The Must-Have Christmas Toy of 2012: The Tickle-Me Bionic Cockroach

A pair of grad students in Michigan has started a line of educational toys designed to teach kids the basics of neuroscience by letting them hack roaches and rewire their nervous systems. These 21st-century Lincoln Logs are going by the trade name Backyard Brains.

Their first kit, the SpikerBox, encourages kids to cut off a roach's leg ("don't worry, they can grow back," the instructions reassure us) and hook up each end to electrodes in order to listen to the neurons fire, or "spike," in response to stimulus. A more advanced experiment with the same kit encourages kids to feed similar electrical impulses back into another roach leg to reanimate it post-amputation.

These guys should look into product tie-ins for the new "Frankenweenie" movie.

But their most ambitious kit (currently in beta) is the "RoboRoach," pictured above. With this toy, kids are encouraged to glue fine electrodes into a roach's amputated antennae, pierce its carapace with a ground wire, and glue a circuitboard onto its back. Apparently all of this can be accomplished with your typical 8th-grade level neurosurgery skills. Here's the instruction video:

Once the wiring is complete, you'll have hours of fun sending artificial antennae stimuli into the roach's nervous system, forcing it to turn left or right by remote control.

The Backyard Brains kits are more humane than your typical bio lab dissection — so why they feel so creepy to me? Maybe I'm just feeling the cultural warnings of Mary Shelley's famous nightmare. These toys anticipate a future in which the kids who play with them will hack into human nervous systems. But they're also one more sign that "nature" is completely bound up with — and increasingly subject to — the progress of our technology.

David Lynch's Nature Film

Hollywood types supposedly love making heavy-handed ecological allegories to brainwash us into being more considerate and thoughtful. It turns out that David Lynch was no exception. Here's a short film about inner-city wildlife in Lynch's signature "neo-noir" style, from 1991:

The alien life in Mono Lake

NASA's astrobiologists have discovered a new form of life that uses arsenic, a toxic chemical, as a critical building block in its organic chemistry.

If you haven't read more about the discovery of arsenic-based life in California's Mono Lake, blog io9 has a great writeup of what it's all about, why it's such a big deal, and some of the implications - from the possibilities of new biofuels to the possibilities of life on Titan.

Alien life has been discovered right here on Earth. Nature is pretty incredible.

Mono Lake at sunrise, by John Muller.

High-Rise Birdhouses

Artists in London have installed clusters of hundreds of birdhouses on Ailanthus Altissima trees (a.k.a. the Tree of Heaven, Ghetto Palm, or the Tree that Grows in Brooklyn) growing in the terrace gardens various public housing projects.

Photo by London Fieldworks.

The high-density birdhousing is meant to mimic the high-density human housing of the surrounding human neighborhood. And also, perhaps, to mimic the proliferation of Ailanthus trees throughout most of the world's cities.

Photo by London Fieldworks.

Pelicans Meet the Markets

The Planet Money podcast - which continues to be excellent, even now that we're (maybe?) out of the economic apocalypse and there's no longer a pressing need to explain what a credit default swap is - takes a crack at tallying the price tag for dead pelicans in the Gulf:

This is a practical problem right now as we figure out how much we should fine BP for its spectacular oil spill. What's a fair price to put on the damage? In some cases, that's pretty easy to figure out: we can multiply the x tourists who won't be visiting oily beaches this summer by the y dollars they might have spent at seaside hotels and beach towns, and then we can add in the loss of p tons of commercial seafood, which would normally sell for q dollars per pound.

But how do you calculate the value of rescuing an oily pelican? Unlike shrimp and hotel rooms, there's no market for most of the Gulf's wildlife.

One strategy is to ask people how much they'd be willing to pay to save one pelican. Animal rescue groups, for instance, are spending about $500 on each bird they save. That tells us that each pelican is worth at least $500 among bird enthusiasts, who may well be willing to pay even more than that. But presumably most people aren't ready to cough up that much money to save one bird.

