In the absence of stone tools, bivalves would have to do.
In 1949, archaeologists pulled 171 clamshells and 49 pumice stones and fragments out of a seaside cave in Italy, up the coast from Naples. The assemblage predated the arrival of Homo sapiens in Western Europe, but had clearly been worked by a human hand. That left only one suspect: Neanderthals.
The actual origins of the clams, however, was overlooked, and it remained that way for the past 70 years. Now, a new paper published in the journal PLOS One argues that the Neanderthals didn’t just gather the dead material from the nearby beaches—they actually dove into the Mediterranean for it themselves.
“If you’re a Neanderthal in Italy, I can tell you there’s lots of beaches, and lots of caves near the sea,” says Paola Villa, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado and lead author of the paper. “They probably collected [the clams] by just holding their breath underwater and scooping them off of the seafloor.”
Like many bivalves, the smooth clams found in Grotto dei Moscerini—Callista chione—like to embed themselves in the seafloor, leaving just their siphon above the sand to feed. By looking at the degree of wear on some of the shells, which remained shiny, Villa’s team determined that the clams weren’t scavenged off the dry sand like their more opaque brethren. Rather, they’d been plucked directly from their burrows under the sea.
The clams weren’t all that deep in the water—probably just a dozen or so feet beneath the surface. For the Neanderthals, their shells made a convenient substitute for the workable stone lacking in the region.
“When we have more stone tools, we have less shells, and vice versa,” Villa says of Neanderthal sites. “When they had more stone, they didn’t care about the shells.”
The Neanderthals at Grotto dei Moscerini likely inhabited the area seasonally—during the winters—based on previous archaeological work on shell fishing in the Upper Paleolithic, the time period that saw the extinction of Homo neanderthalensis.
Recent research has determined that some Neanderthals suffered from swimmer’s ear—an outer ear infection typically caused by water lingering in the ear, which can create a fertile ground for bacterial growth. Perhaps our water-loving cousins forgot to shake their heads after swimming.
Unlike the clamshells, the pumice stones found in the cave were not from the area. Rather, Villa argues, the porous rock made its way to Grotto dei Moscerini on sea currents, which floated it north from the Neapolitan volcanoes. The rock would likely have been used for polishing and abrading other tools.
“[The pumice] was definitely collected by Neanderthals,” Villa says. “The cave is more than 200 meters [650 feet] in elevation, and pumices don’t fly.”
Given that there’s no evidence Neanderthals could fly either, it was probably convenient to them that the pumice washed up on their doorstep. And as for the clams, it was probably easier to hit the beach than to scrape the sky.
What they actually smell like seems to be in the nose of the beholder.
In September 1969, it seemed that everyone in the village of Murchison in Victoria, Australia, had a story about the meteorite. They swapped tales of the sight of the space rock barreling across the sky and chatted about the booming sound they heard just before it crashed to the ground, late on the morning of the 28th. In the days following the fall, residents fanned out. They divided the community into grids and searched, methodically and cooperatively, for pieces of the cosmic visitor. They found one fragment after another—often blackish gray and distinctively dented with imprints that look as though a sculptor pressed her thumbs into clay. The space rocks were appealing and unusual—and the locals couldn’t help but notice that they also stank to high heaven.
Many eyewitnesses described the rocks as smelling of tar or methylated spirits, also known as “denatured alcohol,” which has additives to make it taste and smell foul, to prevent people from drinking it. Others agreed that the rocks had an odor, but didn’t find it offensive: Some described them as smelling “like wet hay,” says Kay Ball, president of the Murchison & District Historical Society.
Chunks of the meteorite went to research institutions around the world, and the smell went along, too. When David Deamer, now a research professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was grinding up a marble-sized bit of the Murchison meteorite to study, he found that a “strange, penetrating odor rose from the mortar … simultaneously smoky, dusty, and sour,” he writes in his book First Life, Discovering the Connections Between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began. He thought it “reminiscent of a cigar butt or the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag.”
In the book, Deamer describes the meteorite as his introduction to “the odor of outer space.” But descriptions of meteorites’ aromas can change during the rocks' time on Earth, depending on what both people and the elements put them through. Researchers who revisited bits of the Murchison meteorite for a new paper, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, discovered that, under certain circumstances, the rock still packs a wallop.
Meteorites are messengers, and can carry information about star formation and other aspects of our universe. But to get at that trove of data, researchers often have to bust the meteorites open. The scientists, from the University of Chicago, the Field Museum, and several other institutions, working on the recent paper were looking for presolar grains, minerals that predate our sun. By isolating and analyzing these, the researchers can approximate their age, and then work backward through the life cycle of stars, which shed grains like these as a last hurrah. Once the rock has been crushed, to get at the presolar silicon carbide they were looking for, the researchers poured the meteorite dust into test tubes, and shuttled those between liquid nitrogen and hot water baths, and attacked it “with some really nasty acids,” says Jennika Greer, a graduate student at the Field Museum and the University of Chicago, and a coauthor of the study. Ultimately, the team found that some of these grains date to between five-and-a-half and seven billion years old. (The particular presolar grains examined for this study had already been isolated, but this work is ongoing in the lab.)
This scientific insight came with an olfactory cost. During the freeze-thaw cycle, when they dunked the test tube into liquid nitrogen and then the scalding bath, the team started to notice something funky. They caught a whiff of “rotten peanut butter,” Greer says. The bits of the meteorite had begun to smell like a very gnarly old sandwich.
Greer suspects that the odor evolved over time as the rock lost volatile compounds, and then emerged as the crushing exposed new surfaces. “There are trapped gases and ices in the meteorite that evaporate and slowly diffuse out,” she says. When that happens, the overall scent morphs into something new—or, sometimes, more or less vanishes. A fragment of the Murchison meteorite at the Murchison & District Historical Society doesn’t have such a distinctive bouquet any more. “Our sample has been exposed to air for too long,” says Ball, the organization’s president. “It now only has a vague, earthy smell.”
Greer and her collaborators also recently smelled another carbonaceous chondrite—the same kind of meteorite as the Murchison one—at the Field Museum. It is known as Aguas Zarcas, named for the town in Costa Rica where it landed in 2019. It’s rich in clay and looks like a squat, squarish clump of the stuff, giving it the nickname, “Cosmic Mudball.” Like the Murchison meteorite, this one is rich in organic compounds, including amino acids. Its scent is often said to evoke cooked Brussels sprouts, or maybe compost. When she smelled it straight out of a plastic bag, Greer had a different take: “I think it smells like vanilla,” she says. “You expected something more tarry, but it has a sweet smell.” These days, at the Field Museum, it can be harder to sniff the Aguas Zarcas meteorite at all: Some samples go into cryogenic storage, or might be too small, or get embedded in epoxy to make them easier to put under a scanning electron microscope, Greer says. Laurence Garvie’s team at the Center for Meteorite Studies at Arizona State University also has a bit of the meteorite, and has designed tests to puzzle out the source of the smells and what they reveal about the components of the meteorite, Popular Science reported last year.
Strictly speaking, sniffing meteorites isn’t key to the work that Greer’s team set out to tackle, but it’s fun, silly, and compelling—and “scientists are human, too,” she says. “If you start smelling something a little bit, you might think, ‘Wait, what is that?’ It’s just natural curiosity and wanting to learn more.”
After devastating Australian bushfires, root vegetables could help the brush-tailed rock-wallaby hang on.
Recently, Australian authorities air-dropped thousands of pounds of carrots and sweet potatoes across the scorched landscape of New South Wales, as part of a bushfire recovery effort backed by the state government. Scientists have dropped off snacks, too. The hope is that the veggies wind up in the little paws and bellies of brush-tailed rock-wallabies, whose hiding places and food sources have been badly damaged by fires exacerbated by climate change. Across Australia, millions of acres have burned, more than two dozen humans have died, and according to Christopher Dickman, an ecologist at the University of Sydney, an estimated 1 billion animals have been affected.
Operation Rock Wallaby 🦘- #NPWS staff today dropped thousands of kgs of food (Mostly sweet potato and carrots) for our Brush-tailed Rock-wallaby colonies across NSW 🥕🥕 #bushfirespic.twitter.com/ZBN0MSLZei
The brush-tailed rock-wallaby was in trouble even before the fires—and that precarious position made the animals even more vulnerable when the flames tore through. Fire aside, the species “has declined enormously,” largely because of predation by foxes, says Ben Moore, a senior lecturer in ecology at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University. “It is listed as vulnerable nationally, but endangered in New South Wales and Victoria, the two states most affected by fires.” In Victoria, there are only two colonies remaining in the wild, according to Zoos Victoria, with just a few dozen members in each. In many places, the recent fires scorched the plants that the animals eat and the hiding places where they dodge predators, making life even harder for a species that was already stressed.
While many ecologists may try to limit intervention in the lives of the creatures they study, this feeding is a short-term move. Most of the known populations of brush-tailed rock-wallabies are mapped and monitored by camera traps and other tactics, which means that “food drops can be targeted to where known populations occur,” says Thomas Newsome, an ecologist at the University of Sydney. “The feeding is not an attempt to maintain large numbers of animals across the entire landscape,” Moore says, “but rather a last-ditch attempt to keep these remaining populations hanging on.”
Brush-tailed rock-wallabies don’t typically chow down on carrots and sweet potatoes—usually, they leave their stomping grounds on rocky outcrops and cliffs to feed on grasses, sedges, shrubs, and ferns, Newsome says. The advantages of root vegetables are that they’re easy to obtain, simple to transport, and they keep well, Moore says. “They are a good source of energy, and the animals happily eat them.”
Newsome says that it’s unlikely that any given population will nosh their supplementary food for more than a few months, and then surviving wallabies will go back to eating greens. Of course, it’s hard to predict when plants will regrow, says Marco Festa-Bianchet, an animal ecologist at the Université de Sherbrooke, in Quebec, who studies kangaroos. A lot depends on rain, which is badly needed after months of heat and drought. If enough falls, “there will be stuff regrowing in a couple of weeks,” he says. “In a scenario where everything is gone and it doesn’t rain for awhile, it could be months with nothing.” (Rain has already begun in New South Wales, but as Earther reported, a downpour can cause floods and landslides in landscapes where fires have consumed the vegetation.) The first plants back on the scene tend to be grass and other ground cover, says Newsome, followed by regrowth on surviving trees.
Newsome says there’s little risk that the animals will become overly dependent on their air-dropped food supply. “If the food is only provided for a short period, and then slowly reduced, they should quickly readjust to finding their own food,” he says. “I suspect they will switch back to natural foods as soon as they become available.” In the meantime, the brush-tailed rock-wallabies will be adorably gnawing on carrots and sweet potatoes, trying to hang in there.
Gangs and mafiosos have a long history with food crime.
In the early hours of December 21, 1935, New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia walked into the Bronx Terminal Market with a cadre of cops. As the police played a horn fanfare, he hopped onto the back of a vegetable truck and addressed the assembled farmers and peddlers. Starting December 26, New York City would institute a total ban on the sale, display, or possession of a commodity that posed a “serious and threatening emergency to the city.” This substance, at the time available in any city market, was controlled by “a monopoly of doubtful legality” (in other words, the mafia). To control its price and distribution, these criminals were engaged in violence and intimidation that the tough-on-crime mayor wanted to root out.
The product in question was the small, or baby, artichoke, a food introduced to the city just decades earlier and especially beloved by its Italian Americans and Italian immigrants.
Even then, some observers found LaGuardia’s claims about a vast artichoke underworld bizarre. “It is impossible not to conclude the world today is a bit mad,” a reporter covering the ban for the New York Herald Tribune wrote.
But LaGuardia was right. By 1935, the Sicilian American mafia had controlled the American artichoke market for at least two decades, wresting millions of dollars from growers, distributors, and consumers. And this was just one of their food-based rackets. Many other agromafia operations, which profited from citrus fruits, olive oil, avocados, and more, persisted or emerged over the following decades. In fact, there is a good chance that you—regularly and unwittingly—eat foods that have passed through artichoke cartel-like operations.
Artichokes have been a hot commodity in the Mediterranean since the age of antiquity, especially among Italians. (In the first century, Romans pickled artichokes in honey and feasted on them year round.) But artichokes are finicky plants, thriving only in specific climes. So while early Americans—including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—cultivated and appreciated artichokes on a small scale, a U.S. industry only emergedaround 1900, when Italian immigrant farmers in northern California realized the region’s potential for artichoke cultivation. Today, around 99 percent of American commercial artichokes come from California, mainly from Monterey County.
Realizing that Italian immigrants would pay a pretty penny for artichokes, Californian farmers sent their produce east to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. By 1935, Monterey County’s choke market grossed about $666,000 per year, or $12.5 million in 2020 dollars.
At some point in the early-to-mid 1910s, the fast-growing artichoke trade caught the eye of the Morello-Terranova crime family, one of the first major mafia operations in New York. At first, it seems the family just used its control of rail line entry points into New York to impose an informal import tax of $25 to $50 ($600 to $1,200 in 2020 dollars) per carload of California artichokes. “It was a transportation racket, effectively,” says Mike Dash, who wrote about the Morello-Terranova clan and their interest in artichokes in The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia.
But by the 1920s, newspapers started describing mafia agents in California intimidating growers into limiting crop sizes and selling at deflated prices. One account even claimed the mafia used small aircraft and the threat of aerial gas bombings to intimidate farmers. (Dash says the mafia was established in California by 1914, and the Morello-Terranova clan led the pack in developing cross-country mafia connections, so these stories are plausible. But mafia-history writer Tom Hunt suspects many of these accounts were overblown.) By 1935, the mafia made sure every artichoke came into New York through its Union Pacific Produce Company for a dismally low $6 per crate, and that wholesalers and vendors bought their chokes at a 30 to 40 percent markup. By the time of LaGuardia’s ban, prosecutors later alleged, the New York mafia was making $333,000 a year ($6.25 million today) on artichokes. Similar operations reportedly popped up in other East Coast cities.
