Extinct Technologies

I feel the way about a Springfield that I do about a Gooney Bird; some pieces of machinery are ultimate perfection of their sort, the only improvement is a radical change in design.
--Oscar, in Robert Heinlein's Glory Road

Sometimes a technology evolves to the point where the only improvement is a whole new technology.

Case(s) in point, last week, Pat and I took a mini-vacation to Pennsylvania, to Lancaster and Philadelphia. We visited Pat's cousin, Phil, deep in the heart of Amish country. Pennsylvania has more covered bridges than any other state; 30 in Lancaster County alone.


Covered bridges are the acme of wooden bridge design. Most employ the arched Burr truss --a double arch of laminated timbers combined with a series of triangular king posts. The king posts gave the bridge rigidity and the double arches (one on each side), distributed what engineers call the "live load" (the weight of moving wagons or trucks) to the bridge foundations. The arches are three 4x12 planks made of heartwood oak, steamed to allow a slight curve, and bolted in sections to each other. The seams are staggered so the pieces overlap, resulting in a single load-bearing piece. Most of the covered bridges we saw are still in use by traffic, including honking big farm machinery.


The bridges are made of locally quarried stone with local timber. Wood rots when wet. The builders added a roof, usually tin or shingle, to protect the wood elements and prolong the life of the structure. Uncovered wooden bridges have a lifespan of 10 years; covered bridges go ten times longer, maybe more. Wooden bridges were cheap and quick to build using local labor and were the way you crossed a creek dryshod until the advent of structural steel in the early 2oth century.

The bridge tour was part of the trip to Philly. On the way, we stopped at Strasburg, an early hub of railroading in the Keystone State. Three different railroad museums to choose from; one devoted to toy trains, one to model trains (there is a difference) and one featuring the real deal.

The model train museum, a private outfit, held a layout the size of a basketball court featuring local color. The sheer size of the layout and movement, including aircraft circling on wires, contribute to the biggest sensory overload I've experienced since going through It's a Small World at Disney World. Every 10 minutes or so, the lights dimmed and the houses, streetlights, and cars lit up. Pretty impressive. My favorite, though, was all the small jokes the modelers worked into the set. I saw several, but I'm sure I missed a lot. Jokes like the town square bronze statue of Eisenhower in full uniform with a pigeon on his head.

Or the hobo jungle with a club wielding three-headed troll under the bridge ("my brother is much bigger") the heads were miniature portraits of Larry, Curly, and Moe. There must have been 20 trains running all over the layout including a familiar face.

We saw gentlemen of a "certain age" leaving the gift shop with big shopping bags stuffed with model railroad cars and building kits. A trail of drool led to the door; you could almost smell the lust.

The real deal, however, was the Railroad Museum at Strassburg. I felt the same as when visiting the Smithsonian's Hall of Dinosaurs; big bellowing creatures that evoke the small kid's "Oh wow" response.


Steam locomotives ranging from one used to transport sugar cane in Hawaii to the huge Atlantics and Mikados that ran from one end of the continent to the other and back. A working exhibition train with coal smoke puffing from the stacks and brass bells agong.



Don't get me wrong; I harbor no nostalgia for bygone days. Being an American in the early years of the 21st Century is as good as it gets (on my optimist days) or as good as it ever will be (on my pessimistic ones). But the scent of live steam or the sound of hoofbeats on wooden decking evokes the same feeling as seeing a live mastodon.

When we have perfected aircars and matter-antimatter drive, I can't help but wonder what bits of today's stuff will be considered cool enough to keep.

Old Birds

People who visit museums tend to fall into one of two categories; those that know nothing about the exhibits in front of them, and those who know more than enough. These categories do not include the usual herds of school kids who only know that they are not in class today and who are savoring a rare taste of freedom.

I visited the Udvar-Hazy facility of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, also known as the Air/Space Annex, near Dulles Airport the other day. Forget the $12 parking fee and the fact that the building is out in the middle of nowhere (OK, not the middle, but you can see it on a clear day). Forget that the lots are less than 25% full and its the least visited of all the Smithsonian facilities. What's really cool is that it's big enough to house real airplanes, real really big airplanes.

The first to catch the eye is the SR-71 Blackbird. Sleek and flat black like Steve McQueen's Mustang in Bullet, as menacing as a T. rex, it sits on the ground floor, looking ready to chew right through the walls and take off.



