The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018

by Sam Kean

  But what if a warming north meant less ice for the seals to use, interfering with their molt? That would explain why the animals showed lesions in the same places on their bodies where the molt begins—the face, the rear end. And when the skin is unprotected by fur, Burek told me, “it may be susceptible to secondary infections” from bacteria and fungi in the environment.

  Nature, alas, is messy and confusing. Though the reasoning seemed plausible, there was no widespread lack of spring ice in 2011 in the areas where the diseased seals were found. Deepening the mystery, lesions in walruses all but vanished in subsequent years, even as some seals continue to have them. “It’s very frustrating—very frustrating,” Burek said of trying to tease out an answer. A lot of her work remains unresolved. Burek knows that this is the reality of doing her job in the 49th state. It is a vast place, expensive to do research; scientists often haven’t been able to do enough baseline studies to know what’s normal and expected, versus new and worrisome, in a given population. Still, it chews at her, the inability to give answers to concerned Native peoples. “I have enough self-doubt that it’s like, well, maybe it’s because I’m not working hard enough, or I haven’t done the right thing to figure it out.”

  To be sure, the far north isn’t collapsing under contagion caused by climate change. And Burek is careful about drawing connections. Still, a good detective doesn’t need a smoking gun to know when a crime has been committed. Circumstantial evidence, if there’s enough of it, and the right kinds, can tell the story. “It seems hard to believe,” Burek told me, “that a lot of these changes aren’t related to what’s going on in the environment. The problem is proving it.”

  There’s a larger question, too, about what these developments augur for humans. The answer, researchers are finding, is that it’s already starting to matter.

  Time was, the cold and remoteness of the far north kept its freezer door closed to a lot of contagion. Now the north is neither so cold nor so remote. About 4 million people live in the circumpolar north, sometimes in sizable cities (Murmansk and Norilsk, Russia; Tromsø, Norway). Oil rigs drill. Tourist ships cruise the Northwest Passage. And as new animals and pathogens arrive and thrive in the warmer, more crowded north, some human sickness is on the rise too. Sweden saw a record number of tick-borne encephalitis cases in 2011, and again in 2012, as roe deer expanded their range northward with ticks in tow. Researchers think the virus the ticks carry may increase its concentrations in warmer weather. The bacterium Francisella tularensis, which at its worst is so lethal that both the United States and the USSR weaponized it during the Cold War, is also on the increase in Sweden. Spread by mosquitoes there, the milder form can cause months of flu-like symptoms. Last summer in Russia’s far north, anthrax reportedly killed a grandmother and a boy after melting permafrost released spores from epidemic-killed deer that had been buried for decades in the once-frozen ground.

  Alaska hasn’t been immune to such changes. A few months ago, researchers reported that five species of nonnative ticks, probably aided by climate change, may now be established in the state. One is the American dog tick, which can transmit the bacterium that causes Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which can lead to paralysis in both canines and humans. In 2004, a bad case of food poisoning sent dozens of cruise-ship passengers running to their cabins. The culprit was Vibrio parahaemolyticus, a leading source of seafood-related food poisoning. V. parahaemolyticus is typically tied to eating raw oysters taken from the warm waters of places like Louisiana. Why was it infecting people 600 miles north of the most northerly recorded incident? Health officials later teased out the reason: summer water temperatures in Prince William Sound, where the oysters are farmed, now gets warm enough to activate the bacterium.

  Earlier in 2016, Burek and NOAA’s Lefebvre coauthored a paper about their discovery of domoic acid in all 13 species of Alaskan marine mammals they examined, from Steller sea lions to humpback whales, in waters as far north as the Arctic Ocean. Domoic acid is naturally produced by some species of algae, and it moves through the food web as it accumulates in the filter-feeding animals that dine on it—anchovies, sardines, crabs, clams, and oysters. Scientists knew the algae that makes domoic acid were present, but they never had a report of a bloom that far north before 2015. The hunch is that warming waters may be increasing the toxin’s presence in Alaska.

  “What’s going to happen to these 100-year-old whales when they get hit by these neurotoxins three years in a row?” Lefebvre said. “And it’s not just mortality. It’s sub-lethal neurological effects.”

