The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • Page 5

A 4 MONDAY. JANUARY 4. 1982 SCIENCE JOURNAL THE CDUWERJOURIJaLi Scientists flock to rugged Patagonia to study in a biologists' paradise grates after each breeding season, and new groups are formed with the arrival of the next season. Regally maned South American sea lions, about a quarter the size of the elephant seals, mingle at Punta Norte. But their main colonies are on rock ledges and other parts of the peninsula.

However, Lopez has photographed the birth of a rare white sea lion, perhaps the only such photographs that exist Danger for both the elephant seals and sea lions can come while lying on the beach. In an extraordinary hunting exercise, the 8-ton killer whales also called orcas come onto the beach with a wave during high tide and snatch one of the pups. In reverse, the sea lions also gather far enough from the water to be safe, and taunt the orcas when they spot the insidious dorsal fins cruising offshore. The whales hunt in groups, possibly families. As one attacks the beach, the rest hang back in the water to join in the feast later.

As the orca recedes into the sea, it often slaps its catch more than 20 feet into the air with its powerful flukes. The whack into the air apparently stuns the prey. Sometimes, the group of whales will toss the hapless seal pup about like cats with a mouse. South Africa is the only other known place in the world where orcas hunt mammals off the beach, but little observation is done there. Lopez said he has witnessed the death ritual more than 100 times in the last year alone.

He is now just completing a major study on the hunting habits of the orcas and the passing of them to their young. Lopez has come to resent the name "killer whales" and the folklore that has grown around it The orca is bigger and has larger teeth than other dolphins. On three occasions here in recent years, an orca has lunged out of the water at an unwary man on the beach, apparently mistaking the man for a marine mammal. Each man Jumped clear of danger. Orcas do not attack people in water.

Lopez said orcas kill only to eat their main diet is still fish, and they are the end of the marine food chain. Nothing eats an orca. The number of orcas is unknown, but Lopez said that Soviet Japanese and Brazilian whalers kill them In the Antarctic for their prized oil, used for precision instruments. "It is men who are the killers," said Lopez, "not the orcas." Up the beach in the New York Zoological Society's "whale camp," Guillermo Harris, a young Anglo-Argentine ornithologist and bis wife, are working on a comprehensive bird guide to Patagonia. Among the many birds they are studying are the crested tinamou, whose male, in a rare reversal of roles.

Incubates the eggs all by himself. Tufted tit-tyrants are flycatchers almost as small and quick Using gear given him by the New York society seven years ago, he has been patiently photographing and recording the activities of the two from an unexcelled vantage in wildlife research: his park-ranger cottage. Punta Norte is the center for more than 13,000 elephant seals that lie on the peninsula's beaches each year. Harems of up to 20 females surround a bulking male sultan who measures up to 20 feet in length and 4 tons in weight They loll together in the sun with their young offspring in groups spaced about every hundred yards up and down the beach. Smaller, younger males about 4 or 5 years old troll offshore or try to sneak onto the beaches to seduce one of the females.

Elephant seals can be found on the beaches year-round, but most breeding is between August and October. The pregnant females crawl onto the beach in the company of their male protector. They give birth to their 90-pound baby within a week. Fifteen days later, in the presence of their squealing, scared pups, they copulate on the beach with the sultan, though some play coy. For the next month the females stay on land without eating, breast-feeding the baby.

After a month of suckling, the pups begin to venture into the water, testing the limits of their safety under the watchful eye of their mother and the sultan, even though he is probably not the father. Elephant seal society disinte r. i-im More than 13,000 elephant seals of Punta Norte, on Argentina's as hummingbirds. Foot-long lap-ings fight with wing spurs. Darwin's rheas, as the ostrich-like birds are known, were once hunted by gauchos flinging "bolas," ropes with balls that wrap around the bird's long legs.

