Catherine Sherman

Scientists Discover Origin of a Cancer in Tasmanian Devils

Catherine Sherman — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 13:55:19 +0000

This Tasmanian Devil looks menacing, but he's just yawning. Devils can get peevish, though, particularly at meal time when they have to share. Devils have the strongest jaws per size of any mammal and can completely devour their meals, bones, fur and all. They are stellar members of the clean plate club!

Above is a photograph I took of a Tasmanian Devil in January 2009 at the Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park in Tasmania. Links to my previous posts on the Tassie Devil are at the bottom. (I’m just wild about the devils!)

The Tasmanian devil, a fox-sized marsupial, was listed in Australia as an endangered species in May 2009 because of a contagious cancer that has wiped out more than half of the wild population. New research shows that the cancers are caused by infectious tumors, rather than viruses as previously thought. One scientist described the tumors, which are passed from devil to devil through bites, as a parasite. The new finding will help scientists to devise vaccines that could save the Tasmanian devils and also shed light on the nature of infectious cancers in humans.

Two young Tasmanian devils.

Devils do not exist in the wild outside Tasmania, although zoos and wildlife parks on mainland Australia as well as on Tasmania are breeding captive populations as a strategy against total extinction. The Tasmanian Devil is the largest carnivorous marsupial now that the Tasmanian Tiger is extinct.

For details on this study, here is a New York Times Article: Scientists Discover Origin of a Cancer in Tasmanian Devils

My previous posts about and photographs of the Tasmanian Devil:

I’m a Friend of the Tasmanian Devil.

More Deviltry.

Cardinal on Christmas Morning

Catherine Sherman — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 18:59:48 +0000

Cardinal in a Snowstorm by catherinesherman
This male cardinal waited for his chance at our bird feeder on Christmas morning. Eight inches of snow covered the ground, making food difficult to find, so there was a lot of bird traffic in line for a meal. Below is a high resolution version of this photo.

High resolution photo of Cardinal in a Snowstorm.

Emergency Chocolate Relief Act

Catherine Sherman — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:49:57 +0000

Need some chocolate relief? Mix this cookie dough, form into cookies, freeze and then pop into the oven whenever you have a chocolate emergency.

Our annual book club Christmas party was on Monday night. We exchange small, but wonderful gifts. We bring a gift for each person, so we go home with a lot of loot.

This year, Chris brought a recipe for “Emergency Chocolate Relief Act” plus the actual raw cookies in a plastic bag to put in our freezers. The raw cookies were ready to pop in the oven whenever we were feeling faint and in need of chocolate. She even gave us a small cookie tray, which will fit into a toaster oven. It was all wrapped in a festive tea towel. Her mother, Judy, also a member of book club, gave us a small spatula to complete the ensemble. You can see it all above with the cookies hot from the oven.

The recipe:

Take off all jewelry. Wash hands. Combine one roll of Nestle refrigerated chocolate chip cookie dough with a roll of another brand (such as Pillsbury) in the same amount. Add substantial amounts of pecans and chocolate chips or pieces of candy bars. Squish all together into balls. Slightly flatten and put in freezer bags. Freeze. When you need a cookie or two or three, break out of the bag. Put on baking sheet and bake at 350 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes. Cool slightly. Eat! You’ll feel instant relief!

May Your Holidays Be Bright!

Catherine Sherman — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 20:28:00 +0000

Geese fly in their famous v-formation against the backdrop of a full moon and the cheerful lights of the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri.

In this season, partly dedicated to consumerism, I’m posting this photograph I took this past January of the Country Club Plaza Shopping Center, one of Kansas City’s notable areas.

The Country Club Plaza was the first shopping center in the world designed to accommodate shoppers arriving by automobile. J.C. Nichols, a residential developer of nearby upscale homes, designed the shopping center after European styles, especially those of Seville, Spain. More than thirty statues, murals, and tile mosaics adorn the Plaza, as well as major architectural reproductions, such as a half-sized Giralda Tower of Seville (the tallest building in the Plaza).

