Where Museum Scientists Will Spend Their Summer
Wednesday, April 28 12:17 pm
John Sparks and colleague snorkel in a sinkhole in Madagascar. © P. Chakrabarty
How will you spend your summer? Will you backpack through blisteringly dry heat, cutting the trail as you go and pushing flies out of your eyes? Could you dine on white rice for weeks while camping by a series of shallow, rocky streams?
That’s how Associate Curator John Sparks travels while working to discover undescribed species of fish in northwestern Madagascar. This summer he returns with a portable lab to test hearing in a group of cichlids that have an unusually shaped gas bladder that abuts their inner ear and allows them to pick up sounds from the noisy background of streams. Fellow ichthyologist Melanie Stiassny will also be collecting fish, this time along the Upper Congo River and tributaries of the Kasai that funnel fresh water to western Africa. After years of describing the extraordinary biodiversity of the Lower Congo, she is now searching for its source upriver.
Other curators will also be continuing long-term research projects with the goal of discovering new species. Ornithologist George Barrowclough returns to mountainous British Columbia, where male blue grouse emit loud hoots while sitting high up in conifers. These calls, in part, have led Barrowclough to conduct a genetic study to show that this species is actually two. Norm Platnick will travel to Cuba this summer, the first of many trips now that the Museum is collaborating with the National Museum in Havana. Platnick studies goblin spiders, a poorly understood, nearly microscopic group of arachnids that he’s followed for decades. He estimates that only a fifth of the species are described. Fellow invertebrate specialist Jerome Rozen, who has been studying bees for nearly half a century, will visit eastern Turkey to find and describe for the first time nests of the Ancylini, a tribe of solitary bees whose nesting biology is still not fully known. James Carpenter heads for the western mountains of Hungary to collect yellow jackets, continuing work he began in 1976. Carpenter will also collect spit from yellow-jacket adults because, in some species, adults lack the enzyme to break down protein and rely on larvae to digest the food and to function, in effect, as the stomach of the colony.
Anthropologists will also head to the field this summer. Laurel Kendall plans to, as she puts it, “mop up any missing sections in my project” on South Korean shamans, or religious specialists who manifest spirits in their bodies on behalf of the community, which she began in 1976. Ecological anthropologist Paige West continues a project studying the social and environmental impact of oil palm plantations. Plantations reduce biodiversity in surrounding forest and reef ecosystems and divert men from traditional roles in their community, increasing the burden on women. Finally, archaeologist Charles Spencer and Research Associate Elsa Redmond will head to Oaxaca, Mexico. This summer’s work includes excavation of a ceremonial precinct to gain insight into ritual activities of the pre-Columbian Zapotec culture from two millennia ago.
Another tradition in Museum field expeditions is the annual trip to the Gobi desert. This summer, paleontologists Michael Novacek and Mark Norell return to the flaming cliffs for the 21st consecutive year. Closer to home, Neil Landman will continue research at the southeastern tip of Missouri. Here he’s found evidence of a tsunami 65 million years ago, part of the aftermath of the asteroid impact that led to the extinction of not only dinosaurs but marine mollusks known as ammonites.
This story appears in the May/June issue of Rotunda.
