The dark price that a sea snake paid to live in a polluted world

Animals do the most amazing things. This is the first and only evidence of a snake changing its colour in response to industrial contamination, writes  Janaki Lenin on the Wire. Read on: 

Turtle-headed seasnakes (Emydocephalus annulatus) in polluted waters are changing colour. Creatures of the Indo-Pacific coast, they usually have high contrast black and white bands or blotches encircling their bodies from head to tail.

While snorkeling in the shallow Nouméa lagoon of Grande Terre Island, New Caledonia, more than 1,000 km east of Australia, evolutionary biologist Rick Shine of the University of Sydney and his family observed unusually black turtle-headed seasnakes. Back then, in 2003, males, the smaller of the sexes, seemed more prone to melanism (80%) than females (54%). These waters are polluted by runoff from nickel mining, the largest employer in this French protectorate. Besides the black seasnakes, Shine observed some retained faint bands. What’s causing the startling white rings to disappear?

A black turtle-headed seasnake sloughing its skin. Credit: Claire Goiran

Dark colours absorb heat, a useful trait for land reptiles in cold countries. But dark aquatic snakes gain no advantage because water is not a conductor of heat, says Shine. Nonetheless, entire populations of black individuals frequent the waters of Saumarez and Ashmore Reefs, Australia. However, in New Caledonia, the banded phase is prevalent and black snakes were not common in earlier years.

Turning black in response to pollution, a phenomenon called industrial melanism, afflicts many creatures, chief among them insects. With soot settling on their environment, several species of light-coloured moths stood out and became an easy meal for insectivorous birds. A surfeit of melanin turned some of them coal black. Since these insects matched sooty surfaces, they evaded predators. First recorded in 1848 in Manchester, UK, dark peppered moths (Biston betularia) became common within 50 years, almost replacing the speckled light phase.

However, black turtle-headed seasnakes don’t restrict themselves to backgrounds that match their body colour. When banded creatures move, they create an optical illusion: They seem to travel in the opposite direction and thus evade their killers. So losing bright bands wouldn’t be to the turtle-heads’ advantage.

Nor could black confer any advantages in catching prey. All males, females and the young scrape fish eggs off coral, and they don’t have to lie in ambush since their meals aren’t about to escape by swimming away.

“Initially I thought it might relate to habitat differences and camouflage; then perhaps mate choice and sexual selection,” Shine told The Wire. “But we gathered a lot of data, and neither of those two ideas worked out.”

What then could be the reason for the colour change? The explanation for why snakes of the same species living in the same lagoon have different colours had to wait 14 years.

In 2014, researchers from France published a study of pigeons becoming darker because of pollution. It wasn’t a result of soot settling on the Parisian birds’ plumage and making them dusky. Instead, contaminants such as zinc stuck to melanin in the darker feathers. This ability to detoxify their internal organs of harmful chemicals by shunting them to their feathers allowed dark-coloured birds to become more successful in cities than pale ones.

“I read the pigeon paper shortly after its publication, and I immediately thought that the link between pollution and melanism could explain why so many Emydocephalus annulatus were black,” Claire Goiran, a marine biologist at the University of New Caledonia, Nouméa, told The Wire.

(A) Emydocephalus annulatus (melanic specimen sloughing). (B) Melanic and banded E. annulatus from a peri-urban population near Noumea. (C) Frequencies of melanism in snakes from urban-industrial sites versus other areas.

Goiran and Shine compared 1,400 specimens that Shine had collected over 13 years. The samples came from the polluted waters along the coast of New Caledonia and the clear seas of Barrier Reef atoll in Australia. An overwhelming majority of the black seasnakes came from contaminated waters, while the ones in non-industrial areas had stark bands.

When pollutants enter their systems through their diet, they collect in the snakes’ skins. For instance, the shed skins of corn snakes contained high levels of lead, cadmium and mercury after researchers fed them contaminated mice.

In addition, seasnakes could also absorb chemicals from the water through their skins. All these contaminants, within their bodies and outside in the environment, accumulate in the skins just as they collect in pigeons’ feathers.

