More Museum

Claudia pointed me in the direction of some very topical links from the museum.

First, Paul Collins has a paper in the early edition of PNAS (available May 3 so this is hot off the press). This is a great example of how museums can be used for research and how the original collectors could have had no idea about the uses their collections would be put to.

The paper concerns a story Caludia told you during the ecology section - the changes in the food web on the California Channel Islands: Pleistocene to historic shifts in bald eagle diets on the Channel Islands, California

There have also been a couple of articles in the local Independent newspaper about the museum:

• Museum of Natural History Expands Into 21st Century
• Bye-Bye Blue Whale

How Safe is Live Kidney Donation?

It’s been about 60 years since the first live kidney donor operation. There have been scattered reports that kidney donation is safe, but most published studies have been limited in scope and used inappropriate control groups against which to compare mortality statistics.

A recent report strengthens the hypothesis that live kidney donation is relatively safe. The report compares mortality data for essentially all 80,347 live kidney donors in the United States between 1994 and 2009 to a carefully matched control group of people who were eligible to donate but were not asked to do so. Mortality statistics were followed in both groups for up to 12 years (median 6.3 years) after donation by the live kidney donor group.

The results indicate that there is a small risk of death from the surgical procedure itself, as would be expected of any similar major surgical procedure. Early post-surgical (three-month) mortality was 3.1 per 10,000 kidney donors, compared to 0.4 deaths in the control group over a similar three-month period. After that, however, there were no differences in survival between the donor and control groups out to 12 years.

The results support the hypothesis that there is no long-term mortality risk associated with live kidney donation except for the usual risks of surgery. Presumably a follow-up study will be done in years ahead to extend the definition of “long-term” to beyond 12 years.

How to draw a gorilla

How to draw a gorilla in 3 easy steps.

1) Be born with a certain amount of artistic talent.
2) Practice, practice, practice.

Okay, I lied about the steps being easy. But even having the talent and the practice will not get you a good gorilla drawing. For that you will need an actual gorilla to pose for you. Herein lies the problem. Gorillas don't like you making eye contact with them. If you do it to a wild gorilla you might be in danger. If you do it to a captive gorilla he'll just wander off (or escape and attack you). Either way, no posing gorilla.

The solution? Don't make eye contact with the gorilla. Hence step:
3) Get yourself some Gaze-averting glasses

The sketch is by James Gurney whose technique of avoiding eye contact allowed him some up close contact with both gorillas and chimpanzees.

He watched me draw with a professional interest. Every ten minutes or so he wanted me to show him how I was coming along on the sketch.

Asphalt volcanoes

And on the topic of geology, check out some of the press on the newest members of the CCS Bio team, Professor Dave Valentine of Earth Sciences , has been getting.

Listen to a report on KCLU: A team of researchers has found a group of what are known as "asphalt volcanoes"...some up to 65 feet high...on the ocean floor off the Santa Barbara County coastline.

Or read about it on the National Geographic website or the NSF website.

This is relevant to biology for several reasons. First, in terms of methane production and the creation of 'dead zones':

Eruptions of the California mounds might have once spewed enough methane to dramatically boost populations of methane-eating marine bacteria.

These bacteria depleted the water's oxygen, creating a giant "dead zone" in the Santa Barbara basin that was lethal to most marine life.

and secondly in terms of creating hard substrates for colonization by living organisms:

Asphalt mounds in general help create environments for marine life that might not otherwise exist.

"Processes that produce hard substrates in the deep ocean are rare. ... Generally speaking, the deep ocean is a muddy place," MacDonald said.

"I think it's really cool that there's this other process that we didn't really know about before that, at least in some places, is making pretty extensive hard bottoms for animals to colonize."

