Central Connecticut Grotto · the spread of white-nose syndrome among hibernating bats, ... Just reading through the list of categories is educational, providing a sobering ... reached

Central Connecticut Grotto

The Underground Movement Volume 13, Number 9 September 2013

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Volume 13, Number 9 September 2013

The Underground Movement

The Central Connecticut Grotto (CCG) is a local chap-ter of the National Speleological Society (NSS) dedicated to the exploration, scientific study, and conservation of caves and all aspects of the underground environment as well as promoting a spirit of camaraderie and fellowship among cavers. Membership is open to anyone who shares these interests. Regular membership dues are $5.00 per year. Non-voting youth or full-time student membership dues are $2.00 per year. Institutional membership is free. Please visit www.caves.org/grotto/ccg/join.htm for addi-tional membership information. Grotto meetings, consist-ing of a short business meeting followed by a caving presentation, are usually held on the 3rd Tuesday of each month, starting at 7:00 p.m. However, the date, time, and location of meetings may vary, so please check the CCG website (www.caves.org/grotto/ccg/) or contact grotto chair Jonathan Le May (203-560-0308) for any updates.

The Underground Movement is the official newsletter of the CCG. Material for publication in the newsletter can be contributed by grotto members as well as friends of the grotto. Opinions expressed in articles are not necessarily a reflection of the official position of the CCG and NSS or shared by the newsletter editor, CCG officers, or grotto members. Unless it is independently copyrighted (indicated by ©), material published in The Underground

Movement may be reprinted in any NSS-affiliated publi-cation, provided appropriate credit is given and either a hard copy or digital file made available to the author.

Submissions to The Underground Movement, including original or reprinted articles, photographs, and letters to the editor are welcome. Digital files, composed in Micro-soft Word with minimal formatting, should be sent to the editor at [email protected]. Images should be sent as jpegs or tiff files. The CCG cannot pub-lish copyrighted material without written permission of the copyright holder. Contributors are responsible for determining whether material is copyrighted as well as for securing appropriate permission.

IN THIS ISSUE From the Editor’s Desk..……………………………..….3 Woman Rescued from New Milford Cave………………4 Notes From Underground………………………..………5 Does West Rock Vandalism Mirror Times?…………...12 Fall NRO - The Widow Jane Mine…………………….13 Old Time Barn Dance - Knox Cave……………………16 Underground Archaeology/Paleontology News…..........17 News from the World of Bats...…………………….…..18 Natural History…..…...………………….……18 White-Nose News……..…...……………..…..19 Rabid Bytes…………..…...…………….…….20 From the Bookshelf…………………………………….22 The Creative Corner……………….…………………...24 Calendar of Events/Photograph of the Month……….....26

CENTRAL CONNECTICUT GROTTO

OFFICERS (2012)

Chair: Jonathan Le May Vice Chair: Steve Millett Treasurer: Norm Berg Secretary: Bob Simmons Webmaster: Norm Berg Membership: Alisa Werst Safety: Doug Truitt Conservation: Bob Simmons Vertical: Felicia Millett Equipment: Steve Millett Member at Large: Jansen Cardy Newsletter Editor: Danny Brass Grotto officers can be reached through the CCG email address ([email protected]). The newsletter editor can be reached at [email protected].

In conjunction with ongoing efforts to help diminish

the spread of white-nose syndrome among hibernating

bats, the Central Connecticut Grotto encourages all

cavers to follow recommended gear-cleaning and dis-

infection protocols. These can be found on the NSS

White-Nose Page (www.caves.org/WNS/). Your con-

tinued cooperation and support is appreciated.

©

Bat on Moonlit Night

This image of a bat in flight is taken from a black-and-white print of a nineteenth-century woodcut. It was superimposed on a dark background and the disk of the moon inserted using Adobe Photoshop.

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Volume 13, Number 9 FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK September 2013

The National Speleological Society (NSS) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the scientific study of caves and karst; protecting caves and their natural con-tents through conservation, ownership, stewardship, and public education; and promoting responsible cave explo-ration and fellowship among those interested in caves. Close to 200 regional member organizations (called grot-tos) make up the backbone of the NSS. Grottos are devoted to the training of both novice and advanced cavers, as well as to the continued development and refinement of equip-ment and technique for safe underground exploration. Grot-tos conduct meetings, organize training programs, and sponsor caving trips on a regular basis. Interested beginners are welcome. Information on membership in the NSS and its various programs and activities can be found at www.caves.org/. Although membership in the NSS is not a requirement for joining the CCG, all CCG members are strongly encour-aged to join the NSS. In terms of educational opportuni-ties available, acquisition of caving skills and experience, and the potential for networking with other cavers on a local, regional, or even global scale, the benefits to cavers of NSS membership are incalculable.

CAVE SOFTLY

Take Nothing But Pictures

Leave Nothing But Footprints

Kill Nothing But Time

I would like to express my appreciation to Norm Berg and Krys-ten Civitelli for their editorial assistance. Special thanks to Merrill Ann Gonzales for generously allowing the CCG and The Under-ground Movement to use her beautiful illustrations.

From the Editor’s Desk

I would like to express my thanks to those who contrib-uted to the last several issues of The Underground Move-

ment as well as to everyone who contributed to this month’s issue. It is only through continued submissions from the membership and friends of the grotto that a vi-able newsletter can be sustained. In the most recent issue of American Caving Accidents (August, 2013), edited by Bonnie Beaver, accidents and incidents for 2011 and 2012 are examined. Accordingly, the description of outcomes include fatalities, injury and aid, aid with no injury, and those with no consequence. Description of incident types include acetylene-related, bad air, caver fall, difficulty on rope or ladder, drowning, equipment problem, exhaustion, flooding, hypothermia, illness/medical issue, lost, lost control on rappel, rock fall, stuck, trapped, or stranded. A category of “other” served as a catch-all for accidents and incidents that didn’t con-veniently fit elsewhere. As in past years, incidents involv-ing cave-diving activity were considered separately. This report brings the nature of caving-related accidents and incidents into specific relief and represents one of the best safety tools available to cavers. Just reading through the list of categories is educational, providing a sobering précis of behaviors or circumstances to be avoided. Dis-cussion and analysis in the ACA report provide invalu-able information for anyone wanting to maximize safety underground. While some accidents or incidents are clearly unavoidable, most can be traced back to an avoid-able underlying cause. It is fortunate that the recent caving-related incident at Tory's Cave in New Milford, CT, ended on a favorable note. A report of this episode by Lee C. Del Valle can be found on page 4.

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Volume 13, Number 9 WOMAN RESCUED FROM NEW MILFORD CAVE September 2013


WOMAN RESCUED FROM NEW MILFORD CAVE — Lee C. Del Valle —

On Monday August 12, 2013, Central Connecticut Grotto (CCG) member Doug Truitt received and responded to a call about a woman who became trapped in Tory's Cave in New Milford, CT. The woman was not hurt, but apparently unable to climb out of a tight and slippery area of the cave. She and a friend entered the cave around 1:00 pm. By 6:00 pm, her companion exited the cave to call for help. This was forwarded through the Milford dispatcher, DEEP, and Jonathan Le May to Doug Truitt, who received a call about 7:30 pm, At that time, he began reaching out to other CCG members for their assistance. By 8:08 pm, Doug and his daughter, Molly Truitt, were en route to assist. When they were almost one-third of the way there, Doug received a second call indicating that a New Milford/Gaylordsville fire-fighter extricated the woman and that she was able to exit the cave unharmed.

In an e-mail to the grotto, Doug stated, “The way they described it on the phone, it sounds like she was in the tight slot reached by the left hand passage at the entrance. She was uninjured and simply couldn't climb back out of the slot. It was slippery and she didn't have the strength to pull herself up on a handline. While I loaded the car with gear, my thoughts were the simplest solution would be an etrier or getting a small caver behind her to help her out.”

The woman was able to walk the 500 feet down to Route 7 and left after being checked out by New Milford Ambu-lance personnel. According to the article in the News-Times, the couple was quoted as saying they are "adventurers" from Connecticut, who have been exploring caves across the country for years (Pirro, 2013). Kudos to Doug and Molly Truitt for their quick response time and willingness to assist. Doug serves as the Safety Officer for the CCG; he and Molly have been caving for several years.

