Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Volume 20, Number 1
Winter, 1989

Understanding Nature in the MCZ

“Understanding Nature” is a
university wide series of exhibi-
tions that opened December 11
in honor of the centennial of the
American Society of Zoologists,
whose president this year is the
MCZ’s Henry Bryant Bigelow Pro-
fessor Karel F. Liem. The exhibi-
tions will highlight the work of
early American naturalists. One
of the most eminent of these pio-
neers is Alexander Wilson. A
19th century ornithologist, Wilson
is best known for his triumph of
early American science and print-
ing, American Ornithology: or the
Natural History of the Birds of the
United States. This inspiring
series of nine volumes published
between 1808 and 1814 catalogs
the birds of North America. Each
bird in the volume is described in
elegant prose and painstakingly
illustrated with hand-colored
engravings. Only a person pos-
sessing Wilson’s tenacity and skill
could have persevered in the self-
imposed task of collecting and
mounting birds, and describing
and painting them with such scien-
tific integrity. Many of these
birds were described by Wilson
for the first time and are type

ry i

1ewsletier

MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY

Plates from Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology, 1808-1814.

specimens (the specimen on which
the first description of the species
is based).

American Ornithology will be
on display in the MCZ Library.
The MCZ Special Exhibition
Gallery will present some of Wil-
son’s original paintings paired with
the specimens from which
they were drawn. These speci-
mens are thought to be the oldest

preserved vertebrates in North
America and number amongst the
most historically valuable in the
MCZ. Memorabilia of Wilson’s
life as a zoologist will also be
shown. Companion exhibitions
will be mounted in the Fogg
Museum and the Widener,
Houghton and Pusey Libraries.

IN THIS ISSUE: C. Richard Taylor, a profile * Mutualism in the Rain Forest *

Fossils from Greenland * DeepseaTubeworms Update * New Curatorial Associate
in Beetle Research * Caterpillar Scholar on Visit * Birdbrain Research

Patterns Of a Life In Science: C. Richard Taylor

by Hilary Hopkins

“ What is it about doing field
work that appeals to you
the most?” I asked Professor C.
Richard Taylor, Director of the
Concord Field Station of the MCZ,
and Alexander Agassiz Professor
Of Zoology. “What is the most
fun?”

“Oh, being outside,” he
answered, “and actually being
able to look at animals, and see
how they’re able to solve the prob-
lems of living in extreme environ-
ments. And encountering extreme
environments yourself.

I get a certain exhilaration,
being ina hot desert,” he added.

“What are you best at, as a sci-
entist, do you think?”

He paused to reflect. “I think
the strength of our laboratory is in
obtaining data under conditions
that are controlled enough to
mimic what animals actually
encounter in different situations.
Sometimes that’s involved using
very unusual animals—you have
to not be put off by having
pythons in the lab, for instance.
And I’ve able to work with some
of the African animals, which
turns out not to be so easy. Trying
to get animals to run on the tread-
mills for you—”

“I like to pursue something
until I get an answer that satisfies
me. If you look at it, I’ve only
pursued three or four questions
over the last twenty-five years or
so, but I really want to be able to
understand them, I guess it’s per-
sistence, stubbornness maybe—
not giving up.”

He ticked off a list of wonderful
questions: “How much energy
does it take to move around in
Nature? Are animals specialized

Hilary Hopkins, a Friend of the
MCZ since 1981, is a science enthusi-
ast and educational consultant spe-
cializing in gifted children. This
article is the seventh of a_ series she
has prepared for the MCZ Newslet -
ter.

to move around cheaply, and how
important is it to move around
cheaply? How fast can animals
go, and what really determines
that?”

Earlier we had been speaking of
his childhood interests. He

explained, “I grew up in South-

— a
a y |

gate, right next to Watts, in Los
Angeles, and at that time there
were farms all around the city, so
I picked beans and corn, and
helped out during the harvesting
seasons and I enjoyed going to the
beach, and hiking in the moun-
tains.”

