Full circle

When I met Mr. thalarctos at a dinner party at the Center for Urban Horticulture lo so many years ago, we were studying at the same summer intensive language program--I was studying Khmer, and he was studying Vietnamese--so I remember making some throwaway joke about a supposed Vieto-Irish language connection (nerdy jokes that require a whole lot of specialized knowledge to be even mildly funny, if that much, my specialty: this particular pun hinged on the fact that the word for "cow" is "bó" in Irish Gaelic, and "bò" in Vietnamese). Then I proceeded to spill a glass of red wine all over the notes he was supposed to sing from with the gamelan later that night--the lyrics were in Sundanese, a language he does not know, so he needed his crib sheet for the performance. From lame humor to full adrenaline panic in less than 60 seconds.

After that inauspicious start, it's a wonder he would still speak to me, much less that we hit it off so well we've been together the 15 years since then. The Center for Urban Horticulture is no longer there in the same form, having been intentionally firebombed, burnt down, and rebuilt in the meantime. And I just learned of another unexpected British Isles-Southeast Asian linguistic parallelism--convergent evolution, rather than homology; in neither case am I positing some grand overarching language family or anything: just two interesting coincidences in how people thousands of miles away from each other arrived independently at similar constructions.

I learned the following from a commenter over at Pharyngula, Dan S.:

And amusingly, one reading of the name of that most famous wandering Geatish hero, Beowulf, has it as 'beo' (bee) + 'wulf' (wolf) - that is, bee-wolf, i.e. bear, in Old English.

"Bee-wolf" for bear: that's cool! I would expect that people would know what a bear was, but there is also a taboo about speaking the bear's name to avoid attracting the attention of such a dangerous animal. So in Finnish:

In the Kalevala are evident traces of arctolatry, bear-worship, once very common among the tribes of the north, Otso, the bear, according to Finnish mythology, was born on the shoulders of Otava, in the regions of the sun and moon, and "nursed by a goddess of the woodlands in a cradle swung by bands of gold between the bending branches of budding fir-trees." His nurse would not give him teeth and claws until he had promised never to engage in bloody strife, or deeds of violence. Otso, however, does not always keep his pledge, and accordingly the hunters of Finland find it comparatively easy to reconcile their consciences to his destruction. Otso is called in the runes by many endearing titles as "The Honey-Eater," "Golden Light-Foot," "The Forest-Apple," "Honey-Paw of the Mountains," "The Pride of the Thicket," "The Fur-robed Forest-Friend."

"Our word karhu (bear: describes a hairy fur of the bear, a shaggy creature) was not allowed to say out loud. That is why there are many euphemisms in Finnish language, which were used when one wanted to weaken or hide the fear towards the bear. Kontio (bruin) describes the way the bear walks. A certain stress was used when Se (it), Itse (self), Hän (he) was said. Metän elukka (beauty of the forest), Otso (the apple of the forest) etc. are usually appropriate code names. When one wanted to flatter one might say Jumalan mies (the man of God), Suuriherra (mighty master), Mesikämmen (lazy honey-pawed one), Mesikkäinen (honey-eater). Words like Kouki, Kouvo, Metsän- vaari (grandpa of forest), Tätinipoika (the son of my aunt) are reminders of the belief that a man and a bear are related to each other. When adults intimidated children by a bear it was called Pöppö, Mörkö (bugbear), Mönninkäinen or Kurko."

The Russian "медведь", "honey-eater"; our own "bruin". "the brown one"--these are also examples of the same naming taboo.

So is "bee-wolf" another example, or is it simply a very old attempt to describe one animal in terms of another, better-known, one? After all, if you want to avoid invoking dangerous animals by calling their names, you could do a lot worse than to start with striking "wolf" from your vocabulary, not that humans are always 100% consistent of course. I don't know whether "bee-wolf" is simply a first pass at description, or whether it's an example of name taboo, but I do know I've seen that construction before:

"bear" = some other familiar carnivore + honey aspect

In Old English, apparently, it's "bee-wolf" (at least, according to one reading); in Khmer, it's "honey tiger": klaa kmoom (I really need to get Cambodian up and running on this machine]. And the "honey tiger" most familiar in Southeast Asia is none other than our old friend, the sun bear:



(this is Fong, at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, sleeping in a position he likes.)

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Bearrings

(Emma, Ruth, if you're reading this, stop! Wait until your packages arrive this week before reading any further, 'k? :)



Finished my first pair of bear earrings ("bearrings") tonight. These are learning pieces, so I'll give them as gifts to friends.

Terry brought the golden bears back from the bead show in Arizona a few weeks ago. I'm using the colors pink, blue, and yellow because of what they mean in reproductive cycle cytology--pink is acidophilic cells, blue is basophilic cells, and yellow is keratinized.

Also, since we want baby bears, not to lock them into rigid sex roles or anything, but pink and blue are well-established baby colors, too. So the colors of the beads in these bearrings have a lot of symbolism.

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Beads for Bears

Squeee! I've been so excited waiting for them, and they're finally here!



Terry went to the giant bead show in Arizona, and, as she always does, she asks us for our shopping lists so she can find us what we're looking for. I told her I was looking for bears, as I want to make earrings to sell as a fund-raiser for the sun bear repro biology informatics project.

