SciCafe: Hidden Reptiles of Madagascar

Thursday, May 26 2:17 pm

After more than 200 years of exploration, new species of snakes, chameleons, geckos, and skinks are still being discovered in Madagascar, the fourth-largest island in the world. At the next SciCafe on Wednesday, June 1,  Christopher Raxworthy, associate curator in the Department of Herpetology who has spent decades working in Madagascar, will discuss the mix of modern technologies—including satellite imagery and DNA sequencing—and “muddy boots” field biology to remote parts of the island that is making discovery possible today.

In this video, produced in 2010 and shot partly in the field, Raxworthy describes surveying chameleons in Madagascar.

Frogs: A Chorus of Colors

Monday, May 23 4:07 pm

Back by popular demand, Frogs: A Chorus of Colors, opens at the Museum on Saturday, May 28. Featuring more than 200 live frogs, from the tiny golden mantella frog to the enormous African bullfrog, this dynamic exhibition introduces visitors to these complex amphibians, their biology and evolution, their importance to ecosystems, and the threats they face in the wild.

In the video below, Associate Curator Christopher Raxworthy of the Museum’s Department of Herpetology discusses a few of the species featured in the exhibition and Hazel Davies, the Museum’s manager of Living Exhibits, shows the prep work and feeding that takes place every morning before visitors arrive.

Frogs: A Chorus of Colors from AMNH on Vimeo.

Museum Scientist’s Team Describes Two New Fish Species from Gulf of Mexico

Friday, July 09 9:05 am

Although the Gulf of Mexico has been intensively surveyed by scientists and picked over by fishermen, it is still home to fishes that are waiting to be described. New research from a team that includes Museum researchers that was recently published in the Journal of Fish Biology describes two new species of pancake batfishes (Halieutichthys intermedius and H. bispinosus) and re-describes another (H. aculeatus), all of which live in waters either partially or fully encompassed by the recent oil spill.

“One of the fishes that we describe is completely restricted to the oil spill area,” says John Sparks, curator of Ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History. “If we are still finding new species of fishes in the Gulf, imagine how much diversity—especially microdiversity—is out there that we do not know about.”

Pancake batfishes are members of the anglerfish family Ogcocephalidae, a group of about 70 species of flat bottom-dwellers that often live in deep, perpetually dark waters. Pancake batfishes have enormous heads and mouths that can thrust forward. This, combined with their ability to cryptically blend in with their surroundings, gives them an advantage for capturing prey. They use their stout, arm-like fins to ‘walk’ awkwardly along the substrate; their movements have been described as grotesque, resembling a walking bat.  As most anglerfishes, batfishes have a dorsal fin that is modified into a spine or lure, although their lure excretes a fluid to reel in prey instead of bio-illuminating.

The pancake batfishes described by Sparks and colleagues, genus Halieutichthys, live in shallower waters than most batfishes and occur along the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic from Louisiana to North Carolina. Until now, the currently described three fishes had been lumped into one species, since they all have similar coloration and body shape. Read more »

Museum Links Evolutionary Biology and Human Health

Wednesday, June 09 6:22 pm

What does Darwin have to do with human disease? Quite a lot, it turns out, as the lessons of evolution, enhanced by sophisticated technologies such as gene sequencing, are being used to tease out the secrets of organisms that spread death and disability around the globe.

The American Museum of Natural History has taken a leading role in these efforts through ongoing collaborations between its evolutionary biologists and medical researchers to understand various threats to human health, from flu pandemics to malaria to the ravages of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

This work was highlighted at a Science Breakfast panel discussion held last week at the Museum before an audience of medical and science writers.

Listen to the Podcast: Download | RSS | iTunes (1 hr 09 mins, 64 MB)

The panel included three curators from the Museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology who work under the auspices of the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics. Rob DeSalle, who moderated, Mark Siddall, and Ward Wheeler were joined by three medical scientists: New York University School of Medicine’s Jane Carlton, Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Robert Burk, and Columbia University’s Paul Planet.

Museum scientists help medical researchers pin down the origin, evolution, and diversity of pathogens, and, perhaps most important, how they have adapted to us and we to them.

“Every doctor, whether they know it or not, is a natural historian,” said Planet, who studies infectious diseases in children and is also a research associate at the Museum.

Another key component of collaboration is the development of new tools to make sense of masses of raw data. Case in point: the Supramap, displayed by Wheeler, a powerful new computer application which allows researchers and public health officials to track the spread and mutation of a disease over time and place.

Of course, the ultimate goal of such supercomputing, genome-sequencing, and the building of evolutionary trees is to better predict pandemic outbreaks and to find better treatments, even cures.

Said Burk, who has worked with DeSalle on the molecular phylogeny of the human papillomavirus, which is linked to cervical cancer, for a decade:  ”From the medical perspective, I think it’s very clear that the better we understand the pathogenesis of any disease, the better we are able to intervene.”