The As It Happens Files (25 page)

Well, the chickens didn’t speak either, but Mouse the Pig was just tremendous, Mr. Rees insisted. Plus, she’d just given birth to eight piglets: four of a cream-and-beige stripey hue and four that were a cross between Tamworth (See? She could’ve been in the pigs-on-the-lam movie!) and French wild boar—hence the French accent, he said. Of course.

A lot of the animal stories we’ve done on
As It Happens
have been in a more serious vein but no less interesting for that. A good many of them fell into the category of science or ecology. We reported on the plight of the endangered right whales on the east coast and on Luna, the overly friendly orca who lived in the waters off British Columbia—and, of course, on Willy of “Save Willy” fame, another killer whale. His “real name” was Keiko, and after he became world-famous for being rescued from an aquarium in Mexico, money was raised to have Keiko shipped back to his native waters near Iceland, where he would be free again to live the way whales are supposed to. That was the theory.

It took a while, but Keiko
was
eventually flown home—at huge expense and, no doubt, some discomfort to Keiko—but the whale did not thrive in his natural environment. Apparently, he didn’t
want
to swim around in icy water without friends or entertainment. In 2002, while he was still being watched over by human caretakers in a kind of large, open pen in Iceland, he gave his minders the slip and made off for Norway. In September he followed a fishing boat to the Norwegian town of Haka, where he seemed to be inviting people to play with him. He was hungry and had lost weight. He died of pneumonia the following year.

The marmot recovery people on Vancouver Island have been having a bit more luck in their attempts to prop up the population of the native marmot species. It was June 2002 when we first talked to Andrew Bryant, chief scientist of the Marmot Recovery Project in Nanaimo, British Columbia. You may wonder, as I did, whether the marmot really was an endangered species and why we would find it necessary to
ensure its survival anyway. A marmot, after all, is just a sort of woodchuck or groundhog—in other words, a
rodent.

Dr. Bryant had heard it all before. “There’s a popular notion out there,” he said, “that a marmot is a marmot is a marmot.” But nothing could be further from the truth, apparently. There are 14 species of marmots in the world, four of which live in Canada, and one of them is exclusive to Vancouver Island. This is the one on the verge of extinction; they’d counted only 30 marmots emerging from hibernation that year.

The problem, as Dr. Bryant outlined it, is that Vancouver Island marmots live on mountaintops: one family atop one mountain, another family on the next mountain and so on. To propagate in a healthy way (no incest among marmots), the teenagers need to wander off and find suitable mates on a neighbouring mountain, but clearcutting has interrupted this practice, and this is how: clearcut logging has removed the forest cover from the valleys between the mountains. Now, marmots don’t like forests, and they love clear, open spaces, so instead of tearing through the forest and rushing up the next mountain to find his soulmate, the errant teenager just settles down in this lovely open valley, where, presumably, he lives happily, albeit celibately, until a cougar comes along and eats him—cougars and wolves being the other elements in the marmot reduction scenario. Poor marmots.

Dr. Bryant’s plan for saving his groundhog friends was to breed them in captivity and then ferry them about from mountaintop to mountaintop, to join up with their wild cousins and engage in a little hanky-panky. When we caught up with him again in 2004, he was sad to report that they hadn’t made a lot of progress to date. Of the four marmots released by the Marmot Recovery Project the year before, three had immediately become lunch (see above) for bigger
fauna. But they were pressing ahead. The marmot savers had been given something of a boost by the B.C. Natural Resources Minister Joyce Murray, who had publicly encouraged local huntsmen to take up arms against the neighbourhood cougars. This call for a cull caused a flurry of negative attention from the anti-hunting community until it was explained that there was no cull as such. The Honourable Ms. Murray was only hoping that hunters would take their full quota of cats and wolves in marmot areas.

Last time I checked with the marmot recovery people, Dr. Bryant’s associate Sean Pendergast was pleased to tell me that the marmots were coming along nicely. He said the captive breeding programme in particular was wildly successful; that is, marmots that had been born and raised in captivity were now happily producing many little marmots in captivity. This is occurring, by the way, in zoos all over Canada. Yes, unbeknownst to you and me—until now—marmots are flying hither and yon across the country all the time courtesy of Air Canada (which doesn’t want to carry your pet schnauzer anymore, but that’s another story).