Truitt, D. (Aug 13, 2013). Woman Rescued from New Milford Cave. Central Connecticut Grotto e-mail Pirro, J. (Aug 13, 2013). Woman Rescued from New Milford Cave. newstimes.com. Danbury, CT http://www.newstimes.com/local/article/Woman-rescued-from-New-Milford-cave-4727367.php

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Volume 13, Number 9 NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND September 2013


nant of a thick accumulation of deceased sea creatures, which sifted onto the seabed for aeons, at a time when sea levels were much higher than they are today. During sub-sequent aeons, slightly acidic rainwater permeated the ground and riddled the rock with conduits and caverns and underground streams, and from time to time the over-lying strata collapse or subside. I visited Jonathan Arthur at the headquarters of the Flor-ida Department of Environmental Protection, in Tallahas-see. He told me that the technical name for Florida’s wa-ter-riddled terrain is karst, and he showed me slides of collapsed driveways, sunken houses, semi-consumed mo-tor vehicles, and a swallowed drilling rig. “You may re-member dripping hydrochloric acid on limestone in a sci-ence class,” he said. “It went pssssss. In Florida’s bed-rock, that same thing happens over time. A cavity in the ground grows larger and larger, then, basically, it mi-grates to the surface.” In the nineteen-nineties, he told me, a woman was working in her yard when a young child, who was playing near her, disappeared through the sod. “She heard a cry for help and saw fingertips at the grass level,” he said. The woman grabbed a hand and pulled, and the child was unharmed, at least physically. In early 2011, Carla Chapman, a forty-seven-year-old resident of Plant City, about twenty-five miles east of Tampa, took a few steps from her back door and plunged through the turf in the same way, becoming trapped in a deep cavity approximately two feet in diameter. She dialed 911 on her cell phone, and the police officer who responded to the call comforted her—while reaching far enough into the hole to grip her arms—by saying, “I’m not going to let you go, angel.” Remarkably, Chapman had fallen into a sinkhole the year before as well. The immediate cause of that accident was an emergency crop-preserving practice employed by local farmers, who, during a single winter week, sprayed so much well water on their strawberries, to protect them from freezing overnight, that the local water table fell by as much as sixty feet. “The aquifer couldn’t recover in time,” Arthur told me, “and during that period several hundred private wells went dry, and a hundred and forty sinkholes opened up.” The water had been supporting the ground, and when it was gone the weakest sections gave way. Insurers paid millions of dollars in claims, and the overall loss was compounded when low prices for straw-berries from California and elsewhere made harvesting most of the Florida crop uneconomical, and caused farm-

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

Florida’s Sinkhole Peril

— David Owen —

In the fall of 1999, much of Lake Jackson—a four-thousand-acre natural body of water just north of Talla-hassee and a popular site for fishing, waterskiing, and recreational boating—disappeared down a hole, like a bathtub emptying into a drain. Trophy bass became stranded in rapidly shrinking eddies, enabling children to catch them with their hands and toss them into picnic coolers, and many of the lake’s other fish, turtles, snakes, and alligators vanished into the earth. At vari-ous times during the next few years, the lake partially refilled, re-drained, and refilled again. Jonathan Arthur, who is Florida’s state geologist and the director of the Florida Geological Survey, was among several people who, during a dry period, descended a ladder into the main opening, which was about eight feet in diameter. “You could climb down twelve feet or so and then walk under the lake bed,” he told me recently. “I hadn’t gone very far before my red flags went up, and I was, like, Maybe I won’t go any farther.” Two weeks ago, a wider, deeper cavity opened under a house in Seffner, Florida, a suburb of Tampa, about two hundred-and-seventy-five miles southeast of Lake Jack-son. A portion of the house’s concrete-slab foundation gave way, as though it had been punched with a cookie cutter, and a bedroom collapsed with it. A thirty-six-year-old man named Jeffrey Bush had been asleep there. His younger brother, Jeremy, heard him scream and ran to the room. “Everything was gone,” he told CNN the next day. “My brother’s bed, my brother’s dresser, my brother’s TV. My brother was gone.” Jer-emy jumped into the hole, but couldn’t find his brother and had to be pulled out by a sheriff’s deputy, who risked his own life to save him. Officials searched the wreckage with listening devices, but eventually gave up. They demolished the house and dumped gravel into the hole, which by that time had grown to be about sixty feet deep. The opening that drained Lake Jackson and the one that killed Jeffrey Bush are both sinkholes, and Florida has a huge number of them. Florida’s bedrock, which is mostly limestone and dolostone, is the hardened rem-

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sources of freshwater in the world: the Floridan Aquifer, which underlies the entire state and extends below parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Sinkholes and other karst features constitute direct portals into major parts of the Floridan. That’s fortunate in one way, because the openings allow rainfall to replenish the groundwater rapidly, without having to seep through in-tervening strata. By contrast, parts of the Ogallala Aqui-fer, in the Great Plains, recharge so slowly that hydrolo-gists worry that they will be exhausted before mid-century. Much of the water that’s been pumped from the Ogallala is so-called “fossil water,” which entered the ground millions of years ago and is unlikely to recover while humans are around to exploit it. But the permeability of the Floridan represents an envi-ronmental challenge, too, because it allows bad things on the surface to migrate quickly into the region’s water sup-ply, with little or no natural filtration. When Lake Jackson drained away in 1999, the aquifer had to absorb not just an influx of disoriented aquatic creatures but also human-generated pollutants and toxins, most of which had en-tered the lake as storm-water runoff, a major source of water pollution in the United States. Arthur took me on a field trip in his truck, which doubles as a kind of mobile office. One cup holder was crammed so full of ballpoint pens that they appeared to have been hammered into the console. We drove south of the city on Route 61, and pulled into the driveway of the Tallahassee Korean Baptist Church. He parked near a tall chain-link fence, on the other side of which was a broad, bowl-shaped depression obscured by trees and underbrush. At the bottom, maybe forty feet below the parking lot, was a round pool of milky green water: a sinkhole. “This is Church Sink,” he said. “Down at the water’s edge, you can see a nice exposure of the carbonate rocks that form the top of the aquifer. If I were a kid, I’d be wanting to jump in there.” Jumping in had not been my first thought; the water was so opaque that I assumed it to be shallow. But Arthur told me that the hole we saw, which was forty or fifty feet in diameter, was roughly analogous to the narrow opening at the waist of an hourglass; far below it, in the bedrock, was an unseen cavity that was large enough to have digested a huge plug of collapsed rock, sand, soil, and other surface material while leaving a deep column of water for heed-less youths to hurl themselves into.

ers to leave their rescued berries to rot. The Plant City fiasco was unusually severe, but in many ways it was just a speeded-up version of what has been happening all over the state for years, as Florida’s population and water consumption have soared. An excess of water can be a problem, too. Last June, during Tropical Storm Debby, more than twenty inches of rain fell during a single twenty-four-hour period in an area just south of Tallahassee. Within a few days, more than two hundred sinkholes appeared across the state. Arthur dispatched field crews to a number of the hard-est-hit areas. “Near the town of Live Oak, a member of my staff was standing in a field and could hear water running under the ground,” he said. “A couple of days later, a huge sinkhole opened up right near where he was standing.” One of the most famous Florida sinkholes opened in Winter Park, in 1981. According to an account pub-lished in a local magazine, a woman named Mae Rose Owens heard a “swishing noise” in her yard, and then “saw a sycamore tree disappear as if it were being pulled downward by roots, making a sound that she de-scribed as a ‘ploop.’” The opening grew to be three-hundred-and-thirty-five feet in diameter and more than a hundred feet deep, and it swallowed, among many other things, a municipal swimming pool, a number of Porsches (which were recovered), and Owens’s house (which wasn’t). The hole later filled with water and is known today as Lake Rose. An article published in the journal of the Florida Engineering Society in 2009 de-scribed the Winter Park catastrophe as “unlike any geo-logical happening ever in Central Florida.” You can build a case against that assertion by making a quick flyover on Google Earth: several large sections of the state, including much of the central portion and parts of greater Tallahassee, appear densely spattered with water features that resemble Lake Rose. Indeed, most of Flor-ida’s natural lakes are probably karst-related. The Flor-ida Speleological Society has likened the state’s geol-ogy to “Swiss cheese coated with soil.” Sinkhole-related deaths are an extreme rarity; Arthur knows of just three in the state, ever, including the re-cent one. But the human impact of Florida’s Swiss-cheese geology extends far beyond the occasional spec-tacular collapse. The subterranean cavities and conduits are major elements of one of the most productive

