On Wed, 20 May 1998, Jack Bowling wrote:

> Poring through the latest batch of monographs in the "Birds of North America"
> project, I spied this gem from the "Metabolism and Temperature Regulation"
> section of the clark's Nutcracker account:
>
> "...nutcracker at -65C in laboratory maintained oxygen consumption of 7.4
> ml/g/h (42.0 W/kg) for 55 min (M. L. Laudenslager and Diana F. Tomback unpubl.,
> cited in: Tomback, D. F. 1982. Dispersal of whitebark pine seeds by Clark's
> Nutcracker: a mutualism hypothesis. J. Anim. Ecol. 51: 451-467)."
>
> Needless to say, the likely demise of the bird was not detailed. Now call me
> just a lily-livered liberal eco-whacko, but I cannot accept any justification of
> freeze-drying a wired up Clark's Nutcracker in the name of science. Makes me
> shudder at what must be going on in those quiet university backrooms.
>
> - Jack
>
>
>
> ==========================
> Jack Bowling
> Prince George, BC
> jbowling at direct.ca


Hmm...can't tell if Jack's joking or not. So here are a few points before
tweeters start storming our (ivory, of course) gates.

I don't know what happened in that particular experiment, but here's my
perspective.

-65 C works out to -85 F - Darn cold, but considering that Nutcrackers
winter in the British Columbian Rockies (don't they? my ancient field
guide shows them there), it seems probable that they'd encounter very cold
temperatures routinely, although probably not that cold. I don't know
what my oxygen consumption would be, but I think I could stand that
temperature for 55 minutes in normal winter garb. I would be surprised if
a Nutcracker couldn't.

What I know about how people do science (at least on vertebrates not
called "rats") makes it seem highly unlikely that anyone would set up an
experiment along the lines of "let's see what this bird does while we kill
it in an interesting way." Heck, that even applies to 99% of research on
rats.

It doesn't say anywhere in the quoted passage that the bird did die. You
can suspect the worst, and think that if it's not mentioned what happened
to the bird, it must be because they killed it and wanted to conceal that.
You might be right. But I doubt it.

Christopher E. Hill
Quiet University Backroom
Department of Zoology
University of Washington
P. O. Box 351800
Seattle, WA 98195-1800