Professor Taylor’s interest in
animal mechanics and locomotion
turns out to have begun early; |
asked if he recalled any special
outdoor events during his child-
hood. “Well,” he responded, “I
remember hiking along and seeing
a tarantula by the side of the trail.
I watched it move, very quickly,
which seemed startling, and I
remember wondering how it was
able to coordinate all those legs and
move so agilely. That was

probably when I was six or
seven.”

We spoke further of his child-
hood. “My father was a minister.
He was very active politically, in
the American Civil Liberties
Union and other rights organiza-
tions. One of the first things I
remember—of course I was very
tiny—was when my father took us
down to see the Japanese being
interned— the idea that this was
in fact something that could go on
in this country. We always had a
very interesting group of people to
Sunday dinner—from Alcoholics
Anonymous and convict rehabili-
tation groups and so on.”

“When I started college I
thought I would go into medicine,
or law, or some sort of govern-
ment service. Our family felt that
there was an obligation to serve
society, and I thought that in those
fields you could do things for oth-
ers:

Needing to take a physiology
course for a possible concentration
in medicine, Taylor discovered the
joys of field work. “The guy who
taught the course was working on
the desert animals, so we were
doing work in the Mojave Desert,
and Arizona, and Baja California.
I became enthralled with it. I got
particularly interested in birds and
how they drink sea water and
whether they had special kidneys
to handle that, and I wrote a paper
about it.”

But the family ethos persisted.
“For my undergraduate interde-
partmental honors thesis, I wrote
about the biological effects of ion-
izing radiation, and how much
politicians knew about that, and
what they did with the informa-
tion. That was at a time when you
still had above-ground tests, that you
could go out and watch from
the front yard. In LA they’d tell
you, ‘Hold this film over your
eyes’ “—he gestures—” and ‘watch
it go up.’ In fact you were

(continued on page 8)

Photo by Dan Perlman.

Mutualism in the Rain Forest

MCZ graduate student in
behavioral ecology Dan Perlman
spends most of his time in Monte
Verde, Costa Rica looking very
closely at Cecropia trees. It is only
on these trees that the two species
of Azteca ants he studies can be
found. Perlman is intrigued with
the complexities of how Azteca
colonies are established within a
rich and shifting network of mutu-
alism among the ants and between
the ants and plants.

Azteca ants have made their
home in Cecropia trees for eons,
during which time the two organ-
isms have evolved a tight mutual-
ism. The ants protect the tree from
constricting vines and insect her-
bivores; and in return the trees
provide the ants with food and
shelter. Segmented like bamboo,
the hollow sections of the tree
make excellent colony nesting
places for both young and mature
Azteca colonies. In addition, the
plants produce special food bodies
for their congenial guests. The
Cecropia are one of only two types
of plants with the ability to pro-
duce glycogen, a substance other-
wise only found in animals. In
essence the tree manufactures syn-
thetic prey, in the form of this
glycogen, for the ants to consume.

Two views of a spiny katydid

Against the background of this
ant/plant mutualism is a fiercely
competetive situation in which
another, and very unusual mutu-
alism appearsthat between species
of ants. In order to appreciate the
importance of this second mutual-
ism, it is critical to understand the
challenges facing a developing
Azteca colony. While there is only
one large ant colony in a mature
Cecropia, younger trees may have
as many as 15 small Azteca
colonies. Since Azteca do not
migrate to other trees only the
strongest of the original colonies
survives.

Painting Queens

Perlman observed developing
Azteca colonies over a few field
seasons, including one of 16
months duration, by cutting small
holes in the walls of suitable
Cecropias and studying the ants
using an otoscope (such as a doc-
tor would use to look in an ear)
and a fiberoptics endoscope (used
for seeing deep inside the human
body). Each queen was marked
with a paint dot allowing Perlman
to follow individual ants over
many months in the field. His
observations indicated that if a

Photo by John Sachs.