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Floridians have usually treated sinkholes the way humans treat most water-filled abysses: as places to heave stuff they don’t want anymore. (Divers in Lake Rose have found abandoned cars, among other odds and ends.) I no-ticed some discarded plastic food containers near the edge of the water, and pointed them out to Arthur. “That trash is only the superficial thing,” he said. “What I see is al-gae.” The water had a pea-soup look, and there were masses of cottony green stuff floating in it. He explained that rainwater draining into the sinkhole carries nutrients from fertilizer and from human and animal waste. Contaminants that enter the aquifer can travel long dis-tances rapidly—as the D.E.P. has demonstrated by inject-ing dye into sinkholes and waiting for it to reappear downstream. This is news that homeowners, farmers, real-estate developers, city officials, and others are not always eager to hear, since it raises concerns about sur-face activities that were previously thought to be harm-less, or even beneficial. For a quarter century, Tallahassee recycled much of its treated wastewater by using it to spray-irrigate a farm southeast of the city—seemingly an ingenious instance of turning an environmental liability into an asset. But a 2006 study led by the Florida Geo-logical Survey proved that the practice was responsible for sharply elevated nitrogen levels miles to the south, and Tallahassee has had to redesign its sewage-treatment procedure. Even so, nitrogen levels remain a problem. The once pristine Wakulla River, which arises south of the city, is infested with an invasive plant, for which, Ar-thur said, the region’s groundwater is effectively a liquid fertilizer. The Church Sink lies near the northern edge of the Wood-ville Karst Plain, a four-hundred-and-fifty-square-mile section of former seafloor that extends like a terrace be-tween the southern part of metropolitan Tallahassee and the Gulf of Mexico. The bedrock under the plain is rela-tively close to the surface, and it contains a number of large sinkholes, more than two dozen of which are now known to be connected by underground conduits. The conduits are branches of the longest known underwater cave system in the United States. Since 1990, roughly thirty miles of the system have been explored by deep-water cave divers. In 2007, a pair of divers set a world record by making a seven-mile traverse through the sys-tem, from an opening called Turner Sink to Wakulla Springs, a state park about fifteen miles south of down-town Tallahassee. That dive, which required a large team

of closely coordinated support divers and other helpers, was the culmination of a decade and a half of preliminary exploration and planning. The average depth of the trav-erse was close to three hundred feet—about the same as the wreck of the Lusitania—and the total submerged time was twenty-one hours. On the evening of my field trip with Arthur, I had dinner with one of the men who set the record, Casey McKinlay, and with three other divers. I’m either ashamed or proud to report that it took me more than an hour to ask a ques-tion that McKinlay told me most people ask within a min-ute or two. Here’s the answer: They didn’t. David Rhea, who has made more than fifteen hundred cave dives, said, “You need so much energy to move and to keep warm that you basically burn everything in your system.” In addition, McKinlay said, divers are careful not to eat any-thing unusual at dinner the night before a long dive—a non-trivial challenge at Carrabba’s, the restaurant they’d chosen for the evening—and, in the morning, to pay close attention to their breakfast choices, coffee drinking, and bathroom scheduling. McKinlay told me that, on long dives, eliminating old nutrients is actually less of a con-cern than acquiring new ones, because it’s hard to keep proteins from going bad during extended immersion and because eating underwater is tricky. “You’d hate to choke to death on a banana,” he said. Sitting across the table from me was John Rose, who, when he isn’t swimming in sinkholes, is an associate pro-fessor of computer science at the University of South Carolina. I asked him why he had come so far to dive in the aquifer. “You’re basically exploring an unknown river, except that it’s underground,” he said. “Where else in the United States nowadays can you be Daniel Boone?” Rhea—who works in the diving-equipment business, as does McKinlay—said, “Every time you go around a cor-ner, whatever you see there you know you’re the first hu-mans who have ever seen it.” Among the marvels they’ve encountered are buried coral reefs, ancient fossils, and cathedral-like “rooms” more than a hundred feet high and a hundred feet wide. They’ve also seen life forms that don’t exist on the surface, including a blind, translucent, lobster-shaped mini-crustacean called a cave crayfish. “I consider us the NASA of diving,” Rhea said. “We go places no one has ever gone.” Nevertheless, during the past decade McKinlay and the others have come to think of themselves not just as ex-

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plorers but as environmentalists. This is a direct conse-quence of an unnerving decline they’ve observed in water quality—most noticeably, the decrease in the water’s clar-ity, thanks to algae and pollution. “It used to be that when you looked into a spring in northern Florida it glowed white, because the water was so clear that the sand on the bottom looked like the sand on a Panama City beach,” Rhea said. “The walls of the caves used to be pristine. Now they’re all starting to be green and hairy.” Wakulla Springs, the exit point of the 2007 dive, is one of the world’s most productive springs: the Wakulla River flows out of it at an average rate of two hundred and fifty million gallons a day. The park used to be famous for its glass-bottomed boats, from which tourists could view multitudes of fish and easily make out mastodon bones and other prehistoric detritus more than a hundred feet below. Today, though, many of the fish are gone, and the clarity of the water has declined to the point that the glass-bottomed boats are deployed on only a handful of days. Rose told me that, previously, a diver just inside Wakulla’s funnel-like cave entrance could sometimes look back up, at an angle, through two hundred and fifty feet of water and clearly see trees on the far shore. “That was only a decade ago,” he said, “but you don’t see any-thing like that now.” The divers have also noticed a drop in the flow rate of the water throughout the system. “It’s looking like a death spiral,” Rose said. Early the next morning, I met the divers for breakfast at their favorite Tallahassee assembly point: the Village Inn on Apalachee Parkway. Their menu choices—fried eggs, omelets, pancakes, bacon, sausage, hash browns, toast—seemed to reflect no particular concern about the fact that they were planning to spend much of the weekend under-water. After breakfast, we drove south, in a caravan, through heavy rain. Our destination was Turner Sink, which turned out to be a weedy, mosquito-infested mud hole in the woods. Nevertheless, it’s a door to a vast realm, which McKinlay described to me as “a superhigh-way of water heading south.” A diver who squeezes through the slot-like restriction, thirty feet down, eventu-ally reaches a deepening canyon of brisk currents and striking geological forms. Swimming in the Floridan Aquifer is not something you simply decide to do. The state’s consent is usually manda-tory, and cave diving requires specialized equipment and a high level of certification. McKinlay’s outfit for the day

weighed more than two hundred pounds and took almost two hours to arrange and put on. It included an insulated full-body undergarment and an extensive inventory of breathing tanks, each of which had been labeled, in large numerals, to indicate the maximum depth in feet for which it was intended. His “300” tanks, for the deepest portions of the day’s dive, contained only about nine per cent oxygen, or less than half the proportion found in or-dinary air. Non-divers think of oxygen as the life force, but it can be toxic to those who breathe it underwater in too high a concentration. And nitrogen, which is the main component of air, is also dangerous. If divers ascend too quickly, the drop in pressure causes nitrogen dissolved in their blood and body tissues to form bubbles, and they suffer the potentially fatal malady known as decompres-sion sickness, or the bends. Deep-water divers prevent the bends by reducing the nitrogen in their breathing mix and by ascending very slowly, in stages. A typical two-hour dive in the aquifer, McKinlay said, requires about eight hours of submerged decompression, and the divers spend most of that time watching the clock and listening to wa-terproof MP3 players. One diver told me that magazines, because they’re printed on coated paper, hold up pretty well underwater, but that books and newspapers fall apart. Because of the dangers, McKinlay and Rhea, who were diving as a team, double-checked the depth numbers on each other’s tanks and verbally ticked off items from a mental list while standing, shoulder-deep, in the muck at the edge of Turner Sink. Major mistakes and accidents are rare, but the consequences can be grim. The day’s dive was informally dedicated to the memory of Jim Miller, a fifty-year-old diver who had died nearby a little less than a month earlier. Miller apparently confused two of his tanks and, at depth, breathed a mixture intended for a hundred and fifty feet nearer the surface. The elevated oxygen level induced a seizure, and he quickly drowned. Turner Sink is named for Parker Turner, who died in the aftermath of an underwater landslide that occurred during a dive in 1991. He managed to squeeze through an open-ing in the blockage, but he ran out of breathing gas and passed out just thirty feet from his decompression tanks. He floated to the cave ceiling and drowned. His diving partner, who had searched for an escape route in a differ-ent direction, later found the opening that Turner had dug and reached fresh tanks just moments before his own tanks ran out. Over the years, McKinlay and the other divers have