Shine and his colleagues found higher concentrations of trace elements in the shed skins of jet black turtle-headed seasnakes. Of the 13 pollutants they detected, five – cobalt, manganese, nickel, lead and zinc – were especially concentrated at levels that could cause health problems in mammals and birds. Even in banded ones, the black sections of the sheds had more contaminants than the white sections. Becoming black appeared to be a way of excreting pollutants.

Black snakes shed their skins oftener than pale ones because algal spores tend to accumulate on dark surfaces. If they didn’t slip off their skins, growing algae create drag, slowing down the snakes. In toxic waters, this frequent sloughing would not only get rid of algal spores but also the adhering contaminants.

Such adaptation to human activity can be rapid. In peppered moths, the mutation for black colour occurred as recently as 1819, nearly three decades before the first record. In turtle-heads, the researchers suspect the mutation for melanism is unique to the species. Seakraits (Laticauda sp.) are similarly banded, but the mutation to make jet black individuals may not have occurred yet even though Goiran and Shine found pollutants in the dark-ringed sections of their sloughs.

This is the first and only evidence of a snake changing its colour in response to industrial contamination.

Since pollution would affect both genders, why are males overwhelmingly melanistic?

“The sex bias isn’t very strong, and I haven’t looked at the data recently – the difference may even have disappeared,” says Shine. “But if it’s real, it might reflect the fact that male and female turtle-heads feed in different seasons, on the eggs of different types of fishes. One type may well have more pollutants than another.”

Despite the number of black seasnakes they observed, the Shine family didn’t catch a black-coloured juvenile. All the youngsters they caught were brightly banded, but Shine doesn’t think they change colour in their lifetime.

Since black turtle-heads are better at coping with pollution, it’s possible they may outnumber the banded ones just as dark peppered moths replaced light ones. However, this blackening of a species may not be irreversible. With stricter laws to check pollution in Britain, the light-coloured peppered moths are returning. Turtle-heads probably could retain their vivid banded forms off the New Caledonian shore if contaminants didn’t spill into the sea.

When the Nanny Leaves

Parents may underestimate how profound the loss can be to young children when a nanny leaves, writes Alexandra Sacks, a psychiatrist and co-author of a forthcoming book about the emotions of pregnancy and the postpartum period, in the NYT. Read on: 

As they walk out the door each morning, working parents are grateful for the nannies who care for their children in their absence. And yet, those same parents often struggle with the knowledge that their young children spend more waking hours with their nannies than with their mothers and fathers.

So when the time comes for the nanny to move on, parents may underestimate how profound the loss can be. As one mother in my women’s mental health psychiatry practice said, “I didn’t realize that she had become part of our family until she told us she had to leave.”

The start of a new school year, when child care needs change, is high season for nanny turnover, said Alene Mathurin, a former nanny who now works as a community organizer for other nannies through her blog “My Nanny Circle.”

“Families often arrange for nannies to leave when children are away at summer camp or on family vacation so it’s less disruptive for their school year routine,” she said.

If the nanny and the parents have a healthy relationship, it can help soften the emotional impact of the departure on a child. Research shows that it’s best when parents don’t let their own emotions interfere with helping their child mourn the loss of a caregiver. Showing that you can relate to children’s sad feelings about a nanny leaving may help them feel safer and more cared for.

Sometimes, parents are so stressed by the logistics of the departure of a nanny or babysitter — who will handle school drop-off? — that they may overlook the nuances of their child’s emotional needs. Parents may also struggle with their own separation anxiety: Fear about how they will fare without the nanny and guilt about their own daily goodbyes are complicating factors.

In a 2014 blog post titled “Is It Hard to Think About Nannies?” on Psychology Today, Susan Scheftel, a psychologist at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, described how parents’ anxieties about a nanny-role can cause them to ignore how important a nanny has become. “She is there when and because the parents are not,” Dr. Scheftel wrote. As a result, Dr. Scheftel said, “Families may need to deny their enormous need for assistance by refusing to acknowledge the nanny’s role or her individual humanity.” This can contribute to tension between a caregiver and the parents that may either contribute to her exit, or create stress in the home that interferes with a child’s sense of stability when it’s time for the nanny to leave.