Dan Perlman closely inspecting one of

his study plants in Monteverde, Costa
Rica.

colony is to compete well against
its neighbors in the tree, it must
quickly develop a large force of
workers to gather the tree’s limit-
ed food supplies. The primary
method by which colonies can
produce more workers early on is
to have more queens than the
other colonies, and a way to
acquire more queens is mutual
cooperation of colonies. The truly
remarkable aspect of this system is
that the cooperating colonies are
often of different species of
Azteca, making it the only docu-
mented case of mutualism
between competing species of
ants.

Perlman believes that it is the
intense competition for control of
maturing trees that has made it
possible for this unusual mutual-
ism to occur.

This spring the MCZ will be
hosting an exhibition of some of
Perlman’s closeup photographs
from Costa Rica. Front Yard Pho-
tos from Costa Rica: Insects and
Flowers Up Close will open on

March 6, 1989. Monteverde
proved to be so rich in photo-
graphic subjects that nearly all of
the photos in the exhibition were
shot within the confines of Perl-
man’s own yard.

See 2 SS

—- sa

MCZ field team excavating at prosauropod dinosaur quarry.

Fossils from Greenland

This summer’s MCZ fossil find-
ing team returned to the stark ter-
rain of Triassic outcrops in eastern
Greenland for a second season in
the quest for evidence of early life.
Led by Professor Farish A. Jenk-
ins, Jr., expedition members
William W. Amaral, and Dr.
Stephen M. Gatesy of the MCZ,
Dr. Neil H. Shubin from the Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley

Complete hindfoot of dinosaur in situ.
4

in jubilant spirits having made
several spectacular discoveries of
fossil vertebrates that eluded them
in the 1988 field season.

Prior to the first MCZ paleonto-
logical expedition in 1988, no fos-
sil vertebrate specimens of sub-
stantial scientific significance had
ever been recovered from this
period of geological time in
Greenland.

During the late Triassic (about
200 million years ago), representa-
tives of diverse groups such as
mammals, dinosaurs, crocodilians
and turtles first appeared; they
continued to diversify throughout
the remainder of the Mesozoic era.
Knowledge of these Late Triassic
forms is fundamental to under-
standing their evolutionary ori-
gins.

One of the more spectacular
discoveries was an_ entire
prosauropod skeleton represent-
ing a primitive herbivorous
dinosaur. Among their other finds
were various armored reptiles,
assorted amphibians (including
one giant with skull bones several
inches thick) and lung fish.

The prosauropod dinosaur was
discovered at a site where a frag-
mentary vertebrae was found last

year, belonging to the genus
Plateosaurus (similar to the one on
exhibit in the MCZ’s Romer Hall
of Vertebrate Paleontology). It is
believed to be the first dinosaur
known from Greenland.

The team also returned to the
site where in 1988 they had previ-
ously found part of a turtle. This
year they used screening tech-
niques to recover the remainder of
the specimen which had been
widely scattered by erosion. It
could be a new genus and is an
extremely important addition to
our knowledge of chelonian evo-
lution which, on present evidence,
began during the Late Triassic.

Perhaps the most significant site
was one containing a large num-
ber of bones of tetrapods (four-
legged animals). The unusual
abundance and variety of the
bones at this locality offer the first
possibility of sampling a large
fauna.

The expedition was funded by
the National Science Foundation’s
Division of Polar Programs with
logistical and technical support
from the Polar Ice Core Office
(University of Alaska, Fairbanks)
and the United States Naval Air
Station, Keflink, (Iceland).

Cleaning and removing bones of
prosauropod dinosaur pelvis.

Photos courtesy of Farish A. Jenkins, Jr.

Deepsea Tubeworms Update

Not long after tubeworms were
found near deepsea hot vents in
the late 70s, Assistant Professor of
Biology Colleen Cavanaugh pos-
tulated that these organisms, some
living at depths of 9,000 feet with
no digestive tracts, received their
nutrition through a symbiotic rela-
tionship with bacteria.

