Seahorses mate for life (one to five years), a rare trait among fish. When they’re ready to pair and breed, single males wind their tails around an anchor of sea grass or coral. Once secured, they put on a showy display of colours, hoping to catch the eye of an interested female. Unpaired females browse the displaying males as if shopping for new shoes – too big, too small, just right – and they really are shopping for the right fit. A seahorse’s size depends on its age, and females tend to select mates their own size.

When a female has made her selection, the new couple begins a long sensual courtship, dancing together, sometimes for a full day, to the rhythms of the sea—floating, circling, stretching, and curling. His tail wrapped around her body, like an arm thrown around her waist, they allemande left, doe-see-doe, and bow to their partners. In sinuous rapture, they shoot for the surface, belly to belly, snouts to the sky, tails trailing below, long and straight. They flirt. She turns away. He nudges her. She turns back. They gracefully rub heads and necks until finally, with tails intertwined, they spiral slowly back to the sandy seafloor.

When the ballet is over, they wrap themselves in a tight embrace and mate, the female depositing her eggs into the male’s pouch. Then the male fastens himself again to the sea grass and the female leaves, disappearing into the undersea meadow. Each morning, from then on, she will return to visit him, and they will briefly dance before she returns to the meadow. It is this daily ritual – her morning visit and their dance – that binds this seahorse couple together. From now on they will mate and produce young every month for the rest of their lives.

My girl!

On this day in 1983 I had a baby.

She was born at home, attended by two Certified Nurse Midwives (CNMs) and a birthing assistant, all of whom were associated with a nearby birth centre. I’m not going to relate all the details here, because the only thing more boring than other people’s vacation pictures is other mothers’ birth stories. But I will say this, complications ensued (APGAR = 2), the CNM’s acted with extreme speed and professionalism and my daughter, after spending a week in the DC Children’s Hospital ICU, came home on Valentine’s Day, happy and healthy.

The only other fact relevant here is that her pediatrician assured me afterwards, that if I had had her in the local county hospital, she would have been born with the exact same problem and, from there, everything would have proceeded identically, including her transfer to Children’s Hospital. In other words, her problem and the course and timing of her treatment were not related to having her at home.

Now, all that said, I am not here to evangelize for homebirths. In fact, my original topic for this post was just the opposite. I was going to tell how, after all these years, I have had a change of heart and now think that homebirth is probably a poor (if not dangerous) option for mothers and babies.

Up to 37% of women planning a home birth with their first pregnancy end up being transferred to the hospital because of emergencies that arise during the labor process.—Harriet Hall (sciencebasedmedicine.org)

I was going to tell you how mine was a decision made by a young mom (22!) who didn’t have a way to really research the safety of homebirths. There was no internet. All I had was my college library (remember how we did literature searches back then?) and popular books on childbirth. But, I did try to do my homework and based on what I found, I decided that home birth was a safe option. But I had no way to really know.

Then I was going to tell you how I have recently come to the opposite conclusion. Not that I’ve immersed myself in the topic. I am long past having babies. But joining the online science community has exposed me to all kinds of people, discussions, and topics I never would have sought out on my own. One of those topics has been homebirths, which, because of my own experience, still catches my eye. And one of those people is Dr. Amy Tuteur, ObGyn.

Dr. Tuteur is smart, well-spoken, seasoned, and most definitely no slouch when it comes to her profession. She is also vocally anti-homebirth and blogs strongly against it in several places.  She is so vocal in online comments, in fact, that for awhile there was a rumour (unfounded) that she was, in fact, not even a person, but a team of people hired to denigrate homebirths. She’s that passionate.

…all the existing scientific evidence and all national statistics indicate that homebirth triples the rate of neonatal death. – Dr. Amy Tuteur (skepticalOB.blogspot.com)

To me she seemed trustworthy, so I started following her with some interest and have been mentally writing a blog post about my change of heart on the homebirth front based on what she has said.  She and other medical professionals opened my eyes to data and information that I didn’t have access to 29 years ago, and a lot it looked pretty frightening.    But then, some of what I read on her blog and Facebook page, along with comments made by people who support her, started to bother me.

Let’s go back a minute: One of the reasons I had turned away from the homebirth arena was that somewhere between 1983 and now it had turned into a movement. Movements are always suspect, especially when they become extreme. And that’s what had happened: Homebirth went from an option to a belief system. And the trouble with that is that people who share a strong belief system tend to reinforce each other and shun anything that is contrary to their belief, no matter how grounded in reality the new information is. With that comes a closed mindset that says you are either in or out; there is no in between.