Even though the Country Club Plaza was designed for automobiles, once you arrive you really need to park your car in one of the garages and walk from store to store. Pedestrians rule on the Plaza. Thousands of people live in condominiums and apartments nearby, and the Plaza is always teeming with activity. I drive by a lot, because my mother-in-law lives nearby, and it’s also on the way to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. I’m not a shopper, though, so I seldom join the throngs, except to go to some of the great restaurants. A quaint restaurant on the Plaza with fantastic vegetarian food is Eden Alley, which is in the lower level of the Unity Temple. It also has a great people-watching patio outside.

The trend in Kansas City now and elsewhere is to look toward another European design, and that’s mixed use –Situating housing areas, restaurants and stores in the same area, so that you can easily walk to a store or restaurant from your home.

For more information about the Plaza — Country Club Plaza Shopping Center. Eden Alley Website.

Kansas City Plaza Christmas Lights Under Full Moon by catherinesherman

Monarch Butterflies in Space

Catherine Sherman — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:00:00 +0000

KU Professor to help send monarchs into space

By RON SYLVESTER

The Wichita Eagle

(published in Kansas City Star on Nov. 16, 2009)

LAWRENCE, Kan. – (By Ron Sylvester) Chip Taylor is used to people giving him strange looks.

As director of Monarch Watch and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, Taylor has placed radio tags on butterflies and tracked them across pastures and plains.

Sending monarchs to space is not that far-out an idea to him.

Three of Taylor’s monarch caterpillars are set to blast off to the International Space Station on Monday aboard the space shuttle Atlantis.

Why send butterflies to space?

To study the effects of gravity.

And yes, the thought of sending butterflies to space has drawn some quizzical looks.

But Taylor is used to that in his field.

“We got strange looks last summer when I was working with National Geographic and we radio tagged a butterfly,” Taylor said. “We have to go knock on somebody’s door and say ‘Can we go look for our radio-tagged butterfly? We think it landed in your pasture.’ I mean, you talk about having strange looks.”

Studying insects helps us learn how the world around us works, Taylor said, and how it affects our lives.

“The nature of what we do is to find out what life is all about,” Taylor said. “When you’re doing that sort of thing you’re up close and personal with all these insects, and that’s something people aren’t comfortable with.”

About 600 individuals and schools will be able to watch the caterpillars develop as they orbit in the space station, about 220 miles outside the earth’s atmosphere.

The schools will receive their own caterpillars in a small rearing station similar to that in the space station.

Students will watch those in their classrooms develop and compare them to how the caterpillars grow in space. Researchers hope they’ll turn into butterflies sometime after Thanksgiving.

The object, Taylor said, is to see how gravity, or the near-zero gravity in the space station, affects the insects. These will be the first of their species to travel in space.

“It is so gravity oriented,” Taylor said. “None of the insects they’ve taken up into space have had a particularly strong gravity orientation. The monarchs do. They’re going to be in a nearly weightless environment. It could pose all sorts of different problems for them.”

That will tell scientists more about movement and how life functions, said Steve Hawley, Kansas professor of physics and astronomy and an astronaut on five shuttle missions.

“The more we learn about how physiology works in space whether it’s human physiology or insect physiology or plant physiology the more we’ll be able to use that information on the ground to understand fundamentally how biological systems work,” Hawley said in a statement from the university.

Monarch Watch is working on the project with the BioServe Space Technologies program at the University of Colorado.

Stefanie Countryman, business development manager with BioServe, said their program created habitat and stringent requirements for the butterflies in space.

But they had no food.

Taylor and his Kansas program developed an artificial food for the caterpillars. That’s how they’ll eat in space.

Since April, Taylor has been perfecting the artificial diet.

“That’s what’s making this all possible,” Taylor said.

A study guide being sent to the schools explains that monarch caterpillars walk with 16 legs and spin silk to attach themselves to surfaces.

