09 janeiro 2018

Axolotl

Amphibians are not often considered charismatic. The axolotl is different.

With its ear-to-ear grin, pink feathery headdress of gills and frantic underwater dance, this amphibian has captivated generations of admirers. Once revered by Aztecs, today the axolotl appears in many forms. It is a symbol for Mexican national identity in anthropologist Roger Bartra’s book La Jaula de la Melancolia (The Cage of Melancholy); Mexican muralist Diego Rivera includes axolotl swimming near a male figure’s genitals—the center of creation—in his mural “Water, Origin of Life.”

You may have heard of the axolotl because its image is so ubiquitous—and so, it seems, is it. Millions of the creatures thrive around the world. The axolotl is a popular pet, particularly in Japan, where they are bred so widely that they are also served deep-fried at some restaurants. They are also distributed so commonly to labs for research that they are basically the white mice of amphibians, thanks to their unique genetic profile and their potential to unlock the secrets of evolution and regeneration.

But few realize that, in nature, the axolotl is in peril. It is native only to Lake Xochimilco, a UNESCO World Heritage site outside Mexico City, where it has long played a role in Mexican tradition. And there, it is on the brink of extinction.

In 2006, the species was declared critically endangered due to habitat degradation and the pervasiveness of invasive fish in the lake, introduced decades ago in a well-intentioned attempt to create fisheries and alleviate food insecurity. In 2009, experts estimated that the axolotl population had fallen 90 percent in the past four years, a decline further exacerbated by urbanization. In 2015, scientists briefly believed that the critter might have gone fully extinct in the wild—only to find one a few weeks later.

When Luis Zambrano started working with the axolotl in 2002, he knew only a little about the curious critter’s cultural significance to Mexico and their popularity throughout the world. Zambrano, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), had previously focused on food webs of fish; he started working with axolotls when fellow researchers in his lab asked if he would help them find axolotl in his by-catch. He was eventually instrumental in designating the axolotl as a threatened species and is now the leading expert on their conservation.

At first, Zambrano dreaded working the amphibians. Axolotls are frustratingly difficult to catch (besides that, there are very few left) and the local people initially didn’t seem keen to work with him, he says. But as he learned of the animals’ rich cultural and biological significance, he quickly grew entranced by the amphibians. He even found a connection to his prior research: as aquatic predators, axolotls are highly important in food webs. Zambrano started to explore how they interact with different species, how they predate, and how they are preyed upon.
“It was like starting with a bad date and falling in love,” he laughs now.

According to Zambrano, axolotls face a variety of threats in their natural habitat. They are only found in Lake Xochimilco, but Lake Xochimilco is suffering. The lake system is highly eutrophic, meaning it is so rich in nutrients from agricultural runoff that the booming plant life kills the endemic species by depriving them of oxygen. Invasive Asiatic carp and tilapia, introduced by the government to increase food security in underserved communities, have now supplanted the axolotl as the top predators, and are known for picking off the scrumptious juveniles.

Pollution from Mexico City is also an issue: strong storms can cause the city’s sewer system to overflow and release human waste into Lake Xochimilco. With their permeable amphibian skin, axolotls are particularly vulnerable to the ammonia, heavy metals, and other toxins carried by human excrement.

At the same time, Mexico City is rapidly expanding, and outlying areas like Xochilmilco become hotbeds for legal and illegal development. Developers view areas like Xochimilco opportunistically and have been grabbing up permits for large-scale developments in critical areas. As people migrate to Mexico City for work, those who cannot afford to live in the central areas look for places to live on the outskirts. Zambrano has observed that not only is the axolotl stressed by noise, but the rapid urbanization also presents untold threats to its only habitat.
 
The problem is, having captive populations of axolotls is not enough, says Randal Voss, a biologist at the University of Kentucky. Voss, who maintains a collection of axolotls for distribution to labs around the world as Resource Director of the Ambystoma Genetic Stock Center, knows the problem intimately. When he looks at his pedigree records, he knows the stock is inbred and thus has less genetic diversity due to the mating between related animals.

In one sense, a homogeneous stock can be good for science, as it is much more likely to facilitate reproducible studies. “On the other hand, it can compromise the health of a captive population,” Voss explains.

Captive populations are more vulnerable to catastrophe. Disease, or even an accidental fire, could wipe out an entire lab population almost instantaneously. Between the inbreeding and efforts to cross the axolotl with the tiger salamander to introduce some genetic diversity, the collection is also very different than the wild populations; not only are their genomes different, but they are highly domesticated and adapted to humans.

