Marked for Life

Conservationists working in Madagascar are doing the unthinkable—defacing the shells of endangered ploughshare tortoises—but it may be the animals’ last hope.

TOUGH ROW TO HOE: A male ploughshare tortoise released at Beaboaly, MadagascarLance Woolaver, Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust

It was with a sense of great foreboding that Bronx Zoo herpetology curator John Behler complied with a mandate to return 33 young endangered ploughshare tortoises to the island of Madagascar in 1998. Behler had rescued the animals—less than half of those stolen from a conservation breeding colony in 1996—a few months earlier from a small zoo in the Netherlands, where the Dutch government had stashed them after an illegal exotic-pet dealer got cold feet. But Dutch commercial animal trader Olaf Pronk, who was well known for dealing in rare Malagasy reptiles, pushed the Madagascar government to sue to get the tortoises back.

“It became a messy legal battle,” recalls British conservationist Richard Lewis, director of Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust’s Madagascar program, which originally bred the tortoises. “The Bronx Zoo was worried, rightly or wrongly, that the animals were going to just disappear again.”

A national Dutch court ruled that Madagascar still had a legal right to the tortoises, and required that the animals be returned to the island country. But before Behler and his colleagues complied, they made a bold move. Using a rotary electrical tool, they engraved “MEF” for Ministère de l’Environnement et des Forêts, Madagascar’s equivalent of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, on the carapace of each of the tortoises, which at the time were only the size of grapefruits. “Basically the Bronx Zoo said, ‘We’re in this legal tussle, we have to give the animals up, but we want to make sure that their resale value is trashed,’” Lewis explains.

Today, 14 years later, conservationists believe that at least 10 to 14 of those 33 tortoises are still alive. They are now just a couple years away from breeding age, and though the engravings are small relative to the size of the adult animal, they are still visible.

Of course it’s a shame that these beautiful animals have to be defaced, but it’s
done with their best interest
in mind.
—Rhett Butler, mongabay.com

“It was very controversial when he did it,” says Eric Goode of the Turtle Conservancy, which he cofounded with Behler, now deceased. On one hand, Behler’s actions defaced a beautiful and extremely threatened species. On the other, “he never wanted to have those animals enter into the trade.”

Goode, for one, is supportive of such practices, especially since the illegal pet trade continues to threaten the tortoises. “We’re at the brink with this species,” he notes. “Unless we take pretty radical measures it’s just going to go extinct in the wild.”

So Goode and his collaborators researched the exotic pet trade to determine the best way to deter smugglers. They even interviewed an infamous reptile dealer who served prison time for his involvement in the trade of Galapagos tortoises. “He basically said he would not buy [a marked] tortoise,” Goode recalls. “He [said] it was the kiss of death. If an animal is marked, especially with the initials of the government of origin, no one wants to take that and put that in their collection.”

Convinced it was a necessary step to save the ploughshare tortoise, Goode teamed up with Lewis in 2008 to start marking the shells of the animals at Durrell’s breeding colony in Madagascar, and more than 200 captive tortoises have been marked so far. The pair has also coordinated with locals, who started finding, marking, and releasing wild tortoises in January.

Like Behler, the researchers are using a rotary tool to do the engravings, which consist of MG (for Madagascar) and a number. Though it may sound invasive, the technique appears to be harmless to the animals. Tortoise shells are covered with layers of keratin, like fingernails, and the ploughshare tortoise has the thickest keratin of any tortoise in which it’s been measured, allowing the conservationists to drill quite deep into the carapace without hitting the bone below. “They’re not showing any real signs of pain whatsoever,” Goode says. “You do it, and the tortoise will just go about its day.” (Tortoises less than 20 centimeters long are marked using a primitive tattooing technique, similar to that employed by prisoners, Goode notes.)

The big question, of course, is whether it will work. “It remains to be seen,” Goode says. Some people might still buy the animals to breed them, for example, or try to find a way to conceal the mark. Others may kill the animals out of spite, as has occurred in rhinos whose horns have been cut off. “There’s no perfect solution,” he says. “It’s not going to end the trade, for sure, but we think it will at least do a lot.”

Not surprisingly, “[the project] was met with a lot of resistance,” says Goode. Even project participants have fleeting reservations. In the end, however, it’s gained the support of the conservation community. “I certainly feel that what Durrell is doing seems to make complete sense and is warranted,” says Mal Mitchell of Azafady, a conservation-oriented charity with a presence in southeast Madagascar.

