News Watch » Ford Cochran

Hope for Haiti: Progress in Broken Shoes

Ford Cochran — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:30:57 +0000

January 12, 2012 marks the second anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, Haiti, leaving more than 180,000 homes destroyed and 1,500,000 people homeless. While the United Nations and a number of governments, NGOs (such as SOIL, lead by NG Emerging Explorer Sasha Kramer, a project to transform wastes into resources), and volunteers have worked to provide relief to those portions of the country most affected by the earthquake, how are the outlying regions of Haiti faring under the pressure of increasingly scarce resources?

In a small village near Port-au-Prince called Gramothe, Haitians are faring better than you might expect.

Text and photographs by Eric Kruszewski

Gramothe, Haiti, is a mountain village located 13 miles southeast of Port-au-Prince. Since 1999, one determined Haitian-American family has built and helped to staff a church here, a school with grades kindergarten through secondary, and a medical clinic. In 2010, construction of a new hospital began—and an earthquake rocked Haiti, and the world.

In the aftermath of the quake, I visited Gramothe with my camera to document life here, to see how the people of the village were coping, and to learn if the benefits of investments in this community had endured. Though the suffering in Port-au-Prince and in the hills around Gramothe is visible and palpable, Gramothe itself remains a bright spot and a source of hope.

More children are attending classes, the volume of locally grown crops per family is increasing, visits to the clinic (open only when foreign medical teams arrive) are on the rise, as are the number of people participating in religious services or classes. Residents are learning to shape their own futures and are embracing a new outlook on life with resilience and determination. The broken shoes on the feet of two young men who walked two hours each way from their homes to attend school in Gramothe five times a week epitomized, to me, this determination.

Plenty of day-to-day challenges remain: Poverty, malnutrition, corruption, and disease are common in the countryside outside of Gramothe, and have been for generations. Access to education, medical care, churches, and gainful employment is limited, often non-existent. Many families live in crumbling homes or makeshift tents. People struggle to find food and work, and some succumb to the notion that there is no hope for a bright future.

As word of the opportunities in tiny Gramothe has spread, the village has begun to draw people who walk hours, sometimes days, to attend school or get attention for a medical ailment. Hope motivates and rewards the grueling journeys in this mountainous region, where infrastructure is poor and continues to be unreliable. Roads are crumbling, electricity is sporadic at best, and water—though accessible from mountain springs—is difficult for many to reach. The challenge, as with so many projects that make a profound positive difference in the lives of tens or hundreds or even thousands of people: How to replicate this success story on an even larger scale?

Related photo gallery: Haiti Earthquake Anniversary: Pictures Show Slow Recovery

Eric Kruszewski, a self-taught freelance photographer, won the 2009 National Geographic Expedition Moments Photography Contest with his image of a girl crossing a tightrope on her knees in India. Read the full account of Eric’s time in Gramothe on his website. Learn more about National Geographic Expeditions.

9/11: Remembering Ann and Joe

Ford Cochran — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:38:02 +0000

Ann Judge and Joe Ferguson

For most Americans, this September 11—like the nine before it—will prompt recollections of the shock, the horror, and the grief we experienced a decade ago, of all we lost on that grim morning. It will also be a day to reflect on the moments of courage and unity, on the worldwide outpouring of sympathy that put a silver lining on the clouds rising over Manhattan, Arlington, and a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

As millions pause to mourn and celebrate those who didn’t come home on 9/11, we at National Geographic will remember staff colleagues Ann Judge and Joe Ferguson, and the teachers and children who traveled with them.

Ann Judge in Belize

Ann directed the Society’s travel office, leading a team that got our photographers, videographers, and writers into some of the most inaccessible places on the planet. Everyone at National Geographic knew Ann. Nearly everyone owed her a debt of gratitude for finessing some impossible connection, finding a room in some sold-out destination, or producing a car—or a boat, or a helicopter—in the midst of a crisis that stranded others who were not fortunate enough to have Ann looking out for them. We all knew her boundless energy, the smile that never left her face, and the warmth that made all who knew her feel as if they were her very best friends in the entire world.

Joe Ferguson with teachers in Washington, D.C.

As a director of the Society’s Geography Education Program, Joe Ferguson worked with a nationwide network of educators. He developed programs and led workshops, inspiring a generation of K-12 classroom educators to teach our kids more about the world. A born extrovert with a wry wit and a Mississippi accent that he used to charm, Joe was a natural in front of a crowd. When there was a party to celebrate a job well done—and with Joe, there was always a party—he was the first on the dance floor and the last to leave.

The morning of September 11, 2001, Ann and Joe were aboard American Airlines flight 77, bound for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration-managed Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary off the California coast. With them were three standout Washington, D.C., teachers—James Debeunere, Sarah Clark, and Hilda Taylor—and three of their star sixth-grade students—Rodney Dickens, Asia Cottom, and Bernard Brown. They had been selected by the District’s Geographic Alliance to participate with oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Sylvia Earle in a research project titled the Sustainable Seas Expeditions. Their fieldwork during the trip would have included swimming, hiking, and kayaking with marine sanctuary biologists, observing and learning firsthand about life under and around the seas. Instead, they perished together when their hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon.