Almost all the land birds are naturally camouflaged in brown, but perhaps none are more expert in using that camouflage than the tawny-throated dotterel, which often leaves its nest and eggs unprotected but nearly invisible among the pebbles of the desert floor. Marine birds are particularly prolific. Isla de los Pajaros Island of inundated with many species of cormorants, gulls, sheathbills, sandpipers, oyster catchers and other birds, is set aside as a refuge just off the beach. About 150 miles down the Pata-gonian coast Punta fombo is home for more than a million Magellan penguins, one of the largest continental penguin colonies in the world. There, other Argentine naturalists have been patiently studying their nesting habits as armadillos scamper among the.

penguins and more than 50 pairs of dolphin gulls, normally aggressive toward each other, inexplicably squeeze into nests measuring roughly 15 feet by 30 feet. The most extensively researched animal at Punta Tombo is the right whale. It was so named because its lumbering size and floatability after death made it the "right" whale for whalers to kill. About a third of the 1,500 surviving Southern Hemisphere right whales have been recorded by Payne as having passed through Punta Tombo in the past decade. The whales often come up to within 10 yards of whale camp.

The Southern right whale is a mirror of the Northern Hemisphere right whale that gathers in the Bay of Fundy at Nova Scotia. Where the Southern whales go when they leave the peninsula is unclear, but having identified more than 600 individual whales by their markings, Payne Is finding a surprising pattern in which the same females return every three years to give birth. i Mil' M. Tim Fit Ptwt lie each year on the beaches Valdes Peninsula. Dusky dolphins also play and feed in the bays year-round, their different leaps apparently forms of communication, according to research by Bernd Wuersig, a biologist from California.

The dolphins, like the whales, are attracted by fish, krill and other life forms that in turn depend, ultimately, on rich nutrients in Antarctic currents heading north. Stan Waterman, an underwater photographer who was recently in Patagonia filming the whales, marveled after his first day out in the water. "There is a diversity of marine life so concentrated it is almost without comparison, except perhaps in the Galapagos," be said. On the land, animals have adapted to living with little water and the unceasing wind. The maras, dr Patagonian cavies, are rarely known to drink.

They munch the region's parched vegetation, whicji contains some moisture. The guan-acos sometimes congregate witji rheas and other animals at watering holes. The guanacos once roamed hi herds across much of the southern half of South America. Today, onty about 150,000 are left including the pocket on the Valdes peninsula. They are territorial animals.

Males often fight charging each other breast to breast The decline of the guanaco, brought on by hunters after the lush wool of the young, underlines the danger man has presented to. Patagonia. Argentine scientists and naturalists are divided between those aligned with the Argentine Wildlife Foundation, which stresses preservation for research, and those aligned with the National Patagonian Center, which stresses resource management for exploitation. A more Immediate human threat has unexpectedly appeared from the flanks, however. Tourists have been invading the peninsula, hoping to pet the elephant seals, to ride boats among the whales and perhaps even to shoot a guanaco.

The cry rising; now is for greater protection before the mysteries of Patagonia' disappear. ernment should be paying more attention to their device. I Cmwmmm nn! 1 ri 4 a By EDWARD SCHUMACHER Vor Timet Mm tanric VALDES PENINSULA, Argentina Patagonia is a barsh and primeval land. Spread mostly across the southern half of Argentina, its dry, broken plateaus stretch and bob for mile after monotonous mile, an expanse of brown hues covered in splotches by scrub brush. A fierce wind blows and often howls most of the year.

On its eastern edge, the desert drops abruptly Into the South Atlantic Ocean in a line of forbidding cliffs and steep Shingle beaches. 1 Glyptodonts, nine-foot-long ar-tnored mammals, once ruled here, along with giant sloths and thoror-hacus, five-foot predatory birds. Charles Darwin came to this peninsula in 1839, he was astonished by the exotic and prolific wildlife that had since evolved. guanacoes, gangly cousins of the camel, wander the desert Creatures such as the rhea, a large bird similar to an ostrich, hnd the mara, resembling a cross between a rabbit and a rat, scurry among the brush. On the shore, giant elephant seals and sea lions drag themselves from the water in rituals of reproduction.