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mapped the cave system not only on paper but also in situ, with nylon line and labeled arrows. At Turner Sink that day, they repaired some of these navigational mark-ings inside the aquifer. The next day, at Wakulla Springs, they replaced a broken flow meter inside the cave, the opening of which is more than two hundred feet below the surface. After they had reemerged, they made their final decompression stop on a limestone ledge about twenty-five feet down, directly beneath the park’s two-level concrete diving platform. Leaping children never reached the ledge, but they could see the divers as they jumped, and the divers could feel and hear the concus-sions of their cannonballs and can openers above their heads. The next day, I drove to Tampa. About forty miles north of the city, I stopped at Weeki Wachee Springs, a state park. It was founded, in 1947, as a private enterprise by a former Navy diver, and its main attraction has always been a mermaid show. I arrived a few minutes before the day’s final performance, and joined a crowd of children and parents watching the mermaids (and a turtle, whose shell was so covered with algae that it resembled a Chia Pet) through the big glass windows of the underwater theatre. The mermaids smiled a lot, breathed from what looked like gas-station air hoses, and did a pretty good job of using awkward-seeming tails to propel themselves across the stage, a deep spring that is part of the Floridan Aquifer. Tap water in towns near Weeki Wachee—as well as in Tampa, St. Petersburg, and New Port Richey, and in three surrounding counties—is produced by Tampa Bay Water, a public utility. Until 2002, all the water supplied by the utility came from the Floridan Aquifer, though now it is supplemented by river water. Producing drinking water from the aquifer costs only about half as much as produc-ing it from surface streams—aquifer water is cleaner to start with—but pumping too much water out of an aquifer has drawbacks. If wells in coastal areas pump too much, the subterranean point where freshwater and saltwater meet can migrate inland—an increasingly common prob-lem around the world, as coastal populations have grown. During the past decade, the water utility that serves Hilton Head, South Carolina—which lies near the northern edge of the Floridan—has had to abandon half a dozen ruined wells, as saltwater intrusion has spread. Groundwater can be exquisitely sensitive to external

forces, including tides. The earthquake in Japan in March, 2011, made water levels in Florida’s wells fluctuate by three inches, and the drop in atmospheric pressure caused by passing hurricanes often makes them move even more. Climate change is likely to have a greater impact: shrunken glaciers will eventually mean less melt water supplying surface streams and, in turn, increased demand for water from aquifers; meanwhile, rising sea levels can cause salt water to creep farther inland. These issues are of potentially critical significance all over the world. The rapid growth of India’s population in recent decades has been fuelled by irrigation practices that have depleted an-cient aquifers and drawn huge amounts of water from riv-ers fed by Himalayan glaciers—a resource that contracts as the glaciers recede. Heavy irrigation has also elevated the concentration of salts and other contaminants in the soil, thereby rendering formerly arable land unusable. Parts of the United States face related problems. If large portions of the Ogallala Aquifer really do go dry, some of the country’s most productive farmland could become unsuitable for agriculture. And farmland in some areas of California subsided more than thirty feet between the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-seventies, as underly-ing aquifers were emptied. One possible remedy, in re-gions where precipitation cooperates, is to recharge en-dangered aquifers artificially, by pumping surface water into the earth—in effect, using emptied aquifers as reser-voirs. India is doing this now, with some success, and so is Florida, most notably in the Everglades. Florida is also taking steps to deal with salt. Tampa Bay Water operates the largest seawater desalination plant in the United States. Desalination offers a promising way of reducing freshwater shortages all over the world—places like Dubai already depend on it—but it is complex and requires a huge amount of energy, which carries a heavy environmental cost. The electricity that runs Tampa’s fa-cility is generated by burning coal, at the city’s Big Bend Power Station, next door. A large area near Tampa has been known for years as Sinkhole Alley, and within it there are stretches of road-way along which nearly every other billboard seems to advertise a lawyer who handles sinkhole claims. I visited one of those lawyers, Joseph A. Porcelli, at his office in New Port Richey. He was wearing gym shorts, flip-flops, and a Nike T-shirt, and was about to pick up his daughter at school. He told me that his firm, at that moment, had more than a thousand outstanding sinkhole cases, and that

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he urges all residents of the region to add a sinkhole rider to their homeowner’s insurance. “There’s no law on the books that requires developers to test the ground before they build homes,” he said, “so they typically just knock down the trees and start building. There can be sinkholes that don’t show themselves until after the construction is finished. A cow is not that heavy, but a house is very heavy, and, over time, with the action of rainwater and the like, it can cause a collapse.” Most of Porcelli’s sinkhole clients are homeowners, and they often come to him after their insurance company has rejected their claim. It can be surprisingly difficult to es-tablish that property damage was caused by a sinkhole and not, say, by an incompetent contractor—and recent changes in Florida’s statutes have made it harder. If an adjuster concludes that a sinkhole may have occurred, an insurance company will usually hire engineers to test the soil with hand augers and ground-penetrating radar. In some cases, they conduct so-called “standard penetration tests,” which can bore more than a hundred feet below the surface. Even then, the facts aren’t always clear. Jonathan Arthur told me that, although he hadn’t inspected the site, he felt that the sinkhole that killed Jeffrey Bush had char-acteristics that could be considered unusual. “The puz-zling thing about it is that the surface expression of the sinkhole did not extend beyond the walls of the home,” he said. “Ordinarily, you would expect something that deep to widen like a funnel”—resulting in an hourglass-shaped declivity, more like that of the Church Sink, which proba-bly would have swallowed the entire structure. The soil above the collapsed bedrock had to have a significant moisture content or some amount of clay, he thought, in order to leave a relatively straight-sided hole, as it did. “I think were going to learn more about the circumstances of that sinkhole as time goes by,” he said. Many of Porcelli’s clients come to him after receiving insurance settlements they consider inadequate. “As you can surmise,” Porcelli said, “there are expensive methods of repair, and there are inexpensive methods of repair, and typically the insurance company is going to go with one that is perhaps more inexpensive.” The costliest measures generally take place out of sight, beneath the foundation. In the most common method, a concrete slurry is pumped into the soil under pressure, often in staggering quantities: a recent residential repair, Porcelli told me, required sixty-four full concrete-mixer loads. Sometimes an ex-panding polyurethane foam is injected into the first few

feet of soil under the slab. And sometimes dozens of steel supporting rods are sunk from the foundation of a house all the way down to the bedrock—a technique called “underpinning.” Often, the cost of the necessary repairs exceeds the market value of the house, and homeowners sometimes take their insurance money and sell the prop-erty, unrepaired, to a so-called “sinkhole investor.” Por-celli said, “There are probably thirty or forty contractors in Florida who specialize in sinkhole repairs, and sinkhole investors work with them.” Because investors usually own multiple properties, they get better repair deals than individuals can. “It’s like retail versus wholesale,” he said. He gave me a copy of a newspaper article about a recent collapse, and after we’d talked I drove over to the house where it happened. It was owned by an elderly couple, who had been inside with seven great-grandchildren when three large sinkholes suddenly opened, two in the back yard and one in the street. The city had filled the hole in the street, which was fifty feet deep, although the site was still cordoned off with police tape. I couldn’t see into the back yard, but two children on the sidewalk hollered, “We walked in the sinkhole!” The couple, serendipitously, had purchased insurance not long before the collapse. Historically speaking, the emptying of Lake Jackson in 1999 was nothing new. Native Americans who lived in the area for centuries called the lake Okeeheepkee, or “disappearing waters.” Archeologists have found evi-dence of prehistoric agriculture around parts of the lake bed, and a clergyman writing in 1842 described the lake as “self-willed and unreasonable.” Nevertheless, many modern drainage events and sinkhole collapses, including the one that killed Jeffrey Bush, reflect more than Flor-ida’s unusual geology. The karst processes that created the cavities in the states bedrock have operated for mil-lions of years, but they have been altered by human pres-sures. Population growth in central Florida has increased sinkhole activity, by lowering groundwater levels, and sprawling development has placed more people and prop-erty at risk. The states geology provides an unusually clear illustration of an environmental truth that’s of grow-ing significance all over the world: what happens on the surface of the earth is closely connected to what happens underground, and the relationship runs in both directions. Florida authorities took advantage of Lake Jackson’s 1999 dry-down—as major drainage events are known—to

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undo several decades’ worth of environmental degrada-tion. They removed many thousands of cubic yards of nutrient-enriched muck from the lake bed, and built treat-ment facilities and storm-water filtration ponds beyond the lake’s perimeter. The lake hasn’t fully returned to its pre-1999 water levels—today, large sections look more like marsh than like lake—but its health has improved, and not everyone who owns waterfront property misses the water skiers. I drove around the perimeter on my first day in Tallahassee, and I pulled in at every public landing I could find. I noticed only one boat on the water: a small, flat-bottomed motorboat with two fishermen standing in it. Even if Floridians decided that they did want the old Lake Jackson back, there’s probably nothing they could do.

“Geologically speaking, the fluctuations we’re seeing now may be the norm,” Arthur told me. A dry-down oc-curred in the nineteen-fifties, and when it was over offi-cials tried to plug the lake bed permanently, with junked cars and loads of concrete. But in 1982 the lake disap-peared again. “When it went dry in 1999,” Arthur contin-ued, “there were people who said, ‘Hey, let’s drop a bus down that thing—I want my fish back.’ But I went up in a helicopter and counted at least fifty closed depressions in the basin. They were places where organic material had flowed and concentrated”—like grounds in a coffee fil-ter—“and they might all be buried sinkholes or other plugged karst features. You see the same thing in other parts of the state. My theory is that, if you artificially plug up one opening, another might hop through.”