Several days later, the Society’s staff and a multitude of regular contributors and friends gathered in the ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel across the street from our D.C. headquarters to remember Ann and Joe. A parade of images—many by the National Geographic photographers who had spent so much time with the pair—brought home with heart-wrenching vividness how much we had lost in losing them, and how fortunate we were to have had them in our lives.

Ann and Joe were the sorts of individuals who could have done anything. They chose to devote themselves to sharing the world with others, encouraging people to understand the planet and one another—inspiring people to care about the planet, as our mission statement puts it, and giving them the tools to transform that care into action.

It is no exaggeration to say that Ann and Joe died trying to make a world in which the September 11 attacks would not have happened. The best tribute we can offer them—and the teachers, the students, and all the others who died with them—is to continue doing all we do with that goal in mind.

The Society created a fund in Ann and Joe’s honor to insure that youngsters will continue to have access to field trips and other educational opportunities. Their work lives on through these efforts. The fund has raised more than $1,000,000 to date, including a major matching gift from National Geographic, a contribution from the National Geographic Education Foundation, and donations from a number of private contributors. Make your own gift to National Geographic’s Ferguson/Judge Fund to support geographic literacy and youth education programs.

National Geographic: Remembering 9/11

Team From National Geographic Killed in Pentagon Plane Crash

Sea Mountains Named for National Geographic Staffers Killed on 9/11

Update on Fund Honoring Geographic 9/11 Victims

Worth Talking About: Silence

Ford Cochran — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 21:36:33 +0000

The devastation following a large oil spill might naturally prompt anger, grief, frustration—or an effort to learn why it happened so as to better avert the next one. For conservationist, author, and National Geographic Education Fellow John Francis, the collision of two Standard Oil tankers near the Golden Gate Bridge in 1971, and the subsequent harmful effects he witnessed in San Francisco Bay—dead seabirds, fish, and seals; thousands of people trying frantically (and in many cases futilely) to save animals and keep oil from the beaches—prompted a more dramatic response. Francis hung up the keys to his car and walked everywhere he went … for the next 22 years.

After getting in one too many arguments with people he met while walking, he pledged to stop talking for a single day. That day, his 27th birthday, stretched into 17 years of silence.

Francis went on to earn the nickname “Planetwalker” (also the title of his first memoir), crossing the country on foot and earning a Ph.D. without speaking a word. Since deciding to talk once more in 1990, he has become a powerful icon and spokesperson for environmental issues, sound energy choices, and listening to others. (See his post “Oil on the Water” elsewhere on the News Watch blog.)

His new book, The Ragged Edge of Silence: Finding Peace in a Noisy World, extolls the benefits of listening and silent meditation as means of building relationships, improving health, achieving personal tranquility, and noticing both the sounds and the people at the fringes of our perception. It also includes “Lessons in Silence”—activities to help readers hone their listening skills. Here’s an excerpt from the first lesson, “Listening for the Ragged Edge”:

First, find a quiet place. If you are lucky enough to be in a wilderness area or a national park where there is a kind of quiet that few of us get to experience, that would be great. But for many of us a city park will do, or even a bench out on a quiet street. Now, close your eyes and listen for all the sounds that you can easily hear and identify.

Next, listen for the sounds that become faint, and then more faint, until you can no longer hear them. Do they fade in and out before they are completely gone? That is the ragged edge.

Now listen for the sounds that are coming to you. They will fade in and out before the sound is sustained. When the sound is fading in and out, you are in effect listening not only to the sound, but also to the silence, the ground on which the sound is built. From here we can reflect and contemplate phenomena.

You can chat online with Francis at a live event tomorrow evening at 7 p.m. PDT/10 p.m. EDT. If you’re in the San Francisco metropolitan area, you can also join the live audience at Toby’s Feedbarn in Point Reyes Station, where his journey began. Francis will share his story of walking the planet and offer insights about the transformative power of silence. Online guests will have an opportunity to use text chat to ask questions.

Follow National Geographic News Watch for more “Lessons in Silence” from John Francis, and get his new book.

Salas y Gómez Expedition: Departing Rapa Nui

Ford Cochran — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 11:58:06 +0000

As the Salas y Gómez team concludes its work near Easter Island, Chile, and disperses to points around the globe, marine scientist and expedition co-leader Enric Sala looks back on several weeks in one of the most isolated, intriguing, and ecologically unique corners of the vast Pacific.

Petroglyphs depicting a tangata manu, or birdman, near the Orongo ceremonial village on Easter Island’s Rano Kau volcano frame islets that were a popular dive site with the Salas y Gómez expedition team. In an annual birdman competition practiced through the mid-19th century, clan representatives raced down a cliff to the sea, swam to the most distant of the islets, retrieved manutara (sooty tern) eggs, and returned them to Orongo.
By Enric Sala, National Geographic Fellow

I left Easter Island by plane, under rain and wind, watching the sea become dark, then disappear beneath a thick blanket of clouds. This weather and the mood it evoked were so different from what we encountered during our expedition, days of sunshine and light breezes. I miss you already, Rapa Nui and Salas y Gómez!
Although the scientific descriptions, data analysis, and interpretations will continue for months, the field portion of our expedition has come to a close. I’m deeply satisfied with the work our team has done. We accomplished all our science and filming objectives, and have forged friendships that will last a lifetime. Yet still I feel a twinge of melancholy at leaving these remote specks of land in the middle of the Pacific: I have fallen under the spell of Rapa Nui, its culture, and its unique marine life.

