Dr. Lowman’s latest Nature’s Secrets column in newsobserver.com:
It is often assumed that wheelchair dependency hinders a career in field biology. But scientists at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences are proving otherwise.
With funds from the National Science Foundation, mobility-limited college students are tackling unanswered questions about what lives in the tops of temperate forest trees – research that is preparing them for careers as forest ecologists or field entomologists. To access the treetops, students do not need to amble along a walking trail. They can sit in a harness and propel themselves upward with hardware used by mountaineers and cavers that has been adapted for tree climbing.
Once airborne, the student arbornauts (technical term for “treetop explorers”) are sampling tardigrades, commonly called water bears or moss piglets. Although these microscopic animals were the first experimental creatures to survive in outer space, back on Earth they are little known, little studied and easy to find. On “Animal Planet,” they have earned the distinction as the world’s most extremophile critter! Water bears can survive the vacuums of outer space, pressure six times greater than the deepest ocean trenches, temperatures higher than boiling water or just above absolute zero. They can go without food or water for more than 100 years.