Why did artichokes appeal to Ciro Terranova, the family’s “Artichoke King,” who also ran lucrative booze, gambling, and union-fixing operations; lived a flashy life, driving around in an armored sedan; and was reportedly friendly with notorious gangsters such as Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Al Capone? Well, they were actually a classic mafia target.
According to a number of historians, the mafia and its brand of intimidation-based, fleece-the-sheep-but-don’t-kill-it crime first emerged in the late 1800s, when Sicilian criminals formed groups to profit from the island’s growing lemon trade. (Others point to alternative industries such as mining.) Thereafter, they fixed prices or collected taxes on every business they could. Dash notes that the Morello-Terranovas, in New York, had several rackets involving dairy, meat, and produce. In 1914, they made $100,000 ($2.5 million today) just from fixing Manhattan chicken prices. In Chicago, the Capones became milk-and-cheese kingpins.
“Artichokes were an anomaly,” argues mafia-history writer Christian Cipollini, only “in the sense that headlines were made rather frequently.” Most food rackets flew under the radar.
By the time LaGuardia clambered up on a vegetable truck, the mafia’s artichoke racket was well known. But it was also weakening, which is likely why the mayor chose to act. As the mafia pursued more lucrative ventures during the Prohibition era (1920 to 1933), they spent less time worrying about artichokes. And after Ciro allegedly lost his nerve during a hit at a Coney Island restaurant in 1931, a new and younger generation of mafiosi seemingly forced him to relinquish most of his operations, including artichokes. His successor, the obscure Joseph Castaldo, soon faced a federal antitrust indictment, along with the United Pacific Produce Company as a whole. LaGuardia, who was elected in part for his promise to take on the mob, had a penchant for flashy stunts to show the people he was hard at work. The artichoke ban would probably risk little, net headlines, contribute to the already well-advanced antitrust case, and give LaGuardia the quick and easy win he (and the city) needed.
Sure enough, LaGuardia’s ban lasted three days before the stranglehold started to let up, leading him to lift it in turn. In early 1936, Castaldo and company got off on charges of using threats to establish a monopoly on a mistrial, but Castaldo shut down the UPPC and pled guilty to another antitrust charge soon after. Ciro, marginalized and functionally banned from New York by vigilant cops, became a joke. When he died in 1938 at age 49 of two consecutive strokes, the New York Times announced “former power in artichoke trade penniless as paralysis ends his life.” And thanks to all of the press surrounding LaGuardia’s ban, interest in artichokes popped off well beyond the Italian-American community. Everyone prospered but the criminals.
But the mafia never gave up its food rackets. In the 1990s, Dash points out, an informant on the Lucchese crime family claimed they were still running rackets on wholesale produce in Brooklyn and the Bronx. In Italy, organized criminal groups reportedly made about $25 billion in 2017 on agricultural rackets. A fair chunk of that comes from fraud—passing off cheap swill as high-end goods, like the fake extra virgin olive oil export ring tied to the ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate. But a lot of this crime looks like theartichoke racket. In one operation, a criminal clan in the Italian town of Círo used intimidation to force restaurants in Italy and Germany to buy their produce at jacked up rates until January 2018.
Italian food rackets, though, are hardly unique. Notably, Mexican drug cartels have diversified by, for example, extorting avocado farmers and distributors, or seizing their land outright. Some crime researchers argue that agromafia activities have been on the rise due to law enforcement successes against organized crime in major cities and in the high-profile drug trade.
Yet there’s little chance of a LaGuardia-style stunt today. Given that, at least in countries such as the United States, food is now a much smaller share of consumers’ budgets, and the number of suppliers and options is much greater, modern food rackets are rarely as disruptive for customers. These schemes may also feel trivial compared to the crime boogeymen of our era—drug and human trafficking, gang violence, and their ilk. So there is less incentive for politicians to expend major bandwidth or capital highlighting them. On top of all of that, if a mayor banned avocados in New York City today, even for a day, for a good cause, it’s safe to bet the torches would come out.
And that is a real shame. Because for all its absurdity, the artichoke racket exemplified a shockingly common form of crime, then and now. And we could use another grandstanding stunt to wake us up to that.
Ariel Waldman doesn’t have anything against penguins. It's just that they already get a lot of love: When people imagine Antarctic wildlife, she suspects, the tuxedo-clad birds get top billing. What about the other life of the icy, rocky continent, especially the residents that are much harder to see? Where is the love for those guys?
In 2018, Waldman, a San Francisco–based video host, author, and science communicator who also works with NASA, journeyed to Antarctica to take a closer look at some of those residents. With 185 pounds of gear and equipment in tow, she flew to Christchurch, New Zealand, then boarded a military transport aircraft to Antarctica, where she settled into a dorm room at McMurdo Station, the United States Antarctic Program’s main hub. With backing from the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists & Writers program and the National Geographic Society, Waldman spent five weeks around the station and farther afield, including the McMurdo Dry Valleys, where she camped at Lake Bonney and Lake Hoare, next to Canada Glacier. Waldman collected samples from glaciers, sea ice, seafloor mud, and more, and rigged up cameras to her slew of microscopes in order to become, as she puts it, “a wildlife photographer at the microbial scale.” She took videos to show the creatures in action.
Her new interactive digital project, “Life Under the Ice,” introduces viewers to the creatures that thrive in Antarctica, in all their minuscule glory. Waldman spoke with Atlas Obscura about extremophiles, glacier hiking, and how much tardigrades look like gummy bears.
Why Antarctica? And why microbes?
I got really obsessed with Antarctica a few years ago because I had unexpectedly gotten a career in space exploration. [Waldman chairs the council for NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program, and is the author of What’s It Like in Space?: Stories from Astronauts Who’ve Been There.] A lot of people were asking me, “Do you want to go to space? Do you want to be an astronaut?” I get motion sick rather easily, so I'm not sure I really want to go to space—but I would like to experience things that are similar. I started realizing that Antarctica is this really unique place on Earth that mimics a lot of aspects about space exploration, whether it's being a Mars analog, or an interesting place to study neutrinos and find meteorites. I kind of felt like Antarctica was my version of going to space—my sort of extreme thing that I could achieve.
We send a lot of biologists to Antarctica to tell us what species live down there. They do a lot of DNA sequencing, a lot of interesting science work, but they maybe only take a photograph or two of these creatures. And then those photographs go into a scientific journal, and almost no one ever sees them. A lot of that is just the nature of science—they're not there to make pretty pictures, they're there to tell us what organisms are living there. But as a result, no one really knows what these creatures look like, act like, what they are like in motion. So I felt like there was this big gap in knowledge, where not that many people are very familiar with all of the life that lives in Antarctica other than just, you know, seeing penguins.
Why is documenting these creatures, including with video, so important?
A lot of times, what we're exposed to with micro-creatures is, at best, a really beautiful scanning electron microscope image—and they either look scary or weird. Without seeing them move, we can’t really assign them a personality. What's their life like? How do they interact with their environment? When I've shown these videos of tardigrades from Antarctica, I've had people say that they were really surprised because they had seen these scanning electron photographs of tardigrades, and they looked like these terrifying creatures. Once they see them in motion, they're like, “Oh, they're like a gummy bear with claws. They're really cute.”
By seeing microbes in motion, we gain better insights into the lives of these creatures and become more familiar with them, the way that we become familiar with penguins. If you only saw photographs of penguins but you never saw how they waddle, you would not fully understand them.
Did you have a picture in your head about what you thought you'd find on the microbial scale?
For some of them, I had an idea, and others I didn't. The thing that's really fascinating about life in Antarctica is that you've got all of these extremophiles, these creatures that can only live in extreme environments. You've got this life, and some of it is really weird, but a lot of it also lives everywhere else on the planet. Tardigrades and nematodes and rotifers—all of those creatures can be found living in the extremes in ice in Antarctica, but you can also find them in your backyard. Understanding how some of the creatures that live in your backyard can also somehow survive for years frozen in ice is really fascinating. Do they interact differently? Do they move differently? Getting to observe them in that way is really special.
There are also a lot of organisms that I came across, especially marine organisms—like diatoms of very weird shapes, and some microbes that I've filmed—that I still can't identify even with the help of other people.
Sodo Antarctic tardigrades behave differently than other ones?
That's TBD for now. I've made all of my videos, hundreds of videos, available under creative commons. It's possible that some of the things that I've caught on camera might be useful for someone's scientific paper. I think it's just going to take time and connecting with the right people to make the definitive assertions about that.
Antarctica has many different types of environments, and you sampled several, from cryoconite holes to the seafloor to subglacial ponds. How did you pick where you went?
It was to get as much of a comprehensive sampling as I could. I wanted to look at organisms in the seafloor and under the sea ice as much as the ones embedded inside glaciers and near subglacial ponds.
With the oceanic microbes, we sampled both immediately under the ice—at the ice ceiling—and then we did mid-water sampling and seafloor sampling. My hypothesis was that the mid-water was probably not going to have anything in it, but I wanted to look just in case. The mid-water turned up pretty much nothing. A lot of creatures either want to float toward the top of the sea ice or they want to sink to the seafloor—everything in the middle is usually marine snow, which is maybe some fish scales or something, but not living microbes. I sampled as much as I could, but I only found microbes living in the sea ice ceiling and the seafloor.
How did you prepare for the trip?
For months before you deploy, you're doing extensive planning—getting all the materials you need, getting all the clothing you need, going for physicals to make sure that you don't have anything medically scary that would worry them about needing to fly you out.
A lot of the field training, though, happens when you arrive. For the first week that you're in Antarctica, you pretty much can't do anything but go to lots and lots of trainings. You have training to show you how to set up tents, how to create campfires for food, what to do under certain types of whiteout conditions. They show you how to measure cracks in the ice, so you know what sorts of vehicles can go over what sorts of cracks. They show you how to use old GPS units and pagers. There's lots of different trainings—some more mundane than others—about how to survive if you are in bad conditions.
Did that make you feel more comfortable or less comfortable?
Before each training, I was really nervous. All of your extreme cold weather gear is extremely bulky and your shoes are massive, so you just feel like you're a little toddler and your mom has come and snuggled you in this huge poof of clothing, and you can barely move. So a lot of times you walk around as a newbie feeling a bit incompetent just because you can't move very easily.
The first time they took us out on the sea ice and I knew I was going to have to stand out there, freezing, for hours, I was really scared. I was like, "Oh gosh, what if I hate this? What if it's terrible?" When I was actually out there, I was like, "Oh, this isn't bad. This is fine." I was always hyping things up to be worse than they were, which I guess makes it better, because then you walk away thinking, "Okay, I got this.”
How did you collect samples, and what did you do with them?
With stuff under the sea ice, I worked with divers who were collecting samples for me. A lot of it was collaborating with them to talk about what different areas they could sample. With the cryoconite holes, that was hiking up a glacier—which, honestly, a lot of people were surprised that I would be able to do, so maybe I wasn't as prepared as I needed to be.
Once I had the samples, then it was about keeping them between two to four degrees Celsius—cold but not frozen, because it was summertime in Antarctica, and not everything was absolutely frozen over. It was just starting to thaw a little bit, and that's when a lot of the creatures come back to life. It was about having access to the right refrigerators at each location. At Lake Hoare, they have a little lab space that I was able to use. At Lake Bonney, I was able to borrow a refrigerator. All the stuff under the sea ice was stored in the aquarium at the Crary Lab at McMurdo base, which hosts of all these aquatic creatures people are studying. I only put the creatures under the microscope when I needed them, so they weren't sitting out and dying.
The seafloor in Antarctica is really just absolutely alive. It's not like you find an occasional little fish: Any random scoop of the seafloor, there's just tons of life in it. Before, I didn't know why anyone would want to be an Antarctic diver—it's just so cold. But when I got to actually see it myself by going down into the tube, it all made sense to me.
I'd get these test tubes of mud from the divers, and one day I was poking around in the mud with a tweezer and all of a sudden I activated all these worms that were in there that I didn't see. They all started crawling up the test tube, and I freaked out because I'm not big on worms.
Is there anything you would have done differently?
I would take more photographs of the environments themselves. I have documentation of where the samples were taken, but it would have been nice to put together an aerial view of the glacier, then zoom down into the place that was actually sampled, and then see the actual microbes.
In the introduction to your project, you talk about how people often associate Antarctica with penguins. Did you take note of any bigger creatures?
I got to see some Weddell seals, and they are just like lazy, fat cats. They hop out onto the sea ice and they just lay there, baking in the sun, living their best life. I also saw skuas, which are like larger, potentially more aggressive seagulls. They like to fly around where a lot of humans are, because they've learned that they can try to steal food, even though a lot of work is done to make sure that there's no litter from food outside. There's a galley in McMurdo where everyone eats, but you can take a tray of food to your dorm on a covered blue tray. Supposedly, the skuas have gotten smart enough to know that when they see a human with a blue tray walking outside, they can try to get some food by dive bombing them. As part of the Antarctic Treaty, you're not supposed to interact with large wildlife. Skuas, they're smart. They try their best to ruin that.
Disgusting? Sure. But invaluable in today's post-surgical ward.
It takes a village to run a hospital, and Duke University Hospital is no exception. There are doctors, nurses, medical technicians, administrative staff, an “infection preventionist”—even a handful of service dogs.
But the most surprising member of the hospital team lives in an aquarium. In this home, it undulates slowly back and forth through ultra-pure water, waiting for a doctor to write its name—Hirudo verbana—on a prescription. And today, a doctor does.