  A study published in 2015 in the journal Science found that harmful algal blooms off the California coast have caused enough brain damage to California sea lions that they lose their way and have trouble hunting. “This is a shot across the bow,” Lefebvre said of the algal blooms. “It’s the type of thing that could happen and become more common.”

  Here’s the broader lesson: if the animals can get sick, we can get sick, whether it’s from invigorated pathogens in the environment or from ailing animals themselves. Three in four emerging infectious diseases in humans today are zoonotic diseases—illnesses passed from animals to humans.

  This is one reason Burek has a soft spot for sea otters like 13: they are excellent sentinels for what’s happening in the world. Otters splash in the same waters where humans live, work, and play. They eat the same seafood humans do. “I call them a pathologist’s wonderland, because they get all the fantastic, extreme infectious diseases—not to sound too unpleasant,” Burek said.

  There are other reasons to pay attention to animals like otters. Mike Brubaker, director of community environment and health at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, points out that traditional foods—everything from salmonberries to moose meat—still make up 80 percent of the Native diet in some remote Alaskan communities. If animals suffer, then traditional diets suffer, and so do the cultures that revolve around hunting, fishing, and foraging.

  Making Burek’s job even more complicated, animals frequently die from mysterious causes that may have nothing at all to do with climate change. As she pokes through the bones, her constant challenge is to discern what’s notably weird from what’s simply everyday and unfortunate.

  Near the airport, Burek turned into Alaska Air Cargo, backed up to a loading dock, and parked the van. “It’s surprising how often they can’t find the carcass,” she said. We went inside. Burek handed a tracking number to an agent behind the counter. A man driving a forklift soon appeared at the loading dock. The forklift was freighted with a 31-gallon blue Rubbermaid Roughneck Tote labeled UNKNOWN SHIPPER. Burek opened the hatchback of the minivan and pushed aside pairs of Xtratuf rubber boots. The tote weighed a lot, but not so much that one man couldn’t lift it.

  We drove east through the sunny noonday traffic of Anchorage with a dead baby moose in the rear of the minivan. Burek was in a good mood, as she usually was. Years of working in close proximity to death had resulted in a sort of over-the-fence neighborliness with the macabre. She told me how area hospitals occasionally helped her determine cause of death by performing CT scans of dead baby orcas or by putting the heads of juvenile beaked whales into their MRI machines to look for acoustic injuries from Navy sonar or energy exploration. “I’m surprised this car doesn’t smell worse for all the things that have been in it,” she said. “I had a bison calf delivered to me, and it was in a tote like that, but it didn’t fit—so these four legs were sticking out.”

  We arrived at a lab at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where Burek is an adjunct professor. The room was small, with white walls, a steel table at the center, and a drain in the floor. Burek pulled on a pair of rubber Grundens crabbing bibs the color of traffic cones, stepped into the tall boots from the minivan, and pulled her hair back. She could have been headed for a day of dipnetting for sockeye on the Kenai. An assistant laid out tools. A big pair of garden shears sat on the counter, as foreboding as Chekhov’s gun on the mantel.

  “You
’re probably gonna want to put on gloves for this,” she said.

  Turned out of the tote onto the steel table, the moose calf was the size of a full-grown Labrador. It lay with its legs folded, as if it was just bedding down in soft lettuce. Burek flipped the calf onto its left side, which was how she liked to work on her ruminants. Then she began, calling out information. Sex: female. Weight: 74 pounds. Death: July 13. Length: 116 centimeters. Axillary girth: 76 centimeters. She swabbed an obvious abscess, open and draining, on the right shoulder. She noted the pale mucous membranes. She inserted a syringe into an eyeball to sample the aqueous humor. She returned to the shoulder, to the painful-looking abscess, and removed a piece of it for later examination on a glass slide under a microscope. Then Burek pressed her fingers into the wound.

