Author: Jo Louise Seltzer

Madagascar. Far-away and exotic. Home of the lemur and the baobab tree. And desperately poor.

“It’s a race against the clock,” Armand Randrianasolo said when describing Missouri Botanical Garden’s research program in Madagascar. Only about 10 percent of Madagascar’s original habitat remains intact with more forests being destroyed all the time. As a result, many of the estimated 13,000-14,000 species of native plants may become extinct before they have even been identified.

 

Read the entire article (1MB PDF).
This article was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon.

Does the thought of whizzing through a loop-the-loop in an open car make your heart beat a little faster?  How do you feel about riding that car straight down from 150 feet above the ground?  Just gotta try it?

To millions of visitors annually, roller coasters are the highlights of theme parks.  Many of the most spectacular of those rides such as SheiKra at Busch Gardens Tampa or Dragon Kahn at Port Aventura, Spain began as designs at St. Louis architecture firm PGAV.

As explained by the designers at PGAV, successful coasters use a fiendish knowledge of psychology firmly grounded in the basics of physics.  (A bit of human physiology is also incorporated to make the rides very safe.)

Here’s how Bill Castle, vice president of PGAV, explains the psychological scripting of a “dive coaster” like SheiKra, recently named the top coaster in central Florida:

“You start out with a little fear.  Your trepidation increases as you go up—the clickety click of the lift gets on your nerves.  Then you hang at the top looking down 200 feet for about ten seconds, with the suspense constantly building.  The adrenaline is in full flower when you go down that drop, and every nerve in your body is tingling.  Time seems to slow down, and you are hyperaware.  At the bottom of the (200 foot) drop you go into a long pullout and begin another climb.  It’s all energy management—fast and slow, high and low.”

 

Read the entire article (500KB PDF).
This article was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon.

When Rainer Bussmann discovered a new plant species in the Andean cloud forest in Peru, he saw both opportunity for the native population and an inducement to preserve the forest where the plant grows. The seeds from that plant could be roasted and turned into a highly nutritious snack. The snack could be sold around the world and the revenue generated could improve the lives of Peruvian farmers.

Translating discovery into results is routine for Bussmann, an ethnobotanist and director of the Missouri Botanical Garden’s William L. Brown Center. “Ethnobotany is the science of how people use plants,” he explained. Since plants enter into almost every human endeavor, from sustaining life as food to giving us pleasure in gardens and wilderness, ethnobotany covers a lot of ground.

A major part of the ethnobotanist’s focus is discovery. There is a sense of urgency about finding and evaluating new plant species, because specimen-rich environments like rain forests are being destroyed constantly. Since only a small fraction of the estimated plant species have been evaluated for human use, the very plant that holds the key to curing Ted Kennedy’s type of brain cancer could be wiped out if a new gold mine is excavated in the Andean cloud forest.

 

Read the entire article (1.5MB PDF).
This article was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon.

Stargazers willing to brave the cold and stay up until midnight or later will observe  a once-in-earth’s-lifetime event this month.  Possibly with the naked eye, and certainly with binoculars, they will be able to observe the newly discovered Comet Lulin on its trip through the inner solar system.  Lulin is named for the Taiwanese observatory where it was first seen in July, 2007.

Comet Lulin will look like a greenish fuzzy blob, with a very bright center, and probably a tail.  It will appear much bigger than a star.  It should be brightest on February 24, its closest approach to the earth.  At that time it will be half the distance between the earth and the sun–about 38 million miles– away and traveling at 31 miles per second toward the outer part of the solar system.

 

Read the entire article (275KB PDF).
This article was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon.

“Around 1962, when we were living on Lake Erie, my parents took me on a special trip to see an eagle’s nest, thinking it might be my last chance for such a sight,” recalls naturalist Michael Arduser. 1962 was the year that Rachael Carson’s book Silent Spring made the public aware that widespread use of the insecticide DDT was decimating the country’s bird population.  Eagles and other raptors were especially hard hit.

Fortunately, in the long run their fears were not realized.  Although the country’s bald eagle population remained very low for nearly twenty more years, around 1980 the tide began to turn. Since then the eagle population has been steadily increasing.  In fact, Arduser, who is with the Missouri Department of Conservation, reports that the state now officially has 150 pairs of nesting eagles.  He and his colleagues think the actual number may be close to 200, up from zero pairs in 1980.

In 1978, the federal government listed the bald eagle as ‘endangered’ in 43 states, and ‘threatened’ in the other 5 of the lower 48.  From about 20,000 estimated nesting pairs in 1800, by 1963 only 417 pairs remained outside of Alaska.

The possible extinction of our national bird spurred regional recovery teams to undertake intensive programs to bring the eagles back.  These efforts were so successful that by 1995 bald eagles removed from endangered list, and upgraded to threatened.  Numbers continued to grow, and in 2007, the American bald eagle was “delisted” by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  Bald eagles have doubled in number approximately every five years.

“The eagle’s recovery is a testimonial to the resilience of nature, and also to people’s willingness to recognize problems and correct them,” says Arduser.

 

Read the entire article (650KB PDF).
This article was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon.