05.14.12
In rural coal mining communities in China, miners face daily perils for slim rewards in a profession that claims an estimated 5,000 lives annually. Winner of the 2011 Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award Yuanchen Liu delved into this riveting story with his documentary To the Light, and as part of the Margaret Mead Traveling Film Festival, the film and Liu will return to the Museum on Thursday, May 17, at 6:30 pm for a special encore screening and discussion.
To the Light has traveled to St. Thomas and Vietnam since the 2011 Margaret Mead Film Festival. The 2012 Margaret Mead Film Festival will take place at the Museum from November 29 through December 2.
Thumbnail: The 2011 Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award jury was led by Darren Aronofsky, the Academy Award-nominated director of Black Swan and The Wrestler, who poses for a photo with Yuanchen Liu.
05.11.12
Jim Hellemn's photography was used to create an interactive coralscape in Creatures of Light. The brilliant patches of red, green, and orange above come from corals, fishes, and sea anemones that are fluorescent. The vivid colors only appear when the animals are illuminated by specific wavelengths of light. © Jim Hellemn, portraitofacoralreef.com
Museum Research Associate David Gruber, assistant professor at The City University of New York (CUNY), describes a diving trip in 2011.
We wanted to include a panoramic image of a magnificent coralscape in Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence, and Bloody Bay Wall [off Little Cayman Island] was the perfect place.
But capturing Ansel Adams-like vistas are impossible under water, where sections of the light spectrum—especially reds—are absorbed within a meter. We need to get in very close to our subject and use flash photography to capture the reef ’s true color. We have to repeat this process hundreds of times over the wall face. Then, the small consecutive images are painstakingly stitched together to create a life-sized, true-color view.
Underwater photographer Jim Hellemn developed this process to create a 20-foot by 70-foot true-color image of the Bloody Bay Wall in 1999. Returning to the wall 12 years later (with the support of a National Science Foundation Connecting Research to Public Audiences grant) allowed us to overlay the images and really see the way a coral wall ages. Some of the corals are disappearing, some of the sponges have gotten huge, and some new things have taken up residence on the wall. It’s amazing.
We also wanted to apply Jim’s methods to photograph the coralscape at night to capture a phenomenon few people encounter in person or in photographs: marine biofluorescence. Read more »
05.10.12
CBC Director Eleanor Sterling received this year’s Faculty Mentoring Award from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. © AMNH/D. Finnin
Museum scientist Eleanor Sterling has been chosen as a recipient of this year’s Faculty Mentoring Award at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Sterling, who is the director of the Museum’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, serves as the director of graduate studies and as an adjunct professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology at Columbia.
The award honors excellence in mentoring Ph.D. students, and recipients are chosen by representatives from the graduate student body. In the words of one graduate student who nominated Sterling, “Eleanor is consistently available to students, whether that means answering questions about an assignment or reading last-minute drafts of a proposal. Truly not a student in the department has remained untouched by her tremendous generosity of time, advice, and career and thesis support.”
“It is a tremendous honor to receive this award,” says Sterling, “particularly given that it comes from the students. Teachers and mentors were instrumental to many important turning points in my life, and I am thrilled to serve in that role myself.” Read more »
05.09.12
Seahorses are some of the many puppets in Luna's Sea, which makes its New York premiere at the Museum on May 12. Photo courtesy of Linda Wingerter
This Mother’s Day weekend, travel from the shores of Africa to the deep-sea habitats of bioluminescent creatures with a live puppet theater production that makes its New York premiere. Luna’s Sea tells the story of a girl named Luna on a magical journey through the world’s oceans using dance, puppetry, optical illusions, and black-light theater. Luna’s Sea will hold performances at the Museum on Saturday, May 12, and Sunday, May 13. The show’s creator, Linda Wingerter, recently shared the history of Luna’s Sea as well as some of the details about how the production’s spectacular puppets are made.
How did the idea for Luna’s Sea come about?
Linda Wingerter: I’m a children’s book illustrator by trade with a background in puppetry. Connecticut’s Mystic Aquarium and the Cornerstone Playhouse in Mystic asked me if I would write, create, and build a stage show based on animals at the aquarium.
What kind of research did you conduct at the aquarium?
Wingerter: The aquarium gave us unlimited time to spend on site with our puppeteers to study the animals. We brought some of our in-progress puppets right to the tanks and had our puppeteers move them alongside the animals. My co-puppet-builder, Jen McClure, and I would then make adjustments. Read more »
05.04.12
Japanese photographer Tsuneaki Hiramatsu combined slow-shutter speed photos for stunning images of flashing fireflies. © T. Hiramatsu of digitalphoto.cocolog-nifty.com
Firefly larvae are voracious predators, feeding on snails, slugs, and earthworms and keeping ecosystems in delicate balance. Many are stocking up on food for their whole adulthood, throughout which they will never eat. Some climb trees in pursuit of arboreal snails. Others have gills like fish that allow them to dive for aquatic snails, whose shells they then use for protection like hermit crabs. In parts of Asia, a large mollusk called an apple snail has ravaged important crops such as rice, and firefly larvae are being explored as a potential form of biocontrol to protect those nations’ food supply.
“Just think how poetic it could be if we had fireflies control snails in these agricultural systems as larvae and produce entertainment as a byproduct as adults,” says Marc Branham, an entomologist at the University of Florida.
Researchers are still investigating whether firefly numbers are dwindling. “If you ask anybody out there, they will tell you that it seems like there aren’t as many fireflies out now as there were 10 or 20 or 40 years ago,” explains Branham. The lack of data on older population numbers makes verifying their decline difficult. “But it’s pretty clear that there are some locations where people used to see many fireflies, and now you don’t see any.” Read more »
