Epilogue

Natural History, July, 2005 by Peter Brown

Smart. Gregarious. Long-lived. Gentle when treated well. Dangerous when angered. No, not people; I'm talking about elephants. Our cover story by Delia and Mark Owens, about the aftermath of many years of elephant poaching in Zambia's North Luangwa National Park ("Comeback Kids," page 22), tells of another striking likeness between our species and elephants, revealed only in times of desperation. Elephants from ravaged families act just like kids from broken homes. Young males form gangs and raise hell. Adolescent females get pregnant. The focus of social life shrinks from the extended family to the single mom and her only calf. The lore of elephant society, vested in elders, dies with them. The good news is that, thanks to the efforts of the authors and others, poaching has been all but eliminated in the park. The bad news is that the consequences of poaching live on.

Graciela Flores has a different perspective on consequences: after years of careful scientific work, she doesn't see many. Flores studied heat-sensing in the blood-sucking "assassin bug" of Latin America, the insect vector of Chagas' disease ("In the Heat of the Night," page 32). The ultimate goal of her research was to control a protozoan infection that afflicts some 20 million people in the region. But the substantial scientific knowledge of the assassin bug's behavior rarely seems to translate into actions that could sharply reduce its impact. Money for fighting Chagas' disease is tight: although it may count Charles Darwin among its illustrious victims, the disease, Flores notes, has been mostly an affliction of the poor. Research remains the province of a few dedicated scientists. The thatch-roofed houses where the insects thrive remain home to 120 million people--all at risk of a malady that can kill or debilitate, virtually without warning. Flores has now traded the lab bench for a career in science journalism (she is an editor-at-large for this magazine).

Edmond A. Mathez presents another kind of epilogue, in his story of geological discovery in a remote corner of Antarctica ("Cold Fire," page 26). Long before it was covered with ice, Antarctica was part of a supercontinent geologists call Gondwana. One hundred eighty million years ago, parts of what was to become the frozen continent were wracked with violent volcanism, the surface repeatedly covered with hot lava, the underlying rock layers repeatedly pried apart by intruding magma. Fast-forward in time, and a series of uplifts and deep cuts by ancient rivers exposed the underground "plumbing" of the molten rock. Miraculously, some of that plumbing occurs in valleys so dry they harbor bare rock for all to see.

Mathez and his colleagues reached this obscure Antarctic landscape as travelers from an unimaginably distant time (our present), to try to make sense of the aftermath. Mathez's story encompasses hundreds of millions of years and a continent-size portion of the Earth's surface. But it begins in camp, where he and his twenty-four companions toast their collective good fortune with Scotch whiskey splashed over 18,000-year-old glacial ice. Who says natural science is dry?