The mountain range offers a wealth of gorgeous, unexpected textures.

Aerial photography is a fusion of two natural interests for me: ground-based amateur photography and a love of flying World War II–era Piper Cubs that I learned from my grandfather.

My first aerial interests were mountains and coastal areas in North Carolina—subjects whose scenic value is fairly obvious. That was until one day in the winter of 2012. On the way to the Great Smokies, I happened upon an arresting sight below. Tractors in the scrubby foothills were tilling the red Carolina soil into patterns and textures that were remarkably beautiful. I isolated them using my zoom lens—and from that moment on, a new genre of photography was born for me.

In the ensuing years, I would look for interesting agricultural patterns wherever I could find them. It was a fickle process, much like chasing butterflies; just because I looked harder didn’t mean I would find more.

Eventually, as I moved to the Rockies, I decided to add naturally occurring textures and patterns to my work. But the same fickleness remained in the process. I found that it was best to focus on finding scenic landscapes, then harvest whatever textures I happened to find along the way.

In 2016 I moved to the Pyrenees, taking the same airplane with me. Spain, and to a lesser extent France, changed the nature of how I located textural images. Instead of a virtually random encounter set against other terrain, the Pyrenees feature such a density of aerial textures that I struggled to keep track of them all. It didn’t take long before I decided to turn things upside down and start specifically looking for texture, which gave rise to this current project.

The Pyrenees—a mountain range that forms the boundary between Spain and France and contains the entire nation of Andorra—reach as high as 11,134 feet, touch the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and feature a few remaining glaciers. Unlike what most people think of when they imagine the Iberian Peninsula, it’s a rugged combination of landscapes—encompassing scenery one would expect to find in Virginia, New York, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho—with a remarkable array of variety.

These images show just a few of the aerial textures on view.

Avalanche – Vall d’Aran, Spain

Small avalanches are relatively common in the Pyrenees. Fortunately, larger slides that can do lasting damage are less frequent here than in some other mountain ranges. After a snowfall of over six-and-a-half feet, a number of large avalanches occurred in the Vall d’Aran of northern Spain. This image shows where one came to rest in a high mountain meadow.

Cows in snow – Talló, Spain

Transhumance, a seasonal agricultural approach, is practiced in the Pyrenees, as it is in the range’s larger cousin, the Alps. Livestock are led into valleys above the tree line during the summer, then gradually down to lower altitudes as autumn progresses, for eventual wintering at village elevations. In the Pyrenees, snow accumulates at a high valley level (3,000–4,000 feet) five to 10 times per year. When that happens, cattle wander around in it, mostly eating straw that’s furnished by farmers. I’ve always wondered if there’s some mathematical pattern to cow wanderings. From looking at tracks in the snow, it appears that there is not.

Fields – Age, Spain

Inches from the Spanish border with France, wheat fields dotted with purple wildflowers gleam before an early summer harvest. An aerial view of the property lines that divide European farming operations tends to present either a Picasso-esque swirl of contours or, as in this case, an agricultural game of Tetris. I’ve been told that because Spanish law requires parents to leave two-thirds of their estates to their children, fields are often hacked into small and strange parcels—a pastoral way to achieve that legal objective as generations pass.

Nieve Beret 1800, Spain

Located in the central Pyrenees near the border with France, the Vall d’Aran receives ample snow on its high-altitude ridges, which feature a number of ski resorts. After a large storm, skiers hike off the pistes to a summit and carve trails on the way down. While I know the feeling of sailing on a cloud of powder, I hadn’t considered what ski tracks look like until I had a chance to see them from above.

Embalse de Mediano, Spain

The Spanish side of the Pyrenees is drier than the French, but many rivers have their headwaters there. The Spanish have created reservoirs to capture mountain rain and melting snow for agricultural use at lower levels. Each of these reservoirs has an iridescent aqua color, likely due to limestone sediments carried by the rivers that feed them. In the central Pyrenees, the Embalse de Mediano is formed among light-colored soils, which winds and lapping water mix into aqua-colored water, creating intriguing color patterns on the surface.

Sèrra des Armèros, Spain

After a six-and-a-half-foot snowfall, one expects to see a blanket of white so serene and featureless that it can be hard to tell the nature of the surface. For some reason, snow settled into this textural pattern. I’m inclined to ascribe the pattern to some rainfall or briefly warmer temperatures. But the storm system in this case brought incredibly cold air and extreme winds, so it remains a mystery. I have not seen a pattern like it anywhere else.

Improvised dirt-bike track – Fontanals, Spain

If I hadn’t spoken to someone who could explain this pattern to me, I would have assumed that whoever farms this field had dosed himself with LSD before hopping on his tractor. After the wheat harvest each year, but before the next crops are planted, people in the town traditionally turn this large field into an improvised dirt-bike track. Racers go positively mad speeding on the track for about a week. When they’re done, the farmer returns to plow it and plant the next crop. This tradition can be found in the high-altitude valley of La Cerdanya in the Eastern Pyrenees—one of the only east-west valleys of its type in Europe.

Sèrra de Bedrera, Spain

Elimination of scale presents this image as a flat piece of terrain with drifted snow. In reality, it’s an extremely steep mountainside, with the snowdrifts that formed pointing up the mountain, against gravity. On the highest ridges of the Pyrenees, strong winds during snowstorms often blow up the mountains on one side and down on the other, leaving snowdrifts as evidence of the wind’s direction and strength. In the lower left of this image, rime ice has formed on the rock—a phenomenon that occurs when clouds and wind impact physical surfaces in certain temperature bands.

Doing donuts in the snow – Sanavastre, Spain

The Spanish have a penchant for having fun. In this case, someone chose to take a vehicle into a farm field and let her rip. I’d never given any thought to what the final product of that would look like until I happened across this field, where a recent snowfall had allowed the driver to leave a record of his merrymaking.

The chinampas that nourished Tenochtitlan may hold the key to better urban gardens.

When conquistador Hernán Cortés reached Tenochtitlan in 1519, he beheld a floating city. The temples and palaces of the Aztec capital gleamed white from an island in the middle of a vast lake, all spread under a searing blue sky. With an estimated population of 200,000, roughly the size of contemporary Paris, the city overflowed with people. Around the metropolis, an archipelago of lush islands emerged from the lake’s glassy surface, overflowing with plants.

These were the floating gardens, or chinampas, that fed the Aztec Empire. Constructed of layers of earth taken from the lake bottom, and held together by the tangled roots of diverse and rotating crops, chinampas are rich islands of soil that can produce up to seven harvests a year. The result of Aztec adaptations of earlier agricultural forms, chinampas’ efficiency has gained them UN recognition as a marvel of agricultural ingenuity.

Today, the parched asphalt streets of Mexico City—built on top of the filled-in lake that once bore Tecnochtitlan—show little trace of these lush Edens. But if you head to the southern borough of Xochimilco, where the cusp of the city touches the countryside, the landscape still bears an ancient crisscross of canals. Some of these chinampas have been in use since Aztec times. Most have been built and deconstructed again and again, part of a living current of agricultural knowledge flowing through centuries.

“The way they are built is almost identical to the way they were built in pre-Columbian times,” says Roland Ebel, a Postgraduate Research Associate in Health and Human Development at Montana State University.

But today’s chinampas face distinctly modern problems. Thanks to rampant urban development, the waterways are fetid with runoff, clogged with algae, and poisonous with heavy metals. Meanwhile, recreational boating—trajinera boats full of tourists and locals, who snack on elotes and request songs from floating mariachi bands—has filled the waterways with trash. Still, working chinampas dot the canals, the moist soil of their surfaces diligently tended into fruit and produce.

For Ebel, this landscape is a reminder of Mexico’s past, and a fertile promise for the future. He began studying chinampas while at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico. While chinampas remain a living, though threatened, agricultural system in Xochimilco, he says, “Most [academic] work sees chinampas as a historic farming system which is worth conserving, but not as an opportunity for contemporary urban farming.”

That got him wondering: Could the urban planners of today’s vast, increasingly food-insecure cities learn from Aztec agriculture?

Ebel’s recently published study suggests they can. Ebel compared features of traditional chinampas with similar “floating” or canal-based agriculture systems from around the world, including in Peru, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Illinois. He found that chinampas are uniquely efficient and adaptable to cities with lake access around the world. Because fields in the chinampa system are surrounded by canals, with plants’ roots sucking water from their swampy surroundings, chinampas require no irrigation and relatively little watering. At the same time, the islands’ dense and varied mix of plants, which is a form of permaculture, yields frequent harvests without the need for pesticides.

Ricardo Rodriguez, CEO of travel company De La Chinampa A Tu Mesa, or “From the Chinampa to Your Table,” has firsthand experience of the benefits of this rotating system. He was not involved in Ebel’s study, but owns and farms a chinampa in Xochimilco, where he leads culinary tours. He says chinampas’ crop diversity is key to their effectiveness, in contrast to industrial monoculture. “Mono agro destroys lands,” says Rodriguez. “If you have permaculture, you have life.”

While Ebel’s study looks to the potential for implementing chinampas globally, the most serious threats to this system are close to home. Over the past several decades, development in Mexico City’s southern fringe has picked up. From 1989 to 2006, the percentage of land in Xochimilco covered by chinampas reduced from 7.4 percent to 2.5 percent. If these patterns continue, researchers project that most chinampas will disappear, eaten up by urban development, by 2057.

This isn’t just bad for farmers. It’s also bad for Mexico City as a whole, a reflection of a broader policy that has driven the megapolis to the brink of environmental disaster. As though in an act of revenge from the submerged Aztec capital, the city is sinking, the clay of the filled-in lake sagging like an old mattress. Meanwhile, rampant development has limited urban greenspace and exacerbated drought. Chinampas are both a casualty and a marker of this looming catastrophe. Saving these traditional systems—and creating a more ecologically resilient Mexico City—requires rewriting city policy to favor local agriculture and sustainability, rather than overdevelopment.

Rodriguez, the owner of De La Chinampa a Tu Mesa, has spent the past 12 years advocating for this shift in priorities, from the ground up. He begins with local farmers, who often struggle to bring crops to market. "They don't have opportunities to sell their production," he says. So he connects them with restaurants, cafes, and organic food stores hungry for local produce. Rodriguez also leads culinary tours that introduce visitors to Xochimilco’s food traditions and the farmers that enable them.

Heavy tourist traffic has exacerbated the canals’ pollution. But Rodriguez hopes that this more purposeful exposure to chinampa agriculture can help inspire the political will to invest in floating gardens, not just for recreation, but for food. “We need to create consciousness,” he says. In doing so, Rodriguez summons an alternate vision to the one the Spanish imposed on Tenochtitlan. Rather than turning a life-giving lake into a parched, paved city, his is a vision of fertile water filling in the cracks of a thirsty land."

A Danish lighthouse is the latest in a string of structures to evade erosion by migrating away from the water.

Until recently, the Rubjerg Knude Lighthouse stood at the edge of a cliff on the west coast of Denmark, overlooking the North Sea. But each year, the 120-year-old structure was getting six and a half feet closer to the water. When the lighthouse was built, it was 656 feet from the edge, NBC reported. A few weeks ago, it was just 20 feet from sailing over the cliff.

The strip of land around the lighthouse keeps narrowing as waves and wind pull sediment north, toward Skagen. “We’re stealing from the coastline,” says Jesper Blom-Hansen, chief of the nature agency that manages the lighthouse. Experts figured it was only two years—maybe three or four, if they got lucky—until the shore was so eaten away that the 75-foot-tall lighthouse would crash into the water 200 feet below.

As a beacon, the lighthouse fell out of use in the 1960s, when sand dunes drifted across the cliff, smothering and flattening buildings and scattering bricks. Over the years, freshly planted bushes and trees did little to stymie the sand. One dune between the tower and the sea reached nearly 100 feet tall, Blom-Hansen says, making the glow invisible to nearby boats. After a few decades of vacancy, a museum opened in the structure—but it, too, soon shut its doors against the onslaught of sand.

A few years ago, mindful of the encroaching water, the nature conservancy reopened the tower, installed a new interior staircase, and invited the public to climb to the top. Up there, you could see a sweeping view up and down the coastline. When the sunlight struck the water on a calm day, it sparkled. Other times, the wind whipped grains of sand hard enough that they scratched eyeglasses. “It’s beautiful and rough at the same time,” Blom-Hansen says.

It was supposed to be a last hurrah—a glimpse before the lighthouse was gone. But then people just kept coming. “It has become a major tourist attraction,” Blom-Hansen says, attracting as many a quarter of a million visitors a year. The experience was beautiful and unsettling. “You were so close to the edge that you felt like you were looking directly down into the ocean,” he adds. “It was just beyond your feet.”

When they noticed that the lighthouse had ardent fans, the nature conservancy, environment ministry, and nearby towns decided to try and save it by hauling it to more stable ground. They determined that it could only move horizontally: Try to maneuver it downhill, the team worried, and they’d lose control as it picked up speed. And if they waited too long, Blom-Hansen says, the lighthouse would be so close to the edge of the cliff that it would imperil the crew. At the end of October, they decided it was time.

This isn’t the first lighthouse to flee from the water that threatens it. The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, in North Carolina, moved inland in July 1999, with the help of hydraulic jacks, steel mats, beams, dozens of sensors that kept tabs on vibrations and wind. In 2015, a time-lapse video recorded pistons prodding the 400-ton Gay Head lighthouse, on Martha’s Vineyard, inland at the rate of four inches a minute.