“Efforts like this are a good short-term strategy,” agrees conservation journalist Rhett Butler, founder of the rainforest conservation site mongabay.com. “Of course it’s a shame that these beautiful animals have to be defaced, but it’s done with their best interest in mind.” Longer-term measures must also be taken to address the demand for such animals in the first place, Butler adds. “The obvious option would be establishing a captive breeding population for the pet trade, which would basically kill demand for wild animals.”

Microscopy Boot Camp

A researcher in Florida changes lives by showing struggling 20-somethings the ins and outs of life in the lab.

THE RECRUITS: Davidson lab members (from left to right) Riley Evans, Brittany Sell, John Allen, Kathy Malik, Michelle Baird, and Paula CranfillDavid Barfield

In the hours before they get hitched, some grooms eat, some pace, and some watch TV. Chris Murphy was in the lab.

While his bride, Brooke—a hairstylist he met while managing a pizza parlor next door to the boutique where she worked—prepared for the big day, Murphy prepared for his next experiment, plating and transfecting HeLa cells for subsequent photobleaching.

Cell culture is one of those tasks that is tough to entrust to others, Murphy explains, “as an infection can be costly.” But there were other upsides: “It was the only time I was alone the entire day,” he recalls. “It was kind of nice.”

Murphy’s wedding day was, in fact, his 300th consecutive day in the lab. Such dedication would be remarkable in a postdoc or grad student, but Murphy was neither. With an associate’s degree from a community college and two semesters of coursework at Florida State University (FSU), Murphy was a lab technician.

His boss was Michael Davidson, who runs a microscopy laboratory at FSU’s National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. The lab is a powerhouse, sporting more than 25 members and some 30 microscopes, seven of them top-of-the-line confocals. Focusing on live-cell imaging and the development and characterization of fluorescent proteins and molecular sensors, Davidson and his team have churned out more than 50 publications in the past decade, as well as microscopy-focused educational Web content for instrument manufacturers Nikon, Zeiss, and Olympus.

These days, Davidson staffs the place with people like Murphy—smart, hard-working twentysomethings who struggled in school and could use a break. “At my age, I don’t need more papers,” Davidson says. “I need to give something back, and that’s my way of doing it.”

Davidson exposes his recruits to what he calls “boot camp,” a no-nonsense environment in which they are expected to clock in daily at 8:30—not 8:45—work hard, and by the end of their tenure get a few publications. Most make it, a few don’t.

Davidson admits that he’s a micromanager, but claims to be no harder on others than he is on himself: he works 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. And Murphy, he says, was similarly driven. Tasks in Davidson’s lab run the gamut from washing dishes and feeding cells to cloning fluorescent proteins and doing microscopy. Yet he also encourages his employees to read and be independent. He trains them, but many techniques are self-taught.

The wage for that work is about $8.50 an hour, which Davidson pays out of the profits from his website contracts and photomicrograph royalties. For Murphy, a $7/hour starting salary was actually a pay cut, he says, but a worthwhile one. “It’s a bummer to make pizza for a living,” he explains. “I have an extremely active mind.” By the end of his tenure in Davidson’s lab, Murphy made $37,000 a year as a senior microscopist and had coauthored six publications. His experience helped get him his current job as a regional sales manager for microscopy camera company Photometrics, where he now makes “six figures.”

Davidson lab alumna Ericka Ramko had a similar experience. After graduating FSU with a bachelor’s degree in human sciences and “zero lab experience,” she worked at a local newspaper, but wanted get back into science. In her three and a half years in Davidson’s lab she became an expert in microscopy, tissue culture, and cloning, publishing papers in PLoS Biology and Nature with the likes of Roger Tsien and Clare Waterman. Ramko now works as a life science specialist at global lab supply company VWR, where she makes three times the salary she made in Florida.

Davidson’s lab, Ramko says, was intense, and new recruits face a steep learning curve. By all accounts Davidson is not the warm and fuzzy type. He’s direct and exacting, demanding excellence and hard work. “I describe these techs as an extension of myself,” he explains. Yet the ones who do best, he adds, are those who come to realize they really are working for themselves, not Davidson. “You have basically unlimited microscopy equipment, unlimited graphics capabilities, one of the best live-cell imaging labs on the planet, and the world’s largest collection of fluorescent proteins,” he says. “Try to take advantage of it.”