Researchers like Voss are working on sequencing the wild axolotl genome, but the sheer size of the genome and the lack of access to wild populations means they have not yet completed it. If the animals went extinct before they could complete the sequencing, they would lose the groundwork for many studies that use the axolotl’s unique molecular toolbox.

That’s key, because axolotls are one of the most important animals we have for studying regeneration. When an axolotl loses its limb or crushes its spine, it is able to regenerate the lost or damaged body parts with stunning perfection. Scientists have seen these creatures regenerate an entire limb in as little as 40 days, with immune cells called macrophages building up tissue until a new limb is formed. As scientists are now learning, certain microRNA groups give axolotls and other salamanders this superpower.

They aren’t unique in this trait. “Regeneration is not special or specific to axolotl,” Voss explains, “It’s just that the axolotl is the best model amongst all the salamanders for doing this research.” Moreover, axolotls have enormous embryos, the largest amongst amphibians, which are useful for stem cell research.
Yet perhaps the axolotl’s most crucial trait to scientists goes back to that adorable baby face. 

B8C6TT.jpg 
Few realize that the lovable, cotton-candy-pink amphibian is on the edge of extinction.

1920px-Ambystoma_mexicanum_at_Vancouver_Aquarium.jpg Axolotls are richly represented in captivity. These two, at the Vancouver Aquarium, are leucistic, meaning they have less pigmentation than normal.
.....
Axolotls are neotenic, which means that unlike other amphibians, they reach sexual maturity without undergoing metamorphosis. Frogs, for example, are aged tadpoles; axolotls maintain their youthful, larval visage throughout all stages of their lives. Axolotls evolutionarily shed the thyroid hormone that triggers metamorphosis to adapt to habitats with low levels of iodine and other resources necessary for maturation.

And because axolotls don’t go through metamorphosis, they don’t depend on the seasons and other environmental factors for breeding. That means scientists can breed them throughout the course of the year. Axolotls may also offer insight to the genetic controls that regulate the switch in life for processes like puberty.

With the race against the clock growing ever pressing, the axolotl conservation efforts ramped up in the early 2000s with a proposed captive breeding and species reintroduction project. Richard Griffiths, professor of biological conservation at the University of Kent and leader of the axolotl conservation efforts for the Darwin Initiative, the UK Government’s funding program to assist with biological diversity projects in the developing world, recognized early on that reintroduction was a long shot given the threats to the species in Lake Xochimilco.

“There really wouldn’t be any point to doing captive breeding and reintroduction,” Griffiths explains. “One of the rules of captive breeding is you have to sort the threats out first.”

Thus, the team developed an action plan in 2004 to raise the profile of the axolotl in the local community through education programs, workshops, and public meetings. They focused on integrating the axolotl into the tourism in the community. One of Griffiths’s favorite projects was the training programs for romeros, or boatmen, to become guides for tours about the axolotl for tourists visiting the lake.

“It’s the best captive audience,” Griffiths jokes. “You have eight people in a boat, and they can’t get off!”
Local businesses like La Casita del Axolotl breed axolotls for sale and conduct tours with their guests and clients. “We work with the tourism that we see at the traditional piers,” explains Karen Perez, one of the managers of La Casita del Axolotl. “We give our guests an explanation about axolotls and what they can do for them.”

The local community was always essential for the axolotl conservation efforts. The difficult method of collecting axolotls—searching for subtle bubbles and casting the net just right—that is needed for censuses is hard to teach, but it is a skill that is passed down through generations of local fishermen. 
It wasn’t always smooth sailing in Xochimilco. “When I started to work in Xochimilco, it was not easy,” Zambrano says. Locals distrust scientists, who have historically exploited the community for data in the past without coming back or paying them sufficiently. Zambrano approached the relationship differently. He knew the community had all the knowledge he needed, so he offered his data collecting skills and credibility as a way for them to have their voices heard—and to help their livelihoods.

These efforts have scaled up in recent years as Zambrano involves local farmers in the process. Local farmers are encouraged to farm with traditional chinampas, or “floating gardens” constructed with aquatic vegetation and mud from the lake, to create sanctuaries for the axolotl. The productive and sustainable agricultural system does not use chemical pesticides—they have even experimented with grinding up invasive tilapia for fertilizer—and creates a semi-permeable barrier to provide refuge for the axolotl with clean, filtered water.

“We are not discovering anything new that wasn’t discovered 2,000 years ago,” Zambrano explains.
It may not be enough. “Despite all this work, there is no doubt that the axolotl is in decline within the larger system,” says Griffiths, pointing out that the threats to the lake system are simply too great. Zambrano is hopeful. He has seen a steady increase in interest in the axolotl, which he hopes to leverage into local government action. The first step, he says, is to save Xochimilco.