Geology talks

Bruce informs me that Geology will be having two good talks in the next two weeks:

Wednesday, May 5th, 3:30 1100 Webb Hall - Revisiting the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary Event in North America. Kirk Johnson, Sr. Scientist & Vice President, Denver Museum of Natural History

Wednesday May 12th, 3:30, 1100 Webb Hall. The Devonian Fish of Gogo, Australia (Home of the evidence for the oldest evidence for live birth in a vertebrate). John Long, Vice President of Research and Collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Saturdaze

This is a GREAT opportunity for CCS Biology students. Check out last year's winners - Caitlin is a CCS Bio student.

The 15 June deadline for applying for the Saturdaze NatureJournal scholarship for research in natural history is fast approaching . This scholarship has been established with the cooperation of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. I would appreciate it if you would notify your contacts and your students of this award. This scholarship is not widely advertised, so generates a small applicant pool. Please encourage undergraduates currently involved in natural history research to apply.

The application form is online and is extremely simple to complete. Thanks.

Larry Friesen, PhD
Director, Saturdaze / NatureJournal
http://www.sbnature.net

----------------------------------------------------------

Scholarship amount: $2,000 and $500 annual awards

Application deadline: 15 June

Award date: 15 July

Application website: http://www.sbnature.net/scholarship/index.htm

Use of scholarship award : unrestricted

Scope of Saturdaze NatureJournal Scholarships: Awarded to undergraduates involved in research in natural history and majoring in a biological sciences major. Research area must be within one or more of the following geographic areas: San Luis Obispo County, Santa Barbara County, and/or northern Channel Islands or conducted by a student from one of the institutions listed below.

Applicant field: Applicant must have been an undergraduate student during the last year at one of the colleges or universities within San Luis Obispo or Santa Barbara Counties: Santa Barbara City College, Cuesta College, Allan Hancock, University of California Santa Barbara, Westmont College, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

>From the Saturdaze NatureJournal website . . .

Natural History is the broadest study of science and attempts to tie together observations of the natural world into a single interwoven fabric. As such, the knowledge base of natural history has grown beyond a single category of study and has been divided into smaller and smaller and more and more isolated disciplines. It is not uncommon that professional biologists study a single organism in a laboratory, far removed from its natural habitat. The Saturdaze Scholarship for Natural History Research supports the broader view.

Natural History is accessible to all who love and enjoy observing nature. In his essay on the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin, as a naturalist, wrote that . . .

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us."

Who among us has not contemplated nature and been inspired to learn about the connectedness within diversity? In this sense, natural history has attracted not only the scientist, but the artist and poet; natural history has become the romantic science. The romance of natural history stems from our desire to relate to the natural world, to regain a connectedness to it, and to preserve its diversity.

Saturdaze has partnered with the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and has funded a scholarship to encourage research that helps to explain one or another "entangled bank". The Saturdaze NatureJournal Scholarship for Natural History Research rewards exceptional students attempting to discover interactions in nature. Saturdaze and the Museum share the goal of "inspiring a passion for the natural world".

Sea bugs heavier than elephants

Hitting the media this week has been a press release from the 'Census of Marine Life'. For example you can see the BBC report here: Census offers glimpse of oceans' smallest lifeforms or at Nature here: It's a microbial world- Worldwide census ups diversity estimates for marine microbes one-hundred-fold.

An unprecedented number of tiny, ocean dwelling organisms have been catalogued by researchers involved in a global survey of the world's oceans.

Although this infromation is fascinating I can help but comment on the appalling abuse of the SI system that is common to many of the reports and so, regrettably, must have been part of the press release.

One of the highlights was the discovery of a vast "microbial mat", covering an area equivalent to the size of Greece.

What? What's wrong with the hectare? It's 100m by 100m. Everyone can picture it. Who even knows how big Greece is? It's a series of freaking islands. Even most Greek people probably couldn't come up with a very good guess for the area of Greece. But wait there's more...

They have also calculated that the estimated total mass of marine microbes is equivalent to 240 billion African elephants.

The African elephant is not part of the SI system! Can we at least get it in tons (and elephants if you must). I know they are only trying to be reader friendly but see what it leads to -
The Belfast Telegraph - Sea bugs 'heavier than elephants' (complete with picture of elephant).