A tuna and a shark etched in stone centuries ago at the Papa Vaka site on Easter Island attest to the importance of these fish to its original Polynesian settlers.
We are a team of scientists, filmmakers, and conservationists who came to survey and document Chile’s largest and brand new no-take marine reserve, the Motu Motiro Hiva (Salas y Gómez) Marine Park. We wanted to compare it with the underwater world surrounding Easter Island. There, we expected to find environmental collapse analogous to what occurred on land centuries ago, when (for reasons debated by scholars) the island lost its native palm trees. But what we found surprised us.
Easter Island has the clearest water and some of the healthiest coral communities we had ever seen. We did not expect corals to thrive so spectacularly around an island that is the southern limit of their distribution in the southeast Pacific. And yet they do. Lobsters, on the other hand, are all but gone here, and large fish are extremely rare.
In contrast, Salas y Gómez has large lobsters and pelagic fishes such as amberjacks, black trevally, and many sharks. But the sharks were small (on average between one and 1.2 meters, or three and four feet, in length). They probably belong to the same cohort, only about two years old. What happened to the older, larger sharks that others had seen in these waters in prior years?
The evidence suggests that there has been fishing in recent times at Salas y Gómez. We saw fishing lines and nets tangled on the corals and a shark with a hook on its mouth. To our astonishment, a fishing boat even showed up and dropped its lines illegally in the park next to the expedition’s host ship, the OPV Comandante Toro, while we were stationed on the lee of the island.
The good news: Young sharks are abundant (several times, 50 or more aggregated simultaneously around the Toro’s small working boats), and the newly afforded fishing restrictions should allow them to recover. Such recovery would be a win for everyone, including Rapa Nui’s fishermen, who have watched their catch dwindle in recent years. Healthy marine ecosystems such as the one Chile has committed itself to protecting at Salas y Gómez seed and sustain marine life in nearby fisheries. Without such safe havens and limitations on the scale of fishing, any fishery is destined for collapse–in some cases irrecoverable collapse.
Chile has recognized the importance of the waters around Salas y Gómez just in time, before its sharks are annihilated, as they have been in most locales around the ocean. Now Chile must protect its new park. The Chilean Navy has proven to be a strong enforcement arm, and with the interception of the boat fishing illegally in the park, it has set an encouraging precedent.
This expedition was exceptional for many reasons, most important being that we developed a new model of collaboration in marine conservation. We were three main partners: the National Geographic Society, the conservation organization Oceana, and the Chilean Navy. Never before had we partnered with a country’s navy or operated from a naval ship to conduct our Pristine Seas expeditions, and little did we know that it could be so successful. Commander Andrés Rodrigo of OPV Comandante Toro proved to be a great leader, thoroughly invested in the mission, and the Toro’s officers and crew worked tirelessly and enthusiastically to make it a success. We were proud to be guests on their ship, and are deeply grateful to the Chilean government and its people for making the expedition possible.

A team bound for dive sites on one of the expedition’s final mornings traverses Easter Island’s southern coast.
Carefully choreographed logistics and terrific teamwork allowed us to conduct 30 person-dives and deploy and retrieve up to three deep-sea drop-cams every day, regardless of the sea conditions. It was hard work. We went to bed exhausted after 17-hour days, of which we spent between three and four underwater, sometimes in a swell that reminded us of a washing machine. But we all did it with passion and commitment, and we had a ball doing it.
One day, I hope to return to Easter Island and Salas y Gómez–islands so incredibly far from other dry land–and find the large sharks, tuna, and other species that their fertile marine ecosystems could surely harbor. Until then, Rapa Nui and Moto Matiro Hiva, you will remain in my thoughts and in my soul.

Enigmatic moai dot a hillside at Rano Raraku on Easter Island, where stone for the immense statues was quarried and the statues were carved.
Photos by Ford Cochran
The science team shared frequent updates and media from the expedition, including photographs, videos, and links to Google maps, here on the National Geographic News Watch blog. You can also follow the expedition on Google Earth by clicking on the blue ship icon located where the expedition began near Easter Island, roughly 2,000 miles (3,300 km) northwest of Santiago, Chile. (Make sure the “Places” layer is turned on).
National Geographic and Oceana are members of Mission Blue
View all dispatches from the Salas y Gómez expedition here.

Costa Rica Expands Marine Protected Area Around Cocos Island

Ford Cochran — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 18:03:58 +0000

Costa Rica has created a huge new marine park that increases five-fold the area of protected waters surrounding Cocos Island–home to some of the highest abundances of sharks and other large ocean predators recorded anywhere. A loophole that permits long-line fishing in some of the newly protected waters, however, may threaten the park’s sharks, tuna, turtles, and other species.