In Julio Cortázar’s 1952 short story “Axolotl,” the narrator writes that “the axolotls were like witnesses of something, and at times like horrible judges,” before turning into one himself. If history doesn’t change, experts warn, real life axolotls may witness is their own demise.

 “I think that we are in a threshold in this moment,” says Zambrano. “But if we follow the path that we have followed for the last 50 years where the government is trying to rescue Xochimilco through more human development, then [the axolotl] will definitely be extinct in the next 10 years.”

Smithsonian Magazine

07 janeiro 2018

The Remarkable Influence of "A Wrinkle in Time"

(My translation for Oficina do Livro)


When Léna Roy was 7 years old, her teacher read the first chapter of A Wrinkle in Time aloud to her second-grade class. After school, Léna ran to her grandmother’s house, which was around the corner from her school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, to finish the book on her own. She curled up in bed and devoured it. She felt just like the hotheaded, stubborn heroine Meg Murry, and took comfort in the fact that a flawed adolescent girl could save the world. “It was almost like your permission to be a real person,” Roy says. “You don’t have to be perfect.”
Millions of other adolescent girls (and boys) have made the same liberating discovery while reading A Wrinkle in Time. What’s different about Roy is that her grandmother happened to be Madeleine L’Engle, the book’s author, who revolutionized serious young adult fiction with her clever mash-up of big ideas, science fantasy and adventure—and a geeky girl action hero way ahead of her time.
Since its 1962 publication, Wrinkle has sold more than ten million copies and been turned into a graphic novel, an opera and two films, including an ambitious adaptation from the director Ava DuVernay due out in March. The book also kicked open the door for other bright young heroines and the amazingly lucrative franchises they appear in, from whip-smart Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter books to lethal Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games. Leonard Marcus, author of the L’Engle biography Listening for Madeleine, says Wrinkle “set the stage for the reception of Harry Potter in this country.” Previously, he says, science fiction and fantasy were suitable for high-end British authors like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in Britain but in the States were relegated to pulp magazines and drugstore paperbacks.

Then came L’Engle, a 41-year-old writer who spent three months in 1959 writing the hard-to-categorize story that would become A Wrinkle in Time. While Meg Murry and her companions traveled through time and space to save her father, a scientist trapped by evil forces on a distant planet, readers had to wrap their minds around the fifth dimension, the horrors of conformity and the power of love. L’Engle believed that literature should show youngsters they were capable of taking on the forces of evil in the universe, not just the everyday pains of growing up. “If it’s not good enough for adults,” she once wrote, “it’s not good enough for children.”

Publishers hated it. Every firm her agent turned to rejected the manuscript. One advised to “do a cutting job on it—by half.” Another complained “it’s something between an adult and juvenile novel.” Finally, a friend advised L’Engle to send it to one of the most prestigious houses of all, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. John Farrar liked the manuscript. A test reader he gave it to, though, was unimpressed: “I think this is the worst book I have ever read, it reminds me of The Wizard of Oz.” Yet FSG acquired it, and Hal Vursell, the book’s editor, talked it up in letters he sent to reviewers: “It’s distinctly odd, extremely well written,” he wrote to one, “and is going to make greater intellectual and emotional demands on 12 to 16 year olds than most formula fiction for this age group.”

When it debuted, not only was Wrinkle widely praised—“wholly absorbing,” said the New York Times Book Review—but it won the Newbery Medal, the most important award in children’s lit. “The almost universal reaction of children to this year’s winning book, by wanting to talk about it to each other and to elders, shows the deep desire to understand as well as to enjoy,” said Newbery committee member Ruth Gagliardo. American publishers, initially resistant to genre bending, soon were producing their own teen epics, including Lloyd Alexander’s Newbery-winning Chronicles of Prydain books and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series.

L’Engle went on to write more than 40 books, including works of nonfiction and poetry, though none was as acclaimed as Wrinkle. None was as controversial, either. Libraries and schools frequently banned the novel because of its entanglements with religion. In one passage, Jesus Christ is compared to Shakespeare, Einstein and the Buddha—a heretical notion to some authorities. On the American Library Association’s list of most “frequently challenged” for the 1990s, Wrinkle was No. 23.

Among the countless girls changed forever by L’Engle’s book was Diane Duane, who first read it as a 10-year-old in 1962. She’d consumed all the science fiction and fantasy at her local library but had never encountered anyone like Meg. “Finally,” Duane recalls, “here was a girl character being treated as if her take on what was going on around her, her analysis and her emotional reactions to the things that were happening around her, were real and were worth paying attention to.” Today Duane is hailed as the best-selling author of So You Want to Be a Wizard and other titles in her Young Wizards fantasy series, which features a young female protagonist, Nita. “All the time L’Engle’s shadow—and a very bright shadow, it has to be said—was lying over that work for me,” she says. “It would have been very difficult for me to do that writing without thinking about her a lot.”