Current lab member Paula Cranfill, an FSU biological sciences graduate, has been in the lab nearly two and a half years and published three papers. She typically works between 45 and 55 hours a week, but lately it’s been closer to 80 as she finishes up photobleaching studies with Vanderbilt University researcher David Piston. For Cranfill, that time is an investment: she wants to do graduate work with Piston, and is hoping her experience in Davidson’s lab will make her a better candidate.

That’s precisely the outcome Davidson hopes for: that his techs give him a few good years, and snag a good job or career advancement in return. For many in the lab, the experience is transformative. Nathan Claxton, a senior biosystems applications manager with Nikon Instruments, worked with Davidson for 3 years. Before that, he served drinks at a local bar.

“I think about what I might have been doing if I didn’t find that [job] ad in the paper,” he says. “Would I still be bartending at the Moose Lodge? I don’t know. I just didn’t have much direction

From Squeaks to Song

House mice sing melodies out of the range of human hearing, and the crooning is impacting research from evolutionary biology to neuroscience

Flickr, dullhunk

Dustin Penn eats, sleeps, and breathes sexual attraction. An evolutionary biologist at Vienna’s University of Veterinary Medicine, he studies the intricacies of courtship, focusing on those biochemical signals that help animals choose their mates. He’s studied them in songbirds, zebrafish, and humans—but his species of choice is the house mouse, Mus musculus.

Surrounded by cages in his lab, Penn has spent years hearing mice unmelodically squeak and chirp in the background as he worked to understand how they use smell to identify their mates. So when he first learned that male mice vocalize in the presence of females—singing, out of the range of human hearing, true songs that transcend the randomness of squeaks—he nearly flipped his lid.

“House mice are one of the most extensively studied organisms on the planet, and they sing like birds, and we don’t know anything about how it’s evolved or their behavior,” Penn says. Despite specializing in the hormonal aspects of behavior, he dove right in, figuring that “after chemical signals, acoustic signals are an interesting place to go.”

Up to that point, studies of ultrasonic mouse singing had been conducted exclusively in lab mice. Reasoning that the years of breeding for other traits might interfere with the songs’ melody and function, Penn went into the field to collect wild mice for his experiments. He recorded the males’ songs and played them back for females to see whether they’d respond. And they did: wild female mice were attracted to the tune of the murine Sinatras, preferentially hanging out in front of the speaker playing the vocal tracks (Anim Behav, 79:757-64, 2010).

IN TUNE: The experimental arena Penn used to test female mice’s attraction to male singing.Frauke Hoffmann

The females also lapped at their fur, preening themselves, while listening to adult male mice sing. But they stopped the behavior when their brothers’ songs were played, even though they had never heard their brothers sing in the flesh. “This suggested that the songs were used for distinguishing kin from non-kin,” says Penn. “What we want to know now is what the females are doing with this information. Can it help them identify better-quality mates?”

Charlie Walcott, a Cornell University ornithologist who studies birdsong, was surprised that he and the bird community had not yet heard of the singing mice, especially considering how similar the functions of each species’ song appeared. “The whole idea for a birdsong is to say, ‘Here I am, I’m a male songbird; if you’re a female I’d love to get acquainted, and if you’re a male I’ll pull your feathers out!’” he says. The mouse song “certainly has to do with attracting females, and the playback experiments make that quite clear. The question that I have is: What about male-male interaction?”

Penn hasn’t delved into whether the songs are used as signals of male-male aggression, but he has started picking apart the differences in song structure. Using the same software used to analyze birdsong, he compared the songs among brothers and between unrelated mice. The brothers’ songs were very similar—and previous work in lab mice suggested that the melodies are innate—but each also expressed distinct individuality (Physiol Behav, 105:766-71, 2012). These vocal “fingerprints” could be used to help mice tell one another apart, Penn says, and he plans to look into it.

Spectrographic analysis of the vocalizations also presented a fresh opportunity to scrutinize whether they really should be described as songs or just as patterned squeaks. “If they weren’t up there so high” in the ultrasonic frequency range, “I wouldn’t know that they weren’t birdsongs,” says Pam Rasmussen, an ornithologist at Michigan State University. “There’s so much we don’t know about groups we think we’re familiar with.”