“What will happen when they lose their grip?” the guide asks, referring to the force of gravity on liftoff or the weightlessness of space.

How the caterpillars are able to react could teach astronauts how to move better in space, the study guide says.

“You win if they succeed, you win if they fail, because you learn something,” Taylor said. “You learn what their limitations are when they fail. You learn how they adjust if they succeed.”

People will be able to follow the experiment through photos, videos and other information at the program’s Web site: http://www.monarchwatch.org/space.

Information from: The Wichita Eagle, http://www.kansas.com

United Breaks Guitars

Catherine Sherman — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:53:04 +0000

United Breaks Guitars

In this busy travel season, enjoy! As one who’s had to ship musical instruments, I can identify. A couple of follow-up videos hinted of a possible happy ending.

Natural Trap, Wyoming, 1975

Catherine Sherman — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 18:08:51 +0000

In August 1975, there were three ways to get to the bottom of the Natural Trap -- scaffolding, rapelling and falling. I liked to rapel into the cave but climb the scaffolding back to the entrance.

In August 1975, while working for the University of Kansas, I was assigned to report on a dig in a cave in Wyoming. I didn’t know the Miocene from the Eocene, but I was happy to be on the road, it was a paid week out of the office, and I wanted to get back to Wyoming for a visit. I didn’t get paid expenses, so a friend and I camped out along the way to save money, making a stop at Yellowstone National Park. I still remember the bird-sized mosquitoes buzzing around the tent, driving us crazy. We eventually slept in the car.

Here I am standing outside of my Army Surplus tent. To the left you can barely see an overturned car from the early 1960s that had been used for target practice. The paleontologists' camp was near derelict uranium mining camp cabins. (August 1975)

The dig itself was a thrilling adventure beginning with the drive up the boulder-strewn single-lane John Blue Canyon into the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains (below the road was the carcass of a Range River that didn’t survive). Once there, we lived in Army surplus tents, ate grilled Cornish game hen and rapelled into the cave, which was packed with fossils from the Pleistocene epoch.

I soon got a crash course in paleontology. For thousands of years during the Pleistocene Epoch, mammals had fallen into an 85-foot-deep cave on the western slope of the Big Horn Mountains. Paleontologists from KU and the University of Missouri at Columbia were digging up the bones of thousands of animals, such as mammoths, cheetahs, camels, bison, bears and horses. (After horses went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, they didn’t populate North America again until the Spanish brought them in the 1500s. )

Paleontologist Larry Martin examines a specimen.

I’ve been hooked on paleontology ever since this trip. I don’t mean that I love the dirty and painstaking work of actually uncovering bones and fossils and trying to figure out what and how old they are, but the excitement of seeing discoveries made in exotic locales and learning about how these animals lived and died. I’m afraid that makes me a bone-digging voyeur.

The dig revealed a lot about the climate in the area by the types of animals that were found. The Pleistocene climate was marked by repeated glacial cycles. At the maximum of this Ice Age, 30 percent of the Earth’s surface was covered by ice. At the time of this dig, it was thought we were heading into another Ice Age. Newspapers and magazines warned that it could happen very quickly and that possibly a little more carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels might stave it off and keep us from freezing to death.

The food in camp was great!

Larry Martin, now head of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Kansas, was one of the expedition leaders at the dig, which was conducted with B. Miles Gilbert from the University of Missouri at Columbia from 1974 to 1980. Some of the Natural Trap specimens are on display at K.U.’s Museum of Natural History. Paleontologist George Blasing featured Dr. Martin and the Natural Trap in Episodes Nine of “Jurassic Fight Club” on the History Channel. Dr. Martin has also appeared on NOVA.

I’ve kept up with Dr. Martin through the years and have written about K.U.’s dig of Jurassic dinosaurs near Newcastle, Wyoming. (More on that in a future post.)

Below is a story I wrote that appeared in several newspapers in 1975, including The Kansas City Star. Except for a few minor editing changes, the story appeared as published below.