Cameron Lynne Macdonald, a former nanny and medical sociologist, found in research for her 2010 book, “Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs and the Micropolitics of Mothering,” that some families expect nannies to play a paradoxical role she called the “shadow mother.” (Yes, nannies can be men, and serve as shadow fathers, but research tends to focus on women.) In such cases, parents expect a nanny to form a strong bond with a child but also appear invisible in the family, “to be simultaneously present and absent in the children’s lives,” she wrote. By asking a nanny to work in the shadows, parents may avoid their own feelings about how psychologically important the nanny has become, and so may be less sensitive to their children’s needs around the separation.

Some parents do this because they are afraid that a deeper bond with a nanny will interfere with their child’s healthy attachment to them. In fact, studies show the opposite. When a child has a high-quality bond with a caregiver, this can actually help complement and reinforce parental attachment. Therefore, children who are more securely attached to both their nannies and parents feel more secure over all.

In a report in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis in March, Dr. Jessica Yakeley, a British psychiatrist, found that children have enough psychological room to attach to both parents and a nanny or multiple other caretakers.

Families and the child care workers they hire share a complex relationship that merges the personal with the professional.

Ms. Mathurin, whose mother left her in the care of a grandmother in St. Lucia at age 3, said that transitions can be especially stressful for nannies who themselves may have a complicated family history. “We don’t realize the toll it has on women to leave their loved ones behind, and then love the children they work with,” she said.

In her research, Dr. Macdonald interviewed nannies who said they in turn found the burden to perfect the art of “detached attachment” exhausting: How can you adequately bond with a child just enough, but not so much that it would make separation traumatic and make the parents feel lesser-than?

Around transitions, parents, children and nannies alike may experience a range of emotions including competition, guilt, abandonment, relief, resentment and love. An open and reflective dialogue including all parties — parents, nannies and children — can make saying goodbye a little easier.

Following are some suggestions to help ease the transition.

Parents — assess your baggage. Talk to your partner, friends, mental health professional or anyone else you trust about your nanny’s role in your family. Unresolved baggage may bubble up and lead to unrealistic expectations and more disruptive transitions if a nanny has to leave.

Practice fair employment. Employers and child care workers should be clear about their expectations. A written contract that is respectful to both parties should be followed. Look to groups like the National Domestic Workers Alliance for ethical employer guidelines, such as terms around notice of resignation or job termination. The more mutual trust and respect you and your nanny share, the better you will be able to work together to help your child prepare for a transition.

Keep communication direct and open. Create an environment in which your nanny feels comfortable talking to you about issues that relate to job satisfaction. Give your nanny advance notice if you can no longer maintain a full-time position when your child starts school. Once it has been decided that a nanny is leaving, ask for her advice on how you can both support your child.

Work together to put the children first. It may be helpful for the nanny to sit down with a child and explain why she has to move on. It may also help children to hear that they didn’t do anything wrong, and that the nanny’s goodbye is not their fault. Let your children’s questions be your guide about what information they’re capable of handling. Drawing the nanny a farewell card can help young children who may not be able to put their feelings into words.

Facilitate a smooth transition to the next caregiver. If possible, allow for a gradual period of overlap and minimize other changes in a child’s routine. Transitional objects like stuffed animals can help children find safety in familiarity — this is not the time to try to throw away a beloved blanket.

The woman who built a $2.3 million beauty business while homeschooling her 14 children

I admit to pausing a second when businesswoman Tammie Umbel pitched me on her Shea Terra Organics skin-care company a few months ago - and how she built it while raising and homeschooling 14 children.

Wow, I thought. How does one do that?

"The purpose of Shea Terra was never intended to be so that I could go out and work," the 44-year-old mom and businesswoman said.

"Whatever I could do while being in the kids' presence and in their service when they need me emotionally and physically, then I would do it. But I never said I wasn't going to make money."

Umbel travels the world finding raw materials for her business that primarily caters to women. Ten employees manufacture products with names like Argan Oil, Shea Butter and African Black Soap.

The two-decade-old company grossed US$1.7 million (NZ$2.3m) in revenue last year, Umbel said. She turned a profit of about US$350,000 (NZ$483,000) in 2016 - and is rightly proud of it.

Tammie Umbel, founder of Shea Terra Organics. Photo / Sarah L. Voisin

The company gets about $100,000 (NZ$138,000) a month in revenue online and most of the rest from Vitamin Shoppe, the 700-store chain that carries her lotions and creams.