The call goes out, and this natatorial health-care provider is quickly loaded into a truck in suburban Burlington, North Carolina. From there it travels along a crowded stretch of I-40 and then I-85, passing redbuds bursting with ruddy blossoms in the early spring air. Though this caregiver hasn’t eaten in months, it will need to be sharp when it arrives in less than an hour in Durham, at the biggest hospital in the state.
The truck pulls up to the loading dock, and the aquarium is hustled up the elevators. Time is of the essence. The creature is wheeled into the room, and the doctor plucks it out of its aqueous home as its circular jaws begin to pulse in anticipation. And then, carefully, it is pressed against the warm skin of a finger.
This unique cog in the modern hospital machine is the European medicinal leech. And it’s ravenous.
The modern medical leech is not a myth, or a homeopathy you can only find behind the counter at a store selling healing crystals. Indeed, these toothy worms are serious tools for the 21st-century doctor. At Duke and in prominent hospitals around the country, from Johns Hopkins to the Mayo Clinic, leeches have found particular utility in the post-surgical ward doing what they do best: draining blood.
When an amputated finger is reattached, for instance, transplanted arteries can quickly fill the digit with blood. Without new veins to drain this blood back to the heart, it pools and stagnates, starving the tissue of oxygen and potentially leading to a failed surgery.
Leeches, it turns out, can solve this problem because they’re like attachable sump pumps for getting rid of old blood. Once placed on the skin, the leech uses its three saw-shaped jaws and hundreds of teeth to chew into the soft tissue of a postoperative finger or ear. The process, gruesome as it sounds, is painless and precise in a way that only 100 million years of evolution can hone. As soon as it’s attached, the leech immediately begins draining blood away from the surgical site and into its voluminous stomachs (yes, stomachs).
But what makes the leech particularly useful is its saliva, says Dr. Ronnie Shammas, a surgery resident at Duke Hospital. Leech saliva is thick with hirudin, a natural anticoagulant. This compound causes the wound to bleed for hours after the leech falls off. While blood thinners might accomplish a similar goal, the result would be much less localized. By continuing to apply new leeches, doctors like Shammas can keep the surgery area from congesting with blood until new veins are able to grow and reattach, a process that takes five to six days.
Two years ago, Shammas co-authored a paper in the Journal of Reconstructive Microsurgery that analyzes the outcomes associated with leech therapy over nearly a decade of treatment at Duke Hospital. The study found that leech therapy led to positive patient outcomes—a successfully reattached digit, for instance—more than 60 percent of the time.
“The patients always get a huge kick out of it when we say we’re going to use leeches on something,” says Shammas. “They think it’s the coolest thing in the world.”
Doctors on the hospital floor without leech experience, however, react differently. “Even some of the older [physicians] will be shocked when we say we’re going to use leeches,” Shammas says. “I had never really heard about it too. It seemed like such an outdated treatment.”
Indeed, using leeches for “bloodletting” is about as old as medicine itself. Healers across thousands of years of history and widely dispersed cultures have almost ubiquitously had a pail of parasites from the pond in their doctoring toolkit. It’s not completely clear why. Perhaps we draw some innate satisfaction in imagining draining our old body fluid to rejuvenate ourselves with fresh juice—like a human oil change.
Nineteenth-century Western medicine in particular had an obsession with leeches, leading at least one doctor to prescribe more than 90 leeches at a time to a single patient. But by the turn of the century, the use of leeches in medicine (also known as hirudotherapy) fell out of practice as it became clear that infection with pathogens was the usual cause of disease—not “bad blood.” By the 20th century, most physicians had dismissed leeches as old-fashioned and about as effective as snake oil.
But something changed in the 1950s. With the advent of microsurgical techniques—which required new blood vasculature to be reconnected after surgery—came the need to drain blood more precisely and effectively. Pioneering doctors in Europe found leeches to be dreadfully effective at this, and the practice quickly caught on around the world.
So, after its brief hiatus, the leech triumphantly oozed its way back into the hospital as the healer’s sidekick. While it might not restore balance to your bile and phlegm, it can keep your severed finger back on your hand.
Unfortunately for the leech, that utility has come at a cost. European medicinal leeches—the name for the two very similar species used most often by doctors, who prize them for their deep bites—are rare in the wild, thanks in part to a long history of overcollection. France, for instance, exported millions of leeches per year in the 19th century, according to Dr. Anna Phillips, a leech expert at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. The parasites were collected by “leechers”—young boys who would wade into ponds to catch them, often using their bare legs as bait.
As a result of these and more modern impacts on leech populations such as pollution, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) now protects the medical leech at the same level as the white rhino.
But today, the medical leech no longer hails from the pond. If you live in the United States and are given a leech, it’s likely that it came from a laboratory in Wales.
Carl Peters-Bond is a “leech-growth technician” at that laboratory—the Welsh company BioPharm, which is one of the world’s only suppliers of medicinal leeches. BioPharm has pioneered a trade-secret strategy over its 100-plus years of existence that lets it maintain a colony 30,000 worms strong. Its leeches breed in special chambers that contain a mossy shelf where the mother leech—or father; they are hermaphrodites—crawls up to lay a cocoon of eggs shaped like a microphone cover.
“We collect the cocoons, and they go into a separate tank,” says Peters-Bond. “There they’re suspended in mushroom trays, and in about three weeks they drop into the water below them.” As the leeches grow, they’re fed blood-filled sausages a few times a year.
Peters-Bond’s leeches take on a variety of colors. “They go from being a sort of light olive green on the underside to having bright-orange wavy line markings, or even having dots,” he says. “It all depends on the origin of that leech.”
The medical leech is, aptly, a marvel of anatomy. Each one, in addition to its three-jawed mouth, contains two hearts, two circulatory systems, five pairs of eyes, 32 brains, 10 stomachs, and 18 testicles. The leech body plan is redundancy in the extreme. Leeches can also grow five to 10 times their normal size after a meal, thanks to specialized food-storage organs. Peters-Bond likens the leech to an oil tanker.
This specialized anatomy allows them to eat a tremendous amount of blood and then literally spend the rest of the year bloated and motionless at the bottom of a pond. But Peters-Bond doesn’t like to let his leeches get flabby.
“What normally happens in the wild is after a leech feeds, it sinks to the bottom of the pond, into the mud, and just goes to sleep,” he says. “We have to exercise them when we need them to lose weight.”
How does one exercise a leech? “If they are slightly hungry, says Peters-Bond, “you just put your hand in the other end [of the tank] and they’ll come swimming.”
Biopharm is just the beginning of the esoteric world of leech supply chains. Carolina Biological Supply is Biopharm’s American distributor. Perhaps the only other American medicinal-leech distributor is the mysterious and straightforwardly named Leeches USA, which declined multiple requests for comment due to “[leech] nature and government regulations.”
Carolina Biological is located just down the road from Duke in Burlington, North Carolina. The company receives a shipment of a few thousand leeches from Biopharm every six weeks, then stores them at its facility until a doctor requests their presence at Duke, or any other major hospital in the country.
The leeches arrive at the hospital in a plastic container of water—you can get a 12-pack for $49.40—hungry and ready to feed. Because the type of surgery that requires leeches is so time-sensitive, Carolina Biological maintains a “leech duty” schedule for employees to ship them out at a moment’s notice, says Keith Barker, the company’s manager of product safety and compliance.
The leeches are maintained under strict quality-control procedures approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which technically considers the leech to be a “medical device.” As is does with scalpels or ibuprofen pills, the FDA has high standards for how to maintain cleanliness in leech-housing facilities. “It’s not just some wild leech from a pond,” Barker stresses.
The leeches get to enjoy a blood meal for an hour or two before they’re plucked off the patient by the doctor—but it’s their last meal. Medicinal leeches, mobile dirty needles that they are, cannot be used more than once. After they’re satisfied from their dinner—and have performed an important service for a patient—they’re given a lethal dose of ethanol, then sent to be autoclaved and incinerated as “medical waste.”
Modern medicine has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last few centuries, and today’s hospitals would be largely unrecognizable to the surgeons of yore. Yet despite all the advances, we still, in certain circumstances, continue to implement medical traditions that have been with us since the dawn of time.
“There’s not the bloodletting and that sort of thing [anymore],” says Barker. “But in modern surgery, there is still an opportunity to use an ancient technique. I find that fascinating.”
Barker guesses that his leech admiration is rare. But knowing what good they do in the medical world, he’s not repulsed by the parasitic worms.
“Oh yeah, I’ve got a lot of good feelings about the medicinal leeches,” he says, beaming. “They’re little hero animals.”
As they paddle out each night, they sing in a disappearing language.
A few minutes before sunset on an overcast November evening, a group of fishermen emerge from the green terraced hills of Kibuye, Rwanda, get in their boats, and paddle towards the center of Lake Kivu, an idyllic lake shared by Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. While rowing, they sing. Not in Kinyarwanda, Swahili, Lingala, or French, the region’s common languages, but in Amashi, a little-used language almost forgotten by Rwanda and Congo.
It’s a duet: splashing water mixes with the soft hums of Amashi. But then the fishermen quiet while readying nets to catch the nimble sambaza (a small fish similar in taste to tilapia, but resembling a sardine). Instead of fishing rods, the captain hangs bright, bobbing lanterns to draw the fish. Racing against the setting sun, he blows on each and fans them with his hands to keep them lit. Across Lake Kivu, hundreds of captains are lighting similar gas lanterns. From Kibuye, one of the country’s largest lakeside towns, the winking lights are an expected, and beautiful, sight each night.
As the last lantern is lit and the nets set, the sun dips low and the fishermen relax. They have several hours until it is time to pull the nets—the first pull of several they will make tonight. So they crack jokes and check their phones for WhatsApp messages. Some sing softly in Amashi, the language that practically marks them as fishermen.
“I learned Amashi from my friends and family,” Nelson Habimana, 28, a local fisherman turned tour guide, told me before I set off for the night. “My father knows Amashi, and my grandfather knows Amashi. They were both fishermen.”
It’s not just songs, either. On and off the boat, fishermen and their families communicate in Amashi, or a mix of Amashi and Kinyarwanda, Rwanda’s national language. Theophile Kikumi, the oldest fisherman on the boat at age 49, was born on Nkombo Island in Rwanda’s Rusizi district. “Everyone is a fisherman on the island,” he says, “and everyone on the island speaks Amashi. It’s not taught or used in school—that’s Kinyarwanda. You learn Amashi from your family.”
Amashi is spoken by the fishermen who launch from the Congo side of Lake Kivu, too. “It’s the language of all fishermen on Lake Kivu,” Habimana says. So much so that outsiders who join the profession need to learn the lingo. The boat’s owner, Jacques Benimana, says he doesn’t speak the language. But he sings in Amashi “because all the other fishermen do,” and uses it to talk about the nets and daily tasks. “If you are a fisherman,” he says, “you need to know a little Amashi.”
After a few hours, it’s time to check the nets. The men work quickly, running between their three pirogue-like boats, which are attached by long eucalyptus rods that the men cross like balance beams. When everyone is in position, Benimana calls for them to pull, and small silver fish materialize from the water. As they slowly haul the net and shift the bulk of the catch to the center boat, they communicate, of course, in Amashi.
“It’s really the fishermen’s language,” says Modeste Nsanzabaganwa, deputy general of the Rwandan Association for Language and Culture. But while local linguists agree on the language’s unique connection to the fishing industry, its origins, and status as the fishermen’s language, is a bit mysterious.
The most popular of Amashi’s anecdotal origin stories is that the language came about as a result of wedlock. According to oral histories, Rwandans marooned pregnant-but-unmarried women on Lake Kivu’s islands as punishment for “their condition.” When Congolese fishermen discovered these women, they married them and adopted their Rwandan children. Thus, Kinyarwanda blended with a few Eastern Congolese dialects, creating the Amashi language that fishermen continue to speak and sing.
Nsanzabaganwa laughs when I ask him about the wedlock story. “It’s partly true,” he says. But more likely, according to Nsanzabaganwa, is simply that Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s shared borders led to shared languages. He says that Amashi is a language from the Abashi people of Eastern Congo, and has historically been located around Bukavu, a bustling Congolese city on the southern tip of Lake Kivu that borders Rwanda.
“Kinyarwanda and Amashi are cross-border languages, and several million [people] speak Amashi today,” says Nsanzabaganwa. “People had an uncle on one side [of the border], or an aunt on the other, and the language passed back and forth.”
Dr. Joseph Rusanganwa, a professor in modern languages at the University of Rwanda, agrees with Nsanzabaganwa about Amashi’s origin in the DRC. But even in Bukavu, Amashi is no longer the predominant language. Amashi, says Nsanzabaganwa, is largely reserved for fishermen, and the families of fishermen. “Fishing is a historically Congolese profession, and that helped introduce the language to Rwanda.”
But, he adds, the language now spoken by fishermen is rarely “pure Amashi.” It changes from north to south depending on how close different lakeside towns are to Congo or Rusizi. “It’s a Kinyarwanda-Amashi hybrid,” he says.
In Rwanda, the country is uniting linguistically around Kinyarwanda, which more than 93 percent of the population speaks. Concerned about Amashi’s potential disappearance, Nsanzabaganwa and his colleagues have recorded Amasare, or work songs of the fishermen. Other Rwandan professions have similar work songs, such as beekeepers’ Amavuvu. But only Amasare are sung in a distinct language.
“I’ve heard the songs before,” says Nsanzabaganwa. “They make the lake sound very beautiful.”
For the fishermen, it just feels natural. “It’s our language,” says Kikumi. “It’s the one that was made for us.” They use it most when paddling out, singing in unison as they set up. A different member of the crew leads each night, favoring their treasured melodies, some of which incorporate intricate harmonies and whistles. Although the lyrics change, “be mighty” features frequently, as does “may God watch over us.” Some songs include exultations of God, and prayers for family and fish. When a fishermen slowly starts to sing, everyone quickly joins in. The songs end fast and upbeat, as all crew members repeat the same, (apparently) easy to learn, new lyrics and tune.