"Did you know," said an airplane geek, standing at the nose of the beast, "that when they flew this bird from Edwards Air Force Base to here, it broke the speed record for time across North America? And that was just practice." I knew that particular factoid, but went along anyway; "Last time I saw one of these, they had just been declassified and were touring the air show circuit." "Whoa," came the reply, "you go back some on this plane." I mentioned that when last I saw an operational Blackbird, the crew had spread tarps under it to catch the oil dripping out of the fuselage and wings. "Yeah," my expert replied, "these things were built loose in the airframe and leaked like sieves. When they got up past Mach 2 or 3, the air friction and heat caused them to tighten up. If they were that tight on the ground, they would implode at speed." I noticed the tail insignia and pointed it out. "oh, yeah," came the reply, now aimed at a small cluster of people who had gathered for the impromptu lecture, "that's the symbol of the Skunkworks." The Skunkworks was a super secret facility located in (wait for it) Area 51 out in the Nevada desert. The Blackbird, the B-1 and -2s and the U-2 were all developed and test flown there. No wonder people kept reporting UFOs all the time. Report seeing a highly classified aircraft that doesn't exist from an experimental facility that isn't there, and nobody in any authority will say "yeah, that's one of ours."



The museum is loosely divided in to general themes. Military, civil aviation, and space. The military wing has examples of aircraft I grew up reading about; a Nieuport with the Lafayette Escadrille emblem on the side, a Spad and a German biplane are the heart of the World War I section. The Spad comes equipped with a Lewis machine gun, state of the art in 1918, and cool enough to be used by George Lucas as one of the weapons carried by the Imperial storm troopers in the first Star Wars movie.




The World War II area has more aircraft, simply because the old biplanes are few and far between today. As a kid I built models of many of the WWII aircraft and hung them from my bedroom ceiling with monofilament fishing line. The Smithsonian has done the same with some of the smaller aircraft, using something stronger than monofilament. The windscreens aren't clouded over with gluey thumbprints either. An old Flying Tiger fighter, a Navy Hellcat and a short takeoff and landing Lysander used for inserting spies and agents into occupied Europe are locked in a frozen dogfight overhead.



The silver dollar in the penny pile, though, has to be the Enola Gay, arguably the most famous airplane in history. An airplane that changed history, carefully restored to look like it did on the morning of the last day of the old world. You can't look at this machine and be neutral about it. I once asked my dad, a veteran of the European Theater, what he thought about the atom bomb. His answer paralleled a quote from James Jones (a veteran combat infantryman and author of From Here to Eternity and several other World War II novels). "It meant" he said, "that I was going to be able to grow up and have a life." My musings were interrupted by a family strolling the catwalk and reading the signage. "This is the airplane that dropped the first atom bomb on Japan" read the dad. "I thought Japan was on our side." replied the semi-bored son. "It is now, but not then." I blame the education system. Had I wits quick enough, I would have quoted Robert Oppenheimer from the Batisvada, "Now I am become death, breaker of worlds" although I doubt anyone present would have got it.



Pride of place, however, goes to the Space Shuttle Enterprise, the first one and possibly the only shuttle named by geeks. Housed in its own gallery with the rest of the space stuff, the first impression is one of overwhelming enormity. It is hard to believe something that big can actually fly. It's like a building with engines you can stand up in. The eye ignores the space suited astronaut off in the corner and provided for scale.



The Smithsonian prides itself on keeping all their exhibits in working order. You could, for example type a letter on one of their vintage 1900 Remington typewriters. A few years back, they let out the Tom Thumb, the first locomotive in North America and took it for a spin on an old B&O spur line along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Maryland. I suppose they could, if the spirit moved them, oil and gas up any aircraft hanging from the ceiling and buzz Dulles Airport.

Humbirds

Q: Why do hummingbirds hum?
A: Because they forgot the words.
--Boys’ Life Magazine

I needed some photos of hummingbirds for an article I was researching for an on-line discussion newsletter. I called around to my various friends and acquaintances in the area parks. Most, when they thought about it, were somewhat puzzled that they hadn't seen any coming to their feeders lately. One park had a few coming in but they were irregular and couldn't be counted on to make an appearance. Finally, the desk volunteer at Huntley Meadows said "Yes, we have a pair. They alternate every 5 minutes or so. I'm looking at the male now." I thanked her and tossed my stuff in the truck.