"I absolutely love what I do," Umbel said.

"I have done everything myself, from A to Z."

The children - ages 4 to 26 - go everywhere with her.

Not all of them at the same time, of course. Her oldest child graduated from the University of Virginia and is in her last year at Liberty University College of Osteopathic Medicine. Three others are in college studying engineering, cybersecurity and medicine.

Some might accompany her on sourcing "vacations" to Africa, something of a logistical nightmare. Sometimes they just pile into her recreational vehicle (sleeps 10), and off they go to an industry show in Florida.

"It's not easy," she said, with notable understatement. "We have to keep our passports up to date, which is a nightmare. Airports are tough. Lots of times, people in airports are jerks."

Most of Umbel's ingredients are things I have never heard of, like the argan oil from Morocco.

"In 2003, a Moroccan worker of mine brought a bottle of argan oil to me that his mother had made. I knew immediately I held the oil of the future, although I detested that it sounded like the name of a gas."

She buys marula oil in Namibia, injecting some much-needed cash into a former mining community. And Egypt is her source of something called Black Seed Oil.

"I built Shea Terra the old-fashioned way," said Umbel, who lives on a Loudoun County, farm with her physician husband. "Hard work is how. Dedication. I took the money I made and reinvested in the business. No debt. No loans. No investors."

As the company has grown, Umbel has trained her staff so she can run the company remotely from her Leesburg farm, a half-hour from the factory that she rents for $5,300 a month.

If she must go to the factory, sometimes the children come, too.

"I would line them up at tables in the shipping area and give them (school) lessons while running back and forth to orders," she said. "I would teach them alongside me as I ran the company. Was it difficult? Very. But I was determined to succeed."

Shea Terra Organics products. Photo / Sarah L. Voisin

The self-taught businesswoman has had to learn marketing on the fly. Most of it came from roaming the aisles at Vitamin Shoppe. She noticed that retail sales demanded symmetry and continuity. Same color. All in a line.

"Retailers want shelf presence," Umbel said. "They want to see five products together, lined up. They want to be able to put a whole regimen on their shelves. They don't want to see just one piece. If you took 10 different fragrances and 10 different products, you basically have chaos."

Umbel grew up in Prince George's County and spent much of her teen years living by her wits. She was born with a curiosity about foreign cultures, including Asian and Indian.

"I was fascinated by different cultures," she said. "My best friend was from Korea, and I loved to go to their house and eat their food. I was a strange child."

She would camp out in front of a black-and-white television and watch public-service ads about hungry children.

"I was fascinated by that, and I wanted one day to create jobs for these people," she said. "I was very conscious of human suffering."

Umbel, a practicing Muslim, met her husband, Syed Ishaq, at a mosque when she was 16. He was 12 years older and had just arrived from Pakistan, where he had attended medical school. Ishaq is now a kidney specialist - a nephrologist - with Inova Fairfax and Access Medicine.

"He was very handsome and well-mannered," she said.

She married him when she was 16 and gave birth to their first child two years later.

While her husband studied for his medical exams, Umbel in 1990 created a clothing company that was modestly profitable and specialized in ethnic garb from South Asia and the Middle East. She closed it down after she became pregnant with their fourth child.

She smelled - literally - another opportunity in the various international people who frequented the Islamic Center near Washington's Embassy Row.

"These women who hung around the mosque had natural beauty and skin they would take care of with these different natural ingredients," she said. Some would cover their body with a blanket and "smoke" their skin with woods from Africa.

"I saw all these different natural regimens and said all these things could make a really good business if I introduced them to the American population," Umbel said. "I could bring some very needed income into the [African] villages."

She started Shea Terra in 2000 in the basement of her Arlington home.

At first, she cooked up some shea butter. Then some cream. She taught herself how to make soap.

The big break came in late 2001, when she returned from a lengthy trip to find $1,000 in shea butter orders from online sales. Soon, she was selling $30,000 a month, reinvesting most of the income in the company.

Umbel eventually moved to her current facility near Dulles International Airport, where she makes and stores her products. Most of her raw materials are flown in through Dulles and trucked to her factory.

The biggest margins are in her facial-care line.