Some babies require medical intervention

So today in the homebirth realm we get mantras like, “your body knows what to do”, “a breech birth is just another kind of normal”, “reclaim your body”, “birth is safe; intervention is risky” and how, if things go badly, “your decision to go to the hospital still belongs to you.” Add that to the fact that much of the homebirth movement has gotten all mixed up in homeopathy, waterbirths, unassisted births, the anti-vax movement, and enough other dubious practices that the whole thing reeks of woo.

So I wasn’t surprised to find that there were doctors speaking out against homebirths – not to protect their jobs, as some homebirthers would have you believe, but to protect women and babies. Yes, we’ve been having babies for millions of years, but women and infants have been dying for millions of years. Just look at the infant and mother mortality stats (and more importantly, perinatal mortality rates) for countries without maternal healthcare to see how far we’ve come.

Worldwide these mortality rates have improved, not because more women are having babies at home, but because more women have access to obstetric healthcare and hospitals. That’s why we have obstetrical support for childbirth. It SAVES LIVES. It certainly saved my daughter’s.

But now the same kind of fanaticism that surrounds homebirthers, surrounds the anti-homebirth movement. Again we have people evangelizing about the one-and-only safe way to have babies – in a hospital under the care of an MD, enveloped by all of the trappings of modern medicine. Anti-homebirthers, many of them followers (dare I say, disciples) of Dr. Tuteur are just as shrill and polemic as the homebirthers.

So what is the answer? Well, I certainly don’t have it. The whole debate has become too polarized and both sides are shouting and not listening. I will say this, however. I don’t believe there is one answer that fits all.

..not all home births are created equal and one with an experienced, well-trained certified nurse midwife (CNM) with a hospital-based, backup OB and hospital access is the gold standard if home birth is your choice. –Emily Willingham

I believe that, for a whole bunch of reasons, the hospital is absolutely the right place for many women to have their babies. I also believe that a well-equipped birth centre or home is a fine place too as long as you have a fully-qualified and experienced CNM (not a lay midwife or CPM) with medical backup and support nearby. Frankly, I think having your baby by yourself or with a lay midwife out on the farm is just asking for tragedy.

So all of this has been rolling around in my mind for the past few weeks as I pondered this post and how I was going to approach it. And then, like a wish come true, I came across this post, by Emily Willingham, written as a clarification and expansion on her Slate post.  And she did it… she brought a measured view to the issue –without drama, extremism, and, importantly, without falling into the trap of having to align herself with a pro- or anti-homebirth camp.

So, if you have found your way to this blog post because you are debating a homebirth, set aside an hour of your life and click that link. Read Emily’s post end-to-end, and then read every single comment after it. There you will find a balanced discussion by thoughtful people who, for the most part, are not part of either reactive community. Click through to as many of her links as you have time for. At least get the 3 or 4 and the end of her post.

Also read Dr. Tuteur’s blog. It will scare you. And it should. Birthing a baby is not a trivial act. People do die in this process, so don’t just blow her off as a fanatic. Take what she’s saying seriously and think hard before you decide where to have your baby and who should be in attendance. If you are leaning towards homebirth, look out your window and ask yourself how fast you and/or your baby could get to a hospital if the need arises, because there is a pretty good chance it will.

Both blogs are worth reading and I think you’ll come away with a more balanced view of homebirth and a better sense of how to choose where you will spend your baby’s birth day.

(Happy birthday Xan!)

This will not save you

As I sit here on my 5th ..6th ..7th .. (what day are we on?) day of marathon writing, trying to meet an impossible February 1st deadline, I can’t help but think about some recent studies and articles on the dangers inherent in our sedentary lifestyles. Then today, a fabulous video on the subject crossed my path, so I want to share that with you. But first, some background.

For decades doctors have studied the positive effects of activity. By now we should all know that if you exercise more, you’ll be more healthy — physically and mentally.  I don’t even need to give you links for that. But what if you’re pretty happy with how you look and feel? Does that get you out of exercising?

To find that out, someone had to study the problem from the opposite viewpoint– how does being sedentary affect health? Well, the folks over at Obesity Panacea have been talking about the whole field of sedentary physiology for some time. Check them out for a run down of what science knows about that. But meanwhile, I’ll jump straight to the spoiler:

Being sedentary is killing us.