“We sing in Amashi to give us strength,” says Kikumi. “So we can be strong on the job.”
Underneath the surface, Lake Kivu is in slow turmoil. Approximately 60 billion cubic meters of methane and 300 billion cubic meters of carbon dioxide fill the lake. The product of nearby volcanoes and decomposing organic material, the gases could be deadly. In 1986, a “limnic eruption” in Cameroon’s similarly composed Lake Nyos released carbon dioxide into the air, which suffocated 1,700 people and countless animals.
Rwanda is trying to turn the situation into an economic opportunity. The country is working on gas-extraction plans that could transform the methane into 960 megawatts of electricity-generating capacity, which, according to the MIT Technology Review, is more than six times what the country has now.
The fishermen say the gas doesn’t affect them yet, but, according to Habimana, “It’s why we can’t get big fish in the lake.” While nearby Lake Tanganyika has more than 400 kinds of fish, and others are similarly plentiful, Lake Kivu has just 28. As fishermen on our boat sort the haul into buckets, there is very little variety in the catch, and I think about how fishing Lake Kivu might be more rewarding if there were bigger fish to fry. Kikumi tells me, and the other men on the boat agree, that they work 24 days a month, from sundown to sunup, to make around 600 Rwandan Francs, or 64 cents, per day.
Later, after an orange sky gives way to deep blue, a thunderstorm rolls in. The men on the boat scramble to secure the nets, and we spend the next few hours huddled under tarps, pressing our legs against the wet wood as the boat shakes in the waves. Benimana, the boat’s owner, stretches out next to me, securing his head underneath the makeshift shelter, and promptly falls asleep. On my other side, the men play games on their phone or softly hum.
As the rain subsides, Benimana wakes up and plays a Kinyarwanda song from his phone about a husband whose wife is dying. In the song, the husband tells his beloved to give away all her possessions and humbly prepare for the afterlife.
Surprisingly, it has a very upbeat melody.
I ask why we aren’t listening to songs in Amashi, and the fishermen sitting next to me laugh. “Eh,” says Benimana. “Because we also like Kinyarwanda.”
Residents of Celles in France were evicted so their village could be flooded. Then, it wasn't.
In the 1950s, Celles was a tiny, nondescript village in the Salagou Valley in southern France, an area known for its dark red soil and dry climate. Most of its 63 inhabitants were farmers and winegrowers whose families had lived in the area for generations.
Then, local government decided the inhabitants of Celles would be evicted so the whole area could be drowned.
At the time, France was facing a viticulture crisis: the wine market was saturated, and prices were low. Local authorities hoped that creating a reservoir in the area would allow farmers to diversify their crops and move away from wine production. They chose the Salagou Valley.
Between 1959 and 1968, the inhabitants of Celles were pushed to sell their homes to make way for the reservoir. Those who didn’t were expropriated, their houses left empty.
In 1968, the dam on the Salagou River was finally finished. The water crept up slowly, covering the red clay landscape. But just short of the village, it stopped. In the original plans the water was supposed to rise to the 150-meter altitude mark. But in the end it stopped permanently at 139 meters, 4 meters lower than the village.
Celles sat empty for nothing, and quickly fell apart. Squatters moved in for a time; looters cleared everything out, from the faucets to the front doors.
But now, thanks to the efforts of a small but very determined group of people, three new families are signing long-term leases to rebuild houses and move back into Celles, over 50 years after the original inhabitants were evicted.
Joëlle Goudal is the current mayor of Celles, where 35 people live in the Celles municipality and three people live in the village proper. Goudal has been fighting almost her entire life to keep her village alive. “We wanted a lively village. A village that’s lively is a place where people work; where kids go to school, where people wake up in the morning to go to their jobs.”
After the lake was formed, the region transformed. It had been an arid valley inhabited by a few farmers and winemakers, known for its red soil that stained your shoes and clothes. Once the dam was in place, it quickly became a popular tourist attraction known for its scenery, hiking and biking trails, and of course the watersports the lake made possible.
Goudal was five years old when her family was forced to move. Her father took it hard. On weekends, he would come back from his job as a farm worker and take her to the ruins his family owned on the other side of the lake, facing the old village of Celles. “There was a little bench. He would sit and he would cry, and I would play with the goats,” she recalls.
After a few months, her fed-up mother put her foot down. “Rebuild the ruins. Do something,” she told him. “Break some stones instead of crying. It’ll have the same effect, but at least it’ll be useful.” So he started rebuilding the ruins of the farmhouse. The Mas de Riri is now a successful seasonal restaurant and campground, one of only two businesses in the municipality.
Goudal’s family and their friends never gave up on Celles, especially her father. “When the last expropriated people were forced to leave, a small group of people said ‘no,’” she says. They formed a municipal council and continued participating in regional politics, even though there were no inhabitants left.
Her father became mayor in 1972. He wrestled with local government for years to keep Celles from being absorbed into another municipality, and finally won in 1990.
Goudal, then a young punk who believed rock ‘n’ roll would change the world, took over from him when she was 29. “I would show up at departmental council meetings with black makeup and pigtails, a mini skirt and ripped tights,” she remembers. “No one gave me a dime of funding, not with that look.” But she and her friends’ punk outlook on life also allowed them to imagine a different kind of village in Celles. “It allowed me to be so offbeat from other politicians, that we did a different kind of politics here. We were much more open and responsive to what people were saying.”
Goudal isn’t exactly a punk these days: at 55, she has ditched the pigtails and wears colorful outfits—today it’s a turquoise sweater and flowered shirt. But the village she and her municipal council are trying to build is definitely offbeat, and very different from the village her parents were forced to leave. “The village is going to be reborn, but it won’t look how it did 50 years ago. It’s turned towards the future.”
Goudal’s father died in 2009. In 2010, the department “sold” the whole village and its buildings to the municipality for one euro, a symbolic gesture. Where her father’s mission was to make sure Celles didn’t become part of a different municipality—didn’t cease to exist, basically—Goudal is more focused on what the future of the village will look like.
As the Salagou Lake continues to grow as a tourist destination, Goudal wants to set a different tone and make sure that Celles becomes a village where people live and work, not a place that hosts tourists six months a year. “People were expropriated for this land,” she says. “It’s out of the question to let people today make money off of the people who were forced to leave.” The municipal council has agreed on four founding principles for the new Celles: No land speculation, each new household needs to contribute to the local economy by moving their job or company to Celles, social/income diversity, and environmentally friendly construction, because part of Celles is a classified European Natura 2000 site, protected for the diverse species of birds that live there.
The municipal council has a plan in place to make this happen. For starters, they’re working with a type of French lease called a bail réel solidaire, a long-term contract designed to prevent land speculation, that separates ownership of the land and the building. The three families moving in will be in charge of rebuilding the ruins of the house they’re signing for, in exchange for this lease.
The municipal council also selected the new inhabitants of Celles out of about 200 applications. According to Celles’ rules, each family will need to bring at least one job/company to their new home. “We didn’t have a lot of houses, so the only solution that we found was not to select the people who would live here, but to choose the companies that would move here.” Goudal says. “We chose people based on their project or the enterprise they will bring.”
They’re also working with different types of leases to make sure that Celles has income diversity, including some social housing. All tourist business will be conducted in a single co-op building, and will be run collectively.
Not everyone is thrilled about the project, however. Some of the people whose families left don’t like the current plans. “Some people think it’s good, but it would be especially good if it wasn’t in their [former] house,” according to Goudal. “And some people have been angry for 50 years. And this hasn’t calmed their anger.”
The closest houses are just a few dozen feet from the water (the water level is now fixed permanently at the 139-meter mark). The ruins are fenced off, but the families who signed leases will be beginning construction in the next few months. The only buildings that are currently standing are the church and the town hall. Only three people live in the village of Celles itself, and around 35 people live in the “commune,” or municipality, which covers 750 hectares. Goudal hopes the final number in the village will be closer to 35, as more families move in. Whether or not the project will work still remains to be seen; the reconstruction of the old village has not yet begun. But Goudal and the people of Celles are used to fighting for what they want; it’s what they’ve been doing for the last 50 years.
Goudal’s father never did get to see the culmination of a lifetime of work. “But I think he’d dig the project,” she says. “I’m sure that he’s super proud.”
Fueling up doesn't need to mean Doritos and hot dogs.
A gas station might not be the first place you’d expect to find find some of the best spit-kissed al pastor tacos you’ve ever had, silken ceviche bathing in a pool of lime juice, or slow-roasted duck glazed with citrus sauce. But the gas station has gone gourmet, and nowhere is this more prevalent than in Texas.
Texas is a state defined by its roadways. The federal government funded its vast highway system in the 1920s, but in a place that big, with so many major cities, lengthy roads were built into its geography long before. It makes sense, then, that the state is home to nearly 14,000 gas stations, more than anywhere else in the country. You’ll find one—and often, two or three—at practically every highway exit. And where there is a gas station in Texas, there is often a gas station restaurant.
One of the most famous is Chef Point, a restaurant and bar in Watauga, a suburb of Fort Worth. Its owner, Paula Merrell Nwaeze, initially tried to open a restaurant in 2003 with her husband, but the bank denied them a loan because they didn’t have prior experience. All the couple could afford was an empty space in a Conoco gas station convenience store.
The restaurant they eventually opened up inside the convenience store—serving high-end food such as steaks and pork chops—became so popular that the couple removed the gas pumps and closed the convenience store. Those two elements “were very helpful when we weren’t making money on the restaurant side, and then it flipped at some point,” Nwaeze says. “The parking lot was packed with cars eating at the restaurant, so it wasn’t convenient for people to get gas because the parking lot was so full.”
There are plenty of similar stories. In 2017, Nikesh Shrestha opened Momo Stop, a small eatery selling Nepalese momos in a Texaco gas station off the highway in Dallas, because it was cost effective and there was guaranteed foot traffic. Now it’s known as one of the best spots for Nepalese food in the city. In 2013, Zahir Walji set up High Country Market Bistro & GastroPub adjacent to a Round Rock Exxon, and soon got rid of the attached convenience store when the restaurant became a destination in and of itself.
Consider as well the mania surrounding Buc-ee’s—a multi-location Texas rest stop so popular that there are separate odes to the service station’s bathrooms, food offerings, and packaged snacks across the Internet.
In 2018, the Dallas Observer ran a story titled “Seven Essential Dallas-Area Restaurants in Gas Stations” in which restaurant critic Brian Reinhart declared that “some of the most interesting bites of food in Dallas can be found in the most unlikely location: behind the fuel pumps.”
But setting up a restaurant inside a gas station is not unique to Texas. In any state where driving is a must, especially Florida, Pennsylvania, and much of the Midwest, these spots exist. The main difference is that in Texas, the gas station restaurant is its own separate subculture.
Because Texas culture is so heavily built on driving and commuting, convenience stores and small rest stops were early fixtures of gas stations, usually serving simple fare such as hot dogs and hamburgers. As the state experienced steady waves of immigration and store owners got more innovative, the quality of the food improved and diversified. There are now gas stations serving bi bim bap, tacos, and biryani. These are restaurants that diners seek out, rather than just happening to stop by.
Frank Beard, an analyst of convenience store trends, points out that three of the most populous cities in the country are in Texas, and they are all separated by hundreds of miles. More often than not, it is cheaper to drive between them than to fly. That means plenty of people need to stop along the highway for a bite to eat, often in locales that typical restaurants don’t reach.
“I think there is something to be said about Texas being wide open,” he says. There’s even enough sprawl to create clusters of gas station restaurants, especially where real estate prices aren’t outrageous. The town of West, Texas is home to a number of Czech gas station bakeries serving kolaches, the fruit-filled pastries that are a hallmark of the Texas road trip. With Texas’s area and traffic flow, these groups of gas station restaurants can survive and even thrive. “There are not a lot of states that could support that,” Beard says.
Gas station restaurants “become such integral parts” of the towns where they’re located, says Al Hebert, who runs the recommendation site Gas Station Gourmet. “At the pumps they’ll run highlights from state championships," he says. "They’ll host fundraisers for local high schools. These are real community places.”
Still, even in Texas, a lot of these places struggle with stereotypes labeling gas station food as greasy and dirty. Nwaeze says that even though her restaurant is well known for its duck and strip steaks, she has seen diners hesitate to come in after seeing its gas station setting.
Reinhart wrote a story in 2018 praising Ceviche 365, a popular ceviche restaurant located in a Dallas Shell station. “The comments were like, ‘I can’t eat ceviche in a gas station,’” he says. “People assumed it couldn’t be hygienic or clean or good.”
Walji says operating a restaurant next to a gas station “puts a ceiling on our prices.”
“People don’t want to pay more than 10 or 12 bucks,” he says. “If I didn’t have that image of a gas station, I could get 18 bucks a meal.”
Yet even as the number of gas stations across the country declines (partially due to the rise in electric vehicles), the biggest growth in the fuel industry over the past 10 years, Beard says, has happened in food service.
That’s particularly true in Texas, where commuters and road trippers will always need a place to stop for a bite, even if they don’t need a fuel-up. Texans will keep buying Buc-ee’s fudge and seeking out kolaches along the interstate. They will continue to plan their morning commutes around their favorite gas station breakfast tacos. The days of the gas station may be numbered. But in Texas, the food culture around them is here to stay.
“I could have retired long ago, but I don’t want this profession to die with me."
On a winter afternoon in the French Alps, the tiny glove shop of Jean Strazzeri is thick with activity. His wife Odile makes packages, his daughter Julie manages sales at the boutique counter, and an intern sits at the sewing machine. The days have grown short in Grenoble, a city that calls itself the “Capital of the Alps,” but some light filters in through the windows.