Broadening this approach gets into the economic method of contingent valuation, which was first employed on a large scale to figure out the damages caused from the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. In this method, economists deliver surveys to a broad swath of the population - including people who will never see a pelican in the flesh - to ask them if they would be willing to pay $X dollars to save one bird. As with any product, values will differ: some people will say "no" to paying $2, while others will say "yes" to paying $100. But with enough responses, economists can construct a demand curve, and figure out the equilibrium where the marginal cost of saving one more bird is just equal to society's marginal benefit.

So, if there are 20,000 people in the world who say they're willing to pay at least $500 to save one pelican, and it costs $500 to save each pelican, then BP should pony up $10 million to save 20,000 pelicans.

This method, too, is controversial. Its biggest problem is that it's too abstract - it's easy to tell a survey-taker that you'd pay $500 to save a pelican, but if the opportunity actually presented itself, would you really postpone your credit card payments to save one bird?

Even for environmentalists, it's a problematic question. Most would probably argue that we, as a society, should spend $10 million to save birds, right? But what if that means that we, as a society, will no longer be able to afford to spend $10 million on a solar energy project, or to conserve a wilderness area from development? Is the immediate plight of few thousand pelicans in the Gulf more important than shutting down a coal plant, or preserving a wild forest?

When I studied environmental economics in college and administered contingent valuation surveys about Oregonians' values of wild salmon in a seminar with Dr. Noelwah Netusil, there were a number of campus activists in my classes who bristled at any notion of putting an economic value on wildlife. Preserving the environment was a moral imperative, in their view, and it needed to be done without regard to the cost. They also criticized its anthropocentrism: how dare we impose our human values, and the structures of a social science, on a natural system that had been around for billions of years before Adam Smith?

That's a nice sentiment, and it may even be an honest reflection of their personal values - they may well have been willing to sacrifice everything they owned for wild salmon.

But it's not realistic for society as a whole. Economics is about managing scarcity, and dedicating our limited resources to achieving the best outcomes. Homo sapiens isn't the only species that practices economic calculations. A wolf makes hunting decisions based on whether the expected value of a meal is worth the cost of running to catch it; plants allocate energy and resources to roots or leaves depending on the respective values of nourishment from the soil or from the sun.

In the 21st century, environmentalists have no shortage of demands on their time and money, and our time and money are scarce resources. The view that everything in nature is sacred and has infinite value is not productive. It's preventing individuals and organizations from setting priorities and winning victories.

At some point, we'll need to stop worrying about the pelicans and start paying those workers to build solar panels and public transit lines, instead of using toothbrushes to get oil out of feathers.

In Seach of Moosey Paradise: A Walk Along Portland's Inner-City Wildlife Corridors

The big news here in Portland yesterday was a young bull moose who had wandered into Deering Oaks Park, a formally-landscaped open space in the central city. Just like the opening credits of Northern Exposure, but with more spectators.

According to reports, the animal took a dip in the park's pond, where it attracted a small crowd of onlookers, as well as the city's police department and a state game warden, who were concerned about how it would cross I-295 on its way out of the city. One of my favorite details of the story is how they were going to shoot the animal with a tranquilizer, but the warden's gun jammed just when she got a clear shot. Apparently Portland's big-game armory has suffered from infrequent use.

It ended up taking the Forest Avenue underpass, crossing one of the city's busiest streets twice, then escaping through the University of Southern Maine campus. It was later spotted at Chevrus High School, located in an inner suburban neighborhood, before it made its way west through the woods in Evergreen Cemetery. The animal was reportedly exhausted, but unscathed.

This isn't the first time a young bull moose has appeared in downtown Portland. A few years ago, police shot one in the middle of the city's Munjoy Hill neighborhood - an even stranger place to see such a huge animal, since it lies at the end of a peninsula, cut off from the mainland by a freeway and the city's central business district. That was also early in the summer, a time of year when juvenile males tend to strike out on their own and take risks in pursuit of their own territory.

These moose that wander into the city obviously have no conception of where it was, just a sense of hope that, on the other side of this neighborhood, it might find a big-enough block of swampy woods with a small surplus of female moose. I'm reminded of how deer and other mammals came to populate islands far from and out of sight of the mainland, swimming for hours on a vague scent, with no way of knowing how much further land would be, or whether they might drown in the crossing. At the risk of anthropomorphizing, I'm impressed at this moose's sense of adventure - its willingness to take big risks to find a great new place.

