Carnival of Science!

The lead story on the BBC New's Science and Environment page is on the research of one of the post-doctoral researchers in my professor's lab. The idea is rather simple, the process was complex.
We know that climate changes over time, and that where one can find a particular type of habitat changes with the climate. Recently, using a wide range of data sources, scientists have been constructing both a detailed history of how climate has changed over time and what climate parameters limit the extent of particular habitats, such as South America's Atlantic Rainforest. My lab-mate, Ana Carnival (along with several collaborators) combined the climate history data with the climate requirement data to make maps of how the extent of the Atlantic forest has changed over the last 20,000 years. She found that there were a few relatively small areas that had been rainforest the whole time, even when climate shifts caused the rest of it to change to other habitat types, such as grassland. She identified these as 'rainforest refugia,' areas where rainforest species could survive through the millenia when the climate was inhospitable elsewhere. She then predicted that these refugia should be the centers from which genetic diversity spread to the rest of the forest once its borders once again grew. To test these predictions, she gathered genetic samples from three species of frogs which can survive only in the rainforest. Sure enough, the frog's DNA told the story she had predicted, confirming the refugia she had identified based on climate models. This is not only cool science, it has significant conservation implications. These refugia should house a large portion of the diversity found in the rainforest, because at some points in the last 20K years, all the rainforest species lived there. This suggests that if we are forced to make choices about which land to preserve (which we are) we might do well to preserve these refugia. And both the methods and the conclusions are potentially generalizable to other thretened habitats around the world.

One final thought: This is very cool work, and very much in line with what most people in my adviser's lab study, but it is so far from my own work that I barely understand the details. This may be why I don't notice any glaring errors in the BBC article, or maybe the UK press are not as bad at writing about science as the American press.

A tiger does not declare his tigritude, nor live in Africa.

Last night Iris, reading a book on French linguistics, came upon the word "tigritude." She asked me what it meant, and I Googled it. I came upon several references to a "Nigerian Proverb" stating that, "Un tigre ne proclame pas sa tigritude." (A tiger does not declare/proclaim/shout his tigritude.)

This stuck me as a useful saying, but something about it wasn't quite right. It took me until just now to remember. There are no tigers in Africa. Haven't been for at least a million years. Either that saying was handed down from before the time Homo sapiens existed, or it isn't a traditional saying from Nigeria.

I looked it up again, in more detail, and it is actually a quote, from the Nigerian author Wole Soyinka, whom Iris of course has read but I had never heard of.

It is funny how many people, including "proverb dictionaries" have labeled various versions of it as traditional Nigerian wisdom. Is "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," an ancient Russian proverb?