Léna Roy, who is a writing teacher in New York and the co-author of an upcoming biography of her grandmother, Becoming Madeleine, doesn’t remember L’Engle ever calling herself a feminist, though she was proud of being what Roy calls a “trailblazing woman.” L’Engle had spent her years at Smith College editing the campus literary magazine alongside Betty Friedan, who later penned The Feminine Mystique. L’Engle herself suggested it was easy to make her protagonist a strong girl. “I’m a female,” she once said. “Why would I give all the best ideas to a male?”

Now the movie adaptation of Wrinkle is poised to make L’Engle’s creation even more groundbreaking. DuVernay, the first woman of color to direct a live-action film with a production budget over $100 million, intentionally cast nonwhite actors in lead roles. (Storm Reid will play Meg, and Deric McCabe will play her younger brother Charles.) In 1962, it was radical to see a young girl in charge. Now a new generation of black girls (and boys) can see themselves onscreen and dream of saving the world.

The Smithsonian Magazine







Pathological consumption, NOT for 2018!

George Monbiot:

There’s nothing they need, nothing they don’t own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious” inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a Scratch Off World wall map. 

They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second, embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they’re in landfill. For thirty seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic stimulus that lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials whose impacts will ramify for generations. 

Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale(1). Even the goods we might have expected to hold onto are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (breaking quickly) or perceived obsolesence (becoming unfashionable). 

But many of the products we buy, especially for Christmas, cannot become obsolescent. The term implies a loss of utility, but they had no utility in the first place. An electronic drum-machine t-shirt; a Darth Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped i-phone case; an individual beer can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog: no one is expected to use them, or even look at them, after Christmas Day. They are designed to elicit thanks, perhaps a snigger or two, and then be thrown away. 

The fatuity of the products is matched by the profundity of the impacts. Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed for manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and combined into compounds of utter pointlessness. When you take account of the fossil fuels whose use we commission in other countries, manufacturing and consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide production(2). We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath thermometers and desktop crazy golfers. 

People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smart phone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility(3). Forests are felled to make “personalised heart-shaped wooden cheese board sets”. Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. This is pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us.

In 2007, the journalist Adam Welz records, 13 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa. This year, so far, 585 have been shot(4). No one is entirely sure why. But one answer is that very rich people in Vietnam are now sprinkling ground rhino horn on their food or snorting it like cocaine to display their wealth. It’s grotesque, but it scarcely differs from what almost everyone in industrialised nations is doing: trashing the living world through pointless consumption. 

This boom has not happened by accident. Our lives have been corralled and shaped in order to encourage it. World trade rules force countries to participate in the festival of junk. Governments cut taxes, deregulate business, manipulate interest rates to stimulate spending. But seldom do the engineers of these policies stop and ask “spending on what?”. When every conceivable want and need has been met (among those who have disposable money), growth depends on selling the utterly useless. The solemnity of the state, its might and majesty, are harnessed to the task of delivering Terry the Swearing Turtle to our doors. 

Grown men and women devote their lives to manufacturing and marketing this rubbish, and dissing the idea of living without it. “I always knit my gifts”, says a woman in a television ad for an electronics outlet. “Well you shouldn’t,” replies the narrator(5). An advertisement for Google’s latest tablet shows a father and son camping in the woods. Their enjoyment depends on the Nexus 7’s special features(6). The best things in life are free, but we’ve found a way of selling them to you. 

The growth of inequality that has accompanied the consumer boom ensures that the rising economic tide no longer lifts all boats. In the US in 2010 a remarkable 93% of the growth in incomes accrued to the top 1% of the population(7). The old excuse, that we must trash the planet to help the poor, simply does not wash. For a few decades of extra enrichment for those who already possess more money than they know how to spend, the prospects of everyone else who will live on this earth are diminished. 

So effectively have governments, the media and advertisers associated consumption with prosperity and happiness that to say these things is to expose yourself to opprobrium and ridicule. Witness last week’s Moral Maze programme, in which most of the panel lined up to decry the idea of consuming less, and to associate it, somehow, with authoritarianism(8). When the world goes mad, those who resist are denounced as lunatics. 

Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke, but for god’s sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you care. All it shows is that you don’t.


3. See the film Blood in the Mobile. http://bloodinthemobile.org/
7. Emmanuel Saez, 2nd March 2012. Striking it Richer: the Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (Updated with 2009 and 2010 estimates). http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2010.pdf