Moving a structure is often the strategy of last resort when other tactics haven’t been enough. New Jersey’s East Point Lighthouse, built in 1849, is starting to get uncomfortably close to the Delaware Bay—and as a first step, the state's Department of Environmental Protection recently begun installing a sand-filled membrane designed to shield the shore from additional erosion, at least for a little while. It’s a “stopgap” measure, NJ Spotlight reported, designed to buy time while local agencies consider more drastic measures, including transporting the lighthouse. Nancy Patterson, president of the Maurice Township Historical Society, which manages the lighthouse for the DEP’s Division of Fish & Wildlife, told NJ Spotlight that the intervention was a bit like treating a wound with a Band-Aid. “You’re happy to get the Band-Aid when you need it,” Patterson said, “but you need something much bigger.”

Many other lighthouses may go on the lam in coming years—or risk being washed away. In a 2017 paper in PLOS One, a nine-person team of archaeologists estimated that a one-meter rise in sea levels would swamp at least 13,000 recorded historic sites in the southeastern United States alone. “Given the large numbers of cultural resources threatened by sea-level rise, planning possible protection and mitigation strategies should proceed with an increased sense of urgency,” they wrote.

When noodling over their possible mitigation strategies, the Danish team didn’t look to the other lighthouses that had journeyed inland. (Blom-Hansen says they just didn’t think of it.) But did they did consider several options, including dismantling and rebuilding it brick by brick, or hoisting it with cranes, the way you might move a windmill or turbine.

In the end, they settled on jacking it up with hydraulics, then lowering it on eight “roller skates,” which glided along tracks. The public could cluster outside a fence to watch the lighthouse crawl inland, but the action was sluggish. To keep the structure safe on its little jaunt, “everything was going very, very slowly and very smooth,” Blom-Hansen says.

The lighthouse reopened to the public on November 16, 2019. Blom-Hansen admits that while its new location, 230 feet farther inland, is much safer, the view is slightly less dramatic. “You can’t look directly down into the ocean,” Blom-Hansen says. Then again, he goes on, the view may return after the water and wind gobble up more of the shoreline. “You’ll have to wait 10 to 15 years until you can do that again.”

Cellars chipped out of volcanic ash are the best place to age the famed Saint-Nectaire.

Deep in the heart of the French countryside, surrounded by the Dore and Cantal mountains, lies a region of lush pasture dotted with grazing red Salers and Montbéliarde cattle. But 7,000 years ago, this area, known as the Auverge, wasn’t quite so colorful. In fact, the mountains were actually active volcanoes, covering the countryside with lava.

Today, the resulting rich soil has made the Auvergne famous for its wine, its meat, and its Appellation d'Origine Protégée cheeses. Of 46 cheeses in France to have the coveted AOP label protecting their name, place of origin, and method of fabrication, the Auvergne is home to five: blue fourme d’Ambert and bleu d’Auvergne; firm Cantal and Salers; and washed-rind Saint-Nectaire, with its gray exterior and semi-soft, nutty interior. But while cattle grazing on this volcanic soil provide the milk for all five, Saint-Nectaire is a little bit different.

Named for a small village in the Puy-de-Dôme department, Saint-Nectaire cheese is actually made in 69 towns in the region. It’s one of the most heavily produced AOP cheeses in Europe–14,115 tons every year–even though it’s also made in the smallest area protected by the label. But that nearly 700 square miles of land is surrounded by 80 dormant volcanoes.

Long-ago eruptions, it turns out, provided an ideal environment for aging the region’s beloved cheese: centuries-old cellars dug right into the hardened volcanic ash.

Caroline Borrell, a cheesemaker in Beaune-le-Froid, ages her cheese in hand-dug cellars dating to the 15th century. These cellars, located on the eponymous Rue des Caves, are part of the draw for cheesemakers in Beaune, which boasts six artisanal producers for just 584 inhabitants in the township area.

Stooping to enter the doorway into the dark cave cut right into the hillside feels a bit like climbing into a hobbit hole. Shelves of round, gray cheeses are arranged in chronological order in the darkness: the oldest to the right, with younger and younger cheeses following the natural curves of the dark, volcanic walls. These cellars naturally have the perfect pressure, humidity, and temperature to age this local delicacy. “I don’t need to do anything,” says Borrell.

Of course, she exaggerates, a bit. In colder weather, the cheese will age more slowly. When the humidity is lower, she might need to wash the cheese a bit more frequently in a brine solution to maintain the perfect downy crust.“But we adapt the cheese to the cellar,” she says. “Not the cellar to the cheese.”

This is not the case for other Saint-Nectaire producers, who rely on concrete cellars. Many use humidifiers, aeration, and temperature control to ensure that their cheese reaches the perfect doneness for selling.“They, instead, adapt the cellar to the cheese,” says Borrell.

While the work might be slightly more manageable in an artificial cellar, it’s hard to get exactly the right flavor profile in such conditions. So why would anyone bother?

The answer lies in modern food safety regulations. “When you look at the walls of a natural aging cellar, you can’t clean them,” says Marie-Paule Chazal, director of the Saint-Nectaire Joint-Trade Association. “And thank goodness–that’s part of their charm!”

But European food safety authorities aren’t nearly as charmed, leading to concerns that the traditional aging process could eventually be outlawed. “Soon, all of this heritage may well disappear,” says Chazal.

There is, however, a loophole allowing this ancestral tradition to continue, at least for a little while longer. “We inherited our cellar,” explains Borrell, who notes that it has been continuously used for several generations. “But once a cellar stops being used … we’re not allowed to use it anymore. You can’t take an abandoned cellar and put it back into use.”

About 10 miles away, in the town of Montaigu le Blanc, Sébastien Guillaume is also aging his Saint-Nectaire in natural, volcanic cellars. Unlike Borrell, Guillaume doesn’t milk his own cattle. Instead, he purchases young wheels of cheese from local farmers and ages them in cellars dug into this volcanic hillside in the 19th century, to store the plentiful wine produced in the Puy-de-Dôme. When local grapevines were wiped out by phylloxera epidemic that swept France in the 19th century, Saint-Nectaire producers began using the empty cellars to age their cheese.

The third generation of his family to age cheese here, in cellars nearly 20 feet underground and joined up via tunnels by his grandfather, Guillaume is convinced of the superiority of a natural cellar for aging Saint-Nectaire.

“We’ve got great natural hygrometry, here,” he says. “I’ve got colleagues who need to water their cellars every day, to up the humidity. We don’t need to do that; it’s really in the air.”

Per Guillaume, despite concerns from European health authorities, there’s nothing innately wrong with a natural cellar at all. “We analyze the cheeses when they come in, when they go out,” he says. “When there’s a problem, that comes from your methods, not the environment. If your methods are right, there’s no problem.”

For Chazal, technology has kept up to such an extent that, today, artificial cellars can almost mimic the benefits of natural.“They’re built with semi-buried bricks, so you get some of the characteristics of an underground cellar,” she says. “You can make very, very good Saint-Nectaire in an artificial cellar.”

But she does note that to lose the rough-hewn volcanic cellars entirely would be to lose a piece of what makes the cheese special. Guillame agrees.“They tolerate the cellars, because the government understands that it’s part of the history of Saint-Nectaire,” he says.

But it’s more than purely history for Guillaume, who considers natural cellars essential to the integrity of his product. “When the cellar is empty, we don’t go in on Friday morning with a hose and wash and disinfect everything,” he says. “And that’s what happens in artificial cellars. And then you have to add everything back artificially. We’re lucky enough to not have to do that.”

“We’ve been aging Saint-Nectaire in our cellars since 1924,” he continues, “so in the air, there’s flora that’s indispensable.”

The results, he says, are striking. Even if he and a colleague source a raw cheese from the same local producer, the flavor of the final product will be different by virtue of the different flora in the cellar.

Borrell agrees, noting that in Beaune-le-Froid, her family has two different cellars.

“They’re less than 10 meters apart from each other,” she says, “but each cellar ages a little bit differently and lends a different flavor to the cheese.” This is part of what makes Saint-Nectaire so special. The AOP recognizes a “wheel of flavors” ranging from earthy to nutty, buttery to mushroomy, all of which may appear to greater or lesser degrees in any given cheese.

Even aboveground, volcanic soil is perhaps the most essential ingredient for the perfect Saint-Nectaire. The prairies allotted for Saint-Nectaire “have never been cultivated,” explains Chazal.

Instead, the volcanic soil is allowed to grow a richly diverse palette of grasses and flowers: Breckland thyme, gentian, yellow bedstraw, purple betony, and yarrow all grow wild, feeding the cattle and flavoring the milk even before it’s made into cheese and tucked into caves.

“There’s a diversity of flowers and species that you won’t find anywhere else,” says Chazal, who notes that in working with the National Botanical Conservatory of the Massif Central, the AOP was lauded for the richness of its terroir. “The first thing they said to us,” she says, “from the very beginning, was: ‘you’ve got no idea what you have beneath your feet.'”

The pollen-dusted beetle pushes back the earliest evidence of insect-flower pollination by 50 million years.

In 2017, a graduate student named Tong Bao polished hundreds of amber droplets, looking for tumbling flower beetles that had been frozen in time for tens of millions of years. Bao was writing his thesis on the beetles, and had come to the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology (NIGPAS) to see whether any had been trapped in the institute’s trove of Burmese amber. He polished every cloudy, fossilized lump, held it up to the light, and placed each beetled piece in a small pile. After polishing one amber fragment, Bao spotted something unusual: Pollen grains were sprinkled across a beetle’s legs like powdered sugar.

This ancient tumbling flower beetle, approximately the size of a pea and immortalized in tree resin 99 million years ago, represents the earliest evidence yet of insects pollinating angiosperms, or flowering plants, according to a study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It is twice as old as the oldest-known specimen of its kind: The finding pushes back the timeline of insect-angiosperm pollination by a whopping 50 million years.

“What is so very important about this fossil is that flowering plants established what’s called co-evolution,” says David Dilcher, a professor emeritus at the Indiana University and an author of the study. “It’s why flowers want to be beautiful, to be fragrant, and to give rewards and nectar to the animals that come visit them.” Researchers have long believed that insect pollination was responsible for the mysterious appearance and efflorescence of flowering plants in the Cretaceous period, which Darwin once called “the abominable mystery.” This discovery offers tangible proof.

Amber preserves life on contact. The tree resin drips into soft tissues and hardens into a protective shell that can retain details on a cellular level. As a result, the beetle’s level of preservation is extraordinary. Dilcher and Bo Wang, a paleontologist at NIGPAS who supervised Bao's thesis project co-authored the paper, counted 62 visible grains of pollen clinging to the beetle’s body hair on its left side (the beetle’s right side was obscured in a fizz of microbubbles). “You could immediately see the little dustings,” Dilcher says. Though the grains look like specks to the naked eye, a microscopic view revealed three distinct grooves on each grain, suggesting they came from a eudicot group of flowering plants. (The grooves also ruled out the possibility that the specks were ancient freckles of fossilized dung, the researchers write.)

The researchers were unable to identify the specific species of plant, but whatever flower species fed the bee is certainly extinct now, Dilcher says. Modern eudicots are the largest group of flowering plants, including oaks, poppies, and buttercups. “They’re out saying, ‘Hey, I’m beautiful! I smell good! Come visit me!” Dilcher says. “And the beetle did.” The beetle was likely drinking nectar or eating pollen when it met its untimely end, Dilcher says—a good way to go.

Before Bao polished the amber, it sat on a shelf for five years, assumed to be just another fossilized tumbling flower beetle, Wang writes in an email. “We could not see the beetle clearly, let alone the pollen,” he says. Wang first collected the specimen in 2012, at a sprawling amber bazaar in Tengchong, a city near China’s border with Myanmar, also known as Burma. Tengchong is known as the best city in the world to buy Burmese amber; Wang bought several hundred pieces, including the beetle, from a Burmese friend.

More recently, some researchers have stopped acquiring amber from Myanmar, Katharine Gammon reports for The Atlantic. Burmese amber is a paleontological goldmine, but it can also be an ethical minefield, as Joshua Sokol reported for Science magazine in 2018. The fossils come from Kachin, in northern Myanmar, and since 2017, the amber mines have helped to fund a civil war that the UN has described as genocide. The mines themselves are narrow, dangerous passageways winding hundreds of feet into the earth, and some contain land mines. Elephants carry the specimens from the mines to markets in China.

Even if scientists stop acquiring new amber from the mines, their current trove of specimens still holds undiscovered information about life from nearly 100 million years ago, when the first flowers bloomed. Wang and his collaborators plan to continue investigating the relationship between angiosperms and insects found in his collection of amber, which currently sits in NIGPAS, waiting to be polished.

Israel's only female prime minister favored a potent roast that carries her name.

Aaron and Mura Cohen once roasted and sold many coffee blends in their now-shuttered shop. But when they retired, a little over a decade ago, there was one recipe they couldn’t let disappear. For years they’d custom-made it for a local of their north Tel Aviv neighborhood, a loyal customer whose kitchen was, for a time, an Israeli political headquarters. Now named after this bygone regular, the couple sought someone to carry on their proprietary method for roasting coffee à la Golda Meir—Israel’s first, and to date, only female prime minister.

“They used to make her the coffee blend that she liked,” explains Uri Rafaelli, whose family has owned and run the Atlas Coffee shop in Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Market for 45 years. “After [Aaron and Mura] didn’t have energy to roast, we would roast it for them. And after they didn’t have energy to sell it either, and closed their shop completely, they gave us permission to sell it and use the Golda name.”

Meir’s coffee was more than the average morning pick-me-up. According to her biographer, Elinor Burkett, “drinking coffee in Golda’s kitchen [remained] an Israeli political institution.” From the time Meir served as a cabinet minister in the 1950s and throughout her five-year term as prime minister from 1969 to 1974, an inner circle often huddled in her green Formica kitchen to talk policy – likely over a cup of black coffee. Meir’s favorite brew was sipped by heads of state, decision makers, and foreign dignitaries.

“It’s a very strong coffee,” Rafaelli describes. “Bitter, and it has a bit of a special aroma.” He hesitates to add that the blend’s acidity recalls the blunt personality of its famous drinker, as well as her reputation as an Iron Lady.

