American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2009 Fall Meeting

Ancient landscapes, like these recorded as crossbedding in sandstone along the Colorado River, are examples of many topics addressed at AGU. 

The crowds were so thick at Fourth and Howard, with scientists in all four crosswalks simultaneously, that traffic came to a halt, the traffic signals seemingly insignificant. The American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting was back in San Francisco, with thousands of earth, atmospheric, climate change, and other scientists attending from around the globe. They were rushing to sessions ranging from how climate change affects the mountains to the recent Samoan tsunami to nitrogen deposition from the air.

There were sessions on the early earth, the earth’s core, planetary plasma, earthquake faults, glaciers, oceans, water tables, and a multitude of other topics.

Over 16,000 scientists attended the AGU 2009 Fall Meeting. 

Like most scientific meetings, scientists at AGU present their work either as short illustrated talks in a lecture session, or as posters in a poster session. In either case, a scientist is relating their latest work to an audience of scientific peers in the same or a related field, with a few interested parties from other areas and perhaps a sprinkling of the science press.

Generally, the presenter represents a scientific team, funded by a group of universities as well as government institutes and agencies. After a lecture presentation, a scientist generally fields a few questions, which may simply seek more detail, or they may be critical in nature.

Scientists gather at poster presentations in the AGU exhibit hall. 

Poster sessions take place in a large hall, with many occurring simultaneously, and colleagues gather at various posters, presenting, discussing, and arguing above the din.

In addition to these formal sessions, scientists bump into each other on the way to sessions, or plan to get together for coffee, lunch, at special events and group meetings, even at reunions, tossing ideas back and forth and catching up on scientific and personal news.

AGU makes a large commitment to informing the public by hosting a dynamic press room and holding press conferences in which experts discuss breaking scientific news. The conferences begin with concise presentations and then the floor is opened to questions from the press. Press conferences this year include Groundwater Loss in California and Beyond, Tracking Greenhouse Gases, and Unlocking the Secrets of Night-Shining Clouds.–Anne M. Rosenthal


http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/

Behind the Scenes at the California Academy of Sciences

A butterfly in the Academy rainforest exhibit bears a torn wing, revealing the inside story. 

Science writers attending the American Geophysical Union’s 2009 fall meeting in San Francisco were treated to a Behind-the-Scenes tour of California Academy of Sciences, a tour that ranged from modern DNA sequencing labs to specimen collections dating back a century.

The tour guides were both members of the Academy’s research staff, W. Brian Simison, Ph.D., Curator and Head of the Center for Comparative Genomics, and Maureen Flannery, M.S., Collections Manager for Ornithology and Mammalogy.

Simison’s research includes the evolutionary history of organisms and how they are related to each other (phylogeny), determined in part by DNA sequencing; a portion of Flannery’s work is collecting marine mammal data on Bay Area beaches. The research staff includes 24 Ph.D.-level curators, as well as approximately 12 collection managers.

The Academy's albino alligator is an example of an animal with a DNA mutation. 

The research labs take up both wings of two floors of the new Academy building. Our tour started in the area reserved for spider experts (arachnologists) and insect specialists (entomologists), where Simison mentioned that older spiders such as tarantulas, evolutionarily speaking, tend to be larger with vertically moving jaws, while newer spiders were generally smaller with jaws that opened and closed horizontally. Spider and insect specimens could be placed in jars with ethanol–which preserves their DNA as well as their body parts–or pinned onto boards to dry.

The Academy also studies small specimens, such as ants, by shooting digital pictures using a CCD camera attached to a microscope. The camera takes multiple photos, each focused on a slightly different portion of the ant or other specimen; these photos are stitched together with dedicated software to provide a 3-D image of the organism’s exterior.

Vials of fossil foraminifera, unicellular (having one cell) oceanic plankton, donated to the Academy. 

We walked down the halls to the next set of labs, passing box after box holding thousands upon thousands of vials of fossil “forams” donated by an oil company to the Academy’s collection. Foraminifera are oceanic plankton, or tiny floating organisms, with calcium carbonate containing tests. As part of the Academy collection, these would be preserved indefinitely for future scientific work.

