Still feeling stuffed from your Thanksgiving feast? Meet the Guineafowl puffer (Arothron meleagris)! Instead of chowing down on turkey, this fish feeds mainly on the tips of branching corals. It gets round not by eating but to avoid being eaten, swallowing water to dissuade predators from attempting such a big bite. If it’s late to inflate, this fish also has bacteria in its body that can be toxic.
Photo: merav, CC BY-NC 4.0, iNaturalist
Here’s a festive Throwback Thursday photo from 1969! On this Thanksgiving, the world-famous parade passed the Museum’s 77th Street turret with a very special float: a sauropod dinosaur. This inflatable Apatosaurus measured an impressive 60 ft (18.3 m) long! The giant green dinosaur featured big eyes, a wide grin, and a 20-ft (6-m) tail. The original Apatosaurus balloon made its first parade debut in 1963 and was retired from service in 1976.
Photo: Image no. 62158_21a, © AMNH Library
Gobble, gobble? Here’s a turkey you might not be familiar with: the Australian Brush-turkey (Alectura lathami)! Found in parts of eastern Australia, this ground-dwelling omnivore feeds on insects, fallen fruits, and seeds. This species' chicks become independent almost immediately after birth. Parents leave their offspring to fend for themselves, and hatchlings are able to fly within hours of being born. Nearly hunted to extinction in the 1930s, this species’ population has since rebounded.
Photo: JJ Harrison, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
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🎞️Here’s a festive #TBT photo from 1969! On this Thanksgiving, the world-famous parade passed the Museum’s 77th Street turret with a very special float: a sauropod dinosaur. 🦕This inflatable Apatosaurus measured an impressive 60 feet long! The giant green dinosaur featured big eyes, a wide grin, and a 20-foot tail. The original Apatosaurus balloon made its first parade debut in 1963 and was retired from service in 1976. Photo: Image no. 62158_21a, © AMNH Library #amnh #Thanksgiving #Apatosaurus #dinosaurs #MacysParade #ThrowbackThursday #nyc #NewYorkCity #history https://www.instagram.com/p/ClWWiuxLYB7/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
Here’s a festive throwback Thursday featuring a historic sauropod balloon floating beside the Museum’s turret on 77th Street in New York City in 1969. 🦕 The green Apatosaurus inflatable first made its debut in the world-famous parade in 1963—it featured big eyes, a wide grin, and measured 60 feet long with a 20-foot tail. The balloon retired in 1976 but another sauropod was added to the parade’s inflatable cast of characters in 2015. The new dino, which is featured again this year, is noticeably sleeker—and longer than its predecessor by 12 feet! Photo: Image no. 62152_14a, © AMNH Library #tbt #macysthanksgivingdayparade #thanksgiving #amnh #uws #nyc #vintagephotography (at American Museum of Natural History) https://www.instagram.com/p/CWs8B0Pr37g/?utm_medium=tumblr
Do you feel like a Guineafowl puffer (Arothron meleagris) post-Thanksgiving feast? Instead of chowing down on turkey, this fish feeds mainly on the tips of branching corals. It gets so round not by eating but to avoid being eaten, swallowing water to dissuade predators from trying such a big bite. If it’s late to inflate, this species packs a punch, anyway: bacteria in its body can be toxic. Photo: Bill Eichenlaub
How do you make a Thanksgiving meal? Turkey, gravy, cranberries and mashed potatoes may all come to mind, but what about microbes? Microbes help make many of our favorite holiday dishes!
Just like any form of life, microbes need energy. To get it, they consume molecules they come into contact with for sustenance. No metabolism is perfect, though, and even the smallest meals produce waste products, a process known as fermentation. A microbe's trash can be a treasure to us, though—these waste molecules are key ingredients in the fermented foods and drinks that are cornerstones of cuisine around the world.
Fermentation works by feeding sugars to microbes like yeast, a fungus, or a bacteria such as Lactobacillus. The two types of microbes have different means of processing the carbohydrates they dine on. For bacteria, the end product of fermenting sugar is a simple molecule called lactic acid, a weak acid with a rather sour taste. Yeast, one the other hand, produces a molecule called ethanol, the inebriating agent in alcohol. Humans figured out early on that both of these waste products could create tasty dishes while also helping food keep longer, as demonstrated in the three recipes below.
Pickling
Fermenting vegetable matter with bacteria (specifically strains of Lactobacillus) produces sour-flavored, long-lasting treats. Better known as "pickling," this process is used in cuisines all around the world to crafts foods from kosher dills to kimchi. The process is thought to have originated thousands of years ago in Egyptian society.
Beer
Fermenting grains or fruits with yeast is a tradition at least as old as pickling, and one that's also known around the world. Luckily for folks who enjoy a beer or glass of wine with dinner, yeast converts sugars into alcohol instead of lactic acid. While the two substances have similar chemical formulas (lactic acid consists of six hydrogen molecules, teamed with three carbon and three oxygen atoms, while alcohol binds six hydrogen atoms to a pair of carbon atoms and a single oxygen atom) they do very different things when they come in contact with our bodies and communicate with our brains—hence the difference between sour-tasting pickles and inebriating beer.
Sourdough Bread
But what happens when a concoction combines Lactobacillus and yeast? Sourdough bread is a good example of this forced symbiosis. Bakers have taken advantage of a wide array ofLactobacillus species and their close relatives to produce three kinds of sourdough bread. The lactic acid from the bacteria and carbon dioxide produced by the fermentation of yeast give this bread its distinctive tangy taste and fluffy texture. The fermentation process also converts the linoleic acid in bread flour into fatty acids that resist the growth of mold and help the loaf stay edible longer, a quality that made this food a favorite among gold surveyors in California. In addition, the presence of yeast means that sourdough freshly out of the oven will have some alcohol in it, although this content evaporates as time goes by.
