Days and Nights at the Museum

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One of the museum things I'm most proud of is the Earth Rangers Studio Winter Wonderland. This is the third year of the project, and each year it keeps getting better. I've talked about it already on the ROM blog, but I thought I'd use this space to talk a little more about how we did it. From this...



...to this...



Year 1
In the first year of the project, then-Coordinator of the Gallery Bep Schippers came up with the idea of using the empty studio space while the Earth Rangers were putting on the big show in the theatre to do a "Winter Wonderland". She and Hands-on Biodiversity Assistant Coordinator Allie Lee came up with the general floor plan of the exhibit, and created all the silver screens you can see hanging in the gallery, adding depth and mystery to the forest.



I came on board to help design the activity for the gallery, and we came quickly to a consensus that identifying animal tracks was the way to go. Over the next several months, I worked on digging through the collections to figure out which animal tracks we had that were a) Canadian, and b) likely to be around in the winter. That done, I had to figure out how to turn that into a snow print.



Through much trial and error, we figured out just how to make a snowy animal footprint. It involved a lot of experimentation to determine how the gypsum cement needed to be mixed and how long it needed to dry in order to be soft enough to take a print, but hard enough that it wouldn't immediately run back into the space.

Once I knew what tracks we had to work with, it was possible to design the activity cards to on which visitors can check off all their answers, and write all the clues to help visitors identify the tracks. It was fun being able to put my writing skills to use in a creative sort of way!



While all this was going on, the staff and the volunteers were hard at work painting recycled cardboard tubes from Fabricland white. Once all the trees were white, we could add the patterns we needed to turn them into aspen trees. However, since we quickly learned that aspen marks are like fingerprints and having wildly disparate markings on trees looked strange, I ended up hand-painting the aspen markings on the majority of the forest. While the trees were drying, I figured out how to turn some old laundry hampers and a coathanger into a paper mache cutaway beaver lodge.



Getting down to the wire, the rest of the staff and I ransacked the Hands-on collections to find anything we could add to the forest, particularly touchable objects, while Bep liaised with Curatorial to see if they could add any other non-touchable objects to go deep in the forest (such as the adorable squirrel). On assembly day, we got the trees in place, and used the last of our available budget to clean Fabricland out of quilt batting to make snow.



The results were incredible!

Year Two
For year two, we wanted to go bigger and better. We tweaked the activity cards to get rid of the hole punches and neaten up the studio a bit. Audio was added to the snow video on the big screen. We also rearranged things so that the walk through the winter wonderland now went from southern Ontario to the Arctic. We painted about thirty more Fabricland rolls to bring the height of the trees up 50%, and added a few more aspens to the forest. Hands-on Coordinator Charlene Connolly made us some new imprints so that we could add the porcupine and the grouse tracks to the forest, and a call went out for donations of old artificial Christmas trees in order to add a Boreal forest to the north. The wolf, flying squirrel, and polar bear cutout and tracks made their first appearance as well.



Year Three
Year Three sees the addition of the grasslands ecosystem to what is now the Canadian Winter Wonderland. Bison tracks joined the others in the forest in honour of our find the baby bison contest, and new detailing went up on the walls in the grassland and the Arctic. We made new powerpoints to go on the side screens detailing winter scenes and animals from the respective ecosystems. The wolf moved from its hiding spot to a place of prominence in the boreal forest, and even more touchable objects (such as a beaver) and little details (like the hibernating frog and rattlesnake) were added to the forest.



This may be the last year of the Winter Wonderland. I hope it comes back again someday, but if it doesn't, our team can really take pride in this activity. It was a lot of work (my roommate now knows the lead-up to ROM for the Holidays as "that time of year where you come home from work every day covered in plaster or paint"), but when you watch families make their way through the forest, it's all worth it.

It's no secret to anyone who knows me, has read my journal for a while, or even knows what I use as my usual default icon on most websites I sign up for, that Jim Henson has been a big part of my life for a long time. Now, on the 75th anniversary of his birth, I wanted to take time to remember why that is.

Some of the earliest memories I have are of Jim's work. Not just Sesame Street or the muppets, but of the Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. The Dark Crystal was one of the few videodiscs that the library had available on a regular basis, and I watched it time and time again. When Labyrinth was released, I was hooked. Here was someone who finally, finally understood how my imagination worked, and helped shape it from its early form into what it is today. Today, reading back over the novel I have just finished, I can see Jim's influence there, buried deep within the images that populate the novel. Jim Henson taught me how to wonder, to imagine, and to dream, and I will be forever indebted to him for that.