The nice thing about the beauty and skin-care business is that it tends to be less affected by recessions than others. "People are really vain and willing to pay a lot of money for their face," she said.

Shea Terra got a boost when actress Sarah Jessica Parker posted on social media applauding its face wash. "She said that her face had not been that soft since she was a baby," Umbel said. "She was thanking her celebrity aesthetician."

It's not all glamorous, though.

Believe it or not, the beauty business has a dangerous side.

"The border control people are scary people," Umbel said, referring to her travels abroad. "Overseas, they tend to give people in general a hard time. You don't know if you are ever going to see daylight again."

But on the other hand, her children go places that most others may never see.

"Not a lot of kids can say, 'I was in Namibia and on a safari at Etosha Park'."

(Source: NZ Herald)

The short-tailed Albatross: A majestic bird driven to the brink of extinction

Its trusting nature and lack of agility on the ground has long made the albatross easy prey for humans. Whole colonies were once massacred for their soft down feathers, driving the species to near-extinction. The first of a set of articles on this bird looks at the early, disastrous history of its interaction with the Japanese, writes Ishi Hiroyuki, the environmental journalist and scientist, on Nippon.com. Read on: 

The Short-Tailed Albatross of the Senkaku Islands
It was 1988, and I was a newspaper reporter on a small airplane flying over the Senkaku Islands. We made two turns around the islands while I had the cameraman accompanying me take a series of photos of the rugged cliffs passing before our eyes. Later, when the shots were developed, we could see fluffy black-brown chicks nestled in seven locations along the rocky ledges of the seaside cliffs.
We had just discovered Japan’s second short-tailed albatross (Phoebastria albatrus) colony, the first being at Torishima in the Izu Islands. It had actually been known as early as 1971 that the Senkakus
were home to a colony of albatrosses; we had just happened to photograph the chicks. Today there are only a few hundred of the birds remaining, but because entry to the islands is prohibited, no progress has been made on their research. Just one bird, however, did lead us to a big discovery.

The Translocation Project

A pair of albatrosses in a courting dance

Nearly all of the short-tailed albatrosses on the planet, with the exception of those at the Senkaku Islands, are concentrated on Torishima at the southern edge of the Izu Islands. Torishima is a volcanic island; should it ever erupt, the albatrosses could be wiped out. Since 2008, a national project has been underway to move the colony to a safer location.

The translocation project involves capturing newborn short-tailed albatross chicks and taking them 350 kilometers away to Mukojima, an uninhabited island in the Ogasawara Islands that used to be the location of an albatross colony. At Mukojima, the chicks are artificially raised and finally released to form a new breeding population. This is the first attempt of this kind in the world for albatrosses, and is based on careful research by Satō Fumio and others at the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology into the minimum safe age for chicks to be transplanted to new breeding grounds.

In February 2008, 10 chicks were transported by helicopter from Torishima to Mukojima. There, for four months to the end of May, project leader Deguchi Tomohiro and other researchers from the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology fed the chicks and cared for them. Feed for the chicks was transported by fishing vessels every week from Chichijima, a three- to four-hour trip. The researchers camped on Mukojima until the chicks had grown. The translocation project continues to this day, with a total of 69 birds hand-reared to adulthood in the new location.

Ichirō Comes Home
The first batch of hand-reared albatrosses released from Mukojima roamed the north Pacific for three years before returning to the island in 2011. The first one to alight was a male named Ichirō. The next year he mated with Yuki, a wild albatross who was to become his life partner, but the egg she laid was infertile. For three years thereafter there were no young. But in 2014, the research group made a joyous discovery: A hand-reared female dubbed “Y11” had apparently mated with a male wild albatross born on Torishima and laid a viable egg on Nakōdojima, just 5 kilometers from Mukojima. The egg had hatched before the observers even realized what had happened. This was the first albatross chick to be born in the Ogasawara Islands in 80 years.

Amid soaring expectations, Ichirō and Yuki finally produced a viable egg on their fourth try, and a chick was born in January 2016. Congratulations and praise poured in from researchers around the world who had been watching the translocation project with keen interest. In May of the same year, another chick of unknown parentage was discovered on Yomejima, another of the Ogasawara Islands.
Where had Yuki, a wild albatross, come from? Satō and his group worked diligently to trace her origins, but it was Eda Masaki, a lecturer at the Hokkaidō University Museum, who found the answer. An analysis of Yuki’s genes revealed the unexpected fact that she had been born in the Senkaku Islands, more than 2,000 kilometers away.