As prime minister, when Meir was frustrated that her cabinet couldn’t accomplish anything during meetings on Sundays (the first day of the Israeli work week), she started her own weekly tradition. A select group dubbed Golda’s “Kitchen Cabinet” gathered around the countertops of her Tel Aviv home at 8 HaBaron Hirsch Street on Saturday evenings to make important decisions in advance. “It was a mark of honor to be invited to meetings in Golda’s kitchen,” veteran politician Lova Eliav told food journalist Ofer Vardi. “It showed that you were important.”

But not everyone was pleased with this arrangement. Those uninvited to Meir’s kitchen felt out of the loop come Sunday morning. “We demand to be fully involved at all levels, including Golda’s Kitchen Cabinet,” protested members of the opposing party in a 1972 meeting. Meir’s response? “There is a limit to the number of people my kitchen will hold.”

Meir’s kitchen was roomier during the rest of the week. She started her grueling days there alone, with a 7 a.m. breakfast of coffee, toast, and hard-boiled eggs. Her morning cup was the first of an alleged dozen coffees she drank daily while acting as prime minister, a habit fueled by the two kettles constantly brewing on her stovetop.

“For me the recurrent picture from those days is of Golda hunched over the kitchen table, forever stacked with heaps of papers: files, budgets and construction plans, reports, drafts of the National Insurance Law she saw through the [Israeli Parliament] and successions of documents of all sorts and shapes, all neatly arranged,” recalled her son, Menahem Meir, in his memoir about his mother. “Reading glasses perched on her nose, ashtray overflowing and a fresh pack of cigarettes at the ready, a cup of coffee forgotten and cooling at arm’s reach.”

Meir was a notorious chain smoker, known for burning through three packs of no-filter Chesterfields every day. That was partly just her habit, but also surely a way to cope with the stressful events that took place during her term. She was prime minister during the Munich massacre, when Israeli athletes were taken hostage and killed during the 1972 Munich Olympics, as well as during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. A diet of nicotine and caffeine helped her get through those episodes.

With time, questions have been raised about the appropriateness of identifying Israel’s only woman prime minister with her quaint kitchen quarters. Linking her with the matronly tasks of cooking and serving may have been a way to knock this female politician down a peg in the male-dominated realm of Israeli politics. “At the end of the day—even with all of her political life and her important and central role as prime minister—they still associated her with the kitchen,” says Vardi, who researched Meir as part of his weekly column about Israeli leaders and their food habits.

“I’m not sure if that term, Kitchen Cabinet, would ever be applied to a male politician,” Vardi adds. “Today it wouldn’t be politically correct. I don’t think that today, for example, somebody would link Merkel in Germany with her kitchen. Or Hillary Clinton, or women leaders in general. Margaret Thatcher wasn’t connected with her kitchen. It was just a different time, for better and for worse.”

Meir’s famous kitchen, the one where the Saturday evening meetings took place, was in a modest duplex home that she shared with her son in north Tel Aviv. A nearby park is named Golda’s Garden, and a plaque notes that Meir lived there from 1959 to 1978, a period that encompasses her term as prime minister plus the few years before her death.

The Jerusalem home where she lived during the week, while acting as prime minister, was used by three heads of state including herself. It opened a few years ago as a museum devoted to Levi Eshkol, who preceded Meir as prime minister. The kitchen at the museum was restored to look period-appropriate, but isn’t a precise reproduction of how it looked when Meir resided there.

“This really isn’t the original kitchen and isn’t even an exact replica of it, so it’s hard to say that this is Golda’s kitchen,” explains Shavit Ben Arie, director of the Levi Eshkol Museum and author of a book about female members of Israeli parliament. “Golda doesn’t actually have any center or place that commemorates her, to date.” In fact, in Meir’s own will requested that no monuments be erected in her honor after her death.

Thus, despite lobbying by some of Meir’s descendants, there is currently no museum, library, or even politically incorrect kitchen commemorating her. Given her complicated legacy, it may be a while until she gets one. But for around $9 a pound, you can buy coffee roasted exactly to the Iron Lady’s specifications at 49 Levinsky Street in Tel Aviv, and attempt to drink the potent (and somewhat burnt) brew at your own kitchen counter. “People come especially to buy Golda coffee,” notes Rafaelli. “Clients from [her neighborhood] who used to buy it there, and people who heard about it and come especially to buy it.”

And how scientists tried to free this formic Donner Party.

Somewhere near Międzyrzecz in western Poland, there is an abandoned Soviet nuclear installation. Patches of pine and spruce, which had been planted as camouflage, are still doing their job. Vegetation entirely envelopes the concrete entrance, which is blocked off but accessible to bats and determined, rule-breaking humans. On top of a ventilation pipe that juts out from the mostly underground facility, there is big, mound-like nest of wood ants. It is a perfectly normal place for wood ants to live. They feast on the sweet honeydew secreted by aphids dwelling in nearby pine trees, and soak up the rays of post-Soviet sun.

But within the bunker, in a small room at the bottom of that shaft, there was a second colony of ants. These ants had no sun, no warmth, no light, and no honeydew. So they survived on the flesh of their fellow ants. Their colony was the wretched result of individuals falling from the healthier colony above, and with no way to climb out of the bunker, they could never return. It feels like a mirror-horror that could have come straight out of the mind of Jordan Peele, except that instead of a commentary on race and class in America, it’s a testament to one population’s sheer will to survive. “It is a peculiar colony” says István Maák, a zoologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. “They are doing the best they can, surrounded by dying.” This year, Maák had taken it upon himself to do something about it, and recently published the tale of a momentous rescue in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research.

The abandoned bunker was once known as Special Object 3003 Templewo, a military complex active from the late 1960s to 1992; it was abandoned right after the Soviet Union fell. Scattered throughout the forest like now-benign landmines, bunkers like this one were used to conceal the assembly and storage of both nuclear and conventional weapons, writes historian Jarosław Pałka in a 2018 paper in The Central European Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities. The core of the base comprised two underground magazines, and the whole thing, from certain angles, now looks like little more than a green mound bulging from the earth.

The ants were first discovered in 2013, during the first year of a campaign to monitor the health of bats known to frequent abandoned bunkers like these. They make great bat dens, with internal temperatures that hover around 44 degrees Fahrenheit in the dead of winter. Though the bunkers had been sealed, curious tourists and intrepid bat-lovers had made their way in, according to an earlier study in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research that first documented the existence of the colony, authored by Wojciech Czechowski, Maák’s colleague at the academy.

To understand the bizarre nature of this colony, one must understand the layout of the bunker. Somewhere inside its reinforced concrete walls, which are over three feet thick, there is a small, closet-like room, cryptically numbered 12. The aesthetic of its walls screams “abandoned Soviet nuclear bunker,” with peeling paint and swelling limewash. The floor, once terra-cotta, is now a pile of rubble and soil. In the ceiling is a hole that holds the ventilation pipe, which is approximately a foot wide and connects the chamber to the outside world, about 16 feet above. Ant Colony One, which rejoices in the light and imbibes sweet honeydew, lives right on top of the pipe’s opening. “These ants are mostly eating aphid [honeydew],” Maák says. But when an unlucky ant takes one wrong step, it can tumble down the perilous chute, where it becomes a member of Ant Colony Two. No light, no aphids, no escape. “These ants are eating corpses,” he says.

This is actually not an uncommon behavior for wood ants. The species is known to engage in battles among colonies, particularly in spring, when they extend their ranges in search of food. Maák calls this time of year the “wood ant wars.” After a battle, the victors feast on the bodies of the defeated. Down in the bunker there were no alternative sources of food—not enough bat guano or passing mites, for example—so instinct kicked in.

Ant Colony Two’s drive to survive resulted in an extraordinarily meticulous ant necropolis that lined the walls of the small room and spilled through the doorway. “They were organizing their corpses in waste piles, putting neatly in the corners, and transporting it away,” Maák says. There were approximately two million corpses, many of which displayed bores from bites and fret holes—signs that their contents had been consumed, he says.

Ant Colony Two seemed to have had some sense of its situation. “We have seen ants wandering quite far away from the bunker colony that couldn’t find a way out,” Maák says. “The hole was too far away.” The ants did not reproduce, but their numbers were sustained by their clumsy brethren above, which ensured that the population hovered at around a million since 2013 (compared with the much larger Ant Colony One, whose mound is two feet high and 10 feet wide). “They had no larvae and no queen,” he says. “But still they survived and kept their organization without any goal of life.” In 2015, the researchers dug into the second colony’s mound, directly below the shaft, to look for traces of pupae, but found nothing. When they returned 2016, the ants had repaired the mound.

Wood ants are remarkably resilient critters. For example, for the past 30 years, a colony has survived on Skeleton Islet, a barren rock of less than half an acre in the Tvärminne archipelago in southern Finland. Czechowski first established that colony in 1992 in hopes of identifying the most austere conditions that could support a population of wood ants. The insects exceeded his expectations, and subsist on the honeydew of aphids living on the island’s lone pine tree. When Czechowski published his study marking the discovery of the bunker ants in 2016, he cited the split colony as evidence of wood ants’ remarkable perseverance. But the general populace was less awed and more concerned. “Professor Czechowski got many letters saying how cruel it was to keep the ants down there,” Maák says. “People kept asking why we did not set them free.”

In most cases, the cardinal rule of wildlife conservation is to not intervene. David Attenborough, the voice behind Planet Earth and the field’s unofficial patron saint, is a staunch believer in this rule, according to The Sun. Maák says he grappled with this ethical dilemma, but his colleagues reasoned that they were not interfering with the course of nature because the ants had been trapped in a human-made structure. Plus, the researchers had learned what they could from the bunker ants, and wanted to study them further—as a united colony with an unusual duplex living arrangement.

And so, out of both compassion and scientific curiosity, Maák devised a plan. Before he could unite the colonies, he had to check if they would recognize each other. If not, the resulting carnage could wipe out both populations. Wood ant colonies each carry a hydrocarbon profile that’s as specific as a barcode, and ants will scan this to see if a newcomer is a friend or foe. In spring 2016, he took a group of around a hundred ants from Colony Two to Colony One, and let them scramble toward the mother nest. The ants were not attacked, and quickly—and perhaps with no small measure of relief—reimmersed themselves in the mother ship.

Maák’s solution would allow ants, after falling, to climb back up to the original colony. He calls it an “experimental boardwalk,” a term that conjures images of a flea circus of the future. It is some wooden planks. Maák’s colleagues installed the boardwalk just after the first trial encounter in 2016. A few ants hobbled over to inspect it.

Maák’s day job is, regrettably, not exclusively devoted to the study of these ants. So he left to conduct other research. When he returned in February 2017, Ant Colony Two was gone. The necropolis remained, but the swarming black mass had disappeared. A few lone ants wandered around the base of the boardwalk—presumably only the recently fallen.

According to Maák, the most significant implication of this research is how wood ants will maintain colony organization in even the most dire circumstances, in total darkness with no food save each other. “They couldn’t predict that we would come in to save them, but they were still surviving and fighting for something,” Maák says. “And that is exciting.”

Reindeer herders and archaeologists both must adapt to the new normal.

In the Mongolian taiga, it takes a multi-day off-road trek by car and horse to get to an area called Mengebulag. The boreal forest ecosystem there is home to the Tsaatan people, one of the last groups of nomadic reindeer herders in the world, and both the humans and their animals rely on its ice patches for water and cooling. Today, as the once-stable ice patches melt away, marshy soil comes to the surface, and with it long-preserved archaeological remains—that will quickly degrade once exposed. Now, research published in the journal PLOS One examines the problems that emerge as the ice disappears.

“As the climate is warming, the size of these ice patches is shrinking, and the location at which they are perennial—permanent or recurring—is going up in latitude and elevation,” says William Taylor, an archaeologist affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Human History in Germany and the University of Colorado, Boulder, and lead author of the paper. “This ice has never melted in known memory.”

Mongolia’s average temperature has increased by about 4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1940, and precipitation has decreased by seven percent, according to a Green Climate Fund report. The decline of the ice patches—which differ from glaciers in both size and the propensity to move—is one of the most obvious impacts of this.

For the Tsaatan, the ice patches provide a reliable source of water, and help keep their reindeer, which are susceptible to overheating, cool and healthy. The vanishing of the ice patches threatens a way of life that has persisted for thousands of years—and with it the record of that history.

“Before animal domestication, Mongolia was a difficult place to live,” Taylor says. “Animal domestication—sheep, goat, cow, camel, but in particular horses, and here, reindeer—really changed the region from a marginal, difficult place to be into an absolute heartland for world civilization and culture.

“The ice is one of these incredibly rare snapshots into the past where things that fall into the ice, especially organic materials that otherwise would disappear in a matter of decades, can make their way into the present day and give us insights,” he adds. “Even though we have this sort of ice patch all over the world, in Mongolia its loss is that much more significant.”

Taylor’s team has so far identified a number of wooden hunting implements, including a willow fishing pole now at the National Museum of Mongolia in Ulaanbataar, that have melted out of ice patches. Documenting even a fraction of these remains is a race against time. Taylor’s team returned to survey the Mongolian portion of the Altai Mountains this year, and hopes to find and document as much as they can before the sites are completely gone, and those deep-frozen organic remains decompose. It’s a sort of windfall for archaeologists—much of this archaeological material would never have been visible otherwise—but for Taylor it comes with a measure of guilt.

“The results are great, but it doesn’t give you excitement because it’s paired with the effects of the melt on people and cultural heritage,” he says. “It’s with a heavy heart that you do the work. Unlike other work we’ve done, this has a sort of moral imperative to it.”

You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

As the region changes apace, so does an ancient style of painting.

The Mithila region of southern Nepal and northern India lies in the flatlands that join the two countries, blanketed by sugarcane fields and golden meadows. Politically divided by a border, it is united by culture, history, and the Maithili language.

