I suppose everybody but me already knew this, but until recently “there existed not a single confirmed photograph” of the world’s largest flea, Hystrichopsylla schefferi, “an awe-inspiring colossus that can reach nearly half an inch, its head alone the size of a cat or dog flea.”
We can be thankful that Carol Kaesuk Yoon, who alerted us to this travesty in The New York Times‘s Science Times, reports in the same story that the problem has been solved.
You can see a picture of the beast in an article entitled The Great Giant Flea Hunt, in which Yoon helps her husband, Merrill Peterson, a biologist and the curator of the curator of the insect collection at Western Washington University, capture one and snap its picture.
How did they do it? By following the directions of another biologist who explained to Yoon and Peterson that catching the flea, which lives on mountain beavers, was simple:
Trap a mountain beaver (perfectly legal). Coax it into a burlap bag, face first. Hold it just behind the jawline — not too far up, or you will be bitten; not too far back or it will get loose and then you will be bitten. Peel open the bag to reveal the hind end. Comb for fleas. Easy peasy!
That was one of several stories that I liked in this week’s Science Times. A very different story by Catherine Saint Louis called When the Caregivers Need Healing described some simple techniques that can help to ease the stress and distress of parents who are raising children with severe disabilities.
Mindfulness training–including meditation and breathing exercises–eased anxiety, depression, and insomnia more than a more conventional kind of training called “positive adult development,” Saint Louis reports. “Part of what makes the experiment innovative is that it was targeted to adults, not their children, and it was not focused on sharpening parenting skills. Instead, parents learned ways to tackle their distress as problems arise,” she writes.
And in another story, Henry Fountain tells us about an exhibit at Brown University that tries to piece together the story of the university’s natural history museum, the 50,000 exhibits of which were “thrown away” in 1945. Sadly, the exhibit can’t come anywhere close to resurrecting what once was there.
-Paul Raeburn
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