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Chickens at a Florida farmhouse museum (courtesy of flickr user Kristine Paulus)

Why chickens? Well, I think we need a break from natural disasters, and chickens are a good distraction (how can the Chicken Dance not amuse?).

1 ) The chicken, Gallus gallus domesticus, is a domestic subspecies of the red junglefowl, a member of the pheasant family that is native to Asia. Genetic studies have found that the grey junglefowl also contributed to the chicken’s evolution.

2 ) This bird was probably first domesticated for the purpose of cockfights, not as food.

3 ) Chickens aren’t completely flightless—they can get airborne enough to make it over a fence or into a tree.

4 ) These birds are omnivores. They’ll eat seeds and insects but also larger prey like small mice and lizards.

5 ) With 25 billion chickens in the world, there are more of them than any other bird species.

6 ) There are dozens of chicken breeds, such as the Dutch bantam, leghorn and Rhode Island red.

7 ) Baby chickens are chicks. Female chickens are pullets until they’re old enough to lay eggs and become hens. Male chickens are called roosters, cocks or cockerels, depending on the country you’re in.

8 ) A rooster announces to a flock of chickens that he’s found food with a “took, took, took.” But the hens don’t pay attention if they already know that there is food around.

9 ) Roosters perform a little dance called ‘tidbitting’ in which they make sounds (food calls) and move their head up and down, picking up and dropping a bit of food. Researchers have found that females prefer males that often perform tidbitting and have larger, brighter combs on top of their heads.

10) Scientists think that the rooster’s wattle–the dangly bit beneath his beak–helps him to gain a hen’s attention when he is tidbitting.

11 ) A female chicken will mate with many different males but if she decides, after the deed is done, that she doesn’t want a particular rooster’s offspring and can eject his sperm. This occurs most often when the male is lower in the pecking order.

12 ) The chicken was the first bird to have its genome sequenced, in 2004.

13 ) Avian influenza (a.k.a. bird flu) is extremely contagious and can make chickens very sick and kill them. The highly pathogenic form of the disease can kill off 90 to 100 percent of birds in a flock in just 48 hours.

14 ) And which came first, the chicken or the egg? Well, all vertebrates have eggs, but the hardshelled variety first appeared among reptiles.

Irene created a new channel across a North Carolina barrier island (courtesy of flickr user NCDOTcommunications)

When I first learned about barrier islands, back in high school, I couldn’t believe that people would live on one. That’s because barrier islands aren’t permanent; they’re just accumulations of sand that form off the coast (many can be found on the U.S. East Coast). And it’s a natural state for these islands to grow and erode and get washed away. A strong enough storm can cut an island in half, as seen after Irene in the photo above, or take away the wide swath of beach that had been between homes and the ocean. What had been prime beachfront property one day can be open ocean the next.

And people can compound the problem. The point of buying beachfront property is to get a great view of the ocean, but destroying the sand dune to get closer to the beach eliminates the feature that protects the beach from erosion. In addition, building jetties and adding sand in attempts to keep an island stable can hasten erosion elsewhere. Building on a barrier island can also limit the island’s usefulness in protecting the mainland coast from powerful storms as well as eliminate important ecosystems, such as dunes and salt marshes.

The best way to limit development on these fragile islands is probably not to outlaw it, though. There’s so much development already on these islands that there’s no possibility of clearing it all away and letting nature take over. But we could add more of these islands to the Coastal Barrier Resources System. People are not prohibited from developing land in this system. Instead, the act that created the system “limits the Federal financial assistance for development related activities such as spending for roads, wastewater systems, potable water supply, and disaster relief,” NOAA explains. In other words, you can build here, but you’re not getting any help from the feds.

As a result of this program, NOAA estimates that U.S. taxpayers saved $1.3 billion between 1982 and 2010. People do build on CBRS land, but it’s more expensive to do so without federal assistance, so less development occurs. And because the land is less developed, these ecosystems often stay intact, providing homes for migratory birds, rare plants and animals. The land is also allowed to grow and erode naturally and serve as the barrier it is meant to be.

Flood debris on the Ohio River is halted by a dam (Photo by Michael Mooney; courtesy of flickr user LouisvilleUSACE)

When the post-hurricane floods drain away, there will be tons of debris left behind. More may be washed away and never seen again. Whole buildings may flow down rivers into the oceans. But what happens then?

Some insight into this phenomenon can be found in Flotsametrics and the Floating World, the 2009 book by oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer and science writer Eric Scigliano:

Today the evening news reports excited on all the houses, cars, and other flotsam washed away in floods. Rarely, however, do we learn what happens afterward to this diluvial debris. Some of the trees washed away in the great 1861-62 flood stranded on nearby shores. Coastal eddies, observable from earth-orbiting satellites, spun others a hundred miles offshore, where the California Current swept them on westward to the Hawaiian Islands. In September 1862, Charles Wolcott Brooks, secretary of the California Academy of Sciences, reported “an enormous Oregon tree about 150 feet in length and fully six feet in diameter about the butt” drifting past Maui. “The roots, which rose ten feet out of water, would span about 25 feet. Two branches rose perpendicularly 20 to 25 feet. Several tons of clayish earth were embedded among the roots”—carrying who knows what biological invaders to vulnerable island habitats.

Any logs that got past Hawaii without being snatched or washed up would, over the next five to ten years, complete a full orbit around the Turtle and/or Aleut gyres.