On Nepal’s side lies Janakpur, an ancient city considered the birthplace of the Hindu goddess Sita. Today, locals in this once sprawling kingdom browse for iPhones in shops that line narrow roads, or nap on the concrete banks of the city’s sacred ponds. Hindus travel to Janakpur to pray at the Janaki Mandir, a white marble temple that illuminates the city center.

Unknown to most visitors, the temple also houses a women’s art studio that’s covered in vivid Mithila paintings—an ancient art form defined by colorful geometric shapes and lines. On a recent afternoon, Sunaina Thakur, a local artist who runs the studio, sat inside under the whir of a clicking fan, watching a painter she’s been training steady her hand over a silk cloth and dab it with black paint. The image the painter was creating showed a bride being carried to the home of her groom.

A group of other female artists sat nearby, leaning on one another. Malti Paswan, dressed in a red and yellow sari, fixed her eyes on the painter’s strokes. The scene being rendered was a familiar one in Mithila art, romantic and classic—one that sells easily to Hindu pilgrims who amble into the shop.

Paswan and the other artists here grew up observing their mothers paint Mithila at home. Their mothers had learned it from their mothers, and so on. For centuries—some say thousands of years—women in the Mithila region have practiced this art form, painting expressions of their faith and desires.

In recent years, however, they’ve started addressing contemporary feminist issues and their visions of equality in this rapidly changing region.

Paswan says she’s been brainstorming ideas for a new series of her own—something more personal. One painting will show a woman standing before a male relative, peering at him through her scarf. Called purdah, it is an abiding practice in parts of South Asia and elsewhere in which women are expected to conceal their faces in front of male relatives or strangers, or to stay secluded in their homes. It is considered respectful by many. But it’s a practice that some local women have been quietly defying for years.

“I want to show people my sorrow—the sorrow I felt doing these things,” Paswan says. “I want people to know what it felt like.”

Many believe that Mithila art traces back to the time of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, when King Janaka, the ruler of the region, is said to have recruited local artists to paint his daughter Sita’s marriage to Rama. For generations, women painted the mud walls of their houses with images of Hindu deities, animals, and nature—a tradition that lasted for centuries and has only recently faded as families have begun building their houses with concrete. Originally painted using red and black natural dyes, these colorful pieces are now completed on canvas, usually with synthetic paint, and practiced by artists across caste and class backgrounds

Little else is known about its history, but local texts began referencing Mithila as early as the 14th century. Hundreds of years later, when a drought devastated the region, in the late 1960s, India’s government encouraged locals to paint their work on canvas and sell it as a means of income generation.

Once practiced only in the private sphere, Mithila painting suddenly became a profession, ushering in new opportunities for local women. By the 1970s, artists were selling their paintings to dealers who would resell them in craft markets in big cities. But they often asked artists to produce dozens of the same painting, for meager pay—a practice that continues today.

Concerned by what he saw, Raymond Owens, an American anthropologist in Bihar at the time, bought Mithila paintings at a high price, sold and exhibited them in the United States, then gave the profits back to the artists.

Owens later established the Ethnic Arts Foundation, an organization that exhibits and supports research on Mithila art and has helped train over 400 artists in Bihar through the Mithila Art Institute. In Nepal, one of the first places to train women to sell Mithila art professionally was the Janakpur Women’s Development Center, founded in the late 1980s. Today a number of other training centers dot the Mithila region.

Most contemporary Mithila artists sell their paintings to tourists in craft and fair-trade shops, usually for a few hundred or thousand rupees. Some of these artists have gained national and international attention, exhibiting their paintings in galleries and museums across South Asia, Europe, the United States, and Japan. Prices vary, but these pieces typically sell for several hundred U.S. dollars (though a few have fetched as much as several thousand).

Inside the studio in Janakpur, where temple chants and Hindi music vibrate through the room, the artists talk about gender issues in the region. Maithili society is considered severely patriarchal. Across Nepal, more girls have enrolled in primary school since 1990. But many eventually drop out due to housework responsibilities, early marriage, and other factors. Nationally, 80 percent of girls drop out by 11th grade.

“The next generation has it better [than] ours [did],” Thakur says. She pauses, then explains that many rural women still face social strictures and may be gossiped about if they talk to strangers or people who aren’t their relatives or neighbors.

Paswan looks up and smiles. “We’ve come here today, but people are going to talk about where we went,” she says. She starts whimpering. “Oh, they went with Sunaina! What are they up to?’” The women burst out laughing.

Married at 16, Thakur left school prematurely and moved into her husband’s home, in order to raise their son and take care of her in-laws. Like other women here, she grew up painting Mithila art. So years later, she asked some local artists to teach her techniques. In 2008, she started training other women herself.

The pushback Thakur faced was intense, but short-lived. At the time, few women in her area were selling Mithila pieces professionally or working outside their homes. Husbands barred their wives from meeting with Thakur. One of them called the group “men” for going out to work, then added that they “still have to go home and go to the kitchen.”

The criticism vanished once the women began earning real income from their paintings, by selling them in craft stores in Janakpur and Kathmandu. Painters at the Janakpur Women’s Development Center had faced similar resistance in the 1990s. But as more social and economic development came to the region, selling Mithila became normalized, according to the center’s founder, Claire Burkert.

Thakur is known for painting feminist themes, depicting local women holding traditionally male jobs—police officer, pilot, and so on. But she also paints women in household roles, doing unpaid care work that sustains families and economies. She points at one painting, a collage that shows women preparing for Hindu festivals—Chhath Puja, Tihar, and Holi—in the Mithila region. “[These women’s work] should be valued,” she says. “But it’s not.”

Distinctly feminist themes are a relatively new phenomenon in Mithila art. Lina Vincent Sunish, an art historian and curator based in India, says that Mithila artists started explicitly addressing gender issues in the early 2000s, many of them inspired by their discussions with teachers at the Mithila Art Institute.

But Sunish believes that long before that, some Mithila artists were using mythological scenes to hint at something more personal. She cites an old painting that depicted Sita—her eyes open wide with fury.

“The stance. The gaze. The gestures,” she says. “It’s there. It’s there in the narrative that other experiences are coming through.”

About 30 miles across the border, in Bihar, India, the mononymous artist Mahalaxmi unfurls a canvas on the floor of her home, flattening it to fill the space between a bed and a table cluttered with scrolls. The painting shows her recurring dreams, many of them images she associates with being a woman who deviates from gender norms here. A departing train symbolizes her need to travel, for instance; a bride riding a motorbike represents freedom.

Mahalaxmi lives with her husband and collaborator, Shantanu Das, part time in Ranti, a village in Bihar—the same place where they grew up, learned art, and encountered ridicule when they started dating before they were married. The village is located outside Madhubani, a small town on the edge of Nepal, known as the heart of Mithila art in India.

Standing over the canvas, Das says there are too many dreams to include them all. “She was always telling me, ‘In my dreams there’s a temple I’m not allowed to enter. I’m impure because I love someone.’”

“Now some of these dreams have stopped coming,” Mahalaxmi says. “Because we’re married.”

Each day in Madhubani, trains screech into a station where every inch of wall is painted in Mithila images: a smiling sun with a handlebar mustache, women collecting mangoes in a grove, buffalo plodding through a forest.

It’s part of recent efforts in India to preserve and promote Mithila art. As in Nepal, it’s been an important source of income for women in northern Bihar. The area—pockets of which are deeply impoverished—endures frequent and severe monsoon flooding each year. To support their families, many men and some women have left, migrating abroad or to other areas of India for work.

The collage that Mahalaxmi and Das unfurled was unfinished, one of several feminist pieces they’ve collaborated on—an arrangement considered unusual among Mithila painters. The pair have been working together since 2012.

The first step in their artistic process is to envision a concept and color palette together. Once they’ve done that, Das renders a loose composition of what images will be included in the painting, which Mahalaxmi—who is trained in line art—polishes and completes by drawing and painting.

Mahalaxmi and Das’s work spans a breadth of themes, from ritual depictions to a playful series on mermaids. Their feminist pieces have drawn acclaim in India and abroad; some have been exhibited in the United States. Their ongoing series, “Household Diaries,” depicts local women in what Mahalaxmi calls their “various incarnations”— wives, mothers, workers, painters. In one painting, a child hovers above his working mother like an apparition.

Other Mithila artists who have painted contemporary feminist themes include Amrita Jha, Shalinee Kumari, and Sangita Kumari. Each of these artists has touched on subjects such as women’s independence, dowries, domestic violence, son preference, inter-caste marriages, and other fraught societal issues.

One of the most celebrated Mithila artists who’s focused on gender issues is Rani Jha, a former social worker based in Madhubani whose work has dealt with purdah, female feticide, and male migration. Her favorite painting is called “Changing Women.” It shows four images of a woman evolving over generations. In the final frame, she wears a sleeveless blouse while her daughter lingers nearby.

“You can see her thinking, ‘Am I right or am I wrong?’” says Jha. “After some time, it becomes more clear. But even in the last scene, she’s still in confusion.”

Back at the studio in Nepal, Thakur mentions something that upset her that morning. On her way to retrieve Paswan and the other women, she passed a group of teenage girls hanging out in their village. Feeling discouraged after failing their exams, several said they had recently dropped out of school.

As Thakur explains that these girls belong to a so-called lower caste, her expression darkens, her tone sharpens. She says that Mithila trainings are expensive—people from “lower” castes can’t always afford them—and that she wishes the government would get involved and help make them more affordable.

She decides that she’ll return to their village to persuade the girls to finish school. If that seems unlikely, she’ll ask them if they’re interested in art.

Bottoms up!

A South African couple is now bottling gin infused with elephant dung. If there’s no easy way to say it, there’s an easier way to drink it. Co-founder Les Ansley recommends it straight, on the rocks.

Liquor stores and restaurants across South Africa and now Europe are selling out of their Indlovu Gin, Zulu for “elephant.” Skeptics may pooh-pooh what comes across as a novelty item, but tasters far and wide are praising a uniquely smoky, woody, earthy flavor that comes from the unlikeliest of ingredients.

The idea came to co-founder Paula Ansley after visiting Botlierskop Game Reserve, home to a herd of majestic African elephants. There, the couple learned that only about 30 percent of the animals’ bush diet of fruits, nuts, flowers, leaves, and bark is actually digested. The animals leave behind an undigested mass of flavorful botanicals in their giant clods of poop.

“I woke up to an elbow in the back at 6 a.m.,” remembers Les. “Paula said to me, ‘Why don’t we make gin from the elephant dung?’ and I said, ‘Ah, okay, let’s see about it.”

The husband-and-wife team, professors of physiology and immunology respectively, requested a bag of feces from the very reserve that inspired the strange brew in the first place. After much experimenting, they learned that if they dried, washed, sterilized, macerated, and redried the elephantine turds, they were left with an herbaceous smattering of African aromatics that could be safely infused into a base gin. (“Think of it as a teabag,” says Les.) The experiments took place under the watchful eye of South African spirits master Roger Jorgensen. To balance such a counterintuitive flavoring process, the couple needed a truly exceptional product. “If you’re going to make gin from shit, you can’t make a shit gin,” says Les.

So far, critical reception is united in praise. Gin connoisseur and South African native Christine Perrett has sampled over 220 gins, the world over. “I’ve got 10, 15 staple bottles I always keep in my cabinet,” she tells me over the phone. “Indlovu would absolutely be one of them. They’ve taken African botanicals and balanced it so well. To be able to take a gin neat says a lot.” This year, the Ansleys’ unthinkable gin won Double Gold at South Africa’s Craft Gin Awards.

The gin is enjoying healthy sales across South Africa and breaking into markets in Germany and Belgium, all while wearing the curious infusion on their sleeve. An elephant graces the label of each bottle of Indlovu, framing the phrase “Elephant-Infused Botanicals.”

As a two-person operation, the Ansleys collect their key ingredients from the reserve by hand—the cost of keeping overhead low. The good news is that the raw materials are endless. With each elephant producing 80 kilos of flavor-rich feces daily, “we’re not running out of botanicals any time soon,” says Les.

A perhaps less obviously unique facet of Indlovu comes from the fact that, given the variation in elephants’ regional and seasonal diets, no two batches will taste exactly the same. As such, each bottle will be labelled with the GPS coordinates and date on which the dung was collected.

The couple is careful, however, to repay the animals for their daily deeds. “We can’t just take; there needs to be a symbiotic relationship,” says Les. They donate 15 percent of Indlovu’s profits to the Africa Foundation, an organization dedicated to animal conservation and ranger training—a cause that man and animal alike can get behind.

John Beasley Greene photographed early European archaeology in Egypt—but he paid little attention to those who lived there.

In the 1850s, when he was in his early 20s, John Beasley Greene packed up his equipment and headed to Egypt. From Alexandria, the young photographer lugged his supplies onto a ship bound for Cairo, and then transferred to a smaller, private vessel that could navigate the Nile’s cataracts. Greene, born in France to wealthy American parents, would go on to visit Egypt twice in total—each time, training his lens on monumental structures, sweeping swaths of desert, and the go-on-forever sky.

He wasn’t the first European to apply the nascent medium of photography to Egypt’s then-moldering monuments, date palms, and riverside views. At least two others had beat him to it: Maxime Du Camp (who traveled with Gustave Flaubert) and Félix Teynard had made separate trips just a few years before.

Unlike Du Camp and Teynard, Greene had begun taking photos before his trips to Egypt, and kept at it afterward, writes Corey Keller, curator of photography at SFMOMA, in Signs and Wonders: The Photographs of John Beasley Greene. (An exhibition of Greene’s work is on view at the museum through January 5, 2020.) Greene was “probably the first photographer we know of who was trained archaeologically,” says Frederick Bohrer, an art historian at Hood College in Maryland, and the author of Photography and Archaeology.