In the water itself, uncommonly rich in nutrients, dolphins and whales openly loiter in the peninsula's deep bays, fulfilling their own rites. Human hunters once slaughtered many of the animals, but over the past 15 years the Valdes Peninsula has become a protected preserve of more than 1,300 square miles. Some threatened animals, such as penguins and whales, have dramatically replenished themselves to form a unique live ecological laboratory. Its remoteness has offered preservation while its approachability there are no disease-infested jungles, no distant uninhabitable islands has opened a recent rush of research into the behavior of many of the species and the ecological relationship among them. "Valdes is a biologist's idea of paradise," said Roger Payne, who for 12 years has been going there as technical director of the New York Zoological Society Whale Fund.

"It is the Serehgeti Plain of the marine world, and has a completely bizarre set of land animals peculiar only to South America. You can't walk in any direction without seeing interesting problems to study for years to come." The New York Zoological Society and its director, William G. Conway, an ornithologist whose avid interest in the region is such that he goes to Patagonia for the holidays, started much of the research in the early 1960s. A southward trek of North American scientists followed. Now Argentine involvement is growing and Argentine researchers, in some instances, are setting the pace.

At Punta Norte, a northern tip of the peninsula, Juan Carlos Lopez has become one of the world's leading experts on elephant seals and marauding "killer whales," which are, in fact, members of the whale family's dolphin branch. California By JAY MATHEWS Tin Washington Pott LOS ANGELES Carl Johnson, 35, a geophysicist wakes at 4 a.m. at least once a week to worry about earthquakes. Sometimes he just gives up on sleep and goes off in the pitch dark to his office at the California Institute of Technology. "He's thinking there may be something he can do to predict the first big earthquake," says his wife, Nancy.

Chuck Koesterer, 32, an electronics technician, has found his life moving with the erratic rhythms of the Pacific plate, the huge piece of the Earth's crust sliding ponderously up the coast of bis native California. It's his job to get government sensors to the spot of a major quake in the mountains or deserts, so every large quake sets off his electronic beeper. "It always seems to happen in the middle of the night," said his wife, Sheryl. Johnson and Koesterer, with hun s. 's Killer whales, like these at Marineland of the nia coast in southern Argentina.

The 8-ton ani-Pacific in Los Angeles, abound off the Patago- mals are the end of the marine food chain. quake watchers search for the elusive big tremor Hi Pito Photo vice that emits a high-pitched tone within 24 hours of a major quake. In the Northern California town of Car-mel, Clarisa Bernhardt said she has visions of a photo, or a calendar with the date circled, and the word earthquake stamped across it, and has successfully foreseen earthquakes this way. In recent years, scientific research on earthquake prediction has focused on history and happenstance. Scientists have spent considerable time recording all quakes in recent history, just to see if there is a pattern that might yield clues to their causes.

Johnson and Hutton, looking at the pattern of recent quakes and the way they come sometimes in complex "swarms," reported to the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco recently that a system of faults near the Salton Sea thought to have been dormant has shown the potential for damaging quakes. Kerry Sieh, an assistant professor at Cal Tech, has unearthed old fissures that Indicate the last great Southern California earthquake in 1857 was part of a series recurring every 123 to 225 years. According to one U.S. government estimate based on Sieh's work, that quake has a better than 50 percent chance of recurring in the next 30 years, and could kill more than 13,000 Southern Calif ornians, leave 100,000 homeless and cause $15 billion in damage. The fascination with earthquakes among researchers tends to extend to their family and social lives.

On one occasion, local reporters panicked when an earthquake occurred and no one could be found at the Cal Tech center to give its location and magnitude. Ms. Hutton says all the scientists had been at a party that had gotten so lively they didn't feel the quake. predicted large tremors and saved many lives, but such success has eluded American scientists. The last death from an earthquake in the United States occurred in California 10 years ago, but the number of small quakes in Southern California has increased recently and there are enough other signs of unusual underground activity to put earthquake watchers under some pressure.

Johnson, head of the U.S. Geological Survey field office at Cal Tech, is trying to computerize the earthquake data in a way that will provide new clues. Earthquake scientists come from many fields, such as Cal Tech researcher Kate Hutton, an astronomer lured by the excitement of the field and its intriguing mathematical puzzles. And some are not scientists at all, but earthquake buffs who volunteer services to the cause. Robert Parsons, 45, a telephone-company transmission technician, said he has invented a seismic de- metric year a metric second 43 hundredths as long as ordinary second.