Terry's been back and traveling again--it's school recruiting season--and between her and my chaotic schedules, it took a while for us to connect up. I've been on pins and needles waiting to see the bears she got me. They're wonderful!

I had asked her to look for some golden bears for me, and she came through! She found some lovely golden bears in the shape of black bears, as well as some black bear fetishes, and a selection of polar bears in different colors.

I am going to have such fun making these into earrings, and selling them to raise funds to support the research. The tricky bit is going to be parting with them, but Terry tells me I am not the first artisan to struggle with that.

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More details on Mother Bear's Day fundraiser, Part II

As I was saying before I interrupted myself, the details for the fundraiser are shaping up. For the motherhood of the bears, we're going with a Mothers' Day Brunch theme. It will take place the day before Mothers' Day, though, so that it won't get in the way of family plans on the day itself.

Below is the invitation to a Donor Appreciation Dinner to celebrate Mother Bear's Day. The donors who contribute to this fundraising campaign at the $250 and above level will be honored at the brunch, and I'll be reporting to the donors on the progress of the research over the last year, and projecting what we'll get done in the next year to promote sun bear reproduction.

We've still got room at the brunch--if you care about bear reproduction, love a good meal, and are going to be in Seattle on Mothers' Day weekend, you should consider joining us!

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Yay, anonymous donor and The Edge of Glass!

(I'm going to have to change this slide, now that PZ has staked out Comic Sans as the "crank font"...

I need to re-do it for another reason, as well--Schutte did not discuss keratinization, a change in the cells' biochemical composition which lends a golden color to the cells. Durrant [1], by contrast, uses the color change associated with keratin as a marker for ovulation in the panda:

A second chromic shift was consistently observed 2 days prior to ovulation when keratinized (orange) cells replaced acidophils as the majority of vaginal cells.

So here's a wonderful example of modeling physiological processes across species: Schutte details the reproductive cycle of the dog, Durrant adapts that information and applies it to the panda, and then Durrant's group and ours uses that panda information to study other species of bear.)

Anyway, this is a presentation slide that I adapted (animated, colored) from Schutte 1967 [2,3,4] for a talk on using informatics to aid in the reproduction of endangered species at the 2004 American Veterinary Medical Association conference:



What you are seeing, as you read left to right, is the change over time in the shape and color of the vaginal epithelial cells, collected by swabbing the animal. Shape changes (from more round to more irregular and from a high nucleus-to-cell size ratio to a much lower one, approaching or reaching zero in some cases), and color changes between pink/red (acidophilic) and blue (basophilic) can be seen as the cycle progresses. Although the hormone level peaks and the white and red blood cells (leukocytes and erythrocytes) are shown as well, we'll ignore those for the moment to concentrate on the changes in the colored cells in the middle of the diagram.

With a break in between, the cycle resumes at the left, and the whole process is repeated over and over again through the animal's reproductive life.

The important take-away points from this slide are the irregular borders and small nuclei of the aging cell, and the colors blue and pink (depicted above), and golden (which is also significant in pandas, but which Schutte did not address in dogs in his work).

So keeping those factors in mind, you can see why I was practically dumbstruck when I walked into a glass art studio in Fremont (a Seattle neighborhood) and noticed the piece by James Curtis titled "Little Bang":



I mean, it's all there! Large, irregular cell borders, tiny nuclei, and pink (cranberry), blue (teal), and golden color. Even the rack on which it is mounted looks like a graph over time of a cycle. I swear, if I had commissioned the artist to render mature vaginal epithelial cells in glass, he could not have carried it out more faithfully.

A huge shout-out to James and his assistant Tara for patiently working with me while I arranged financing and donation of the work to our sun bear reproductive project for auction at a later date. If you're looking for glass art, I would recommend The Edge of Glass in Seattle unconditionally for their quality, their vision, and their customer service.

And to our anonymous donor, who prefers to remain behind the scenes to put the work at the forefront, our deepest gratitude and appreciation for your help for the bears. We will keep you posted on the progress of the project.

UPDATE: I forgot, before I published this post, to mention that James told me he probably will not use the teal again, or if he does, it won't be very often--it is simply so hard to work with that it's not practical. So the bears and I did indeed get very lucky to get in there before someone else bought the piece, and we would never had known about it. I thank Mr. thalarctos for deciding to surprise me with a drop-in visit there; it worked out so much more beautifully than I could have predicted.

References:

[1] Durrant B, Czekala N, Olson M, Anderson A, Amodeo D, Campos-Morales R, Gual-Sill F, Ramos-Garza J. Papanicolaou staining of exfoliated vaginal epithelial cells facilitates the prediction of ovulation in the giant panda. Theriogenology. 2002 Apr 15;57(7):1855-64.

[2] Schutte AP. Canine vaginal cytology. I. Technique and cytological morphology. J Small Anim Pract. 1967 Jun;8(6):301-6. No

[3] Schutte AP. Canine vaginal cytology. II. Cyclic changes. J Small Anim Pract. 1967 Jun;8(6):307-11.

[4] Schutte AP. Canine vaginal cytology. III. Compilation and evaluation of cellular indices. J Small Anim Pract. 1967 Jun;8(6):313-7.

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