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Science Tuesday - Charley Horses, Pandemics, and Echidnas
Q & A: A Charley Horse in Bed
By C. CLAIBORNE RAY, The New York Times, June 9, 2009
Q. Why does one get muscle cramps while sleeping or resting?
A. In most cases, there is no apparent cause for hard knots in the muscles, usually in the calves, that are not associated with vigorous exercise, medical authorities say. Nighttime attacks of leg cramps are quite common, especially in older people, and can be very painful though usually not dangerous.
Most night cramps are not associated with serious underlying diseases, but diabetes and circulatory problems are among the conditions that should be ruled out by a doctor, especially if the cramps are frequent and severe. Cramping can also be a side effect of some prescription drugs.
One popular suggested explanation for the involuntary contractions involves overactive nerve networks in the large leg muscles, but there is no conclusive evidence as to whether this is true or what the cause may be.
Other researchers suggest that cramps are an effect of dehydration, which is known to be involved in spasms after exercise. Common sense suggests drinking enough water through the day and before going to bed, as well as avoiding heavy bed covers that keep the toes from pointing up. Gentle stretching exercises may help.
If you develop a cramp, you can help relax the knotted muscle with gentle stretching and massage; walking or standing if you can manage it; and perhaps a warm bath or shower.
The Doctor’s World: Is This a Pandemic? Define ‘Pandemic’
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D., The New York Times, June 9, 2009
After decades of warnings about the inevitability of another pandemic of influenza, it is astonishing that health officials have failed to make clear to the public, even to many colleagues, what they mean by the word pandemic.
Generations of people have used the term to describe widespread epidemics of influenza, cholera and other diseases. But as the new H1N1 swine influenza virus spreads from continent to continent, it is clear that a useful definition is far more complicated and elusive than officials had thought.
And what is at stake is far more than an exercise in semantics. A clear understanding of the term is central to the World Health Organization’s six-level staging system for declaring a pandemic, which in turn informs countries when to set their control efforts in motion.
Dictionaries and medical journals offer little guidance. Their definitions can be too vague or too narrow, contradictory and clouded by jargon.
“There is a lot of misinformation in the medical literature, and it is really quite hard to figure out what is and what is not a pandemic,” said Dr. David M. Morens, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who has been studying the history of pandemics.
The word implies the rapid spread of an infectious disease to many countries in different regions, hitting each with more or less the same severity. But in fact, severity varies — not all people are infected at the same time, and not every country need be affected.
And there can be many other factors, including the numbers and percentages of people falling ill and dying; a population’s vulnerability to the disease, based on previous rates of infection; and the quality of health care facilities and disease monitoring systems.
Not least is that scientists do not know precisely how pandemics arise, what fuels them, why they vary in their lethality, why some occur in waves and why they stop.
Health officials have long preached that with influenza, the only sure bet is to expect the unexpected. The new swine influenza virus, which appeared suddenly after years of warning about a potential pandemic of avian influenza, upset the W.H.O.’s assumptions that most people have the same understanding of the word pandemic.
For years, the organization’s Web site defined an influenza pandemic as causing “enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” But the agency recently pulled the definition, apologizing for causing confusion and anxiety.
One of the biggest problems in public health is communicating risk assessment.
United States and W.H.O. officials say their preparedness plans are intended for governments, not people in the street. Officials bristle at criticism that their messages and plans have led the public to equate the word pandemic with the Spanish influenza of 1918-19, the worst recorded pandemic in history, killing 20 million to 100 million people.
In preparing for the worst, officials have considered milder pandemics, said Dr. Nancy J. Cox, chief of the influenza division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
But Dr. William Schaffner, the chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University, said that “we, the public health community, deserve to be chided” about the confusion.
“We ought to be able to do a better job in communicating in an understandable way,” he said in an interview.
Scientists like to assert that theirs is an exact discipline. But like the terms “evidence -based medicine” and “peer review,” pandemic turns out to be another example of imprecise vocabulary that doctors use every day, assuming everyone understands their meaning.
Journals, textbooks and reference works use pandemic in discussing certain diseases, but rarely define the word.
For example, the definition section of the Control of Communicable Diseases Manual, a standard reference work, includes “endemic” (said of a disease that is usually present in an area or a population group) and “epidemic” (more cases of an illness than would normally be expected) but not “pandemic.”
