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Harlem Beauty (1930) by Werner Drewes. Image courtesy of the American Art Museum.

Friday, February 26: Artist Talk: Karen LaMonte

Glass artist Karen LaMonte—who American Art Museum visitors may know for her cast glass sculpture Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery—will be discussing her work and the unique process she uses to create her sensuous glass garments. Free, American Art Museum, 5:30 PM

Saturday, February 27: Black History Month Family Day Celebration

Because of the unfortunate bout of wintry weather we had here in DC earlier this month, the Black History Month Family Day has been rescheduled for today! Featured activities include:

• 11 AM-2 PM: Family Activity: Create a cut-out genealogy book led by artist Carol Barton
• 11:30 AM, 2 PM, and 4 PM: “Join the Student Sit-Ins,” an award-winning interactive theatrical presentation
• 1 PM, 3 PM, and 5 PM: The musical program “Sing for Freedom,” which celebrates the role of freedom songs in the Civil Rights movement
• 1-1:30 PM: Andrea Pinkney signs copies of her children’s book Sit-In
• 1:30 PM: The puppet show Can You Spell Harlem?

Free. American History Museum, 11:00 AM-5:30 PM

Sunday, February 28: Wild Side Stage

Ideal for persons ages 4 and older, this installment of the National Zoo’s Wild Side Stage series features the storytelling talents of Antonio Rocha. Let him draw you into a magical world filled with furry friends. Tickets may be purchased at any National Zoo store ahead of time or online at Ticketmaster.com. Tickets will also be sold at the door; however, please be advised that only a limited number of tickets will be available. National Zoo, 11:00 AM. This concert repeats today at 1:00 PM.

A strawberry dart frog hides in a bromeliad leaf at the National Zoo. The female frogs carry their tadpoles to safety atop the leaves until they grow into frogs. Courtesy of the National Zoo.

It took 10 minutes to spot just one strawberry dart frog in the terrarium at the National Zoo, hidden carefully in the folds of a lush green leaf and staring with beady black eyes into the early morning sunlight.

Though about 20 of the frogs live there, the tank’s dense vegetation makes it easy for the animal to disappear from sight.

“Usually they’re a little more active, but they’re just getting used to the light,” says the frogs’ keeper, Justin Graves, who is at the tank before the Zoo opens to check on the animals.

The vegetation in the terrarium mimics the frogs’ native environment in the rainforests of Central America, Graves says. The rainforest is one of the only places the frogs can successfully raise young tadpoles, but the terrarium has proven to be a successful alternative: The zoo recently welcomed it’s first brood of baby strawberry frogs.

Unlike most frogs, which lay thousands of eggs at a time only to abandon them, female strawberry dart frogs lay about six eggs at a time, Graves says. And it’s the father who protects the pea-sized eggs, urinating on them for the next 10 days until they hatch into tadpoles.

The mother carries each tadpole on her back and climbs two to three feet into the trees (though in the wild, it could be up to 40 feet) to find each of her babies their own home in a small pool of water. Often, she finds it in the base of a bromeliad plant leaf, which naturally forms a small cup with the plant’s stalk. The mother spends each day of the next few months checking on her young and bringing them food, traveling back and forth between the ground and their homes in the leaves.

Strawberry dart frogs grow to be smaller than a quarter. This frog measures about half the size of a dime. Courtesy of the National Zoo.

Bromeliad leaves abound in the zoo’s tank, which has given the mother strawberry frogs plenty of room to carry tadpoles. It’s also given the tadpoles enough distance from the other species of frogs (lemur frogs, glass frogs and green and black arrow frogs) that live in the tank, who could otherwise compete with the strawberry frogs for food, Graves says.

In the wild, strawberry dart frogs are best known because they’re poisonous to touch—a result of the bugs and plants they eat, which causes toxins to be released from their skin. But at the zoo, workers like Graves can control the frogs’ diet, so they can be handled (as long as you don’t have any cuts or abrasions).