This kind of exploration is hard to come by for anyone who actually lives in and knows the city. But the moose's path in and out of Portland seems to have gravitated towards the city's remaining blocks of undeveloped land and forested parks - and the places where a moose would feel most at home happen to be the kinds of places I most enjoy exploring myself.

Because there aren't any public reports of the moose before it was sighted in Deering Oaks Park, it's hard to tell how this particular moose got into the city, but I suspect that it either came in the way it left, through Evergreen Cemetery, or it ventured in along the banks of the Stroudwater and Fore Rivers. Here's a map:

Although Portland is on a peninsula, there are two large blocks of wildlands on its fringes that extend towards the central city. To the south, critters like deer and coyotes regularly migrate into the city along the Stroudwater River, which is surrounded by a large block of swampy, undeveloped woods, as well as several farms and golf courses. The Maine Turnpike, probably the biggest barrier for critters trying to get into the city (it's the red-dashed line running across the map above) flies over the Stroudwater on a wide bridge, which makes it easy for critters (and people - this is roughly the path of the Stroudwater Trail) to cross under the highway:

On the other side of the Turnpike, just north of the mouth of the Stroudwater, there's the Fore River Preserve, a former Maine Audubon property that occupies the headwaters of the Fore River along with acres of marsh and forested uplands. From the Preserve, a moose bound for the city could walk through the sparsely-populated neighborhood between the Fore River and the railroad tracks, cross under I-295 at the bridge, and then follow an abandoned railway into Deering Oaks, without seeing a human soul.

Alternatively, a critter could cross the Turnpike at one of two other Turnpike underpasses: one at Warren Avenue, a relatively rural-feeling road that cuts through an industrial area, and one where the Presumpscot River passes under the Turnpike in the city's northernmost reaches. From either of these options, a moose could cut through the thin patches of woods between houses in the city's low-density outer suburbs, before reaching the the Evergreen Cemetery. While the front of the Cemetery, along Stevens Avenue, is highly landscaped, and doesn't offer much cover for critters, the back of the Cemetery is a huge, wild forest that extends almost all the way to the Turnpike. Better still, right across Stevens Avenue from the Cemetery is Baxter Woods, a forested city park, which itself is just a skip across a busy road and railroad tracks to a smaller tract of woods around the new Ocean Avenue School. From there, its just a matter of trespassing through some inner-suburb backyards to get to the parklike University of Southern Maine campus, which is right across the freeway from Deering Oaks Park. The moose yesterday opted to take a detour to the north to visit Chevrus High School, but this roughly describes his escape route.

By coming into Portland, this moose has demonstrated to us an inner-city bushwhacking course through the wildest remaining areas of our city. While I've hiked portions of this itinerary before (such as the Stroudwater Trail, which I described here), I've never tried to do the whole thing in a day, as this moose did. But I think it would be fun to try.

Safari 7: a wilderness tour of Queens

During a few days spent in New York, I had a chance to briefly visit the Safari 7 Base Camp, set up in Grand Central for Earth Week.

Safari 7 is pretty much exactly what I have been thinking about doing ever since I worked as an Urban Park Ranger a few years ago in Inwood Hill Park: a guided tour that highlights nature and ecology in the places we typically overlook those things. I'm glad that someone actually had the initiative to make it happen. From the project's description:

“The 7 line is a physical, urban transect through New York City's most diverse range of ecosystems. Affectionately called the International Express, the 7 line runs from Manhattan's dense core, under the East River, and through a dispersed mixture of residences and parklands before terminating in downtown Flushing. Safari 7 circulates an ongoing series of podcasts and maps that explore the complexity, biodiversity, conflicts, and potentials of New York City's ecosystems. Tours are available online and can be experienced independently, or in group expeditions and workshops organized by the Safari 7 team.”

The "Base Camp" at Grand Central included an array of gorgeous banners that highlighted things like the aquatic wildlife of the East River, the ecosystems of decomposition at work in the city's huge “cemetery belt,” and the dual role of urban chickens, as food sources and as illegal fighters. The centerpiece of the project is a series of podcasts, short enough to listen to between stops, that describe various ecological phenomena at work at each stop along the line.