Although mouse songs haven’t quite taken the ornithological community by storm, people who study the mouse brain are all ears. Neurobiologist Tim Holy, who published the 2005 paper that inspired Penn (PLoS Biol, 3:e386), hasn’t personally touched mouse-song research since. But his postdoc Terra Barnes at Washington University in St. Louis picked up where he left off. Using mice that are genetically modified to sing a disrupted song, she is trying to model stuttering, and she says other researchers are using the mice to better understand neurological diseases.

“A lot of really good research has been done in birdsong as it relates to the basal ganglia,” the region of the brain associated with speech disorders as well as diseases such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s, Barnes says. However, bird brains are quite different from mammalian brains. “If we could join the two fields, taking what’s been learned in birdsong and applying it to mouse song, that would be really cool.”

It’s Raining Mice

GERONIMOUSE! Managers throw mice toxic to brown tree snakes from a helicopter.USDA APHIS Wildlife Services

A new brown tree snake control strategy takes to the skies as scientists scatter toxic rodents over Guam’s forest canopy.

Guam has brown tree snake problems. Alien, secretive, and extremely hungry, the reptiles snuck onto Guam as unintentional cargo on docking ships decades ago, possibly as early as the 1940s. And now snakes bite sleeping babies, cripple electrical grids by slithering into conductors, and wreak ecological havoc.

Although most island residents never encounter the nocturnal tree-dwelling snakes, they’ve have had a particularly woeful impact on Guam’s native bird, lizard, and flying-mammal species.
The Micronesian kingfisher now exists only in captivity, and the Guam flycatcher is extinct. Only one of Guam’s three native bat species has been sighted since 1968, and endemic lizards have been decimated.

Birds are critical for dispersing and digesting seeds, says Haldre Rogers, an ecologist at Rice University in Houston who studies the impact of bird loss on Guam. Rogers’s research has shown that seeds on Guam fall to the ground rather than being carried through the forest by birds, which means the forest may be shifting toward small homogeneous pockets of plant species rather than the robust, mixed plant communities seen on nearby, snake-free islands. Reductions in birds also allowed the island’s spider populations to explode.

To try and turn this tide of disruption, wildlife managers have deployed traps, detector dogs, barriers, and poison. But these efforts are labor-intensive and difficult to implement in deep forests, where most of the snakes can be found.

Now scientists with several US Department of Agriculture (USDA) agencies, including the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), and its research arm, the National Wildlife Research Center (NWRC), together with the Guam Wildlife Services Program, are trying another angle: death from above. With grants from the Department of Defense, the researchers are testing a strategy that involves showering brown tree snake habitats with toxic mice.

FOREIGN INVADER: A brown tree snake, Boiga irregulariswikipedia, Soulgany101

An 80 mg-dose of acetaminophen, which is toxic to snakes, is stuffed inside the frozen carcass of a mouse neonate. The neonate is glued to a “flagger,” a cardboard square, attached to a “four-foot long streamer, like heavy-duty toilet paper” culminating in another unbaited flagger, says USDA Wildlife Services supervisory wildlife biologist Craig Clark. When the mouse is tossed from a helicopter, “it sort of rainbows,” he says, describing the arc of the poisonous mouse, and the streamer tangles in the forest canopy where the snakes reside. USDA wildlife biologists performed one drop in September 2010 as proof of principle and are planning a larger operation this year.

It’s the culmination of decades of research, says William Pitt, who coordinates brown tree snake research for the USDA. After USDA researchers showed, in a 1997 study, that dead mice were just as effective as live mice at baiting snakes, acetaminophen was identified as a possible brown tree snake poison. Then, in 2001, NWRC researchers demonstrated that seeding traps with acetaminophen-laced mice reduced the number of nontoxic mouse baits eaten by snakes by up to 80 percent.

Managers first attempted to scatter mice from the sky in 2002, but aerial bait dropping came with its own challenges. Paper parachutes were initially used to tangle the mouse baits in treetops, but in 2007 scientists tested hardier cardboard streamers. Bait persistence in the environment is a problem, says Pitt. The mice themselves only last about three days, prompting scientists to begin hunting for some kind of inanimate bait that will attract snakes for longer periods. The streamers are a different problem. Scientists hope to find more biodegradable materials, but they too must persist long enough to keep the baits in the treetops. Ground-dwelling species, such as coconut crabs, will scavenge mice that fall to the forest floor.