Since that time, Cavanaugh asa
Harvard graduate student, Junior
Fellow, and since July 1 as an
assistant professor has pursued
that thesis at increasing levels of
complexity. The question, in sim-
ple terms, is whether the bacteria
found in the tissue of deepsea
invertebrates such as the tube-
worms and certain species of mus-
sels and clams use sulphur the
same way plants use sunlight to
make nutrients out of inorganic
matter.

In this process, known as
chemosynthesis, the chemical
energy in compounds such as
hydrogen sulphide is used to con-
vert carbon dioxide into organic
molecules. Thus, chemosynthetic
bacterial symbionts could provide

New Chair for Jenkins

Farish A. Jenkins, Jr., formerly
Professor of Biology, has been
appointed Alexander Agassiz
Professor of Zoology in the MCZ.
He is also Professor of Anatomy
at Harvard Medical School and
Curator of Vertebrate Paleontol-
ogy in the MCZ.

With this appointment there
are now seven Alexander Agas-
siz Professors at the MCZ includ-
ing Professors S. J. Gould, B. K.
Holldobler, H. W. Levi, R. C. Le-
wontin, J. J. McCarthy, and C. R.
Taylor, made possible by the busi-
ness acumen and lifelong com-
mitment of Alexander, son of
MCZ founder Louis Agassiz,
who served as the museums sec-
ond director. Following his great
success in copper mining, Alex-
ander turned his interests to sci-
ence, and thus set the stage for the
MCZ’s role in twentieth-century
zoology.

the host animal with an internal
source of nutrition. Although
these types of bacteria were previ-
ous known as free-living species,
their existence as symbionts was a
new discovery.

As a_- graduate _ student
Cavanaugh used __ electron
microscopy to show that bacteria-
like organisms occurred in the
tissues of the deepsea tubeworms.
The carbon dioxide fixing enzyme
was also shown to be present in
these bacteria-containing tissues,
indicating that chemosynthesis
was occurring. She has since
shown that similar symbioses
appear to be wide spread in
nature and have been found in
clams, mussels, and _ benthic
worms.

However, one major problem
has confronted Cavanaugh over
the years in her research: “No one,
so far,” she says, “has been able to
cultivate these bacterial symbionts
outside of the host organism.
Therefore very little is known
about them.”

As a result, she has had to resort
to other approaches to character-
ize these symbionts. Using the
Atlantic coast clam Solemya velum
as a model, she has studied
the physiology of its bacteria in
situ, measuring carbon dioxide
fixation and what kinds of sul-

phur compounds stimulate such.

fixation. She has worked at the

Collen Cavanaugh with a tubeworm.

cellular level, using antibodies to
localize the carbon dioxide-fixing
enzyme in symbiont containing tis-
sue. And, most recently,
Cavanaugh says, “I’ve been
focussing on molecular aspects,
sequencing genes from symbionts
for comparison with free-living
bacteria.”

The long term goal of her
research is to understand how
host and symbiont metabolism are
integrated, allowing animals to
live in sulphide-rich marine habi-
tats, such as the deepsea vents.
How much more work remains?
Cavanaugh smiles at the question.
“We are still doing the descriptive
work,” she says.

Cambridge Schools Museum Program

After seven years of a continu-
ous program to third and fourth
graders in several Cambridge
public schools, lack of funds has
made it impossible to continue
this year. A combination of factors
including the fact that this pro-
gram is no longer eligible for seed
funds from foundations and cor-
porations has contributed to this
situation.

Until new support for the pro-
gram can be found, limited ser-
vices to Cambridge will continue
in the form of a teacher-training
program.