Thus, as you ride under the East River, you can listen to a podcast about the tiny island formed from that tunnel's excavation, and learn about the cormorants that nest there. Or hear about the ecology of courtyard gardens in Queens, while you try to get a glimpse of one from the elevated portion of the line.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to write more about those individual podcasts and some of the issues they discuss in more detail. Much of the subject matter isn't unique to Queens - no matter what city or backwoods internet-enabled cabin you live in, there's something for you to learn about your own human habitat. Visit safari7.org to download your own safari audio tour.

The Cosmopolitan Winters of Corvus brachyrhynchos

Here in Maine, we get thousands of migrants who arrive here every summer and stake out their own tiny territories in seaside cabins or camps in the woods, turning Maine's quaint villages into far-flung suburbs of New York and Boston. And every fall, as the days get darker, they flock back south to console themselves against the cold and the dark with the social opportunities of cities.

As it happens, the common American crow does the same thing.

Around this time of year, all over the country, huge swarms of crows flock across the skies and mob the trees at city parks every afternoon and evening. Here in Portland, they seem to start around the northern end of the Eastern Promenade, then they flock over to Lincoln and Deering Oaks Parks before settling in for the night near the new Mercy Hospital buildings near the Fore River.



A few months ago I started working at Maine Audubon, and I asked the staff naturalist, Eric Hynes, what these crows were doing. He told me that, essentially, they're just socializing. While crows are fairly territorial in the summer, in the winter, when food is scarce and predators are more of a threat, they prefer the company of other crows. Thousands of other crows.

It's not all for fun: "They get together every afternoon and check each other out," said Eric. "They might say, 'hey, that guy looks fat and happy today, we'd better follow him and find out where he's getting his food.' Or, 'that one looks sick and scraggly, stay away from him.'" When it gets dark, they bed down together by the thousands to provide safety in numbers against predators.

Crows have also figured out that they're safer in cities, where their biggest nemesis, the Great Horned Owl, is less likely to venture. As a result, these wintertime social flocks tend to gravitate towards urban areas.

To see them for yourself, head out to your local city park this afternoon around 4 pm and walk towards the noise of a thousand crows cawing.

Haliaeetus leucocephalus in the Heights

Image from www.trinitywallstreet.org.

The people at the Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum in Manhattan's Washington Heights snapped these photos of an American Bald Eagle, enjoying a lunch plucked from the Hudson in a tree near the cemetery offices. It's a big fish - maybe a striped bass?

This just happens to be the same cemetery where the famed naturalist John James Audubon has been buried since 1851. During most of Audubon's lifetime, bald eagles were a common sight in the ecologically-rich Hudson River estuary, which had been a teeming mixing-basin of saltwater and freshwater habitats. But by the mid-nineteenth century, sewage and industrial waste from the booming city (in an era without pollution controls) laid waste to the estuary's food chain -from the oysters near the bottom to the bald eagles at the top.

The Clean Water Act and other environmental laws of the 1960s and 1970s gave the Hudson River a chance to recover, though. Fish came back, but state and federal wildlife programs had to resort to importing eagles from Canada in order to lure the big birds of prey back to the city.

In the summer of 2006, when this blog was just getting started, I was part of the Urban Park Rangers team that maintained a bald-eagle hack site in Inwood Hill Park on the final year of a five-year program (here are some of my photos). Eagles typically wander around for a five-year adolescence before returning to nest near the place where they were raised, so it tickles me to think that this bird in the Trinity cemetery might be one that was raised in Inwood Hill Park.

Birdwatchers in New York City can look for this eagle themselves at 770 Riverside Drive, between 153rd and 155th streets.

10031

A Field Guide to North American Seafood Menus

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has put together a consumers' guide to sustainable seafoods. The idea is to encourage grocery shoppers and restaurant patrons to support responsible fisheries, like wild Alaskan salmon, and to avoid fisheries that are environmentally harmful or near collapse, like farm-raised Atlantic salmon.

Snapper, Red

Rating: Avoid


Red snapper is in decline worldwide, and fishing pressure on this species remains excessive. Red snapper should therefore be avoided.