In the 19th century, the two disciplines lurched toward a kind of maturity together. Earlier excavations had begun to investigate Stonehenge and other English megaliths, as well as the ash-covered ruins of Pompeii. But for the most part, like the medium of photography, archaeology—at least as it was practiced in Egypt, by Europeans—was an invention of the 1800s. Before that, enthusiasts of history were known as antiquarians, and many were just as invested in sifting through libraries as through dirt.

The switch to the shovels-in-the-ground approach of archaeology happened just before the middle of the 19th century, and by the time Greene first went to Egypt, scientific societies had begun to see photography as a useful research tool for the new field. Drawing, painting, and engraving had worked well enough for the many hundreds of plates and maps in the Description de l'Égypte, the sprawling tome compiled by Napoleon’s brigade of scientists at the end of the 18th century, but the techniques were hugely labor-intensive.

“To copy the millions of hieroglyphics which cover even the exterior of the great monuments of Thebes, Memphis, Karnak, and others would require decades of time and legions of draftsmen,” grumbled mathematician and physicist François Arago, who tried to persuade his peers at the Académie des Sciences that photography was the cataloguing tool of the future. The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres agreed, Keller writes, and dispatched Du Camp to Egypt, with instructions to “take advantage of every favorable moment” and “to always apply himself, as much as location and time permits, to complete the general views and the details of a monument, whether an entire legend of a complete hieroglyphic tablet.” The idea was to capture everything he could.

Greene’s approach was rather different. He appears to have been the first science-trained photographer to depict an excavation in progress—his own, at Medinet Habu, plus a dig near Giza—writes archaeologist Michael Press in Hyperallergic. Greene’s photographs are quiet, heavy on ground and sky, and nearly empty of people. Because European excavations in Egypt hadn’t yet reached the frenzied pitch they soon would, many of the structures he photographed were still swallowed by centuries of rubble. One example is the Temple of Dendur—long before it made the journey to America, where it now sits in its own room in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today, it’s surrounded by soaring glass and a placid pool; in Greene’s photos, it’s strewn with chunks of rock.

It’s not that it was impossible to include people in images. Exposure times could be less than a minute (but were often much longer), meaning that while movement was impossible to capture as anything other than a blurry, ghostly streak, subjects could sit, stand, or sprawl long enough to show up clearly. But even when figures are present in the images, Press points out, Greene’s captions ignore them. An 1854 image featuring a clearly defined, contemporary structure and blurry figure is titled "Etudes de dattiers" (or "Studies of Date Palms”), Press notes, “as if the person and their domicile were invisible or incidental.”

Some contemporary scholars suspect that Greene’s compositions were informed by artistic choice, and the European perspective that sidelined or erased indigenous residents of other countries. His sweeping landscapes borrowed from the atmospheric style of his teacher Gustave Le Gray, who pioneered a technique of waxed paper negatives and salted paper prints, Press writes. But portraying these landscapes as vast and empty also affirmed a colonial agenda, suggesting that that these were places just waiting for Europeans to stroll in and make their mark.

“Photographs like these are engaging with conventions of artistic representation in many areas of the world, and the Middle East in particular, that were being seen as empty spaces ripe for Europeans to go in and give meaning to,” says Christina Riggs, a historian of archaeology, photography, and ancient Egyptian art at Durham University and a fellow at Oxford's All Souls College. "Colonialism is a crucial factor in considering the circumstances in which such photographs were being made in the first place." Later photos taken by the English photographer Francis Frith featured many more people, but they were there for scale, as proxies for traveling Europeans or armchair adventurers, or as local representations of the titillating and 'exotic,' Keller writes.

As archaeology and photography continued to develop in tandem, Bohrer explains, crews would sometimes literally sweep aside the people who lived in a place before they photographed it. At the Acropolis in Athens, he says, archaeologists removed homes, military barracks, and a mosque before snapping photographs. A site “never looks the way it did when these photographs were taken,” he says.

Greene’s life was short, and details about him are hard to come by. Many of his photographs were exhibited before he died of an illness in Cairo in 1856, at the age of 24, but then his work “languished in almost total obscurity for a hundred years,” Keller writes. It was dusted off in the 1970s and 1980s “as part of a resurgent interest in the medium’s early history.” His images don’t tell any sort of complete story of Egypt, then or now. But they have become artifacts in their own right.

You seal it up, but you have to test it first.

As the city of Venice continued to wade through its alarming floods, commuters half a world away in Brooklyn noticed something strange—a subway station flooded above street level, a sight that hadn’t been appeared since 2012, when Superstorm Sandy inundated nearly a dozen tunnels and many stations around the city. Except this station entrance was flooded on a sunny November day. It was no act of god, but rather a test to see if the city would be ready the next time around. The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), like other major transportation agencies around the world, especially the ones that operate underground facilities in areas near the ocean, is deeply concerned about storm surges and rising seas.

“That was a hydrostatic test yesterday of a newly installed flex gate. The gate is tested with a head of water to make sure it is installed correctly,” says Shams Tarek, a deputy communications officer for the MTA. “The test was successful.”

Sandy had made a mockery of the largest subway system in the world, and the MTA alone requested $5 billion to both fix what was broken and plug things up where they could.

It wasn’t the entire station that was flooded at the Broadway station of the G train that connects Brooklyn and Queens. The water was being held back by a woven kevlar flex gate, a device developed by the engineering firm ILC Dover. In flooding events, these rolls of kevlar will be able to be unfurled from hidden receptacles attached to the signs that mark subway entrances. They can be pulled over the stairwell and attached to the highest step, to create a seal to prevent the worst from happening.

“Our barriers are impervious and designed to handle flooding as much as 16 feet deep,” says Dan Klopp, a product managing marketer at ILC Dover. “There can be some slight leakage at the interfaces between our barriers and the surrounding infrastructure, however this amounts to much less water ingress than would happen during a light spring rain shower.”

In an old subterranean system—a warren that runs throughout the city, full of closed stations, some of which offer tours, secret exits, underground artwork, and even an abandoned attempt at a pneumatic subway—where rain can lead to stalled trains, slippery floors, and leaky ceilings, such barriers are a new age solution: ideally both waterproof and tough as nails.

The barriers make the most obvious subway access points impenetrable, but water is a slippery foe. “These gates do not address the increasing stress of groundwater penetration into the subway, which is also likely to increase with climate change,” says Thaddeus Pawlowski, managing director of Columbia University’s Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes. “Many of the streams that once flowed through the city are buried underground and find their way into the subway.”

Pawlowski says the MTA already spends considerable energy pumping it out and treating it. “Perhaps in the future, the MTA could adopt an approach of working with the water, rather than just keeping it out,” he adds.

The MTA began this expansive, high-tech plugging initiative with stations at the highest flood risk, due to their low elevation. The most at risk, such as the end-of-the-line South Ferry station in Downtown Manhattan, were fitted with larger, more bulbous “resilient tunnel plugs”—32-foot-long balloons that are like a cross between a blimp and an airbag.

“We’re doing this,” the MTA’s Twitter account stated, “because climate change is real.”

This mosaic is trash.

In the Vatican’s Profane Museum, there’s one artifact that looks out of place among the ornate sarcophagi and marble statues: a mosaic floor that seems to be covered in the picked-over refuse of a meal.

When you first look down at the mosaic, it looks like the kitchen trash tipped over: Nutshells, olive pits, fruit rinds, and grape stems are strewn about. But if you look closer, the food scraps dissolve into chunks of stone and chips of glass. It’s a trompe l’oeil in mosaic, and an extraordinarily fine one. The shells gleam, the chestnut husks bristle with spines, and the grapes are fuzzed over with a soft, velvety bloom.

Mosaics like this one formed the floors of triclinia, dining rooms in ancient Rome where party guests lounged on couches, picking at delicacies. This one was unearthed among the remains of a villa on Aventine Hill, and even now it emanates some of the atmosphere of one of those long, dim, boozy Roman banquets. The scraps of food cast long, erratic shadows in different directions, as if lit by the dancing flicker of oil lamps, and even the little mouse, nibbling on a nut in the corner, carries a white glimmer of reflected lamplight in its eye.

This motif is a surprisingly common one, enough so that it has its own name: asarotos oikos, or “unswept room” in Greek. Although Greek artists made the first “unswept room” mosaics, we have only later Roman copies, which were constructed during a craze for Greek culture. But why would an elite Roman go to such effort and expense to make their dining room floor look like it was covered in trash?

For one, it was a kind of sly status symbol. Consider the refuse represented in the collection of the Profane Museum (so named because it houses non-Christian art): It’s trash, yes, but trash of the most luxurious kind. There’s fresh seafood, rushed in from the coast, including lobster, oysters, and even the spiny shell of a Murex Brandaris, which was the source of the famous Tyrian purple that only the elite of Roman society were permitted to wear. Strewn among the shells are expensive imports, such as mulberries from Asia, ginger from India, and figs from the Middle East. The spoils of a whole empire are scattered on the floor.

The mosaic implies a feast so lavish that, if it were actually served, it might have been illegal—a violation of Roman sumptuary laws, which capped how much a host could spend on any one banquet. The Lex Orchia, passed in 182 BC, limited the number of guests that could be invited to a single meal, and later laws outlawed the consumption of fattened fowl, shellfish, and sow’s udders (a favorite Roman delicacy). But based on the accounts of feasts we have from this time, these rules were frequently flouted. After all, what better way to impress your guests than breaking the law to entertain them?

Art historians, however, have connected the motif to another Roman dining tradition: the memento mori, or “reminder of death.” These little references to mortality were all part of the fun at a Roman banquet. Little jointed bronze skeletons called larva convivalis, for instance, seem to have been used as party entertainment. One appears in the Satyricon, doing a jiggly puppet-dance on the table while the host declaims, “Alas for us poor mortals … So we shall all be, after the world below takes us away. Let us live then while it goes well with us.”

Viewed from this perspective, the mosaic was a demonstration that even the finest feast is quickly transformed from sustenance into trash, just as the diner will be reduced in time to bones and dust. In other words, enjoy your meal, because it might be your last.

Almost 2,000 years separate us from the diners who ate over this mosaic. The deaths they imagined came to pass; all that’s left is this image of their trash. But this trompe l’oeil mosaic still has a few tricks up its sleeve. In his book Courtesans and Fishcakes, James Davidson, professor of ancient history, points out this telling detail: Some of the food remnants don’t quite meet their own shadows, as if they are still a split second from hitting the ground. The diners may be long dead, but the feast rages on.

For free: Four more of these derelict, decommissioned structures, courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard.

When you live in a tower surrounded by ocean, crazy things can happen. You might ride out a hurricane with 200-mile-per-hour winds, rescue passengers from a sinking ship, be taken hostage by Confederate soldiers, be healed by a Seminole medicine man, maybe even go fishing with Herbert Hoover.

Such were the lives of lighthouse keepers in the Florida Keys, who manned their posts and kept countless ships from running aground from 1852 until the mid-1900s, when automation took their place.

If that sounds like a fun gig, then here’s some good news: The Sand Key lighthouse, six miles off the shore of Key West, is up for grabs in a public auction. The winner doesn’t actually get to use the light—its official job is now handled by a more modern light mounted on a nearby pole—but the new owner will acquire a wild tower of history.

Back in 1819, when Spain ceded Florida to the United States, American entrepreneurs saw dollar signs. They wasted no time capitalizing on the region’s biggest asset: water. The area south of the Keys had always been a busy shipping lane. And with its natural deepwater port, the town of Key West soon sprang to life, along with a few traditional brick lighthouses on the main navigation routes.

That was a start, but the 140 miles of outlying barrier reef between Biscayne Bay and Key West were still hard to navigate, and particularly treacherous, wrought with hidden, shallow-water shoals. It called for an innovative solution: reef lights.

Between 1852 and 1880, the U.S. government built six offshore reef lights. Also known as screw-pile lighthouses—because they stand on piles that are screwed into the sea bottom—these haunting towers look more like metal spiderwebs than buildings (a design that likely influenced a more famous tower across the Atlantic, built by an architect named A.G. Eiffel).

These outposts stand in just five feet of water, but they’re four to seven miles offshore, so the lives of their keepers came with distinct isolation. These lonely souls sometimes went weeks without human interaction. In some cases, the extreme solitude led to mental derangements. But on serene days, sharks swam by in crystal-clear waters, and nights were passed watching waves wash over the reef, illuminated by moonlight and burning whale oil.

The Keys reef lights comprise the largest collection of screw-pile lighthouses in the world. While traditional lighthouses of the time were masonry structures, the hurricane-prone Keys called for a more open design. Like a tepee without a cover, these lighthouses had iron skeletons that let the elements blow on through.

But while their construction was a marvel of their day, time moved on, and GPS navigation eventually rendered them obsolete. The last beacon was extinguished in 2015.

Today these offshore giants are still icons to boaters and divers, but to their owner—the U.S. government—they’re useless. In 2012, the Coast Guard deemed the rusting sentinels “to be in excess” of its needs, and began the lengthy process of liquidating these aging feats of engineering.

That year, the Coast Guard gave the first one away: Fowey Rocks lighthouse became part of Biscayne National Park. Sand Key lighthouse, near Key West, was next. But after the government failed to find a qualified nonprofit or government agency to take it over, it put Sand Key on the auction block in the spring of 2019.

It is a stunning structure. The black-and-white, 132-foot-tall cast-iron pyramid sits atop a beloved snorkeling site. It gets attention from pelicans, sea turtles, and the occasional brown-footed booby. Once the staircase is replaced, it will offer stunning sunrise and sunset views. If the keeper’s quarters are rebuilt, they would make a delightful apartment or museum.