Alright, that’s dramatic, but really, our bodies aren’t meant to sit in our chairs, recline on our couches, and sleep in our beds for 12..15…23 hours a day.  The fact is, the longer we sit, the sooner we die.

Now that first study targeted television-watchers, a cohort that doesn’t include me. But those of us who sit at our computers all day are no better off. Sitting is sitting, no matter what you’re doing or how much you spent on your ergonomic office chair.

Nor will this

So, what to do?  Well, some people have resorted to using standing desks but, as any cashier or surgeon will tell you, standing in one place all day long isn’t good for you either.   Alex Hutchinson of SweatScience provides some straight-talk on standing desks in a recent  Globe and Mail Jockology column.

What you don’t need to do is resort to fancy gadgets or pricy gym memberships you’ll never get your money’s worth from. No, there’s an easier answer:

To gain a measurable health and lifespan improvement over sitting, just get up and walk around.

And the operative term there is “get up.”  Sitting on an exercise ball, doing curls or butt-squeezes from your chair, lying on your back stretching — this is not getting up.

Here's the ticket!

So, that’s the cure. What’s the dose?  It turns out, only thirty minutes a day out of your chair (or bed or couch or car)  is enough to measurably reduce the negative health effects of a sedentary lifestyle. Everything after that is certainly a bonus (and recommended!), but incremental in its overall health gains. That first step is really the one that matters.

Now, since I’m short on time (remember that deadline I mentioned?).. I’m going to let Dr. Mike Evans talk to you about the 30 minutes and what effect is will have on your health.

Watch it while you’re walking around and you’re 9 minutes into your 30. Now go!

Patel, A., Bernstein, L., Deka, A., Feigelson, H., Campbell, P., Gapstur, S., Colditz, G., & Thun, M. (2010). Leisure Time Spent Sitting in Relation to Total Mortality in a Prospective Cohort of US Adults American Journal of Epidemiology, 172 (4), 419-429 DOI: 10.1093/aje/kwq155

Veerman, J., Healy, G., Cobiac, L., Vos, T., Winkler, E., Owen, N., & Dunstan, D. (2011). Television viewing time and reduced life expectancy: a life table analysis British Journal of Sports Medicine DOI: 10.1136/bjsm.2011.085662

AND .. as exciting as that is (and it really is!) .. it also means that I get to bestow the award on 5 other bloggers!

In the interest of not reinventing the wheel, I’m going to take the award description directly from Paul’s post:

“Liebster” is a German word meaning dearest, beloved or favorite, and the Liebster Award is sort of a chain letter among bloggers that’s intended to showcase exceptional up-and-coming blogs (typically, those with 200 or fewer followers). Now, there’s no evaluation committee or formal award process for the Liebster, but in a way it’s even nicer – it’s recognition that a peer has noticed and appreciated your hard work.

This is exciting for me!  I really appreciate Paul taking notice of my little corner of the blogosphere.  The blogging universe is a big one and hard place to get noticed.  Some days you feel like your only readers are your friends and family (hi mom!) and you wonder if your visitor count will ever regularly hit the triple digits .. much less the thousands. So being recognized by a more established blogger like Paul is important in building buzz and gaining readers. (plus it feels soooo good!)

The Liebster Blog Award is based on peer recognition, and in that light there are rules that go along with it. Most importantly, recipients have to pass on the love:

1. Show thanks to the blogger who gave you the award by linking back to them.
2. Reveal your top five picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.
3. Post the award on your blog.
4. Bask in the love from some of the most supportive people on the internet—other writers and artists.
5. And best of all – have fun and spread the karma.

I’ve put a lot of thought into my selections. As I said in an early post, my readership is divided between science writers and the literature and fiction-writing community so I wanted to recognize people in both of those areas.  I think at least one of my choices is a blogger who falls well above the  “under 200 followers” parameter, but I think it’s worth promoting the blog anyway.

So .. <drumroll>.. my selections for the next round of Liebster Awards go to:

Cheryl Rainfield

“I know that as a teen being sexually abused, I would often give someone a passage to read from a book to try to help someone understand. I wish I’d had such a book to help others understand about self-harm. That is part of why I wrote Scars.” — Cheryl Rainfield

For an author and blogger who covers some of the most decidedly un-fun topics a person can imagine (child abuse, incest, self-harm and suicide) Cheryl’s blog is a place of surprising excitement and energy.  Blog posts flow from her keyboard almost daily, each one filled with enthusiasm, love, and, more often than not, links to free (!) stuff  – all of it geared towards her young adult readers.  On her blog and via Twitter, Cheryl hosts a dizzying array of contests, prize drawing, live chats, Q&A sessions, and mental health support information for teens.   As near as I can tell, every single commenter gets a sincere response from Cheryl, and it’s clear she appreciates her young readers as much as they admire her.   Follow Cheryl on Twitter.