Market Names:
Mule Sow, Rat, Tai, American Red Snapper

The guides started as printable pocket versions that you could fold into your wallet and consult at the supermarket. But now there's an even better, more discreet version for mobile phones, accessible at mobile.seafoodwatch.org (part of the mobile-phone webpage about Red Snapper, a species that's in serious decline, is shown at right). Or, if you prefer, get the iPhone app. There's even a guide tailored for sushi restaurants that translates common Japanese fish names.

These guides are meant to accompany your menu at the restaurant, but I find them pretty fascinating in their own right. For instance, the Aquarium's guide for the Northeast region endorses Pacific halibut as "best choices," but we're advised to "avoid" Atlantic halibut and flounder caught here in the Gulf of Maine.

Clams (both farmed clams and wild steamers) are also endorsed as a "best choice." Which is good news, as long there's no red tide.

And Monterey is lukewarm about Maine lobster, a fishery that's long been hailed for its socially-driven sustainable management techniques. Maine lobster ranks as merely as a "good alternative," not as one of the "best choices," since the "current population status is considered weak or unknown" and there are concerns about right whales getting trapped in the buoys and lines attached to traps. Haddock also falls into the middling "good alternatives" category, with the caveat that "the majority of U.S. Atlantic haddock is caught using bottom trawl gear [which causes] considerable habitat damage to seafloor habitats."

So maybe I'll switch my preferred clam-shack order from fried haddock with tartar sauce to fried clams, and just opt for salad during red tides or after big rainstorms.

If you're a chef looking for sustainable-fisheries cred, Monterey Bay and a number of other marine research institutions also recently launched fishchoice.com, a tool for restaurants and other commercial seafood buyers.

Picket Lines and Prairies

Above: An unmown pedestrian bridge in Windsor, Ontario.
Photo courtesy of wreckingball.org

In Windsor, Ontario (the city directly across the river from Detroit), 1,800 municipal workers have been on strike for several months now. Among other things, this means that no one is mowing the lawns in the city's parks, which are transforming from riverfront esplanades and soccer fields into wild prairies as the summer wears on.

The re-wilding of Windsor's parks has inspired some nice nature writing from Anne Jarvis, a columnist from the Windsor Star, and her readers:

At first, the flood of comments and letters on the strike by 1,800 city workers, including those who cut the grass in the usually manicured parks, expressed anger about the unsightly overgrowth.

Then the grass matured, the wildflowers began blooming and wildlife returned. And the letters began to change.

This one is almost poetic in its description:

"The long grass is now home to so many singing birds and insects and there is such a wide variety of colourful native plants in bloom. The wind can be heard as it blows through the grass ... Such a difference from the plain, flat and empty space it was before."

The park? The soccer pitches at the Ford Test Track [which is exactly what it sounds like: a former proving ground for Detroit's dying manufacturers] in the heart of the city.

"Today was the first time that I have ever considered that park to be beautiful," wrote the woman.

A colony of bobolinks and some eastern meadowlarks, declining species known and loved for their beautiful song, were discovered there last month. They surprised and delighted birdwatchers. A grassland species, they're rarely seen in the city because there isn't much grassland.

I found out about Windsor's strike and unintentional re-wilding project via the Broken City Lab, whose latest project has been to unofficially recognize the city's overgrown meadows with these signs, which they designed and installed themselves:

Above: Strike commentary from Windsor's Broken City Lab.

I love how these signs tweak peoples' perceptions of these places: suddenly, it's not an overgrown lawn or a symbol of municipal neglect: it's a wildlife refuge!

As the Summer Without Lawnmowers wears on, people in Windsor are growing fond of the new wildflower meadows and flocks of bobolinks. In the same Windsor Star column, Jarvis reports that the City has resolved to leave a couple hundred acres of parkland unmown, even after the strike eventually ends.

The Big Box Aviary

Photo by flickr user PhotoJeff.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that house sparrows love home improvement warehouse stores:

These birds have set up housekeeping in Home Depots, Lowe's, and other big-box stores around the industrialized world. But here's the really amazing thing: from Maine to Virginia, England to Australia, and points in between, house sparrow populations everywhere have learned the motion detector trick [fluttering in front of automatic door sensors] to let themselves in and out of their cavernous homes. In other words, it appears that all these far-flung flocks have independently discovered how to use technology to their advantage.

