Spring 2008

   The jars themselves are arrayed densely on shelves that rise about ten feet and extend row upon row extend down narrow aisles under fluorescent lights, covering hundreds of square feet of painted concrete floor space. There are even more fish in the huge building next door. Tulane, it turns out, warehouses some seven million fish, plus thousands of preserved mammals, birds, reptiles, mollusks, and insects.

   The whole ambience recalls a 19th Century cabinet of curiosities. I half expect to see a slightly nutty Herr Doktor Professor von Hoople wander past, pushing bifocals up the bridge of his nose, trailing the smell of formaldehyde, and mumbling about a small crisis in the herpetology department. Outside the door the scene changes. The museum is housed in a World War II munitions depot, a half-underground concrete bunker so close to the Mississippi River you can hear the low engine room thrum of cargo ships making their way upstream. The bunker itself is set in what feels like an abandoned stretch of river at the southernmost edge of New Orleans on the river's West Bank, and just beyond the tall, humped bridge that crests the Intracoastal Waterway.

   The Museum is one of three very different nonprofit institutions on the Lower Coast of Algiers, one of the city's last wild areas. All three, I discover on several trips here, have broadly similar goals. The natural history museum, the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species, and A Studio in the Woods, share an overarching mission to better understand and to preserve the natural world.

   The Lower Coast is actually a peninsula defined by English Turn, a giant hairpin curve in the river named for an incident in 1699 when the French explorer Sieur de Bienville, coming downstream, met the English who had come up the Mississippi to choose site for settlement. Bienville convinced them that the territory was already in possession of the French, and the English ships turned away.

   The bend was a critical point of defense during the age of sail, since ships had to await a change in winds before pushing on to New Orleans, leaving them susceptible to cannon fire. You can still see the ruins of old brick fortifications at low water. Steam power eliminated the area's strategic value in the early 19th century, and the Lower Coast was drained and subdivided into sprawling sugar cane plantations.

   Hank Bart has several titles. He's museum director, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Tulane, and, most pleasingly, "curator of fishes." He oversees the collections, and arranges for specimens to be shipped to distant taxonomists, who seek to identify, categorize, and re-categorize new species and subspecies. The specimens are also requested by experts in the field of systematics, or the study of biological diversity.

   Each jar carries a label with the date and place the species was collected. That comes in handy today in ways that were unanticipated decades ago. "You can model the location of the species, and that's relevant to global climate change." Bart said. "Over time, the collection will become more valuable."

   Still, Bart is keenly aware that rooms filled with specimen jars are not exactly cutting edge science these days. He's been applying for grants to transfer information from the shelves to computerized databases. Looking to the future, his greatest fear is that the collection could be "orphaned." That's been happening with disconcerting frequency to natural history collections nationwide as research dollars chase sexier scientific subjects like molecular biology and DNA sequencing.

   Bart walks me to another bunker where the birds and some mammals are located. These specimens been effectively orphaned for years, ever since the curator retired and wasn't replaced. The orphans include species like the extinct Carolina parakeet and the ivory-billed woodpecker, ornithology's Holy Grail, which may yet exist in a remote Arkansas swamp.

   Bart explains that he's been seeking other institutions interested in adopting these specimens. He walks up to a steel filing case and slides open a drawer. I peer down at a pair of dead passenger pigeons, a species that once blackened the skies over North America until exterminated by hunting. The pigeons' plumage is faded and faintly dusty. There are small cotton balls where their eyes once were, and they look vacantly at nothing. Orphaned and extinct. The bunker suddenly seems very cold and silent indeed.

   Avoiding the silence of extinction is the chief goal of the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species, just through the woods from the Museum. The center is the research arm of the Audubon Nature Institute, best known for the Audubon Zoo and the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas which attract millions of visitors annually.

   "Besides being an education and entertainment venue, [the institute] wanted to be able to do something for endangered species," said Dr. Betsy Dresser, the center's longtime director. "We chose to develop science in the lab that would help animals to reproduce, especially animals that are either infertile or have behavioral incompatibilities. We're really a breeding resource center."

   Set on 1,200 wooded acres leased from the Coast Guard, Audubon has invested more than $53 million in infrastructure including a state-of-the art laboratory and a new facility for endangered fish and marine animals. Surrounded by a tall fence, the preserve is closed to the public. ("We have lions," said Dresser. "It's not like the zoo. You can walk right up to the fence here and stick your hand in.") An exception is made for visiting scientists and other V.I.P. guests who can stay, safari-style, at a lodge overlooking a watering hole frequented by antelope.