Florida Sinkhole Videos and Recent Sinkhole-Related News Reports http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2288410/ANOTHER-sinkhole-opens-Florida-town-man-killed.html

http://www.weather.com/news/florida-sinkhole-photos-20130301

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2288410/ANOTHER-sinkhole-opens-Florida-town-man-killed.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL5bB8gV5OY

http://news.yahoo.com/guests-fla-sinkhole-sounded-thunderstorm-085904529.html

http://news.yahoo.com/sinkhole-causes-resort-villa-partially-collapse-074651503.html

http://www.usnews.com/news/newsgram/articles/2013/08/12/massive-sinkhole-causes-disney-world-area-resort-to-collapse?s_cid=rss:massive-sinkhole-causes-disney-world-area-resort-to-collapse

http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/louisiana-sinkhole-swallows-trees-seconds-160309311.html?vp=1

This article was reprinted, with the author’s permission, from the March 18, 2013 issue of The New Yorker magazine.

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Volume 13, Number 9 DOES WEST ROCK VANDALISM MIRROR TIMES? September 2013


DOES WEST ROCK VANDALISM

MIRROR TIMES? — Christopher Pagliuco —

Artists view landscape through the prism of their time and values, which can result in starkly contrasting views of the same scene. Such is the case with two prominent paintings at the New Britain Museum of American Art.

The paintings are of a Connecticut historical and geologi-cal landmark, West Rock Ridge on the Hamden-New Ha-ven town line. It is the location of the legendary Judges Cave, where New Haven colonists hid Edward Whalley and William Goffe from royalist agents pursuing the two regicides for their role in the execution of King Charles I in 1649. It was a bold gesture on the colonists' part in 1661, the restoration of the monarchy the year before hav-ing changed the political landscape.

Frederick Edwin Church depicts this location in "West Rock, New Haven," painted in 1849. The painting repre-sents the coming of age for the young Hudson River School master from Hartford. Church's landscape cele-brates the grandiose American geography while incorpo-rating nationalistic themes. He portrays two farmers, hard at work, in a lush American landscape. Slicing through yonder is a gleaming church steeple stretching toward the sky, a playful reference to the painter's last name and a celebration of the Christian values that guided the young nation.

In the background sits West Rock Ridge, which in the mid-19th century was synonymous with the famous leg-end of Whalley and Goffe. So well-known was the story at the time that the ridge was associated with liberty and democracy. To Church, a Christian people with a firm commitment to democracy, planted in a bountiful land, were certain to succeed.

Valerie Hegarty's work, "West Rock with Branches" (2012), picks up where Church left off. Hegarty reproduced a likeness of Church's West Rock painting as the starting point of her work. However, the reproduction looks as if it has been exposed to the ele-ments. The surface shows sign of rippling, the paint is fading and smudged, bleeding down the canvas. Thick tree roots literally reach up from the floor strangling the

damaged painting off the wall. It is clear there is no cele-bration here. It would take a clever interpretation indeed to find any shred of optimism in the work. When placed adjacent to Church's original, as it is, the effect is thought-provoking if not disturbing.

A visit today to West Rock Ridge State Park confirms one of these portrayals. The nature center has closed, old con-crete bases where roadside rails once stood lie littered on paved entrance roads located near a dilapidated atten-dant's booth. Yet, the chief attractions of the park, Judges Cave and the amazing view, provide motivation for many to make the short hike to the summit. Judges Cave is now severely damaged. The rock formation that forms the cave is covered in graffiti tags and carved initials, as if it is a living work of art. The sign that once challenged visitors to ponder the meaning of the quote, "Opposition to tyrants is obedience to God" is now splintered and defaced.

Sadly, the only redeeming quality to the park is the mag-nificence that nature provided — a sheer cliff, an astound-ing view and a tranquil walk. As Hegarty suggests, only nature lives on.

One hundred sixty-eight years after Church painted his original, Hegarty engaged him in a debate about America and its future. Although the artists do not share a common time, they share a common place. The neglectful state of West Rock Ridge State Park has confirmed Hegarty to be correct at least in the physical sense.

West Rock, as home to Judges Cave, was an important symbol to Frederick Church. Its sorry condition today raises the question of whether Church's celebrated ideals of high moral virtue and personal sacrifice are in a similar state. Let's hope that the current condition of Judges Cave and West Rock Ridge State Park does not represent an abandonment of traditional values, but rather are only physical conditions that can be remedied.

Christopher Pagliuco is the author of The Great Escape of Ed-ward Whalley and William Goffe, Smuggled Through Connecti-cut (History Press, 2012) and teaches at Daniel Hand High School.

This article was reprinted, with the author’s permission, from the June 27, 2013 issue of The Hartford Courant.

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Volume 13, Number 9 UNDERGROUND ARCHAEOLOGY/PALEONTOLOGY NEWS September 2013


Underground Archaeology/Paleontology News

Dating the Art of Altamira Cave

As the first painted cave to be discovered and investigated in modern times, the story of Spain’s Altamira is a well-known and oft-repeated tale. Don Marcelino Sanz de Sau-tuola was a lawyer with a keen interest in natural history. Having attended the 1878 World Exposition in Paris, he became fascinated with the displays of prehistoric tools. At home, he was determined to find similar objects in local caves. This is how he came to be exploring in Al-tamira Cave with his nine-year-old daughter Maria in 1879. She reportedly ran playfully through the cave and, at one point, looked up at the ceiling and exclaimed, “Look papa, oxen!” Following her gaze, de Sautuola was stunned by the polychrome ceiling of painted bison.

Recognizing the significance of the find, de Sautuola hesitantly publicized his discovery. And while local pale-ontologists and dignitaries (including the King of Spain) embraced the find, he suffered scathing criticism by the global archaeological community, especially Émile Car-tailhac, the most prominent and respected archaeologist of the time, who declared the work a forgery and branded de Sautuola a fraud. De Sautuola never recovered from the criticism heaped on him and died a broken man.

It wasn’t until 14 years after his death that de Sautuola’s reputation was finally vindicated. By then, many other painted caves had been found, which Cartailhac had in-spected firsthand. In 1902, Cartailhac published a retrac-tion in the journal L’Anthropologie, France’s preeminent journal of prehistory. In this famous paper (Mea culpa

d'un sceptique), he publicly and sincerely apologized to de Sautuola for his unfounded skepticism and the harsh criticism that had caused this honest man such anguish. Altamira was declared a World Heritage site in 1985.

Accurately dating Paleolithic artwork is a necessary step in understanding the early evolution of human thought and symbolism that characterized the various human cul-tures that flourished in Western Europe. These were dis-tinguished from one another largely by the style of their artwork and the nature and complexity of their tools, and included the Aurignacian culture (40,000 years ago until around 28,000 years ago), the Gravettian culture (28,000 years ago until around 22,000 years ago), the Solutrean culture (22,000 years ago until around 17,000 years ago),

and the Magdalenian culture (17,000 years ago until the end of the Ice Age, around 11,000 years ago).

An assessment of Altamira was made by the Abbé Henri Breuil in the mid 1930s. Breuil dominated the field of Paleolithic cave art until his death in 1961. His stylistic interpretation of the longstanding artistic tradition of Al-tamira subsequently became a model for considering the chronology of Paleolithic art across all of Europe. Breuil hypothesized that the Altamira tradition spanned a consid-erable period of human occupation, encompassing Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian cultures. Breuil saw this tradition as representing a linear evolution in complexity from the Aurignacian (broad red lines, hands, anthropomorphs, and assorted non-figurative symbols), through the Solutrean (black-outlined figures with a de-gree of internal detail, engravings made of multiple lines and internal striations), and finally the Magdalenian (naturalistic engravings and polychrome paintings).

There are a variety of methods available for use in deter-mining the age of ancient cave art. Classically, this was done by making stylistic comparisons with artwork from datable locations and, in time, making radiocarbon deter-minations of organic material used in production of rele-vant pigments. Each method suffered from limitations and potential pitfalls.

Uranium series dating (decay of 238U to 234U and 230Th) affords an opportunity to obtain chronological ages for paintings created with inorganic pigments. It also allows for the dating of overlying calcite deposits. When calcite has been deposited upon a cave painting or engraving, its date of formation provides a proxy for the minimum age of the underlying artwork. These studies confirm that the art in Altamira Cave was created over a prolonged period of time that spanned at least 20,000 years (between 35,559 and 15,204 years BP).

