in the bush and now educate African children on the importance of wildlife. On the side, he catches poachers.

 We found an elephant tusk on the ground.

He tells us about one poacher who has just been released from prison. Through some local contacts, we manage to make a date with the guy and spend an afternoon chatting with him. What motivates a poacher? Money.

The (ex)poacher has nine children and no job. The 70% unemployment rate in Zambia means no work, no income. So how does a father provide for his family? How does he put food on the table?

The easiest way is by poaching. Edwin told us he built his own guns and would spend the night in the bush, hunting impala, buffalo, kudo and more. He ate the meat but mostly sold it.

He got caught. At some point he got offered a job but screwed up and went back to poaching. He ended up in jail. Jail in Zambia is not for the faint of heart. “1,500 men in one cell,” he says. People right next to him died of suffocation. One meal a day of a kind of uncooked porridge. It was a wonder that he survived the year. But now he swears he will never poach again. Only time will tell. We hope he will find a job. His skills as a tracker are probably unparalleled. And he now seems to agree: wildlife needs to be protected. Wildlife brings tourists, and tourists bring money.

We also understand the problems caused by free roaming wildlife. Herds of elephants trample and eat the crops of corn. They break into grain storage units. Governments try to help villagers by building stronger storage units. They supply villagers with ‘chili bombs’ and help them to plant chili hedges to discourage elephants.

In Mfuwe, the village nearest the National Park, people have lots of trouble with elephants. “They come through our village at night and eat all of the mangos,” our driver tells us, “but people in the next village can sleep outside without fear of being trampled.”

I think about this as I fall asleep to the music of cicadas and the loud ‘snoring’ of hippos just outside our chalet along the river. That night we have the very first rainfall of the new rainy season - the first rain in seven or eight months. It will soon transform the region into a lush green forest with wide rivers and newborn animals. Animals, who will hopefully continue to live in their natural habitat without being brought to the brink of extinction.

Photos by Margriet Ruurs.

Jumping Jiminy! It's Snow Flea Season!

By Jan Thornhill

Snow fleas look like hopping black specks in the snow (Rolf Schlangenhaft)

Though there's still two feet of snow covering the forest floor, there are signs everywhere that spring is on its way. Chickadees have started singing their mating song! The warm sun is tatting lace into south-facing snowbanks! The driveway has turned to mud! And sunny depressions and ruts in the snow are liberally sprinkled with black pepper! But, wait a second...why would there be black pepper on the snow? And why is that black pepper JUMPING??

Close-up, tiny snow fleas have a blueish cast. 

The first time I found these leaping blackish blue dots in the snow, I had no clue what they were, so I called them snow fleas—which it turns out is what everybody else calls them, from Russia to Sweden to France— though they're not even remotely related to fleas. What they are is a very interesting type of springtail. 

Springtails are very cute little guys that, though they have six legs like insects, are nonetheless different enough that they're not included in that class: among other little quirks, they have fewer abdominal segments, lack proper compound eyes, and shed their exoskeletons throughout their lives. They also have a special way way of jumping. 

Sminthuridae sp. springtail (Tim Evison/Wikipedia)

Almost all springtails have a tail-like appendage on their abdomen called a furcula. This little device—the biggest springtails themselves are only 3mm long—is folded under the creature's belly and held there under tension by another structure called a retinaculum. When this click mechanism is triggered and the furcula snaps against whatever a springtail is sitting on—be it twig or fallen leaf or crust of snow—the tiny little guy is flung into the air. Kind of like the action of an old tin click toy. This makes it fun to poke your finger into a clutch of snow fleas, which makes them all trigger their devices at once. 

Remember these?

Sadly, springtails have no aiming ability, so they don't have much choice in the direction they go, but the quick random "boings" can be enough to keep them out of the mouths of predators.

Springtails are mini garburators that help to make soil by eating decaying organic matter, algae, fungi and fungi spores, and poop—which is sometimes their own. Thousands can be rummaging though the moist forest floor litter at your feet, but are usually not noticed because they're so incredibly tiny. In the winter, snow fleas are eat spores that accumulate on the surface of melting snow.  

When there's no snow, snow fleas can be found in forest litter.

No one knows exactly why snow fleas creep up through melting channels in snow to the surface on warm days at the end of winter, but the fact that these minute "cold-blooded" creatures are capable of such activity in cold temperatures when other over-wintering insects remain dormant has interested researchers for a long time. 

Thousands of snow fleas in tire ruts in snow... 

...or in crevices. (both photos Rolf Schlangenhaft)

A couple of these researchers, Laurie Graham and Peter Davies of Queen's University have isolated a protein from snow fleas that acts like antifreeze in their bodies. Though there are a number of different animals that have evolved proteins that protect their tissues against the nasty effects of freezing, including the woolly bear caterpillar and the grey tree frog, two characters featured in my recent book, Winter's Coming: A Story of Seasonal Change  about animals preparing for winter, the protein found in snow fleas, has a novel, and possibly very useful characteristic that other animal "antifreezes" don't have: at higher temperatures they break down. The exciting possibility is that this protein might be of use for organ transplants, which could not only be kept colder, and therefore stored longer than they can be now, but also, when the organ is finally used, the protein will be cleared from a patient's before harmful antibodies can form.  

Reference

Graham, L.A. and Davies, P.L. (2005) Glycine-rich antifreeze proteins from snow fleas. Science 310, 461.

Winter Whites: How Snowshoe Hares and Ptarmigan Are Influenced by Climate Change & Evolution

By Jan Thornhill

Josée Bisaillon's illustration of Lily wearing her 
"winter whites" in Winter's Coming.

My most recent book, Winter’s Coming: A Story of Seasonal Change, follows Lily, a young snowshoe hare, as she learns about the ways in which other animals prepare for winter’s arrival. While the forest's leaves turn from green to yellow to brown and eventually fall to the ground, Lily is unaware that she, herself, is gradually changing colour from brown to white.

A young snowshoe hare has no idea that it will turn
completely white in the fall. (NPS/Tim Rains)

Snowshoe Hares

Snowshoe hares are one of seventeen northern animals that have adapted to their environments by undergoing a colour change twice a year. In the autumn these mammals and birds grow white fur or feathers so they’ll be hidden against the snow, and in the spring they trade their glorious whites for a variety of muted browns that provide summer camouflage.

Snowshoe hares turn white for the winter (NPS/Jacob W. Frank)

Right now it’s January and winter’s well under way in the northern hemisphere, which means that throughout their range snowshoe hares are safely camouflaged in their “winter whites.” Unfortunately there’s a new glitch in this fabulous winter adaptation: climate change is causing snow cover to arrive later and disappear earlier than usual in many of the areas where snowshoe hares live. 

Snowshoe hare researchers have been keeping track of this shortening of winter for a few years now and, not surprisingly, it’s not a great situation for the hares: for each extra day their coats are mismatched with their surroundings, there is an increase in mortality from predation.

A snowshoe hare in transition. (D. Sikes/Wikipedia)

Unlike people, snowshoe hares can’t just slip on appropriate clothing at will. Their colour changes are triggered by something neither they nor we can control: the changing length of daylight hours. Because of this, as warming trends continue, the snowshoe hare population is going to take a hard hit. The species, however, will likely bounce back as they gradually adapt to climate change. It’s all about evolution: any hares that turn white later than the majority in the fall or that moult earlier than others into their summer browns will have a greater chance of surviving long enough to breed and pass on this advantageous trait to their offspring.

This might be the only chance the species has since, like my character Lily in Winter’s Coming, snowshoe hares don’t have a clue that they spend half the year white and the other half brown. Researchers have found that in the spring, pure white hares do not seek out and crouch in areas where snow remains, but instead choose open areas where they are easily seen. 

Ptarmigan

Soyeon Kim's illustration of a moulting ptarmigan from Is This Panama?

Ptarmigans are another species that turn white in the winter to match their snowy northern surroundings. Although, like the snowshoe hare, the change in a ptarmigan's plumage is linked to changes in daylight hours, researchers have shown that these birds, unlike snowshoe hares, appear to have an awareness of their colour.  

Ptarmigans are camouflaged by white plumage in the winter, and will
also burrow into snow for warmth. (Xander/Wikipedia)

While both male and female Ptarmigans turn almost pure white in the winter, the females' springtime return to cryptic, camouflaging browns happens considerably earlier than the males'. So, while a female in her mottled summer colours is almost impossible to see once the snow melts, the white feathers the male still sports glow like beacons against the greens and browns of their habitat. Which makes them a target for predators such as gyrfalcons. But, apparently, standing out is the whole point: their flashy whites impress the girls, and impressing the girls is more important than hiding from predators. The really interesting thing, though, is that once the females begin egg-laying and are no longer receptive to the males' attentions, the males go out of their way to muddy their white feathers, masking the glaring white with smears of brown dirt for a couple of weeks until their spring moult is complete.

A female willow ptarmigan is well camouflaged in the spring after
she grows her cryptic breeding plumage. (Jan Thornhill)

Male ptarmigans keep their conspicuous white feathers longer than
the females in the spring to attract the girls. (Jan Thornhill)

To prove that this feather-soiling activity wasn't just a coincidence, during a 17-year study, Bob Montgomerie of Queen's University and his team purposely dirtied the white feathers of males early in the mating season with markers when the females were still receptive. This sullying of the birds showy "winter whites" so disturbed the amorous males, that they went to work, primping and preening, making their handsome white feathers once again immaculate within 48 hours.  

Soyeon Kim's illustration of a moulting ptarmigan from Is This Panama?

References:

Zimova M, LS Mills, PM Lukacs and MS Mitchell (2014). Snowshoe hares display limited phenotypic plasticity to mismatch in seasonal camouflage. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: 281(1782).
Mills LS, et al. (2013) Camouflage mismatch in seasonal coat color due to decreased snow duration Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110(18):7360-7365.
Montgomerie, Robert; Lyon, Bruce; Holder, Karen, 2001: Dirty ptarmigan: Behavioral modification of conspicuous male plumage. Behavioral Ecology 12(4): 429-438


Kids' Resources:

Shameless plug for my two most recent books, Winter's Coming: A Story of Seasonal Change (illustrated by Soyeon Kim), and Is This Panama? A Migration Story (illustrated by Josée Bisaillon)