Ada Lovelace Day and Jeanne Villepreux-Power

Today is Ada Lovelace Day so folks all over the world will be blogging about women in science and I would like to talk about Jeanne Villepreux-Power. Ms Villepreux-Power was a marine biologist who in 1832 designed and built the first aquaria in order to study marine molluscs on the island of Sicily. I suppose she lived close enough to the sea to have a daily bucket or two of fresh water, so she wouldn’t have needed to design things like aeration, UV filtration systems and protein skimmers, although she must have been aware that such things would be needed if she were forced to operate a closed system.

Between 1832 and 1843 she studied the secret life of the paper nautilus, a small pelagic octopus which has a sexual history which deserves a few words: Females grow to a size of 10cm while males barely reach 2cm. Females mate and reproduce frequently while the male mates once before dying. In fact the male organ becomes detached during mating and the female takes it away with her. The female then produces a curving egg case into which she lays her eggs. The eggcase is bouyed by a bubble of gas and can be found bobbing along the surface waters of the world’s oceans, with the female sheltering inside and clutching her takeaway male organ.

None of this had been known before Ms Jeanne Villepreux-Power and her aquariums came along. No one had realised that the male looked so different and it was generally accepted that the male organ the female carries was a parasitic worm.

Imagine  what she must have felt upon unearthing the secrets of the paper nautilus. Similar to the sexual history of the deep sea angler fish, where the male attaches itself to the female and fades into nothing but gonads, it is one of those wonders of nature that make you want to smile quietly to yourself.

At the same time, one must consider the circumstances that led to her being able to follow her studies. As a young woman she walked to Paris and took a job as an assistant dressmaker where she was given the chance to design and make a stunning bridal outfit for a princess. The fame and standing she thus aquired brought her to the attention of a noble English merchant. She married him and moved to his residence on the island of Sicily, where she was able to do her science, design her aquariums and discover her paper nautili.

Unfortunately we will never know much about Ms Jeanne Villepreux-Power as most of her records were lost in a shipwreck, but I wish I knew whether she was driven by ambition to marry Mr James Power, enabling her some time for studies undisturbed by other wordly worries. I would also like to know whether she told him about the paper nautilus and whether he appreciated her discovery. I would like to think so.

Source: Juillac Claude Arnal; Jeanne Villepreux-Power A Pioneering Experimental Macalogist.

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It’s Monday

This appeared in the Guardian the other day and it set my brain rolling on those unfortunately long commutes I seem to be doing these days. I once spent a while hanging out with the Santhali tribe in the Indian state of Jharkhand, some while back. This particular tribe is not officially a matriarchy, at least not according to all the official sources I have seen so far. But let me lay it out properly: The Santhali are basically Iron Age farmers, live in permanant villages and cultivatie a variety of crops including red rice, lentils and vegetables. They keep cows, water buffalo, chickens, goats, pigs and fish. They make their houses out of cow dung and locally mined minerals. They don’t really go to school and some are kind of hindus, some are kind of christian and some are kind of animist. What did strike me was the women.

You see, the women did most of the work. They did the farming and the house building, the child bearing and rearing and the logistics, and they were strong. Physically. I saw women dragging their besotted husbands home from the weekly market, bashing them furiously about the ears the whole way. I saw women building the village, tilling and ploughing the land. I saw a woman trotting down the road carrying 50 kilo sacks of rice on her head, because the bus had broken down.  I asked, where are you going and she cheerfully replied, to Barai, 20km away down a stony thorny track. She wasn’t wearing anything on her feet either.

The women carry the household money tied into a knot of their shawls. They decide what to do with their land, what suplies need to be bought for the market and whether they can buy silver for themselves or bangles for their daughters. The men were not consulted, instead they seemed to spend most of their time participating in one of three pursuits: Gambling, drinking or hunting, the latter consisting mainly of hitting small birds with catapults. Everyone seemed perfectly happy with this arrangement.

I lived and taught in a school and the attendance of girls and boys was about equal. It was the mothers who brought their children to school and paid the twenty rupee fee. If a child was repeatedly naughty or absent, its mother would berate it loudly and send it back to herding livestock until it had shown a greater appreciation of learning.

They brewed and distilled the local toddy and spirits and when the season of dancing and festivity came along, they all lined up neatly, wrapped in shawls and sarees and danced to the men’s drumming.

What the Guardian article talks about, women of the world running its ecnomics, is a nice idea, but I am afraid that most of the world’s women are too busy building the hosues, raising the children, growing the food, organising the community and hauling their husbands home from a night at the market to be concerned our problems.

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Year of the Ox

We were on the lookout for yesterday’s annular solar eclipse. It was late in the afternoon, around 5pm Borneo time, but the high clouds that gather towards the end of the day at this time year got in the way. We just saw the daylight go a bit funny, that was all.

We go back to work tomorrow. Well, I do, and the kid is going back to daycare, but Riko is starting to come to grips with building us a house. My grandfather died last year and he left me a legacy that is getting smaller with every drop of the pound. For now it will be enough to make a tropical homestead on the 5 acres of scrubby hillside we own up by the mangroves at Sulaman Lake.

This will be a most intersting challenge. I have far too much academic education with a BSc in Marine Biology, an MSc in Fisheries Science and ten years of travelling the globe learning about not very much. My husband left school by age 16 and can make and fix anything. He has left the state of Sabah twice and both times became quite ill with the experience. What we are going to manage to do together remains to be seen.

Happy Chinese New Year, here’s hoping its better than the last one.

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