García-Diez, M. and D. L. Hoffmann (2013). Uranium series dating reveals a long sequence of rock art at Altamira Cave (Santillana del Mar, Cantabria). Journal of Archaeological Science. xxx: 1

1For readers interested in an excellent discussion of the discov-ery of Altamira and many other painted caves of southwest Europe, two superb texts are The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists (2006) by Gregory Curtis, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and The Caves of the Great Hunters (1962) by Hans Baumann, Pantheon Books. A vivid photo essay of Altamira’s exquisite artwork can be found in The Cave of Al-tamira (1999) by Pedro A. Saura Ramos, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

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Volume 13, Number 9 NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF BATS September 2013


News From the World of Bats

Natural History

Flight Performance in Bats with Damaged Wings. One of the most obvious hallmarks of bats afflicted with white-nose syndrome (WNS) is the presence of lesions of varying severity in wing membranes. This typically re-sults in erosions and ulcerations that can lead to necrotic (dead) tissue. Severe damage to wing membranes may lead to sundry metabolic derangements (particularly re-lated to water loss, thermoregulation, and perhaps respira-tion) as well as impair a bat’s capacity to fly and, there-fore, forage efficiently for food.

One of the weakest and most vulnerable portions of a bat’s wing is the plagiopatagium. This refers to the trail-ing edge of the wing that stretches between fifth digit, the arm, and the body. This portion of the bat wing is impor-tant for generating both lift and thrust. Stresses associated with the mechanical aspects of flapping flight may limit healing capabilities along this portion of a bat’s wing.

In order to gain insight into the limitations on flight im-posed by wing injuries along the plagiopatagium, Voight (2013) studied flight performance in two species of tropi-cal bats, the silver-tipped myotis (Myotis albescens) and the black myotis (Myotis nigricans), with naturally occur-ring damage to this portion of the wing. Results of this study showed that the flight performance of both species was altered by damage to the pla-giopatagium. While bats with damaged wing membranes flew at a similar speed to healthy bats without such dam-age, bats with wing damage made fewer U-turns in the flight-testing area. Clearly, changes in flight performance would be expected following significant injury to the wing. An unexpected find was that the metabolic rate of affected bats during flight was lower than that of bats with intact wing membranes. While Voight briefly enter-tained the notion that this may have been related to the lower weight of bats with damaged wings, he believed the difference was related to diminished flight performance. Wild-caught specimens of both species with significant wing-membrane damage weighed less than healthy bats with no appreciable wing damage, suggesting a dimin-ished capacity for foraging. Regarding the lower overall body weight of bats with damaged wing membranes, he was unable to distinguish between two alternative expla-nations for the reduction in body weight: 1) a compensa-

tory mechanism that permits bats to avoid an increase in metabolic rate following wing damage, or 2) bats with damaged wing membranes were simply less efficient at foraging for food. Voight pointed out some of the limitations of the study. For example, because bats with appropriate wing damage were selected from wild-caught specimens, there was no way to control for the possibility that the diminished flight performance observed was actually related to selec-tion of animals that were inherently less agile in flight than other specimens. Also, it should be noted that the actual damage to wing membranes caused by fungal in-fection with Pseudogymnoascus destructans may vary considerably in both severity and location. As such, valid-ity of the results of this experiment as a proxy for measur-ing outcomes and consequences of WNS is limited. Voight, C. C. (2013). Bat flight with bad wings: is flight metabo-lism affected by damaged wings? The Journal of Experimental Biology. 216: 1516

Some Things Just Aren’t Good Ideas

On August 29, 2013, The Canadian Press reported the case of an individual in Lethbridge, Alberta (Canada) who required post-exposure rabies prophylaxis follow-ing a bite by a bat subsequently determined to be rabid. The person had been trying to break up a “fight” be-tween the bat and a cat. Note: Interactions between cats and sick, injured, and downed bats are not uncommon and pet owners should take caution. Vaccination of pet cats, especially indoor/outdoor cats, will help safeguard the health of both the cat and its owner.

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Revision of the Genus Geomyces. White-nose syndrome (WNS) is a fungal disease of hibernating cave bats caused by infection with the psychrophilic (cold-loving) fungus, Geomyces destructans. Well, at least it used to be caused by Geomyces destructans.

Geomyces is a widespread genus of fungi, especially com-mon in soil in cold environments. Renewed interest in this group, including its natural history and taxonomy, directly followed the discovery of WNS in bats. Analysis of soil samples from bat hibernacula in eastern North America revealed that there are more species of Geomyces and al-lied fungi present than was previously thought.

Minnis and Lindner (2013), scientists affiliated with the U.S. Forest Service, Center for Forest Mycology in Madi-son, Wisconsin, used genetic data from fungal isolates collected from various locations, including bat hiberna-cula in the Northeast, to generate a phylogenetic frame-work by which the evolutionary relationships among these various groups could be understood. As a result of this phylogenetic analysis of genetic sequence data and a new understanding of the evolutionary relationships of Geomyces and related fungi, it has been determined that the fungus previously known as Geomyces destructans is not properly a member of the Geomyces group. Revised nomenclature now places Geomyces destructans in the new genus Pseudogymnoascus. Based on the lack of ge-netically closely related species in samples collected from North America, the authors confirm the thesis that Pseu-dogymnoascus destructans is an invasive species, not na-tive to North America.

The term Geomyces was coined prior to a revision in the mechanism of naming fungi, when sexual and asexual forms of a single fungus were given different names. In-deed, the appearance of sexually and asexually reproduc-ing forms of the same fungus may look sufficiently differ-ent as to warrant separate species names.

After several years of getting used to the genus Geomy-

ces, it will take some time for everyone to get comfortable with the revised genus Pseudogymnoascus. But cavers are resourceful and intelligent folks and will find the strength within themselves to come to grips with the new nomen-clature. After all, we managed to digest tri-colored bat (Perimyotis subflavus) after a long period of time know-ing this species as the eastern pipistrelle (Pipistrellus sub-

White-Nose News flavus). And even children now know that the beloved dinosaur Brontosaurus is now Apatosaurus. For a period of time, at least until people get used to the new name, we will likely be seeing a lot of “Pseudogymnoascus destruc-

tans (formerly known as Geomyces destructans).”

Minnis, A. M. and D. L. Lindner (2013). Phylogenetic evaluation of Geomyces and allies reveals no close relatives of Pseu-dogymnoascus destructans, comb. nov., in bat hibernacula of eastern North America. Fungal Biology. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.funbio.2013.07.001

A little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) from New York State dis-playing the characteristic appearance of an individual suffering from white-nose syndrome. The powdery-white fungal patches of Pseudogymnoascus destructans are readily visible on the bat’s face, wings, and ears. Pseudogymnoascus (formerly Geo-myces) is a primary pathogen in North American bats and not simply an opportunist. WNS has decimated bat populations across the Northeast and continues to spread. Photo courtesy of Al Hicks, New York Department of Environmental Conservation.

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Rabid Bytes Dangers of Bats in Cabins. The presence of bats in living quarters is not uncommon. Because bats are well-established reservoirs of rabies virus—and responsible for the majority of indigenously acquired cases of human ra-bies in this country—their presence in sleeping quarters represents a unique exposure risk to inhabitants. Individu-als at highest potential risk of exposure to a bat in the home include deep sleepers, the very young and the very old, and those who are mentally incapacitated for what-ever reason. Household pets are also at risk of exposure. Although the threat of exposure to rabies from bats in the home remains small, risk increases as the population of either bats or humans increase. In this regard, one signifi-cant concern is the presence of bats at camp cabins and similar facilities where large numbers of people (especially children) may be sleeping. Such facilities are commonly located in wilderness areas with relatively large numbers of indigenous bats present and typically in use during summer months when bats are most active. Moreover, because many campers may be present at any given time, particularly in association with summer camps for children, the potential for mass exposure exists. All campers should recognize the importance of avoiding direct contact with wild animals, including bats. Children may easily mistake ill bats that are unable to fly for in-jured ones and attempt to help them. It has been estimated that as many as 11 million children and adults engage in camping activities in the U.S. each year, many of which involve activities at summer camps and sleeping in large cabins. And while there have been no reports of human rabies cases following exposure of individuals to bats in camp settings, reports of potential exposures necessitating intervention by public-health au-thorities are periodically reported. As such, it is important that counselors and other staff members remain vigilant about the presence of bats in camp settings. Because of the possibility that sleeping campers may unknowingly be exposed to bats that wander into the sleeping quarters of cabins, it is important that such buildings be kept free of bat colonies. In this regard, it is important that cabins be annually inspected and proper steps taken to ensure that they are bat proof. If campers are permitted to bring dogs to such camps, the animals should be current on their ra-bies vaccinations. If exposure to a bat is suspected or a bite or scratch