Cheryl’s books:

Jess Lahey: Coming of Age in the Middle

“It’s part of my job to teach my students to be brave and view their failures as learning opportunities. To buck up and return to the place of their defeat and ask for help.  I’m just grateful I get to be in that place when they show up.”  –Jess Lahey

If you are completely fed up with the education system, certain that teachers care more about contracts than students, and you figure it doesn’t matter anyway because “kids today” are a distracted and apathetic lot, then I challenge you to spend 30 minutes on Jess Lahey’s blog and not come away changed.

Jess blogs on her trials and successes teaching English and Latin to middle-grade students. Never disparaging or complaining, Jess speaks of her young students with consideration and respect. She carefully analyses their failures, rejoices in their successes, and reflects on her role as more than just a teacher of language.

Jess is a gifted writer and her blog posts are thoughtful, compassionate and solidly-grounded in the good earth of her New Hampshire gentlewoman farm. In her capable hands, even a cat story becomes a lyrical reflection on life, writing, and teaching.  Now, if she would just finish her book…

Follow Jess on Twitter

Lindsey Fitzharris: The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice

“This website is dedicated to a study of early modern chirurgeons, and all the blood and gore that comes with it.” — Lindsey Fitzharris

What’s not to love about that?

Chirurgeon (that’s ki-RUR-jun according to Webster’s audio clip) was the 17^th century word for surgeon, the early body explorers who were more like tradesmen than doctors.

Lindsey’s eclectic collection of posts spans the gamut from the realities of the dissecting theatre to the concepts of death in the 19^th century,  to the horrors of vivisection on living animals.  A Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London,  Lindsey is available to answer readers’ questions and provide professional consultation.  Follow Lindsey on Twitter.

Brenda Schmidt: Alone on a Boreal Stage

“Nov 24 – No wind today. No waxwings so far. Another deadline met, another to go. I just uncovered the big box of books and journals now parked beside my desk. The flagged pages will have my attention until the new year.” — Brenda Schmidt

Photo: Brenda Schmidt

Brenda is a poet, author, bird watcher, painter and taker of pictures.  She’s not new to blogging but she’s new to me and so maybe there are others out there who aren’t familiar with her and her little corner of the blogosphere.

I like what Brenda does on her blog with photographs, especially those of books – showing us what she’s reading or announcing where she’s been published.  It’s a nice visual way to present information that most people just plop into a list.  (I might even steal the idea!)  Brenda’s fine eye for art and ear for poetry and literary form come together nicely on this simple, but elegant blog. Follow Brenda on Twitter.

 Felicity Muth: Not Bad Science

“…I’ll not only tell you about dog behaviour, but also all the hot-off-the-press research in bees, rooks, ravens, humans, elephants, fish, chimps, and just about anything else capable of behaviour (which you’ll be surprised to find stretches farther than you’d imagine- see the irrational slime moulds).”  Felicity Muth

Felicity is a newcomer to the science blog community. She is PhD student researching animal behaviour and cognition.  Her blog, launched in June 2011, presents clear, straightforward explanations of recent discoveries and research in those fields.  She tells us that spiders can smell us (ewww), fish change their behavior depending on who’s watching, and that dogs may be trying to tell us more than we understand.  Whatever the animal or the behavior, Felicity seems to have her finger on the pulse of the science behind it. You can follow Felicity on Twitter.

Again, thank you Paul for the Liebster Award. Besides making me feel good, it really got me thinking about other blogs that I like. I’m glad to have had the chance to make my own nominations. And now, I am going to commit myself wholly to Liebster Blog rule #4: Basking in the love ….

To those of you who linked to me, tweeted and promoted my posts, and otherwise took notice, I am entirely grateful. You’ve been instrumental in bringing my blog to public light.

1.  For the Love of Chemicals

This post has garnered an enormous amount of interest, primarily because of its connection to Deborah Blum’s wonderful series on Chemical Free Chemistry.  Her posts (and others) inspired me to reflect on why our use of language is important when shaping young people’s image of science, in general, and of chemistry in this particular case. For me, the quotes from Primo Levi illustrate the true wonderment a scientist can have for his or her subject when they aren’t tainted by fear or social pressure.

