The Shuar people of the upper Amazon dress for special occasions by adorning elaborate ornaments, such as these made of beetles' wing covers. Photo courtesy of the Division of Anthropology (Catalog no. AMNH 40.0/35.04). Click to enlarge.
When dressing for special occasions, the Shuar people of the upper Amazon adorn themselves with ornaments made from materials found in the surrounding rain forest: feathers, plant fibers, animal parts, wood, and stone. Along with colorful headdresses and necklaces, men wear dramatic ear ornaments like those pictured here, which are made from toucan feathers, glass beads, and the iridescent wing covers of the giant ceiba borer beetle, Euchroma gigantea.
The Shuar are one of several Jívaroan tribes who occupy some 7.5 million acres along the border between Peru and Ecuador. The ear ornaments came to the Museum in the 1930s as part of a large collection donated by Dr. Harvey Bassler, a Standard Oil geologist who spent more than a decade studying unexplored areas of the western Amazon basin in search of petroleum. An amateur herpetologist with an interest in local wildlife, Bassler kept a menagerie of rain forest animals in Iquitos and collected thousands of biological specimens for research. He was also one of the first outsiders to spend time among the isolated indigenous peoples of the region, becoming an expert on the cultures of northwestern Amazonia and collecting artifacts in the process.
On completion of his assignment in South America, Bassler shipped 22 tons of books and specimens—including some 10,000 amphibians and reptiles, one of the largest collections of its kind from a single collector—to the Museum in 1934. He later joined the staff to help organize the material. Members might remember the ornaments shown here from the Museum exhibition Body Art: Marks of Identity, which ran from 1999 to 2000. Read more »
Museum Research Associate David Gruber, assistant professor at The City University of New York (CUNY), describes a diving trip in 2011.
We wanted to include a panoramic image of a magnificent coralscape in Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence, and Bloody Bay Wall [off Little Cayman Island] was the perfect place.
But capturing Ansel Adams-like vistas are impossible under water, where sections of the light spectrum—especially reds—are absorbed within a meter. We need to get in very close to our subject and use flash photography to capture the reef ’s true color. We have to repeat this process hundreds of times over the wall face. Then, the small consecutive images are painstakingly stitched together to create a life-sized, true-color view.
Underwater photographer Jim Hellemn developed this process to create a 20-foot by 70-foot true-color image of the Bloody Bay Wall in 1999. Returning to the wall 12 years later (with the support of a National Science Foundation Connecting Research to Public Audiences grant) allowed us to overlay the images and really see the way a coral wall ages. Some of the corals are disappearing, some of the sponges have gotten huge, and some new things have taken up residence on the wall. It’s amazing.
We also wanted to apply Jim’s methods to photograph the coralscape at night to capture a phenomenon few people encounter in person or in photographs: marine biofluorescence. Read more »
Firefly larvae are voracious predators, feeding on snails, slugs, and earthworms and keeping ecosystems in delicate balance. Many are stocking up on food for their whole adulthood, throughout which they will never eat. Some climb trees in pursuit of arboreal snails. Others have gills like fish that allow them to dive for aquatic snails, whose shells they then use for protection like hermit crabs. In parts of Asia, a large mollusk called an apple snail has ravaged important crops such as rice, and firefly larvae are being explored as a potential form of biocontrol to protect those nations’ food supply.
“Just think how poetic it could be if we had fireflies control snails in these agricultural systems as larvae and produce entertainment as a byproduct as adults,” says Marc Branham, an entomologist at the University of Florida.
Researchers are still investigating whether firefly numbers are dwindling. “If you ask anybody out there, they will tell you that it seems like there aren’t as many fireflies out now as there were 10 or 20 or 40 years ago,” explains Branham. The lack of data on older population numbers makes verifying their decline difficult. “But it’s pretty clear that there are some locations where people used to see many fireflies, and now you don’t see any.” Read more »
Ichthyologist John Sparks, curator of Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence, recalls two challenging expeditions in Madagascar in search of new species of blind cavefishes. Read an excerpt of the interview below.
We were in Ankarana Reserve in far northern Madagascar, a surreal landscape of exposed karst formations. These are one-of-a-kind formations of permeable rocks, with rivers and streams in between. It’s kind of like Swiss cheese, with water running through it. We were looking for a species of blind cavefish endemic to this region.
But first, we had to make our way through the piles of bat guano [dung]. The cavefishes, which lack pigment and have no eyes, eat some of the invertebrates that are in the water, but a lot of them survive mainly on guano. There are enormous piles of it in these caves, 20- to 30-foot mounds. When you get closer, the mounds seem to come alive, with millions of clicking, rustling cockroaches that run over your feet and up your legs. It’s just like a scene out of an Indiana Jones movie. Read more »
Only one group of animals, the deep-sea fishes of the genus Linophryne, is known to glow using two different processes: by producing their own light and by broadcasting the glimmer of a cooperative colony of bioluminescent bacteria. Several species shine to attract both prey and partner, a much-smaller male who attaches to his mate using his jaws and proceeds to fertilize her eggs while receiving nourishment in return.
An anglerfish’s lure-like esca, named for the Latin word for “bait,” is a bulb that glows with light provided by bacteria. Other marine animals such as ponyfishes and flashlight fishes also rely on such symbiotic relationships for light. Anglerfish species such as Linophryne algibarbata boast elaborate glowing strands that radiate from the fish’s chin, where a chemical reaction generates energy that is thrown off as light.