After tinkering with mechanical methods of deploying the mouse baits, it’s now done by hand. The mice are arrayed on trays, and one or two people sit in the back of a helicopter and drop the bait out. “You grab them and count: one thousand, two thousand…” to disperse the mice evenly, says Daniel Vice, the assistant state director for the agencies working to control brown tree snakes on Guam. The right cadence of counting and tossing was determined by driving a pickup truck at the appropriate speed through an empty field, explains Clark. An apparatus the team previously used to spray toxic mice into the forest caused the baited streamers to stick together, dropping two or three of them at a time, or tangling them in the wheels of the slow-flying helicopter. “It looked like toilet paper was stuck to the helicopter,” Vice recalls.

The next drop will tell scientists more about the challenges of scaling up the operation. They’ll drop mice over fenced and nonfenced areas of 100 acres each. Baited (but unpoisoned) ground traps will be set, and biologists will track success at eliminating snakes by measuring how many traps are emptied. This attempt will cover several hundred acres, with a field biologist sitting in the back of the helicopter, counting and tossing.

An island-wide mouse drop using a mechanized deployment system is in the works, but for now the cumbersome manual drops are the best strategy, says Pitt. The principle has been proved, and current work is focused on smoothing out the kinks: “It’s definitely working,” he says.

Mighty Moth Man

An evolutionary biologist’s posthumous publication restores the peppered moth to its iconic status as a textbook example of evolution.

SALT AND PEPPER: Camouflage is the key to peppered moth predator avoidance.Michael Majerus

It must have seemed terribly ironic to late University of Cambridge evolutionary biologist Michael Majerus, after dedicating nearly half a century to the study of peppered moths (Biston betularia), that in the late 1990s his name became central to an increasingly contentious campaign to strip the peppered moth of its status as the prime example of Darwinian evolution in action.

It’s a well-known story: The moth’s ancestral typica phenotype is white with dark speckles. In the decades following the Industrial Revolution, a new, soot-colored form, known as carbonaria, flourished and displaced the typica moths in the heavily polluted woodlands of Europe.

Although scientists hypothesized as early as 1896 that the increase in carbonaria frequency could be explained simply by the fact that soot-covered tree barks camouflaged the dark-colored moths against predation by birds, it wasn’t until the 1950s that an Oxford University lepidopterist named Bernard Kettlewell performed the key experiments that provided persuasive evidence that bird predation was indeed the selective agent at work.

Kettlewell placed live carbonaria and typica moths on tree trunks in polluted and unpolluted woodlands in the U.K. and counted how many of each type survived predation. Moths with a coloring that blended better with the tree trunks survived in greater numbers.

But beginning in the 1980s, peppered-moth experts, including Majerus, began noting flaws in Kettlewell’s experimental designs. The most serious of these was that limited research into peppered moth behavior seemed to suggest that tree trunks were not the insect’s preferred resting place. That alone threatened to put a serious dent in the validity of Kettlewell’s setup—and in the bird predation theory itself.

In his 1998 book, Melanism: Evolution in Action, Majerus discussed these shortcomings in the context of a critical dissection of all the peppered-moth case evidence that had accumulated.

MOTHS ON TREES: Majerus confirmed that wild moths (typica above and carbonaria below) did indeed rest on tree trunks.Michael Majerus

For Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago evolutionary biologist who had been teaching the case to university students for years, learning that “Kettlewell’s experiments weren’t really that carefully done” came as a shock, he says. In a review of Majerus’s book, published in a November 1998 issue of Nature, Coyne concluded that “for the time being we must discard Biston as a well-understood example of natural selection in action.”

Coyne’s review dismayed Majerus, who, despite his criticisms, did believe there was strong evidence to back the case for the peppered moth as evolution’s poster child.

In no time, the popular media as well as the creationist movement pounced on the review, calling the classic peppered moth story “fraudulent,” a “blunder,” and an “embarrassment” to science. Even The Scientist contributed to the hysteria, publishing a 1999 opinion piece by then-cell biology postdoc and current intelligent design advocate Jonathan Wells on rethinking the peppered moth story.

“Through innuendo and through public smear campaigns, this case study was put into disrepute undeservedly,” says Ilik Saccheri, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Liverpool.

Not one to shy away from controversy, Majerus was nonetheless distressed by the fallout from Coyne’s book review. “[Majerus] was a cocky bastard,” says Laurence Cook, a retired geneticist from the University of Manchester. “He liked to have arguments of this kind around. But I think he did feel, because what he had written had been misinterpreted, that it was up to him to try and put it right.”