Weeks and months would not have metric designations, but 10 days would be one "decaday" and 73 "decadays meaning 730 conventional days would be one metric year equivalent to two old fashioned years. Vij said bis system would simplify calculations dealing with time and make it easier to program time into computers. dreds of other geologists, mathematicians, technicians, graduate students and psychics up and down the coast are engaged in one of the great scientific races in American history: to find a way to predict earthquakes before the next great quake devastates a major city in California. The thrill of the chase, which intrigues nearly everyone in California, is enough to make many decline much better paying jobs in the oil industry. The first successful earthquake prediction in the United States, in the view of some scientists, occurred eight years ago in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.

A team from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory predicted a quake with fairly precise time and location after measuring wave velocities from a series of tiny foreshocks. Unfortunately, the same technique, later proved "an abysmal failure" in California, Johnson said. Chinese scientists claim to have of India's adoption of metric weights and measures. Every metric time unit would be different from the current Gregorian calendar except for the day still reckoned from midnight to midnight Each hour of the 20-hour metric day would have 100 metric minutes and each metric minute 100 metric seconds making one metric minute 72 hundredths as long as a conventional minute and The Cal Tech field office has since added its beeper system so Hutton, Johnson and Koesterer are immediately alerted to anything above a mere rattling of teacups. A buzzer alarm sounds at the second-floor Cal Tech field office if one of the sensors scattered about Southern California picks up such a quake.

Several universities and the U.S. Geological Survey have scattered mechanical earthquake detectives all over the state seismometers, strainmeters, radon meters, tilt-meters, magnometers and creep meters. Some scientists think the measurements of underground radon gas, on a recent upswing, may signal approaching quakes. But none of the sensors has yielded consistent clues. With so few large quakes, they can only be put to a test sporadically.

Earthquake scientists have already proved the value of seismometers, which measure vibrations in the Earth, by their accurate prediction of eruptions at Mount St Helens. Volcanoes, however, are far easier to predict because, unlike earthquakes, their precise location is usually known in advance and seismometers can be placed in the best positions. Ned North, 64, and Robert Parsons, 45, have ignored the drawbacks and formed their own company, Earthquake Sentry. They say they can predict earthquakes over magnitude 5 on the Richter Scale anywhere in Southern California within 24 hours. Since there has been no quake of that magnitude on land in the area in the two years they have been forecasting, North said, "Our prediction has been, 'No He said they have predicted quakes outside the area, however, and feel the gov show his earthquake-predicting device to a Cal Tech expert, or patent it for fear his secret to improving ordinary seismological sensors will be -stolen.

North, a former Los Angeles fire commission member working out of a tiny office in Huntington Beach, has written dozens of companies, offering the earthquake-forecast service to the first 10 major corporate subscribers at $42,000 each. He advises companies who buy the service that, "once they are made aware that a damaging earthquake will occur, they should not issue any public warning. This is strictly tand privately for their own use." Parsons and North have bad no offers. Company executives seem convinced by scientific evidence hat major quakes are so far very difficult to predict But that does not stop the friends of California earthquake researchers from hoping for inside information. "My friends always ask me, 'Let me know if something is going to Koesterer said.

His wife said friends at the basement ophthalmology clinic where she works tell each other, "When Sheryl starts running upstairs, we'll know." The Koesterers have told their children how to crawl under the table in case of a quake, and have told Sheryl's grandmother, who stays with them, how to turn off the gas and water. They have candles, flashlights, bottled water and some canned goods ready for use. Carl and Nancy Johnson, on the other hand, admit that like most Californians, they have made hardly any preparations. "Basically, we consider ourselves lucky to get the laundry done," says Mrs. Johnson.

Tired of birthdays? Try a AsMdatod Prou NEW DELHI, India A metric calendar with longer years, fewer birthdays and shorter minutes and seconds has been proposed by Brij Bhusan Vij, an Indian air force flight lieutenant The idea of splitting the day into 20 metric hours and on down into metric minutes and seconds was presented in Vij's book "Toward Unified Technology" published last week on the 25th anniversary.