Home improvement stores offer near-ideal habitat for sparrows: there are none of the housecats that decimate bird populations elsewhere in the suburbs, no hawks, no weather, and there's an abundance of birdseed.

The Monitor article reports that one Home Depot employee in Maine put up a decoy owl to scare away the birds from turding on the kitchen and bath display. Other stores have installed fine-meshed nets around the ceiling rafters to prevent the birds from nesting.

Search "home depot sparrows" on flickr for few photos of the birds in various stores around the nation.

Observations

Things seen today while lounging in the grass at Fort Allen Park:

• An osprey headed west, possibly to one of the nests near the Coast Guard base or the Casco Bay Bridge, and carrying a fish in its talons
• The Java Sea oil barge (which has been here since Thursday), swinging on its mooring near Little Diamond Island
• The Baltic Captain I arriving in harbor, and a smaller barge docking alongside (presumably in order to take on bunker fuels)
• Wild strawberry (fragaria virginiana) blooming in the mown grass
  

March 6, 1890

The Portland Museum of Art had an opening this evening for its Biennial, and although there were many excellent things there, my favorite was this drawing, by an artist named Julianna Swaney, called "Central Park March 6 1890":

The man depicted is Eugene Schieffelin, who, as legend has it, made it his project to introduce all of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare to the new world in the late 19th century. He tried, and failed, to populate nightingales here "Believe me, love, it was the nightingale," Romeo and Juliet); he succeeded in introducing the House Sparrow ("Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow," Hamlet) and the European Starling, which was mentioned only once in all of Shakespeare's complete works:

Nay, I will; that's flat:
He said he would not ransom Mortimer;
Forbad my tongue to speak of Mortimer;
But I will find him when he lies asleep,
And in his ear I'll holla 'Mortimer!'
Nay,
I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.
-Hotspur, in King Henry IV, part I.

And so, on March 6, 1890, Eugene Schiefflelin set free two flocks of starlings, the bird that Shakespeare considered to be an agent of torment, into Central Park. And the rest is history: the descendants of Schieffelin's starlings have multiplied themselves to a population of 200 million birds, living throughout temperate North America.

The starling has become a banner example of an unwanted invasive species. Yet Schieffelin was a member of the New York Zoological Society, and the American Acclimatization Society, a quasi-scientific organization that expressly sought to introduce non-native species into new ecosystems, in accordance with some scientific theories of the time. Without a doubt, he would have considered himself a conservationist.

In hindsight, we're prone to think of Schieffelin as an idiot. But on March 6, 1890, he was doing something he believed to be virtuous. As the birds flew out from the cage, he would have felt a sense of hope: the beginning of a new future. For all of the hassles it has caused in the years since, it must have been a beautiful moment.

Cooper's Hawk in Cambridge, Massachusetts

In a London Plane tree next to Memorial Drive and the Charles River:

Many are the wonders...

In the past week, two amazing wildlife stories have come to my attention.

First, in Florida's everglades, rangers recently found the carcasses of an alligator inside a burst-open Burmese python. Nobody wins in this fight:

The BBC's pithy caption: "The python tried to swallow the alligator whole and then exploded."

Pythons are not native to the Everglades: they were introduced about 20 years ago when exotic pet owners got tired of taking care of them in terrariums and began dumping them in the swamps instead. Since then, they've thrived in Florida's hot, humid climate. And as the photo above attests, the pythons don't have many predators to worry about.

And by the way: under modest global warming scenarios, Burmese pythons will probably be found throughout the old Confederacy by the year 2100.

Second, I'd like to introduce you to Macropinna microstoma, a deep-sea denizen of California's Monterrey Bay. It has a transparent head through which it peers with barrel-shaped eyeballs:


Video comes courtesy of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

You can read about the Aquarium's recent discoveries about this fish in this article from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Rats prefer Manhattan: an application for biomimicry in urban planning

New research from Tel Aviv University (and reported in Science Daily) finds that cities with grid layouts, like Manhattan, are more rat-friendly than cities with irregular street networks: a gridded system allows rats to cover more territory.

Researchers set up two obstacle courses that followed a grid and non-grid pattern (right, above). The paths the rats took in both courses covers the same distance, but in the grid "city," rats' paths covered much more territory than in the irregular "city."