Later research showed that 7% of the chicks born on Torishima had genes that could be traced back to the Senkakus, indicating that the parents had most likely met in their migratory routes over the north Pacific. Further study indicated that Yuki’s genes were very unlike those of the Torishima-born chicks, suggesting with high probability that the albatrosses of the Senkaku Islands represent a totally new species.

Satō believes that this may account for the fact that Yuki’s first eggs were infertile, as her reproductive cycle may have been slightly different. The day may soon come when the new breed of albatross is internationally recognized and given a name.

A Tokyo Island of Castaways
Administratively, Torishima is a part of the Tokyo metropolis. It is located at the southern edge of the Izu Islands, 580 kilometers south of the mainland portion of Tokyo and roughly 300 kilometers south of Hachijōjima. The small, 4.8-square-kilometer island is an active double volcano measuring 2.5 kilometers across at its widest, 7 kilometers in circumference, and 394 meters high at its highest point. It has been unpopulated since a small community of 125 people was wiped out by a volcanic eruption in 1902. There have been repeated eruptions since then.

The Kuroshio, a powerful ocean current that sweeps toward the east along the southern edge of the Japanese archipelago, periodically makes a big loop to the south, where it bumps into Torishima. There was a time when the island was populated with castaways from frequent shipwrecks—hapless fishing vessels caught in its powerful flow—who were left to eke out hard and tragic lives that have been portrayed in numerous literary works.

The remote island of Torishima.

An Island of Shipwrecks and Birds
The frequent shipwrecks were in part due to a seventeenth-century prohibiton against the building of ocean-going ships imposed by the Edo shogunate as a strategy to prevent the daimyō from building their own navies. Ships larger than 100 tons could not be built; no vessel was to have more than one sail or one mast; there was to be no keel; and the hull had to be flat. This made for vessels that did not fare well in storms and were easily wrecked.

Records compiled in the online Torishima hyōryū shi (History of Torishima Shipwrecks) show 14 shipwrecks on Torishima during the Edo period leaving 98 castaways, 80 of whom were eventually rescued. The longest stay on the island was achieved by three surviving members of a crew, originally 12 strong, who were washed ashore in 1720 and lived on the island for 19 years and 3 months. On average, those who survived a shipwreck were confined to Torishima for three years, but many, many more died of starvation, disease, or suicide.

With no fresh water or edible plants, Torishima is a harsh place to live. The fact that 80% of the people cast upon its shores nevertheless did survive was due to the island’s dense population of albatrosses—a frequent feature of the tales told by the survivors.

There is a written record of a 1788 shipwreck on Torishima left by the surviving crew of the ship out of Osaka that was portrayed by Yoshimura Akira in his 1976 novel Hyōryū (Adrift). This record includes a passage referring to the albatrosses.

[After being washed ashore] we pushed our way through the tall pampas grass to come upon a vast expanse totally covered in white and black birds. They were big birds and we were quite taken aback to see so many congregated in one place.

We know that 11 of the recorded shipwrecks occurred from November through March. Those who were trapped on the island during this time had a good chance of surviving because this was the period when the migrating albatrosses would be present. The birds provided meat and eggs to sustain the castaways.

An albatross egg is six times as large as a chicken egg and can make a good vessel to capture rain water for drinking, and clothing and mats can be made from the feathers and dried skin of the birds. Industrious survivors knew enough to prepare plenty of dried bird meat to stave off starvation during the period when the albatrosses were gone from the island.

Travelers of the North Pacific
A fully grown albatross will weigh around 7 kilograms and its outspread wings will measure 2.4 meters across. It rarely flaps its wings, preferring to ride on the winds like a giant glider. Albatrosses have no fear of humans and are clumsy walkers, making them easy prey to capture and kill—hence the Japanese name ahōdori, which literally means “foolish bird.” The Chinese characters for the bird’s name, 信天翁 (xintianweng) literally mean “an old man trusting in the heavens”—one who stupidly waits for food to fall from the sky.