Thirty minutes later, I was set up at the feeder and waiting. Hummingbirds just materialize out of nothing. One second you are staring at an empty feeder, and the next, there it is. "Beam me down, Scottie." The male, resplendent in a carmine gorgette (the "ruby throat" of Rubythroated hummingbirds), hovered while he sipped at the 1/4 sugar to water solution. A low buzz from the wings, like a bumble bee, only more punctuated, was audible even 10 feet away where I snapped like crazy. Three or four sips later and he was off, Turing the corner of the building and disappearing like so much fairy dust.

Five minutes later, right on schedule, the female winked into existence. No ruby throat, but body shining in metallic green, she perched on the lip of the feeder and guzzled like a construction worker in a tavern.

Hummingbirds are tiny scraps of life; the Cuban Bee hummingbird, about the size of your thumb and weighing less than a penny is the world's smallest bird. The Giant hummingbird, found in the Peruvian Andes, is about the size of a starling and the Goliath of hummers. Hummingbirds only inhabit the New World and islands throughout the Caribbean have their own endemic species, such as the Jamaican Red-billed Streamertail with 8 inch tail plumes on the male (over twice the length of its body). The streamers hum during flight. The locals call it the doctor bird because the black plumes remind them of the old fashioned frock coats worn by physicians (“and the big bill”). The doctor bird is the logo for Jamaican Airways.

There are about 340 different species, though new ones are discovered almost every year. Sixteen species nest in North America, but only one, the Rubythroated hummingbird is found in the eastern half of the continent. Every year, however, we get reports of western species spending the winter in the East. One year, a Broad-billed hummingbird, usually found in the Rocky Mountains, wintered only a few blocks from our house.

Hummingbirds all have specially shaped short stubby wings that allow them to hover in place, back up, and even fly upside down. The wings cup air and provide lift on both the up stroke and down stroke; most birds’ wings only lift on the down stroke.

Hummingbirds all drink nectar for energy. They prefer red flowers with long tube shapes like trumpet vine. Pretty much any long flower, especially red ones are dependant on hummingbirds for pollination (most insects can’t see the color red) depositing the stuff on the birds’ heads and throats. With their long bills and longer tongues with fringes on the tip, they soak up nectar via capillary action and squeeze into their mouths. Hummingbirds also hunt small insects like aphids and tiny spiders for protein, and feed them to the chicks for a rapid growth boost.

Christopher Columbus was the first European to see hummingbirds, noting them in his ship’s log when he arrived at the island of Hispaniola; he thought they were bees. In fact, the name “hummingbird” comes from both the low buzz they make in flight and from the old name for bumble bees (humble bees); interesting aside: another old name for a bumble bee is “dumbledore”. Of course, the people who already were living in America knew about hummingbirds. The Aztecs believed them to be the ghosts of warriors who had died in battle, combining the bird's brilliant beauty and utter fearlessness. The Hopi people thought hummingbirds could predict rain. In the arid Southwest, hummingbirds build nests just before the summer monsoon rains to ensure a good supply of nectar-bearing blossoms and associated small insects.


Hummingbirds nests are tiny —the nest of a Rubythroated fits over the end of your thumb like a cap. The female builds nests of silk stolen from spider webs, lines the inside with soft plant down like dandelion fluff, and attaches lichens to the outside for camouflage. Silk stretches, allowing the nest to expand as the chicks grow. Two pinto bean-sized eggs, hatch in 2 weeks and the babies are up and out in about 3. Hummingbirds usually raise two broods a season, fixing and reusing the old nest with each new clutch.

Due to their tiny size and warm bloodedness, hummers have ferocious metabolisms, burning their way through life. Hearts, largest in size in proportion to body weight of any animal, run at 500 beats per minute at rest- double that in flight. They hover with wings going at 55 beats per second, 75 in flight. The human eye just can't follow that speed so all you get is a blur. Naturally, with such a jacked-up metabolism, you expect them to have a very short life span, but hummers have several tricks up their feathered sleeves. They go into torpor or temporarily hibernate every night and in cold weather. Body temperature drops 20 or more degrees and metabolic rate slows accordingly, saving energy. The oldest Rubythroated is documented at 9 years. Other species, particularly those in temperate regions may live even longer.