At a time when so many amphibians are in danger of extinction, being able to give the frogs the space they need to reproduce is crucial for further study of the animal, including it’s elusive behavior, Graves says. The zoo has a team of volunteers who come in each day to track the animals’ movements, down to the minute: what they’re doing, how they’re moving and where exactly they’re hiding. Some of them even have names (like one little fellow named Emerson).

It’s important to understand amphibians like the strawberry frog, Graves said, so stronger conservation efforts can be made before they’re completely gone from the wild. “This is kind of their last refuge,” he said.

Jimmy Carter (1980) by Joan Hall. Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery; gift of Time magazine.

Here’s something that few people might be unaware of. The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery is a major repository of original artworks that once graced the covers of Time magazine.  Since its founding in 1923, the publication has relied an extensive network of artists to produce a bevy of eye-popping visuals not only to entice a passerby to pick up a newsstand copy, but also to comment on a notable newsmaker. In 1978, Time Inc. donated some 800 paintings, drawings and sketches of major luminaries of the times and today the collection is about 2,000 strong and still growing.

The Portrait Gallery’s new show From FDR to Obama: Presidents on Time features 32 portraits executed in a variety of media—from oil to sculpture—and invites visitors to visually explore the modern American presidency.

One of the show’s standout pieces is a shadow box created by artist Joan Hall for the August 18, 1980 issue. ”When I was given this assignment by Time magazine,” Hall says in a letter to the Portrait Gallery, “I was assigned a long list of events during President Carter’s term to include in the assemblage. I believe that an illustrator must combine good graphics with content, so it was a bit of a challenge to put so much information on one cover without it looking too cluttered. I solved this problem by making individual compartments surrounding the sculpture of Carter. In one compartment symbolizing Chinese/American relations I decided to use a fortune cookie with an American flag against the Great Wall. For inflation, I used a green balloon with dollar signs. Finally, to give a more personal and humorous touch to the piece, I included at the base of the bust of President Carter family photos, peanuts, a Bible, and a red dollhouse hotline telephone.”

Granted, I wasn’t even alive during the Carter presidency, so many of the images in pieces like this don’t have much resonance with me. While I may not be intimately familiar with the nitty gritty details of American life under his administration, Hall’s visuals do a fair bit of storytelling. Funny how certain problems—like gas prices and inflation—keep cropping up. Furthermore, there’s the sheer fun and novelty of the piece. Who couldn’t have a laugh at Billy Beer, if only for the bouncy, alliterative name and the fabulously offbeat presidential connection?

See this and other prime pieces of American illustration in From FDR to Obama: Presidents on Time, on view until September 26, 2010.

Smithsonian scientists tested elephants, like these Asian elephants at the National Zoo, to better understand why the species are so susceptible to diseases. Courtesy of the Zoo.

Elephants are beloved but threatened animals. African elephants number fewer than 575,000, and Asian elephants, which number only 30,000 and are considered endangered. A recent study of elephant DNA at the Smithsonian National Zoo may bring researchers one step closer to saving them.

Scientists at the zoo and their colleagues were the first group ever to analyze diversity in the elephant genes that detect and fight diseases. It also analyzed how these genes have an effect on the animals’ mating and social behavior.

We spoke with Jesus Maldonado, a member of the research team, about why these creatures seem to have high rates of disease both in captivity and in the wild, and how this study can help future generations of elephants.

Why are Asian and African elephants struggling to survive in the wild?

African and Asian elephants have been under a lot of pressure from humans hunting them in the wild. Elephants are highly prized because of their tusks—people have commercialized the value of them. So they’ve been hunted down almost to the levels of extinction. But there’s also a lot of problems they face with small population sizes, like inbreeding and disease.

Your study was the first to characterize patterns of genetic diversity and natural selection in the elephant. Why?