Next we arrived at the DNA labs, which included separate rooms for DNA extraction, DNA amplification (making multiple copies of DNA), and DNA sequencing. The separation of tasks, noted Simison, minimized sample contamination, although when prodded by one of the reporters, he admitted to occasionally sequencing his own DNA by mistake.

Dr. W. Brian Simison discusses the Freezer Room, which preserves hundreds of valuable samples. 

The following tour stop was the Freezer Room, equivalent to a bank vault for tissue and DNA samples. These are so valuable that both the room itself as well as individual freezers alarm staff if their temperature rises. (The Academy has sufficient diesel generating power to keep the freezer room in business during an entire week without power, for example, after a large earthquake.) Small tissue samples or, in some cases, aliquots of DNA, are shared with researchers around the world.

Maureen Flannery stepped in at this point to give us a snapshot of the bird and mammal collection, part of the 26 million total specimens at the Academy. Not everything was neatly tucked away in drawers, however, as sizes varied from hummingbird eggs to a blue whale skeleton.

Skeleton in storage. 

We walked past rows and rows of cases, with occasional mounted skeletons or positioned birds breaking the sea of metal. Identifying a favorite location, Flannery opened a drawer containing Green Towhees collected in Peru from 1950 to 1952. She pulled on gloves before handling them, just in case these older specimens had been preserved with arsenic. These were “skins,” that is birds preserved without their inner organs.

Cabinet drawer containing a series of bird skins, part of the Academy collection. 

Most valuable, mentioned Flannery, are drawers containing a group or series of individual birds from the same location, collected at the same time. A series gives an indication of the how much a species varies at a single spot.

Another avian drawer contained Birds of Paradise, originally housed in the De Young art museum, specimens that had arrived, unfortunately, without collection data. Males of this group have stunning decorative feathers used in displays that attract mates. One of the birds had been dried in a tell-tale position that betrayed its former use as a hat ornament, Flannery mentioned. Rather than use as fashion statements, however, most Academy specimens serve ecological purposes, for example, providing clues for researchers sleuthing the entry of avian pox virus into the Galapagos Islands.

Leaving the birds and moving on to the Academy's impressive collection of marine mammal skulls, Flannery retrieved a sea otter skull from one of hundreds of boxes and pointed out an imbedded shark tooth. It was confirming evidence that the otter, discovered with a missing hunk of flesh, had indeed died from a shark bite...just another fascinating detail of the Academy's collection, preserved for future generations to study.–Anne M. Rosenthal


http://www.calacademy.org/

An Addition to the Chorus

An unfamiliar chattering, a series of whistles, trills, and rattling, along with distinctive loud “wheet” call notes, meant migrating visitors in my yard. This cacophony certainly wasn’t the usual avian symphony. Since the migrants were flitting through the treetops, it was hard to get a good look, but persistence paid off: Finally I obtained a quick glimpse of the neon yellow, black-throated male–a Hooded Oriole, Icterus cucullatus. Later I spotted the luminous bird hundreds of feet away, high up in the trees across the street.

The next morning, I was sound asleep when the sounds of chattering orioles filtered through the window. Like a mother awakened by her infant’s cries, I sat bolt upright, fully alert in seconds. Then I ran out to the balcony overlooking the treetops to see if I could get another look at the visitors.

There was the golden male, along with a considerably smaller greenish female. I watched her feed a begging fledgling of similar appearance. The birds called endlessly, keeping track of each other; likely, the three birds were traveling together. Later that day, the trio moved on, continuing their southward migration.

In California, the range of the Hooded Oriole has extended northward, following the artificial expansion of nesting habitat–the use of palms in landscaping. The birds suspend their nests, woven of coarse fibers and grasses, from the underside of palm fronds and line the nests with fine materials.

Out there shivering on the balcony, surveying the yard in 6:30 AM chill, I realized that I had been missing the action. The local American Robin, Bewick’s Wren, Brown Towhees, House Finches, and Chestnut-backed Chickadees were out and about eating breakfast. Across the street, several large crows marched across my neighbor’s lawn, and a hummingbird visited each of the flowers remaining on our pomegranate tree. The prime-time show was on.

View image by photographer Stuart Nafey:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/unklstuart/3487691736/in/photostream/