Year after year, monarch butterflies make Mexico’s Sierra Madre their winter home. For years, scientists struggled to figure out how they knew where to go. They recently discovered the answer: the butterfly’s antennae. (In Spanish with English subtitles)
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After spending numerous meetings with Maya Lin at the Academy and seeing how she distilled the stories told by some of the most venerable figures in the field of conservation biology into a final artwork, it seemed fitting that we should give a voice to someone who took a chance to give a different perspective to science. Shaped like a giant megaphone, the “Listening Cone” unveiled September 17, 2009 on the Academy’s East Terrace is not just an art exhibit, nor is it just a memorial. It is at once a portal to planet Earth and a sounding device to the work that is currently being done to conserve its resources. Take your shoes off and step inside!
The Listening Cone is part of a multi-site memorial called “What is Missing”. To learn more about what others are doing and what you can do to prevent species and habitat loss visit a selection of the institutions and organizations that played an advisory role to the “What is Missing” project.
Cornell Lab of Ornithology
National Geographic Society
Conservation International
National Resources Defense Council
World Wildlife Fund
Freedom to Roam
-Lindsay
When Jean-Michel Cousteau came to give a presentation at Nightlife this spring, we had the great opportunity to interview him for Science in Action.
Because of his work to help establish the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument in 2006, we thought this would be a good subject to have him discuss. California Academy of Sciences researchers were instrumental in the monuments declared earlier this year and we wanted to do a story on it.
These designations, covering over 325,000 square miles of ocean, represent former President Bush’s so-called Blue Legacy. A very surprising legacy, indeed.
A voyage across the ocean in a plastic boat seems an unlikely way to fight the buildup of plastic in the ocean. Yet that is just what David de Rothschild and team are planning as they build a 60 foot boat made entirely from recycled plastic. Dubbed “Plastiki”, after Thor Hyerdahl’s “Kon-Tiki” that made a similar voyage in 1947, the vessel is being manufactured out of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) - the same material used to make water bottles. Their goal is to change the public view of plastic as a one-use material into one that sees plastic for what it really is - a cheap and versatile raw material that can be reused time and time again.
The voyage calls attention to the toxic soup created from decades of dumping used plastic into the ocean. The mess created by our throw-away society has been consolidated by the winds and currents of the North Pacific Gyre into vast floating garbage patches. Much of the plastic is visible - bottles, toys, bags, netting, etc., but most of what is floating is invisible, because over time, plastic breaks apart into micro-particles. In some areas of the gyre the ratio of plastic to plankton is as high six to one. Birds, fish and mammals choke on and are poisoned by the bigger pieces, while the tiny particles are ingested by small marine life and enter the food chain. To make matters worse, the micro-particles attract and absorb toxic chemicals that are ingested as well.
As de Rothschild likes to say, the solution to pollution is not dilution. We need to change our thinking about the life cycle of plastic. The voyage of Plastiki demonstrates that plastic is not the problem – it’s how we use plastic. We don’t think of steel as a material to be dumped in the ocean after a single use. Steel is melted down and reformed. We can do the same with plastic - it is a matter of changing how we view it.
-Pete
They say necessity is the mother of all invention, and 20 years ago after the large oil spill of the Exxon Valdez, hairdresser Phil McCrory saw a need and discovered a solution. Human hair absorbs oil naturally, why not in large oil spills? He invented hair mats, testing them in his backyard and even at NASA. Lisa Craig Gautier and her organization, Matter of Trust have taken it a step further. They’re collecting human hair and dog fur from around the globe and are trying to manufacture the mats stateside. Lisa is so hard-working and her organization is so wonderfully holistic, it’s easy to be inspired by the work she does.
She’s also working with researchers on a safe disposal method for the used, oil-filled mats. It looks like Thomas Azwell of UC Berkeley might be on to something with his army of worms. Check it out. Oil, hair, worms - not a pretty story, but an important one.
-Molly
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