[Pollinator] Invitation to the Bee Monitoring and Identification Listserv

[Sam Droege]

All:

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. 

You can sign up on the web (and look at past emails)
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/beemonitoring/

Or email me directly at:

sdroege at usgs.gov

and I will sign you up.

Most Cordially,

sam

 
Sam Droege  sdroege at usgs.gov 
w 301-497-5840 h 301-390-7759 fax 301-497-5624
USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center
BARC-EAST, BLDG 308, RM 124 10300 Balt. Ave., Beltsville, MD  20705
Http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov

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
 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 
search yielded the following estimates for the smoothed out dimensions of 
the cerebral cortex of the human brain. 

                    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 
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
 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 
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 
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
 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.

Jay Ingram, The Burning House, Unlocking the Mysteries of the Brain 
Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, U.K., 1995 p 11.


P Bees are not optional.
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