The Manhattan Mercury from Manhattan, Kansas • 26

C6 THE MANHATTAN MERCURY LIFESTYLE SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 1 998 i Os I Missing lynx sparks studies, debate persed north to more-suitable spruce forests in Canada. "Preliminary indications are that there aren't very many lynx, if any, left in the core release area," said Weaver. "Nor was there much sign of snowshoe hares." This winter, wildlife officials are hoping for better success in Colorado, where 40 lynx from northern Canada and Alaska will be released in the San Juan Mountains in the southwjsst part of the state. "We feel reintroduction is timely from a biological and political perspective," said John Seidel, predatory-mammal biologist ith the state. "It's the only way to remove the species if it is listed, and the only way to help it recover.

And by putting animals on the ground we can actually tell what their habitat needs and preferences are. Otherwise, we'll have to take a broad-brush approach to regulation if it is listed." Once prime habitat is identified and local populations pinpointed, Ruediger thinks things could go smoothly for both lynx and humans. "There'll be some tweaking of management policies here and there," he said. "But there is no big plan to keep people off federal land. I'd be surprised if there are any restrictions at all." The Washington Port Mont.

John Weaver probably knows more about the Canada lynx than most American biologists. With the help of a pet lynx, he developed a technique for studying the wild cats without having to trap them. Within a 16-square-mile area, Weaver attaches squares of scented carpet to trees. From the carpet protrude the points of a few tacks. When a lynx rubs its chin against the scented material, the tacks pull out a few hairs.

Weaver then analyzes the DNA in the hair to help determine the abundance, distribution patterns and genetic relationships of the species. Weaver's studies in the Pacific Northwest, Montana, Idaho, New York, Maine and the Great Lakes region will help the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determine whether to place the Canada lynx on the endan-gered-species list by next June. If the Fish and Wildlife Service does list the lynx, it will be the largest-scale endangered-species effort ever for federal land managers, encompassing 53 national forests and 24 Bureau of Land Management districts. Special-interest groups already are digging in against the listing.

Opponents fear a listing will lead to closures of millions of acres of boreal lems may be There is no silver-bullet solution. Right now, everybody's rushing for answers, and we don't have them." What biologists do know is that the lynx once ranged across many of forested northern tier states, from Portland, Maine, to Portland, as far south as Colorado in the Rocky Mountains and Pennsylvania in the Appalachians. Suitable habitat in the United States lies on the southernmost boundary of the lynx's range, and is considered marginal in some places. Much of the slender slivers of habitat finger their way along rolling mountain ridges. Biologists estimate that in the lower 48 states, there are fewer than 700 lynx, which typically stand about thigh-high to a 6-foot human and weigh about 20 pounds, twice that of a large house cat.

The cat's long hind legs and shorter front legs give it a stooped appearance. Its very wide, furred paws, which make no sound in snow, enable it to chase down snowshoe hares in deep powder. In fact, the lynx dines almost exclusively on the hare, and its numbers can cyclically ebb and flow with hare populations. Some local wildlife officials who oppose listing the lynx contend that the animal was never a full-time resident in their the high price paid for fur in the mid-1970s, ranging from $600 to $700 per pelt. "The Kettle Crest area in northeast Washington is an instructive example," Weaver said.

"Two trappers there took 37 lynx in two years. According to local accounts, that seemed to have extirpated the local population." This past summer, Weaver's scent pads attracted only a few animals in that area. "There's certainly not as many lynx there as there were 20 or 25 years ago," he said. Intense trapping pressure also diminished lynx populations in several areas of Montana and Idaho. And although trapping is now banned in all states except Montana, which allows only two takes per winter, lynx populations have not increased.

"The populations aren't able to recover on their own because they haven't been able to reach critical mass," Weaver said. "With small populations, random events like road kill, other predators or a poor bunny year can keep the lid on population growth." In 1989, wildlife officials transplanted 83 lynx from the Yukon to the hardwood forests of New York's Adirondack Mountains. But half of the ani-mals quickly died, with 17 being hit by motor vehicles. The rest seemed to have dis forests, shutting down logging, mining, dam building, trapping and recreational activities such as snowmobiling. "It's anotherspotted-owl surrogate," said Dave Skinner, spokesman for People for the USA, a group that advocates multiple uses of public lands, including mining, logging and use of all-terrain vehicles.