Sharks and other fish crowd the water just off Cocos Island.
By Enric Sala, National Geographic Fellow
Costa Rica has just announced the creation of a large new marine protected area (MPA) around Cocos Island National Park. This new MPA–called the Seamounts Marine Management Area–encompasses a group of deep seamounts located 35 miles south of Cocos, plus other important waters for shark and tuna nearby.
Announcement of the new MPA came after more than a year of discussions between the Costa Rican government and conservation organizations, including National Geographic.
An expedition by the Geographic and local NGO partners in 2009 revealed that Cocos Island National Park has some of the highest abundances of large ocean predators (such as sharks) found anywhere in the world. The expedition team also concluded that illegal fishing inside the park and encroaching fishing pressure outside the park are threatening the biodiversity of this World Heritage Site.

A whale shark dwarfs a diver near Cocos Island.
National Geographic and its Cocos expedition partners–Costa Rica Forever, Marviva, Pretoma, The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, Fundación de Amigos de la Isla del Coco–recommended the creation of a no-take marine reserve covering 25,000 square kilometers around Cocos Island National Park. The purpose was to protect key aggregation areas for sharks and tuna, as well as the Las Gemelas seamounts. These seamounts have been fished with lines but not trawled, and therefore have a relatively intact and pristine habitat. The government of Costa Rica instead created a 9,640-square-kilometer MPA that excludes purse seining for tuna, but will allow long-lining for tuna in some of its waters.
This is great news for marine conservation, and a good first step for Costa Rica to fill its gaps in ocean protection. I believe this will not be sufficient to accomplish the goal of protecting Cocos’ extraordinary undersea communities, however, because long-line fishing–which already accounts for the largest amount of illegal fishing at Cocos–will be allowed in much of the new MPA.
The protection of the seamounts south of Cocos Island, by contrast, is a very important step in preserving a sensitive habitat that previously had no protection at all in Costa Rica.
View photos from the 2009 Cocos Island expedition.
Learn more about the 2009 Cocos Island expedition and find more ocean resources from National Geographic.
Photos by Octavio Aburto

Leaders Gather in Monaco to Promote Marine Protection

Ford Cochran — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 23:54:26 +0000

European national leaders and environment ministers have gathered in Monaco to discuss the need for more marine protected areas and other strategies to conserve life in the oceans.

National Geographic Executive Vice President for Mission Programs Terry Garcia addresses European environment leaders about the United States system of marine protected areas (MPAs) at the Monaco Blue Initiative meeting yesterday. Oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Sylvia Earle and HRH Prince Albert II of Monaco are seated to his left. The panel was moderated by Enric Sala, who helped to create this first meeting of Mediterranean leaders to discuss the potential for MPA protection, and followed the premier screening of National Geographic’s film Secrets of the Mediterranean at Monaco’s Oceanographic Museum.
By Enric Sala
I’m in Monaco with several of my National Geographic colleagues participating in a meeting of national leaders–prime ministers, presidents, ministers of the environment–convened by Prince Albert to discuss marine protected areas. It’s called the Monaco Blue Initiative, and all of these leaders have come here to talk about ocean conservation. This is a first.
In addition to the political leaders, conservation organizations and several ocean champions, including conservationists and scientists, are on hand. I hope that together we can inspire the leaders to do more for ocean conservation.
That’s the goal: Inform leaders about the need for more ocean protection, and inspire them to follow through. We want to show them that ocean conservation is not a luxury or a sacrifice, but something that provides economic and social benefits. It is far better than the current situation where we are overfishing everywhere.
I hope that some of these leaders will return to their countries inspired to create more and larger protected areas. If we are able to accomplish that, this meeting would be a total success.
The Mediterranean is one of the most overfished seas on the planet. Since I was a little kid growing up in Spain, I’ve been swimming and diving–and not seeing much marine life. The exception has been in marine reserves that are well protected. There, marine life has come back, and you can see abundant large fish such as huge groupers–three feet long and more–that can be 40 or 50 years old.
Marine reserves are the best hope for the ocean. They’re what keep me going.
I’ll share more updates from the meeting soon.

The March issue of National Geographic magazine’s Spanish edition includes the cover story “Mediterranean Sea: A Pure State,” which will also appear in a number of other European editions of the magazine. “Secrets of the Mediterranean,” premiering next month on the Nat Geo Wild channel, traces the adventures of Pierre-Yves Cousteau and Enric Sala beginning in Marseille, France, and moving across the western Mediterranean where they dive in the spots where the legendary Jacques-Yves Cousteau first filmed.
Follow Enric Sala’s tweets from the Monaco Blue Initiative meeting on Twitter.
Photos by Lucie McNeil

Largest Land-Dwelling “Bug” of All Time

Ford Cochran — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 09:15:01 +0000

The giant extinct invertebrate Arthropleura resembled some modern millipedes, but could grow to be more than one-and-a-half feet wide, and may sometimes have been more than six feet long.

