Smithsonian.com

It was Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), a founding member of the Hudson River School, who taught us to appreciate nature, and to hike and bike and canoe through all of its rugged splendor. Without him and his companions, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church and William Cullen Bryant, we might be still battling a fear of beastly creatures that roamed the dark and terrifying forests—Rodents of Unusual Size, oh my!

“Durand was the first to give us the idea of the landscape as an escape,” says Eleanor Jones Harvey, chief curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where 57 Durand works go on view on Thursday through January 6, 2008.

Before Durand, nature, dark and dreary, was mostly depicted as tamed, cultivated or captured—landscapes were gentle pastoral scenes of farm, village, steeple and pasture. (Durand, too, painted his share of these.)

But by the middle of the century, Durand literally upended that notion, turning the canvas vertical—the better to craft towering forests and majestic mountains. From the 1840s to the 1870s, Durand spent many months each year on sketching expeditions that ranged from New York to New England, usually with other artists or members of his family. Raw, splendid nature, the stuff of westward expansion, became a kind of a paradise, a place for introspection and communion. A sensibility, says Harvey, that carries forward today.

Hudson Trail Outfitters and REI owe this guy big.

(Courtesy of SAAM: Asher B. Durand, In the Woods, 1855, Oil on Canvas, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift in memory of Jonathan Sturges, by his children, 1895; Asher B. Durand, Study from Nature: Rocks and Trees in the Catkills, New York, ca. 1856, Oil on canvas, The New-York Historical Society Museum, Gift of Mrs. Lucy Maria Durand Woodman, 1907.20)

In December 1982, Benjamin Victor, founder of the coral reef research initiative Ocean Science Foundation, was diving in a reef just offshore of a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute field station when he scooped up an adult goby. The fish looked slightly different from its Atlantic goby kin, but its features weren’t unique enough to declare it a new species.

Victor suspected that the differences ran deep in the goby’s genetic makeup, but the species identification system, based purely on physical identifiers such as markings, numbers of fins and shapes of bones, failed him. He would need a second specimen and DNA analysis. So the specimen sat, and sat–on Victor’s desk, actually–for close to 25 years.

In March 2006, Dave Jones of the National Marine Fisheries Service collected a larval specimen reminiscent of Victor’s goby in a trap off of Mexico’s Yucatan. From there, the new taxonomic technique of barcoding allowed Victor to match the DNA of the larva with that of the adult and declare the goby a new species, one that diverges from its Atlantic goby kin by a whopping 25 percent (keep in mind: humans and chimpanzees are only 1-2 percent different).

The fish’s claim to fame is that its identity has been nailed down by a DNA barcode. The barcode, taken from an agreed-upon location in the genome, acts like a consumer product’s barcode in that it seals the deal in terms of identification.

Named Coryphopterus kuna, the goby has become the first vertebrate species to have its DNA barcode included in its official species description. About 30,000 known species, from mushrooms to birds, have been barcoded, but in all cases, the species were found and scientifically described before the barcodes were created. The Barcode of Life Initiative, of which the Smithsonian Institution is a partner, is urging that the short DNA strands be collected and put in an open-access database.

“There was no way to make it easy and consistent to identify a fish. You usually had to be an expert and would have to have a good adult specimen to examine and then it was your opinion,” says Victor of taxonomy pre-barcoding. “Now anyone with access to barcoding technology can say for sure, the sequence matches species X, even if what you have is an egg, larva, or a scale or piece of skin.”

(Courtesy of STRI)

An intruder is among us. A hairy-clawed invertebrate is trying to invade the Chesapeake Bay and Smithsonian officials want help rounding up the villain.

The critter, which the U.S. Feds call “injurous wildlife,” is the Chinese Mitten Crab, or Eriocheir sinensis. It is a harmful invasive species that burrows into embankments and causes erosion and threatens levies. An established population can be so overwhelming in sheer numbers that the critters clog fishing equipment and the cooling systems of power plants. Since 1927, the crab has been spreading throughout Europe and reached California’s San Francisco Bay in 1992.

Smithsonian officials confirm ten captures of the crab, which measures about four inches across its back and varies in shades from light brown to olive green, in the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary. The crab likely made its way here from Asian ports in the ballast tank of an ocean-going vessel, says Gregory Ruiz, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), with headquarters on the Rhode River in Edgewater, Maryland.

Unlike Maryland’s native blue crab, young mitten crabs prefer fresh water, and so experts say the animals could be lurking in places up to 50 miles inland from Bay waters.

The crab is easily recognized by its so-called “mittens,” a fur-like coating on its oval-shaped claws. It looks nothing like a native blue crab, however young mitten crabs may be confused with the Harris mud crab, which burrows into the same areas. To make a positive ID of the culprit, check for the furry claws.

SERC officials warn, however, that if you catch a mitten crab, you should not throw it back alive. They want you to note the exact location of where the animal was found, take its picture if possible, then freeze the animal on ice, or preserve it in rubbing alcohol. The Mitten Crab Hotline is 443-482-2222.

(Courtesy of SERC)

“Lucy,” the renowned fossil skeleton of one of the world’s earliest known human ancestors, which was recovered in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974, recently began a six-year tour in the United States, organized by the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The fossil, however, will not go on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, director of the museum’s Human Origins Program, explains why:

“From the outset, the plan to bring ‘Lucy’ to the U.S. ignored an existing international resolution signed by scientific representatives from 20 countries, including Ethiopia and the U.S. The resolution calls for museums–in fact, all scientific institutions–to support the care of early human fossils in their country of origin, and to make displays in other countries using excellent fossil replicas.

It’s especially distressing to museum professionals I’ve talked with in Africa that ‘Lucy’ has been removed from Ethiopia for six years, and that a U. S. museum has been involved in doing so. The decision to remove ‘Lucy’ from Ethiopia also goes against the professional views of Ethiopian scientists in the National Museum of Ethiopia, the institution mandated to safeguard such irreplaceable discoveries.

As a leading research institution in the study of human origins, we at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History believe it is best to support our fellow scientists and institutions that have such mandates and to listen to what our counterparts in other countries have to say.”

Above: A cast of the “Lucy” skeleton, housed in the Human Origins Laboratory, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The cast is a replica of the original fossilized bones, and is conserved in protective foam. The head end of the skeleton (at right) includes Lucy’s nearly complete lower jaw, and the foot end (left) includes thigh, shin, and foot bones. The fossil’s field number is AL-288, and it represents the 3.2-million-year-old species Australopithecus afarensis.

(Courtesy of Rick Potts)