Cheese
Lactobacillus bacteria consume milk in the guts of infants—and in fermented milk products like yogurt, sour cream and cheese. They produce lactic acid, which keeps fungi and bacteria from spoiling yogurt—and keeps disease-causing microbes from infecting people, too. That’s why they are a popular probiotic.
Learn more about microbes in The Secret World Inside You, now open at the Museum!
Amazing Animal Eaters
As we tuck into our Thanksgiving feasts and find ourselves uncomfortably full, many of us will find ourselves wishing we had just a little more room in our bellies. Today, take inspiration from these amazing ocean dwellers who have evolved for just that purpose.
Many fishes that live in the deep ocean are specialized to swallow large prey. Depths below 650 feet (200 meters) receive too little sunlight for plants to grow, meaning food can be hard to come by. These animals address the problem by eating extra-big meals.
Black Swallower
In the twilight depths of the ocean, a good meal can be hard to find. One deep-sea fish called the black swallower can gulp down prey 10 times its own weight. Two rows of large, pointed teeth on each jaw collapse to make room as the prey ratchets down the gullet, to be slowly digested in a stomach with expandable walls.
Viperfish
A viperfish has teeth so long they don’t fit inside its head. It can dislocate its lower jaw, and its skull is attached to its vertebrae by a hinge, so the jaws can snap out and up and spread wide to snatch especially large prey.
Anglerfish
A female deep-sea anglerfish attracts prey to her gaping jaws with a built-in lure—a spine tipped with a bauble of flesh that emits light. Her body is plump, and her stomach can stretch to make room for oversize meals.
Gulper eel
The gulper eel is known for its huge, expanding mouth, expandable stomach and extraordinarily long tail, adorned with a light that may work as a lure. Most bony fishes suck prey into their mouths, but some scientists think this one lunges at prey like a pelican.
Meet many more amazing animal eaters in the exhibition, Life at the Limits: Stories of Amazing Species, open now through January 6.
Images: AMNH/R.Mickens, AMNH/J.Sparks, AMNH Archives, WIkipedia
Be Thankful For Your Microbiome
Happy Thanksgiving from the American Museum of Natural History! This year, we’re thankful for our microbiome, which is particularly helpful in digesting the traditional holiday feast many of us will be enjoying today.
Millions of microbes enter your body at every meal. Indeed, after your skin, the digestive system is the main place where your body comes in contact with microbes. But unlike your skin, your digestive system is a warm, sheltered space—and it’s filled with food. It’s the perfect spot for microbes. So it’s no surprise that the vast majority of your body’s microbiome is inside your digestive tract. Your digestive tract is home to around 100 trillion bacteria—more than all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Many fibers from food, including cellulose, cannot be digested by the human body alone—but resident bacteria produce enzymes that can break them down.
Stomach Almost no nutrients are absorbed in the stomach. It is filled with harsh acids that kill most bacteria. Very few live here permanently.
Small intestine Your small intestine is about 20 feet (6 meters) long. Most of your food is digested in your small intestine. Sugar, fat and protein are broken down and absorbed, with the help bacteria. Large intestine Your large intestine is where fibers ferment, frequently for 40 hours. Trillions of microbes ferment fiber and other food you can’t digest, producing useful nutrients and protecting your gut lining from inflammation.
MY GUT? SO WHAT? Microbes in your gut play many important roles in your body. They help with digestion, immune regulation, disease prevention, healing and protecting your gut lining, appetite control, brain development and even emotion.
Learn more about your microbiome in The Secret World Inside You, now open at the Museum!
Thanksgiving Reminder!
The Museum will be closed tomorrow for Thanksgiving, and we hope you're having a wonderful one. If you feel the need to walk off some turkey and stuffing, though, the Museum's halls will be there for you the rest of the weekend, with plenty of things to do! Come by and get a look at the Origami Holiday Tree, which went up in the Grand Gallery earlier this week.
After a period of renovation, the Hayden Planetarium Space Theater reopens its doors this week, and you can catch the acclaimed Space Show, Dark Universe, on a new screen that makes Planetarium presentations more immersive than ever before.
In our newest special exhibition, The Secret World Inside You, you can learn more about the countless microbes that live on and in the human body, assisting in tasks like defending you from disease and helping to digest the latest plates of leftovers.
And don't forget, you've got just more than a month left to catch Life at the Limits: Stories of Amazing Species. This special exhibition exploring the adaptations that let life thrive in Earth's most extreme environments closes in January, so don't miss your chance to see living exhibitions like the jet-powered nautilus and the mighty mantis shrimp.
What's Thanksgiving without turkey? Here are some terrific turkey facts:
- Wild turkeys range all the way North to Canada and down South to Mexico
- In the United States, four races of turkey are recognized, differing chiefly in tail-tip coloration
- Wild turkeys feed on a variety of seeds, fruits, and on many kinds of insects
- Turkey was one of the few animals raised for meat in the Aztec Empire
- The Spanish name for turkey, pavo, is the Latin name for peacock, which they resemble in their display
Happy turkey day!
The above turkey is located in the Museum's Hall of North American Birds.
Thanksgiving is a time to reflect, give thanks, and also EAT!
Happy Thanksgiving to all our friends and followers, from the American Museum of Natural History.
Watch as the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons inflate outside the Museum in this speedy time-lapse video!
A very Happy Thanksgiving to all of our friends and followers! #thanksgiving #turkey
Spotted: Eastern cottontails browsing in a pumpkin patch