Senescence sucks: Prologue

(DrTom feels sort of like this man looks, but his body doesn't know that.)

senescence: a biological term that basically means aging. It encompasses all of the biological processes of a living organism's approaching an advanced age (i.e., the combination of processes of deterioration which follow the period of development of an organism). The word senescence is derived from the Latin word senex, meaning "old man" or "old age" or "advanced in age".

Physical work is more difficult to do, takes longer, and hurts more now than it did just 10 years ago.  How is that for a lead-off to get you to read more?  Terrible.  Who wants to read about senior citizens and their aches and pains.  I have always been a very active person, but recent years have taken their toll.  I'm a biologist, so I know this is a normal process, knew it was coming, and felt it when it started, but I hate every minute of it. 

Senescence is so weird, because in your mind you still feel like you are about 30.  When I walk across campus, I still gawk at long-legged coeds wearing short skirts, and I enjoy every minute of it.  In fact, now that I am retired and I won't be having any of these girls as students, I can gawk even longer.  Who gives a damn?  It is a challenge to see if I can gawk just up to the point where they would call Campus Security, but not longer than that.  It is a little game I play.  I do keep my hands to myself, however, but I can't promise anything 10 years hence.

But the severity of the situation crystallized for me about two years ago.  Let me set the stage for the anecdote I am about to tell.  A few months prior, my wife turned her ankle in our basement.  It was a really bad sprain; she heard a loud pop when it happened, and she could barely move for weeks.  For about a year after that, the ankle would occasionally "lock up" for no apparent reason, making it almost impossible to walk.  Then, my wife severely damaged her eye, possibly from using a commercial eye product, by chemically burning the cornea so badly that she was blind in that eye for many months.  After a couple dozen visits to the optometrist, she finally had laser surgery in Syracuse to repair the damage.  In my case, I have suffered from severe leg cramps since I was a teenager.  Whenever I do physically exhausting work, like cutting firewood for six hours, or hike a long distance, I tend to get leg cramps so badly that I double over in pain, unable to move until the cramp relaxes.  In the 1960s, I played varsity tennis for Ohio State, and leg cramps were a major issue for me during long matches. 

On the day in question, Robin and I had to go to the drug store to pick up a prescription for Robin's eye problem.  In fact, Robin was wearing a patch over her right eye to protect it from the sun.  We pulled into the Rite Aid and parked very close to the front entrance.  At that very instant, her ankle locked up and I had to help her exit the passenger side of the car.  She leaned heavily on me, given that she was half-blind and lame, as we started to make our way to the entrance of the drug store.  After moving only a few feet, I got tremendous cramps in my legs, which brought me to my knees.  I literally could not move at all.  Robin was still holding on to me and I was now holding onto her, in a mutual fight-for-life embrace that must have been pitiful to witness.  We were both in pain and completely unable to progress forward.  I tried to encourage us: "Robin, we are only 15 feet from the front door of the drug store.  If we can just get inside, I know there is a registered pharmacist in there who can help us".  She looked down at me with her good eye (still on my knees), and I looked up at her (still blind and lame), and we began to laugh so hard it incapacitated us all the more.  A passer-by would certainly think we were two drunks on our way to pick up an Alka Seltzer.

We managed to get inside eventually, my cramps subsided, Robin's ankle came unlocked, and we got her eye medicine.  It was as though the Rite Aid was some kind of healing temple of the gods.  Almost as soon as we got inside the door, half of our ailments went away magically.  If someone ever initiates Sunday morning religious services from this drug store, I will be the first to attend.

This incident was hilarious in many respects, and we have laughed about it many times.  I guess we can find it humorous, in part, because it was only a temporary problem.  We are not permanently disabled the way we appeared to be on that day.  If we were, it would not be nearly as funny.  The incident helped us to appreciate those elderly people who really are that immobile all the time, kind of like putting on a blindfold to appreciate what non-sighted people have to contend with every day.  As a result, I now go out of my way to help women cross a busy street.  However, it doesn't hurt if they have long legs and wear a short skirt.