  “Oh, that’s kind of gross,” she said. “There’s a comminuted fracture in there.” When not using a scalpel and forceps, Burek often uses her fingers. After years of practice, her touch serves almost as a caliper and gauge. She will bread-loaf a liver and pinch the sections, probing for hardness. She will run her fingers along a wet trachea in search of abnormalities. “Oh, feel that,” she will say to anyone willing to feel that.

  Burek cut deeper to expose the wound. “Oh. Oh. Poor thing. It probably got nailed,” she said. The detective was hitting her stride now. Searching the exterior of the calf, Burek quickly found what she was looking for—a second puncture wound, this one also badly infected. She measured the distance between the wounds: 5.5 centimeters, or the approximate distance, she estimated, between a bear’s canines. “So that’s cool.”

  In an interesting coincidence, Burek later would tell me she suspected that, for all the other abnormalities she found inside 13—the clot, the weird-looking lung—perhaps the otter, too, was ultimately done in by something as mundane as a predator. Blunt-toothed young killer whales will sometimes grab otters but not kill them, she explained; they sort of play with their food. Burek had seen it before. Intrigued, she telephoned the Museum of the North in Fairbanks and asked colleagues to measure the skull of a juvenile orca for an estimate of the diameter of its bite. The measurement perfectly fit the damage. “Of course, we’ll never know for sure,” she said. Still, there was a trace of satisfaction in her voice.

  Now, using a No. 20 scalpel, Burek quickly skinned the moose calf and opened the stubborn clamshell of the rib cage. An unwelcome visitor wafted into the room. Burek, however, no longer seemed to notice odors that, were they canistered and lobbed across international borders, would swiftly be outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. As she worked, the gore took on a practiced orchestration. Burek cut triangles of beet-colored liver and dropped them into prelabeled bags with a pair of medical tweezers. She took samples of lung and lymph node and gall bladder. She squeezed the descending colon and collected the pellets. She filled vials and syringes. Some of the bits she did not even bother to label; after decades, Burek could recognize them by sight. With a few slices, she opened the firm dark knot of the heart like a chapbook and removed what resembled red chicken fat. At home Burek would spin the stuff in a centrifuge. Stripped of its red blood cells, the clear blood serum was an excellent way to see which infectious agents the animal had been exposed to in the past. “Diagnostic gold,” Burek called it.

  The table took on the appearance of a Francis Bacon canvas: A smear of blood. An ear divorced from a head. The sprung cage of the moose’s body exposing its soft, translucent clockworks. The open mouth mutely horrified. Burek noted a hemorrhage on the surface of the pancreas and fibrin on the peritoneal cavity, and she moved on. The door of the lab stood open to the smiling July afternoon. Sunlight caught on aspen leaves. One of the two young women who were assisting Burek had just returned from her first year of veterinary school. Burek was her inspiration, she said. As the women laughed and worked, Burek quizzed her on biology and she told stories.

  “I had a horse head in my freezer one time.”

  “Bears smell absolutely horrible. I did a bear necropsy in our garage once, and my son Thomas said I could never do that again.”

  “Can I get some muscle?”

  “Those large whales? Holy cow. It’s so confusing: where the heck is the urinary bladder?”

  “For a while, I had a big colony in my garage of those flesh-eating beetles that museums use to clean skulls. But a couple of the beetles got out. That’s when Henry put his foot down.”

  “Where’d my duodenum tag go? Anyone seen it?”

  “I don’t think rumens smell that bad. But I went to vet school in Wisconsin.”

  The steel table slowly emptied. The blue Rubbermaid bin filled. In went a foreleg. Intestines. The ear.

  Now another assistant lifted the garden shears. She squeezed and sliced through the ball joint of the calf’s femur, which is one of the best places on a young animal for Burek to see evidence of troubles, such as rickets, that would affect its growth plates. Burek, meanwhile, opened the skull to sample the brain.

  “It’s a bit of a mystery,” she said as she worked, meaning the cause of the moose’s death. Her initial guess: the bite led to septicemia, which led to encephalitis. “It’s a story that kind of makes sense,” she said. “I’d like to see more pus.” Later she added: “But in this job you have to be willing to look dumb and be wrong and change your story.”

  Burek asked for the time. When I told her it was after four o’clock already, her good humor slipped. “I’ve got to get to the dump.”