The disease manual’s editor, Dr. David L. Heymann, a retired assistant director-general of the W.H.O., said the term had not caused confusion in the past, but assured me in an interview that “pandemic will be defined in the next edition.”
Even the indexes of most major medical textbooks do not list pandemic. One is Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, of which Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is a main editor.
“It’s a mistake, and I’m surprised it’s not there because it should have been,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview.
Government agencies do not have official lists of pandemics. Textbooks cite many recent and old ones, including these:
Although pandemics have been classically limited to infectious diseases, the term has spread to noninfectious, chronic ones. For example, many health officials now speak of pandemics of obesity and heart disease.
Knowledge about past pandemics is necessarily incomplete; historical accounts cannot make up for the absence of modern disease monitoring and laboratory tests.
About 14 pandemics of influenza have been described since the 16th century, with the first indisputable one occurring in 1889.
In 1580, an influenza pandemic swept through Asia into Europe within six weeks, and at least 10 percent of Rome’s 81,000 residents died in the first week, said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Some Spanish cities were almost totally depopulated.
Dr. Morens, of the infectious diseases institute, said his studies of influenza pandemics left a confusing track record and “are rewiring our brains about thinking about influenza.”
“The medical literature will tell you there were three pandemics in the 1830s,” he said — “one from 1830 to 1832, a second in 1833 to 1834 and a third in 1836 to 1837. But I am beginning to think they were all one pandemic.”
Dr. Morens said he was puzzled as to why no influenza pandemics were recorded for nearly 150 years after the one in 1580, although there were some severe localized epidemics.
“A period of pandemic stability makes us wonder whether a pandemic comes at any time by chance,” he said, “or whether something about epidemic situations prevents pandemics,” or at least delays them.
The W.H.O.’s staging system has long been part of its plan for an influenza pandemic. Deep concern about a potential pandemic of the H5N1 avian influenza virus led the organization to convene a large meeting of experts in 2005. Among other things, the experts recommended simplifying the staging system.
A number of doctors ask why health agencies do not declare seasonal influenza a pandemic when it spreads around the world.
But Dr. Osterholm, the Minnesota expert, said that “you can’t use the terminology for just worldwide transmission, because if you did that, you would say every seasonal flu year is a pandemic.”
“To me,” he continued, “a pandemic is basically a new or novel agent emerging with worldwide transmission.”
Dr. Keiji Fukuda, an influenza expert who is an assistant director-general at the W.H.O., said in an interview that “as difficult as things are right now,” the problem of defining a pandemic and communicating risk “would be magnitudes worse and more confusing” if the agency had not dealt with AIDS, SARS and avian influenza.
Those experiences prompted new international health regulations and pandemic plans, and allowed critical scientific information to be disseminated quickly, he said.
The process was “painful, sure,” he said. “But you can’t really do anything like this without having some amount of pain.”
Basics: Brainy Echidna Proves Looks Aren’t Everything
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, June 9, 2009
If you wanted to push yourself to the outermost chalk line of human endurance, you might consider an ultramarathon, or a solo row across the Atlantic Ocean, or being nominated to the United States Supreme Court.
Or you could try studying the long-beaked echidna, one of the oldest, rarest, shyest, silliest-looking yet potentially most illuminating mammals on earth.
Muse Opiang was working as a field research officer when he became seized by a passion for the long-beaked echidna, or Zaglossus bartoni, which are found only in the tropical rain forests of New Guinea and a scattering of adjacent islands. He had seen them once or twice in captivity and in photographs — plump, terrier-size creatures abristle with so many competing notes of crane, mole, pig, turtle, tribble, Babar and boot scrubber that if they didn’t exist, nobody would think to Photoshop them. He knew that the mosaic effect was no mere sight gag: as one of just three surviving types of the group of primitive egg-laying mammals called monotremes, the long-beaked echidna is a genuine living link between reptiles and birds on one branch, and more familiar placental mammals like ourselves on the next.
Mr. Opiang also knew that, whereas members of the two other monotreme genera, the duck-billed platypus and short-beaked echidna, had been studied for years — last May, the entire genetic code of the platypus was published to great fanfare — the life of the long-beaked echidna remained obscure and unsung.
“We knew nothing about it,” he said in a phone interview. “Scientists had written that it was impossible to study,” he said, adding with a laugh, “I took that as a challenge.”