Reconstruction of the giant millipede Arthropleura from the Pennsylvanian and earliest Permian of North America and Europe. The head capsule (marked by an asterisk) is shown tucked under the first plate (collum), as in present-day millipedes. Courtesy and copyright of Dr. Elke Gröning (Technische Universität Clausthal-Zellerfeld).
By Hans-Dieter Sues
As a kid I enjoyed watching those old sci-fi movies (like the 1954 classic Them!) where giant ants and spiders, created by fallout from atomic explosions, laid waste to cities and towns. While most of us are not overly fond of “creepy-crawlies” invading our homes, many people love the frisson of learning that there were once really big animals like these.
Fortunately, the laws of nature impose tight limits on the maximum size that arthropods can attain. The arthropod body is completely encased in an exoskeleton. The legs are made up of jointed tubes that contain the muscles necessary for their movement. As the animal’s size increases, the walls of these leg tubes rapidly increase in thickness, and operating the limbs soon would be impossible if the animal grew too big.
Another constraint faced by large arthropods is breathing. Small forms such as insects can breathe through tubes (tracheae) that open on the outside of the body. The body then absorbs the oxygen into the haemolymph (blood) through specialized soft membranes. The surface area of a body increases in proportion to the square of its dimensions, but the body’s volume increases as the cube. Thus if the size of an animal doubles, its body volume (which needs to be supplied by oxygen) increases eightfold. This geometrical relationship significantly constrains size increase. Thus, no monster bugs will ever menace humanity!
During the Pennsylvanian and earliest Permian periods (about 320 to 290 million years before present), much of present-day North America and Europe was located close to the equator and was covered by vast, richly vegetated swamps. The remains of this vegetation ultimately formed the great coal deposits that fuelled the Industrial Revolution and to this day remain a key energy resource. These ancient swamps were home to many large arthropods including early dragonfly relatives with wingspans in excess of two feet and the subject of this blog, the giant millipede Arthropleura. One species of Arthropleura (“jointed rib”) is the largest known land-dwelling invertebrate of all time.
The flattened body of Arthropleura is composed of approximately 30 jointed segments, each of which was covered by two side plates and one center plate. The ratio of pairs of legs to body segments was approximately 8:6, similar to some present-day millipedes. Typically, the body armor of Arthropleura fell apart after the death of the animal, and only individual segments or plates were preserved as fossils.
Unfortunately, nobody has yet found a complete large individual of Arthropleura. One partial body fossil from southwestern Germany has a length of 90 cm (3 ft.). A trackway ascribed to a large Arthropleura on a Pennsylvanian-age sandstone surface from Nova Scotia (Canada) comprises two parallel rows of small imprints and is 50 cm (19.7 in.) wide. It is estimated that the maker of this track was at least 1.7 m (5.6 ft.) long. Similar trackways have also been discovered in the United States and in Scotland. The size of some isolated armor segments indicates that Arthropleura adults could attain a length of at least 2 m (6.6 ft.). The only even larger arthropod was the aquatic Early Devonian “sea scorpion” Jaekelopterus, which, based on one isolated chelicera (pincer-like mouth part), reached an estimated length of 2.5 m (8.2 ft.).
As no complete fossils of large Arthropleura are known, the interpretation of their structure has been difficult. In the last few years, two German researchers–Otto Kraus, an expert on present-day millipedes, and Carsten Brauckmann, a specialist on ancient arthropods–have undertaken a detailed re-examination of the known fossils. Many older reconstructions of Arthropleura showed a large rounded “head end,” but this appears to be the first armor plate, known as the collum, and the actual head capsule was tucked under the collum, as it is in present-day millipedes. Another interesting result of the new research is the discovery that the sturdy-looking body armor is only a few millimeters thick and was not reinforced by calcium carbonate (as, for example, in crustaceans). Considering their size, adult Arthropleura would have had few if any enemies in the Pennsylvanian coal swamps and therefore no need for heavy armor.
How did Arthropleura breathe? There are no traces of a tracheal system, and gas exchange through the body surface would have been insufficient for the oxygen needs of such a large animal. There are paired, pocket-like features on the underside of each body segment, and these pockets have a peculiar granulated surface. It has been suggested that a thin layer of air covered these surfaces and oxygen could be absorbed by diffusion through them. Geochemical modeling by Robert Berner (Yale University) suggests that the oxygen content of Earth’s atmosphere was much higher during Pennsylvanian times (30 to 35%) than today (21% free oxygen), so large arthropods could have breathed more easily than they would have today.
What did Arthropleura eat? An earlier study reported possible gut contents in a specimen from Scotland. These contents were composed of debris from the tree-like club mosses (lycophytes) that formed a major component of the coal swamp vegetation. Restudy of the fossil in question by Kraus, however, indicates that this is an accidental association of a shed skin of an Arthropleura with some plant fragments. Kraus believes that Arthropleura indeed fed on plants but thinks that the enormous quantities of spores shed by swamp plants including lycophytes as well as early growth stages of these plants would have been rich sources of food. Most present-day millipedes feed on dead plant matter, and it is reasonable to assume that Arthropleura did likewise.
The extinction of Arthropleura is probably related to the climatic changes during the Permian Period when increasingly drier conditions led to the disappearance of the coal swamps. The work by Kraus and Brauckmann and other researchers indicates that Arthropleura may be most closely related to the present-day Penicillata, a group including the tiny bristle millipedes (Polyxenus), which are widespread in drier habitats in eastern North America. What a relief that we no longer have to worry about tripping over six-foot millipedes on our hikes through the forest!

