<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">All:</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Many of you are already members of the
beemonitoring listserv (337 members as of writing this message) but others
are not and I wanted to extend an invitation to those of you who are interested
in issues of native bee sampling, monitoring, and identification. This
listserv is a useful place to learn about events, tools, and new information
surrounding those issues of monitoring and identification. Over the
next few months we will be discussing the issue of the creation of a national
monitoring scheme and you need not be a technician nor part of the bee
intelligentsia to be on the listserv. </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">You can sign up on the web (and look
at past emails)</font>
<br><a href=http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/beemonitoring/><font size=2 face="sans-serif">http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/beemonitoring/</font></a>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Or email me directly at:</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">sdroege@usgs.gov</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">and I will sign you up.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Most Cordially,</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">sam</font>
<br>
<div>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">
<br>
Sam Droege sdroege@usgs.gov
<br>
w 301-497-5840 h 301-390-7759 fax 301-497-5624<br>
USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center<br>
BARC-EAST, BLDG 308, RM 124 10300 Balt. Ave., Beltsville, MD 20705<br>
</font><a href=Http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov</font></a>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">I once read that if the folds in the
cerebral cortex were smoothed out it would cover a card table. That seemed
quite unbelievable but it did make me wonder just how big the cortex would
be</font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif"> if you ironed it out. I thought
it might just about cover a family-sized pizza: not bad, but no card-table.
I was astonished to realize that nobody seems to know the answer. A quick
</font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">search yielded the following estimates
for the smoothed out dimensions of the cerebral cortex of the human brain.
</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">
An article in Bioscience in November 1987 by
Julie Ann Miller claimed the cortex was a "quarter-metre square."
That is napkin-sized, about ten inches </font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">by ten inches. Scientific American magazine
in September 1992 upped the ante considerably with an estimated of 1 1/2
square metres; thats a square of brain forty</font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif"> inches on each side, getting close
to the card-table estimate. A psychologist at the University of Toronto
figured it would cover the floor of his living room (I haven't </font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">seen his living room), but the prize
winning estimate so far is from the British magazine New Scientist's poster
of the brain published in 1993 which claimed that the </font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">cerebral cortex, if flattened out, would
cover a tennis court. How can there be such disagreement? How can so many
experts not know how big the cortex is? I don't</font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif"> know, but I'm on the hunt for
an expert who will say the cortex, when fully spread out, will cover a
football field. A Canadian football field.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Jay Ingram, The Burning House, Unlocking
the Mysteries of the Brain Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, U.K., 1995 p 11.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif"><br>
</font><font size=5 color=#008000 face="Webdings">P</font><font size=2 color=#008000>
<b>Bees are not optional</b></font><font size=1 color=#008000><b>.</b></font></div>