| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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life on the edge When the Light Goes Out
Here I am, wriggling on my tummy through a narrow, dark passage. Lumpy This issue is about life that survives in the absence of the sun. Just as life hs filled every physical niche earth has to offer—on, above, and below—so has it filled every moment of the day and night. On these pages, you'll find a broad cross-section of the cast of dark-dwelling characters and their multiple adaptations. There are the lovers of twilight, the night birds and small mammals, from ringtails to bats, that slip onto the scene when the sun goes down, and the moths that make use of every moment of their few short nights. There are moles and gosphers that spend their lieves avoiding the surface, preferring to seek out roots and arthropods in teh soil, and the arthropods themselves that have evolved to feed on the detritus of caves and each other. Buried even deeper in the darkness, right in the rocks, microbial bacteria live off minerals such as iron and manganese, breaking them down to form digestible compounds. And thousands of miles away, deep int he ocean where sunlight never penetrates, are more bacteria able to synthesize the chemical foods they need from sulfur. They form the base of a community of crabs and tubeworms that spring up wherever fissures appear along mid-ocean ridges. During the power outages last summer, I got a call from a reporter from a European newspaper inquiring whether the regular blackouts were benefiting wildlife. I couldn't help. But Senior Editor Kathleen M. Wong in her "Horizons" column describes how some animals are being affected by the lack of blackouts, by the plethora of artificial light that pollutes so much of the urban sky. Featured in "Here At the Academy" this isue is a man most accustomed to surveying the night sky, either in reality or through the simulations of the Morrison Planetarium. Steve Craig has guided the planetarium for almost 20 years, expanding its presentations so that today they reach every child in San Francisco, and most children in the Bay Area during some point in their school careers. This fall, the Planetarium celebrates its 50th Anniversary. Along with "San Francisco: Then and Now," a new presentation already being shown, there will be an all-day celebration on November 9. And the cost of admission throughout this fall will be 74 cents, just as it was 50 years ago. Craig was put in charge of the Planetarium by the late George Lindsay, who was executive director of the California Academy of Sciences from 1963 to 1982. Dr. Lindsay passed away in July 2002. He was resonsible for a "quantium leap" in the Academy's program and exhibit growth, says Curator of Botany Frank Almeda. He initiated the building of Wattis Hall, Cowell Hall, and the Fish Roundabout. A renowned botanist, he was especialy interested in strengthening Academy research and collections. He doubled the curatorial staff, and established the G. Lindsay In-House Research Fund, which has enabled Academy researchers to travel the world in search of species. Despite being an administrator most of his life—he became director of the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix at age 22—he was also the world's leading authority on barrel cacti. His doctoral thesis formed the basis of his book, The Genus Ferocactus, published nearly 50 years later. Barrel cacti are hard to preserve, and many of their most salient characteristics are best shown in photographs. Realizing this, Lindsay took his camera into the field and made the photographs available as part of the definition of a newly described species. Another first was his insistence on studying cacti and other succulents "not only as specimens, but also as populations," Almeda says. As an enthusiastic popularizer of science, Dr. Lindsay contributed 33 articles to Pacific Discovery, California Wild's predecessor (he never liked the name change.) Many are about his travels to Baja California, a land he loved. Keith K. Howell is Editor of California Wild. |