The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

by Rebecca Skloot

  These questions intrigued Daniel Berlyne, working on his PhD in the 1940s at Yale. He distinguished between the exploring curiosity, shared with animals, and the kind he felt was uniquely human, “epistemic”: that curiosity based in the desire for knowledge. What type of things triggered human curiosity? he wondered. What would be our equivalent to corks and a rubber mat? To find out, he gave undergraduates in the course “Normal Human Personality” at Brooklyn College a list of 48 questions about invertebrates.

  For example:

  “What crops do some ants cultivate in underground ‘farms’?”

  “What form does the clam’s brain take?”

  “How does the spider avoid being caught in its own web?”

  “How do sea wasps swim?”

  Now, he said to them, and I say to you, which makes you most curious?

  Sifting through his results, Berlyne concluded that curiosity is spurred by the novel, the complex, the ambiguous, the uncertain, and the surprising. When elements previously thought of as incompatible are harnessed together—a juxtaposition—the curiosity grows stronger. Loewenstein described these traits as “violated expectations,” and noted that often, the closer the subject matter was to the observer’s life, the more intense the need was to stare, to figure it out.

  In a study published in 2009, scientist Min Jeong Kang and others recreated Berlyne’s experiment using MRI equipment that let them see where blood flowed in the brain. They showed Cal Tech students slides with questions, then asked them to rate how curious they were about the answers. (The questions ranged farther afield than Berlyne’s, covering rock bands, politics, and snack foods. It is worth noting, though, that one of the questions that prompted the most curiosity was “What is the only type of animal besides a human that can get a sunburn?” Animals make us endlessly curious.) These intellectual questions spurred a physiological response. Curious students’ pupils dilated. Activity increased in the caudate nucleus, the bilateral prefrontal cortex, and the parahippocampal gyri, which the scientists interpreted as the brain anticipating a reward. Other studies have charted the way curiosity triggers the production and release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with heightened arousal and motivation, creating the experience of pleasure. The mind becomes receptive, wakes up; that little mink grows hungry.

  Incidentally, reading Berlyne made me realize how similar these traits are to what I ask of my writing students. The opening of their essays should make an irresistible offer to the reader—to show her that her assumptions about the way the world works are wrong, to present an odd juxtaposition and promise to unravel it, to reveal the strange hidden at the heart of the familiar. Not surprisingly, Berlyne later went on to study aesthetics, exploring what makes viewers stare at one painting longer, and with more pleasure, than another.

  Given Berlyne’s formulation, it makes sense that the Dutch couldn’t stop looking at the Surinam toad. The animal, its life history, complicated questions they were asking about humans. For example, how did we breed? Some claimed they could see the man in miniature inside the sperm head. Others felt the egg contained the whole, a preformed creature that started to grow when nudged by the sperm. Still others argued for a more gradual development. And here was a swarm of tiny toads, emerging complete from their mother. It violated expectations of toad reproduction (eggs) and mammal reproduction (live birth). And from the mother’s back? What could that mean? It was a disturbed mirror. Irresistible.

  One of those most fascinated by the Surinam toad during Golden Age Amsterdam was an artist and naturalist named Maria Sibylla Merian. She was curious about metamorphosis—of insects, of frogs—and she visited the best Dutch cabinets of curiosity, including those of Ruysch and Witsen. But she was dissatisfied by what she found there. The preserved specimens didn’t tell her how the creatures lived: what they ate, where they hid, how they moved from shape to shape.

  So she went to Surinam to investigate, spending two years gathering plants and moths and lizards, raising them through their life cycles, taking notes. For her painting of the toad, she captured a female and dropped it in a jar of brandy as soon as the young broke the skin. In the final image, the Surinam toad is mideruption. The mother’s face is impassive. One little toad swims behind her, ready to dart off into its own perverse life.