2. If I am Eaten by a Polar Bear

This is one of those posts that I just dashed off in a reactive moment and which went largely unnoticed. Then months later, when the subject of “revenge killing” of animals came up in the news,  I tweeted it out again and it caught fire! (Timing is everything)  I guess informing the world that if I am killed by an animal, I do not want it killed, resonated with a lot of people.  Later in the week I was honored to feel the full shock and awe of the Ed Yong Effect after he put my post on his Missing Links Top Picks of the week.

3.  Romeo: A Lone Wolf’s Tragedy in Three Acts

While it didn’t get the most hits, this post received the biggest honor that I think a science blog post can get: Selection for publication in Open Laboratory 2012 as one of the top 50 science blog posts of 2011. I talk a little bit about that here, but I’ll say again, this is a huge honor for a new blogger like me.

This post is a great illustration of finding stories in unexpected places. I spent a week in Alaska touring, sighting whales and other wildlife, listening to naturalist lectures, and taking volumes of notes and photos, all the while trying to come up with something unique to write about.  This story came from an aside by our bus driver on the way to Mendenhall Glacier. She just casually mentioned that, among the wildlife at Mendenhall, there use to be a lone wolf who romped with visitors but he had been killed by hunters. She seemed unusually angry about the situation, so I made a short note to remind myself to follow up when I got home. That led me to Romeo’s story.

I feel pretty attached to Romeo now and bought myself a copy of John Hyde’s book for Christmas. The photos are, as predicted, stunning and his personal acquaintance with Romeo is touching.

4. And Then There Came Fungus

This post on the “mysterious and creepy tornado fungus” that wasn’t so mysterious or creepy, really, caught the eye of researchblogging.org editor Vincent Racaniello and garnered me an Editor’s Pick (and a nice rush of visitors) that week.

5. An Unlikely Heroine

This post tying bdelloid rotifers to feminist literature (Now there’s a combo!) was the other of my posts to be nominated to Open Laboratory. An exciting moment in my first 3 months of blogging!  I wish I could remember who nominated it (we had a brief Twitter exchange that I can’t track down).  But whoever you are, thank you again.

So those are the posts that had an impact this past year. I’m looking forward to 2012 and hope to get my blogging feet more firmly under me over the course of the year.  Really, writing this blog, specifically the science posts, has been some of the most rewarding writing I have ever done.

Thank you all for a wonderful inaugural year.

More meaningful than presents?

In this season of giving, I’d like to offer up a suggestion for a last-minute gift exchange that has meaning and doesn’t involve battling crowds at the mall: Exchange donations.

I don’t mean just dropping off toys at the firehouse or sending your kids to school with non-perishable food items for the food-bank box. I mean turning at least part of your Christmas gift exchange into a Donation Exchange.

I know I’m not just speaking for myself when I say I don’t need any more stuff. Really. But there are people who do need things, so why not channel the money you’d spend on gifts to them?

This post won’t be so much about where to donate your money, (though I’ll make some suggestions along the way), but on different ways that families and friends manage a donation exchange.

At the simplest level, you could just announce to your friends and family that, in lieu of gifts, you’d prefer them to make a donation, in your name. You could either identify a cause you’d like to support or let them decide on something. This column makes some really good suggestions as to how to go about communicating that preference to your friends and family.

What you’d hope, is that they agree to do the same thing in return — allow you to donate to something on their behalf.  (I personally think it’s presumptuous to make a donation in lieu of a gift if the recipient hasn’t made that request).   And who knows, you might even learn something about your friends and family –

Much to my surprise, the exchange was a bonding civic experience for my family…Up to that point, I didn’t even know if my kin supported causes. I found out through the exchange that most of them supported at least a couple causes. Their choices revealed a side of them I hadn’t seen before.

– Neal Gorenflo, How I Avoided Holiday Shopping Through a Donation Exchange

Several years ago, once our kids hit their teen years, we started doing a donation exchange with my brother-in-law’s family.  Rather than buy each others children gifts, we simply make a donation in the name of the other family. Our rule is that the donation must assist people (rather, than say, Save the Whales), but other than that, no restrictions.