Gulliver, the red-eyed vireo

(Red-eyed vireo)

One morning in June a few years ago, I went out onto the deck to have my morning coffee. I heard a loud begging squawk of a bird, which was quite persistent and lasted all morning.  Finally, my young son and I went into the yard to investigate.  Bingo!  There on the ground was a young nestling bird, which I determined was a red-eyed vireo (Vireo olivaceus).  About 25 feet above the location of the baby vireo, I could see a nest on a limb of a red maple tree; obviously, the bird had fallen from the nest, which was too high for me to reach.  I always hate these decisions, but the choice was clear: either try to raise the baby by hand-feeding it, or let it die.  Lazy DrTom probably would have let nature take its course, but my empathetic 12-year old son would have none of that.  He was such a cry-baby.

We put the bird in an old bird cage that we had from our daughter's zebra finch days, and then the work began.  The bird was hungry even now, so we started the laborious process of collecting crickets and other insects from the yard, and feeding them to the open mouth of this insectivorous species.  Nestling birds can eat a tremendous amount.  How adult birds can locate and collect enough insects to feed 4-5 ravenous babies has always amazed me.  They eat so much and grow so fast that you can literally see the increase in their body size within a 24-hour period.

The vireo, which we named Gulliver, begged and ate, and we hunted and searched.  This was really getting old. Insects were getting more difficult to find for some reason, even when I used a sweep net.  So I did what most red-blooded Americans do to solve their problems--I went shopping.  I bought mealworms at the local pet store.  This solution was a little expensive, but mealworms are a nice, plump juicy meal, and Gulliver loved them.  So far, so good.  We even took Gulliver on a little trip with us to Hershey Park.  When we got to the park on a really hot afternoon, we left Gulliver in his cage in the car while we reconnoitered a bit.  We returned to the car only about 20 minutes later to find the bird lying on the bottom of the cage, with bird guano all over the car seats.  The poor thing had gone apoplectic before passing out from the heat.  Of course, our son was hysterical (cry baby), so we rushed to our motel room, and hustled the patient into the air-conditioned room.  After applying drops of water to his bill for several minutes, Gulliver lapped up the life-saving liquid and made a remarkable recovery.  Whew!

We returned home that day and decided that it was time for Gulliver to try his wings.  He was now about 12 days old, the time at which he would normally fledge from his nest anyway, so I banded the bird with an aluminum leg band, and set him free.  We didn't know what to expect.  Would he zoom off, never to be seen again, or what.  Quite the contrary.  Because we were his sole source for a well-balanced meal, he was not about to leave the cafeteria.  He stayed very close to the house for several weeks, mostly on the deck railing.  Whenever any of us went outside or came home from work, he immediately flew to us, landed on our shoulder, and begged incessantly.  As the summer continued, he spent more and more time in the forest next to our yard, but I could call him to the deck to feed him.  He was adult size by now and eating quite a bit, so I decided to adopt an economy of scale and order a box of 2,000 crickets from Rainbow Mealworms of California.  On the very day the crickets arrived, Gulliver apparently moved into migration mode and was gone.  Red-eyed vireos spend the winter in South America, so I figured his ancient instincts had kicked in or he had been picked off by a predator during the night, leaving us with beaucoup crickets and no mouth in which to insert them.

Throughout that winter we often discussed our experience with Gulliver, this interesting little bird that had befriended us.  Had he made it to Argentina?  Did he even know that he was a red-eyed vireo?  Had his instincts developed normally so that he could function as he should?  Our answer came the following spring.  I was standing on the deck one May morning, when a red-eyed vireo landed on the railing for only 1-2 seconds, and then returned to the woods.  Vireos are common in our woodlot, but they never land on our deck.  In addition, I saw the unmistakable glint of a shiny metal band on one leg of the bird.  Gulliver had survived his first migration and returned to the location of his birth.

We never saw Gulliver again after that brief encounter that May morning.  It was almost as if he was signaling to us that he had made it, and to say thanks, and now I'm an adult, and I'm nearby.  I usually hate that anthropomorphic stuff (i.e., making it sound like animals have human emotions), but even DrTom is allowed to slip once in a while.

The taming of the shrew

(A nest of Northern short-tailed shrews, only a few days old.)