  What was the hurry?

  There was a new movie she wanted to see at seven, she said. She would have to race home to shower—to wash off the day, to wash off the smell, the blood, the moose.

  “It’s a Disney movie, I think,” Burek said. A film about animals run amok. “It’s called The Secret Life of Pets.” She loaded the moose in the back of the minivan and reached for the bleach. “It looks cute.”

  PART V

  “I’m Not a Mad Scientist—I’m Absolutely Furious”

  Political Science

  KAYLA WEBLEY ADLER

  Female Scientists Report a Horrifying Culture of Sexual Assault

  from Marie Claire

  Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they’re in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry.” That’s what British biochemist and Nobel laureate Tim Hunt told an audience at the World Conference of Science Journalists just two years ago.

  Following intense social media backlash, Hunt claimed his remark “was intended as a lighthearted, ironic comment.” His defenders said the line was taken out of context, pointing to his praise of female scientists in the same speech (“science needs more women, and you should do science, despite all the obstacles”). Bad joke or not, it cost Hunt his faculty position at University College London—and pointed to an insidious problem in the world of scientific research that had persisted far too long already.

  From her office at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Kate Clancy, Ph.D., watched the reaction to Hunt’s comments unfold on Twitter, thinking, Same shit, another day. The thirty-eight-year-old associate professor was recalling a string of recent high-profile incidents that have made her and other women in science feel excluded, unwelcome, and like the very nature of being a woman in science “is in some way problematic,” as she puts it. There was the peer reviewer for a scientific journal who suggested that two female researchers find “one or two male biologists” to coauthor and strengthen their paper. And the column published on Science magazine’s website in which a biology professor told a postdoc who asked how to handle her adviser, who frequently tried to look down her shirt, to “put up with it, with good humor if you can.”

  In October 2015, Buzzfeed reported that University of California, Berkeley’s Geoff Marcy, a noted astronomy professor, got away with sexually harassing students for at least a decade—despite complaints being filed against him at two different universities. (Marcy denied the allegations genera
lly, but he apologized and has since resigned.) In January 2016, Democratic congresswoman Jackie Speier aired on the House floor a 2004 investigation into renowned astronomy professor Timothy Slater by his former employer, the University of Arizona, in which Slater was revealed to have gifted a student a vibrator, told a female employee she’d “teach better if she did not wear underwear,” hosted meetings at strip clubs, and asked graduate students for sex. (Slater denies all allegations and is suing Arizona for releasing the confidential report.) A month later, Science magazine reported that paleoanthropologist Brian Richmond, curator of human origins at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, was under investigation for sexually assaulting a research assistant. (Richmond said that the encounter in question was “consensual and reciprocal”; following multiple investigations by the museum, Richmond resigned last year.) Similar cases of harassment by science professors have also been reported at the California Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, University of Rochester, and Boston University.

  Each time one of these incidents comes to light, and each time women in science take to social media to express empathy and anger, commenters swarm to tell them to get over it or learn how to take a joke—as if putting up with sexism, harassment, and assault is the expected price of being a female scientist. But Clancy knows it’s never just a joke, or a few bad apples, or one misguided university—and she has the data to prove it.

  In July 2014, Clancy and her coauthors Robin Nelson, Ph.D., Julienne Rutherford, Ph.D., and Katie Hinde, Ph.D., published the results of a survey that gauged the climate for women and men on field sites, where students and faculty at all levels across many scientific disciplines perform research. Of the 666 scientists from 32 different disciplines who completed the survey, 64 percent said they had personally experienced sexual harassment in the field and 20 percent reported having been sexually assaulted. Women were 3.5 times more likely to have experienced harassment or abuse than men, and were primarily harassed and assaulted by superiors (whereas male students were more likely to be victimized by peers). The report sent shock waves through the scientific community. “There was a lot of outrage,” says Heather Metcalf, director of research and analysis at the Association for Women in Science. “A lot of, How is this still happening? After all this time and all of these efforts to change the culture, how can this still be so prevalent?” And worse: How many would-be female scientists are we losing as a result?