Summer woes and wins

Another month, another column, another weather debacle. June’s drama was a heat wave, miserable but only for a few days. July brought a deluge the results of which we continue to endure and pay for, damaging both to our town roads and our homes and property. Charlotte’s dedicated road crew and local contractors have done yeoman’s work to return our lives to some level of normalcy. Thank you, thank you.

I’ve been reading a book that makes humans seem rather bumbling, “An Immense World” by Ed Yong. While our five senses, vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell, guide us through life, Yong’s volume enumerates 13 ways that animals navigate their world.

A human breath goes straight to the lungs while a dog’s inhalation splits. “A smaller tributary … enters a labyrinth of thick, bony walls that are plastered with a sticky sheet called olfactory epithelium,” Yong says.

Neurons, dozens of times more than humans possess, carry messages from passing odorants to part of the brain called the olfactory bulb. There’s more, much more, but my takeaway is that dogs explore their world with a sensory richness that humans cannot imagine.

Bats navigate and pursue their prey using echolocation, up to 200 ultrasonic bursts per second. Unlike human senses that are passive, bats actively transmit, receive via sensitive ears and interpret these pulses. In a darkened lab, bats can avoid thin wires and find their way around clear glass panels to flying meals that lie beyond.

Dolphins share this skill set, although the mechanisms differ and are devilishly difficult to study. Dolphins are big, smart and willful, refusing to participate in many experiments. Thus, researchers can only study those that live in aquariums or naval facilities. In the 1970s, the U.S. Navy invested heavily in echolocation research in a quest to improve military sonar by reverse-engineering the animals’ abilities.

Another animal ability, magnetoreception, guides monarch butterflies, spiny lobsters, songbirds, sea turtles and many others. A geomagnetic field surrounds the planet, driving migrations that can span oceans and continents.

One of the most perilous journeys is that of hatching sea turtles. Emerging to a world of predators on land and in the air and sea, the hatchlings must make their way as quickly as possible to the ocean depths. There they locate a clockwise current that spans the Atlantic Ocean. Sea turtles ride this slow, circular flow for five to ten years while growing big enough to evade all but the largest sharks on the return journey to reproduce where they began life. As the hatchlings began their journey on sandy beaches, this response to magnetic fields in the ocean is embedded in their DNA.

If you read no other chapter in this book, that on magnetic fields is worth a drive to the Charlotte Library. At more than 400 pages, this volume is too much information for even this columnist, but there are layers of fascinating insights and answers to questions you never thought to ask.

A note of hope

While there is no silver bullet to reverse climate change, there are areas of hope and progress. It seems healthy, in this summer of grim weather news, to focus on positive developments. I learned recently, on WNYC’s Science Friday, about a strain of millet that manifested climate resilience in Iowa. After completion of another experiment, the plants were forgotten in a greenhouse.

When time came to clean up, not only had this lone plant survived a torrid summer month with no water, but it produced a nutritional crop. The grains can replace corn in both animal feed and ethanol. Millet is grown in northwestern Colorado and other western regions where summer rain is scarce but had not been tried in Iowa, one of the nation’s grain breadbaskets. Definitely good news.

We’ll end on that note of hope. Enjoy the good of summer and keep track of your umbrella.