AUGUST 1975 — The western foothills of Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains are arid, red and rocky, peppered by clumps of pungent sage brush and dwarfed juniper trees.

A few cattle graze on the sparse grass, and an occasional deer bounds through a ravine, but the harsh terrain supports few animals.

It wasn’t always so desolate. In the Pleistocene Epoch, 10,000 years ago and earlier, the Big Horn foothills teemed with large mammals. It was a wetter climate. The seasons were more moderate, the land more lush and more forested than today.

Herds of bison, horses and camels grazed on the meadows, stalked by fleet, long-legged bears and cats. Mammoths lumbered through the valleys. Bighorn sheep cropped hillside grasses.

The hills are limestone and pocked with caves and hollows. One cave mouth was open to the sky at the end of a finger of land, affording no escape for a panicking herd pursued by a fast-moving predator. This narrow peninsula was flanked by canyons which funneled predator and prey toward a rise, and then they all plummeted into the hole. Hungry wolverines and jackal-like dire wolves, catching a tempting whiff of rotting meat, crept daringly on a ridge of melting snow along the edge and tumbled below.

Here the crew digs in the Natural Trap Cave. Working hours were short because the crew relied on natural light, which only fell in the cave from mid-morning to mid-afternoon. Daylight was augmented by a few lamps.

As thousands of years passed, the cave gathered a scrambled mass of victims, preserved in layers, until a severe change in the climate wiped out most of the large mammals above, ending the cave’s carnage.

Today (1975), paleontologists and anthropologists from the University of Kansas and the University of Missouri – Columbia are making an easier descent to the bottom of the cave to return the bones of those Pleistocene animals to the surface, where they become the survivors of their age.

A grate covers the opening of the Natural Trap to keep modern animals and people from falling in.

The hole, known as the Natural Trap, is a vast 85-foot-deep dome-shaped limestone cavern (karst sinkhole). Tens of thousands of years ago part of the cavern’s roof fell in, making it a death-trap.

The names of the Pleistocene mammals in the trap may sound the same as some of the modern-day Big Horn animals — bighorn sheep, bison, bear — but the Pleistocene specimens were larger, different animals. The Pleistocene versions often had longer legs. The modern counterparts of other animals also found in the Natural Trap are smaller, such as wolves, wolverines and pronghorn antelope. Other animals found in the Trap, such as horses, camels, American lion, mammoth, woodland musk ox and American cheetah, all went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene.

“I don’t think we have a good potential in a specimen from the cave that is a good ancestor of any animal now in the area, ” Dr. Martin said.

Humans, who hunted the large Pleistocene mammals for food, partly has been blamed for their extinction, but most of the evidence points to climatic change as the cause, not only in North America but world-wide, Dr. Martin said.

The paleontologists are studying soil samples and bone deposition, looking for clues to the climatic fluctuations of the past, useful in anticipating future climate changes. The types of animals found in the trap probably will indicate the climate at the time since animals migrate to their favorite climates, Dr. Martin said.

In the forefront are Dr. Miles Gilbert, left, and Dr. Larry Martin, right, sorting a tray of specimens.

The specimens from the trap went to K.U. Museum of Natural History, which has the tenth largest vertebrate paleontology collection in the country.

There have been some remarkable finds, such as the cheetah-like cat, which has the characteristically long radius and ulna limb bones of the modern-day cheetah and has been found nowhere else in North America, Dr. Martin said.

“The cheetah-like cat found in the cave is the first good evidence that there was one in North America,” Dr. Martin said. There were several cheetah-like cat specimens found in the trap with the small cheetah canine teeth, necessary to give more space in the nose area. To run as swiftly as it does, the cheetah requires a large lungful of air.

Larry Martin digs in one of the areas staked out in the Natural Trap.