  Several years ago my own curiosity took me to Surinam. I was writing about Maria Sibylla Merian and her thirst to understand the insects, lizards, fruits, and toads of South America. I hoped to retrace her footsteps, wondering about her drive and self-conception. What was she doing there? How did she get away with it in a time when the slightest sign of eccentricity could cause someone to be burned as a witch? That a woman would travel to Surinam with her 21-year-old daughter to conduct field studies 300 years ago violated expectations. That strange juxtaposition of person and time and interest made me itch.

  It was not an easy journey, for reasons both practical and emotional. The first airline where I bought a ticket went bankrupt a week before the plane left the ground, no one in Surinam answered my phone calls or e-mails as I tried to make arrangements, and I had to leave my nascent family—my husband and 10-month-old twins—for a week and a half. But this was my work; the money from this book was sustaining us, I told myself. Besides, I wanted to go. Chasing an epistemic question dilated my pupils, lit me on fire.

  Despite my itchiness, though, I was not very brave. Not as brave as Cheryl, the anthropologist who hitchhiked on canoes into the rainforest to interview remote tribes of Maroons, descendants of escaped slaves who had fled the Dutch sugar plantations. She looked at the forest floor, found evidence of earlier ways of life. Cheryl said she’d arrange for me to fly to her study sites and I said no, afraid of her descriptions of the drug dealers and prostitutes and miners in the interior, of evenings spent picking ticks off each other over a sloth stew. Who knew what might happen? All I could picture was the tiny plane going down and my death in flames and broken branches.

  Instead I took the bus from the capital of Paramaribo to the National Zoological Collection of Suriname at Anton de Kom University. The university logo displays a Surinam toad next to a microscope. After a quick hard rain, steam rose off my clothes as the curator of invertebrates gave me the tour, highlighting the species that enthralled the Dutch: the lantern flies with heads reputed to light up, bat skeletons, hundreds of kinds of beetles. In a hallway packed with specimens, a Surinam toad glowed in a jar.

  Leached of color, floating in space, unmoored from time, the toad had transcended its lifespan with the help of pickling. She was less golem than ghost. The ragged holes left her looking mutilated. I could see that the attraction to her is snarled up in fear: dread of infestation and disfigurement, loss of bodily integrity.

  Looking at the suspended skin and bone made me think for a moment, not about the toad but about the jar. It’s hard to analyze—a form of dissection—subjects in motion. How much easier to go part by part when they are held still. Think of where we put our curiosities: in a bottle, in a zoo, in a glass display case with their stuffed peers. Faced with an object in isolation, the mind can stretch its muscles, crawl and explore. The blank background forces focus, a situation that we crave but that is ultimately artificial, stripped of vital information.

  The image of the pale toad in the jar makes me think of Barbara Benedict’s recent book Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry. She traces the evolution of curiosity during the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, the era of Maria Sibylla Merian and many other curious folks. This period included the scientific revolution, Linnaeus’s categorization, comprehensive exploration of the Americas, the birth of the novel. Even as curiosity gained respect, though, it remained suspect in women particularly, a category that includes Eve, Bluebeard’s wife, and Pandora as well as gossips, women thrilling with useless information. The reason? As Benedict says, “Curiosity is the mark of discontent” and “curiosity is seeing your way out of your place.” One of the things that makes us m
ost curious is the suggestion that the world isn’t how we think it is, that our categories are the wrong ones, and the promise is that the answer to our questions will give us a different, fuller, better view.

  It’s easy to dismiss this criticism as reflecting another world, one more obsessed with maintaining the status quo and keeping women in their place. But Benedict makes other points about the nature of curiosity, points that are harder to ignore. The way, for example, that items in the cabinets of curiosity (and modern-day museums and zoos) have been stripped of their use, of their ability to work. A bow and arrow, a ceremonial mask—to be a curiosity, they have to become not a way to feed yourself or talk with the gods but an artifact. To own one means you have the status to possess a bow and arrow for decorative purposes. Curiosity can turn the objects of its desire into, well, objects. They can enter the system of commerce; they can be used and then discarded. Bluebeard, Benedict reminds us, was also curious. He had his own collection—of women’s heads, which he could study without having to contemplate their subjectivity, their humanity.

