Six on History: Geography and Science
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Swan’s book is staggering in its findings. “In some parts of the world, the average twentysomething woman today is less fertile than her grandmother was at 35,” Swan writes. In addition to that, Swan finds that, on average, a man today will have half of the sperm his grandfather had. “The current state of reproductive affairs can’t continue much longer without threatening human survival,” writes Swan, adding: “It’s a global existential crisis.” That’s not hyperbole. That’s just science.
As if this wasn’t terrifying enough, Swan’s research finds that these chemicals aren’t just dramatically reducing semen quality, they are also shrinking penis size and volume of the testes. This is nothing short of a full-scale emergency for humanity.
Given everything we know about these chemicals, why isn’t more being done? Right now, there is a paltry patchwork of inadequate legislation responding to this threat. Laws and regulations vary from country to country, region to region, and, in the United States, state to state. The European Union, for example, has restricted several phthalates in toys and sets limits on phthalates considered “reprotoxic” – meaning they harm the human reproductive capacities – in food production.
On the day Phil vacated the house, he wrestled an irate Billy into a cat carrier, loaded him into a moving van, and headed toward his new apartment, in Brooklyn. Thirty minutes down I-84, in the middle of a drenching rainstorm, the cat somehow clawed his way out of the carrier. Phil pulled over to the shoulder but found that, from the driver’s seat, he could neither coax nor drag the cat back into captivity. Moving carefully, he got out of the van, walked around to the other side, and opened the door a gingerly two inches—whereupon Billy shot out, streaked unscathed across two lanes of seventy-mile-per-hour traffic, and disappeared into the wide, overgrown median. After nearly an hour in the pouring rain trying to make his own way to the other side, Phil gave up and, heartbroken, continued onward to his newly diminished home.
Some weeks later, at a little before seven in the morning, I woke up to a banging at my door. Braced for an emergency, I rushed downstairs. The house had double-glass doors flanked by picture windows, which together gave out onto almost the entire yard, but I could see no one. I was standing there, sleep-addled and confused, when up onto his hind legs and into my line of vision popped an extremely scrawny and filthy gray cat.
I gaped. Then I opened the door and asked the cat, idiotically, “Are you Billy?” He paced, distraught, and meowed at the door. I retreated inside and returned with a bowl each of food and water, but he ignored them and banged again at the door. Flummoxed, I took a picture and texted it to my landlord with much the same question I had asked the cat: “Is this Billy?”
Ninety minutes later, Phil showed up at my door. The cat, who had been pacing continuously, took one look and leaped into Phil’s arms—literally hurled himself the several feet necessary to be bundled into his erstwhile owner’s chest. Phil, a six-foot-tall bartender of the badass variety, promptly started to cry. After a few minutes of mutual adoration, the cat hopped down, purring, devoured the food I had put out two hours earlier, lay down in a sunny patch of grass by the door, and embarked on an elaborate bath.
How Billy accomplished his remarkable feat remains a mystery, not only to me but to everyone. In 2013, after an indoor cat named Holly went missing during a road trip with her owners to Daytona Beach and turned up back home two months later, in West Palm Beach, two hundred miles away, the collective ethological response to the question of how she did it was “Beats me.” And that bafflement is generalizable. Cats, bats, elephant seals, red-tailed hawks, wildebeests, gypsy moths, cuttlefish, slime mold, emperor penguins: to one degree or another, every animal on earth knows how to navigate—and, to one degree or another, scientists remain perplexed by how they do so.
What makes this striking is that we are living in a golden age of information about animal travels. Three hundred years ago, we knew so little about the subject that one English scholar suggested in all seriousness that storks spent their winters on the moon. Thirty years ago, a herd of African elephants, the largest land mammals on earth, could still stage an annual disappearing act, crossing beyond the borders of a national park each rainy season and vanishing into parts unknown. But in the last few decades animal tracking, like so much of life, has been revolutionized by technology, including satellites, camera traps, drones, and DNA sequencing. We now have geolocation devices light enough to be carried by monarch butterflies; we also have a system for tracking those devices installed on the International Space Station. Meanwhile, the study of animal travel has acquired tens of thousands of new contributors, in the form of amateurs who use cell phones and laptops to upload observational data points by the billions. And it has also acquired—perhaps unsurprisingly, given the enduring, “Incredible Journey”-esque appeal of the subject matter—a spate of new books about advances in animal navigation.
Two main lessons emerge from those books—one tantalizing, one tragic. The first is that, although we are developing a clearer picture of where animals go, we still have a lot to learn about how they find their way. The second is that the creatures with a credible claim to being the worst navigators on the planet have steadily reduced the odds of all the others getting where they need to go, by interfering with their trajectories, impairing their route-finding abilities, and despoiling their destinations. Those feckless creatures are us, of course. While other animals lend this field of study its fascination, we humans distinguish ourselves chiefly by adding existential undertones to the fundamental questions of navigation: How did we get here? And where, exactly, are we going? ... "
"Cicadas lack toxins to deter predators, but evolution has equipped the insects to survive nonetheless. Coming out every 13, or 17, years makes it hard for predators to adapt to their life cycle. And by gathering in such high numbers — in a process called predator satiation — there are just too many in one place for predators to make a dent in the population.
"It’s the highest density of terrestrial animals in the world," said entomologist Doug Pfeiffer, a professor at Virginia Tech. "They're such a flash in the pan. They're here for a few weeks and they disappear for another 17 years."
