The Bone Room and the Rise of the Scavengers

A short trip on the 51 bus brought us to the Valley Life Sciences Building on the Berkeley campus for our second Aesthetic Immersion field trip. We were there to do a bit of exploring in the university's private Museum of Vertebrate Biology and see "one of the coolest rooms on campus", the Bone Room. Our knowledgeable tour guide this time was Alan Shabel, a lecturer and graduate of Berkeley, who explained a bit about vertebrates and the study of comparative morphology, then impressed with his questionmaster abilities.

The Museum of Vertebrate Biology holds one of the most impressive collections of amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal specimens in the country, possibly the world. Aisles of metal cabinets each contain numerous samples of each critter type, identified on the font only with scientific name and region. One might be rodents (probably rodents evidently, since they are extremely diverse and numerous) or maybe frogs or whales. Back a bit further though and you enter the Bone Room. A room lined with shelves with so many skulls looking back at you, limbs and baleen and other parts that I couldn't place and neatly labeled boxes containing more.

The variety in the forms of the skulls we saw surprised me. In many ways they are remarkably similar, once they reach the bone room they are vaguely the same color, they more or less have the features we can recognize as eyes or mouth, there are so many there that indiscriminately wandering the aisles can make a blur of the individual pieces. But each of these animals has developed adaptation to it's environment and way of life, whether it's the krill harvesting baleen of a gray whale or the locked jaw movement of otters.

I flipped through the pages of my notebook last night looking for any scribble that might inspire a blog post and in the mix of my poor note taking and absent minded lecture doodles was the word kleptoparasitism. Alan used the term in reference to how paleontologists had believed that velociraptors stole eggs from other dinosaurs. Its a term that also describes those that steal from other animals who have caught, prepared, stored food or nesting material. It can occur where theft is from others of the same species or another species entirely. There are many cases of this behavior in bugs, between lions and hyenas, a few species of birds and according to wikipedia sometimes humans chase lions away from their prey in kleptoparasitic style. But it seems that we as a species participate in a few more variations of kleptoparasitism than that. For generations we took what was prepared by others, honey from bees, milk from cows, eggs from chickens. We have raised truffle finding pigs, dogs to hunt our prey, and sap to make maple syrup, etc. We cut down the homes of many species to build our own. We may be the biggest kleptoparasites of them all. On a larger scale, we as a species have taken whatever we please from an environment that otherwise has been able to maintain balance for thousands and thousands of years. Its been a remarkably effect method of growth, but at this point is clearly unsustainable, so how can we change our development pattern to better integrate with the rest of the natural world? Its a tough question.

We have been successful, but the other winners of our method is the scavengers. While many suffer from decreased resources and expanded human population, those creatures that can adapt to using what we have put in place have also experienced massive population growth. Rats, raccoons, flies, other now urban dwelling creatures. As resources diminish we may very well have to take cues from the scavengers to take advantage of the situation that we created. They have adapted to us, how can we adapt to us?