known to have been incurred, the affected area should be thoroughly washed with soap and water and medical au-thorities consulted. If possible to do so safely, the bat should be captured for testing. Unfortunately, deciding whether or not such an exposure has occurred is not always straightforward and clear evi-dence of a bite or scratch not always available. In such cases, consideration for the need to pursue post-exposure rabies prophylaxis must be based on a reasonable prob-ability of exposure. Some of the criteria that help to sup-port such a reasonable probability of exposure include 1) direct physical contact with a bat, 2) bat found in a room with a sleeping person, 3) bat found in a room with an unattended child, or, in some circumstances, found in close proximity to an unattended child outdoors, or 4) bat found in a room with an individual under the influence of alcohol or drugs or with other sensory or mental impair-ment. However, even in one of the circumstances listed above, there is a wide range of exposure probability. For this reason, consultation with public-health authorities is warranted when circumstances are equivocal. An excel-lent set of guidelines for the management of bat-related incidents at camps for children can be found in the New York State Department of Health’s, Guidelines for Man-

aging bats and Risk of Rabies Transmission (2004) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC), Bats: Safety and Risk Management at Camp (2011). A recent example of potential exposure of campers was reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Preven-tion (2013). Accordingly, the Kentucky Department of Public Health (KDPH) had been alerted to a possible mass exposure of campers to bats in a building that had been used as sleeping quarters for thousands of children and adults since 1999. During June of 2012, 273 volun-teers and staff members of an organization had slept in the facility during volunteer efforts to renovate the build-ing and remove a colony of 200 - 300 big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus). A survey was conducted by the KDPH and the CDC in an effort to assess any potential risk of bat exposure that might have been incurred by volunteers who had slept in the facility immediately before or during the period of renovation. A total of 257 (94%) of the 273 people known to have slept at the site—and ranging in age from 13 to 87 years—were questioned in regard to 1) the observation of bats, 2) the apparent health status of any bats seen (e.g., healthy appearing, injured, appearing ill, dead), or 3)

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whether they had ever awakened to see a bat in the room or to see a bat contact any individual who was sleeping. People were also questioned about their own sleeping habits (e.g., heavy or light sleepers, what kind of clothes they slept in, and whether alcohol or medications had ever been used that might have dulled their senses). Based on their responses, people were categorized as being at low, moderate, or high risk of bat exposure. Moderate risk was defined as someone who had been asleep in a room dur-ing a time when a bat had been reported present and at which time their potential for awareness was knowingly impaired. Persons at high risk were defined as those who had definite contact with a bat and who could not defini-tively rule out the possibility of a bite or scratch. Between June 19 and July 24, the presence of bats in the sleeping quarters had been reported on 13 separate eve-nings. Following their evaluations, 48 (19%) individuals

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2013). Assessment of risk for exposure to bats in sleeping quarters before and during remediation—Kentucky, 2012. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 62(19): 382

were determined to have been potentially exposed to bats, with 13 (5%) of these determined to have been at moder-ate risk and 3 (1%) to have been at high risk. Two people in the latter group actually held bats without gloves; in addition to catching bats in his bare hand on two separate occasions, the third person in this group had also been awakened one night when he rolled over onto a bat in his bed. Post-exposure rabies prophylaxis was recommended for each of these 16 individuals. Reports like this hardly exist in a vacuum. Similar reports have been investigated at other facilities in other states. In 2011, 7% of bats submitted for testing in Kentucky tested positive for rabies.

In the December, 2011 issue of The Underground Movement, I briefly mentioned the case of a woman from South Carolina, who had died from rabies of insectivorous-bat origin. At that time, I indicated that I would provide addi-tional details when they became available in an MMWR report. That report was released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on August 16, 2013.

A 46-year-old woman was seen in the ED on December 3, 2011, with a 6-hour history of shortness of breath, exces-sive sweating, chills, and intermittent tingling sensations in both hands (although the latter had resolved prior to her hospital visit). She was in the ED for 6 hours, after which time she was transferred to a referral hospital for consulta-tion with her cardiologist (she had had coronary bypass surgery in 2001). Twelve hours later, she developed respira-tory arrest, which required intubation. Her pupils, at that time, became fixed and dilated. She was sedated and re-mained intubated for several days, during which time she began to exhibit signs of multiorgan failure.

While there was no initial history of animal bite, her family reported that she had noticed bats in her home on several occasions, and had even awakened to the presence of a bat in her bedroom in August. She reportedly removed the bat and let it go, after which she sought information about removal of a bat colony from her home from a local county service. She had never sought the advice of public-health authorities and no mention of rabies had been made by the extermination company she had consulted. Following the report of this interaction with bats, samples were sent to the CDC for analysis and a positive diagnosis of rabies was made. Genetic analysis of a viral isolate revealed a variant characteristic of Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis). The patient died on December 19, 2011.

As a cautionary measure, post-exposure rabies prophylaxis was administered to 22 people with potential exposure to infectious secretions from the patient, including 18 healthcare workers and 4 family members. Two dogs in the pa-tient’s home also received a booster dose of canine rabies vaccine as per recommendations of the Compendium of Animal Rabies Prevention and Control. The fact that this woman had received no advice about the potential serious-ness of bats in the home highlights the need for more effective education and better avenues of communication be-tween various entities (e.g., extermination companies and animal rehabilitation facilities) and public-health officials.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2013). Human rabies—South Carolina, 2011. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 62(32): 642

HUMAN RABIES OF INSECTIVOROUS-BAT ORIGIN - SOUTH CAROLINA

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or rocks. What would others have thought of such an indi-vidual: gifted or daft? This is the tale that Gerstein weaves in The First Drawing. It is the story of a young boy who sees the world through a slightly different set of eyes than others of his clan. But he is frustrated by the fact that only he seems able to appreciate the shapes of animals in sky and stone. To everyone else, he is the “Child Who Sees What Isn’t There.” Undaunted by the skepticism of others in his clan, includ-ing his own mother and father, the boy remains deter-mined to help others understand what he alone seems able to see. In a phenomenal leap of logic, when all likelihood of being able to convince the others seems almost impos-sible, he finally comes to understand that he can use a burnt piece of wood to unlock his imagination and draw on the cave walls what only his mind has been able to fathom. Seeing animals suddenly born anew on the rocks around them, the people are finally able to appreciate what he has been talking about … and also to finally un-derstand what has been driving this young boy for so long. And in that instant, the very concept of art is awak-ened in our distant ancestors, who then continued to cre-ate images in caves for thousands and thousands of years. The First Drawing is nicely illustrated and young readers (3 to 6 years of age) will enjoy the lovely full-page/full-color artwork. The pictures and text nicely complement each other and will open a world of new ideas that par-ents/teachers and children can explore together.

THE FIRST DRAWING (2013) by Mordicai Gerstein. Little, Brown and Company, New York. Hardcover, 30 pages, 8½" x 11" format, ISBN 978-0-8050-6751-4. Available for $16.95. Reviewed by Danny A. Brass.

Imagine you were born before the invention of drawing,

more than thirty thousand years ago. In this delightful children’s book, Mordicai Gerstein con-siders what it must have been like before people learned to associate imagery with real objects … before recogniz-ing that a real animal could be represented by a two-dimensional image painted on a wall. Academicians have wrestled with this issue for quite some time, trying to un-derstand how, when, and why our ancestors first devel-oped this kind of cognitive ability. In bringing these ques-tions to bear, Gerstein stimulates young readers to ponder what may have driven the first person to create a drawing. Perhaps there was a single individual who was first able to appreciate abstract shapes and textures in an artistic context—to be able to see the shapes of animals in clouds

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Volume 13, Number 9 BOOK REVIEWS September 2013


able although the extent and depth of coverage and degree of explanation vary from topic to topic. Underground ex-amples of various cave features discussed in the text are primarily drawn from the many caves of India’s Megha-laya region.

Although the interactive, conversational-chat format is an interesting concept, little seems to have been gained by its use, and the repetitive back-and-forth questioning that the author employs does become somewhat tiresome after a while. In the longest chapter of the book, which is de-voted to understanding some of the many cave-related creation myths from different areas of India, the author appears to have abandoned the conversational format en-tirely.

A tabulated appendix contains excerpts from Bob Gulden’s website of cave statistics (http://www.caverbob.com) and includes data about the 25 longest caves in the world, the 25 deepest caves in the world, the largest underground chambers in the world, the longest caves of Asia, the deepest caves of Asia, the longest caves of India, and the deepest caves of India. A glossary appears to have been taken largely from the British Cave Research Associa-tion’s Cave Studies Series No. 6 (A Dictionary of Karst

and Caves).

Several pages of references are provided for readers inter-ested in additional information. Unfortunately, more than half of these contain no publication date. However, the most significant drawback of the book is the illustrations, which are of relatively poor quality throughout and uni-formly disappointing. By and large, they appear to be a collection of poorly made photocopies taken from various sources. Many have been placed crookedly on the page and, in some instances, text that has been inserted into an illustration has been formatted crookedly in the figure. Moreover, some of the illustrations contain extraneous material from the original reproduction (including par-tially cut-off lines of text, smudges along the edges of the page, darkened background, etc.) that had not been re-moved prior to printing. A few images are completely undecipherable.