We’ve also fallen into a routine of gift-wrapping something inexpensive that symbolizes the gift and we exchange those on Christmas Eve — fun wigs for Angel Hair for Kids; small stuffed animals for Heifer International; Bags with $3 worth of groceries (1-day’s worth for a low-income family) for our local food bank; The Half the Sky book to go with a donation to one of their recommended charities.

In another family I know, the grandparents take the money they would have spent on their 17 grandchildren, and donate that to a cause selected by the grandchildren. The “kids” (many of them are in their 20′s now) confer by email before Christmas and then send a card with their Donation Wish to the grandparents.  At the grandchildren’s request, they’ve made substantial donations to Kiva, Heifer International, and to local charities.

(Kiva’s kind of neat. Your donation is really a micro-loan. Once the recipient pays it back, you can reinvest it. It really is the gift that keeps on giving.)

Some families “adopt” a needy family through their church or a community organization. Each adult member of the extended family donates a fixed amount to a fund.  A family member contacts the organization, tells them how much they have to donate, and the church matches them up with a family in need. That family submits a Christmas wish list and the donor family shops for the recipients. While this may not get you out of the mall, you’ll sure feel better about buying items that actually make a difference in someone’s Christmas — or life.

Families can also sponsor a family on a more ongoing basis through international organizations such as International Rescue Committee.

Exchanging donations isn’t for everyone. To some people, the whole joy of the holiday season is the selection of just the right gift for each person they care for. And, frankly, some folks really like receiving gifts. They look forward to seeing what their loved ones have picked out especially for them. That’s fair.

But if you have switched to exchanging charitable donations or if your family has a special way in which it does this, I’d like to hear from you.  Post your comments below.

Deep Sea Swag!

That’s the gorgeous book, Poseidon’s Steed, by Helen Scales –truly a lovely natural history of seahorses and human’s relationship with these remarkable creatures.  Then there’s a pad of seahorse paper, perfectly pocket-sized for note-taking at the zoo; a dancy squid with springy tentacles (he’s a refrigerator magnet!) and an official Scripps Institution of Oceanography coffee mug.

So, what did I do to deserve this fun collection from Scripps?

I donated money to Donorschoose.org as part of the Science Bloggers for Students Challenge. Donorschoose.org is a great program where teachers who need classroom supplies post their needs and donors contribute money to fulfill those needs.

Mr. Hosmer's Ocean's In Front of Us Classroom

One of the blogs I supported was Ocean & Geobloggers member, Deep Sea News (DSN).  At the end of the challenge, they did a random draw of donors and I was the winner!  (I had no idea they were even drawing!) So, yay for cool ocean swag and thank you to the folks at DSN and Scripps who made it happen.

Now I want to take a minute here to do a plug for Donorschoose.org. If you’re looking for a way to make a direct impact on education and children, this is the way to do it.

From their “How it works” page:

DonorsChoose.org is an online charity that makes it easy for anyone to help students in need.

Here’s how it works: public school teachers from every corner of America post classroom project requests on DonorsChoose.org. Requests range from pencils for a poetry writing unit, to violins for a school recital, to microscope slides for a biology class.

Then, you can browse project requests and give any amount to the one that inspires you. Once a project reaches its funding goal, we deliver the materials to the school.

You’ll get photos of your project taking place, a thank-you letter from the teacher, and a cost report showing how each dollar was spent. If you give over $50, you’ll also receive hand-written thank-you letters from the students.

I’m happy to have supported three projects so far:

• Miraculous Microscopes
• The Ocean in Front of Us
• Scoping out Cells

Two of these donations were made possible by the Science Bloggers for Students Board of Directors who provided a match for all donations made to the challenge between October 20^th and 22^nd.

So, if you’re looking to make a holiday donation, check out Donorschoose.org.

And, if you’re in the US (and maybe Canada?) be sure to catch BBC’s Frozen Planet on the Discovery Channel in March. I’ve see it, and I assure you, you’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve been watching nature documentaries my whole life, and this just blew me away.

Also, this is important: Americans reading this should know that originally the Discovery Channel only agreed to air 6 of the 7 episodes. Why? you ask. Because the last episode shows something that apparently Americans aren’t equipped to cope with.  Are you ready for this? It contains information about …. CLIMATE CHANGE.

I know. I was shocked.

However, faced with enormous public backlash, The Discovery Channel conceded and will be airing all seven segments, the final one narrated by David Attenborough himself.  (I guess they don’t think we can handle too much Attenborough either. The first six segments will be narrated by Alec Baldwin.)