Anyway, the zoo-bred marmots have been released into the wild in ever-increasing numbers, and their survival rate has steadily improved—nearly half of them survived in 2006. And in 2006 two marmots that had been released a couple of years earlier bore litters—four pups each—and they all emerged successfully from hibernation. This was cause for great celebration in the marmot welfare community, who now see more reason to hope that they will eventually reach their goal of about three hundred wild marmots.

Our introduction to the marmot crisis came a year after we learned about snail sex. Ronald Chase of McGill University
was the man who, in June 2001, enlightened us as to the antics snails get up to when mating—namely, shooting darts at each other. Now, in evolutionary terms, when you record a particular—not to say peculiar—behaviour on the part of a plant or animal, you ask yourself how it might promote the animal’s long-term survival. (Vancouver Island marmots, for example, might be well advised to become allergic to meadow valleys.) But when it came to snails’ arrows, Dr. Chase said, scientists had been distracted by their own species’ lore. Immersed as they were in Greek mythology and images of Eros, they thought the arrows might be a device to turn on the opposite sex in order to engage in … hanky-panky. As a result, they hadn’t bothered to investigate the snail darts business too closely, which left him a nice opening. What he discovered was that when a snail gets hit by a dart, he stores up more sperm; in other words, it may or may not be a turn-on, but it will make the dart receiver more likely to produce little snail babies when he mates.

Here’s a wee complication. Snails are hermaphrodites—that is, they are both male and female at the same time. I don’t really understand how this works, but there you are; the snails must have sorted it out, because they’re not nearing extinction as far as I know.

We’ve been surprised and delighted and fascinated for more hours than I can count by the many, many scientists—biologists, chemists, oceanographers, astronomers and so on—who have appeared on
As It Happens
and chatted away about their work and shared their excitement about everything from flying snakes and kangaroo rats to moose noses, whale songs, turquoise skies and the science of throwing a baseball. Their enthusiasm is irresistible. Even when they go
astray, they’re interesting—and it happens all the time in science, of course. It happens in other walks of life, too, only scientists are often quicker to admit their errors than other people. I hope Dan Goldston won’t be upset if I remind folk of the time he developed a proof regarding the occurrence of twin primes only to discover, almost as soon as he’d published it, that he’d made a wee mistake somewhere along the way.

A prime number is one that can be divided evenly only by itself and by one: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29 are all prime numbers.
Twin
primes are close together, like 5 and 7, 11 and 13, 17 and 19. As the numbers get higher, the pairs get further and further apart. The question that Dr. Goldston was working on was whether you could say with any certainty that prime numbers occurred close together predictably and infinitely often … or something like that.

“We always thought this was true,” he said, “but we never proved it before.”

Dr. Goldston teaches mathematics at San José State University in California, and he’d been working on this problem for
20 years,
so you can imagine his jubilation when the breakthrough came—as he told us in March 2003. But then the aforementioned disaster struck. It was one Andrew Granville at the University of Montreal who spoiled the party, Dan told us when we spoke again a few weeks later, by demonstrating that the “approximation we were using to detect primes didn’t have all the properties we thought it had.” So it was back to square one for Dan. At least he didn’t have to find a new problem.

Over the years,
As It Happens
listeners and I have had a lot of free lessons in math and physics and chemistry, sometimes from scientists as young as 11, who have accomplished things like making crackers stay crisp when dunked, demonstrating that it takes but a nanosecond for a dropped gummi bear to
pick dirt up off the floor and using probiotics to treat a crippling gastric disorder. These were school projects carried out by Gina Gallant in Prince George, B.C.; Jillian Clarke in Chicago; and Lindsey Edmunds in Nova Scotia. When she wrote up her probiotic results, 17-year-old Lindsey became the youngest person ever to have an article published in the
Canadian Medical Association Journal.
I expect to see all their names in the Nobel lists before too long.

Violet the Very Valuable Chicken also started life as a school project, a classroom lesson on the meaning of life, using chicken hatching as the experiment. When the experiment was over, Violet and her sister Ruby went to live with the Flight family (still not making it up) in Fitchingfield, England. Somehow Violet ran afoul of the parish council there—they wanted to kill her—which was when Paula Flight took out a million-pound insurance policy on her. We’ll let Mrs. Flight pick up the story.