It might also be possible for flood debris to form a floating island. Not just a fantasy in fiction, floating islands are a fairly common lake phenomena:

The influential early-twentieth-century paleontologist William Diller Matthew estimated that a thousand islands drifted out to sea during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and 200 million during the Cenozoic era. Such islands, formed when soil collects on dense mats of fallen trees and other debris, were known on the lakes of Europe, the marshes of Mesopotamia, and the log-jammed rivers of the Pacific Northwest….Today engineers and harbor authorities clear out such accumulations [from rivers and inlets] before they block passage and menace shipping. But untended, they would pile up until enormous floods washed them out to sea, there to drift, taunting mariners and bedeviling mapmakers, until they broke apart on the waves or crashed onto new shores.

The most famous floating island on the ocean was spotted in the spring of 1892 off the east coast of Florida:

It was a season of extreme weather: hurricanes, tsunamis, and floods violent enough to uproot whole sections of forest. One such section became the only wooded island ever observed transversing an ocean. Thirty-foot trees enable mariners to see it from seven miles away. The U.S. Hydrographic Office feared it would menace transatlantic steamers, and inscribed it on the monthly pilot charts that marked such threats as icebergs, underwater mines, burning vessels, and floating logs. Many captains stared in disbelief when they received their November 1892 chart for the North Atlantic; it showed an island floating in the stream. But this was no cloud or mirage; it had been sighted six times along a 2,248-nautical-mile course.

(Read more about ocean currents and how they brought lost Japanese sailors to America in this except from Flotsametrics.)

In this GOES satellite image taken on August 24, the eye Hurricane Irene, traveling over the Bahamas, can be clearly seen (Credit: NOAA/NASA GOES Project)

Not that long ago, people got little to no warning about hurricanes. They couldn’t know when the winds would kick up, when the surge of water would arrive, what kind of destruction a storm might bring. But now we have satellites orbiting overhead, powerful computers that can forecast a track days in advance and plenty of scientists to make sense of a wealth of data. We may not be invulnerable, but we can, at least, limit the amount of destruction and loss of life. (If anyone asks, “what good is science?” here’s a great example.)

And because this is mostly government-funded science, the public gets plenty of access to information and tools to help us better understand hurricanes and prepare for them.

“Understanding the history of hurricane landfalls in your community is an important step toward assessing your vulnerability to these potentially devastating storms,” says Ethan Gibney, a senior geospatial analyst for NOAA. He’s one of the developers of NOAA’s Historical Hurricane Tracks online mapping application. Users can map the tracks of storms around the world and get detailed information about tropical cyclones going back to 1842.

Information about Irene (as well as Tropical Depression 10, brewing in the Atlantic) is available from the National Hurricane Center. Most of us will be satisfied with the array of maps, advisories, podcasts and videos produced by the center, but even more detailed analysis tools are also available to those who are interested and understand it.

NASA monitors storms from above the Earth and publishes the best of its imagery online. Instruments on the GOES and Terra satellites provide great visible images along with temperature (of both air and sea surface), pressure, wind and cloud data. The TRMM satellite, meanwhile, measures the hurricane’s rainfall and gives insight into the storm’s structure.

And anyone who lives near Irene’s projected path should consult FEMA’s hurricane site and learn what they should do to prepare.

Check out the entire collection of Surprising Science’s Pictures of the Week and get more science news from Smithsonian on our Facebook page. And apologies for the East-Coast-centric coverage the last few days; we’ll go back to regular science blogging once the Smithsonian office is no longer plagued by natural disasters. Good luck to all who sit in Irene’s path.

A building in the northern reaches of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, that was destroyed in the 1938 hurricane (credit: NOAA Photo Library/Donated by Susan Medyn, Tiverton, Rhode Island)

A storm formed in the eastern Atlantic near the Cape Verde Islands on September 4, 1938, and headed west. After 12 days, before it could reach the Bahamas, it turned northward, skimming the East Coast of the United States and picking up energy from the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. On September 21, it crashed into Long Island and continued its way north at a speed of 60 miles per hour, with the eye of the storm passing over New Haven, Connecticut. It didn’t dissipate until it reached Canada.

The winds were strong enough that modern scientists place the storm in Category 3 of the Saffir-Simpson Scale. The Blue Hill Observatory outside Boston measured sustained winds of 121 miles per hour and gusts as strong as 186 miles per hour. The winds blew down power lines, trees and crops and blew roofs off houses. Some downed power lines set off fires in Connecticut.

But it was the storm surge that caused the most damage. The storm came ashore at the time of the high tide, which added to the surge of water being pushed ahead by the hurricane. The water rose 14 to 18 feet along much of the Connecticut coast, and 18 to 25 feet from New London, Connecticut to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Seaside homes all along Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island were submerged under 12 to 15 feet of water, and Providence, Rhode Island was inundated with 20 feet. Whole communities were swept out to sea.

One of the homes that washed away was Katharine Hepburn‘s beach house in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Hepburn would later recall:

It was something devastating—and unreal—like the beginning of the world—or the end of it—and I slogged or sloshed, crawled through ditches and hung on to keep going somehow—got drenched and bruised and scratched—completely bedraggled—finally got to where there was a working phone and called Dad. The minute he heard my voice he said, ‘how’s your mother?’—And I said—I mean I shouted—the storm was screaming so—’She’s all right. All right, Dad! But listen, the house—it’s gone—blown away into the sea!’ And he said, ‘I don’t suppose you had the brains enough to through a match into it before it went, did you? It’s insured against fire, but not against blowing away!—and how are you?’

The hurricane, one of the most destructive to ever hit New England, was followed by massive river flooding as the water dumped by the storm—10 to 17 inches fell on the Connecticut River basin—returned to the sea. By the time the devastation was over, 564 people were dead and more than 1,700 injured, 8,900 homes were completely gone as were 2,600 boats. Trees and buildings damaged by the storm could still be seen by the 1950s.

In the days and weeks following the storm, the federal government sent thousands of men from the Works Progress Administration to assist with the search for survivors and the huge effort to clear away the destruction, as can be seen in this newsreel from the time: