Blog Posts

Survival at a Mountain Top

16/6/2020

Have you ever heard of a pika? It was a new animal to me. It lives in mountains at 10,000 feet and, as a skier, I have been to its habitat many times but didn't know where or how to look for it.
Thanks to Pika Country: Climate Change at the Top of the World by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent & Marlo Garnsworthy, I am now enlightened. The pika, also know as a rock rabbit, is yet another version of a canary in a coal mine. It requires cool summer temperatures to forage for food, (mostly grasses that dry to become hay) and stockpile enough to stay alive all winter.

"Pikas are specially adapted to live in the chilly alpine environment among
the rocks and plants.
"In fact, pikas are usually only found in the mountains where the temperatures
  are cool. In temperatures warmer than 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius), pikas quickly overheat and die."

Pika Country, illustrated with photographs by skilled nature photographer Dan Hartman, is a picture book with intimate images of the pika barking, leaping, squeezing into a small rock crevasse, and carrying a mouthful of vegetation. How did he ever get those shots? Obviously, he had to be there, be ready and be patient.

The poor pika is prey to mountain mammals, like the weasel and fox and raptors, including the golden eagle and the prairie falcon. Added to its woes, its habitat is shrinking due to climate change. Where can you go when you're at the top of the hill and there's no more "up" to go?

The authors are exceptionally good at explaining the predicament by including many other alpine animals and trees that will be wiped out when mountain tops warm up.

They also include an excellent explanation of climate change and what kids (and caring adults) can do to slow down climate change. Maybe it will also create the demise of the winter olympics?

A Picture of the Coronavirus at Work

16/6/2020

- CDC/ Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAM / Public domain

Above is the familiar, iconic electron micrograph of the corona virus that causes the disease COVID-19. Here's what we can learn from the picture. First, it is a scanning electron micrograph (SEM) that shows the three-dimensional surface of the virus. It is a sphere that is extremely small, 1000 times smaller than the cells it invades. We cannot see it under an ordinary microscope that uses visible light, because it is smaller than the shortest wavelength of visible light. It is one thousandth the size of an ordinary cell.

Under an electron microscope the image is all gray, (like the background) no color. It is colorized later by people who are trained to recognized structures distinct from a gray background so that that average viewer can easily see them. Viruses have no color because the wavelengths of all the colors of the rainbow (visible light) are longer than the virus. So the color of a structure is chosen to stand out by the colorer. We know its size from the magnification of the electron microscope. An electron micrograph captures an image of a specially prepared specimen in a vacuum. It cannot show us a living cell, only a frozen snapshot.

Colored SEM of cells in alveolus of the lung Credit: Prof. Arnold Brody/Science Photo Library

This is a scanning electron micrograph of the healthy cells lining an air sac (alveolus) of the human lung. At the center left and top are two type-two cells typically attacked by the novel coronavirus. They are covered with hair-like structures (microvilli) and secrete a substance that that reduces surface tension in the air sac and prevent it from collapsing. The magnification is x 5,100 at the photograph's 6 x 4.5 cm size.

Image credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases.

This is a colorized scanning electron micrograph of a lung cell infected with the virus the causes COVID-19. They are the yellow dots on the surface of the cell. You can see how small they are compared to the cell, which has many projections to increase its surface area for the exchange of gases (oxygen for carbon dioxide), the crucial job of the lungs to keep us alive.

The spikes on the surface of a COVID -19 coronavirus (you see in the first picture) are proteins that fit like a piece of jig-saw puzzle to receptor proteins on the surface of the host cell. This fools the cell into inviting the infectious enemy through its membrane. Once inside, the coronavirus finds a ribosome,  a small organelle that makes proteins from RNA codes specific to the organism. (RNA is a single strand of nucleotides with the same sequence as the organism's DNA) . The coronavirus, which is basically RNA with a protein protective coating, is able to use the replicating machinery of a ribosome to make copies of itself. In the process, it interferes with the functioning of the lung cell to provide us with oxygen.  The newly minted coronaviruses then squeeze through the cell membrane like tiny buds.

Meanwhile lots more of the virus are being replicated inside the cell. Upon re-emerging outside the cell, each virus particle is now free to infect other cells in the body and be shed from the person in tiny drops of moisture from speaking, sneezing and coughing.

