A desire to explore the adaptations 
of animals to stressful environments 
has led Cynthia Carey to study quail in 
the California desert, toads in the high 
Rockies, and finches in the cold Michi- 
gan winter. Her present-day research 
includes the physiological and morpho- 
logical adaptations of bird eggs to high 
altitudes. Carey is an assistant pro- 
fessor in the Department of Environ- 
mental, Population, and Organismic 
Biology at the University of Colorado. 
Like coauthor Carey, Richard L. 
Marsh began to study birds’ metabolic 
adaptations to cold climates while he 
was a graduate student at the Univer- 
sity of Michigan. The project he 
worked on allowed him to “combine an 
interest in biochemistry with interests 
in adaptations of birds to their environ- 
ments.” Now a postdoctoral scholar at 
the University of California, Irvine, 
Marsh is continuing his research on 
muscle physiology and temperature 
regulation in birds and reptiles. 
Lynn Rogers has been monitoring 
the life styles of black bears in north- 
eastern Minnesota since 1969. A wild- 
life research biologist at the North 
Central Forest Experiment Station of 
the U.S.D.A. Forest Service in Saint 
Paul, he has paid particular attention 
to the behavior and the habitat re- 
quirements of the bears. Rogers is 
known as a zealot when it comes to 
bears. He thinks nothing of crawling 
into a hibernating bear’s den and mea- 
suring the animal’s heart beat by lay- 
ing his head on its chest. He is also 
expert with the rectal thermometer. 
Such talents have led to more than one 
interesting moment, but he is as yet 
unscathed, albeit looking more bear- 
like every year. 
Roger M. Knutson’s observations of 
solar heating in plants were made 
over a period of years as he taught a 
course that took him and his students 
out among the spring flora of north- 
eastern Iowa. A professor of biology 
at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, 
Knutson is also studying the primary 
productivity of annual herbs, such as 
giant ragweed and nettle, that grow 
on flood plains. In an earlier article 
for Natural History (“Plants in 
Heat,” March 1979), Knutson de- 
scribed his investigations into the reg- 
ulation of heat production in eastern 
skunk cabbage. 
William Dwight Billings first 
worked on the physiological ecology of 
high-mountain plants more than forty 
years ago in the Sierra Nevada. Since 
then, his research has taken him to 
mountains throughout the world — in 
Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, and 
Lapland, and along the Rocky Moun- 
tains and the Andes from the Arctic to 
the Equator. Billings is James B. Duke 
Professor of Botany at Duke Univer- 
sity, where he is currently studying the 
effects of increasing temperatures on 
the exchange of carbon dioxide among 
plants, soils, and microorganisms in 
tundra ecosystems. 
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