Word: zoologists
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Musine Diastole. This roster of rodentry was cited last week by Zoologist Charles Elton of Oxford University. In his 496-page study, Voles, Mice and Lemmings (Oxford; $10), Zoologist Elton investigates one of nature's strangest mysteries-why, all over the planet, hordes of such rodents pop up out of the earth from time to time. Small, silent, fleet, these musine masses scurry tirelessly among the grasses, destroying grain, trees, any other vegetation they can get their teeth into. Then they vanish from the desolated fields as if they had sunk back again into the earth, which remains sieved...
...only in the last 20 years have most scientists' eyes opened to the fact that these plagues are periodic, ebbing & flowing almost as regularly as the tides. Says Zoologist Elton: animal populations were formerly thought to be fairly stable, fluctuating only by chance. Now they are known to recur regularly, so that the biomass-"the living fabric of the world" -may be said to pulsate like the diastole and systole of a mighty heart...
...major mystery is how the animals maintain their fixed cycles in spite of all such interference. Zoologist Elton concludes that the master factor is still unknown. He believes it may prove to be of a hitherto-undetected meteorological nature, hints at possible interstellar influences...
...task to bottle, bundle, crate and ship even a large fraction of the Smithsonian's 1,000,000 fish, its 1,750,000 plants, its 510,000 historical relics. (Only 5% of this material is displayed for the museum's 2,500,000 yearly visitors.) A Smithsonian zoologist last week estimated that the alcohol required to preserve the chosen animals for the duration would be enough to provide the entire Japanese army with a 24-hour spree...
...really close-up view of the delicate anatomy of these tiny creatures. Magnified up to 20,000 diameters (ten times larger than light-microscopes can do) by R.C.A.'s new electron microscope (TIME, Oct. 28, 1940), insect innards were revealed in photographs exhibited at the A.A.A.S. meeting by Zoologist Albert Glenn Richards Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania, and R.C.A.'s Thomas F. Anderson. Bugmen buzzed with delight at the spectacle of mosquitoes' windpipes, a butterfly's scale, a roach's cuticle...