"Any listing must not result in further public-land closures to multiple-use activities, nor result in use restrictions on private lands without compensation for the loss of use, value." Environmentalists, on the other hand, are pushing for the listing because of the animal's dwindling numbers. One environmental group even claimed responsibility last month for fires on Vail Mountain to protest the ski resort's expansion into lynx habitat. One of the key issues in the increasingly strident debate is the extent of the animal's habitat, and exactly what poses a true threat. Until now, lynx studies have been few and far between, said Bill Ruediger, a Forest Service biologist who chairs an interagency lynx biology study team. "There's not a lot of information to base management programs on," he said.

"The risk factor for the lynx includes everything at this point because we're trying to system-ically find out what the prob states. Instead, they say, the cats migrate south across the Canadian border when the northern population expands and the young disperse. "We think lynx occurrence in the Great Lakes region is driven by a population cycle in Canada," said Mike DonCarlos of the Minnesota Division of Natural Resources. "Those biological factors need to be addressed." DonCarlos contends that managing logging, changing trapping techniques or curtailing snowmobile activity will not help the species. "There is nothing we can do for the lynx in Minnesota aside from creating programs that can't address the animal's problems," he said.

In 1994, the Fish and Wildlife Service gave the same reasoning when it decided against listing the lynx in the lower 48 states. But when the Biodiversity Legal Foundation and 14 other plaintiffs sued on the grounds that there was not enough information to back that finding, a federal judge ordered the agency to conduct more studies. Eventually, the Fish and Wildlife Service changed its stance and declared that the Canada lynx population in the contiguous United States was warranted for listing under the Endangered Species Act. One of the main reasons for today's low lynx numbers was The birth of supergenes Waste not: Recycled fur polymerase chain reaction. Short template or "primer" sequences ensure that the fragments are stitched together in the correct order to produce a functioning gene.

The daughter genes can then be inserted into bacteria or fungi, where they begin making protein. To make superior versions of an industrial enzyme, the identity of which is still secret, Maxygen's scientists isolated genes from 26 microorganisms which each make their own versions of the enzyme. Using its system of DNA shuffling, Maxygen made 600 new daughter genes, 77 of which produced superior enzymes. Screening showed up variants which functioned better than natural enzymes at high, low or intermediate pH. Others were more resistant to solvents or heat.

"They're all highly significant commercially," says Pirn Stemmer, Maxygen's vice-president of research. Maxygen has also shuffled genes that make the 20 known human interferons. This time they made 2,000 daughter genes and once again, the results were spectacular. The best interferon produced by the genes was 285,000 times as potent as interferon alpha-2b, which is marketed as a drug, as measured by its ability to protect cultured cells against a mouse virus. It could, prove a major mon-eyspinner for Maxygen.

Sales of interferon alpha-2b, which is New Yoric Times Sex at a molecular level is spawning an elite class of proteins. Maxygen, a company in Santa Clara, has used a DNA shuffling technique to create interferons that are dramatically more effective against viruses than any produced naturally by the immune system. It has also made ultra-efficient versions of an industrial enzyme. When organisms reproduce sexually, the offspring end up with a mix-and-match set of genes inherited from both parents. Maxygen's technique is similar, exceptthe parents are a series of related genes.

These are cut into pieces, shuffled together and then assembled to form a new genetic generation. Some of these daughter genes can manufacture proteins that are much better at certain tasks than nature's originals. The best ones can be screened out and shuffled to produce whole lineages of superior descendants, in a process mimicking evolution by natural selection. Maxygen's technique was described earlier this year in Nature (vol. 391, p.

288). Now its potential is beginning to be realized. The parent genes are first broken into fragments by shattering their DNA with ultrasound, or cutting them up with an enzyme called DNAse. They are reassembled into daughter genes, comprising fragments from several parents, using a variant of the DNA-building aggravate people unnecessarily, or have to shout out, 'This raccoon was killed 80 years Ms. Ragsdale said.

She had the corner dry cleaner stitch together a patchwork quilt of pieces from stoles and from her grandfather's raccoon cheerleader coat to make a big throw for an unsightly couch. This she can live with, she-said, because of its sentimental value, and her cats love it. Those without inheritances are browsing flea markets and the Salvation Army. Alison Houtte, the owner of Hooti Couture, a popular vintage store in Brooklyn, used to stock vintage full-length fur coats, but few people would even try them on, let alone buy them. About 16 months ago, she finally donated the furs to the Salvation Army and began to stock only fur accessories and fur-trimmed clothes.