Self-replication is an essential activity of all living things. Is a virus a living thing? Are there any free-living viruses? All it can do is replicate itself in the cells of a living host, which range from the smallest bacteria to us. It doesn't have metabolism, so it doesn't "eat." As long as it doesn't come across an outside environment strong enough to destroy is complicated molecular structure, it will exist (not "live") as long as it needs to exist until it encounters a receptive host.

It's amazing to see the magnitude of the infection in the microscopic world of a single sick cell.

The Birds.....and the Bees

25/5/2020

At a time when nature is attacking the human species, it makes sense to look at two other species that have been under attack for many years. First, The Turtle Dove' s Journey: A Story of Migration by Madeleine Dunphy, is a tale of the month-long trip of one small individual turtle dove from his home near London who travels 4,000 miles to winter over in sub-Saharan Africa. According to the back matter, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSBP) began tracking European turtle doves by satellite since 1980, when their population in Europe had dropped by 78% and are still at it, since 1994, with a further decrease to 93%.

The Turtle Dove's Journey is a picture book, illustrated with quietly stunning art by Marlo Garnsworthy. We see the travels of a single, lone bird as he embarks from Suffolk, England in the fall and flies due south arriving at Mali a month later with stops along the way.

"When migrating, the turtle dove flies at night because it is safer. If he traveled
during the day, predators like falcons and hawks could easily see him. But at night time these predators are asleep."

Thus, the reader is invested in the fate of a single bird, as opposed to a traditional dispassionate description of the migration of many. It is this point of view that gives the story its power. A map of the flight path serves as an index of double-page illustrations depicting and acclaiming the turtle dove's rest stops.

The publisher, Web of Life Children's Books, is dedicated to stories of the fragile ecological dependencies of life on earth. They also published Dorothy Patent's At Home with the Beaver, which I also reviewed.

There have been five extinctions of life over the past 3.5 million years. We are now in the sixth. Survival of the web of life is under constant attack. A Turtle Dove's Journey brings Madeleine Dunphy's focus on a lovely, seed eating bird, who routinely travels great distances for seasonal comforts in home territories 4,000 miles apart.

And now for the bees.  Honeybee:The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera is a picture book written by Candace Fleming and illustrated by Eric Rohman, created especially for people that don't think of insects as warm, fuzzy, strong, loving and essential workers. (Yes, I'm channeling Andrew Cuomo.) The essential worker part, in the back matter of this biography of a worker bee Apis, was revealed in 2006 when there was a collapse of honeybee colonies, both wild and domestic all over the world-- a pandemic for bees! It impacted "one out of every three mouthfuls of food in the American diet [that] is, in some way, a product of honeybee pollination--from fruits to nuts to vegetables."

A honeybee colony is an intricate cooperative society that is chronicled in the life of a single female worker bee whose job changes every couple of days. Candace Fleming's lyrical prose leading up to a job that involves the act of flying (which we anthropomorphically think of as worthy of aspiration) doesn't happen immediately. The intense, extremely active, slightly-longer-than-a month lifetime of Apis begins with a struggle to get through the wax cap of the cell in which she developed. "Hmmmmm!" hums Fleming's words. "Now what?" the reader wonders.

Flying is delayed for days as Apis cleans up after her "birth," starts gaining strength by eating a lot of stored pollen, taking care of developing bees in the hive's nursery, tending the queen bee, building the comb for the reception of honey, processing incoming nectar from other bees until she is 18 days old and ready to start flying to collect nectar and spread pollen herself. Her first flight is rightfully celebrated with a double page spread featuring Apis, a lone bee over a field of wild flowers.

Her nectar collection and pollen spreading career lasts about two weeks. During this time:
"She has flown back and forth between nest and blossoms, five hundred miles in all.
"She has visited thirty thousand flowers.
She has collected enough nectar to make one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey."
In the natural order of things, she dies but is replaced by a new worker bee struggling our of her wax cell.

Both Fleming and Rohman are to be commended on this distillation of enormous amounts of meticulous research into lyrical prose and vivid, detailed art that pays homage to an insect whose colonies contribute mightily and essentially to the web of life.

Voting and The State of the Union

13/5/2020

The United States is hailed by the rest of the world as its most successful democracy. Yes, we are guaranteed great freedoms and we are the most diverse superpower. But, according to iNK author, Elizabeth Rusch, we have a long way to go to become "a more perfect union." Her new book, You Call This Democracy? How to fix our government and deliver power to the people, is an eye-popping exposé of all the ways the wealthy oligarchs have gained overarching power and what can be done by young people to fix it.