Hummingbirds in temperate areas are migratory. Rufus hummingbirds go from Alaska to California and back every year. Rubythroateds migrate 500 miles across Gulf of Mexico in one hop. They were once thought to ride on the backs of migrating geese since nobody could believe such a tiny bundle of feathers could make the trip on its own.

Hummingbirds, especially males posses iridescent feathers in metallic greens, blues and reds. Feather color is due to structure, not pigment, with layers of specialized scales on each feather acting like miniature prisms. The metallic feathers on the throats of males, called gorgettes, catch the light during courtship displays to show off to any females in the area. Males fly patterns to best display their colors - Rubythroats fly in low inverted arcs like a clock pendulum, other species fly spirals or weave back and forth through the foliage, flashing on and off like living neon signs.

Flotsam

It was supposed to have been just a quiet adventure. I was going to River Bend Park here in Fairfax County to try to find a Cyrano Darner; a state-rare dragonfly rumored to inhabit one of the ponds a mile or so upstream from the visitor center. I never got there. About 500 yards upstream, I saw a group of half a dozen vultures on one of the numerous rocky islets that dot the Potomac above Great Falls. They all looked like black vultures and I walked quietly to an opening in the vegetation lining the bank. I focused and shot maybe 5 or 6 photos of the flock. Finding vultures in a group is not all that unusual since they gather in sunny spots to bask and raise their low energy metabolisms to flight level. What was unusual, a small voice in the back of my brain was saying, was that they were all black vultures, not a red-headed turkey vulture among them. Black vultures will visually track turkey vultures to a carcass and drive them off when they get there.

The voice in the back of my brain was getting louder when I put the binoculars on the group and saw a pair of blue jeans draped over a tree branch. The jeans waistband ended at an old river worn log. The voice began to go off the chart when a vulture dipped its head down and I saw the exposed bones of the rib cage. The voice said, quite calmly, “We should go back and report this.”

I made my way back to the visitor center and found a uniformed park person at his desk. “I think I have found a body in the river” I said. His eyebrows rose, “Are you sure it’s not just a deer?” “Not unless they’ve started wearing Levis” I replied. I realize now that it sounded flip, but the twin ideas of “body” and “person” never made the connection. It was wreckage and it was human. Not someone’s kid or parent or whatever. Just a pile of bones in blue jeans. The park ranger walked with me to the point and glassed the thing in the river. He pulled out his walkie-talkie and called it in. “Now the circus begins” he muttered.

First to arrive was the rescue squad. Their job, I gathered, was to ascertain that: a) there was a body and, b) it was dead. The ranger walked them upriver and when they got back, they began putting away the rescue equipment. It was now a recovery operation and legal issues reared their ugly heads. The Potomac River is technically all in Maryland, up to mean low water, a precedent dating all the way back to early colonial days. The body was in Maryland, Montgomery County, to be precise. Having grown up in Montgomery County and having lived along the river there for several years, I knew that the only safe places to launch a boat were at Cabin John, which was below Great Falls and impossible to traverse, or at Seneca, about 15 miles upstream from where we were. Montgomery told Fairfax to stand by. Meanwhile, Fairfax police began to arrive. A cruiser, then another, then another with an officer in charge. I was asked to wait so I could give a statement, having been the one who discovered the wreck. Helicopters began appearing overhead. US Park Police, Fairfax County, Montgomery County, News 7 and Fox. All holding station or buzzing up and down stream. One of the cops said Montgomery was putting in at Seneca and would be there within half an hour. One of the Fairfax Fire and Rescue people, who already had their zodiac in the water at the boat ramp scoffed. “Maybe an hour if they have someone steering who knows the line” meaning knew how to avoid the rocks and snags that make the Potomac such fun for kayakers. “We can have this guy in a bag in 15 minutes if they let us.” Somewhere along the way the “it” became a “he”.

I told my story to several cops in a row, uniform, uniform supervisor, homicide detective, cold case detective. The cold case guy noticed my camera and asked if I had made any photos. “Yeah, I wanted to get images of the vultures, but I think the body is in the pictures.” He asked if he could have my camera card so he could download the photos. Turns out that with digital, the first download is the official one and the one to be used in court. He promised to get the card or its replacement back soon. “We will take the images off if you don’t mind” he said. Sure, like I really want that in my camera—bad enough the image is in my brain. Last to ask questions was the WJLA reporter. She was pleasant enough in a wide-eyed gosh weren’t you scared kind of way. I gave some inane answers to the questions. Even spelled my name. So I made the news at 11, answering two questions. The caption labeled me as a hiker. Andy Warhol once said everybody gets 15 minutes of fame. He didn’t promise they would spell your name right.