Short-tailed albatrosses used to proliferate in the Ogasawara Islands, particularly Torishima, and the Senkaku Islands, but over the years some 5 million of the birds were slaughtered for their down. There were fears that the species would become extinct, but that danger has effectively been avoided thanks to protective measures. In 1962, Japan designated and protected the short-tailed albatross as a Special Natural Monument. (Illustration by Izuka Tsuyoshi)

In 1861 the French poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire published “L’Albatros,” a poem describing one of these birds captured by sailors at sea with imagery that mirrors the “foolish bird” of Asian tradition:

À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l’azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d’eux.
Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid!
Scarcely have they placed them on the deck
Than these kings of the sky, clumsy, ashamed,
Pathetically let their great white wings
Drag beside them like oars.
That winged voyager, how weak and gauche he is,
So beautiful before, now comic and ugly!
(Translation from William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil, 1954.)

There are currently believed to be 21 species of albatrosses. Two species, the short-tailed albatross (Phoebastria albatross) and the black-footed albatross (Phoebastria nigripes), are found on Torishima. There is a very small colony of Laysan albatrosses (Phoebastria immutabilis) on Mukojima in the Ogasawara Islands.

Migration takes the birds of Torishima away from the island in late April to early May; they return to breed in early October. Young birds that have matured enough to leave the nest do not return until the third year after their departure. Except for breeding season, the birds spend all of their lives over the seas. The albatrosses born in Japan migrate over a broad area of the north Pacific, including the Bering Sea, the Aleutian Islands, and off the west coast of the continental United States.

Feathers for Export
After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the down feathers of the albatrosses nesting en masse on the small islands in the Pacific off the main Japan coast became a valuable commodity for acquiring foreign currency. Mass nesting sites could be found not only on Torishima, but also on the Ogasawara Islands of Kitanoshima, Mukojima, Yomejima, and Nishinoshima, the Daitō Islands of Kita Daitōjima and Oki Daitōjima east of Okinawa, the Senkaku Islands, and the Penghu Islands near Taiwan. It is believed there were more than 10 million albatrosses throughout the Pacific at that time.
Tamaoki Han’emon (1839–1910), a Meiji-era entrepreneur, was the first to see the value of albatross down. In 1877, he set up the Tamaoki Shōkai company, and up to 1922 when he finally left Torishima, Tamaoki collected large volumes of feather down from the albatrosses, which he then exported to Europe. The barren outcropping was transformed into a treasure island. He was backed in all of this by the Meiji government, which even paid Tamaoki cash incentives to seek out more albatross breeding grounds.

Tamaoki’s venture might be better called a massacre. According to Hiraoka Akitoshi, the author of Ahōdori o otta Nihonjin (The Japanese Who Chased the Albatrosses), from around 1890 onward, nearly 400,000 birds on Torishima were slaughtered every year. One man beat 100 to 200 albatrosses to death every day. By the turn of the century, there were 300 people living on the small island, their sole purpose to collect albatross down. An elementary school was built and tracks laid for carts to haul the bird carcasses.

Yamashina Yoshimaro, founder of the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology, estimated that by 1902, at least 5 million albatrosses had been killed, bringing the species to the brink of extinction.

Why I’ll be spending my golden years with my golden girls

Kiran Sidhu and her friends are in their 40s and none of them have children. They have decided to buy a house together, where they can pool resources, skills and a yoga teacher – and never be lonely, writes Kiran Sidhu on the Guardian. Read on: 

I have a group of female friends and we are all in our early 40s. None of us have children. We have known each other for what seems to be an eternity; we went to college together, and then visited each other at different universities and remained good friends. I clearly see a timeline of our conversations throughout the years: how we stayed up all night studying for exams fuelled by copious amounts of Red Bull and Hula Hoops; how we compared notes of the first time we dabbled with drugs at university; we talked of the hedonistic parties we attended and the hearts crushed by an array of unsuitable partners. These days, as well as discussing the healing powers of yoga and green tea, a new topic of conversation has entered our midst like a brick through the now-opaque window of our youth: who will look after us in our old age?