The premise of democracy is one person, one vote, majority rules. Simple, no? That is true for all elections in the United States save the one for president and vice president, which is determined by electoral representatives. But there's more, Rusch reminds us: Four times, in our history, popular vote winners lost the presidency. Then she explains not only why but how this can be corrected, not by doing the impossible and adding another amendment to the constitution, but by another method entirely called the "National Popular Vote" interstate compact. In her highly readable book she says:

"The compact will take effect once states representing a total of 270 electoral
votes--the number needed to win the presidency--have signed on. The endeavor
   is two-thirds of the way there, with just seventy-four more electoral votes needed.
Efforts are afoot in a dozen or so states, which could get the tally to the magic 270."

Wow! I learned something new. And I continued to learn, in subsequent chapters, about specific problems stymieing many voters from making their vote count. These include: geographically redistributing party votes (gerrymandering), under-representation of populous states in the Senate, dark money influencers (lobbyists and legal contribution loopholes), lying with impunity for politicians, voter suppression, votes denied to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, where Americans are stateless, and more.

But this book is not just a litany of woes. As Rusch says in her introduction:

"I admit, working on this book often made me angry--even outraged--when
I saw clearly how some aspects of our democracy hurt fellow citizens. But my
research has made me hopeful, too. Countless people, young and old, are
already working to form a more perfect union......this book is, ultimately,
   a book of solutions."

Elizabeth Rusch, whose work I know from her many accurate and accessible science-related children's book, (sometimes on the same subjects that I, too, have explored) is extremely qualified to give me a civics lesson. (What ever history and civics I know has come to me independently of my formal education.) She first became interested in politics from an eighth-grade trip to the U.S. Senate. She has a master's in public policy from U. C. Berkeley and has served as a Jacob K. Javits Fellow in the U.S. Senate.   In keeping with her target audience of young adult readers, she has also established an interactive website:   https://www.youcallthis.com/ where they can find actionable items in their own states.

You Call this Democracy? is a how-to book for saving what is valuable in our country and a practical, actionable guide to young people who are tasked with creating a brighter future out of the immense challenges we now face in the wake of this pandemic.

It is a timely and very valuable addition to home libraries of teen-agers and their parents.

A Candidate for a Child's Home Library

7/5/2020

In my last post, I quoted a literacy statistic for a children's home library, "Children growing up in homes with at least twenty books get three years more schooling than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents’ education, occupation, and class." A children's home library contains books that, by definition, will be read more than once. Roxie Munro's glorious adventure under water on a coral reef, Dive In: Swim with Sea Creatures at Their Actual Size, is a perfect candidate.

Dive In is enticing on so many levels. As someone who has had the memorable experience of snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef, once was not enough but once is all I got. Munro's book powerfully creates the experience. You are immersed and absorbed, never leaving the sea, viewing 29 of the gorgeous, quirky, fantastical inhabitants of coral reefs. It deserves to be revisited time and time again.

Did you ever hear of a spotted cleaner shrimp or a longsnout seahorse or the queen triggerfish, to name a few? And what's that gray thing that starts looming in the background on 15,16, 17, 18 and folds out into two double-spreads on pages 19-22 to reveal a reef shark that is 8 feet long? (Measuring that critter, alone, is worth owning the book.)

This is a book that commands study and involvement that goes way beyond the five-minute bedtime read. Munro includes a simple fact or two for each critter that are gems:

"The common octopus is a mollusk, as are snails, clams, and squids. Like a squid,
an octopus also changes colors and patterns to camouflage itself. An octopus has
excellent vision and a large brain, and is considered the most intelligent,
invertebrate. It even uses tools to build its den, which might feature a door that
opens and closes!"

My kid-like curious brain is teeming with questions to know more. If it's a mollusk, where's its shell? How many colors can it be? How do we know that? What does its eyes have to do with the size of its brain?

The back-matter reveals a key to the 29 different species as a "walk in the park" diagram including the relative sizes depicted as actual size in the book. Yep, there's the reef shark, taking up space in the middle. And the end papers feature coral reefs of the world, including the one I dove into.

Roxie Munro brings the skills of a fine artist and the discipline of a diligent nonfiction author to revealing a complex and glorious ecosystem currently under attack from global warming.

If Dive In is the first book on coral reefs in a child's library, it will not be the last.

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Vicki Cobb

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Voting and The State of the Union

A Candidate for a Child's Home Library

Vicki Cobb

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