THE NATURAL MOMENT 



UP FRONT 



~< See preceding two pages 



The Pantanal is an immense 

 floodplain that percolates 

 through parts of Brazil, Bolivia, 

 and Paraguay. About 80 percent of 

 the land is deeded to cattle ranch- 

 ers, yet remarkably, the area's 

 patchwork of meadows and 

 swamps still supports jabirus, 

 jaguars, and peccaries. Another lo- 

 cal exotic, the giant anteater 

 (Myrmecophaga tridactyla), actually 

 gets a calorie boost thanks to the 

 farmed cattle. The anteater pic- 

 tured here was going from one 

 cow patty to the next, foraging lor 

 ants beneath the fertile droppings. 



Snuffling through cow dung may 

 be a good way to get a quick bite, 

 but it hardly begins to show oft the 

 giant anteater 's most amazing adap- 

 tation: its snout. The lower and up- 

 per jaws are joined to create a nar- 

 row tubelike mouth with no teeth. 

 The animal can open its mouth 

 slightly by rotating the lower jaw. 

 That's gap enough for the anteater 's 

 sticky, two-foot-long tongue to 

 dart out and extract some thirty 

 thousand ants and termites a day. 



In most circumstances giant 

 anteaters forage alone. Mothers 

 carrying young on their backs, 

 papoose-style, are the exception. 

 The prospect of catching a pair on 

 film lured photographer Theo Allots 

 to the Pantanal seven times. Luck 

 finally struck when Allots — not 

 imagining the animals would be ac- 

 tive at midday — was in the midst of 

 a siesta. After being roused, he raced 

 off in pursuit. As he was getting this 

 image, Allofs says he watched 

 through his lens as stray ants scur- 

 ried up the mother's snout, forcing 

 her to stop periodically and brush 

 them out of her eyes. — Erin Espclie 



What Little Memories 

 Are Made Of 



Mitzi. Two syllables across time, and for Eric R. Kandel, 

 the memories rush in. She sits on the edge of his child's 

 bed, touches his face, opens her blouse. Would he like 

 to touch her? She is the family housekeeper, from the working 

 class, "an attractive, sensual young woman of about twenty-five." 

 He is a boy of eight, the second son of a middle-class family living 

 through the dying days of prewar Vienna, once the intellectual 

 capital of Europe. A sophisticated culture swirls all around them, 

 but of course he is much too young to imagine what secrets Mitzi 

 has in store. "I barely grasped what she was talking about," he 

 writes, from a vantage sixty-seven years later, "but her attempt at 

 seduction had its effect on me, and I suddenly felt different than I 

 ever had before." 



Then, less than a year after his encounter with Mitzi: a terrible 

 day. Soldiers bang on the door. You must leave at once. Hurriedly, 

 he, his brother, and his mother gather a few bits of clothing and 

 rush to the home of another family of Jews. His father, Hermann, 

 is missing. The family, frantic with worry about Hermann, returns 

 a tew days later to find the house ransacked by the Nazis. But they 

 are the lucky ones. Hermann served as a soldier in the First World 

 War, and he can prove it. The family is reunited, emigrates from 

 Austria, and begins a new life in America. 



Memory has always fascinated me," Kandel writes, in his intel- 

 lectual autobiography. In Search of Memory (forthcoming this 

 month from WW Norton). With such vivid recollections of the 

 past, is it any wonder? In "Learning to Find Your Way" (page 32), 

 we draw excerpts from that book, which bears witness not only to 

 memories of sexual awakenings and the early days of the Holocaust, 

 but also to the discovery, decades later, of how such searing mo- 

 ments can be permanently preserved in neural pathways for instant 

 recall. The study of memory lured Kandel away from a planned 

 career as a psychoanalyst to the study of basic neurobiology and the 

 neurophysiology of the brain. Kandel finds his compass in the writ- 

 ings of Freud himself: Psychoanalysis, Freud had insisted, would one 

 day learn all it could learn about the unconscious by putting patients 

 on the couch. The neurobiologist would explain more completely 

 what the psychoanalyst could probe only superficially. 



Fast-forward through a life of science, highlighted by Kandel's 

 Nobel Prize— winning discoveries of how long-term memories are 

 fixed at the cellular and molecular levels. Those biochemical un- 

 derpinnings in place, Kandel and his students could explore one of 

 the most intriguing questions at the intersection of philosophy, 

 physics, and the study of the mind: how do animals — in particular, 

 how does the human animal — represent memories of place? 



— Peter Brown 



6 



NATURAL HISTORY March 2006 