Hans-Dieter (Hans) Sues is a vertebrate paleontologist based at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. He is interested in the evolutionary history and paleobiology of vertebrates, especially dinosaurs and their relatives, and the history of ecosystems through time. A former member of the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration, Hans has traveled widely in his quest for fossils and loves to share his passion for ancient life through lectures, writings, and blogging.

Blog entries by Hans-Dieter Sues >>

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Mission Blue: Tracking Whale Shark Wanderings

Ford Cochran — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:04:48 +0000

University of Southern Mississippi ecophysiologist Eric Hoffmayer received a National Geographic Society/Waitt grant to tag and track whale sharks in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Last June while diving with Sylvia Earle and a filmmaking team led by Bob Nixon, Hoffmayer witnessed roughly 100 of the sharks–the largest gathering ever recorded of this, the world’s largest fish species–at Ewing Bank off the Louisiana coast. Several days later, three of the filter-feeding sharks were filmed at the surface near the Deepwater Horizon blowout site, skimming waters coated with spilled oil.

Aboard the research vessel Brooks McCall with the Mission Blue team, Hoffmayer relates what’s known about the Gulf’s whale sharks and some of the many mysteries surrounding their migrations.
By Eric Hoffmayer
Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) are probably more susceptible to oil than most sharks or other fish because of their surface filter-feeding behavior. It’s not the toxicity of the oil, per se; it’s the physical properties of the oil coating their gills. Once these are coated, whale sharks are going to sink to the bottom. They’re negatively buoyant. We’ll never see the ones that die, which makes it hard to know their fate.
What brought attention to this was our encounter back in June followed, five days later, by NOAA doing overflights and getting pictures of three animals within four miles of the wellhead site, swimming in thick oil. Those animals most likely died.
One question is how many in the population we saw have been affected? And because we know there’s a lot of connectivity, how far-reaching are the consequences of the spilled oil for these sharks? There’s lots of ecotourism going on in other parts of the Gulf and the Caribbean. A lot of people are concerned about whether the animals they’ve seen year after year are going to show back up again in 2011.
We’ve documented whale sharks swimming down to depths of 6,300 feet. If there’s submerged oil somewhere, they have a high likelihood of encountering it. As long as there’s oil in the water there’s still a threat.
Why is Ewing Bank so important? We first encountered whale sharks back in 2002. We were studying Sargassum (a seaweed genus) in the Gulf, and we came across a school of yellowfin tuna. In the middle of this school there were two whale sharks. We knew they were in the Gulf, but no one had documented their presence.

So I started researching, and I found out that’s a very common association throughout the world: Whale sharks and tuna seem to hang together, probably because of a common food source.
One thing we wanted to do was talk to the offshore fishermen, the guys who go several hundred miles out. We wondered if they ever saw whale sharks. We were just amazed at the response we got.
First off, it was “We see them all the time!” This was a classic example of the disconnect between fishermen and scientists: They knew it, but didn’t know to tell us, and we didn’t know to ask. Not only that, but we had four different people tell me they saw groups larger than 20 animals, with perhaps as many as 100 animals at a time. In 2002, that was unheard of anywhere in the world, even in Australia, the Caribbean, other places.
In 2009, I was contacted by a commercial snapper fisherman. He had encountered 44 whale sharks the year before, and he wanted to help out any way he could. We started talking and realized we didn’t have a lot of funding, so he said “Hey, would you come out on my boat? I want to help and bring awareness to this.”
We went out to Ewing Bank, and we encountered on, I think, day three, we don’t know how many whale sharks–at least 30, I would say. We had several more sightings in 2009. We’ve had 19 now in the past three years. The smallest group at Ewing Bank was five.
There’s something unique to that area, and we think it’s the spawning. Every large encounter we’ve had in the northern Gulf, little tunny has been spawning, and the whale sharks feed on the little tunny spawn.
Bob Nixon called me and said Sylvia wanted to come out and take a look. So we went to Ewing Bank. I didn’t think we were going to have the success we had. I was hoping we would see a couple animals, maybe five or ten.
The little tunny started circling below our boat. They were shining, and I was thinking “I don’t know what little tunny spawning behavior is like, but I’m hoping this is it.” Sure enough, I awoke at about five in the morning to screams of “Sharks all around us!” And it just got better as the day went on.
We think what is going on is that these fish are spawning maybe 50 or 60 feet down, maybe as much as 200 feet down, and their eggs are slowly rising to the surface. The whale sharks are there at depth and follow the eggs to the top. The eggs would concentrate once they reach the surface.