Strazzeri, who is 69, stands by a table and surveys his small kingdom. “I could have retired long ago, but I don’t want this profession to die with me,” he says. “I will stop working the minute someone tells me they can carry the mantle after me.”
Strazzeri has been making gloves for more than half a century. When he was eight, his parents moved from Sicily to France, taking him and his nine siblings with them. In 1964, at the age of 14, he began an apprenticeship at a glove-making company called Ganterie Lesdiguières. He spent three years learning the tricks of the trade. Strazzeri went to the abattoir to buy kidskin, or the hide of young goats; took it to be treated and turned into leather; sorted it for thickness; sent it for tinting with various colors; cut the leather into the shape of hands; and finally sewed it into gloves. He received a vocational training diploma at the age of 17. By then, Grenoble’s glory days of glove-making were already far behind.
Today, France’s federation of traditional glovemakers has only seven members, and Strazzeri is the only one who works with kidskin—a material that Grenoble was once famous for. “The fabric is soft, robust, flexible, and sturdy,” he says. “I just love working with my hands, with kidskin.”
The city of Grenoble began to establish itself as a center for glove-making during the Middle Ages. Its location—in the middle of the mountains of southeastern France, where many farmers raised goats—gave the city easy access to kidskin. The story goes that in the mid-1800s, a master glover named Xavier Jouvin catapulted the artisanal craft into a fully-fledged industry. Grenoble has dedicated a statue, a square, and a bridge to him.
Born in 1801, Jouvin was a glovemaker who learned the trade from his uncle, Jean-Baptiste. At the time, people cut gloves with scissors. The process was arduous and the sizes were imprecise. In 1834, Jouvin prepared a table classifying 320 different kinds of hands, based on measurements of wrists, fingers, and so on. Soon afterwards, Jouvin invented the main de fer, or iron hand, a mold that could cut three or four sheets of leather into glove shapes with a single motion.
The invention revolutionized the industry. “Suddenly, people could cut multiple gloves in a matter of seconds,” says Maurice Rey-Jouvin, the great-great-grandson of Xavier. Seven years ago, Rey-Jouvin, who is 71, opened a glove museum that is dedicated to this history. It sits in the cellar of a stone building that once heaved with the sounds of cutting and sewing, not far from the Isère River. At a time when there were 100 other glovemakers in the region, who collectively produced millions of pairs each year, the Jouvin family alone made hundreds of thousands, thanks to the iron hand.
When the instrument entered the public domain in 1849, production in the region rose sharply. At its peak between the 1850s and 1910s, the glove-making industry was the leading employer in the region, with about 150 glove houses employing over 30,000 people. Eighty percent of the gloves were exported to the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Russia.
One cannot speak of Jouvin’s success without mentioning his wife, Julie. After her husband’s early death in 1844, she managed the growing empire. According to Rey-Jouvin, when Napoleon III was passing through Grenoble in 1860, Jouvin’s daughter is said to have gifted his wife Eugenie a basket of 25 gloves. He says the family’s gloves were also ordered for the wedding of Princess (and later Queen) Elizabeth II, and again for the funeral of her father King George VI, although it’s unclear who wore them. But the glove-making business waned in the early 20th century. “Priorities changed. Fashion changed. Gloves were no longer à la mode,” Rey-Jouvin says. “People wanted something sturdy that would keep their hands warm, not a decorative item of clothing.” The Jouvin house closed in 1964.
Since he opened the museum, Rey-Jouvin has been bringing back the gloves his ancestors sold, from different continents. “I keep trawling eBay,” he says. He recently paid $80 for a pair in the U.S. “Nobody ever wore them. Look,” he says, taking a pair of black gloves from a box. A blue leather flower accompanies them.
Back at the Strazzeri workshop, Strazzeri lays a big sheet of blue kidskin on the table. He stretches and straightens out the fabric numerous times with his hands, before cutting it into small pieces. These will eventually become light, soft gloves lined with silk or cashmere. His glove-making house is the only one that remains in Grenoble. Many gloves are now produced in Asia.
Strazzeri didn’t set out to preserve a disappearing tradition. “My sister said it was a noble profession and that I would get to work with my hands, something she thought I would enjoy,” Strazzeri says. A decade and a half after joining his glove-making company, he became its director. In the 1990s, he bought Barnier house, and today the business is called Ganterie Lesdiguières-Barnier.
In 2000, Strazzeri earned the title of Un Des Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, which translates to “One of the Best Craftspeople in France,” a prestigious award for craftspeople issued by the French Ministry of Labor. In 2010, he was given the Légion d’Honneur, the highest French order of merit for military and civil achievements.
Strazzeri now views glove-making as more than a profession: It is a disappearing art form that needs to be saved at any cost. From time to time, he opens his workshop to the public, and for years, Strazzeri has been trying to get the government to open schools for glove-making. “People now want to buy local products,” he says. “There is demand but no manpower.” Two years ago, he managed to start a fashion class in the commune of Romans-sur-Isere, that admits six students a year. He hopes his passion rubs off onto some of his students.
Strazzeri is in talks with the government to open a glove museum, and a school where he can teach every step of glove manufacturing. “From A to Z,” he says. “It’s not enough to only know the rich history of our region in the field, but it’s crucial to transmit the savoir-faire. I would love to see young people take over. While I am realistic and know that the future can never be as glorious as the past, I have hope that this craft will not vanish.”
Nuclear fallout is often characterized by its human toll: the immediate casualties, the complete exodus from the region, the radioactivity that continues to permeate the lives of those affected, and the surrounding area, for years afterward. But less attention is paid to the affected animals, which generally exist beyond the scope of human disaster protocols.
Now, an extensive photographic survey has revealed the resurgence of animal populations in Fukushima, Japan, where nearly a decade ago a nuclear disaster forced living creatures—human and bestial alike—to flee en masse.
Statistically speaking, the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was the worst of its kind since the 1986 reactor failure at Chernobyl. Over 15,000 people were killed as a result of the Fukushima disaster—a tripartite chain reaction in which a hard-hitting earthquake roiled Japan's shores, which begat a tsunami, which triggered a nuclear meltdown. Over a million homes suffered serious damage, according to Japan’s agency for reconstruction.
But as with the recent bushfires in Australia, it can be difficult to measure the toll on animal life, which often suffers significantly more harm than humans do.
“The species that showed the [greatest resurgence] are those most often in contact with people,” says James Beasley, a wildlife biologist at the University of Georgia’ Savannah River Ecology Laboratory and the lead author of the new paper, published in the Journal of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. “That means macaque monkeys, raccoons, and wild boar.”
Beasley’s team used motion-sensor cameras to measure the animal presence in human-inhabited regions, partially inhabited regions, and areas where human habitation is still prohibited due to high levels of radioactivity—the Fukushima Exclusion Zone. The area stretches from Japan's low-lying eastern coastline to the high-altitude inland of the prefecture (which, despite the radioactivity, has not lost its charm).
“The Fukushima landscape is really beautiful,” Beasley says. “There’s a coastal area that tends to be more populated, but it quickly moves up into mountains. The mountainous area is rural. It reminds me a lot of the Appalachian mountains in the United States, where you have interspersed populations, but also lots of forest.”
And in that forest, tens of thousands of photographs taken for the study identified 20 unique species, some of which are endemic to the region—the raccoon dog, the Japanese serow, and the Japanese badger among them—and many of which have an increased presence in areas that now have fewer humans.
The wild boar, which can vex farmers with its voracious foraging and propensity for property damage, has earned particular ire; Japanese cities have been been trying to cull the populations since 2009. In Fukushima’s Exclusion Zone, the boar overshadowed all other species, captured in nearly 50,000 photos.
“This is very consistent with what we’ve seen in Chernobyl,” says Beasley, who conducted a similar study in Ukraine in 2016. “The extent at which species like wild boar have responded. They’re a species that can respond more rapidly than others.”
The rice paddies and fields once cultivated by local farmers make prime grazing and living space for a boar population run amok. Other species have found uses for the former human habitat as well. Beasley says he’s seen macaques perched on derelict structures, similar to the way in which animals like bison and bears began to use the spaces hastily left behind in Ukraine.
In other words, in the absence of humankind, animals living in the nuclear evacuation zone have had room to grow, and have begun reclaiming areas previously used by people.
Yet to be determined is the actual effects of the radioactive fallout on the animals' physiology. The recent study was literally the first look at which animals had returned to the area—and another piece of evidence that if given a choice between a human hub and an empty radioactive zone, many animals would opt for, and thrive in, the latter.
“Chernobyl and Fukushima are terrible environmental and human tragedies, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that,” Beasley says. “But they’re also important living laboratories for understanding the effects of radiation on plants and animals.”
Mitsuaki Tanabe's untimely death spurred his son to finish his last work.
Takamitsu Tanabe wants to take a walk. Meeting in the suburbs of Yokohama, a city south of Tokyo, we make our way to the Matsunokawa Greenway, a trail that runs through the town. The path is unkempt, with native trees and grasses sprawling in tangled tufts across the walkway. It’s deliberate, explains Takamitsu, who goes by Taka. He points out that the snarl supports birds and insects.
The path was established more than 30 years ago by Taka’s parents. The Tanabe family has lived in this area for 400 years, and over the generations, housing developments gradually encroached on the Matsuno River. The river became increasingly polluted, so the Tanabes worked with the city of Yokohama to establish the Greenway around it.
Taka and I come to an enormous steel bird’s head, its beak pointed towards the sky. It was made by Taka’s late father, the sculptor Mitsuaki Tanabe. I wade through the tall grass to get a better look, and seeds stick to my boots. A brown-and-white bird swoops down, and the grass quivers as it pecks at something in the brush. “Birds are a kind of indicator because they’re at the top of the ecosystem,” says Taka. “If the ground condition is good, with a lot of plants and insects, there are a lot of birds.” Down the path, we come to another sculpture by Mitsuaki, this one a steel lizard at the side of the path. The words “WILD CRISIS” are written on its legs.
The crisis facing the world’s biodiversity was the subject of most of Mitsuaki’s work. His sculptures depicting wild seeds can be found all over the world, from Thailand to Italy. But Mitsuaki was especially passionate about wild rice. One of his wild rice sculptures is installed at the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway.
Attempting to explain his father’s fascination with wild rice, Taka notes that “70 to 80 percent of the world’s people eat rice as a main staple. It’s a precious food.” Because wild rice isn’t cultivated, it’s largely ignored. Yet wild rice holds the blueprint for modern cultivated rice strains.
“Ancestor species of our most important crops are of significant value as a genetic resource to improve the characteristics of our crops,” says Dr. Greg Leach, the former chief botanist of Australia’s Northern Territory. “They may well hold attributes of disease resistance, drought tolerance, and salinity tolerance, which can adapt our crops to changing conditions.” And of course, rice is a mainstay in Japan.
Mitsuaki graduated with a degree in sculpture from Tama Art University in 1961, then trained for a time under the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Over the following decades, Mitsuaki developed his craft: traveling, working on public projects, and carving out his own space in the art world. He worked in Australia in the 1990s, and in the early 2000s, he dreamed up a new project.
“Tanabe-san had heard about wild rice growing in northern Australia and was keen to see this for himself,” says Leach. He arranged for Mitsuaki to travel to the UNESCO World Heritage-listed floodplains outside of the city of Darwin. “He was totally blown away at the extent of wild rice, as elsewhere in the world wild rice has been almost wiped out due to development of floodplain areas,” Leach says.
There, Mitsuaki decided to create one of his wild rice sculptures, which he called “Momi,” in order to raise awareness of the Northern Territory’s wild rice varieties (which include Oryza officinalis, Oryza rufipogon, Oryza meridionalis, and Oryza australiensis) and to support their conservation. “His main medium was stainless steel, and we were initially a little perturbed about having a large stainless steel sculpture in the wetlands," says Leach. “However, when Tanabe saw the beautiful granite boulders around Mount Bundey, he sought approval to use these as his medium for creating his sculptures.”
Mitsuaki received support from the Australian Embassy and the government of the Northern Territory, as well as permission from the aboriginal landowners. “[Mitsuaki was] taking a fantastic passion from Japan and applying it to something that most Australians aren't even aware of, wild rice,” says Michael Hoy, Public Affairs counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Japan.
Mitsuaki went back and forth between Japan and Australia for 10 years, carving insects and lizards into the granite boulders, and a 269-foot-long wild rice strand into the floodplain itself. He visited in the dry season in order to avoid the area’s poisonous creatures and spent a month per year carving, sometimes with the help of other sculptors. “Our floodplains are far from pristine, and face a number of threats such as weeds, feral herbivores, and sea level rise,” says Leach. “The efforts of a Japanese sculptor have served to highlight the valuable resource we have in wild rice, as it is a key species in the ecology of the floodplains.”
“It sometimes takes an outside perspective to awaken us to what we have,” he adds.
But in 2014, Mitsuaki had a heart attack and collapsed. Within a year, he passed away. His work in northern Australia was left unfinished.
He had so loved working on the project, reminisce Taka and his mother Misayo. “He was very steadfast and put a lot of effort into it,” says Misayo. “He was a taciturn person, but if he started talking about sculpture, he was incredible. He would talk all night.” Bringing attention to issues of biodiversity was his life’s work. “He thought a lot about how he could be of use as a human being,” explains Misayo. Both Taka and Misayo thought he would have wanted his epic Australian endeavor to be completed.
At the time of his death, says Leach, “he already had a significant body of work spreading over quite an area. A few items were unfinished, but the site already achieved his vision as a statement on the significance of wild rice and the international conservation value of our wetlands.” Yet the huge strand of wild rice, which Mitsuaki called "Momi-2010," was not quite completed, and neither was the uncarved outline of a beetle nearby.