I feel we have reached an age where this question can no longer be swatted like an annoying fly. It needs to be answered, or at least wrapped up and packaged like an unwanted gift. It is assumed that, if you have children, getting help in your older years is easy. But what if you don’t have children to help you chug along when life becomes tough? Who will look after you then?

There are myriad reasons why none of us had children; some made conscious decisions not to, others did not. Regardless of reasons, we are all in the same position of facing what will certainly be the most challenging times of our lives, in terms of physical capabilities, without children. This makes me feel a little disconcerted. I told a friend who has three children. I got an unexpected response: “You don’t have kids so they could help you in your old age!” To do so would be a selfish motivation, she added. I asked her why she had children. “I wanted to have my own family,” she said. I asked her why, and she said: “I wanted to be surrounded by love.” I questioned whether her own motivation to have children was an altruistic one.

We want children to love, to fill our lives, to give us purpose, to carry on the family name, and to satisfy our own maternal desire to nurture and to love. The decision is never altruistic. Essentially, we are all asking for the same thing: to be loved.

Kiran Sidhu: ‘No one will feel useless - it’s a highly practical plan.’ Photograph: Amit Lennon for the Guardian

In India, where my roots lie, family does mean looking after each other, especially in old age. Living in an extended family with an elder is the norm. As a rebellious teen and as a woman in her 20s, I had a very bleak view of this; there seemed to be no room for individuality in a family that worked as a nucleus. (This was my view when I would stroll in at 6am after clubbing trying not to wake anyone).

As I get older, I understand the value of living in a family that has several generations looking out for each other. As a younger person, the focus is on the individual, but when you get older, I believe the focus changes to your connection with others.

My grandmother lives in a house that has two generations under the same roof. She is in her late 80s and doesn’t worry about whether she can pay the heating bill or not, there is always home-cooked food and a plethora of visitors; loneliness is an alien concept. More importantly, as her ageing body weakens and is prone to falling, there is always someone to pick her up. My granny, who doesn’t speak English, who hasn’t visited any country other than England, whose world is microscopic compared with mine, will most certainly have a more comfortable old age than the one I see myself facing.

My friends and I have come up with an alternative way to live out our golden years. When the time comes, we have decided that we will pool all our resources and buy a property that we will live in. According to Age UK, more than 2 million people in England over the age of 75 live alone, and more than a million older people say they go for more than a month without speaking to a friend, neighbour or family member. With our alternative old-age plan, we hope to avoid that loneliness. We will all live together and be each other’s carer and emotional companion. There will be no one tutting and losing patience with our slower pace of life, as we all would be ageing together. Our own individual care will be paramount, as each of us will be relying on the other.

There will be collective responsibility for each other’s health. Currently, we all participate in pursuits such as running, swimming, yoga and cycling, and none of us are smokers. When we’re old and living together, we will hire a yoga instructor, who will visit us once a week for a group class.

The feeling of losing one’s usefulness and purpose plagues older people, whether you have children or not. I wonder whether this feeling is magnified if you don’t have grandchildren to babysit or children to worry about. When our golden years come a-calling and we all move in together, my friends and I have decided that all our talents and skills will be utilised. No one will feel useless. It’s a highly practical plan. One of my friends is a nurse, one of us is a whizz in the kitchen, another a keen gardener, while I love DIY and have an eye for interior design. We will be pooling not only our resources, but also our unique, individual talents and skills. Instead of being redundant, these will be needed more than ever and celebrated.

Since my friends and I came up with our alternative old-age plan, getting old no longer feels like a daunting prospect, and I no longer shy away from it – instead it feels hopeful and promising. I am almost looking forward to it. Sam plays the piano and the guitar, Steph is a published novelist and I’m a writer; I look forward to the bohemian life that we will lead and being surrounded by like-minded people I will have known most of my adult life.

It almost feels like the perfect society, where we all focus on the greater good: helping each other out when we need it most. I envisage songs and storytelling by the piano and a house filled with a certain joie de vivre. Yes, we have no children to rely on, but we have each other, and we will share the understanding of what it means to get old. In fact, several friends of mine, who do have children, have asked me whether they can be included in our old-age plan.

To some it may appear a little utopian, but as my friend with kids insightfully pointed out, it’s no more utopian than believing that your kids will look after you in your old age.