| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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habitats www.nature.notquite This column is dedicated to habitats: places where things live. A few years ago I wrote an article here about an ecologist named Tom Ray who had begun an experiment with "digital creatures," computer viruses essentially, replicating and evolving in an international network of computers. Ray and other artificial lifers insist that they are not merely modeling evolution but providing an environment in which life forms actually evolve over thousands of "digital" generations. But viruses aren't the only things living in computers. As many as 20 years ago I knew people who lived in their computers, at least if there's anything to the old idiom that home is where your heart is. In those days computer dwellers hacked in esoteric programming languages, lived on Coke and Twinkies, and did not stop punching keys to wash their hair. It was a monochrome world, without graphics or much respect from anyone, let alone Wall Street. Today millions of us (even those who wash our hair) spend much of our lives "inside" our computers. The graphics-based portion of the Internet known as the World Wide Web has, in less than three years, changed the way Americans spend time more than anything since the Rubik's Cube. Whether this change constitutes progress for humans and the rest of the natural world remains to be seen. I have my doubts. What follows is a random survey of the sites on the web that might be of interest to naturalists. Since there are millions of web sites, I have been forced to overlook approximately all of them. If I've overlooked your favorite, or if you want addresses for any of the sites mentioned below, e-mail me at gslack@calacademy.org Early yesterday morning I set out on the web to find an answer to a real-life question: an oriole (hooded, I think) had begun building an ingenious nest in the banana tree outside my window in Oakland. I wanted to find out what I could about orioles and whether they customarily nest in banana trees. When I entered "birding" in the query box of one of the web's search engines I drew more than eight thousand sites considered somehow relevant to the subject. Narrowing my search to "oriole" pulled up three thousand sites, most of them, as far as I could tell, dedicated to the Baltimore baseball team. Too wide a net, I guess. Next, I looked for something I'd heard of called Mistnet, an international network of birders who keep online records of their sightings. I found the address, but whenever I entered it I was informed that the site was not available. This happens a lot on the web, since things change much faster there than any indexing system could. Giving up on Mistnet, I followed the advice of an Academy librarian and found the Electronic Zoo, a site put together in the early days of the World Wide Web (about a year and a half ago) by a veterinarian who wanted to give users easy access to what were then a few animal-related sites. The Electronic Zoo has since grown into a hub providing hyperlink access to all sites on the web about animals. E-Zoo opens with a mural of the different animal groups. Click on the class you want and you're taken to a list of relevant sites. Aim carefully, though. On my way to the bird I accidentally clicked on the little spider and brought up a list of arachnid sites. It was a felicitous mistake because that's where I got to see something I never would have searched for: a stunning scanning electron micrograph of "an entire spider fecal pellet under high magnification." You must click on this to believe it. Backing away from the fecal pellet, I pointed properly at the little bird and got a list of four directory choices: poultry, pet birds, other birds, and commercial. "Other birds" took me to a list of more than 150 ornithology sites, and as I scrolled down looking for one that might tell me a thing or two about orioles I spotted one dedicated to Tympanuchus cupido attwateri, Attwater's prairie chicken, an endangered grouse I'd written about a few years ago. It is a beautiful chicken and the rarest grouse in the world, with fewer than 50 remaining in the wild. Click. Plenty of natural history as well as links for those who want to get involved or send an e-mail about its recovery to Bruce Babbitt. Nothing here about orioles, though. Back at the Electronic Zoo and distracted from my mission, I clicked on the gorilla and under it I found, among 80 or so other sites, the primate gallery archive, where digital photos of primates are organized by taxonomic group. This site includes a primate of the week section; the venerable gorilla occupied that place of honor when I visited. It is perhaps only a temporary irony, but the very graphics that now make the web compelling to people also make it frustrating to use. Photographs, for one thing, occupy a lot of memory and can take a long time to appear on screen. But even if they load quickly, once they are there, reproduction quality is generally low. When the novelty of seeing a gibbon on your screen has passed, it would probably be better to see its picture in a book. I jumped from electronic primates to a listing of 85 different mycology sites ranging from Brazilian Fungi to Fungi Perfecti and finally landing on Myko Web, developed by the past president of the Mycological Society of San Francisco. There are beautiful fungi photos here along with species descriptions and wild mushroom recipes. The webmeister promises to soon list 100 photos and descriptions of the common fungi of the Bay Area. (The web is riddled with promises.) From mushrooms I jumped to the United States Geological Survey's (USGS) earthquake site, where there is a great deal of detailed information about cutting-edge earthquake research. On the other hand, practical advice on how to prepare for an earthquake is pretty cursory and of the "get under a sturdy desk or table and cover your face" variety. Good advice, but you hardly need a two-thousand-dollar computer and web access to learn that. Most interesting on the USGS site are the archival maps of earthquakes and records of their intensities; these maps are compiled in real time by computers and are available one minute after a quake, in case your computer is with you under the desk. Back in the Electronic Zoo once more I clicked on the butterfly in the mural and found myself at a listing of entomology conferences, the most eccentric of which is dedicated to forensics. It opens with a line drawing of a murder scene. The victim is lying face down, knife in back, while the entomologist swings a butterfly net over the lifeless body. This site includes descriptions of the most common arthropods occurring on dead bodies, a bunch of forensic entomology case studies, and a how-to guide to determining whether a corpse has been transported to the crime scene or died in situ. From forensics I jumped to a medical entomology site where I found an extensive collection of photographs of mosquitoes. Do orioles eat mosquitoes? Following the food web, I jumped from mosquitoes to amphibians and found a number of interesting sites. One of my favorites, Robert Drewes's Frogs of the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest in Kenya, is located here on the Academy's web site. Another novel herpetology site allows the user to do a bloodless, virtual frog dissection. I must have looked at a couple of hundred sites, and I never did find out which species of oriole was nesting in my yard or whether banana trees are a customary nesting tree for orioles of this type. Is there an answer out there on the web? Probably. But in as anarchistic and shape-shifting a medium as this, the information you seek often remains tantalizingly beyond your reach. Researching on the web is like talking to a crazy, narcoleptic philosopher-scientist who seldom gives a straight answer, is prone to fall asleep at the most exciting moment in a conversation, but usually says something interesting before he nods off. Ask him about orioles in banana trees and he'll tell you about forensic entomology or give you a glimpse of a spider's fecal pellet under great magnification. At the end of my day I found an example of a successful web page called Wildernet: American Environment and American Culture, created by a Yale seminar in American studies. It includes various texts from John Muir, Terry Tempest Williams, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry David Thoreau who, in his essay on walking, wrote: "When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers [and computer-dependent editors] stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them--as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon--I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago...."
Gordy Slack is Assistant Editor of California Wild. |
Fall 1996
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