Yesterday I found the first nest of northern short-tailed shrews (Blarina brevicauda) I have ever found.  I was transferring some straw from one pile to my compost pile, you know, the one that never reaches 170 degrees.  Beneath the straw were two nests.  One contained 4 or 5 babies, with gray fur and eyes still closed.  I did not measure them, but I estimate that they were about 40mm in length, minus the tail.  The other nest was empty and was about a foot from the babies' nest, but I am sure it was the nest for the mother.  I had no idea that she kept a separate nest from her babies, but she was close enough to detect what was going on with them.  I have captured this species in Sherman live traps many times, and I have watched the adults moving in the woods from time to time, but this was a novel event for me.


When I uncovered the nest, the babies began to scatter immediately.  I quickly gathered them up and put them back in the nest.  Shrews have a high metabolic rate, and I am sure these babies would die outside of the nest in short order, and it was a cool day.  I returned about an hour later, and they were all gone.  When I left them, they had been sleeping in the nest, all cuddled together (see photo).  I am sure the female returned, realized that the site had been compromised, and moved them.  She probably did this by picking each one up individually in her mouth, and moved them to a new location.  I was unable to locate this new site.

Whitaker and Hamilton's "Mammals of the Eastern United States" give many details about the life history of this interesting mammal.  This species feeds on numerous invertebrates, especially earthworms, slugs, and snails.  They have been known to kill mice and even small birds.  This species is one of only two shrews (and the only one in North America) with venomous saliva, and they are the only mammals in the world to have this feature, which they use to subdue their prey.  The idea is that they are able to paralyze an earthworm and then place it in a food cache for later use; the food item does not die and decompose and yet is unable to crawl away.  Young are born from early spring to late September, and a litter usually numbers 4-6.  Copulation between male and female may last 25 minutes, with the pair locked together, and with the male seemingly inactive and dragged around by the female all the while.  (No wise-crack comments, please.  We are talking real biology here.)  In addition, short-tailed shrews use echolocation (clicks in the range of 30-55 kHz) to navigate their environment, given their extremely small eyes and probable poor eyesight.

I have always maintained that there is still a great deal to learn about shrews and moles, given their relative secrecy and the difficulty observing them.  I also tell students that no matter how much you have seen in nature, I can guarantee there is much more to be seen.  I have been poking around fields and forests for 50 years, and the discovery of this nest taught me yet again that there is much I have to learn.  So get out there and make a new discovery for yourself.  And if you have children, take them with you.   If you have a spouse, you can bring them also, as long as they leave their iPod, and cell phone, and any other electronic thingamabob at home.  Cameras and binoculars are permitted, however.

Let's talk about the word "data"

(The data show a downward trend.)

A pet peeve of mine is the abuse of the word "data", and it has been bugging me for years.  Specifically, commentators on tv and radio, websites, and magazines almost never get the agreement between subject and verb correct, when the subject of the sentence is the word "data".  (From a Google webpage: "There is no data for this view").  The word "data" is plural.  So, for example, a correct sentence would be, "These data are not very interesting".  It is incorrect to say, "The data is foreboding".  I watch CNBC, the business channel, several hours per day during the week when the stock market is open, and those people happily get it wrong all day long.  I'm sick of this!

All scientists know that the word "data" is plural.  Our fear is that our research will produce only a single piece of information, which would be a "datum", the singular of the word "data".  I am sure all economists know the same.  But those who report on science or economics continue to get it wrong.

Wake up media!  Correct yourself!  Set an example!  Be the first in your profession to get this right.  And, by the way, the word is pronounced "day ta"; don't pronounce it like it was spelled "datta".  But that is another subject.  Let's just start with baby steps.

(Addendum: I now have a Cause on Facebook called "The Word "Data" is Plural".  Please join it if you want to support this important movement.  Among my FB friends are many tv commentators (Joan Lunden, Michael Wolff, Ron Insana, Amy Robach, Peggy Noonan, George Stephanopoulos, Contessa Brewer, Alexis Glick, Craig Crawford, Charlie Gasparino, etc.).  If any of them actually pick up on this Cause, maybe we can make an impact.)