In a recent issue of The Journal of Mammalogy, Mr. Opiang offers the first glimpse of the natural history and ecology of an immaculately private nocturnalist with a surprisingly well-endowed brain. And while Mr. Opiang’s report shows that the doubters were technically wrong, the grueling details of his field methods suggest that as a workaday rule, “impossible to study” still suits Zaglossus quite well.
“Muse has amazing perseverance,” said Debra Wright, who was Mr. Opiang’s honors thesis adviser. “I don’t think that anyone else on earth could have done what he did.”
The research and Mr. Opiang’s training were initially supported by the Wildlife Conservation Society of the Bronx Zoo, but Mr. Opiang, who pronounces his first name Moo-say and is now working on his doctorate through the University of Tasmania, has since cofounded his own organization, the Papua New Guinea Institute of Biological Research.
Reproductively, monotremes are like a VCR-DVD unit, an embodiment of a technology in transition. They lay leathery eggs, as reptiles do, but then feed the so-called puggles that hatch with milk — though drizzled out of glands in the chest rather than expressed through nippled teats, and sometimes so enriched with iron that it looks pink.
Monotreme sex determination also holds its allure. In most mammals, a single set of XX chromosomes signifies a girl, a set of XY specifies a boy. For reasons that remain mysterious, monotremes have multiple sets of sex chromosomes, four or more parading pairs of XXs and XYs, or something else altogether: a few of those extra sex chromosomes look suspiciously birdlike. Another avianlike feature is the cloaca, the single orifice through which an echidna or platypus voids waste, has sex and lays eggs, and by which the group gets its name. Yet through that uni-perforation, a male echnida can extrude a four-headed penis.
However they conduct their affairs, monotremes do it remarkably well. Not only are they the oldest surviving mammalian group, but individual monotremes can live 50 years or longer. Peggy Rismiller of the University of Adelaide has studied the short-beaked echidna, or spiny anteater, since 1988. “One of the females we’ve been radiotracking since 1988 is at least 45, and she’s still reproducing,” Dr. Rismiller said.
Dr. Rismiller also pointed out that short-beaked echidnas are Australia’s most widely distributed mammals, adapting to life in the desert, along on the coast, in the rain forest, up above the snowline, all the while feeding on any invertebrates they can disinter. Even in summer they maintain their internal body temperature at a temperate 88 degrees Fahrenheit, and on a winter night they may lapse into a torpor, their core body thermostat dropping down as low as 40 degrees — a cryogenic skill of interest to surgeons and space enthusiasts alike.
Echidnas keep their cool, all right. “They’re one of the most pacifistic mammals,” Dr. Rismiller said. “Nobody bothers them; they don’t bother anybody. There’s a lot we could learn from them.” And in that level head sits a mighty brain. Among humans, the neocortex that allows us to reason and remember accounts for 30 percent of the brain; in echidnas, that figure is 50 percent.
If only they could stand to teach us. Short-beaked echidnas put up with people, however grudgingly, but as Mr. Opiang learned, the long-beaks of New Guinea shun all signs of human habitation, perhaps because, being twice the size of short-beaked echidnas, they are prized as bushmeat by local hunters and their dogs. “They’re not attracted to baits,” he said. “You can’t catch them with traps for tagging.”
To reach them, you must hike for miles into the highlands, on treacherously steep and slippery terrain where it rains 275 inches a year. “It’s one of the wettest places on earth,” Dr. Wright said.
That rain also wipes away signs of echidna foraging and denning. It took Mr. Opiang months of searching before he found his first echidna. Then he discovered that if he followed trails of freshly dug nose pokes at night — the holes that echidnas made with their beaks as they foraged for earthworms — he could find a den where a sated echidna would be hiding. He learned to grab them under the stomach, where there were no spines. “If you hold them against yourself, they’re friendly and they won’t struggle,” he said. Over five years he managed to capture, measure and, in most cases, attach radio transmitters to 22 individuals. Among his intriguing early findings: unlike most mammals, the females are bigger than the males, and the toothless, hairless tubular beaks through which they aim their ribbony tongues are longer, too.
Once again, the long-beaked echidna pokes fun at all the rules.
By C. CLAIBORNE RAY, The New York Times, June 9, 2009
Q. Why does one get muscle cramps while sleeping or resting?
A. In most cases, there is no apparent cause for hard knots in the muscles, usually in the calves, that are not associated with vigorous exercise, medical authorities say. Nighttime attacks of leg cramps are quite common, especially in older people, and can be very painful though usually not dangerous.