Taka decided to finish his father’s work. While not a sculptor himself (he's the curator of the Hiyoshi no Mori museum, which is dedicated to both his father's art and preserving the ancestral Tanabe home), he enlisted help from artists who had known Mitsuaki, as well as from the Australia-Japan Foundation.
“With Mitsuaki’s sculptures, we wanted to convey the importance of wild rice to future generations,” says Kazuhisa Aketa, who helped to complete the unfinished “Momi-2010” sculpture. “The wild rice of the Northern Territory, and rice, a Japanese staple food, may save the future of the earth,” he says. “And as a sculptor, I thought the work shouldn’t go unfinished. This special project took more than 10 years, and I thought it was very important to complete it.”
The “Australian In-Situ Wild Rice Conservation Project” was finally finished in 2016. In a region with plenty of wilderness, it has the potential to become a powerful symbol of conservation. “The project is significant to northern Australia for a number of reasons,” says Leach. “We now have the artwork of an internationally recognized sculptor in a dramatic outdoor setting on the approach to a World-Heritage listed area in Kakadu National Park.”
It also helps foster the relationship between Japan and Australia. Hoy says that many older Australians associate Darwin with its bombing by Japan in World War II. “I think for Australians traveling through the region, finding that a Japanese sculptor has come to the Northern Territory has helped,” he says. Now, carved into the floodplain forever, there’s a physical representation of the connection between the two countries, and “how far we've come,” notes Hoy.
Mitsuaki used art to raise awareness of the natural world, and both his wife and son hope that his message will continue to resonate, even after his death. “Do you know the term shin-zen-bi?” asks Misayo. (It means “truth, goodness, and beauty” in Japanese.) “We need beauty during tough times. Looking at beauty gives us back our energy.”
The Tanabes hope that some of that energy can go towards the fight for biodiversity, both for the sake of humanity and the natural world. Mitsuaki saw seeds as the key to that fight. After all, says Taka, “seeds have infinity power.”
Understanding the ecological impact of hundreds of dead feral hogs.
It’s the smell that will never leave Brandon Barton. He has spent years dealing with tons of decomposing hog carcasses, and considers himself a “grizzled old pro,” impressively desensitized to the noxious stench. But even miles away from the field where the hogs were placed—in the name of science—sometimes the smell comes back. “Every once in a while, something will hit me,” Barton says. “If I look at the pictures of those carcasses, my brain can smell it.”
Barton, an ecologist at Mississippi State University, studies and simulates mass mortality events—MMEs, for short—to understand how a heap of dead creatures can alter the ecology of where they wind up. “There’s a long history of decompositional ecology,” he says, noting that researchers have studied the pile-ups of dead salmon that accumulate after spawning or the mounds of millions of cicadas that hatch and promptly die after waiting underground for years. But MMEs are a little different, as they represent the stuff that’s not supposed to happen, rather than as part of the natural life-and-death cycle of a population. “I study anomalies,” Barton says, such as a 2016 lightning strike that killed 323 reindeer in Norway or a warm summer in Kazakhstan that allowed a single bacteria to kill approximately 200,000 saiga antelopes. In other words, if Barton were to dump dead salmon in a river where they die en masse every year, that wouldn’t shock the ecosystem enough to count as an MME. “But if I dump a bunch of dead salmon in a forest in Mississippi,” he says, “it does.”
MMEs happen throughout the world, but they are nearly impossible to predict by their very nature. But new research suggests these events are on the rise and likely to become more frequent as climate changes and environments are stressed in new ways, according to The Guardian. In Australia, for example, recent record-breaking bushfires have led to one of the largest MMEs ever recorded, with over a billion animals estimated to have died, according to ABC News. The best way to understand the impact of these mass die-offs, Barton says, is to “gather a big pile of dead animals and watch what happens.”
While interesting, dumping several tons of salmon into a Southeastern forest isn’t exactly a cost-effective way to simulate an MME. Barton instead uses one of the one of the region’s most inexhaustible and irritating resources: feral hogs. “The Southeast is just about at all-out war with these pigs,” he says. Local trappers were happy to provide the hogs that he needed.
Barton worked on his first simulated MME in Mississippi in 2016, alongside wildlife biologist Marcus Lashley, now at the University of Florida. They dumped approximately 6,000 pounds of pig carcasses in a patch of forest generously provided by Mississippi State University. “We were originally thinking about doing it at this wildlife management area, but as soon as we started talking about bringing thousands of pounds of dead pigs, they backed off,” he says. “They said, ‘We can’t have people hiking by piles of dead pigs.’” The site was warm and humid, with mixed deciduous and evergreen forest—not that the researchers were picky. “When your experiment is putting out tons and tons of rotting pig flesh, beggars can’t be choosers,” he says.
A year later, they tried to do another one in a wildlife refuge in the Mississippi Delta, but unexpected rainfall flooded the site and washed away all the carefully placed hogs and, with them, much of the data. “But we did see a big alligator walking off with a pig,” Barton says.
In spring of 2019, Barton and two graduate students, Abby Jones of the University of Mississippi and David Mason of the University of Florida, decided to have another go, this time with nearly three times as much dead pig as the first time (around 200 animals). The new location was a large prairie grassland owned by the Nobel Research Institute in Oklahoma. The carcasses were placed four sites of six plots each, three of which got one pig and three of which got 10 pigs or more. Some plots were left to the open air, marked only by flags, and others were fenced with netting to simulate what would happen if scavengers couldn't get to them. “Frontloading tractors would take a scoop full of pigs and dump them on a trailer to take them to each specific site,” Barton says.
At first, the sites seemed relatively innocuous, if a little macabre. But within a few days, the fumes crept in. “It gags you so that you can’t breathe, and seizes your lungs up,” Barton says. “It’s incredible.” Pigs, like us, carry microbes within their internal cavities that begin the decomposition process. As they do their work, “they just build gas until sooner or later a vulture comes and pokes a hole and then it’s gross, it’s so gross,” he says. On particularly windy days, the researchers wore sanitary masks, and they also kept stations for hand-washing and sanitizer at hand. Their rest station—where the team dined on sandwiches, donuts, and, on one occasion, barbecue—was a little farther afield.
The riotously messy decomposition meant the researchers had to get creative to get the data they needed. Mason, who was investigating the relationship between the carcasses and nearby plants, placed tiny pouches of seed beneath the carrion and, a few days later, retrieved them. It seems a simple task, but three-day-old maggot-freckled hog carcasses aren’t easy to handle. “You have to look for the firmest thing you can, such as a leg or some kind of appendage to pull the thing up, but you can feel some tearing,” Mason says. In the case of one hog, he had lost sight of the pouch and had to root around in a seeping puddle for “what seemed like forever,” he says.
In the first two weeks, the grassland around the MME sites looked charred because of the flies clinging to each blade of grass, says Jones, who has a degree in forensic entomology. “I would walk from one pig to another and seas of flies would part,” she says. “Every time you move, a big cloud of flies goes up and then goes down,” Mason says. “They would land on a decomposing animal with a ton of diseases, and then they would land on you.” Jones studied microbial changes in the soil, which meant taking a scoop from every pig plot. Mason and Jones also collected flying insects with sticky traps and maggots with tablespoons. “As soon as you scoop them, they’d be wriggling out of the jar, and you gotta push them back in,” Mason says.
It gets worse. “The poles at the center of the plot would be covered in tiny black dots, almost like tar,” he says. Those spots were fly frass—insect excrement, normally miniscule, but made visible by sheer volume. Mason also realized that many of the flies at the site were inflicted by a zombie fungus, which grows inside the fly and forces it to die on an elevated perch, the better to fling its spores on any other flies nearby.
The hogs all looked the same when they arrived, but each decomposition was different. The ones left in open, unfenced plots were scavenged by vultures, coyotes, racoons, possums, eagles, and in one case, an armadillo. While Jones worked, she noticed she was being watched. “You could see vultures sitting in trees, waiting for us to leave,” she says. “It was spooky.”
Ones under mesh either mummified or burst open from the built-up gas. In the 2016 experiment, one pile of pigs formed a “river of maggots” six inches deep and more than 30 feet long. Barton also spotted rove beetles, notorious maggot-eaters, “surfing the maggots,” he says. “It would be like literally swimming in a giant river of hamburgers, having so much food that you’re literally drowning in it.” But one aspect of the MMEs was universal: The grasses and wildflowers surrounding each hog all withered and died, Jones says, creating black halos around each site.
After deploying the pigs, the researchers visited the site every day for two weeks to monitor initial decomposition. When they returned months later, the smell was gone. All that was left were skeletons. The soil microbiome around each site was wounded, missing key species. In single-hog plots, grass had begun to regrow, often in great green plumes, fueled by the pig’s nutrients, Jones says. But in plots with multiple hogs, the grass tended to remain brown and dead. In some patches, surrounding trees had also died, with no sign of recovery.
When one animal dies, its body is naturally recycled into the ecosystem by decomposers, fueling new life. But when many animals die in one place, they leach so much nitrogen, gases, and acidic body fluids that they can overwhelm and poison the soil’s balanced population of fungi and bacteria, inhibiting their ability to recycle organic matter. The researchers found that this systemic disruption is worsened when larger scavengers are taken out of the picture (as they are in many ecosystems), since they help distribute and process organic material. The plots left open to vultures, coyotes, and also flies left less of an impact on the soil, Barton says.
Studying decaying hogs in Mississippi could have implications for mass mortality sites around the world, particularly in Australia, where bushfires have produced unprecedented amounts of animal death. These carcasses are in some cases charred and more scattered than the hog sites, but their ecological impact is likely to cascade. The country has also seen a string of other MMEs driven by extreme climate events, including millions of fish dying in the Murray Darling Basin due to droughts, 23,000 spectacled flying foxes dying due to heat waves, and 500,000 farm animals dying in a flood, Thomas Newsome, an ecologist at the University of Sydney, writes in an email.
Newsome has been studying scavenger behavior across Australia’s arid Simpson Desert, forested Blue Mountains, and alpine Kosciuszko National Park (the former flooded in 2018, and the latter two were severely burnt in the bushfires). “There is actually very little known about scavenging in Australia,” he says. “We have also been interested whether carcasses attract introduced predators like feral cats and red foxes and whether, after visiting a carcass, they predate on native animals in the surrounding areas.”
This year’s bushfire season destroyed some of the sites Newsome had been monitoring, and also interrupted his plan to conduct his first MME simulation of a larger scale, much like the ones in Mississippi and Oklahoma: the placing of a little over 13 tons of deer carcasses in Kosciuszko. But the fires have provided plenty of material for study. “There are carcasses all over these landscapes following the deaths of wildlife during and after the fires,” he says. “So we are now looking at replicating and extending our ongoing work to the areas that were burnt.”
Barton has been applying for grants to travel to Australia to assist Newsome. In the more distant future, he hopes his team’s work might be able to identify strategies for mitigating the impact of MMEs, either by treating the soil or saving certain plants.
The most important insight he’s gleaned so far is on the importance of native scavengers, which he calls the “most persecuted” group of organisms. Vulture populations are plummeting across the world, often due to poisoning both deliberate and accidental, according to Science. Eleven out of 16 vulture species in Africa, Asia, and Europe risk extinction in our lifetimes, according to the nonprofit Birdlife. But the species, which can devour more than two pounds of meat in a minute, play a massive part in speeding up decomposition and blunting the ecological impact of an MME, Barton says. “There are very few people fighting for the vultures,” he says, “but when you don’t have those guys there to clean up, we lose so much.”
Camp Artek is known for its sun, fun, and socialism.
Like thousands of kids across the globe, Anton Belaschenko went to sleepaway camp last summer. The 11-year-old from Bethesda, Maryland swam in the sea, went sailing, hiked in the mountains, and sang camp songs. He made new friends and ate “the most amazing pancakes in the world.”
He and his fellow campers weren’t roughing it: their camp has multiple swimming pools and tennis courts, film and music studios, a fleet of sailboats, computers and 3D printers, and an amphitheater that seats 7,000. Anton video-chatted on WhatsApp twice a day with his mom, Anna, because no 21st-century camp would be complete without Wi-Fi.
Anton’s camp, Artek, is more than just a place for kids to build self-confidence and hone outdoor skills. Founded in 1925, Artek was the first and most elite of the Soviet Young Pioneer camps, specialized summer camps for tweens and teens that once numbered in the thousands across the Eastern Bloc.
Stunningly situated in Crimea on 540 acres of the pebbled coast of the Black Sea, Artek was the exclusive summer destination for the children of the Soviet elite until 1956, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev introduced an international session open to kids from around the world. Soon, Artek was hosting about 30,000 children every year. Some 1.5 million kids from more than 150 countries have camped there in the past near-century.
During the Cold War, the goal was to “kind of convert these children into peace activists of a Soviet-led world peace,” says Matthias Neumann, an associate professor in modern Russian history at the University of East Anglia in England.
The Soviet era may be long over, but Artek as an emblem of Russian influence is not. The camp fell on hard times in the 1990s, but since 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed the Crimean Peninsula, Moscow has poured more than $200 million into its renovation.
“The buildings are new and shiny and beautiful,” says Elle Amant, founder of Artek Global, a U.S.-based nonprofit that promotes Artek and connects its Artekovsky, or camp alumni. Amant, a Metro-D.C. resident, brought Anton and nine other American kids to Artek this summer.
What’s little known is that from the 1960s through the 1980s, as many as 400 kids from the U.S. camped at Artek before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
How did American kids wind up making campfires in the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War?
Neumann learned about the American Artekovsky in 2013 when he came across a few folders labeled Artek in the archives of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship (NCASF). The New York–based organization was founded in 1943 to foster peace between the superpowers through cultural exchange programs. One program was camping at Artek.
The name jumped out at him. “Everyone growing up in the Eastern Bloc would have heard that name,” he says. “I was born in East Germany, and I was a young pioneer myself until the age of 12.” That was 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down.