Stone Monsters

It was a beautiful May day; the sun was shining, the sky blue, bird on the wing, and snail on the thorn. On the spur of the moment, I decided to go the National Cathedral to shoot gargoyles. I had read that the Cathedral had added a Darth Vader head to the collection and was eager to see it. I debouched from the underground garage near the north transept where I heard the Dark Lord was ensconced and gazed about. The bottom row of gargoyles were all there; the rattlesnake and the elephant with eternal mouths open to spout water (or boiling lead if you are a fan of the movie version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney Jr.). I was trying to locate Darth when a maintenance worker emerged from the basement. “Excuse me,” I asked, “I’m told there is a gargoyle of Darth Vader somewhere up there. Do you know where it might be?” He replied “Sure” and directed me up to a lonely tower where old bullet head was just visible. “Tell you what”, he said, “I’ve got some time left on my lunch hour—I’ll take you up there if you don’t mind the walk.” When gift horses stare one in the face, you don’t count teeth, and I enthusiastically agreed. Several stair cases, one elevator ride and a steel ladder later, we were up on the roof, over 100 feet up. “I’m not supposed to bring people up here due to liability, but just don’t fall off. OK?” We tracked around the transept, with “Bill” (not his real name to keep him out of trouble) giving a running narrative of all the gargoyles and grotesques along the way. “Bill” has been at the Cathedral for 25 years and knows every nook and cranny in the building. I squeezed through the passages between the flying buttresses trying to keep up and not miss anything. There were no fat hunchbacks. The sculptures were in themed pairs, flanking each gable, but from up top, they were seemingly out of kilter until I figured out the pattern. The penguin and baby made more sense when you knew the companion pieces were a polar bear and an old man.





I don’t know whether it was my good ole boy accent, or the fact that “Bill” just recognized a fellow story teller, but it was a tour to remember. He pointed out the Veep’s house on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, about half a mile off and the front line of the Blue Ridge Mountains over 30 miles to the Southwest. Sugarloaf Mountain, an isolated outlier of the Appalachians was on the horizon over 50 miles to the north in Maryland. He pointed out the caricatures the stone carvers made of each other and the fanciful animals, monsters, people, and whatnots that are just not visible in any detail from the ground. We stopped less than 20 feet below the Darth Vader sculpture and I could even see the small stone hands holding onto the wall for dear life. The Cathedral sponsored a contest for young people a couple of years back to get suggestions as to what to fill the remaining spaces. One kid suggested Darth and the administration and (most importantly the stone carvers agreed.



The stone carvers of the Cathedral sometimes worked from models made by other artists, turning the ideas into Indiana limestone. But often as not, they made their own sculptures, using each other, their pets, and whatever came to mind for inspiration. Master carver Roger Morigi, the chief carver for many years, was known for his explosive temper, so his caricature has him blowing his top,


a mushroom cloud erupting from his hat, one foot changed into a cloven hoof. The carvers made a stone security camera,

a bulldog (the mascot of St. Anselm’s school on the Cathedral grounds), and when master carver Vincent Palumbo had a heart attack on the job, a stone heart monitor machine, complete with EKG readout, was created to welcome him back.



We ambled to the older section of the Cathedral, which was begun in 1907, and “Bill” showed me some of the older sculptures. More along the lines of traditional European carvings, the lacked the humor of the more recent batch, but were still impressive with suggestions of Art Deco in their lines.



We passed one of the stained glass windows for which the Cathedral is justifiably famous. ”Bill” pointed out the individual glass bits cemented into the matrix. Instead of using colored glass panes, the glass workers flaked chips from bricks of Italian colored glass. The varying thickness and striations from the chipping process give additional depth and refraction to the windows.


The National Cathedral has 120 gargoyles and heaven knows how many grotesques (gargoyles have drain spouts in their mouths; grotesques don't), each hand-carved with loving care. Even the carved stone frieze contains identifiable flowers and plants native to the region. Hand carving the flowers was a tedious job, “Bill” said, so the carvers would add a flourish just to keep from being bored. I noticed a long line of flowers was interrupted with a face of Bozo the Clown.

You wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking carefully. Other jokes began to pop out as well; a monkey face peering out from a cluster of stone leaves, the Green Man from another.
“Bill” asked me if I was up for one more stop; we rode a service elevator down into the bowels of the building and into the boiler room. There above the door, were a set of shelves, lined with empty wine bottles, each with the year of its consumption in magic marker on the label. Each New Year’s, the carvers would toast their work and drink to what was to come. The last bottle was finished at the funeral of the last master carver. “They’ll find out about this one day and tell me to take it down” said “Bill” with a sigh, “I’ll tell ‘em to go to hell. This is part of the soul of this place.” I do believe he’s right.

Really Old Glory

The world is full of things that make you wonder “how the hell did they come up with that?” For example; who first came up with: “You know, I’ll bet that tarantula-looking thing we just pulled out of the water would taste good if we steamed it with Old Bay and figured out how to take it apart; and maybe dipped the edible bits in some melted butter, too.”

Dye stuffs fall into this category. Royal purple was produced in ancient times by gathering tons of Murex snails from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and letting them rot in huge vats. The resultant goo yielded a deep purple dye which turned indigo in the presence of sunlight (ultraviolet radiation). Ancient travel writers told of being able to smell the dye-producing city of Sidon from far at sea on shipboard while Sidon was still below the horizon.

I was recently rereading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, and was intrigued by the chapter on domesticated animals. Diamond says that domesticated species share several characteristics including social behavior (humans can take over the top spot in the pecking order) and docility.

These criteria apply to mammals (except maybe cats) and explains why the ancient Egyptians, who went on a domestication binge, failed to domesticate the hyena or the hippo (although the why in this equation seems to be lost in the dim mists of history). Of the three species of domesticated insects, only one, the honeybee fills Diamond’s condition of sociality. Of the other two, silkworms are docile but most assuredly non-social, and the other, the cochineal scale, seems social only because it is sedentary and almost entirely females. Cochineal is a small scale insect feeding exclusively on prickly pear and closely related cacti.

Cochineal, though now no longer produced industrially, was at one time, the major source of red/scarlet dye in the world. Somewhere way back when, an unremembered Mesoamerican hunter-gatherer found red stains on his or her clothes after harvesting cactus fruits and probably thought: “You know, if we could produce this stuff in industrial quantities, we could revolutionize the textile industry”. Originally raised throughout the drier parts of Central America, cochineal was the source of scarlet dye, the color of Aztec royalty. It was farmed like any other livestock. Scale rancheros tended the prickly pear cacti and the herds of bugs, to the point of building small straw “barns” to keep the rains from dislodging the insects. Cortez brought back cochineal scales as part of the spoils from the conquest of Mexico—gold, silver, corn, chili, bugs.

The Spanish made cochineal production a state monopoly and a state secret, much the same as China had tried to do with silkworms centuries earlier and Venetians did with glass. As with the Chinese experiment, it didn’t work for the Spanish. Prickly pear with its attendant cochineal scales was smuggled out of Mexico and introduced into Europe, to desert islands such as the Azores and the Canaries, and as far afield as the Galapagos and Australia. Fortunes were made on the dye, which some early chemist discovered could be made colorfast with the addition of tin salts.

The English and Dutch, in particular, went crazy over scarlet. Painters like Ruebens used it with abandon (close examination of pre-Columbian renaissance paintings reveals no bright reds) replacing the red-brown kermes dyes (made from European bugs) on their palettes as soon as they could lay hands on the stuff. The uniform tunics of British soldiers (redcoats) were dyed scarlet with cochineal dye as were eight of the fifteen broad stripes on the original Star-Spangled Banner.

Following the invention of coal tar aniline dyes in the late 18th century, the cochineal industry collapsed, leaving acres of untended prickly pear in its wake. The insects, which are as domesticated as chickens, mostly perished from their island homes, leaving the cactus to run riot without anything to eat it. Prickly pear cactus has become a noxious weed wherever it was planted outside its original range.

Today, cochineal has come full circle; it is produced in small amounts in Peru and Central America and is exported as safe, USDA-approved food coloring. Cochineal red is a replacement for coal tar dye Red 40 which comes from petroleum. You may fondly remember coal tar dye Red 40 as what gave bottled maraschino cherries their startling red color. Nowdays, the red comes from bugs; kind of puts you off that next banana split, doesn’t it?