And that’s exactly what, in 2001, Majerus set out to do.

Over the course of 7 years, Majerus systematically recorded the fates of 4,864 peppered moths released into a 2.5-acre plot of unpolluted rural land in Cambridgeshire, U.K.

This time, instead of artificially placing the moths on tree trunks during the daytime, as Kettlewell did, Majerus released the moths within the hour before sunset into netting sleeves set up around the lateral branches of trees—which, through years of observation, he had identified as the moth’s preferred resting site. (He somewhat vindicated Kettlewell by observing that wild moths could in fact be found resting on trunks at least a third of the time.)

Majerus would then leave the moths to flutter about inside the enclosure throughout the night, removing the netting only after sunrise, when the moths were already settled in their resting positions for the day. After 4 hours or so, he counted the number of moths that were still at their resting sites. Those that were missing were presumed eaten. He also saw some of them being eaten by birds.

The results of his ambitious predation experiment showed that, in the unpolluted parkland of Cambridge, carbonaria moths had a daily survival rate 9 percent lower than that of their light-colored kin. This was significant enough to explain rapid directional changes in color frequencies.

In 2007 Majerus presented his results at a conference in Uppsala, Sweden. But before he could publish them, he passed away from a sudden and aggressive case of mesothelioma in 2009.

After realizing that Majerus’s results would not be published, Cook, Saccheri, and evolutionary biologists James Mallet from University College London and Bruce Grant from the College of William and Mary published the detailed account of Majerus’s work in the journal Biology Letters in February (Biol Lett, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2011.1136, 2012). “We really felt that we had a duty to try and make sure that all his efforts were not wasted,” Cook says.

Upon seeing Majerus’s results in a peer-reviewed journal, Coyne resumed teaching the peppered moth story after a 14-year hiatus. “He did everything he needed to do to take care of the problems in Kettlewell’s experiment,” he says.

Correction (May 4, 2012): This story has been updated from its original version to correctly state that Kettlewell used only live moths in his experiments, not live and dead moths as originally stated. The Scientist regrets the error.

The Sound of Color

A completely colorblind musician and painter perceives the world in a new way with help from technology

ORANGE TONES: Neil Harbisson wearing his “eyeborg,” a device that converts light waves into vibrations that lend a touch of color to his worldDan Wilton/RedBulletin

As a kid growing up in Barcelona, Spain, Neil Harbisson could tell you that the sky was blue, the grass was green, and a lemon was yellow. But he couldn’t tell you exactly what all those descriptions really meant. Born with a rare inherited condition similar to the one that plagued the Pacific islanders neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote about in The Island of the Colorblind, Harbisson sees only in shades of gray, and had simply memorized the colors he thought he was supposed to know. But it wasn’t until he was 11 years old that he learned that he didn’t perceive the world in the same way as most people.

“I noticed that other students at school could identify colors easier than me,” he recalls. “Then I knew there was a problem with color.”

A decade later, as a music composition student at the Dartington College of Arts in England, Harbisson discovered there was hope that he might see things differently. In 2003, he attended a lecture about using technology to change the way we see the world. After the talk, Harbisson approached the speaker, young cybernetics innovator Adam Montandon, then at the University of Plymouth, to describe his condition and ask if there might be a way to help him perceive color.

On his train ride home, Montandon thought about the possibility of using a system that would assign different musical instruments to colors—drums for red and violins for blue, for example. But realizing that this would introduce his own interpretations of color, Montandon then considered a device that would simply say the names of colors aloud, but this didn’t sit right with him either. “I wanted to give him something a bit more magical,” Montandon recalls. Finally, he thought about the physical similarities of light and sound. “Light is a wavelength that moves very fast,” he says. “[If] you slow it down enough, it stops becoming visible. It starts becoming audible.”

In just 2 weeks’ time, Montandon and Harbisson created a device that translated the light waves that correspond to different colors into sounds with different pitches. The prototype, constructed from an inexpensive computer webcam, a laptop carried in a backpack, and a pair of old headphones, was a bit “crude,” Montandon admits. “It was fairly primitive, but it was good enough,” he says.