  Before I left to go to Surinam, the toad seemed to be a story about ocular lust and the extent people will go to satisfy it. But it’s also a story about the glass, its insulating properties, the attraction of those boundaries. They keep us safe—not just safe to make precise observations, but also safe from being observed ourselves. Maybe this is the real danger of curiosity, the teeth in the warning. Though it’s easy to laugh at Brooks, the preacher who claimed “curiosity is spiritual drunkenness,” maybe he has a point about the risk that it will distort our sense of what is important, that it will obscure the big picture.

  For curiosity to have value, perhaps we have to allow it to be the beginning of something larger, to pursue it past the initial itch, the spark of hunger, the quick answer, the dopamine burst, to the “real investigation” Darwin asked for. Darwin, so hard on curiosity, was relentless at looking at the big picture, of looking at creatures through time, of challenging categories and turning the mirror back on humans. We have to see the disturbed world it implies, and ourselves living within it, moving beyond the role of observer, of questioning mind.

  Several days after seeing the toad in the jar, I paced along one of the trails through the Brownsberg Nature Park, at the edge of the rainforest, through the tall trees with invisible crowns, the wasps building bulbous nests on the branches, the odd smashed fruit spilling its seeds in the dust. The plants Merian picked and painted often didn’t have European names—she worked with the head of Amsterdam’s botanical gardens to categorize them—but in places she used the Amerindian name or left the plant nameless. Brown-furred flanks rustled in the bushes. Monkey tails unfurled into upside-down question marks.

  Maybe my question about Merian was never going to have a definitive answer. Certainly I could never know what was going on in her mind. Maybe the question was going to change as I pursued it. Certainly its pursuit was changing me.

  Off to the side of the trail, a mud-colored head poked out of a small pond. I knelt to see if it was a Surinam toad, but with half its body submerged, no real line between skin and water, I couldn’t say. No label declared it rare or important or special or forbidden. No brandy or videotape scissored it from time. It had escaped the box, like one of Pandora’s demons, and now might breed or rot or pioneer some new behavior, do its work of living, participating in the fleshlife of the forest. And for the moment I was content not to know. Anything could happen. And then it ducked back under, out of reach.

  Answers (just in case you were curious):

  Ants cultivate edible fungus in underground “farms.” Interestingly, the 17th-century Dutch generally and Merian specifically were also fascinated by these same ants, the leaf-cutter ants of Central and South America. They scissor bits of leaves and carry them over their heads like green sails back to the anthill. Early naturalists proposed many theories for what the ant was doing—using the leaves as food or miniature roofs—but it would take a 19th-century biologist to unravel the mystery.

  The clam doesn’t have what we would recognize as a brain. It has three “nerve centers,” pairs of ganglia near the mouth, near the foot, and near the back of the body.

  A spider doesn’t stick to its own web because only some threads of the web are sticky, and the spider avoids them. In addition, its legs are covered with a nonstick coating, and specialized claws allow it to move lightly and precisely.

  Despite a fascinating life history presented to the undergraduates by Berlyne in an effort to spur their interest, the nine-inch-long sea wasp, a creature with a fatal sting whose main enemy is the sea-wasp-eating porpoise, is fictional.

  And, finally, the correct answer in the Cal Tech study was “pigs sunburn.” More recent research has shown that whales sunburn too.

  DAVID WOLMAN

  The Aftershocks

  FROM Matter

  GIULIO SELVAGGI WAS asleep when the shaking started. It was the night of April 5, 2009, and the head of Italy’s National Earthquake Center had worked late into the night in Rome before going home to crash.

  From the motion of his bed, Selvaggi could tell the quake was big—but not close. When you’re near the epicenter of a major quake, it’s like being a kernel of corn inside a popcorn maker. When you’re farther away, the movement is slower and steadier, back and forth, as the shock waves hit you.

  Selvaggi hopped from the bed and checked his phone, but there were no messages. He hurried into the living room, dialing the office on the way.

