Dinosaurs in the Attic (30 page)

With such a large collection of insects, some are bound to escape. Many years ago, one of her tarantulas escaped from its cage and was gone for several weeks. Then one day she received a call from someone who had found a tarantula wandering about in Central Park about four blocks north of the Museum. Gray recognized it, she said, "by the balding pattern of hairs on its abdomen."

Another famous escape scene occurred in 1979 during the Museum's special exhibition, "Pompeii
A.D.
79." One of Gray's favorite scorpions managed to squeeze out of its box and disappear. "I knew it was in the Museum," Gray explained later, "since it was born and raised here." One day about three weeks later, someone burst into her office and said that a scorpion was loose in the crowded exhibition, causing panic. Gray rushed to the scene and found a large crowd gathered around the insect, which sat in the middle of the exhibit, stinger raised in fear. Several burly men had taken off their shoes to crush the insect, but they just couldn't work up the courage. Gray forced her way through the crowd, clucking disapprovingly, and picked up the scorpion  in her bare hands. She is reported to have said, "There you are, I've been looking for you for weeks!" Then she turned to the crowd, dangling the insect by its stinger. "It can't hurt you," she explained, "if you pick it up by the stinger."

Gray's collection is periodically augmented by gifts from visitors. Several summers ago, she added two praying mantises to her collection: one picked up on the forty-fifth floor of the Empire State Building, the other discovered on a window ledge on the thirty-eighth floor of a Wall Street office building. Apparently, Gray surmises, the hapless insects were caught in updrafts of air from the hot city streets.

Gray recalled one of her strangest cases, that of a large grasshopper found on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Gray recognized it as a species that could be found only in the South. The story was published in a newspaper, and eventually a woman came forward to solve the mystery. She worked as a secretary in the building, she said, and had received a box in the mail from a friend in Florida. Upon opening the box the grasshopper had popped out, and before the horrified woman could recover her wits the insect had escaped out the window. Normally this grasshopper inhabits the tops of rushes, and it instinctively climbs upward when confused. Thus, mistaking the Empire State Building for a lovely tall rush, the poor insect climbed several dozen stories to end up on the observation deck.

The Museum's only Insect Hall closed in the early 1970s. The remains of it can be seen in a storage area outside Gray's office—a series of dusty dioramas and various aging wax models. There are plans to create a new Insect Hall, but it may be years before it opens. According to entomologist and Deputy Director Jerome Rozen, it could include live material—like the Smithsonian's Insect Zoo—or just models. But live insects are expensive to maintain, and models expensive to build. Someday, though, insects are sure to take their proper place in the Museum. "The Museum," said Rozen, "simply can't neglect nine-tenths of the animal kingdom in its exhibits forever."

THIRTEEN

Amphibians and Reptiles

The Herpetology Department is tucked away, apart from most of the other offices, in a warren of rooms off the Museum's second floor. A sign on the department's main door discreetly points out that the offices are not open to the public.

One of the most interesting areas of the department is the office of its chairman, Dr. Charles Myers, which usually echoes with the sounds of chirping frogs. Along the walls are several terraria full of brilliantly colored and actively hopping frogs. Myers' research focuses on a group of animals popularly named poison-dart frogs—so called because Indians in northwestern South America use the frogs' skin secretions to poison blowgun darts. So far, Myers and his collaborators at the National Institutes of Health have discovered a dozen new species of these frogs—one of which is in fact so poisonous that it produces one of the most toxic nonprotein substances known to man. Appropriately, the vivarium containing this most poisonous and most beautiful of species—a brilliant golden yellow creature—includes a moss-covered human skull.
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Myers and colleagues discovered this new species in western Colombia in the early 1970s. Two other poisonous species were previously known to be in this area, and a few writers had commented on the use of the frogs by the Indian population for poisoning darts. The poisoning method involved catching the frogs in the forest and bringing them back to camp. To obtain the maximum amount of poison, one witness reported, the Indians impaled the unfortunate animal on a sharp stick passed through the throat and out one leg. The dying frog might even be held close to a fire. This torture caused the frog to "sweat" the poison in large quantities off its back, and the Indians collected this secretion for their darts.

The new species of yellow frog that Myers discovered turned out to be twenty times more poisonous than its relatives—so toxic that Indians poison their darts simply by wiping the points across the animal's back. No torturing of the frog was necessary. "We didn't realize just how poisonous this frog was:' Myers explains, "until our contaminated garbage killed a chicken and a dog." Back in the United States, the scientists named the new species
Phyllobates terribilis
—for obvious reasons—and the toxin, when analyzed at the National Institutes of Health, was found to contain large quantities of a recently discovered class of compounds labeled
batrachotoxins,
or "frog poisons." Poisoning by these alkaloids swiftly results in blurred vision, convulsions, gagging, muscle rigidity, heart failure, and death. The skin secretions of a single frog may in fact contain two dozen different poisonous compounds, and there are no known antidotes. So far, over two hundred previously unknown compounds have been identified from the group of poison-dart frogs.

"In the rain forest," says Myers, "there could be over a hundred possible predators of frogs—snakes, birds, opossums, you name it. But most animals learn to avoid this frog very quickly. A snake, for example, will take one bite, drop the frog immediately, and go into convulsions. The snake usually doesn't die, so it learns to avoid the frog in the future." There is, however, one species of snake, Myers has discovered, that seems to be almost completely immune to the poison. Myers fed a young frog to the snake, which ate it without apparent ill effects. When he gave the snake a larger frog, it chewed on it awhile but couldn't swallow it. "The snake went limp and I could hang it over my finger like a piece of spaghetti, but twelve hours later it seemed fine. It just proves that nothing is immune from predation. But this frog comes close."