The folders held applications to Artek from adolescents across America. Among them were the children of socialists, communists, idealistic peace activists, and progressives committed to racial and social justice. Many were African American, Latino, or Native American. A group from Anchorage, Alaska applied at the urging of their Russian-language teacher. Some learned about Artek through the YMCA, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, or the American-Indian Movement.
This surprising range was largely the work of NCASF director Kathy Rothschild, a progressive activist with no connection to the Communist movement, Neumann says.
The kids worked hard on their applications, highlighting their accolades. Competition to get into Artek was even fiercer within the USSR. “It was a very exclusive camp for elite kids,” says Amant, 34, who primarily grew up in Russia and the U.S. “The kids who won the competitions. Who were the best at ballet, in sports, in dance, in academics—or saved somebody's life.” Amant was already writing articles for local newspapers in Crimea at age 10 when she first attended Artek.
“It’s like the Metropolitan Opera,” says Anna Belaschenko. “Everybody hears of it, but not everybody goes to it.” (She didn’t.)
As Neumann recounts in American Peace Child: Bridging the Cold War Divide in a Soviet Youth Camp, his book-in-progress, once the camp opened to foreign kids in the 1950s, it “was very about promoting a view of world affairs and foreign policy from Soviet eyes.” Official documents from the era say that after 15–20 days at Artek, campers should have adopted these views—and then taken them back home.
“They didn't expect foreign children to be turned into Communists, but they should’ve formed a sympathetic view of the Soviet Union and of Soviet foreign policy,” Neumann says.
Daily life at Artek was a mix of sports, activities, and orchestrated political events. The American kids were sometimes confronted by children from Vietnam, Nicaragua, and other countries who said they’d experienced violence and loss due to U.S. foreign policy.
Some American kids were sympathetic, but others felt unfairly attacked, Neumann found when he interviewed about 50 camp alumni for American Peace Child. These alumni, now in their 40s–60s, include teachers, white- and blue-collar workers, felons, philanthropists, a prominent Greenpeace activist, and a California billionaire. (Neumann did not disclose their identities.)
Some Western governments viewed groups like the NCASF “as propaganda outlets and foreign policy outlets of the Soviet Union,” he says. NCASF landed twice on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations. “And to some extent they were important agencies for Soviet cultural diplomacy. But the people who were involved … were often very committed activists that were not necessarily interested in Soviet communism, but much more in peaceful relationships [between nations].”
Perhaps the only well-known American Artekovsky is Samantha Smith, who in 1982, at the age of 10, wrote a letter to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov expressing her fear of nuclear war and questioning why “you want to conquer the world or at least our country.” After the letter was published in Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, Andropov invited Smith to the USSR. Her highly publicized tour in 1983 included a stay at Artek, where she donned the Young Pioneers neckerchief and uniform.
On her return to the U.S., she became a cub reporter for the Disney Channel, interviewing Democratic candidates George McGovern and Jesse Jackson during the 1984 presidential campaign. Just one year later, Samantha Smith and her father died in a plane crash. Both Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, who had succeeded Andropov, sent their condolences to her mother, Jane, who soon after created the Samantha Smith Foundation. Like NCASF, the foundation sent kids to Artek. It also hosted Soviet campers in Maine, despite receiving threatening letters from American parents.
Smith is still a local hero at Artek. A tree-lined path near the Black Sea is named after her, its entrance marked by a large stone. This past summer, campers cooked her favorite Russian dish—chicken cutlet with mashed potatoes.
Today, 95 percent of the camp spots are reserved for high-achieving kids in Russia, who attend for free. The other 5 percent of spots can be won through merit-based competitions or purchased. The American families paid about $1,200 for 21 days. “Even if you pay, you have to prove to them that you are good at something,” Amant says. Kids are required to upload a portfolio to the Artek website, which is then scored.
The day at Artek begins at 8 a.m. with three “cheerful, happy” songs, Amant says: One to wake up to, one for getting dressed and brushing teeth, and one for making the bed and running downstairs for morning exercise. The camp still offers a mix of sports, activities and international events. A highlight for Anton was the International Fair, where kids from more than 70 countries set up tables filled with tchotchkes that visiting kids could win by correctly answering trivia. The American campers asked visitors questions like, “Who was the first president of the United States?” At the French table, Anton scored a French flag by naming two famous things about the country: the Eiffel Tower and “civil wars.”
Neumann visited Artek at the same time. He awoke at 4 a.m. to hike up Bear Mountain to watch the sunrise—an Artek tradition. He visited the on-site camp museum to see historical records. He interviewed staffers, some of whom have worked at the camp since Soviet times.
He also took Arteks’ political pulse. In comparison to the overt geopolitical maneuvering of the past, “I was struck by the absence of ideology,” he says. “There were lots of scout-like activities about team building, self-confidence, and discipline. The camp educators really care about the kids—and they like that lots of investment goes into it.”
It’s in the investment itself that the geopolitics lies. Russia’s $200 million upgrade of Artek is meant to “restore Artek’s reputation as the prime children's camp in the Russian Federation, if not in the world,” Neumann says. “It kind of becomes this sacred space of an ideal Russian childhood.”
The Ukrainian government believes that’s the case. In a statement to UNESCO in April 2019, Ukraine condemned Russia’s “shameless use” of Artek to further its political and military agenda post annexation.
The Russians are also promoting Artek as a brand. Today it’s not the idea of Soviet-led world peace that campers are supposed to take home but Artek-labeled uniforms, T-shirts, and backpacks.
For Anton, Artek is simply a great summer camp. (Check out the video of his session’s closing ceremony, titled “We’re Different, We’re Equal.” It was livestreamed.) “It's really, really awesome. There’s a lot of diversity, and I can make a lot of friends. They also have great food.”
But when rain arrives and tops off the rivers that empty into the salt pan, it’s anything but bare: The shallow basin shimmers with highly saline water often just a few inches deep, and becomes a haven for several animal species. As new images from the NASA Earth Observatory show, that transformation from bone-dry to bluish can occur in just weeks.
On December 11, 2019, NASA’s Terra satellite pictured the Etosha Pan looking dry, and the surrounding vegetation appearing patchy. By January 17, 2020, the same area was more watery and verdant. The Namibianreports that northern Namibia was pelted with above-average rainfall in December. The rain appears to have nourished the squiggly Ekuma River, which feeds into the Etosha Pan. In the January image, the Ekuma River appears dark blue.
In the summer months when the salt pan turns watery, the 2,400-square mile landscape is a haven for animals, and tourists flock to Etosha National Park to watch them. The water is too salty for animals to drink, according to UNESCO, but it’s a mating spot known to put white pelicans and flamingos in the mood. (Unfortunately, populations have struggled anyway.) Throughout the year, visitors might spot black rhinos, ostriches, elephants, wildebeests, zebras, and more roaming the surroundings, which include mopane woodlands, grasslands, and shrubby stretches, or congregating at spring-fed water holes that freckle the edges of the pan.
The pan is forecast to stay slick through March, NASA reported, with more downpours expected throughout the rainy season. But eventually it will be dry again, and Namibia’s hottest interspecies hang-out spot will be a little less hopping until the rains return.
The weather forecast warned it would be raining reptiles.
This story was originally published byThe Guardianand appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
It truly was the night (and day) of the iguana.
After the National Weather Service sent an unusual alert to south Florida residents on Tuesday night, warning them of possible “falling iguanas” in light of unseasonably low temperatures, residents were indeed treated to a show of rigid reptiles out of the sky (or, actually, the trees).
The not-so-small creatures were seen motionless in the middle of sidewalks and backyards. While they looked dead, they were actually just too cold to move. Iguanas start becoming sluggish when temperatures drop below 50F and are susceptible to freezing once temperatures drop to around 40F. When frozen, they easily fall out of the trees they call home, appearing lifeless even though they aren’t dead.
Floridians shared videos of the phenomenon, giving Twitter an up-close look at the green-scaled reptiles that are probably dreaming of warmer climates, or at least spring.
One Twitter user happened to capture the resurrection of an iguana as it took in some warmth in the sunshine and slowly crawled back to life after being temporarily frozen.
Iguanas are an invasive species in Florida and can be little nuisances when not frozen. They can damage infrastructure by digging small burrows into sidewalks or foundations and leave droppings on decks and inside swimming pools.
Wildlife conservationists recommend people not touch frozen iguanas as they may come back to life and feel threatened if a person is close.
According to a scientist's satirical guide, flowers are even more beautiful when you can only kind of see them.
Let’s say you’re cruising down a highway in Nebraska at the speed limit of 70 miles per hour. Out of the corner of your eye, you notice a purple-pink blur by the side of the road. You’d crane your neck or take a picture, but you have to keep your hands on the wheel. So you drive onward, haunted by a question: What wildflower did you see?
Worry no more. Chris Helzer, the creator of The Prairie Ecologist blog and director of science for The Nature Conservancy in Nebraska, has written “a practical guide” for identifying flowers without so much as getting off the highway. “Most wildflower field guides are nearly useless for roadside flower viewing, written for the eccentric botanical enthusiast who wanders slowly through prairies, stooping low to determine whether the sepals of a flower are hispid or hirsute,” Helzer writes in the guide, using the technical terms for hair-like structures found on plants. His tongue-in-cheek blog post continues: “But what about the silent majority who prefer to experience wildflowers the way General Motors intended–by whizzing past them in a fast, comfortable automobile?”
The resulting e-booklet, “A Field Guide to Roadside Wildflowers at Full Speed,” blurrily documents the different species of wildflowers one might encounter near highways in the central Great Plains, which includes states such as Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and South Dakota. Butterfly milkweed, a beautiful orange flower with delicate pom-poms of florets, appears as an undulating orange smear against shades of green. Black-eyed Susans, the yellow, daisy-like flower with a dark center, also look like a smear, only this time brown and yellow, like a wayward bumblebee that got caught in a windshield wiper. And repeating bands of purple-pink are none other than the stick-like flower gayfeather, also known as blazing star (though bands of a darker pink could also be purple loosestrife). Each flower is accompanied with accurate descriptions of the species’ bloom times, habitat, and similar species. “Technically there’s nothing untrue in the book,” Helzer says. “And 99 percent of people understand that it’s a joke.”
Helzer, who is also a photographer, came up with the project over 10 years ago, but only finished it when he was bored over the winter holidays. “I started out by just making a couple of images, taking good wildflower photos and smearing them in Photoshop to look blurry,” he says. “The more I got into it, I figured I might as well make the whole book.” He admits the edited images are exaggerated, as most people hoping to see wildflowers out the window would likely focus on one spot as they drove by. “But if you turned your head sideways and just kind of focus in one direction, they look just like blurs of color,” he says.
Though Helzer had no grand agenda for the project, he’s been surprised by people’s reactions. “I did not expect this stupid field guide idea to blow up,” he says. “But I’m glad it has, and I’m hoping a side effect is that it convinces people there’s something else to see in prairies besides just something to drive through to get to the mountains or the ocean.” In his job at The Nature Conservancy, Helzer spends much of his time wandering the grasslands at more like three miles per hour. He manages prairies with prescribed fire, helps ranchers manage their lands for grazing livestock, and monitors biodiversity. “The guide is pretty facetious about how you’d have to be crazy to go around and wander and just stare at flowers,” he says. “But I guess that’s my actual job.”
Dendrochronology doesn't just work on forests. It works on buildings too.
Despite our best intentions, humans can be awful recordkeepers. There are personal biases and faulty memories to consider, older means of documentation that can decay or crumble (thereby jumbling any meaning there was to begin with), and so many other inherent hazards. So it’s no wonder that hazier parts of the historical record require an entirely different species of historian.
Increasingly, American researchers are turning to trees, and reading them to fill in the gaps. A new study, published in the Journal of Biogeography, looks at the tree rings of West Virginia’s historic log cabins and other wooden structures to better understand the period in which they were built. It’s just the latest example of what the science of dendrochronology can tell us.
As trees grow each year, they sprout new rings of tissue under their bark. These rings are formed by the rate at which trees grow over the course of the calendar year—slower in winter, when there aren’t many nutrients, and faster in the spring and summer. Each new ring, a testament to the tree’s survival, encircles the older ones, inscribing a hidden historical record beneath the bark, in concentric circles.
Tree rings encode a trove of data—the state of the climate in each year of the tree’s life; the amount of nutrients the tree collected in each season; and, obviously, the times of birth and death. The older the tree, the more comprehensive the history. The cross-sectioned trunk of a giant sequoia at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, for instance, has over 1,400 rings, revealing information about its native Californian environment since the fall of Rome.
But trees don’t only tell us about their environmental contacts. They also tell stories about human endeavors.
“It’s not just the trees themselves,” says Bess Horton, an archaeologist at Yellowstone National Park. “Those trees are used in structures, and you can also date those structures based on those trees.”
Some of those structures are picture frames—like the portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots that was thought to be a 19th-century reproduction, but through dendrochronological analysis turned out to be an original. Other structures are human tombs—like the burial chamber of the Viking king of Denmark, Gorm the Old, that proved precisely when the king’s remains were laid to rest.
In the United States, there aren't many royal portraits or regnal tombs. But there are a lot of buildings. And many of them were built with wood.
Four hundred years ago, the European colonization of the Americas was in full swing (at which point that giant sequoia was already more than 1,000 years old). The first enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown, Virginia. In West Virginia, colonists had begun cutting down forests to build log cabins on the frontier. Native Americans were killed in large numbers by new diseases and by European violence, and many fled the continent’s new arrivals.
As Europeans and their descendants settled the eastern United States, forests were felled to sate the growing demand for housing. While there’s plenty of documentation of these colonial-era events, the stories have rarely been told through trees.