The short-faced bear specimen is one of the most spectacular finds do far (as of August 1975), Dr. Martin said. The beat was a long-legged open country animal, adapted for running and more carnivorous than modern-day bears. (A fight between a short-faced bear Arctodus simus and an American lion Panthera atrox near the Natural Trap is featured in episode nine of the History Channel’s “Jurassic Fight Club” in 2008.)

The bones of horses are the most abundant specimens found. Many seemed to have landed on their feet, snapping their leg bones. The cave’s fine limestones preserved the bones well, but most were broken from the initial impact or later by roof fall and other carcasses. To find the bones fragment, the crew sieves all of the dirt from each five-by-five section. The pieces are then painstakingly washed, scrubbed with toothbrushes and sorted at camp. Some are glued there, the rest to be assembled at K.U.

Temporary scaffolding is erected and dismantled each summer, the most dangerous part of the expedition, Dr. Gilbert said. The group couldn’t afford permanent scaffolding. Many team members prefer to drop into the cave by rappelling, which was the only way to enter the cave before 1974. There is a natural ledge just below the cave opening from which it’s easy to rappel. Climbing out by jumaring on a rope is a much more strenuous exercise, so everyone climbs up the shaky scaffolding to get out of the cave.

The scaffolding rests in a depression where deposits continually are eroded by rainfall even though the annual precipitation averages less than 15 inches. Bones remain intact in a mound to the east of the scaffolding where the crew lie on their sides and stomachs picking at the dirt, ice picks and whisks brooms. Dig sites were selected at random until a few productive sections were located.

The dining tent at Armpit Camp.

There are possibly 30 feet of deposits to excavate, Dr. Gilbert said. Specimens could be as old as 50,000 years at the bottom, but there’s no way to tell except to dig there.

“I personally don’t want to dig the entire cave,” Gilbert said. “I’d like to leave a third or half of it for the future to investigate when they have better technology to understand it.”

George Blasing’s Blog “Dinosaur George” is on my blogroll at the right.

History Channel’s Jurassic Fight Club

About Larry Martin.

About the Pleistocene Epoch.

When the crew wasn't working, there were classes about the area's plants, animals and history. Some of us could barely stay awake after a late-night trip exploring another cave, which required climbing in and out by rope. We were led by a geologist mapping the caves for the U.S. Geological Survey. He liked to scare us by leading us into a cavern and then ask us which way we'd come. We never knew. Another time he told us to turn off our acetylene head lamps. It was very dark and unsettling to be so far under the earth. A couple of times while exploring caves we felt the earth shake from dynamite blasts and worried that more rocks would fall from the ceiling to join those on the cave floor.

Armpit Camp.

This is a section of Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area north of the Natural Trap.

Sign at the opening to the Natural Trap, which is now closed.

Cooper’s Hawk

Catherine Sherman — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:45:00 +0000

A Cooper's Hawk waits on a tree near my bird feeder today. As much as I wanted this hawk to eat, I didn't want him to grab one of the black-capped chickadees or cardinals. They were smart enough to stay away today.

Click on these links to learn more: Wikipedia on the Cooper’s Hawk and Cooper’s Hawk

Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa

Catherine Sherman — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:10:07 +0000

Artist assistants stand next to 3,604 cups of coffee which have been made into a giant Mona Lisa in Sydney, Australia . The 3,604 cups of coffee were each filled with different amounts of milk to create the different shades! Those Aussies sure do know how to have fun (as I know from personal experience.)

Another fun-loving, art-loving, puzzle-loving person is Shouts from the Abyss (despite his grim name), who posts some of his pixel puzzles. To find them, click on pixels in his tags on his blog (on my blogroll). Here’s one of his puzzles. They get harder, but I thought I’d start you out easy.

Malcolm is a Norwegian Forest Cat — Cat of the Vikings!

Catherine Sherman — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:58:21 +0000

: Malcolm stands here showing many of the traits of a Norwegian Forest Cat — a mane, a bushy raccoon-like tail, tufted ears and toes, very thick fur. His belly fur would drag on the ground if we didn’t trim him. He’s probably really a Maine Coon cat, but that breed likely is descended from the Norwegian Forest Cat that traveled with the Vikings to North America in the 11th century.