The big question is this: How did 100 whale sharks find this event, a 12-hour event? How did they know to show up? They weren’t there the day before, because we were there looking and didn’t see them. They were there at the perfect time to be there, and the event’s over and done in 12 hours. Do these whale sharks stay together, do they disperse, do they come back? What do they do in the winter time? Where are they going, what are they doing now?
Those are some of the questions I’m hoping to answer in the future by tagging and tracking multiple animals at the same spot.
Speaking as a scientist, this oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico sort of caught us off guard. We don’t know a lot about many of these animals. Whether it’s whale sharks, tiger sharks, makos, whatever, we don’t know what their habitat use is in the region. We don’t have the baseline data. Without understanding how they use this environment, we don’t know how the spill will affect them.
Support for the Mission Blue Gulf of Mexico expedition is provided by the National Geographic Society, Google Inc., the Waitt Institute, and Hope Spots LLC. Follow along in context by clicking on the ship icon near Pensacola, Florida using Google Earth.
Read all Mission Blue expedition coverage here.
Photos of Sylvia Earle diving with a whale shark by Bryce Groark; photo of Eric Hoffmayer reviewing video footage with Sylvia Earle by Ford Cochran

Mission Blue: The Wake-Up Call

Ford Cochran — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 22:45:06 +0000

Aboard ship in the Gulf of Mexico, ecologist and author Carl Safina of Stony Brook University’s Blue Ocean Institute talks with Sylvia Earle about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its aftermath. “It was a wake-up call,” says Carl, “and I hope we don’t hit the snooze button because it will happen again. There are thousands of rigs. There is pipe all over the seafloor carrying oil and gas all the time. There’s a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong.”

By SYLVIA EARLE and CARL SAFINA
Earle: I’m really glad you could come on board and join this expedition, Carl.
Safina: I’m honored to be invited here. Thank you.
Earle: We’ve had some good news and bad news so far. We’ve had the little sub over a couple of times, and Edie Widder’s little system called the Medusa–a camera that’s baited, goes down deep, and attracts critters.
And we’ve also had some bad news. The bad news is the weather, which is keeping us from achieving all of our objectives.
Safina: As can happen at sea.
Earle: I really want to see you in one of those little submarines.
Safina: I want to see out the window of one of those little submarines from down on the bottom.
Earle: It’s going to happen in the future, but right now, we really are making the most out of this opportunity to be out here, looking at the whole system and reflecting on the events of 2010 that have given this beautiful body of water a big blow. You’ve been out here observing it.

Safina: I was here a few times during the blowout. I flew over the site. I saw the big perspective from the air, which was horrifying. I was ashore in various places from Louisiana all the way to here in Pensacola.
There was oil everywhere, but the way it was configuring itself on the beaches was very different. It was pretty light here. It was pretty hard by the time it got ashore in what they call tar balls here. In Louisiana, it was still very oily, a terrible mess.
Earle: The news report yesterday here in Pensacola said that there are tar balls coming on shore right now here, and that someone reported a tar mat just offshore. So it’s not over.
Safina: The taxi driver was telling me that as we were coming from the airport.
Earle: A reliable source!
Safina: The mess is not entirely over, but I think that it might have been much worse than it was. In a way, it’s great that it wasn’t and in a way, I think it’s going to give people a false sense of security. It was a wake-up call, and I hope we don’t hit the snooze button because it will happen again.
There are thousands of rigs. There is pipe all over the seafloor carrying oil and gas all the time. There’s a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong. BP and the government and the other contractors were totally unprepared for the possibility of a blowout, which is mind-boggling, because blowouts happen. You would think they would be prepared for it, because they happen, and they’re not prepared yet for the next one. That’s important.
Earle: The greatest tragedy of all of this whole Gulf of Mexico phenomenon of the past year will be if we fail to learn from it and take action as a consequence of it. But I think there are promising signs, not just that nature is resilient and we’re seeing some recovery, but also that not everyone says, “Oh, it’s just gone away and therefore nothing more to worry about.” I think that it has left an enduring impact, and will change policy.
Safina: I think the residents of the region know very well that there’s something to worry about, and unless there are some fundamental changes in the approach to safety and preparedness, it will happen again. I think people here realize that, and I hope that the changes will come before the next time.
Earle: One of the objectives of this expedition is to look at the Gulf with a mindset of “Let’s find the places that are still in pretty good shape to see if there are recommendations that can be made about protection for some places that will give back to the Gulf and help restore.” That’s not just because of the massive oil blowout of 2010, but also from years of taking too much out and putting too much of other things in–the upstream pollution that flows into the Gulf from the heart of the country.
I’m so glad that you took the time and put in the intellectual juice that it takes to write about this, the oil spill, in the book that’s coming out in the spring. What are you calling it, what’s the title?
Safina: It’s called A Sea in Flames, and it’ll be out in mid-April of this year, 2011.
Earle: Well, you keep writing! The book that’s just come out is about your perch up there in the Great Northeast, and the title of that is?
Safina: The title of that one is The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World.
Earle: But you’re anything but lazy.
Safina: No, the place is lazy, not me! But you know one thing about the Gulf here that I think is really important–and it shows how much we take for granted–is that we have these oil leases on the seafloor. These are places reserved for taking oil. And we have almost no place reserved for protection. It’s just whatever is not being used up, by default. What we need to do is say, well, we reserve these places for taking, we need to reserve some other places for leaving.
Earle: For not taking–keep it in the bank. For one thing, there’s all of the future to contemplate. Why burn through the assets in a few decades? That’s kind of what we’re doing.
Safina: Another way I sometimes think of it is if you can take from everywhere, it’s like every place is a store. And if you only have stores and no factories, you will run out of goods.
Earle: That’s right, and we need to keep the factories alive and well. That’s fish habitat, it’s the sea grass meadows, it’s the coral reefs, it’s places like where the tuna spawn. The bluefin tuna in the Gulf of Mexico were right in the path of the spill.
Safina: Yes. And that’s the only spawning ground between here and the Mediterranean sea for those fish.
Earle: That’s one of the recommendations we would like to endorse. We’re not alone in saying we’ve got to give these big beautiful fish a break.
Safina: Yes, at some point, they can’t be up for grabs every day every place.
Earle: Just because they taste good.
Safina: Just because they taste good.
Earle: We still have some time left on this expedition, and I’m so glad you’re here to bring your good mind and spirit to the cause. We’re going to have a chance to get out and get in the sub. I can’t wait to see the expression on your face when you get in the sub, and even more when you get out of the sub! This is cause for celebration that you’re here.
Safina: I really appreciate the honor of being invited. Thank you.