Most night cramps are not associated with serious underlying diseases, but diabetes and circulatory problems are among the conditions that should be ruled out by a doctor, especially if the cramps are frequent and severe. Cramping can also be a side effect of some prescription drugs.
One popular suggested explanation for the involuntary contractions involves overactive nerve networks in the large leg muscles, but there is no conclusive evidence as to whether this is true or what the cause may be.
Other researchers suggest that cramps are an effect of dehydration, which is known to be involved in spasms after exercise. Common sense suggests drinking enough water through the day and before going to bed, as well as avoiding heavy bed covers that keep the toes from pointing up. Gentle stretching exercises may help.
If you develop a cramp, you can help relax the knotted muscle with gentle stretching and massage; walking or standing if you can manage it; and perhaps a warm bath or shower.
The Doctor’s World: Is This a Pandemic? Define ‘Pandemic’
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D., The New York Times, June 9, 2009
After decades of warnings about the inevitability of another pandemic of influenza, it is astonishing that health officials have failed to make clear to the public, even to many colleagues, what they mean by the word pandemic.
Generations of people have used the term to describe widespread epidemics of influenza, cholera and other diseases. But as the new H1N1 swine influenza virus spreads from continent to continent, it is clear that a useful definition is far more complicated and elusive than officials had thought.
And what is at stake is far more than an exercise in semantics. A clear understanding of the term is central to the World Health Organization’s six-level staging system for declaring a pandemic, which in turn informs countries when to set their control efforts in motion.
Dictionaries and medical journals offer little guidance. Their definitions can be too vague or too narrow, contradictory and clouded by jargon.
“There is a lot of misinformation in the medical literature, and it is really quite hard to figure out what is and what is not a pandemic,” said Dr. David M. Morens, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who has been studying the history of pandemics.
The word implies the rapid spread of an infectious disease to many countries in different regions, hitting each with more or less the same severity. But in fact, severity varies — not all people are infected at the same time, and not every country need be affected.
And there can be many other factors, including the numbers and percentages of people falling ill and dying; a population’s vulnerability to the disease, based on previous rates of infection; and the quality of health care facilities and disease monitoring systems.
Not least is that scientists do not know precisely how pandemics arise, what fuels them, why they vary in their lethality, why some occur in waves and why they stop.
Health officials have long preached that with influenza, the only sure bet is to expect the unexpected. The new swine influenza virus, which appeared suddenly after years of warning about a potential pandemic of avian influenza, upset the W.H.O.’s assumptions that most people have the same understanding of the word pandemic.
For years, the organization’s Web site defined an influenza pandemic as causing “enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” But the agency recently pulled the definition, apologizing for causing confusion and anxiety.
One of the biggest problems in public health is communicating risk assessment.
United States and W.H.O. officials say their preparedness plans are intended for governments, not people in the street. Officials bristle at criticism that their messages and plans have led the public to equate the word pandemic with the Spanish influenza of 1918-19, the worst recorded pandemic in history, killing 20 million to 100 million people.
In preparing for the worst, officials have considered milder pandemics, said Dr. Nancy J. Cox, chief of the influenza division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
But Dr. William Schaffner, the chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University, said that “we, the public health community, deserve to be chided” about the confusion.
“We ought to be able to do a better job in communicating in an understandable way,” he said in an interview.
Scientists like to assert that theirs is an exact discipline. But like the terms “evidence -based medicine” and “peer review,” pandemic turns out to be another example of imprecise vocabulary that doctors use every day, assuming everyone understands their meaning.
Journals, textbooks and reference works use pandemic in discussing certain diseases, but rarely define the word.
For example, the definition section of the Control of Communicable Diseases Manual, a standard reference work, includes “endemic” (said of a disease that is usually present in an area or a population group) and “epidemic” (more cases of an illness than would normally be expected) but not “pandemic.”
The disease manual’s editor, Dr. David L. Heymann, a retired assistant director-general of the W.H.O., said the term had not caused confusion in the past, but assured me in an interview that “pandemic will be defined in the next edition.”
Even the indexes of most major medical textbooks do not list pandemic. One is Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, of which Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is a main editor.
“It’s a mistake, and I’m surprised it’s not there because it should have been,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview.