It is ironic that a program that
has received accolades from prin-
cipals, parents, teachers, and stu-
dents as well as being ranked super-
lative in an independent evaluation
conducted by the Harvard Gradu-
ate School of Education at the re-
quest of John Shattuck, Harvard’s
Vice President for Government,
Community, and Public Affairs,
should fall through the cracks of
foundation, government, and school
system support at a time when the
overwhelming need for better sci-
ence education on all levels is so

widely recognized. Aveo aE

D

New Curatorial Associate is a Beetle Researcher

acerreerrereer:

David Furth

David G. Furth, recently
appointed Curatorial Associate in
Entomology, is no stranger to the
MCZ. Furth, a specialist in
chrysomelids (leaf beetles) has
“used the collections here for
years in my own research.”

Furth’s research has taken him
all over the world on collecting
trips. He has worked on beetles in
many parts of the United States, in
Africa, Central and South Ameri-
ca, Europe, and the Middle East,
spending six years collecting and
doing research in Israel, where he
found himself in the middle of the
Yom Kippur war of 1973.

He comes to the MCZ at an
opportune time. While the mu-
seum’s collection of insects is more
than 50 per cent beetles and “the
most important in the western
hemisphere,” according to Furth,
it needs a lot of curatorial work.
Specifically, Furth wants to curate
the F. C. Bowditch collection of
chrysomelids, among others.
These are now crowded into speci-
men boxes with ambiguous
labelling and with the type speci-
mens the original, irreplaceable
specimen, the standard against
which all other individuals of a

6

species are compared, mixed in
with ordinary specimens.

Furth wants to have at least one
tray per species and each type
specimen in its own box. The pro-
cess of sorting, reclassifying, and
relabelling, however tedious and
lengthy, involves more than cura-
torial bookkeeping. Furth con-
tends that “collections research is
often more important than field-
work; it’s what you base every-
thing else on.” Moreover, a collec-
tion such as the Bowditch will
yield new species, type specimens
thought to be lost as well as other
undescribed material.

Noting what E. O. Wilson has
called the “biodiversity crisis’ —the
increasing extinction of species,
many of which remain undiscov-
ered—Furth says an upgrading of
the collections at Harvard is cru-
cial for anaccurate account of the al-
ready collected species. Without
knowing what we already have,
it’s difficult to calculate the extent
of the destruction now going on in
the natural world.

While Furth has studied many
aspects of the beetle, including the
unusual mechanism for jumping
used by the flea beetles (Alticinae),

some of his more recent focus both
in collecting and research involves
the plants that beetles feed on. In
fact, some of the beetles he studies
are so small, that he looks for char-
acteristic plant damage during col-
lecting forays. His own extensive
collection of Alticinae from Israel
and elsewhere are carefully
marked with Latin name, time and
place of collection, and, in many
cases, the type of plant the particu-
lar specimen was feeding on.

The relevance of this approach
goes beyond basic science, accord-
ing to Furth. Because the plants
that flea beetles devour are genera
specific—species of one genus often
feed on specific plants or groups
of plants—beetles can provide a
good natural agent for biological
control.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Furth
attended Miami University in
Oxford, Ohio, and received his Ph.
D. from Cornell after working for
several years in Israel on the sys-
tematics, zoogeography and host
plant relationships of the Alltici-
nae. He comes to Harvard from
the Peabody Museum of Natural
History at Yale.

Wilson Recognized

Edward O. Wilson, the Frank B.
Baird Jr. Professor of Science and
Curator of Entomology at the
MCZ, has recently received two
significant accolades.

He was awarded a 1989 Inger-
soll Prize, which carries an hono-
rarium of $20,000 and is given to
“authors of abiding importance
whose works affirm the moral
principles of Western Civiliza-
tion.”

In addition, Wilson’s Sociobiolo-
gy: The New Synthesis, published
in 1975, was recently voted “the
most influential book in animal be-
havior in the last 20 years” by a
wide margin of his colleagues in
the Newsletter of the Animal
Behavior Society. A majority of
respondents also ranked Wilson’s
monumental work as the most
important book of all time in animal
behavior.