Myers is working on a related group which shows other intriguing problems. For example, a given species may come in hundreds of different colors, patterns, and sizes. Why a single species would show such tremendous variation is a mystery that Myers is still working on. "This could shed light on some fundamental problems in speciation—how species occur—as well as problems in genetic variation:' Myers explains.

The Herpetology Department employs two other curators and two scientific assistants. One curator, Charles J. Cole, keeps a colony of live parthenogenetic lizards in the department. These unisexual lizards (of which there are about thirty species) live in all-female populations that reproduce without the benefit of males. The egg of this lizard develops unfertilized, and the resulting offspring is an exact genetic copy of its parent. Among other things, Cole is trying to discover how these lizards evolved.

In addition to their research, these curators of the Herpetology Department (like all of the Museum's curators) are in charge of caring for the collections and the planning of exhibits. The collection itself dates back to well before the Museum was founded.

On May 17, 1832, Prince Alexander Philipp Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied set sail for America with a Swiss artist, Karl Bodmer, on a grand expedition to explore the West. For thirteen months the prince and his companion traveled up the Missouri River, from St. Louis to the Rockies, through five thousand miles of largely unknown territory. Along the way, the prince kept his celebrated journal (which swelled to 500,000 words), while Bodmer created his splendid watercolors of the Indians and landscapes. A lesser-known accomplishment of their travels was the collection of jars and jars of pickled animals, including strange new species of snakes, lizards, and frogs.

In 1870, when the Museum was barely a year old, it bought Prince Maximilian's collection of amphibians and reptiles. The venerable collection spent its first few years in the Arsenal Building while the Museum was being built, and was later moved uptown to a small storage area in the Museum's first building, where it formed the distinguished nucleus of what is now one of the best herpetology collections in the world.
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As of November 1, 1982 (when the most recent count was made), the collection comprised 263,529 cataloged specimens, not including some 10,000 recent arrivals still awaiting admittance to the catalog. Of the 9,200 or so species of "herps" known to exist, over 60 percent can be found in the Museum, and an average of fifty-one species per year are being added to the collection. Most of the storage areas for the collection were recently overhauled, and new cabinets in Day-Glo orange were installed for the benefit of the frog collection. (Charles Myers explains that the whimsical color choice was based on the brilliant skin color of his favorite poison-dart frog.)

The new storage space and offices include a sound studio crammed with fancy electronic equipment for analyzing frog calls ("Some frogs," says Myers, "can best be identified by their calls"); a half-dozen computer terminals; a separate room for type specimens; a tape library for storing animal sounds; a live-animal room (filled with king snakes, from curator Richard G. Zweifel's research); a breeding colony of mice for the king snakes; a breeding colony of beetles; and various other storage areas. (Since this was originally written, the department has switched to using more convenient frozen mice.)

The Herpetology Deparrment has responsibiliry for one hall in the Museum, the Hall of Amphibians and Reptiles. While the actual layout of this hall is unexciting, the exhibits are among the most remarkable in the Museum. The new hall opened in 1977, but many of the specimens were painstakingly recycled from the old 1929 hall. Where earlier models didn't exist, pickled specimens were cast and painted. One live snake even made an involuntary contribution.

The case showing this particular snake—a python—was prepared by a Museum technician. The nine-foot snake itself was arranged through a Singapore agent, who acquired the snake and sent it via jet to New York's Kennedy Airport. A museum staff member met the snake at the plane, and it was later taken to the New York Zoological Park animal hospital. There it was anesthetized with halothane administered with a mouth cone. The unconscious animal was then wrapped around a clutch of plaster eggs, a veterinarian inserted a breathing tube down the animal's throat, and plaster was smeared over the snake, layer by layer. Work had to proceed quickly, because the natural heat of the setting plaster could not be allowed to exceed 100 degrees without danger of harming the snake. As soon as the snake was removed from the mold, a few whiffs of oxygen revived it. The Museum donated the live snake to the Bronx Zoo. (Unlike most reptiles, this snake incubates its eggs. Being cold-blooded, it generates metabolic heat when necessary by flexing its muscles while coiled around its eggs.)

Not far from the python—either in the hall or in world geography—is the Komodo Dragon. A group of these ancient-looking beasts was salvaged intact from the old hall, and placed in a new habitat setting showing the creatures eating a dead boar. These specimens were the first such animals brought back to the West from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where the animal lives on several small, nearly uninhabited islands. We shall pause here for a moment, because the story of the discovery and capture of these animals is a particularly fascinating tale.

THE DRAGON LIZARDS OF KOMODO

West of Timor and east of Java lie the Lesser Sunda Islands. One of the smallest of these islands is Komodo, sandwiched between Flores and Sumbawa in the Lintah Straits. Komodo, a twenty-two-mile-long series of eroded volcanic plugs, rises several thousand feet above the sea. It is covered with grass, tall gubbong palms, and pockets of jungle. Because of the island's position in the Lintah Straits, tidal currents, driven by monsoon winds, rip past its shores and churn about its treacherous coral reefs at speeds of up to thirteen knots. It is likely that these currents are what prevented human settlement on the island, and are certainly what discouraged Europeans from exploring the island until the twentieth century.

In 1912 some Malay pearl divers risked the currents and anchored in a harbor on Komodo, hoping for a rich haul from its virgin oyster beds. After landing, they saw giant lizards roaming about the island's uplands and volcanic slopes, and returned to tell their neighbors about it. The story reached a man named P. A. Ouwens, then director of the Zoological Museum in Buitenzorg (now Bogor), Java. Ouwens had heard rumors of "dragons" in the Lesser Sundas for years, and he finally decided to investigate. He sent several collectors to Komodo, who killed and brought back specimens of a nine-foot-long black lizard. Ouwens described the new species and named it
Varanus komodensis;
the public started calling it the Komodo Dragon.