Government agencies do not have official lists of pandemics. Textbooks cite many recent and old ones, including these:
- AIDS. Many experts have called H.I.V. a pandemic. Others disagree, saying the virus is pandemic only in Africa.
- Cholera. Since 1817, most experts agree, the world has had seven pandemics of this bacterial illness, which causes severe diarrhea and dehydration. ¶Acute hemorrhagic conjunctivitis. Beginning in 1969, an enterovirus has caused tens of millions of cases of a highly contagious, acute, painful, but rarely blinding, form of hemorrhagic eye inflammation.
- Dengue. Since World War II, this mosquito-borne viral disease has spread widely in Asia and Latin America.
- Syphilis. A pandemic of the bacterial disease raced through Europe and Asia after Columbus’s return from America and during mass movements of armies in Europe.
Although pandemics have been classically limited to infectious diseases, the term has spread to noninfectious, chronic ones. For example, many health officials now speak of pandemics of obesity and heart disease.
Knowledge about past pandemics is necessarily incomplete; historical accounts cannot make up for the absence of modern disease monitoring and laboratory tests.
About 14 pandemics of influenza have been described since the 16th century, with the first indisputable one occurring in 1889.
In 1580, an influenza pandemic swept through Asia into Europe within six weeks, and at least 10 percent of Rome’s 81,000 residents died in the first week, said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Some Spanish cities were almost totally depopulated.
Dr. Morens, of the infectious diseases institute, said his studies of influenza pandemics left a confusing track record and “are rewiring our brains about thinking about influenza.”
“The medical literature will tell you there were three pandemics in the 1830s,” he said — “one from 1830 to 1832, a second in 1833 to 1834 and a third in 1836 to 1837. But I am beginning to think they were all one pandemic.”
Dr. Morens said he was puzzled as to why no influenza pandemics were recorded for nearly 150 years after the one in 1580, although there were some severe localized epidemics.
“A period of pandemic stability makes us wonder whether a pandemic comes at any time by chance,” he said, “or whether something about epidemic situations prevents pandemics,” or at least delays them.
The W.H.O.’s staging system has long been part of its plan for an influenza pandemic. Deep concern about a potential pandemic of the H5N1 avian influenza virus led the organization to convene a large meeting of experts in 2005. Among other things, the experts recommended simplifying the staging system.
A number of doctors ask why health agencies do not declare seasonal influenza a pandemic when it spreads around the world.
But Dr. Osterholm, the Minnesota expert, said that “you can’t use the terminology for just worldwide transmission, because if you did that, you would say every seasonal flu year is a pandemic.”
“To me,” he continued, “a pandemic is basically a new or novel agent emerging with worldwide transmission.”
Dr. Keiji Fukuda, an influenza expert who is an assistant director-general at the W.H.O., said in an interview that “as difficult as things are right now,” the problem of defining a pandemic and communicating risk “would be magnitudes worse and more confusing” if the agency had not dealt with AIDS, SARS and avian influenza.
Those experiences prompted new international health regulations and pandemic plans, and allowed critical scientific information to be disseminated quickly, he said.
The process was “painful, sure,” he said. “But you can’t really do anything like this without having some amount of pain.”
Basics: Brainy Echidna Proves Looks Aren’t Everything
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, June 9, 2009
If you wanted to push yourself to the outermost chalk line of human endurance, you might consider an ultramarathon, or a solo row across the Atlantic Ocean, or being nominated to the United States Supreme Court.
Or you could try studying the long-beaked echidna, one of the oldest, rarest, shyest, silliest-looking yet potentially most illuminating mammals on earth.
Muse Opiang was working as a field research officer when he became seized by a passion for the long-beaked echidna, or Zaglossus bartoni, which are found only in the tropical rain forests of New Guinea and a scattering of adjacent islands. He had seen them once or twice in captivity and in photographs — plump, terrier-size creatures abristle with so many competing notes of crane, mole, pig, turtle, tribble, Babar and boot scrubber that if they didn’t exist, nobody would think to Photoshop them. He knew that the mosaic effect was no mere sight gag: as one of just three surviving types of the group of primitive egg-laying mammals called monotremes, the long-beaked echidna is a genuine living link between reptiles and birds on one branch, and more familiar placental mammals like ourselves on the next.
Mr. Opiang also knew that, whereas members of the two other monotreme genera, the duck-billed platypus and short-beaked echidna, had been studied for years — last May, the entire genetic code of the platypus was published to great fanfare — the life of the long-beaked echidna remained obscure and unsung.