But take note: The structure is being auctioned “as is.” Whoever assumes ownership will have to bear the cost of preserving it, with historical accuracy and within the rules of the national marine sanctuary in which it lies. While the bidding will probably reach only into the tens of thousands of dollars—it’s currently at $24,000—the restoration will be challenging and costly. Based on estimates from the ongoing Fowey Rocks preservation efforts, it might take upwards of $3 million—probably more.

The online auction for the Sand Key lighthouse started on March 29, 2019, at $15,000. The bidding is blind, and the process is open to anyone willing to put down a $5,000 guarantee that they can make good on their final offer. So far, there are five bidders.

“Bidder No. 4 has bid three times,” says Eric Martin. “I keep having to raise more money to stay in front of him.”

Martin, aka bidder No. 3, really loves lighthouses. It’s a passion that goes back to the 1970s, when he first climbed the Old Cape Henry lighthouse in Virginia Beach. Now when he and his wife, Susan, go on vacation, they go to lighthouses—400 so far, including 44 in Ireland alone. When Martin does volunteer work, it’s at a lighthouse. When he moved on after three decades as a loan officer, and his kids moved out, he put his history degree to work as a substitute teacher—a strategic move that gives him more time flexibility to do all things lighthouse, including serve as president of the Florida Keys Reef Lights Foundation.

Martin says he really wants to win the bid, but has a sinking feeling that something is awry. “These auctions normally run two months,” he says. “Sand Key has been on the block since March, and hasn’t seen a bid since July.” Martin wonders if the General Services Administration, which is conducting the auction, is stalling to get top dollar.

In the meantime, four other reef lights in the Keys—Carysfort Reef, Alligator Reef, Sombrero Key, and American Shoal—are up for grabs. If a suitable nonprofit can be found, the government will transfer ownership at no cost, as it did for Fowey Rocks. But there is a chance all four will go up for auction as well.

The feds tried to give Sand Key away in the same manner back in 2018. Martin’s nonprofit and several others applied at the time, but all were turned down. Once the government deemed that there were no qualified candidates, Sand Key became eligible for auction. Martin believes the same fate awaits the other four.

“I just want to get them saved, no matter what,” says Martin. “They’re going downhill fast. There’s hurricanes. If they’re not restored, the government will have to spend money to tear them down, because without maintenance, they will fall to the reef.” Indeed, in 2017 a hurricane ripped off the landing platform on American Shoal, opened the roof panels, and broke some windows.

Martin wouldn’t be opposed to seeing the restorations become a collaboration between groups. He says perhaps his organization could partner with the Friends of the Pool, which submitted a competing proposal for the Alligator Reef lighthouse.

That group is headed by a man named “Lighthouse Larry,” a local sculptor. Larry likes Alligator Reef so much that every year, he leads an eight-mile open-water swim out to the iron icon. He also makes small-scale statues of it and the other reef lights.

Alligator Reef is in the best shape of the bunch, though in Martin’s perfect world all five lighthouses will eventually be restored. His ambitions may be a little lofty, but expressed through his jolly smile and school-teacher glasses, it’s impossible not to root for his utopian vision.

Martin’s dream is to stabilize the structures, then make them into museums, with authentic guest rooms to rent. He also wants to see them relit, albeit with smaller beacons, since they’re no longer official navigation aids. In Martin’s world, volunteer keepers would move in, creating a full-circle restoration of history. But this time around, they would not be tasked with keeping the light; they’d be more like docents, who might aid an occasional boater in distress. Martin would also make sure that the lighthouses have nice mattresses and other modern comforts.

Back in 1926, Herbert Hoover harbored similar comfort concerns. When he learned that the Keys keepers had no radios, and would have to pay for such things themselves, Hoover—then the secretary of commerce—declared, “I don’t know of any other class of shut-ins who are more entitled to such aid. The government does not pay them any too well, and the instruments which they can hardly afford are in many cases their only means of keeping in touch with the world.”

It was mostly political grandstanding, since Hoover didn’t actually go so far as to get them radios. But in 1929, a generous (and anonymous) Key West woman did. Soon after, the lighthouse keepers wrote about the wonders of listening to Sunday sermons and choirs, boxing matches, and the results of presidential elections—including Hoover’s inauguration.

To Martin, these are more than just old stories. They’re the matrix of history. Seeing the Keys reef lights restored is infinitely personal.

“To me, it’s like having children,” he says. “People ask me which lighthouse I’d choose if I can only have one. That’s like saying what child do you want to keep. Carysfort has the only round keepers’ house. Sombrero is the tallest. Alligator survived the 1935 hurricane. American Shoal … .” He keeps going, for quite a while. Clearly his appreciation for every feature on each lighthouse runs deep.

Meanwhile, the Sand Key auction continues indefinitely, open to all bidders.

A word to the wise, though: Sand Key is in the worst of shape of the five reef lights that are up for grabs. In fact, the word “lighthouse” itself is a bit of a misnomer at this point, since there is no actual house there. The keepers’ quarters burned up in 1989, when a restoration went awry. Also, some of the iron leg pieces are corroded and will need to be custom fabricated. The deck is failing, and the spiral staircase is missing along with the dock.

But taking Key West housing prices into account, and the prospect of living on top of the country’s only barrier reef, Sand Key might just be a pretty good deal.

Natural history collections are topping their specimens with replicas.

One night in August 2011, long after the last visitors had left the galleries, a man slipped into the Natural History Museum at Tring in Hertfordshire, England. He entered some time between the cusp of midnight and the very early morning—when the only creatures around were the stuffed specimens peering out from glass cases.

The museum is claustrophobic, in the Victorian wunderkammer way: narrow corridors and tall cabinets, lined with perched birds, sprawled lions, and a polar bear with a dopey grin. This man had a mission, and no time to dawdle. He headed for the stuffed rhino.

When he reached it, he used a hammer to loosen the horns, the BBC reported. He snatched them and then fled.

Real rhinoceros horns are made of keratin, the same stuff that makes up human hair and nails, and the thief at Tring had good reason to assume that these horns were, too. But Tring, and many other natural history collections, have been on their guard. They’d taken stock of their holdings, and were thinking ahead.

Rhinos have struggled in the wild, in the sights of poachers’s weapons, and at the time museum workers around Europe and beyond saw that taxidermy specimens and isolated horns in museum displays were at risk, too. The thefts first began ramping up around 2009, says Jack Ashby, museum manager at the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge, and a trustee of the United Kingdom’s Natural Sciences Collections Association, after an unnamed Vietnamese official circulated an unsubstantiated rumor that rhino horn vanquishes cancer. Rhino horn has long been prized for its alleged and unproven medicinal benefits and as a luxury item. In traditional Chinese medicine, for example, it is said that it can be used to treat fevers, gout, or rheumatism. In several countries, horn is also a status symbol. The market wasn’t new, but the rumor accelerated demand. “We’re pretty confident that [it] started the spate of thefts,” Ashby says.

Over the next few years, dozens of horns were stolen from museums across Europe—sometimes in secret at night, other times in broad daylight with brazen shows of force. Some thieves used teargas; others tied up security guards. At Norwich Castle Museum, in Norfolk, England, thieves on a smash-and-grab were tackled by onlookers. In summer 2011, The New York Times reported that powder from ground-up horns was selling for $45,000 a pound on the black market—more than gold or cocaine.

Just a month before the incident at Tring, thieves had targeted the Ipswich Museum, about 100 miles away, and pried a horn off of a rhino that visitors had affectionately named Rosie, a museum mainstay for over a century. (The museum installed a condolence book nearby for people to scribble “get well soon” wishes for the unfortunate ungulate.) Tring had already seen thieves go after its bird collection a few years prior in pursuit of brilliant plumage, so when the staff heard about the rhino horn break-ins, they took steps to safeguard the collection. The man who stole the horns—and would be caught and sentenced to 10 months in jail—had taken resin replicas.

There are many reasons a museum curator, conservator, or staff member might put a replica on display. Because the fossil record is fragmentary, many skeletons are incomplete, so rather than install a quagga teetering on three legs, museums often craft missing pieces out of wood, plaster, resin, or 3D-printed plastic to help visitors get a sense of a creature’s full form. Replicas can also lessen some of the stress and strain that a fragile, fossilized skeleton might encounter. And a big, bonafide tusk might require unsightly supports, unlike lighter papier-mâché and resin.

Rhino horns fall into a different category: Because they’re alluring to people with illicit plans, many museum professionals believe that putting them on display is just too dicey.

Since the rhino horn heists, the Natural Sciences Collections Association has issued guidelines for what museums can do to keep their horns safe. It starts with a security audit, explains Paolo Viscardi, a zoology curator at the National Museum of Ireland, and the chair of the association. Security begins with the display case and moves out from there. Is the horn behind bulletproof glass and multiple locks? Are security staff roving the galleries around the clock? Are there cameras? Do police officers hang out nearby? If the security can’t be brought up to snuff, the guidelines suggest loaning or donating the specimen to another museum.

The guidelines also encourage museums that do have authentic rhino horns to keep mum—or at least not holler about it. “The very first line of security you have is, don’t tell people about it,” Viscardi says. “The Lord of the Rings sums it up: ‘Keep it secret, keep it safe.’” If museums post images of their rhino horns on Twitter, Viscardi adds, they should only use fake ones and make that as clear as they can. Ashby’s museum in Cambridge has extended this idea to the label text. Next to their rhino displays, small signs read, “All rhino horns on display at the museum are replicas.” This is to discourage anyone from even trying. Though a stolen fake is less devastating than a real pilfered horn, the act can still damage the museum, the display, and—most importantly—the preserved animal.

Museums with rhino horns will sometimes prepare themselves for the worst by collecting DNA samples from the horns, in case they ever go missing. They take these samples by, for instance, drilling a one-millimeter hole in the base of the horn and collecting the powder, Viscardi says. There are also international projects, including the Rhinoceros DNA Database Project, run by the Scottish government, that invite museums to contribute the genetic information to a single repository that can help police or customs agents trace seized horns.

At this point, packing away authentic rhino horn is “pretty much universal” across museums, Ashby says. It’s “not a decision that museums make lightly,” he adds. “Changing a historic specimen is rarely done.” But safety often comes before the impulse to leave old specimens be. Viscardi says that pretty much every museum he knows has taken their horns off display, tucked them into secure storage, and fitted synthetic replicas. The average visitor will likely never be able to tell the difference, unless label text trumpets the swap.

Several museums contacted for this story declined to comment about horns in their collections at all, citing security concerns. In rare instances in which museums do keep the originals on display and are willing to talk about it, they make it clear just how tight security is. The Field Museum in Chicago has real rhino horn on display on a taxidermy specimen from the early 1900s. Because the horn is affixed to the original mount, removing it would involve potentially damaging the specimen, which the museum wants to avoid, says Adam Ferguson, collection manager of mammals. But that’s not to say that horns are just sitting out in the open. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable with our stuff on physical display if we didn’t have a physical barrier and then added security,” Ferguson says. Talking about the precautions, he says, “highlights that we take this stuff seriously. Like, ‘Damn, that’s hard to get that stuff.’”

All of the museum’s rhino horns are behind glass, and the cases are outfitted with alarms and surveillance cameras, Ferguson says. (The same goes for convincing fakes, attached to an entirely unnatural specimen fashioned from cellulose acetate, which yields an uncannily lifelike impression, down to the wrinkles of the skin.) Another rhino horn and other objects with temptingly high black-market appeal are sealed up in storage facilities behind biometric locks. There, rhino horn sits alongside narwhal ivory, and priceless type specimens—the definitive and diagnostic examples of a given species—are clustered with pangolin scales in locked cabinets, only accessible with badges. The museum doesn’t want to hide stuff away, Ferguson says, but it’s tricky to find the right balance between sharing and safeguarding these items. “You lose the ‘wow’ factor of having it out and on display,” hen says, “but you’ve got the balance the risk versus the gain.”

Demand for rhino horn may wax and wane, but the replicas and security probably aren’t going anywhere. “I could see security practices changing slightly or becoming lax, but it’d be hard,” Ferguson says. “It would take such a long time—it’s not something I could see in my generation or lifespan, someone saying, ‘Let’s get rid of that security altogether.’”

If anything, high-quality fakes might get even more use. A recent paper in the journal Scientific Reports made the case for trying to flood the rhino horn market with imitation horn made from horsehair. (Speaking to Wired, many conservationists voiced concerns that such accurate knockoffs might just fan the desire for the real thing.) There are good scientific reasons for keeping rhino horn on hand, but fewer for putting them at risk on public display, at least until security is locked down and demand fades. “No one thought it was an issue until they started smashing and grabbing horns,” Ferguson says. Now it’s just safer to keep them out of sight.

Tiny gastropods, huge undertaking.

In 2018, Keahi Bustamente went to Molokaʻi, an island nestled between Oahu and Maui, in search of a snail. No one had seen it since the 1960s, but then again, Newcombia canilicuata, is barely an inch long, with a delicately whorled shell that looks like an intricately carved almond. Snails in the genus Newcombia once sprawled across the islands of Maui and Molokaʻi, but have all but vanished under the shadow of invasive species, human development, and shell collectors. Tracking down these lilliputian snails—at least the ones that survive—in sprawling Hawaiian jungles is a near-impossible feat. “It’s not like finding a needle in a haystack,” Bustamente says. “It’s like finding Earth in the universe.”

Bustamente, a field technician with the state’s Snail Extinction Prevention Program, is what’s known as a “snailer.” He and his colleagues journey to the island’s last truly wild refuges—places that tourists, and sometimes even locals, have yet to touch. It’s the best strategy for tracking down any of the 750 species of land snails that once populated the Hawaiian islands, 747 of which are endemic to the chain, according to a 2018 report from malacologists Norine Yeung and Kenneth Hayes of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. (Malacologists are the scientists who study snails, snailers are people who try to spot them in the wild, and shell collectors who acquire live animals are essentially poachers.) “Even as we’re rediscovering snails, species are blinking out as we rediscover them,” Yeung says.