But it goes even further than that. His work continued to encourage and inspire me, even after his death. Some people have the most vivid memories of where they were when the Challenger disaster happened, or JFK was shot. For me, it was when my mother told me that Jim Henson had died. It was a warm day, a year or so before we moved from the house on Timothy. I remember leaving the room and standing in front of the window in the upstairs hall. I can still feel the warmth of the hardwood under my bare feet as I stood in the patch of sunlight, looking out the window over the backyard and crying. For what we had lost, and also for the fact that I would never now get to meet him.

I was twelve.



And still, his importance to me continues. As I moved from childhood into my life as an adult, I became fascinated with his work behind the scenes. Struggling to proceed forward in my career, I have been to many interviews now in which I am asked to describe my leadership style. And in almost every way, I aspire to be like Jim. Listen to the remembrances on the Henson Company homepage about what it was like to work with him. This was a man who cared about the people he worked with, who loved what he did and wanted everyone to love it just as much as he did, and especially in a day and age where one can turn on the TV and see interviews with Donald Trump talking about the cutthroat world of business and how you can't afford to be soft with your employees, here is the living testament to a man who led by giving it his all, sharing his kindness and generosity, and letting his example inspire others to reach places they hadn't thought they could go. It's Not Easy Being Green is a wonderful book, full of quotes like these, and it gave me something to aspire to as a human being. I'm not saying that I live up to it every day -- he was truly a remarkable man -- but I do try. And every so often I go back and reread that book, to remember what kind of person I want to be.

"When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope still is to leave the world a little bit better for my having been here.

It's a wonderful life, and I love it."
--Jim Henson

As a storyteller, a leader, and as a human being, the world could use more people like Jim. And despite the teasing I sometimes get, I think, all things considered, I picked a good one.

Happy birthday, Jim. We miss you.

My very first official ROM blog is now online, but I have one problem with it -- we have to keep it short. Under 500 words short. And anyone who has been reading me for any length of time knows that when I geek out over something, I really geek out over it (I sense a kindred spirit in Bill Nye here. So here is what didn't make it into the ROM blog.

In the Keenan Family Gallery of Hands-on Biodiversity Gallery, we pride ourselves on being one of the few places in the ROM where you can get up close and personal with (and sometimes even touch) live animals. There's no better way to learn about the living things that share our world with us than by watching them do their thing, and nobody does it better than our bees. Which is why the death of the colony over the winter came as such a blow. Now, contrary to the way the papers made it sound, this isn't unprecendented. It's hard to survive the winter in Canada, especially for small colonies; overwintering deaths are not uncommon, and in feral colonies, that number is even higher. Our definitive bee resource, The Biology of the Honeybee, states that in one Ontario study, only 45% of established colonies successfully overwinters. If the colony is new or small, that number drops even further. So our bees are usually beating the odds; historically, our colony overwintered successfully about three times out of four. Now it's looking like the cause of death was the bees themselves.

Honeybees cluster in the winter. The queen needs to survive in order for the colony to continue, so the workers gather around her to keep her warm. They will shiver to make heat, and take turns on the outside and the inside of the ball so everyone has a chance to warm up again. During this clustering time, the bees survive on the honey stored in the hive. That's why they make it -- it's so concentrated that it doesn't spoil, so it's a great food to store in your hive to see you through the winter. But our bees didn't make enough of it last year. We're not really sure why; my pet theory supported by absolutely NO scientific evidence is that our summers are getting longer and our winters shorter so they're not starting to really store up the honey until too late in the year.

We do feed our bees. In addition to the honey they store, they are given jars of sugar water to supplement their winter stores. But the bees are very dedicated to keeping the queen warm. So dedicated, in fact, that they wouldn't leave the ball around her even to venture as far as the sugar water at the side of the hive, so when the honey ran out, so did the bees.

There might be an extreme bee home makeover in the works (anyone know if Ty Pennington has a bee suit?). But in the meantime, our beekeeper from the University of Guelph, Janine McGowan, has visited the gallery, and I'm pleased to announce that at long last, the bees are back!


The new colony hard at work

One thing most people think when they visit the gallery is "oh, how can they survive trapped in there?" But they're not actually trapped; the hive is connected to the window by a tunnel system that the bees make free use of. The gardens around the University of Toronto are frequently visited by the ROM's bees.


Her Royal Majesty, Queen Beatrix XXIII

Here is the (now departed) new queen of the hive. The dot isn't natural -- beekeepers paint those on to make queens more visible and track their ages. Our painted queens will only be in the hive until the colony gets big enough to swarm (that's when the older bees take the old queen to find a new place to live and leave the crowded hive to the younger bees and a new queen), and we can't paint the new queen that will be born in the hive to replace her (opening up a busy hive in the middle of a crowded gallery is not a great idea). Our colony did swarm on June 6, so we're eagerly awaiting the emergence of the new queen. She's going to be tough to spot without a dot, so if you manage it, you can earn yourself the coveted "I found the Queen Bee" sticker!