“We knew nothing about it,” he said in a phone interview. “Scientists had written that it was impossible to study,” he said, adding with a laugh, “I took that as a challenge.”
In a recent issue of The Journal of Mammalogy, Mr. Opiang offers the first glimpse of the natural history and ecology of an immaculately private nocturnalist with a surprisingly well-endowed brain. And while Mr. Opiang’s report shows that the doubters were technically wrong, the grueling details of his field methods suggest that as a workaday rule, “impossible to study” still suits Zaglossus quite well.
“Muse has amazing perseverance,” said Debra Wright, who was Mr. Opiang’s honors thesis adviser. “I don’t think that anyone else on earth could have done what he did.”
The research and Mr. Opiang’s training were initially supported by the Wildlife Conservation Society of the Bronx Zoo, but Mr. Opiang, who pronounces his first name Moo-say and is now working on his doctorate through the University of Tasmania, has since cofounded his own organization, the Papua New Guinea Institute of Biological Research.
Reproductively, monotremes are like a VCR-DVD unit, an embodiment of a technology in transition. They lay leathery eggs, as reptiles do, but then feed the so-called puggles that hatch with milk — though drizzled out of glands in the chest rather than expressed through nippled teats, and sometimes so enriched with iron that it looks pink.
Monotreme sex determination also holds its allure. In most mammals, a single set of XX chromosomes signifies a girl, a set of XY specifies a boy. For reasons that remain mysterious, monotremes have multiple sets of sex chromosomes, four or more parading pairs of XXs and XYs, or something else altogether: a few of those extra sex chromosomes look suspiciously birdlike. Another avianlike feature is the cloaca, the single orifice through which an echidna or platypus voids waste, has sex and lays eggs, and by which the group gets its name. Yet through that uni-perforation, a male echnida can extrude a four-headed penis.
However they conduct their affairs, monotremes do it remarkably well. Not only are they the oldest surviving mammalian group, but individual monotremes can live 50 years or longer. Peggy Rismiller of the University of Adelaide has studied the short-beaked echidna, or spiny anteater, since 1988. “One of the females we’ve been radiotracking since 1988 is at least 45, and she’s still reproducing,” Dr. Rismiller said.
Dr. Rismiller also pointed out that short-beaked echidnas are Australia’s most widely distributed mammals, adapting to life in the desert, along on the coast, in the rain forest, up above the snowline, all the while feeding on any invertebrates they can disinter. Even in summer they maintain their internal body temperature at a temperate 88 degrees Fahrenheit, and on a winter night they may lapse into a torpor, their core body thermostat dropping down as low as 40 degrees — a cryogenic skill of interest to surgeons and space enthusiasts alike.
Echidnas keep their cool, all right. “They’re one of the most pacifistic mammals,” Dr. Rismiller said. “Nobody bothers them; they don’t bother anybody. There’s a lot we could learn from them.” And in that level head sits a mighty brain. Among humans, the neocortex that allows us to reason and remember accounts for 30 percent of the brain; in echidnas, that figure is 50 percent.
If only they could stand to teach us. Short-beaked echidnas put up with people, however grudgingly, but as Mr. Opiang learned, the long-beaks of New Guinea shun all signs of human habitation, perhaps because, being twice the size of short-beaked echidnas, they are prized as bushmeat by local hunters and their dogs. “They’re not attracted to baits,” he said. “You can’t catch them with traps for tagging.”
To reach them, you must hike for miles into the highlands, on treacherously steep and slippery terrain where it rains 275 inches a year. “It’s one of the wettest places on earth,” Dr. Wright said.
That rain also wipes away signs of echidna foraging and denning. It took Mr. Opiang months of searching before he found his first echidna. Then he discovered that if he followed trails of freshly dug nose pokes at night — the holes that echidnas made with their beaks as they foraged for earthworms — he could find a den where a sated echidna would be hiding. He learned to grab them under the stomach, where there were no spines. “If you hold them against yourself, they’re friendly and they won’t struggle,” he said. Over five years he managed to capture, measure and, in most cases, attach radio transmitters to 22 individuals. Among his intriguing early findings: unlike most mammals, the females are bigger than the males, and the toothless, hairless tubular beaks through which they aim their ribbony tongues are longer, too.
Once again, the long-beaked echidna pokes fun at all the rules.
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