But Bustamente was determined to find N. canilicuata. He’d seen a snail that fit the description in 2015, and had returned to the same place in 2018 with Yeung, Hayes, and other researchers who could potentially confirm the identification and document the population. The area was pristine—promising for the snail but precarious for the researchers. They had to plow through dense thickets of uluhe, an impenetrable clambering fern that makes walking feel more like wading. “You have to walk through it like a sea, the fern holding on to you and grabbing you,” Bustamente says. Covering just 500 yards could take an entire day. “It’s not just that there are no trails,” he says, “but probably no people have been here before.”

The exact location of this place and other sites where endangered snails have been sighted are known only to members of the extinction prevention program and the Bishop Museum. “To guard it against any threats, we have to keep it secret,” Bustamente says. These naturally protected areas are one of the snails’ last safe places, not just from invasive predators, such as larger rosy wolf snails and rats, but also from overly curious tourists and grabby collectors.

The snailers split up to cover as much of the jungle as possible. Though their mission was focused on N. canilicuata, they were on the lookout for any other endemic Molokaʻi snail species. “You can’t go to one area and look for one snail,” Yeung says. “You have to go to one area and find every snail that lives there.”

The next strategy for finding a long-lost snail is to seek out the plants it was formerly spotted on. On Molokaʻi, Bustamente was looking for the hāhā plant, a lobeliad in the genus Cyanea with purple flowers that resemble the beak of the native Hawaiian honeycreeper. He and another snailer trekked through the uluhe until they spotted what they believed could be a hāhā. It turned out to be another, more common species of Cyanea, “but I turned over a leaf and there’s this snail on it,” he says.

Alas, not N. canilicuata, but Laminella venusta, a Hawaiian land snail in the family Amastridae. The family was down to 20 species, from 325. Bustamente’s discovery brought the total to 21 living species. He turned over several other leaves—nine snails in total.

Unwilling to test the luck of this population, which had managed to survive the twin demons of predation by rats and predatory flatworms—the researchers collected all nine individuals and took them to the safest place in the world for a Hawaiian land snail: a 44-foot trailer run by David Sischo, the coordinator of the Snail Extinction Prevention Program. Sischo is the steward of Hawaiʻi’s most endangered snails, and his trailer teems with small plastic terraria that contain the entire known populations of 30 species of snails that are now thought to be extinct in the wild. On Near Year’s Day 2019, Sischo documented the death of Lonesome George, the last known individual of Achatinella apexfulva, a farewell that Ed Yong reported for The Atlantic. When the nine specimens of L. venusta die, their bodies will be deposited in the annals of the Bishop Museum.

Even though Bustamente had just stumbled upon an incredibly rare population of snails, he still wanted to find Newcombia. So he forged ahead, toward, roughly, where Bustamente had seen the snail in 2015, while on a snailing expedition with research student Chris Johns. He’d only spotted it then, in a gulch, because an entomologist who’d seen it in the 1960s mentioned the olopua tree, also called the Hawaiʻi olive. And that’s where Bustamente and Johns found them.

In 2018, when Bustamente reached the same olopua gulch, the snails were easy to spot. They collected 18 of them and left the rest to the wild. When Yeung and Hayes returned to the site nine months later, the N. canilicuata were still there, though the tree that once held nine individuals of L. venusta had been overrun by invasive plants and there was no further trace of that species. For Yeung and Hayes, the blinking out of a population is not unusual or surprising. But it is still devastating every time. “People think of extinction as this rare thing, but in Hawai‘i it’s something we deal with everyday,” Hayes says.

Hayes and Yeung have been studying Hawaiian snails for a little more than a decade, during which time they’ve directed surveys at more than 950 sites. This work has confirmed more than 200 living populations of snails in nine families, which Hayes and Yeung document in their 2018 report on the state of snails in the islands. But there are more out there, if snailers are smart about where they look.

Besides dispatching crews of snailers on quixotic missions, the Bishop Museum is working on a digital database of its extensive collection of six million shells and voluminous archives on where they were found. “Things are disappearing faster than we can discover them,” Hayes says. “We want to make the database publicly available not just to scientists but to anybody who wants to log on and look for snails.”

Traditional Hawaiian knowledge also offers snailers clues on where to look. The Hawaiian call land snails, particularly tree-bound Achatinella species, kāhuli, which means “to turn or shift”—a reference to shell whorls, according to Aimee You Sato, in her 2018 thesis at the University of Hawaii Mānoa, which was published in Society & Natural Resources.

Kāhuli feature prominently in chants, songs, and stories, and were known to sing themselves. King Kamehameha III named his summer home Kaniakapūpū, after the sound of the snails. (Snails have no vocal cords, so there are a number of theories to explain the stories of singing snails in various ways, Sato writes.) Still, the snail’s importance in traditional Hawaiian culture is obscured by that of plants, according to Bustamente, who worked as a botanist before turning to snails. “There aren’t many people who specialize in Hawaiian snails, and not really any Native people who specialize in Hawaiian snails,” he says. “I saw it as a calling.”

As a kid growing up on Molokaʻi, Bustamente used to run around along the island’s north shore, near the immense sea cliffs that spill out into blue ocean. “Any work I can do on Molokaʻi is really special, and I put all my energy into doing good work out there,” he says. Bustamente has tried to spread the gospel of kāhuli to his Native Hawaiian community. Recently, he brought a batch of Partulina snails to his children’s classroom at the Kamehameha School in Maui, which educates Native Hawaiian children. “Most people don’t even get to see these snails, let alone Hawaiian children,” he says. “So that felt really good to do.”

Answering the call of the sea.

"Life is too short! I wanted to brighten it up as much as possible, and I shall never regret the decision which I took. Whereas had I acted differently, I would have nothing but regret.” These words were written by Rose de Freycinet, a woman from France, in her journal—and the “decision” was to disguise herself as a man in order to travel the world aboard the French corvette Uranie in 1817. Shipwreck, scandal, and homesickness stalked de Freycinet during her global tour, all documented in her journal, Mémoires, now kept in the State Library of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia.

Stories of sea voyages, especially first-person accounts, are a source of enduring fascination, full of discovery, endurance, survival, and larger-than-life characters—usually men. In The Sea Journal: Seafarers’ Sketchbooks, historian Huw Lewis-Jones collects diaries, letters, and drawings, made at sea, “as if curating a kind of global exhibition of rare artworks and personal materials,” he says. “But of course this is only possible where journals, diaries, and sketchbooks survive.” Among those are the rare but compelling tales of the women who endured the hardships of life at sea: de Freycinet and her cross-dressing predecessor, botanist Jeanne Baret; Nantucket whaling captain’s wife Susan Veeder; and aristocratic English traveler Annie Brassey. “They faced the same challenges the men did,” says Lewis-Jones, “and then some.”

De Freycinet was just 23 years old when she arrived in the port of Toulon, intent on joining a three-year scientific voyage to the Pacific with her husband, Captain Louis de Freycinet. With Charles as a conspirator, she dressed as a man to begin the voyage (though she was soon found out), and became the first woman to document a circumnavigation of the world. Her journal reveals a rare perspective on the Age of Sail. Sea travelers kept journals for many different reasons, says Lewis-Jones: “navigation, recording coastlines, keeping mind and soul occupied, overcoming fear, as much as boredom.” De Freycinet wrote her journal as a series of letters to a friend, Caroline. She wrote as a means of escape from both the endless expanse of the sea and the tight confines of the shipboard cloister that kept her separate from the male crew. “You told me you wished to accompany me everywhere,” she wrote, “I therefore have no choice but to bore you a little whenever I myself am not having much fun."

Life at sea is reflected in her journals—long periods without incident punctuated by moments of sudden activity and panic. In 1820, after two years at sea, inclement weather strafed Uranie and dragged it toward the rocky coast of the Falkland Islands, off the South American coast. “I shall never forget it as long as I live,” she wrote. Soon the ship struck a rock and the crew used pumps to keep the ailing vessel afloat as it sought a place to safely run aground. “However,” records Rose, “the ship was taking water; the breeze was light and the strength of the men, who had not eaten for a long time, was failing.” All were spared when Uranie ran “almost imperceptibly onto the sand at 3 a.m.”

By then the expedition had taken its toll on de Freycinet. “I am pale, yellowish, and have sunken eyes: in short I look like a ghost,” she wrote. She also underwent a mental transformation: “It is true that everything that I have endured during the last two years has given me such a sombre outlook on life that I have become a philosopher and that the gay, wild and scatterbrained Rose has become serious.”

Though women were forbidden from naval vessels, the de Freycinets were fêted upon their return to France. But de Freycinet had not been the first woman known to have posed as a man to sail around the world. That was Jeanne Baret, daughter of agricultural laborers from France’s Loire Valley. With the collusion of a lover, she passed as “Jean” on Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s 1766 expedition, where she worked as a botanist, to sail around the world. If she kept a journal it is not known, but her remarkable story survives in the accounts of four crewmates.

Baret’s ally and lover was scientist Philibert Commerson. “That said, the quick-wittedness and determination needed to sustain her disguise was Baret’s alone,” says Glynis Ridley, of the University of Louisville and author of The Discovery of Jeanne Baret. After a year and a half at sea, she was reportedly revealed as a woman in Tahiti—though she had probably aroused suspicion already. She did not relieve herself with the crew and the surgeon noted that her care for Commerson “did not seem natural for a male servant.”

Both de Freycinet and Baret were seriously transgressing social norms. Merely entering the company of men was seen as morally suspect, says Ridley. And both were also involved in scientific work. “Baret’s life spans a period that was one of intense debate about women’s exposure to scientific knowledge,” says Ridley. “A female stowaway was a curiosity, a female botanist was a breach in the natural order of things.” Baret became the first woman recipient of a French government pension for her contribution to science. Ultimately, says Ridley, “Baret refused to be bound by others’ limited expectations for someone of her sex and class.”

As time passed, some navies permitted officers to bring their wives aboard, but on merchant vessels, where space and speed were at a premium, the situation was different. “Merchant vessels rarely carried women except as passengers or, of course in the case of the slave trade, as cargo,” says Lisa Norling, a historian at the University of Minnesota who specializes in women and gender in the maritime world. Eventually even merchants and whalers saw more women on board. “By the early 19th century it was becoming more common, especially as non-naval vessels were going farther and farther away.”

The journal of Susan Veeder is furnished with gorgeous watercolors, several of which Lewis-Jones reproduces in The Sea Journal, and traces the voyage she embarked upon in 1848 on the Nantucket whaling ship Nauticon. Veeder’s entries make brief mention of weather conditions and islands sighted, but her illustrations of the Galápagos, Pitcairn Island, and Peru truly stand out. Her journal otherwise describes the hospitality she encountered—“the Captn gave me Jar of plums a tin of soup a Cheese a few bottles of wine”—and her homesickness. “Going along nicely towards home,” she writes. “I hasten the time when we may arrive.”

Due to declining whale numbers, in the 19th century whalers had to hunt farther from home. Like in the navies, captains and others were sometimes allowed by owners to bring their families with them. Women had long provided essential support to the whale industry from shore. Veeder, wife of Nauticon’s captain, and women like her were obliged to participate in arduous voyages to the Pacific. “For some of them, it was very clear they felt their place was to be with their husband,” says Norling. “That was their job.”

A captain’s wife would have had “privileges but real restrictions on most of the whaling vessels,” she adds. “They were not allowed on deck when there was a whale that was being processed because they would be in the way…. The whole deck would become a slaughterhouse. It stunk, it was dirty, and the smoke was horrific.” For the crew, the captain’s wife would have personified the difference in rank—and the men resented anything that prolonged their tours, such as the captain putting into port for his family’s health.

Seafaring was wearisome, but the tedium made moments of joy and pain stand out. On December 31, 1849, Veeder wrote that her daughter Mary, also on the voyage, “is 11 months old has 7 teeth creeps all about the ship and is very cunning.” Barely three months later, Mary became fatally ill in Tahiti. For five years Veeder shared in the hardship of Nauticon, raising a family at sea. She lost a daughter and later, her husband—to infidelity.

Toward the turn of the century, the Age of Sail was passing into memory. Steamships were faster and more reliable, and required different skills, such as the management of coal rather than the wind. Old hands lamented the decline of sailing and the dull monotony of steaming. But there were also those, such as Lady Annie Brassey, who embraced the technology’s capacity for travel and romance.

Sunbeam was a 532-ton, three-masted schooner equipped with 9,000 yards of sail and a 70-horsepower steam engine. It had a crew of 43, including Brassey and her family, and it was the first steam yacht to circumnavigate the globe, in 1876 and 1877. The English heiress wrote daily letters about her experiences on board, and published them in the bestselling A Voyage in the ‘Sunbeam’.

Her curiosity was sated thanks to her class and marriage into the family of a railway tycoon, which let her travel in luxury, to esteemed receptions around the world. She was also an energetic collector, and many of the items she procured along the way are in museums in her native Sussex. She writes of visiting pawnbrokers’ shops where “out of funny little boxes and bags and parcels [they] produce all sorts of rare and curious things.” Among her unusual collection was a feathered cloak from Hawaiʻi, a Buddhist offering vessel from Southeast Asia in the shape of a sacred hamsa bird, and a helmet mask from Papua New Guinea made of wood, fiber, and mud.

Brassey’s letters were “a sort of open diary” for family, says Julian Porter, curator at Bexhill Museum in Sussex. “Annie’s books were in some way just opening up that distribution list to the general public.” She discussed food, sights, and the people she met, as well as crises—threats of being boarded one day, a volcanic dust storm another. “Happily, the children don’t know what fear is,” she observed. “The maids, however, were very frightened, as some of the sea had got down into the nursery.”