Baby bees!

Here are some of the fruits of the queen's labours. See those white things down inside the cells? Those are bee larvae, or baby bees. When they get big enough, the larvae go into a pupal stage and their sisters cover the pupa with a covering of thick wax. Inside the pupa, the bee changes from a worm-like larva to an adult bee, and when she's fully grown, she chews her way out and gets to work! That yellow substance you can see in some of the cells is bee bread; it's made from pollen and a little honey, and the bees eat it during the summer.


Drone cell

Most bees in the hive are the female workers, but during the summer months, the workers get some brothers. Drones are the male bees, and you can actually tell which cells contain which type of bees. Worker pupae are covered with a flat cap of wax, but the cap on a drone cell looks a bit like bubble wrap. You can see a worker sitting on top of a drone cell here. Queen cells look different too, a little bit like a peanut stuck to the comb. There are several all over the hive now; the bees don't just raise one replacement queen, they raise several, and if they hatch together, the young queens will fight and sting each other until only the strongest queen survives. There can be only one!!!


Worker with loaded pollen baskets

It's not an easy life for a worker. While a queen can live 3-5 years, a worker lives a few months in the winter, and only a few weeks in the summer. From the moment she emerges from her pupa, she starts working. First, she helps to clean the hive. Then she moves on to nursing her larval sisters, then to guarding the hive, and finally to foraging for food. This worker with the yellow blobs on her legs has returned from one of the gardens around the ROM; those yellow blobs are baskets full of pollen destined to be turned into bee bread.

But though it is a hard life, it's definitely an important one. Without bees, we wouldn't just be missing honey, we'd be missing most of the food we eat. Fruits like apples, oranges, lemons and limes; yummy snacks like blueberries, cherries, and cranberries; veggies like cucumbers and carrots; even avocados and almonds are all pollinated by bees. Without these productive little insects, we'd be in serious trouble.

So come out to Hands-on Biodiversity and show your appreciation for these industrious little insects!

First of all, I know people are asking me about video updates (they are coming!), but I've got a new editing software, and it's taking some time to get to know it and figure out how to use it.

But we've been really busy here at the museum with the launch of the Robert Bateman Get to Know contest!



The contest is open to Canadian kids under the age of 19, and the winners are published in a special calendar that's released every year. This year's theme is "This is my forest," in honour of the International Year of Forests and as in previous years, the winners, like the ones shown above, are the entris that reflect the theme and show that a) you really understand the subject of your entry, and b) that it really means something to you.

The due date this year is May 23, so you need to get your entries submitted soon!

I've written about the contest before, but this year is especially exciting; the museum is doing a full-out launch this weekend. Survivorman was here, and we have tables set up throughout the second floor focusing on the various categories in which you can enter: art, writing, and photography. But this year, there's another category: video. Unlike the other categories, the video competition is open to all countries around the world, and it's a subject close to my heart, because my Naturequest campers last summer really worked hard on their own video about showing how much they know and appreciate the world around them.

The video came about in a roundabout way. In 2008, the members of Ecoquest looked at messages in the media about the environment. They discovered that media about things that are harmful to the environment (such as driving SUV's) are shown as being fun and exciting, and something that you would want to do. They also found that pro-environment messages are often angry and harsh, and make you want to argue against them, even if you actually agree with what they are saying.

So Ecoquest came up with the idea of creating a pro-environment message that shows action items kids can take to make a difference, but portrayed in a way that shows that they can be fun instead of a hardship.

The result was amazing. And it's right here:

( Ecoquest 2008 )

(Producer's Note: I get a lot of questions about the "take baths instead of showers" suggestion. We basically did the math and figured out that if you can shower in under 8 minutes, a shower uses less water. If you take more than 8 minutes to shower, a bath uses less water. Most of the campers (especially the girls) stated emphatically that showering in under 8 minutes was impossible, so they used the bath)

But Naturequest 2010 wanted to take it one step further. They wanted to create a high-definition video that could be played on the ROM Green Screen in the Earth Rangers Studio in the Schad Gallery of Biodiversity. The kids wrote the script, using Ecoquest 2008 as their inspiration, and the result of all their hard work plays daily in the Earth Rangers Studio after 3 p.m.

But we had to cut a lot out to fit it into the 2-minute timeslot, so here for the first time is the extended edition of Naturequest 2010's "Saving the Earth, One Step at a Time."