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  “L’Aquila, 5.8,” came the answer.

  (It would later be classified as a 6.2.)

  Selvaggi’s first thought: At least it’s not a 7. A magnitude 7 quake centered in L’Aquila, a medieval town high in the mountains, would have killed 10,000 people.

  Seventy miles from Rome, Giustino Parisse had already been woken twice by tremors. The second one, at 12:39 in the morning, had stirred his whole family. Checking the house, Parisse, a 50-year-old journalist with the L’Aquila newspaper Il Centro, met his teenage son in the hallway.

  “Questo terremoto ci ha rotto,” said 17-year-old Domenico, restless. This quake is breaking our balls.

  “I know, I know,” Parisse replied. “But you have school tomorrow. You really have to go back to bed.”

  He switched on a light to peek in on his 15-year-old daughter, Maria Paola. She wasn’t asleep.

  “We’re all going to die here,” she said.

  Startled, Parisse tried to muster a joke. “Nothing could ever kill you,” he said, and headed back to bed.

  Three hours later Parisse and his wife woke to an avalanche of plaster and brick. They clawed and scrambled their way into the hall, lighting their path with a cell phone, and tried to reach the children. But it was too late: Domenico and Maria Paola were buried, dead.

  The 28-second earthquake had demolished hundreds of buildings throughout L’Aquila. By the time the shaking was over, 297 people had been killed, more than 1,000 injured, and tens of thousands were made homeless.

  During the winter and early spring of 2009, Selvaggi and other seismologists at Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology had been monitoring numerous tremors around L’Aquila. The sequence of small quakes over a short period of time, known as a “seismic swarm,” is distinct from the aftershocks that follow a big quake.

  And in places like L’Aquila they are not necessarily abnormal. Local media repeatedly relayed that generic message to the public. Regional government officials insisted there was no need to fret, despite chronically unenforced building codes. The Civil Protection Department for Abruzzo, the region where L’Aquila is located, even issued a press release flatly proclaiming there would be no big earthquake.

  But the people of L’Aquila were understandably concerned. Over the centuries the city had been devastated by several major quakes: one in 1703 killed 10,000 people, and a magnitude 7.0 quake in 1915 killed 30,000. This history has given ris
e to a culture of caution. When the ground seems especially temperamental, many residents—like their parents and grandparents before them—grab blankets and cigarettes and head outside to mill about in a piazza or a nearby park. Others sleep in their cars. Better not to be in an ancient building that hasn’t been seismically reinforced.

  As the swarm continued, anxieties were compounded by a local personality named Giampaolo Giuliani. Giuliani uses a homemade apparatus to try to predict imminent earthquakes. His proclamations—and the amplifying power of media interest in them—earned him a reputation in town. During church services at Santa Maria del Soccorso or over an orange soda at Bar Belvedere, he was often greeted not with Buongiorno but Tutto a posto? (Everything look okay?). One local news outlet referred to him as “the prophet of doom,” and every time the earth shook that winter it seemed to validate Giuliani’s incessant agitation.

  By late March thousands of tremors had happened, dozens of them hitting 3.5 on the Richter scale. Then, on March 30, a 4.0 tremor catapulted the situation from tense to near madness. Sensing the need for a gesture that would calm the public’s nerves, the country’s Civil Protection Department—Italy’s equivalent to FEMA—decided to call in the country’s top experts, the Serious Risks Commission, to assess the situation. Selvaggi, the seismologist in Rome, wasn’t on the commission. But his boss, Enzo Boschi, was. A titanic figure in the Italian science community, Boschi asked Selvaggi to come along and talk with the group.

  Before the meeting Italy’s civil protection chief, Guido Bertolaso, called the regional office in Abruzzo. According to a transcript that was later leaked to the media, Bertolaso said the goal of the meeting was “to shut up all of these morons and calm people down.”

  He was particularly annoyed that local officials had tried to counter Giuliani’s claims with the preposterous response that there would be no quake.