EYES AND EARS: The original version of the eyeborg used a computer webcam to detect light, a laptop to compute the conversion to sound, and headphones to transmit that sound to Harbisson’s ears.an Wilton/RedBulletin

Harbisson tested the device in a school hallway in front of a big red notice board as a friend pointed to different objects, identifying their colors. He quickly learned the color/pitch associations. “Then he just ran off down the corridor,” Montandon says. “I couldn’t stop him. He went to listen to absolutely everything.” And when Montandon returned to the school 2 weeks later, he learned that Harbisson “hadn’t even switched off the computer.”

Harbisson listened to the colors of the houses in the street. He went to local grocers’ shops to listen to the sounds of fruits and vegetables. “It’s like listening to electronic music,” says Harbisson, who now wears a refined version of the device, which he calls an “eyeborg.”

“And it’s constant,” he adds. “I wasn’t expecting that I would be listening to colors all the time, but there’s color absolutely everywhere.”

The device has since been through many iterations, with the help of Montandon; a software developer from Kranj, Slovenia, named Peter Kese; and most recently, Matias Lizana, a computer engineering student at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona. Today, the system comprises a camera that sticks out above Harbisson’s head like an antenna, and a small computer chip that converts light to sound. Harbisson has since also forgone the need for headphones, mounting the chip to the back of his head, where it transmits the sound vibrations directly into his skull bones. “I receive color through the bone, and I’m listening to you through the ears,” Harbisson says. This helps him “differentiate what is a visual sound and what is an audio sound.”

Harbisson can also hear many more colors than the handful portrayed by the original device. He can even hear colors of wavelengths not visible to the human eye, such as those in the infrared. This year, he plans to add ultraviolet. The project is the ultimate demonstration of the promise of cyborgs, says Montandon, now a digital technologies professor at Erhvervsakademiet Lillebælt in Denmark. “It’s very easy with the technology we have now to explore different parts of the spectrum that we don’t normally experience,” Montandon adds. “You’re not just enabling someone with a disability, but you’re enabling someone to be more than a regular human.”

Of course, the device is not the most practical medical solution to color blindness, its creators recognize. First, wearing a camera around all day is inconvenient. Furthermore, the device is really designed for those with true color blindness, or achromatopsia, which affects only about 1 in 30,000 people—not for those who simply are unable to distinguish red from green, a far more common condition. And people with achromatopsia “also have a whole host of other vision problems,” says Medical College of Wisconsin neuroscientist Joseph Carroll, including involuntary eye movements called nystagmus, very poor acuity, and photophobia. “The ability to perceive color is the least of their worries,” he says. A more promising treatment for these patients is gene therapy to restore cone function, and thus increase acuity and reduce photophobia, he adds. Human trials for these treatments are expected to start this year.

That said, Carroll adds, “this is really cool and adds a dimensionality to your visual experience.” Indeed, Harbisson’s eyeborg is catching the attention of some musicians and artists. The pianist Jools Holland, for example, used a version of the device to accompany live concerts held in 2009–2010 across the U.K., Montandon says. “He likes to improvise, [so] we created a reverse system that would turn his music into colors and lights as he played.”

And Harbisson himself, who now works full-time as a freelance “colorologist,” pairing colors with music, uses the device for artistic inspiration, often painting what he hears. Listening to his world has definitely changed how he perceives it, he says. “People said that cities were gray—they’re not. They are actually extremely colorful. I’m discovering color in a different way.”

Finding Phasmids

Researchers rediscover a giant insect, thought to have gone extinct a century ago, and plan to reintroduce it to its native island off the coast of Australia.

A BIG STICK: Nick Carlile, seen here with the Lord Howe Island phasmid, discovered the thought-to-be extinct insect in 2001.Patrick Honan, Zoos Victoria

Australian government ecologist Nicholas Carlile was often asked to review requests from outdoors climbers to visit the normally restricted island of Ball’s Pyramid off the nation’s east coast. An extremely narrow, 562-meter (1,844-foot) high spire of rock, it is the tallest sea stack in the world and a perfect challenge for ambitious climbers.

Some requests were made under the guise of looking for a phasmid, a stick insect the size of a human hand that went extinct from nearby Lord Howe Island in the early 20th century after a supply ship ran aground and released a swarm of hungry—and prolific—rats. There had been rumored sightings of the insects’ skeletal remains and freshly dead specimens on Ball’s Pyramid, and climbers often claimed they were part of a scientific expedition in search of the lost species.