Caves for the Uninitiated may be of interest to beginning cavers, especially those with opportunity to explore the many caves of the Meghalaya region or to participate in various organized beginner caving activities with mem-bers of India’s Meghalaya Adventurers’ Association.

CAVES FOR THE UNINITIATED (2013) by Brian D. Kharpran Daly. Strategic Book Publishing. Houston, TX. Paperback, 136 pages, 6" x 9" format, ISBN 978-1-61897-470-9. Available for $12.50. Reviewed by Danny A. Brass.

Following a beginner caving trip, several young students become interested in learning more about caves and cav-ing. Making use of a series of fictional chat sessions by two veteran cavers, the author—a founding member of India’s Meghalaya Adventurers’ Association—introduces a small group of Indian students to the nature of caves and underground exploration. A variety of topics are covered in the course of several such sessions, ranging from geol-ogy and exploration to natural history and conservation. Important skills necessary for safe underground explora-tion are also discussed. The text is generally quite read-

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Volume 13, Number 9 THE CREATIVE CORNER September 2013


THE CREATIVE CORNER

ERGOR RUBRECK’S MARVELOUS CAVE

LIGHT

— Ergor Rubreck —

Back in the 1950s, the carbide lamp was standard issue for cave explorers. Those unfamiliar with this piece of equipment should envision a shiny brass, two-part cap lamp, with a round reflector on the front and a yellow-white flame burning from a ceramic tip. Part one of the lamp is a base that unscrews and allows the caver to pour in several tablespoons of calcium carbide lumps, resem-bling gray gravel. The bottom chamber is screwed onto the top chamber containing water. A lever atop the water tank adjusts the drip of water into the bottom to one per second. Water activates the carbide to produce a jet of stinky acetylene gas, which is ignited by rubbing the heel of one’s hand over a spark wheel. The carbide lamp was once popular in mining until a number of mines blew up, hundreds of miners were horribly burned to a crisp, and canaries were denuded of feathers. No wonder electric lamps replaced carbide lamps in mining and then caving. Early electric cap lamps used either 8 D-cell batteries or heavy lead acid batteries. The latter burned for 8.5 hours per shift and weighed 32 pounds, and the former burned 17.5 minutes before winking out due to wire breakage, battery corrosion, battery case failure, bulb burnout, or any of 26 other ailments. The revolution came in the form of the Wheat Lamp, an incandescent bulb attached to an Army surplus guided missile battery. Since then, Pretzel developed smaller cap lamps using AA and AAA dry cells, in which LEDs gradually re-placed incandescent bulbs. Then came the Stun Light, costing $300, and most recently the ScurryOn, costing $4000. You must empty your bank account to go caving with one of these babies, but you will be able to see fos-sils 300 feet up the walls in TAG caves, and 1 km across the rooms of Chinese caves. Darkness in caves is a thing of the past; good riddance, some say. These marvelous lights of today, combined with helmet cams, allow one to make color videos of cave trips. Cave divers use variations of these compact lights to make un-derwater videos. Next, I expect to see lights so powerful as to see under mud and through solid rock walls.

A whole different class of cave lighting is under develop-ment, and I will reveal the details of some of these inven-tions for the first time. First is Ergor Rubreck’s Emer-gency Batteryless Lamp; second is a remarkable Fuel Cell Light that uses only organic heat conversion; and finally, a ChemLight that uses cloned fireflies to do away with a need to use scarce resources. I got the idea from hand-cranked emergency flashlights that give you light so long as you squeeze the handle vig-orously. My prototype uses a bicycle electric generator driven by a bicycle wheel that is raised on a spring-loaded boom to track along the ceiling, much like a streetcar boom. It is mounted on a cave helmet. Spring tension keeps the wheel on the ceiling of the cave as you go along the passage. What about domes? My bike wheel is rigged to a heavy flywheel that spins on ball bearings. When the ceiling contact is lost, the flywheel keeps rotating for 4 minutes and 30 seconds. I am perfecting a hinge that will allow repositioning of the boom toward either cave wall if the ceiling is too high. Also, I am thinking of replacing the 20-pound flywheel with a 35-pound wheel to increase the spin time to 7.5 minutes. The difficult part of my de-velopment program is recruiting test subjects who are strong enough to support my wonderful emergency light. They quit and complain of fatigue. Why can’t these whin-ers appreciate true science? The next development is not mine. Dr. Alan Mountain calls his novel fuel cell lamp the Analite®. It uses no bat-teries, but adapts space-age technology of the fuel cell. The lamp has a 3-foot cord that one inserts in the rectal cavity, where it converts 98.6° F heat into electrical cur-rent. Its drawback could be its unreliability during hypo-thermic episodes, not to mention discomfort. When I asked Dr. Mountain how reliable his Analite® will be, he replied, “You bet your ass.” A few cavers have used Cylume chemical light sticks for emergency lights in caves. In its present form, the stick is a glass tube covered in tough plastic. When broken, the glass shatters allowing two liquids to mix and give off a weird greenish glow. Recent improvements have widened the color spectrum so the sticks give off bluish, pinkish, or violetish glow. The problem is that after 15 minutes or so, the glow fades; so the caver is forced to crack another Cylume stick—if available. My improvement on the Cylume stick is a green solution.

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Volume 13, Number 9 THE CREATIVE CORNER September 2013


The whole world will benefit. Each year, hundreds of thousands of fluorescent tubes are disposed of when they burn out. My plan is to use old 4-foot fluorescent tubes, fill them with fireflies and dip them in rubber cement. If you crack one of those, you will almost have the illumina-tion of the ScurryOn, but it will be less hard on the eyes than the ScurryOn’s blinding beam. A caver could carry a golf bag of these natural chemical lights and find his or her way out of Mammoth Cave. It took me all summer to catch enough fireflies to build my first prototype. But when I sealed them into the 4-foot fluorescent tube and coated it with rubber cement, the fireflies died due to lack of air. I have yet to bring off a practical test.

I am reading scientific papers on cloning fireflies to see if I can build an environmental generator within the tube and use cloned insects to reduce lethality and increase longevity. When I asked Dr. Alan Mountain for his advice on sustainable cave lighting, he said, “Bug off.” At first, I was insulted. But then, I realized he had inad-vertently given me a catchy name for my new and mar-velous cave lighting invention: BUG-ON©® LIGHT.1

1Patent Pending. All rights reserved. Violators will be shot.

Cave Vase — Michael Kehs —

The Cave Vase is made from silver maple. It is 6 inches tall and 3.5 inches in diameter. This piece was turned on a lathe to a thickness of 3/32 of an inch. The intricate de-sign was first drawn on the outer surface and then it was pierced through to remove the negative spaces. Mike uses a small, air-powered tool (similar to a dental-type tool) that spins at 400,000 rpm. The rapidly rotating bit allows him to accurately cut out small sections of wood in a smooth and precise fashion. The final carving and surface texturing is done using the same tool, but with a variety of bits of different shape, including round, conical, dove-tailed, oval, and others. The inspiration for creating this vase came from a trip into Alexander Caverns some years ago. This is a beautifully decorated cave in central Penn-sylvania.

The editor of The Underground Movement welcomes sub-missions of original, non-photographic, cave-related art-work for inclusion in The Creative Corner. This can include paintings, pen-and-ink drawings, sculpture, carv-ings, etchings, engravings, tapestries, jewelry or other artistic media. General information about the medium used would be appreciated. Short stories and poetry will also be featured in this column. Of course, underground photography is always welcome; however, this medium will be displayed elsewhere in the newsletter.

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Volume 13, Number 9 CALENDAR OF EVENTS PHOTOGRAPH OF THE MONTH September 2013


CENTRAL CONNECTICUT GROTTO CALENDAR OF EVENTS

September 16: Monthly Grotto Meeting. September 20 - 22: Fall NRO. The Widow Jane Mine. September 28: Old Time Barn Dance at Knox Cave. A fundraiser for the Northeastern Cave Conservancy. September 27 - 29: Fall MAR hosted by the Nittany Grotto at the Lincoln Caverns Campground. Hunting-don, PA. Additional information is available at the MAR website (http://preview.tinyurl.com/pvp2qvc). Neighboring grottos in the Northeast may also sponsor activi-ties of interest to CCG members. Links to homepages of other grottos can be found at the NSS website (www.nssio.org/Find_Grotto.cfm).

PHOTOGRAPH OF THE MONTH - Norm Berg kayaking on the Long Island Sound during the August grotto meeting in Guilford. Photo by Mark Williams.

Documents

Central Connecticut Grotto · the spread of white-nose syndrome among hibernating bats, ... Just reading through the list of categories is educational, providing a sobering ... reached