As of this summer, she said, those items rarely remain in the store for more than three days. "Women see it in the magazines, and it flies out of the store," said Ms. Houtte, who recently sold a yellow wool coat from the 1950's with a dyed yellow fur collar It resembled one that was $5,530 in the Versace store on Fifth Avenue before it sold out earlier this fall. because, she said, "I don't want to know what kind of animal it was." Ms. Dougherty used the leftover strips to edge the hem of an otherwise boring skirt.

Some skins, however, don't allow for such willful conscience abating, LizDarst, 33, a freelance television producer, inherited her mother's fox stole, the kind with the head still on it that attaches jaw to paw, which looked as if it last saw the light of day circa 1959 at the local country club. "It was like something from the Flintstones," she said. "It's so grotesque, there are eyeballs sticking out. You can't salvage thatbecause it's so shameful." But she is making her mother's mink stole into a scarf. "It's so soft and pretty," she said.

"I guess I feel like it's already dead and gone, so it's better not to waste it." The logic can be as fuzzy as a frazzled beaver coat. Jana Ragsdale, 34, a Columbia University administrator, played dress-up in her grandmother's furs when she was a child and always thought someday she would wear them. But after she inherited the furs, she only dared wear them in the woods near her former home in upstate New York, and never had the nerve to put them on in public in the city. "I don't want to used to treat viral diseases and cancer, pull in $600 million each year for Schering-Plough of Berlin. At present the most popular method of coaxing genes into makingnewversionsofproteins is random mutagenesis, in which ultraviolet light or a DNA-disrupting chemical makes genes mutate.

But most of these mutations are damaging, with typically only 1 percent yielding genes that make improved proteins. By comparison, 13 percent of the enzymes Maxygen produced through DNA shuffling were superior. "DNA shuffling is a very powerful technology," says Andy Ellington of the University of Texas at Austin, who is currently comparing the technique with random mutagenesis. It is not even necessary to know the identity of all the genes which might profitably be "mated" with one another, Stemmer says. Fragments of DNA from a known gene can be used to trawl genomes of other species for related genes.

CLASSIFIED ADS are as close as your phone Call 776-2200 The Manhattan Mercury 5th Osage FLORALS LINENS Y. Times News Service NEW YORK Last year, Angela Voulangas found the mink cape she had inherited from her grandmother years ago. Actually, it was more of a capelet, and Ms. Voulangas, a 33-year-old graphic designer, had no idea what to do with it. "Where am 1 going to wear a capelet?" she asked.

The40-year-oldminkseemed "too incongruous with my life," she added. And yet, it also seemed like "exciting raw She decided to dye it blue and burgundy, and cut it up into two collars and a bag. That way, she said, "I don't feel I went out and clubbed a baby seal." Park Avenue matrons once lined raincoats with their favorite minks to avoid paint-throwing protesters. Now that the anti-fur frenzy has died down a bit, furry pelts are coming out of the closet. Even young eco-sensitive people are finding ways of rationalizing this indulgence.

Hand-me-downs are OK; so is anything found at a flea market or a vintage store, or any fur recycled into bite-size pieces of trim, collar and other accessories. Dyeing the fur a color not found in nature helps. Emily Dougherty, 25, a beauty editor at Harper's Bazaar, had two collars made purple, and black and blue Hunkeler EYE PARTICIPATING OPTOMETRISTS Manhattan Paul Bullock, OD Doug Stigge, OD Ronald Janasek, OD Bruce Oberhelman, OD Sam Odle, OD Ron Price, OD Richard Schroeder, OD Gary Young, OD Jeanne Klopfenstein, OD Junction City Raymond Schmidt, OD Wamego Verne Claussen, OD Gail McPeak, OD Mark Bettencourt, OD Tuesday, how Laser have reduce contacts with Eye doctors you St! ii V' ii Stonehouse INTERIORS HOME DECOR FURNISHINGS i DESIGN SERVICES See for yourself you could be HOLIDAY SHOPPING IS A WONDERFUL EXPERIENCE AT STONEHOUSE INTERIORS contact lenses. large crowds and fighting your way to the check out experience the hassle-free shopping atmosphere at Stonehouse Interiors. If your tired of counter, come FURNITURE AREA RUGS CANDLES PICTURES LAMPS ACCESSORIES post-operative care at their local offices.

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