For Kay...

This scene is pretty generic; we’ve seen it scores of times—in Dr. No, an early James Bond movie, one of the evil Doctor’s henchmen releases a Mexican redknee tarantula on the slumbering Bond’s bed. Cue ominous music as the hairy monster creeps ever so slowly up towards the blissful dreaming victim. Bond awakens in the (ta-da!) nick of time, flings back the covers, and mashes the hapless spider with several well-aimed whacks from his elegant, handmade, rich Corinthian leather, Gucci loafer; the music climaxing discordantly with each strike.

Too bad neither the henchman nor Cmdr. Bond was able to stay awake during biology class. They would have learned that Mexican redknee tarantulas, for all their nasty looks, are really quite docile. This despite the fact that Sean Connery insisted upon a pane of glass to separate him (or his stunt double) from the creepy-crawly itself. Due to their size and conspicuous coloration, Mexican redknees are movie stars, also appearing in Raiders of the Lost Ark (in the opening scenes) and as the title role in Tarantula, a late 50’s horror film, wherein a giant mutant redknee develops a taste for pickup trucks.

In the wild, Mexican redknee tarantulas mate in the summer, shortly after the male sheds his exoskeleton for the final time and becomes fully mature, usually by the start of the rainy season (July and August). Mating occurs in or near the female's burrow, where the male uses his pedipalps (front limbs) to transfer sperm to openings on the underside of the female's abdomen. After mating, some females will try to eat the male, although this has never been observed in the wild (usually they just smoke a cigarette and cuddle). The sperm and eggs are stored in the female's body and not deposited until spring. In the spring, the female deposits hundreds of eggs and the sperm onto a silk mat she has made and then fashions into a ball or egg sack. Fertilization takes place in the sack within minutes and the spiderlings hatch in 3 months but remain in the egg sack for 3 more weeks. Once out of the egg sack, they spend 2 weeks in the burrow with mommy before they disperse out into the big wide world on their own. Males mature at about 4 years, females 2 to 3 years later. They are a long-lived species with females reaching 25 to 30 years; longer in captivity. Males only live about a year after maturity. Adult females are sedentary, with permanent borrows, but males wander the country side in search of mates, making them vulnerable to predators. (Sounds familiar.)

A nocturnal ambush hunter, the Mexican redknee tarantula is what ecologists call a “sit and wait” predator, preferring prey (insects, small frogs, small lizards, and mice) to come to it. The tip of each leg is sensitive to smells, tastes, and vibrations, and the spider uses it to detect prey or to avoid predators. The spider holds its prey with its pedipalps (front limbs) and injects it with venom delivered via two hollow fangs. This venom has a double component; a neurotoxin and a toxin which degrades proteins. The neurotoxin paralyzes the prey and the other toxin fraction begins digestion. Once the venom has acted, the tarantula is able to suck up the liquefied proteins and fats of its prey, leaving just a small ball of undigested bits.

The usually docile Mexican redknee tarantula has an unusual defense: when threatened, it flicks hairs off its abdomen with the hind legs. Known as urticating (irritating) hairs, they may cause a skin rash in humans. In rare cases, Mexican redknees may bite, producing results comparable to a wasp sting—there are no known human fatalities from the bite of a redknee. Mexican redknee tarantulas make popular class pets in elementary schools—you can get one from biological supply houses—beats the hell out of a hamster.

Tarantulas are surprisingly delicate—a friend who grew up in the Canal Zone once told me about stepping on one in the bathroom—“it felt like stepping on a banana”. I leave the rest to your imagination. Books on keeping redknees as pets mention that they are terrified of heights and can die from falling only a foot or two onto a hard surface.

Unless he was planning on tickling 007 to death, the henchman should have chosen something a bit more lethal; perhaps the rabbit from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. Bond, for his part, should have suavely thanked the evil Doctor for the new pet and mentioned that he was planning on donating it to the local orphan’s home as a cute and cuddly companion animal. But alas, when he threw back the covers, dashing the spider to the floor, the fall probably killed the poor creature outright and James didn’t need to get spider guts all over his hand-tooled, pabulum-fed, kidskin bedroom slipper, with the expensive tassels on the top. “Hello, front desk? Could you send someone to clean up a large squished spider? Oh, and maybe polish my shoes?”