Caterpillar Scholar Visiting MCZ

Duncan Reavey, a Kennedy
Scholar from York University, Eng-
land, who is spending this year at
the MCZ, has put in a lot of time in
the field watching caterpillars.
Indeed, last year he spent four
months on Skipwith Common, a
nature reserve near York, studying
in detail the daily habits of the yel-
low horned moth (Achlya flavicor-
nis).

Caterpillars, Reavey has found
out, “are not just feeding
machines,” as naturalists and oth-
ers have assumed for hundreds of
years. Rather, he has found that
caterpillars are constantly making
decisions as they move about on
plants: where to go for food, what
leaves to eat, where to rest, etc. For
instance, caterpillars tend to be
fussy about what leaves they will
eat. They prefer new leaves to old,
because the former have more
nutrients, and they avoid leaves
damaged by other caterpillars
because such vegetation will have
produced defensive chemicals.

Each species, moreover, mani-
fests it own characteristic behav-
ior. A. flavicornis, for instance,
“twists leaves into little shelters
where it sits when not feeding.”
When it does emerge, it moves as
much as a half meter away from
its shelter among the complicated

leaf system of the birch on which
it feeds and still manages to find
its way back. Reavey’s hunch is
that the caterpillar leaves a trail of
pheronomes to guide itself back to
its shelter. He plans to test this
hypothesis next year by obstruct-
ing the trail and seeing how the
caterpillar reacts.

Reavey finds this kind of field
work essential to biology. “All too
often this kind of natural history is
forgotten; scientists become too
interested in models on the com-
puter and experiments in a bot-
tle. There’s no substitute for natu-
ral history in the field. You get
your feet wet and you get bitten
by mosquitoes, but so what?”

While here in the Entomology
Department, Reavey will study
the behavior of newly-hatched
caterpillars. What are their deci-
sions the moment they emerge
from the egg to march off imme-
diately in search of food, to sit and
wait for new buds to burst, or
even to “balloon” on air currents
from tree to tree till they find one
that’s acceptable?

In addition, Reavey will be
learning Arabic during his year at
Harvard, not as a linguistic or lit-
erary exercise, but as another tool
to use in the field. Not long ago he
spent time in the Sudan, working

rae a. Dt hme”

Duncan Reavey demonstrates his
caterpillar-catching technique.

with cotton farmers to control the
termites that plague the cotton
crops in that part of the world. “It
will be a lot easier for me to get
input from the farmers, none of
whom speak English, if I know
something of the language,” he
says.

A graduate of Oxford, Reavey is
in his third year of a doctoral pro-
gram at York.

Birdbrain development studied by Balaban

Evan Balaban, appointed Assis-
tant Professor of Biology as of July
1, will pursue his interest in the
correlation between the brain, sys-
tems of communication, and social
organization in his new MCZ lab.
He received his Ph.D. at Rocke-
feller University and subsequently
conducted research at the National
Center for Scientific Research,
Institute of Embryology in
Nogent sur Marne, France.

Operating on the assumption
that dissimilarities in the brains of
different species of animals lead
them to experience things in
unique ways, Balaban wants to
pinpoint which areas are responsi-
ble for specific behavioral differ-

ences, and ultimately, by isolating
the mechanisms in development
that influence brain structure and
function, to understand how
brains evolve. Balaban’s back-
ground in music and cultural
anthropology plays an important
role in his current research inte-
rest. During his graduate studies
Balaban examined culturally-trans-
mitted vocal variation in birds that
learn vocalizations from members
of their own species. The only
other vertebrates that do this are
marine mammals and humans.
As in human language, bird
songs change over time and dis-
tance. As the range of a species
expands, population groups fur-

ther away from each other tend to
be less likely to exchange mem-
bers directly. It follows that these
groups would have songs least
like each other. However, Balaban
discovered that there are bizarre
exceptions to this generalization.
Often populations living close
together have very different songs,
and these populations tend not to
breed together, indicating that cul-
turally-transmitted songs play a
role in defining whom individuals
choose to interact with.