“Annie wasn’t a natural sailor,” says Porter. She “often suffered from seasickness but rarely complained. She was almost completely fearless.” Brassey was always troubled by ill health, however, and was finally stricken with malaria in 1887. “I am sure she realized she wasn’t likely to make it to old age,” says Porter. “She had a ‘bucket list’ and she was taking it by the horns.”

Like the seafaring women that preceded her, Brassey possessed courage and a sense of adventure as she pursued the lure of the sea. The journals and other items that bear the names of these women vividly document extraordinary journeys and experiences—both psychological and geographical. “That’s what true explorers do,” says Lewis-Jones, “change the way we see and understand the world.”

A tiny plot of land in eastern India safeguards 1,420 kinds of rare indigenous rice.

From Kolkata’s Howrah Junction, the oldest train station in India, the Howrah-Koraput Express noisily sputters past fields of rice and steel plants pumping plumes of smoke into the sky. It crosses above silt-rich rivers, past pastel-colored houses and water buffaloes grazing pondside, and, after a 16-hour journey, enters the lush green township of Muniguda, in the state of Odisha. From here, at the edge of the untouched forests of the Niyamgiri Hills, it’s another ten miles by auto rickshaw or motorbike to a 1.7-acre plot of land that holds the last specimens of India’s bountiful rice diversity.

Basudha is a rice conservation farm that grows 1,420 traditional rice varieties, including some that are no longer found anywhere else in the world. Here, one can find such rare cultivars as Garib-sal (“garib” meaning poor in Bengali), an ironically named folk rice with nano-quantities of silver in each grain. Or Sateen, meaning “co-wife,” a rice that contains three grains in each hull.

Much of this fascinating diversity is at risk of erosion, says Debal Deb, the founder of Basudha. “It is very difficult to make people understand what they’ve lost, especially with varieties they have never tasted before,” he says. A former Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Deb is an ecologist-turned-agricultural scientist who, for the better part of the last 25 years, has traveled to the remotest corners of India—by train, by bicycle, and on foot—to collect and document the country’s multifarious and rich assortment of rice.

During his initial survey, Deb found that until the 1970s, farmers grew more than 110,000 varieties of rice across India. But he contends that the advent of the technology-driven Green Revolution led to a rapid decline of traditional landraces in favor of new, high-yielding varieties. The Indian government and the International Rice Research Institute advanced the cultivation of these imported landraces, while indigenous varieties disappeared from the fields. “They promoted the idea that the traditional varieties of rice are unscientific, backward, and that’s why people growing them were going hungry,” says Deb. “And that there would be a scare of another famine unless we grow more food, grow these high-yielding modern varieties.” In 1943, a famine in Bengal killed between two and three million people.

Nearly 90 percent of traditional rice varieties were lost in the aftermath of the Green Revolution. Deb estimates that only around 6,000 are extant today. As it turns out, extremely poor farmers, those who were farming on drought-prone, remote, or coastal saline land, continued to grow the indigenous varieties. As did farmers who could not afford to buy the fertilizers, pesticides, or expensive irrigation technology required to grow high-yielding varieties. “So far there has been no high-yielding variety that can grow on marginal lands,” says Deb. “So these farmers are still relying on traditional varieties, and they are the source of my collection.”

In 1996, Deb left his job with the World Wide Fund for Nature to begin his country-wide search for traditional rice. Fed up with the focus on conservation of what he calls “charismatic mega-fauna” such as the tiger and elephant, he wanted to document the catastrophic genetic diversity loss of India’s staple crop. He started on home soil, setting up in a village in West Bengal. In 1997, he established Vrihi (Sanskrit for “rice”), a folk rice seed bank, where farmers can take seeds from Deb’s collections to plant on their own farms. Farmers from across the country bring traditional landraces from their own fields, and exchange these for other landraces in the seed bank.

Deb doesn’t charge any money, and doesn’t require a seed barter, but he encourages the farmers to distribute the seeds among neighboring farmers. “You are free to sell the rice produce,” he tells them. “But not the seeds.” 7,000 farmers from all over India have since collected or exchanged rice varieties directly with Vrihi. They then distributed this rice to other farmers, and Deb says around 17,000 farmers to date have benefited from Vrihi’s indigenous rice collection. Vrihi is now South Asia’s largest open-access rice seed bank, with 1,420 landraces in its collection.

In 2001, Deb established his conservation farm in West Bengal, naming it Basudha, “Earth mother” in Bengali. There, he grew the folk rice in his rapidly expanding collections. But he was beginning to tire of the skepticism from local farmers who could not fathom why a man with no farming background was asking them to return to the indigenous rice planting they had abandoned years ago. In 2010, farmers from Odisha invited Deb to set up operations in the Niyamgiri foothills, where the tiny farm now stands.

To grow over 1,400 distinct rice cultivars on a 1.7-acre plot of land while maintaining their genetic purity is no mean feat. Experts recommend an isolation distance of at least 360 feet on all sides for each variety of rice that is planted, since rice pollen can travel that far. It would be impossible to grow all the landraces on his small farm while still maintaining the recommended isolation distance, so Deb has devised an ingenious planting method. He times his planting so that each rice variety is surrounded by others with different flowering dates, to avoid cross-pollination. To maintain the genetic purity of each variety, every year Deb examines 56 morphological characteristics of each landrace. These characteristics include such aspects as leaf color, angle of the leaf, length and width of the rice grain, and aroma.

Deb offers striking examples of the rice he’s encountered on his mission to restore the genetic loss of one of the world’s staple food crops. He speaks of Lalu, a variety so fragrant that he could smell it wafting out of a distant household while on a walk in the fields in Odisha one day. “The smell was so strong, and reminiscent of rice pudding,” he says. Basudha has a collection of nearly 200 aromatic varieties. Other varieties on the farm have nutrient-rich, or even medicinal properties. He also mentions Nyavara, a variety grown primarily in Tamil Nadu and considered to hold neurotherapeutic value, that locals traditionally fed to epileptic patients.

About 70 landraces on the farm are flood-tolerant, including some that are capable of growing in 12-feet-deep water. There are landraces capable of growing not just in highly saline soil, but in the seawater that sometimes flows into coastal farms during cyclones. There are other flood-tolerant varieties that can remain submerged for weeks. “As if they hold their breath,” says Deb. “And when the water level subsides, they can breathe again.”

Even cultural traditions are lost with the fading of these rice landraces. Deb speaks of Jamai-sal, “son-in-law” rice, a cultivar grown specifically for the Bengali celebration of jamai shashti, when a jamai, or son-in-law, is invited for a feast. To serve the new son-in-law fresh-tasting rice, Jamai-sal was harvested mere days ahead of jamai shashti. Deb believes Basudha might now be the only farm where this rice is grown. “Without becoming a jamai, I have these seeds,” he laughs.

Establishing Basudha in the backdrop of the Niyamgiri Hills proved appropriate. For the past two decades, the region has been the site of a people’s movement to protect indigenous and tribal lands from the hands of government-backed multinational mining interests. The land on which Deb farms is in a tribal village, offered to him by farmers who understood the value of his mission, even as he was being rebuffed by India’s state and national institutes of agriculture.

But the long arm of industry frequently intrudes into his conservation efforts, both to his chagrin and amusement. A week after he published his findings on Garib-sal, the silver rice, a representative from a national mining company contacted him, asking how much money he’d want for 50 kilos (about 110 pounds) of the rice. They wanted to grow and extract silver from it. On learning that the company’s annual revenue was 27 million rupees a year, Deb named his price. “Multiply your 27 million rupees by 25, which is the number of years I have been growing and collecting this rice,” he told the representative. “Then pay me that for each kilo of rice.”

Deb has good reason to believe that his rice is invaluable. With a rapidly changing climate, crop diversity is a necessity. An increasing number of climate refugees can no longer subsist on the land that nurtured their forebears, and the preservation of indigenous rice, especially types suited to growing in adverse conditions, is more important than ever.

But in India, rice is more than food. It is the bearer of the country’s rich heritage. In Bengal, when someone wants to know if you’ve eaten, they ask “Bhaat kheyechho?” or “Did you eat rice?” The Hindu goddess of food is Annapurna, whose name can be translated as “full of rice.” Rice is both daily sustenance and sacred offering, celebrated as a rite of passage in the annaprashana, a ceremony marking an infant’s very first spoonful of rice. To let this cultural and culinary heritage perish is unconscionable. To save it, says Deb, imperative.

A relic of North America’s shallow sea.

During the Late Cretaceous period, some 90 million years ago, long before Kansas was a flat expanse of grassy plains, it was a part of a great inland sea that connected what is now the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, right through Middle America. That’s why giant prehistoric sharks often turn up in a state that today is as landlocked and crop-covered as they come. Recently, after nearly a decade of deliberation over a collection of fossilized teeth, the menagerie added an ancient relative of today’s great whites that once swam what's called the Western Interior Seaway. The find, described in a paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, came out of a ranch in Mitchell County, about 50 miles south of the geographic center of the United States.

“The Western Interior Seaway was apparently a relatively stable, warm ocean that provided favorable habitats to a diverse array of prehistoric marine creatures,” says lead author Kenshu Shimada, a paleobiologist at DePaul University in Chicago and a research associate at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays, Kansas, where the teeth are held.

For about 20 million years, sediments steadily settled on the bottom of that shallow sea—sediments that now stick out of the earth like a butte or lie just below fields of wheat and soybeans.

The shark was a lamniform, a prehistoric mackerel shark in the same family as modern great whites, and could grow longer than 15 feet. While many lamniformes are known for their predatory speed, some, like the megamouth shark, are slow-moving filter feeders. The new species, Cretodus houghtonorum, seems to have been from the more languid side of the family.

“Their lifestyle varied,” Shimada says of lamniformes. “Many of them, but especially smaller species, likely fed on small fish and squid, while larger species were able to consume other large aquatic vertebrates, such as marine lizards called mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, and sea turtles, besides other types of fish.”

Though C. houghtonorum was not a plankton eater—it had classically sharp shark teeth—Shimada determined the fish was slow, in part on the basis of its scales, 23 of which were found on site. (They’re not obvious, but sharks do have small scales.) C. houghtonorum’s scales were not well grooved, the way they tend to be on fast sharks, which means its prey was likely small and similarly pokey.

The remains now reside in the veritable shark tank of the Sternberg Museum, alongside fossils of everything from snails to mosasaurs, as relics of Kansas's marine past.

The magenta-colored blooms are rare but easy to spot.

One afternoon this October, as the light was fading along the coast of Wales, botanist Trevor Dines found treasure in an ancient pasture. It wasn’t an old Viking relic or rare coin, but an almost gaudy fungus. It looked as though a piece of coral had been plucked from some tropical reef and transplanted to the less-colorful grasslands of Wales. “We were about to give up on the search when I noticed it nearly under my feet,” Dines writes in an email. “Thankfully I didn’t actually trample.”

The fungus in question, aptly named the violet coral, is a relatively uncommon sight in the United Kingdom. People report sightings a few times each year in northern England and Scotland, and Dines, who works for the charity Plantlife, had never seen it before. He’d been searching all day, in hot pursuit of not only violet coral, but also a bevy of other bizarre fungi that have popped up in the UK this year. A wet spring, warm summer, and rainy autumn have turned Welsh meadows into reefscapes.

Beyond merely looking out of place, the violet coral is rare due to its persnickety growing requirements, Dines says. The fungus, like other vibrant waxcap fungi, grows best in ancient pastures, which is the British term for grassland that has not been plowed, sprayed, reseeded, or fertilized for decades. Ancient, species-rich grasslands like this once sprawled across England and Wales, but nearly 97 percent were lost in the 20th century, according to a 1987 study in Biological Conservation. The small pastures that do remain tend to be fields that are too steep or small for intensive development with fertilizers and pesticides, though the occasional grazing pony may wander through.

In northern Wales, where Dines lives, pristine patches of pasture are common, but they’ve all but disappeared from lowland England, Wales, and Scotland, he says. And when weather conditions are less than ideal, meaning a dry spring or summer, fungi remain underground, with no above-ground blooms in the fall. As a result, it’s difficult to find violet coral unless you’re actively looking for it.

In full bloom, violet coral lasts anywhere from a few days to a week, Dines says. “Some years it appears, usually it doesn’t,” he says. Luckily for enthusiasts, rare fungi often grow together. On the path where Dines and other botanists spotted the violet coral, they also spotted a number of other fungal oddities: crimson waxcaps, oily waxcaps, and smoky spindles. (Waxcaps are another variety of gilled fungi.) These grew alongside the more commonplace, but no less jubilantly named, honey waxcaps, snowy waxcaps, and parrot waxcaps. “It’s quite a colorful community!” Dines says.

Elsewhere in the United Kingdom, an even stranger fungus has popped up this year. Devil’s Fingers, an invasive variant of stinkhorn fungus that smells like putrid meat and resembles the tentacles of a blood-red octopus, were spotted in Kent in October by a member of the Avon Wildlife Trust. “It appears to have been introduced to Europe with military equipment during the First World War,” Dines says, adding that there have been fewer than 100 sightings since the fungus was discovered. “Some people speculate it may be spreading with climate change, but as a relatively new arrival it’s likely to still be finding its own place here, popping up in sites where it’s happy.”

As temperatures continue to cool, there will be many more opportunities for fungus-hunting in the UK. At the top of Dines’ list is the incredibly rare jack-o’-lantern fungus, a bioluminescent mushroom whose gills begin to glow orange at night when its spores are ripe. They grow around the base of tree trunks. “There are just a handful of records so it’s not something I’m likely to stumble across,” Dines says. But even if they are rare, the fungus's colorful body means it’s almost impossible to miss.

Dines has some advice for would-be fungi-spotters. Go for walks in nature, he says, and look out for a fungal bloom in damp, less-trodden slopes and fields. “It could pop up anywhere,” he says. “This is the joy of fungi.”