Malcolm doesn’t have a pedigree. Almost eighteen years ago, he was just a fluffy stray kitten with ear mites and fleas when we chose him at Wayside Waifs, an animal shelter in Kansas City, Missouri. Through the years, as he grew larger and fluffier, people would tell us he might be partly if not all Maine Coon Cat. We didn’t care about breeds, though. To us, Malcolm was one of a kind, special, unique, in a class by himself. We barely remember life before he joined our family.

Malcolm loves the sunshine and follows it as it moves across the floor.

Lately, though, we’ve been watching shows about the different breeds of cat. I had no idea there were so many, although still not even close to the number of dog breeds. Our daughter has a Turkish Angora (now living with us), and I knew about a few others.

There are 80 breeds of cats recognized by one cat registry or another. The IPCBA (International Progressive Cat Breeders Alliance) recognizes 73 feline breeds, while the more conservative CFA (Cat Fanciers’ Association) acknowleges only 41, according to WikiAnswers.

Wikipedia says: The Maine Coon is one of the oldest natural domestic cat breeds in North America, specifically native to the state of Maine, where it is the official State Cat. The breed was popular in cat shows in the late 1800s, but its existence became threatened when long-haired breeds from overseas were introduced in the early 20th century. The Maine Coon made a comeback and is now the second most popular cat breed in North America, according to the Cat Fanciers’ Association. The Maine Coon is noted for its large bone structure, its rectangular body shape, and a long, flowing coat. The breed can be seen in a variety of colors and are known for their intelligence and gentle personalities.

One theory of the origin of the Maine Coon Cat is that it evolved from the Norwegian Forest Cats that traveled to North America with the Vikings in the 11th century. We decided that Malcolm must be a Viking cat. My children have one set of Norwegian great-grandparents, so this seemed the perfect origin for Malcolm. We should have named him Erik the Red!

Even in his old age, Malcolm managed to find ways to groom some of the more difficult to reach areas by propping himself against furniture.

Like the Maine Coon, Norwegian Forest Cats have a thick fluffy double-layered coat, long tufts of fur in ears and between toes, and a long bushy tail to protect them against the cold. They have a lion-like ruff or mane. Their coat is fairly waterproof because of its coarse outer layer and dense undercoat. They are very large cats with adult males weighing 13 to 22 pounds (6 to 10 kg), while females are about half that size. Their hind legs are longer than their front legs. Malcolm fits this description perfectly. At his largest, he weighed 16 pounds.

Maine Coon and Norwegian Forest cats are described as very intelligent, playful cats that enjoy human company but can get upset if left alone for a long period of time. Malcolm would always meow very bitterly when we left him for a couple of days. He had plenty to eat and drink, but he missed us. And we missed him.

Malcolm followed me around the house and always wanted to sit with or near me. In his later years, he slept next to me. He was my faithful companion, and when I called to him, he always answered. Malcolm is very sick now, and has all but his tail in Valhalla. Who would have thought a little cat (ok, not so little) could steal your heart so completely? I can barely write any more about him, I’m so sad. There are tears on my keyboard. Below is a link to a post (Good-bye, Mr. B) about another person’s tears on his keyboard over his beloved cat. (Written from the dog’s perspective.) Hold your pet close today. I had no idea when we were recording his vacuum grooming just a few weeks ago that Malcolm would decline so quickly. (The video is on this blog.) One day he was jumping on the sofa to sit next to me, the next day he retreated to the closet and refused to eat. Tests showed an inoperable tumor.

Malcolm getting vacuumed.

When I took Malcolm to the vet last week, a man who had come in to ask for directions, took a look at Malcolm and said:

“Now that is a cat!” Well said, sir!

Maine Coon Cat.

Norwegian Forest Cat.

Good-bye, Mr. B

Malcolm looks regal as he sits in one of his many favorite chairs.