But Carlile, who specializes in island and seabird ecology for the state of New South Wales (NSW) Office of Environment and Heritage, had his suspicions. “You’d look at the list of people who were in the crew, and there wasn’t a scientist,” he recalls. “We knew this was just a ruse for a climbing troop.”

PHASMID HOUSE: Entomologist Patrick Honan in the phasmid enclosure he established at the Melbourne ZooNicholas Carlile, OEH NSW

Convinced that the phasmids were extinct—the bare rock of Ball’s Pyramid simply didn’t have the creature’s preferred humid habitat—Carlile and his colleague David Priddel decided they needed to mount their own survey of the island to prove it once and for all. “Then we could tell these people they had no basis for their climbing,” Carlile says.

So he gathered up a small team, planned for 4 years, then set out for Ball’s Pyramid in February 2001. The team carefully leapt from the pitching boat onto the rocky island, then traversed its jagged perimeter while slowly ascending to GanNet Green, the largest patch of vegetation on the island, about 150 meters, or nearly 500 feet, above sea level. Finding no evidence of the Lord Howe phasmid, Carlile and company began to make their way back down to base camp. During the descent, Carlile spotted some old insect excrement near a bush. Large insect excrement. But, hot and out of water, the team continued downward.

After several cups of a tea and a rejuvenating swim, Carlile decided he would return to the bush where he’d spotted the feces that night, when the nocturnal phasmids might be moving about. Just as it got dark, Carlile set out with Lord Howe ranger Dean Hiscox. When they reached the shrubs, they saw an adult female phasmid—the first sighting of the insect in nearly 80 years. “It was such an amazing experience,” Carlile recalls. “I’d not seen such a large invertebrate. [It was] like going back to the Jurassic, when insects ruled the world.”

When he returned home, Carlile contacted entomologist Patrick Honan at the Melbourne Zoo about starting a breeding program. After 2 years—“both to overcome the logistics of moving invertebrates as carry-on luggage that people weren’t allowed to open up, as well as dealing with the bureaucracy of wanting to collect what is potentially the rarest invertebrate in the world,” Carlile says—government approval was granted and Carlile returned to Ball’s Pyramid to collect four individuals; two males and two females. One pair went to Honan, while the other went to NSW entomologist Stephen Fellenberg, who had bred other species of phasmids.

ISLAND FORTRESS: Ball’s Pyramid, a rocky volcanic remnant jutting out of the Pacific Ocean, where the stick insect was rediscoveredNicholas Carlile, OEH NSW

But starting a breeding program was easier said than done, Honan writes in an e-mail. “We knew almost nothing of their biology, let alone their husbandry.” Determined to make it work, he stayed with the phasmids every night for the first month. “With only one [pair], and little chance of collecting another, we have to make sure [to get it right the] first time,” says Honan, now a manager of live exhibits at the Melbourne Museum. Today, the captive population is thriving with more than 500 individuals, and Honan and his successor at the Zoo, Rohan Cleave, have sent phasmids to other institutions to start their own colonies. In total, there are more than 1,000 adults and 20,000 eggs now in captivity all over the world, Carlile says.

Studying the phasmids has revealed “an enormous amount about a highly unusual species, whose behavior, morphology, ecology, and reproductive strategy is unlike just about anything else,” says Honan. Eventually, Carlile and his colleagues hope to use the captive-bred phasmids to repopulate Lord Howe. “The phasmid was the major consumer of vegetation on the island, and therefore a key component in the ecosystem in terms of turning over nutrients,” Carlile explains.

The Lord Howe phasmid is “a really important case study in terms of rearing and reintroduction,” says Aaron Dossey, an entomology postdoc at the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service and the founder and owner of All Things Bugs, a company that promotes the use of insects as a human food source. But before the phasmids can be reintroduced, the rodents that drove them off the island in the first place must be eradicated. The project, which is slated to start later this year, will take some $10 million and 3 years to complete.

“This is an enormous task and has been in the planning stages for about 7 years,” Honan says. “It would be one of the biggest and certainly the most complicated eradication project ever.”

Once the rats are gone, Carlile will begin reintroducing the phasmid, as well as a biological control, such as an owl species, to avoid overpopulation by the phasmid. “It’s part of the rebuilding of the ecology of the island,” Carlile says. “You’ve got to deal with a number of components to get the pieces to fall back into place.”