“Prior to European contact in the Americas, indigenous peoples were heavily managing the landscape [of West Virginia],” says Kristen de Graauw, a graduate student at West Virginia University and lead author of the new study. “Following European contact and the spread of European diseases and mortality, and the loss of a vast portion of indigenous people in Americas, the lands these people had managed were abandoned.”
De Graauw’s research argues that trees moved into the areas previously inhabited by Native Americans, springing up thanks to the ample sunlight at these sites. By looking at the old-growth forests of West Virginia—forests with a lot of definitions, but generally speaking, those with long-lived trees that haven’t been razed by human or natural causes—De Graauw hopes to better understand how the West Virginia land was used at the time (and to gain insights into a 17th-century drought that affected the forest).
“We don’t have many old-growth forests left in eastern North America, due to past logging,” she says. “They’re mostly restricted to areas that are really hard to log.”
As a result, De Graauw also looked to the structures erected by European colonists on the frontier mountains of Appalachian West Virginia. “We should not overlook logged buildings for understanding past forests,” she says.
The 18 historic logged buildings in the study—only some of the 30-plus that De Graauw sampled for her doctoral dissertation—offered information about old white oak, red oak, and pine trees, among others.
The challenges of "coring" trees are many. If they're dense, hard woods—like white oak—it can take up to half an hour to take a sample. Softer woods, like pine, core quicker, but are prone to crumbling. Yet despite the difficulties of coring, these wooden buildings hold some of the last dendrochronological DNA of the past forests of eastern North America.
“One day I was in this massive barn, and I’m thinking, ‘I have to core like 50 or 60 of these logs,’” she says. “But then I thought to myself, ‘I’m really in a forest. And the forest doesn’t exist anymore. It only exists here, in this barn.’”
Dendrochronology is also a hyperlocal tool—a means of understanding population and regional changes in a specific place. In Yellowstone, looking at axe-cut tree stumps helped Horton understand the flight of the Nez Perce in 1877, when the indigenous people were forced to flee their land in the Pacific Northwest as they were pursued by the U.S. Army.
Though the event was well documented in diary entries and other historical records, trees have their own story to tell. The tree stumps along the route have recently revealed that a bivouac was part of the 1877 event, and likely used by members of the Nez Perce.
“The record is there, in the trees,” says Horton, who is not affiliated with the new study led by De Graauw. “The [conundrum] is that each different area will have its own different record.”
But in West Virginia, the premise is quite similar. Forced to flee their ancestral homelands, indigenous peoples didn’t leave much in the way of comprehensive diary entries. Studying the trees—when they came down, and when they grew anew—is a useful tool for filling in the gaps.
Frieda Caplan defied gender norms to take Americans from peas and potatoes to kumquats and quince.
Most Americans have never heard of Dr. Frieda Rapoport Caplan. But any American who has enjoyed a kiwi, mango, or blood orange has tasted her legacy.
A veritable pioneer in the world of produce passed away on Saturday at the age of 96. As the founder of Frieda’s Specialty Produce, Caplan revolutionized American cuisine and supermarkets by ushering guavas, passionfruit, shallots, endives, kumquats, Asian pears, radicchio, and kiwi, among many others, into a broader culinary lexicon. She transformed a male-dominated industry at a time when few women were business owners at all.
But she always insisted she was just in the right place at the right time.
In 1955, Caplan was a UCLA political science graduate with a budding legal career. With the birth of her first daughter, however, she forewent a rigorous work-life in favor of more flexible employment. Luckily, her husband’s (a man later known as Mr. Frieda) aunt and uncle needed a bookkeeper for their downtown produce house. Her ability to steer customers toward the day’s more obscure produce—brown mushrooms—did not go unnoticed. In short order, she graduated from bookkeeper to the first female sales associate in L.A.’s Wholesale Produce Market.
After successfully marketing a haul of unheard-of “mangoes,” her path became clear: With a small loan from her father, she launched her own produce house in 1962. Her first charge was the “Chinese Gooseberry,” a small, fuzzy fruit from New Zealand. As she recounted to CBS in 2019, she noticed that the fruit bore a striking resemblance to the country's national emblem, and suggested they rebrand it "kiwifruit." The producers pivoted to “kiwi,” and Caplan encouraged local restaurants to put kiwi tarts on their menus. Slowly but surely, the fruit took off. “I like to call it our 18-year overnight success,” she told the LA Times.
Caplan’s reputation as an exotic-produce trailblazer was sealed, and she was just getting started. According to Darrell Corti, the globetrotting gourmand behind Sacramento’s iconic Corti Brothers Grocery, who helped spark California’s Food Revolution in the 1970s, the American produce scene before Caplan was “peas and potatoes." “I had a reputation of trying anything new,” Caplan told the Pasadena Star-News in 2003. “I couldn’t compete with all the boys on the big items … so I built the business selling things that were different.” She introduced endives, kumquat, chayote squash, shiitake mushrooms, and tamarind. “She made the unknown known, the undiscovered discovered,” writes Corti in an email. When customers couldn’t tell sunchokes and ginger apart, she affixed her products with instructional labels and recipes. “Ripe When Wrinkled,” read the sticker on each passionfruit.
By marketing far-flung items like lemongrass, galangal, habanero peppers, enoki mushrooms, lychee, and turmeric, Caplan made the unfamiliar accessible to the American public. She afforded Americans the luxury of travel without leaving their kitchen. Corti adds radicchio and hot house cucumbers to the list. “And who knew about elephant garlic?” he adds. Today, Frieda’s Specialty Produce is credited with the introduction of more than 200 items to American produce aisles.
It wasn’t just business savvy that distinguished Caplan. In a 2015 bio-documentary called Fear No Fruit, she claims to have slept four hours a night for 30 years, starting her days at 1 a.m. to beat wholesale clients to the market and staying until the smallest buyers left at 5 p.m. She did so six days a week while raising two daughters, who now head the company. Until recently, Caplan still came to work to file invoices by hand and research the next big product. “At least it’s just Monday to Friday now, no more Saturdays,” she said in the film at age 90.
If she wasn’t always the last person in the room, Caplan was often the only woman in the room: She stands as the first woman in the U.S. to open her own produce house. She recalled a trade convention in San Antonio to the LA Times. The trade group’s president greeted the room by saying “Good morning gentlemen—and Frieda.” “She was a ballsy lady,” recalls Corti, “her brand and name carried weight.” Caplan never let her gender limit her success. “People looked at her and said, ‘Wow what a great role model for women,’” said Dick Spezzano, former VP of produce at Vons Supermarkets, in Fear No Fruit. “That's not true, she was a great role model for women and men.”
For a ripe, decades-long career, she was bestowed an array of awards. The LA Times listed her among Steve Jobs and Jane Fonda in a 1990 roundup of Californians who reshaped American business throughout the 1980s. She won a Lifetime Achievement Award from United Fresh Produce, an honorary doctorate from Cal Poly, and a Legacy Award from the National Association of Women Business Owners, to name a few. She refused to accept the Packer Newspaper’s “Produce Man of the Year,” however, until they agreed to change the name.
While she introduced American audiences to hundreds of fruits and vegetables, there are still tens of thousands of undiscovered edible crops left in the world today. Her mission of bringing the unfamiliar to American doorsteps may never be completed, but she did put a good dent in it.
After years of drought and habitat loss, “It’s one more nail in their coffin.”
The platypus—furry-sausage body, duck bill, beaver tail, venomous heel spurs—lives what might be considered a cryptid lifestyle. The semiaquatic, egg-laying mammals are notoriously hard to spot, skulking around in Australian streams at night. They’re predictably hard to catch, and escape easily from the conservationists trying to track them, including Josh Griffiths, an ecologist with Cesar Australia, an environmental consulting firm, who has studied the creatures for 12 years. On a typical survey night near Melbourne, which lasts anywhere from 14 to 16 hours, Griffiths might catch two or three of the strange, slippery creatures.
The recent Australian bushfires, which have burnt tens of millions of acres* and killed approximately a billion animals, have spotlighted the plights of certain species, from koalas to the lesser-known Kangaroo Island dunnart (a mouse-size marsupial). But there has been little news about how the platypus has been faring, in part because their status is still largely a mystery to science. After all, they’re incredibly hard to spot even when there aren’t raging bushfires. “The short answer is that we simply don’t know,” Griffiths says. “The scale of the fire we’ve got at the moment is unprecedented." All the sites he usually monitors for platypuses have been declared emergency zones and are inaccessible. “It’s one more nail in their coffin,” he adds.
In 2008, after bushfires and floods swept through Victoria, the Australian Platypus Conservancy conducted a survey of the creatures, according to Geoff Williams, a conservancy biologist. At the time, they found little relationship between platypus populations and local bushfires. Temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit can be lethal to platypuses, so they retreat to underground burrows when things get too hot. These may have provided a critical refuge—one that more terrestrial or arboreal animals such as koalas often desperately need—according to Tom Grant, a biologist who has spent nearly 50 years studying the platypus. (Grant wrote the definitive book on them, and Griffiths calls him “the Godfather of platypuses.”) And in times of drought, platypuses move into the refuge pools that persist in many dried-out streams. These strategy are how platypuses have survived for as long as a million years, Williams says.
But those studies focused on smaller, localized fires. “These most recent catastrophic fires present a different situation, where the vegetation consolidating the banks, in which they dig their resting and nesting burrows, has been devastated,” Grant writes in an email. He predicts that when rain does finally fall in these areas, the banks will erode, degrading water quality and stifling the small, bottom-dwelling invertebrates that platypuses depend on.
To make matters worse, January and February are the time of year when, baby platypuses tend to emerge from their mothers’ burrows, Grant says. “They will be attempting to find their own food in streams devastated by the fires and in many cases reduced to disconnected refuge pools by the current severe drought,” he says. He predicts many of these platypus young will die this season.
The 2008 study also examined stable rivers and streams that still held a substantial water after the fire had passed. But the country’s extreme, ongoing drought has taken a toll on refuge pools, Grant says. And according to Griffiths, the small creeks that once connected habitats have gotten vaporized by the current bushfires, further fragmenting platypus habitat and maybe putting distant remnant pools off-limits. Travel over land to get to these places would expose them to predators, and lingering heat, even at night, could prove fatal. It is, perhaps, a perfect storm, and Griffiths, Grant, and Williams all see the possibility that local populations may go extinct.
In some places, conservationists air-dropped food, such as carrots, to help some stricken wallabies, but that's not an option for the more finicky platypus. “We can’t do food drops because they only eat live prey,” Griffiths says, including waterbugs and yabbies, a type of freshwater crayfish. “And we have to be careful when spreading live organisms around.” Williams says he’s heard of some prior attempts to feed vulnerable platypuses live earthworms and yabbies, but that there was never any evidence that the food was actually eaten. Plus, this solution is simply not scalable in a crisis like this, he says.
Another option could be to capture and care for some platypuses, but that’s also proven tricky. “You can’t just put in cave traps, you have to use highly specialized nets that can only be used in shallow waterways,” Griffiths says. And the species consumes at least 15 percent of its body weight per day in live prey, making it a huge drain on resources for any zoo or facility, most of which are already stressed to their limits, according to a statement from the Australia Platypus Conservancy. Relocation is also a bad option, since any surviving rivers likely also hold surviving platypuses and other species, competing for the same meager habitat and resources, Williams says. The only thing that might make this possible, as it did following a 1983 bushfire, would be to move surviving populations into places where others had died out. It’s a long-term plan, though, and biologists still have limited access to the survey sites they’ve been studying.
When the state of emergency passes, Griffiths says, he will return to his monitoring project, a collaboration with the San Diego Zoo called the Great Australian Platypus Search. The project relies on environmental DNA, or eDNA, the genetic traces platypuses leave behind. But the bushfires might have thrown a wrench into this project, too. When Griffiths surveyed a site near Melbourne after Australia’s 2009 Black Saturday Fires, he found charred soil; the fire had burnt off the eDNA. And any samples he finds now might be from platypuses that did not survive all the environmental stress.
Though the bushfires are a serious, recurrent problem, the real menace to platypuses is likely to remain the drought. Since European colonization of Australia, the species has lost nearly half its historic population across the eastern part of the mainland and Tasmania, according to Gilad Bino, a researcher at the University of New South Wales Centre for Ecosystem Science. “There’s been a change in what we call the shifting baseline, a change in our collective memory,” he says. “When we see two platypuses in a pool, we think that’s a lot of platypuses, but it’s a fraction of what it used to be.” Bino published a paper modeling the platypus’s future decline, and potential extinction, in the February issue of Biological Conservation. His research identifies a toxic soup of factors beyond fires that threaten the strange mammals’ future, including prolonged drought, climate change, land clearing, and the construction of dams that break up habitat.
The platypus is such an iconic species that it’s almost surprising its decline has happened without much fanfare. European scientists first encountered the platypus in 1791, but argued over its anatomy for nearly a century, according to a 2019 paper in the Journal of Mammalogy. Aboriginal people, who called the platypus mallangong, tambreet, gaya-dari, boonaburra, and lare-relar, among other names, had developed a deep ecological understanding of the creatures, though European scientists characteristically ignored this knowledge, suspecting the specimens they saw were some kind of elaborate hoax.
Bino hopes his paper will lead to a national risk assessment of the future of the species. “There’s a desperate need for more information, and for government funds to monitor platypuses,” he says. “Not knowing what’s going on is not an excuse to assume everything is fine.” And if you are in Australia on a midnight stroll and happen upon a platypus, consider marking it in platypusSpot, a citizen science project Griffiths helps run.
Meanwhile, researchers continue to toil away for long nights in pursuit of the elusive animals. “The more data we’re getting points to that they should be at least listed as vulnerable, or endangered,” Griffiths says. “At least then, people would have to pay attention to them.”
* Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that the recent bushfires have burnt two million acres. They have burnt tens of millions of acres.