Bird songs also contain many
features which are shared by all
members of one species and which
differ from other species. Such

(continued on page 8)

Uy,

Taylor

continued from page 2)

killing people, and I wondered
about w hy they weren’t more
careful in restricting access.”

Professor Taylor told a black-
humor story about his high school
chemistry class which suggested
that his college interest in the poli-
tics of information began a bit ear-
lier. “People were paranoid,
building bomb shelters and wor-
rying about the Russians and so
forth, and we actually had train-
ing in learning how to track and
map radioactive sources, and we
went out with Geiger counters.
We'd be wearing helmets [he ges-
tures to an imaginary helmet with
a smile], and we'd stop cars and
tell them we were looking for
somebody that was smuggling a
bomb, and we’d turn up the
audio on the calibration mech-
anism of the Geiger counter, and
stick it under the car, and the
thing would go click!-click!-click!
We'd get quite a reaction from
people! But that’s when I was
made aware of the fact that you did
know what these effects were.”

Near the end of our conversa-
tion Professor Taylor spoke of his
son. “In first grade my little boy
had a science teacher who really
stimulated his curiosity, about
rocks, and animals, and machines
and how they work—that kind of
experience can have an enormous
impact by giving you the feeling
that you can really understand
these things.”

It seemed to me that a signifi-
cant part of Professor Taylor's life
in science began with his family,
with their persistence in seeing
and confronting the reality of
humans in severe situations, and
continued with his own interest in
trying to understand the reality of
life-threatening misinformation.
His present focus on the realisti-
cally functioning whole animal
and its confrontation and interac-
tion with a harsh environment
seems to continue this theme of
striving to see clearly.

There’sa two generation pattern
of tenacity here: sticking with a
different situation until its meaning
becomes clear, until the answers to

New Masters of Dunster House

Karel F. Liem, Henry Bryant
Bigelow Professor of Ichthyology
in the MCZ, and his wife Hetty
have been appointed co-masters of
Harvard’s Dunster House. “Liv-

questions are unravelled.

When we'd spoken of the effects
of radiation, Taylor commented,
“It’s only been recently, in the past
five or six years, I think, that peo-
ple have begun to worry about
long-term effects. Somehow our
system isn’t equipped to deal
with something that’s going to
happen twenty years down the
road. But we’ve begun to focus on
that now.”

Balaban

(continued from page 7)

“species specific” features can be
used to discover which brain cells
are responsible for species differ-
ences in behavior. This is done
through a delicate technical feat:
switching brain regions between
quail and chicken embryos. The
resultant chicks sound distinctly
quail-like; by transplanting brain
cells, behavior can be transplanted
as well. In future experiments Bal-
aban hopes to pinpoint more
exactly which parts of the brain
account for the difference in chick
and quail songs. On a larger

ing with undergraduates helps
keep me young,” explains Liemas
one reason he has assumed this
new responsibility.

scale, these tissue transplant
experiments can also be used to
study brain development.
Although the quail and chick cells
fuse seamlessly (in fact, five hours
after the procedure one cannot tell
that a transplant has been per-
formed), the quail cells remain rec-
ognizable and distinct under a
microscope, and serve as markers
to reveal the patterns of cell divi-
sion and migration that take place as
the embryo develops. With this
information, in conjunction with
future findings regarding which
areas of the brain are responsible
for specific behavior, Balaban
hopes to uncover the mechanisms
in development that change brain
structure and function and reveal
how brains with different behav-
ioral potentialities can come about.

The MCZ Newsletter is published two or
three times a pear by the Museum of
Comparative Zoology, Harvard Univer-
sity, Oxford Street, Cambridge, Mas-
sachusetts 02138; James J]. McCarthy,

Director
Editor: Gabrielle H. Whitehouse
Photographer: A.H. Coleman
Contributing writers: Jane
Anderson, Alfred Alcorn