   Breeding aid takes a variety of forms, including in-vitro fertilization (Dresser is a internationally recognized expert in this field), embryo transfer, and cloning. There's also ongoing research endangered animal stem-cells. The Center claims a series of impressive firsts: It's home to the first cloned African wildcat, the first embryo transfer of an endangered species of antelope, and the first Mississippi sandhill crane hatched from artificial insemination

   The facility is spread widely around the grounds, with animal breeding areas tucked discretely here and there, away from prying eyes. On a tour, curator Jeff Vaccaro and I scramble up a two-story wooden tower at the edge of a clearing, and listen to the whoops and klaxon sounds of rare cranes in their pens. Vaccaro points to a distant building. "That's the costume rearing building," he says

Costumes?

   Vaccaro explains that the eggs are removed from the whooping and Mississippi sandhill cranes right after they're laid and to be incubator-hatched. To prevent the chicks from getting too comfortable with humans, they're fed by interns and staffers who don baggy grey costumes and wire-mesh masks. The humans also carry little fake crane-heads on sticks and attempt those strange crane-like noises.

   Back in the laboratory, Dresser walks me into the Frozen Zoo. It's a brightly lit room with stainless steel tanks and an array of jug-like vessels the size of end tables. Dresser pops off the top of one jug and that creepy, slasher-movie vapor curls out and flows toward the floor. Dresser hoists a steel rod and through the cloud pulls up a cluster of what looks like cocktail straws. Inside these narrow straws, she says, are the living cells of several thousand animals representing some 500 endangered species.

   "A cell is essentially 85 percent water," Dresser explains. "What we do is take that cellular water out and replace it with something like an antifreeze. Once you know how to freeze those cells it's like a living library. We think we can keep those cells alive for hundreds, maybe thousands of years."

   In the distant future, scientists will find in these tanks an extensive library of genetic patterns, allowing them to possibly reestablish animals that may have gone extinct. Meanwhile, the Frozen Zoo has already met its first major survival test in August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina came barreling toward New Orleans. As Audubon's detailed evacuation plan went into effect, the tanks cell and liquid nitrogen were loaded into a van. Like Noah's Ark on wheels, the van sped north with some 500 species to safe haven at the St. Louis Zoo.

   Before we leave the lab, Dresser points under a laboratory bench to a case that is used to haul frozen specimens as checked baggage on commercial airline flights. "People don't know they have a herd of antelope on board," she said.

   Katrina was also a defining moment in the natural history of A Studio in the Woods, an artists' retreat and an outdoor classroom where school children and university students experience and study the natural world.

   "That first spring, everything was white with blossoms," said botanist Dave Baker. He's standing in the middle of the Studio's seven acres of woods and wetlands, just upriver from the Audubon preserve. (On quiet mornings, Baker says, you can hear the lions roaring on the other side of the forest).

   While lovely, the delicate and fragrant white blossoms were also disturbing. "That's not what's supposed to be here," Baker said. The blooms were on Chinese privet, introduced from Asia in the mid-19th Century as an ornamental shrub. It escaped from backyards and has quickly spread over much of the southeast, forming dense clumps blocking out sunlight and dooming less aggressive native plants.

    "Our goal over the past four years has been to clear out the invasives," said Baker. So Baker spent months painstakingly cutting the privet and painting the exposed stems with herbicide. By 2005 he had set up 32 study plots, each ten meters square, and inventoried every plant within. The inventory was finally completed a week before Katrina.

   And so, somewhat inadvertently, Baker has found himself with his own small laboratory for observing how a forest recuperates from a severe hurricane - part of an emerging field called "hurricane ecology." And what Baker has seen has been a little startling - trees whose crowns where toppled by Katrina's winds have sent new sprouts soaring skyward, some as much as 12 feet in two years. Tree saplings from an ancient pecan orchard are thriving. Baker points out new water oak, sweet gum and other native species that have already pushed up a foot or more.

   "There's been just phenomenal growth," Baker said, adding that more biomass had been formed in the two years since the storm than existed on the land previously. That's testimony to the resilience of the native forest. "This forest has benefited dramatically because of the hurricane."

   Elsewhere, where Chinese privet has established itself, the outlook for a healthy and diverse forest on the Lower Coast is not as promising, Baker says. With more sunlight streaming through the former canopy, the privet will gorge itself like a high school football team at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

   "It's going to be one big shrub," he said.

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Travel writer Wayne Curtis divides his time between homes in New Orleans and Maine. He blogs on travel topics for the New York Times and contributes regularly to Atlantic Monthly, Saveur, Travel+Leisure and other national magazines. He can be reached at www.waynecurtis.com.

Artist and photographer Julie Dermansky has a passion for natural history museums and has documented collections around the world.  You can see  more of her amazing work at www.jsdart.com.