Support for the Mission Blue Gulf of Mexico expedition is provided by the National Geographic Society, Google Inc., the Waitt Institute, and Hope Spots LLC. Follow along in context by clicking on the ship icon near Pensacola, Florida using Google Earth.
Read all Mission Blue expedition coverage here.
Photos of Carl Safina and Sylvia Earle in the Deepworker sub by Ford Cochran

Google Unveils Global Science Fair With National Geographic

Ford Cochran — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:37:53 +0000

National Geographic has joined Google, CERN, the LEGO Group, and Scientific American to launch a global online science competition for students ages 13 to 18: The Google Science Fair.

By Ford Cochran
The next generation’s Albert Einsteins and Marie Curies got a chance to jumpstart their careers this morning with the debut of the Google Science Fair, an online competition that invites 13- to 18-year-olds to share their bright ideas, experiments, and observations with the world.
Representatives from Google, National Geographic, the LEGO group, CERN, and Scientific American gathered in Manhattan this morning to kick off the contest, which will remain open for submissions through midnight ET April 4, 2011. A panel of scientists and educators will select 60 semifinalists in May. 15 finalists winnowed from that group will travel to Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters in July for a celebratory event and live judging.
“If you win this competition,” said Samantha Peter, an Education Product Marketing Manager for Google, “we want to make sure you feel like the rock star of the science world.”
The grand prize-winning student or team will travel to the Galápagos Islands, Darwin’s living laboratory, with National Geographic Expeditions aboard the National Geographic Endeavor. Other prizes include scholarships from Google, Android phones and Google Chrome notebooks, opportunities to spend time at Google and CERN research labs in Switzerland, a year-long virtual internship with the LEGO MINDSTORMS R&D team, an internship shadowing the editor of Scientific American magazine, and more.
Oh, and some serious exposure and bragging rights.

Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist and “father of the Internet” Vint Cerf took the stage at this morning’s launch event. Cerf spoke of how many questions about our universe remain unanswered. “Young people have a chance to ask and answer those questions,” he quipped, “and I can hardly wait to Google your results to find out what the answers are.”
William Kamkwamba from the southeast African country of Malawi also took the stage, and shared his story of having to leave school because his family couldn’t afford for him to attend. Kamkwamba nonetheless made time to educate himself from books in the school library, and used discarded items such as a tractor fan, a shock absorber, and lengths of PVC pipe to build windmills to generate electricity to light his family’s home, charge neighbors’ cell phones, and pump water from a well. He’s since earned a college degree and built a windmill to power portable laptops for children in the local school, and he trains other rural Malawi youth to follow in his footsteps.
Tesca Fitzgerald, a college student from Portland, Oregon, walked through a sample science fair entry about her own award-winning project, a set of artificial intelligence algorithms that help robots make routine item deliveries in hospitals, freeing up nurses to provide more patient care.

The panel of competition judges includes geneticist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Spencer Wells (pictured at top at this morning’s event), Genographic Project Director, as well as two National Geographic Emerging Explorers: marine biologist and filmmaker Tierney Thys and urban planner and educator T.H. Culhane.
Enter the Google Science Fair, learn more about it on the Official Google Blog, or follow it on Facebook.
See what else National Geographic is doing for K-12 students and teachers.
Photo of Spencer Wells by Colby Bishop; photo of students with the National Geographic logo by Glynnis Breen

Ford Cochran directs Mission Programs online for National Geographic. He has written for National Geographic magazine and NG Books, and edits BlogWild–a digest of Society exploration, research, and events. Ford studied English literature at the College of William and Mary and biogeochemistry at Harvard and Yale, with a focus on volcanoes, forests, and long-term controls on atmospheric CO2. He was an assistant professor of geology and environmental science at the University of Kentucky before joining the National Geographic staff.

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