So again, it is a wonderful world.

Romeo

I am incredibly pleased to announce that my post Romeo: A Lone Wolf’s Tragedy in Three Acts, was selected for publication in Open Lab 2012, an anthology of the some of the best science blogging on the web.

This announcement comes a bit late in “internet time” — a full 3 days after I receive the email from Jennifer Ouellette.  But I’m not a yipeee jump up and shriek sort of person – especially for myself. Also, I do feel that certain people deserve to hear Big News first (and BIG this was!).

My order of operation was simple: Husband (over a toast during my birthday dinner: “Honey, I have news …” ), parents, close friends and family, my writing group, and only then, Twitter ….and the world.

But while my announcement comes late, the honor itself comes early in my blogging career. My first post went up February 25, 2010. Romeo went up on August 27, almost 6 months to the day after I began.  Three months later, this. What better confirmation can a blogger ask for, really?

So first, a humble thank you to the editors/judges of Open Lab 2012: Editor, Jennifer Ouellette, Bora Zivkovic, Scientific American Blog Editor, and Amanda Moon, Senior Editor, Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I appreciate the effort that you must have put in and know it couldn’t have been easy to make the final selections. Thank you very much.

It’s an honor to be amongst such a great group of writers. There are so many people on that final list (and in the science blogging community at large) I admire. First, of course are the veterans – those scientist and journalists whose names I recognized from books, newspapers, and magazines. You are the first people I found when I stumbled my way into Twitter six months ago and you are the level heads, critical thinkers, and seasoned writers I consistently take my cues from.

But really, it’s you young bloggers who leave me in awe –the students and young scientists and writers whose unfettered enthusiasm, grasp of science, and pure hutzpah have completely blown me away.  Unlike me, you folks came of age in this world of blogging, tweeting, and online discourse and you’ve embraced it in the most positive way I can imagine. I’m thrilled (and hugely relieved) to know you’re out there taking the world head-on in the name of delivering accurate and immensely readable science to the public.

So congratulations to all of the fine writers who made the cut for Open Lab 2012 and also to those who, just by nature of print-publishing constraints, had to be one of the darlings killed in the final selection. I’m looking forward to another great year of being part of the science blogging community and, most especially, to the publication of Open Lab 2012.

Check out this picture:

That, of course, is Sir David Attenborough. In his hand is an elephant bird egg.  He, and that egg are featured in a 2011 BBC documentary on Madagascar that I’ve just finished watching, called, Attenborough and the Giant Egg.   In the 3-part series, Attenborough shows, through archival video, how he came to be in possession of the egg during his first visit to Madagascar in 1960, while filming an episode of the BBC TV series ZooQuest. This video clip, in which a young Attenborough receives his egg (in the form of several large pieces) and reassembles it with medical tape, is a gem worth watching.

Attenborough then retraces his steps, now 50 years later, updating the audience on Madagascar today and providing more information on what is known about elephant birds and what he has learned about his egg – including its age (which I’ll get to later).

I’m not going to recount the details about elephant birds here.  The basics you can find on Wikipedia. For the rest I’d highly encourage you to watch the BBC production.

But I do want to say that the minute I saw Attenborough’s Giant Egg, I thought, Wait! I’ve seen that egg! Ok, not that exact one, but an elephant bird egg.

Me and the elephant bird egg (c 1968)

One day when I was in 4^th grade, I came home from school all excited. In my Weekly Reader News Magazine was a story about the discovery of a giant egg laid by a bird called the elephant bird. Now, an enormous egg (1 foot tall!) was exciting enough, but even more exciting was this: The egg was on display at the Smithsonian. I could SEE it!  So that I did. My parents took me to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (aren’t they the best!), and there it was:  The Egg in all of its giant awesomeness.

Back then, I didn’t really know much about the elephant bird, except whatever short blurb my Weekly Reader provided.  To me, the amazing part was the enormity of the egg itself, the fact that it was ancient, and that it belonged to some giant extinct bird. What else does an 8 year old need to know?

Now, after a bit of research, I know that the egg was one of two intact eggs collected in Madagascar in 1967 by National Geographic Photographer, Luis Marden.  (This makes sense. I think I saw it 1967 or 68)

The research expedition to Madagascar and the story of the elephant bird and its eggs were featured in the October 1967 National Geographic Magazine along with a great artistic rendering of how the animal must have looked.