Quoting from the Science Daily article,

"We've found that routes taken by rats and other members of the animal kingdom tend to converge at attractive landmarks, the same way people are attracted, for example, to the Arc de Triumph in Paris," says Prof. David Eilam from TAU’s Department of Zoology.

The researchers also hope that rat race experiments like this one might be of some use to urban designers as they plan new cities and neighborhoods in the future.

Speaking of rats' love of Manhattan, New York City's Pest Control Services is now indexing their inspection reports on online maps at the new Rat Information Portal, which allows anyone to compare rat inspection data across neighborhoods, community districts, or individual properties. Below, a map of rat inspection results in the Upper East Side. Red parcels indicate properties where inspections found "signs of rats," orange parcels indicate "problem conditions" (such as exposed piles of garbage), and yellow parcels indicate properties that passed their initial inspections:

The Foreclosed Backyards National [Skate] Park

Photo: New York Times

Last summer, I'd written about how Sun Belt swimming pools were reverting to semi-wild conditions in abandoned backyards thanks to the foreclosure crisis. Suburb-dwellers, so accustomed to a landscape of control, are seeing their swimming pools transform into vernal pools. Quoting a Wall Street Journal article on the phenomenon:

"First you have fish, then you have birds that eat them" and then bird droppings, says Arnie Shal, a retired accountant, who lives next to several foreclosed houses with pools in Clearwater, Fla. "It's not really a healthy situation."

But it certainly is a healthy situation for fish and birds, of course. The foreclosure crisis is turning suburban backyards into tiny little wildlife refuges.

Unless you're interested in fishing for minnows or birdwatching, though, the foreclosure vernal pools don't offer a lot in the way of backcountry recreation opportunities. Which is why I'm so happy to learn, via the New York Times, of another burgeoning trend: reclaiming foreclosed backyards and their drained swimming pools as skateboard parks.

"There are more pools right now than I could possibly skate," [skater Adam Morgan of Los Angeles] said. "It’s pretty exciting." Mr. Peacock travels around town in his pickup searching for the addresses of homes he has learned have been foreclosed on, either via the Internet or from a friend who works in real estate. He has also learned to spot a foreclosed house, he said, by looking for "dead grass on the lawn and lockboxes on the front door."

California's abandoned backyard pools are thus becoming a world-renowned landmark for suburban outdoor recreation: "Skaters are coming to places like Fresno [a Central Valley city with a preponderance of foreclosed backyard pools] from as far as Germany and Australia."

So, not only are our foreclosed suburban backyards becoming new havens for wild nature; they've also become world-renowned playgrounds for outdoor sports. And, thanks to the passage of the massive bailout package and the "troubled asset relief program," the American public now owns a substantial portion of these over-mortgaged backyards.

America's foreclosed backyards are a lot like a newly-created national park.

Photo: New York Times

The skateboarders have even developed their own code of ethics, which is strikingly similar to the "leave no trace" principles that are promoted among backcountry hikers and climbers. Quoting once again from the Times article:

In order to maintain a sense of public service, the skateboarders adhere to basic rules: no graffiti, pack out trash and never mess with or enter the houses. [Skating occurs] in short bursts during the workday to avoid disturbing neighbors or attracting police attention. Twice in recent weeks, Mr. Peacock said, the police caught the skateboarders in an empty pool and demanded they leave but did not issue citations.

So, skate Chlorine Canyon! Try angling in the Fresnoglades! Learn about the family life of opossums, raccoons, and other small mammals in the Pool Shed Game Preserve! Just remember to leave the Park as you found it, and please respect other visitors.

No matter where you live, a piece of the Foreclosed Backyards National Park is nearby... start planning your vacation today!

Wilderness game theory

Above: female lechwe in Botswana. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

There are three things that tickle me about The Economist: fun, safety, and their writers' knack for tying a broad range of topics into the free-market economic theories of Adam Smith.

To wit: this week's issue includes a summary of new research that demonstrates that a rare species of African antelope, the Nile lechwe, is somehow capable of making strategic decisions about whether to give birth to a male or female offspring, depending on its age, in order to maximize the probability of passing on its genes to future generations.