They’re not an easy organism to study because obtaining samples from an elephant is actually not an easy thing (laughs). Darting an elephant and taking a piece of tissue is very difficult. Imagine the logistics of taking a blood sample from an elephant. Those are intense things. So studying the genetics of elephants in the wild has posed a big problem. One way to get around that is to look at poop samples, and we did some of that within this study. But the thing that allowed us to actually be able to study them was all the connections we had with zoo and captive animals. Having captive animals and obtaining a fresh blood sample that was required for some of this analysis was key. The blood has to be taken almost immediately from the vet and it has to be sent to our lab and preserved in a special buffer so the DNA doesn’t degrade.

Your research focused specifically on the immune-system gene, known as MHC.

For mammals in particular, the MHC gene system is really a functional gene that helps animals fight disease and recognize the various diseases that come into the animals’ system. So the more diverse the MHC genes are, the more capable they are of identify different kinds of diseases. And the more MHC genes an animal has, the better they can fight off those diseases.

What did the DNA tell you about their ability to fight disease? What else did you find?

When we compared the patterns of MHC diversity in elephants we found that they had a relatively lower number of MHC genes than that of other mammals that have been recently surveyed. We also found that one of those genes was especially common and was found in over half of our samples. We think that this gene became so common because it may have been advantageous to individuals in resisting a disease that was or is still highly prevalent. We have not identified the disease. But we know, for instance, that elephants in captivity have been plagued by an endotheliotropic herpesvirus, which is responsible for about half of the deaths of young elephants in zoos, and one of our next steps will be to try to determine whether the MHC affects susceptibility to this disease.

MHC genes have also been implicated in the ability of other mammals to recognize individuals that are close kin. So we are also very interested in studying how elephants choose individuals they want to mate with, or how they recognize their own siblings and so avoid inbreeding.

How does this help protect elephants?

If we have knowledge of the levels of MHC variation in both captive and wild elephants, then we can make predictions about what kind of threat they’re in. Not only will our new findings help us predict how elephants may be able to cope if there is an epidemic, but they may soon help us understand if elephants use this same mechanism to avoid mating with close relatives and consequently decrease inbreeding. With their wild populations dwindling at an alarming rate, not only from disease but from hunting and illegal poaching, we can make a case to politicians and government agencies that we need stronger measures against hunting and over-harvesting of these animals. If we have a better understanding of their mating systems, we can also make recommendations about the minimum number of unrelated versus related individuals that need to be in a group, in order to avoid inbreeding. We can use this information for better management strategies of wild elephant populations.

Researchers clean and measure the remains of William Taylor White after he was unearthed in 2005. White's descendants recently donated the boy's remains to the National Museum of Natural History. Photo by Chip Clark, National Museum of Natural History.

The “boy in the iron coffin” who mystified Smithsonian scientists five years ago is back at the National Museum of Natural History– and this time, for good.

The descendants of the boy, who Smithsonian scientists identified as William Taylor White in 2007,  has donated the coffin, as well as the boy’s clothing and remains, to the museum’s department of anthropology, where it will help scientists further their DNA research.

White’s remains first came to the museum in 2005, after construction crews discovered a coffin containing a corpse in 19th-century style clothing while digging a gas line in Washington D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood.

The scientists identified the boy in 2007, after nearly two years of studying his tooth and bone development; searching obituaries and census records. Finally, they found a record of White: a 15-year old orphan who had moved to Washington from Accomack County, Virginia to attend Columbian College (now known as George Washington University). He is thought to have died from a combination of pneumonia and a heart condition on January 24, 1852.

Smithsonian researchers traced White’s family until they found a living relative in Pennsylvania. And now that the family has dedicated a gravestone to the boy on Virginia’s eastern shore, they’ve given him back to the museum, where officials say he “fills a void” in their access to well-preserved remains, as well as in their collection of Civil War-era clothing, and pre-Civil war cast iron coffins.

As for the rest of us on the Mall, we’re just happy White has finally found a home.