National Geographic Oct 1967

The discovery of the intact (and Attenborough’s mostly intact) eggs was exciting. That was the big news back in the 1960’s.  But today even more is known about elephant birds and their reproduction.  I’ll cover just a few of the recent findings here.

50 years after collecting his egg, Attenborough had it carbon dated.  Most elephant bird eggshells had been dated to around 900 years ago.  To Sir David’s surprise, his egg proved to be 1300 years old. Imagine, an eggshell lasting that long!  Of course, these weren’t delicate little sparrow eggs. When you look at the video of Attenborough handling and repairing the egg, you realize how robust that shell really is.

One would expect the shell to scale up, not only in size, but in shell thickness, as baby bird size increases.  But it turns out, in some birds the shell thickness is correlated more strongly with the mass of the parent than with the mass of the developing chick.

Well that makes sense.  The parent bird has to actually sit on the egg without crushing it.  But that then begs the question, how do you provide such a thick protective shell without making it so thick that chicks cannot peck their way out? This is a conundrum that probably places an upper limit on the size of birds.

One way to tackle the conundrum, which may apply to the half-ton elephant birds, is for the species to have a sexual dimorphism with males being smaller. In this way, the large females can carry and lay big eggs with proportionally thin shells, but the lighter males can do the incubating, thus avoiding shell breakage.  This could explain why females outweigh males in the largest of species of extant birds. It may also explain the difference in elephant bird egg sizes. Notice the one in the Smithsonian is appreciably smaller than Attenborough’s egg. It could be that the largest eggs contain the larger female chicks.

Xray elephant bird egg (Nat Geo, 1967)

We also know more about the chicks themselves today.

To our astonishment and gratification, the larger of the two eggs brought back from Madagascar by the GEOGRAPHIC’s Luis Marden proved to contain the remains of a well-developed embryo. X-ray photographs clearly show bones of a chick, perhaps three-fourths developed. Stereoscopic X-ray pictures were even more eloquent and scientifically valuable.

That early image was good for the time, but revealed little more than the shadows of bones.

In 2007 however, the other egg (mine!) was scanned using high-resolution X-ray computed tomography (HRCT).  Now we’re talking real x-ray vision! Take a look at what that revealed:

HRCT Scan of aepyonis egg (A.M. Balanoff , Digital Morphology Group, Univ of Texas)

This image is the best anyone has ever had of an elephant bird embryo.  The skeleton had disarticulated and settled into the bottom of the egg but with the HRCT, researchers were able to digitally isolate and identify over half of the skeleton, including the braincase, palate, rostrum, vertebral column, and both the fore- and hindlimbs.

What’s really neat is that they can reassemble some of the bones digitally. Check out what they did with the skull bones:

Click to view a roll animation of the reconstructed embryonic Aepyornis skull.

Click to view a yaw animation of the reconstructed embryonic Aepyornis skull.

Kiwi skeleton with egg

One other question that’s been raised is how (or more correctly, where) the female elephant bird carries her egg. Most birds carry their eggs in the rear of their pelvic cavity.  However, there is one species that carries its inordinately large egg toward the front of its body.  This is the kiwi.

Comparisons of the pelvic bones of the elephant bird with those of other palaeognaths (kiwis, cassowaries, and emus) indicates that the elephant bird may have carried her eggs in a similar fashion to the kiwi in order to provide stable support for such a large egg.
 
 
Finally, I leave you with David Attenborough and the trailer for BBC’s David Attenborough and Giant Egg:

Balanoff, A., & Rowe, T. (2007). Osteological Description of an Embryonic Skeleton of The Extinct Elephant Bird, Aepyornis (Palaeognathae: Ratitae) Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 27 (sup4), 1-53 DOI: 10.1671/0272-4634(2007)27[1:ODOAES]2.0.CO;2

Birchard, G., & Deeming, D. (2009). Avian eggshell thickness: scaling and maximum body mass in birds Journal of Zoology, 279 (1), 95-101 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7998.2009.00596.x
 
Endo, H., Akishinonomiya, F., Yonezawa, T., Hasegawa, M., Rakotondraparany, F., Sasaki, M., Taru, H., Yoshida, A., Yamasaki, T., Itou, T., Koie, H., & Sakai, T. (2011). Coxa Morphologically Adapted to Large Egg in Aepyornithid Species Compared with Various Palaeognaths Anatomia, Histologia, Embryologia DOI: 10.1111/j.1439-0264.2011.01100.x