For some as yet unknown reason (possibly because sons are generally heavier), lechwe are three times more likely to die in childbirth while delivering a son than they are while delivering a daughter. So giving birth to a son is a risky proposition for a lechwe. It's also more of a genetic gamble: a male lechwe has some chance of becoming dominant and breeding a lot, which could be a genetic jackpot, but if a male fails to become dominant, it becomes a genetic dead-end. Daughters, on the other hand, are the safer bet, since nearly all females breed and will pass on some of your genes to another generation.

In theory, if a mother could somehow choose between sons and daughters, a lechwe should choose to give birth to more daughters while she's young, then take a chance on a son or two once they're old and expect to die soon anyhow. If possible, the mother should also put in more resources into making sure that her offspring are larger as she gets older, so that if she does give birth to a male, it has a better chance of becoming dominant.

It's more or less the same strategy that explains the old Publishers' Clearinghouse Sweepstakes contests and their demographics. The Sweepstakes take up a lot of time and postage, and the odds of payout are so low that most young or working people couldn't be bothered by it [if you doubt the demographics, how do you explain Ed McMahon's spokesmanship and the fact that the ads always ran among pitches for Metamucil and adult diapers?]. But if you're old, retired, and have nothing better to do with your time, why not buy crappy paperback novels you don't want and spend hours at the post office? After all, you could win ten million dollars!

Of course, a variable reproductive strategy would assume that lechwe are capable of dynamic optimization, a complicated subdiscipline of economics that utilizes multivariable calculus. But as it turns out, lechwe somehow are capable of changing and optimizing their reproductive strategy as they age.

Researchers at the San Diego Zoo's 90-acre Wild Animal Park witnessed the birth of over 176 lechwe calves over a 38-year period. They found that yearling lechwes had sons 57% of the time, but by the time those mothers became seven years old (roughly middle age for a lechwe, whose average lifespan is 12 years) the odds of having a son rises to 67%.

Not only that, but older mothers are more likely to give birth to larger offspring as well.

Lechwe probably aren't capable of making a conscious choice between male and female offspring, the way humans might choose between small-cap and fixed-income IRAs. But the dependence of their reproductive strategy on age does indicate that the lechwes' reproductive strategy is the product of evolution: females who are more likely to give birth to males later in life are more likely to pass their genes on to future generations; therefore, after thousands of generations of lechwes, most females somehow possess this unusual reproductive characteristic.

With some imagination, an alternative solution to our credit crisis presents itself: let humans breed for a few dozen more generations, and the surviving offspring of our most fertile and successful money managers will be able to solve our financial problems with ease.

Chelydra serpentina

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The Common Snapping Turtle, Chelydra serpentina, is a common dweller of inner-city wildernesses, especially in rivers and shallow lakes.

Snapping turtles typically live about 30 years in the wild, which is an unusually long life span among species of urban wildlife. This, combined with their opportunistic, omnivorous diet (snappers are important aquatic scavengers) means that urban turtles' fatty tissues end up absorbing a lot of toxic substances from their environment.

This Canadian research paper analyzed turtle eggs at various sites around the Great Lakes, including in so-called "Areas of Concern" like the Detroit River and the Hamilton Harbor complex southwest of Toronto. From the abstract:

PCBs, organochlorine pesticides and dioxins/furans in snapping turtle eggs and plasma (Chelydra serpentina) were evaluated at three Areas of Concern on Lake Erie and its connecting channels (St. Clair River, Detroit River, and Wheatley Harbour), as well as two inland reference sites (Algonquin Provincial Park and Tiny Marsh) in 2001–2002... Dioxins appeared highest from the Detroit River. The PCB congener pattern in eggs suggested that turtles from the Detroit River and Wheatley Harbour [sites] were exposed to Aroclor 1260... Although estimated PCB body burdens in muscle tissue of females were well below consumption guidelines, estimated residues in liver and adipose were above guidelines for most sites.

Even more interesting, a short blurb on snapping turtles from the book Concrete Jungle, edited by Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman (Juno Books, 1996) asserts that

In some areas, when the turtle dies it must be treated with toxic waste protocols.

The long-lived snapping turtle: the fatty palimpsest on which the toxic legacies of our lakes and rivers are chronicled.