( Ta-da! )

In honour of the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, I'd like to mention a woman close to my heart. She was a real career girl, and a woman of her time. She's one of the most popular women at the museum. And she's absolutely gorgeous.

( Stunning! )

Isn't she pretty? Her name is Djedmaatesankh, or Djemma, as she is affectionately known to many.

Djemma lived during the 22nd dynasty, between 950 and 715 BCE, and was a musician at the temple of Amun-Re at Karnak. She probably never had children, as shown by CT scans of her pelvis, but she did have a husband. Her coffin tells us that his name was Pa-ankh-entef, and he was a doorkeeper at the same temple. Sadly, he outlived her. Djemma and her husband would have enjoyed fairly prestigious roles as temple staff, landing them solidly in the middle class. They would have enjoyed the comfort of being part of Amun-Re's household, in addition to some small wages to help supplement what they could raise. Yet their diet would have been rough, and in a sandy environment like ancient Egypt, that meant a lot of wear on the teeth.

( Ouch )

In 1994, researchers performed a detailed scan of her remains, and discovered a massive abscess in her jaw. Nearly an inch in size, this would have caused her excruciating pain as it spread, ate through her jaw, and eventually burst. It is very likely that the cause of death was the blood poisoning from this burst abscess.

However, all was not lost, for Paankhentef had Djemma mummified in a beautiful cartonnage coffin (that's a shell-like mixture of linen and glue sewn together at the back and brightly painted), which would surely have seen her to the afterlife. In fact, if you look closely at the front of it, you can see just that: Horus has taken her by the hand (that's her in the pinkish party dress with the blue stripe and the fashionable scented cone of wax on her head) and is presenting her to Osiris, the lord of the dead and king of the Egyptian gods, while Osiris' wife Isis and their (yes, their) sister Nepthys look on with their hands raised in welcome (Isis is the one with a throne on her head; Nepthys is wearing a palace on hers).

But her story doesn't end there. Researchers now believe that they may have found her husband at last, at the Art Institute of Chicago. That coffin lists him as "Paankhenamun", but some ROM staff believe that Paankhentef would have been a way of abbreviating Paankhenamun. If you look at his coffin, there are many similarities in style. For example, both show pairs of lion snakes -- a motif that has only been found on 11 coffins so far! And when you look underneath, the similarities continue. Their brains were removed the same way, they have scarabs and amulets in the same position (you can see them in the second scan above), their necks were packed the same way -- everything leads to the conclusion that the mummification was done by the same person, and the coffins were made by the same person. But why, then, is there that grammatical variation in Paankhentef's name? One theory is that it's a way of showing he actually had two wives, something that wouldn't have been uncommon in an age where infant mortality was high and some women, possibly like Djemma herself, were not able to have children.

We may never really know for sure, and it seems likely that the husband and wife may never be reunited -- moving a cartonnage case as delicate as theirs is dangerous. Even opening it and exposing it to air is a risk. And where would they be united? Toronto? Or Chicago?

But one thing is certain: the ancient Egyptians believed that to speak the name of the dead was to make that person live again, and we speak Djemma's name every day. So though her last days might have been hard, she is surely guaranteed a long and prosperous afterlife.

( together again )

Things are afoot in Museum Girl Land. I have a video installment I'm working on, but contending with a new software I'm learning at the same time. Nevertheless, we have another installment of Museum Girl Learns ASL!

Finding the time to blog has been tricky lately; things are crazy at the museum, and I'm working at another job for a while as an English teacher. So I thought I'd try a video blog, which ironically took far more time than actually writing things out, but I'm happy with in the end.

Enjoy!

One of the coolest things I get to do as part of my job is introduce people to the live animals who live at the museum. While most of our live animals are fish or invertebrates, the hidden stars of the show are our reptiles. So I thought I'd take a little time to introduce Zip.



( Meet Zip! )

We all know that nature is important to our daily lives. From the food that we eat, to the clothes that we wear, to the roofs over our heads, to the workings of our own body, we are connected to nature and the world around us. Nature has inspired great artworks and great inventions throughout history, but scientists have just come up with something truly awesome.

Photosynthesis is the process by which plants and other photosynthetic organisms create energy from sunlight. So scientists from MIT decided to see if they could create a process that imitates photosynthesis.

What they came up with were molecules that spontaneously create solar panels in a petri dish. What's even cooler is that these groups of chemicals that arrange themselves to collect electricity from the sun can be dissolved and put back together just by adding and removing other chemicals. And no matter how many times you take them apart or put them back together, they don't lose efficiency.

Can you imagine the potential for solar cells that can create themselves? What do you think we could use them for? We are living in the future right now, and I can't wait to see what we come up with next. But the coolest part is that the idea for this electrical marvel comes from nature -- from plants!