This week, a photo exhibit at the headquarters of the Campbell Soup Company marked the debut of the Camden, N.J. site of Drexel’s “Witnesses to Hunger” program.
Photos from 10 low-income Camden women were on display to raise issues and challenges associated with food insecurity, as experienced by those who have lived with them. “Witnesses to Hunger,” a community-based participatory research and advocacy project was developed in Drexel’s School of Public Health in Philadelphia in 2008, and previously expanded to Boston and Baltimore last year. More background information about “Witnesses” and the Camden debut are available in the press release.
Here is a closer look at some of the Camden Witnesses, with their photos. (For photos presented in mini galleries, click through to view larger with full “voice” captions from the Witness, transcribed from interviews.) The Witnesses highlighted here have expressed willingness to be interviewed for news stories about…
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“We call it a ‘fish-eat-fish world,’ an ecosystem where you really needed to escape predation,” said Dr. Ted Daeschler, describing life in the Devonian period in what is now far-northern Canada.
This was the environment where the famous fossil fish species Tiktaalik roseae lived 375 million years ago. This lobe-finned fish, co-discovered by Daeschler, an associate professor at Drexel University in the Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science, and associate curator and vice president of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, and his colleagues Dr. Neil Shubin and Dr. Farish A. Jenkins, Jr., was first described in Nature in 2006.This species received scientific and popular acclaim for providing some of the clearest evidence of the evolutionary transition from lobe-finned fish to limbed animals, or tetrapods.
Excavating Devonian fossils in the Canadian Arctic. Credit: Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University
Daeschler and his colleagues from the Tiktaalik research, including Academy research associate Dr. Jason Downs, have now described another new lobe-finned fish species from the same time and place in the Canadian Arctic. They describe the new species, Holoptychius bergmanni, in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
“We’re fleshing out our knowledge of the community of vertebrates that lived at this important location,” said Downs, who was lead author of the paper. He said describing species from this important time and place will help the scientific community understand the transition from finned vertebrates to limbed vertebrates that occurred in this ecosystem.
“It was a tough world back there in the Devonian. There were a lot of big predatory fish with big teeth and heavy armor of interlocking scales on their bodies,” said Daeschler.
Daeschler said Holoptychius and Tiktaalik were both large predatory fishes adapted to life in stream environments. The two species may have competed with one another for similar prey, although it is possible they specialized in slightly different niches; Tiktaalik’s tetrapod-like skeletal features made it especially well suited to living in the shallowest waters.
The fossil specimens of Holoptychis bergmanni that researchers used to characterize this new species come from multiple individuals and include lower jaws with teeth, skull pieces including the skull roof and braincase, and parts of the shoulder girdles. The complete fish would have been 2 to 3 feet long when it was alive.
“The three-dimensional preservation of this material is spectacular,” Daeschler said. “For something as old as this, we’ll really be able to collect some good information about the anatomy of these animals.”
Above: Portions of the skull (left and center) and lower jaw (right) of Holoptychius bergmanni. Credit: Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, with drawings by Scott Rawlins.
The research on Holoptychius bergmanni was led by Downs, a former post-doctoral fellow working with Daeschler who also teaches at Swarthmore College. Other co-authors of the paper with Downs and Daeschler are Dr. Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago, and the late Dr. Farish Jenkins, Jr. of Harvard University, who passed away in 2012.
Honoring a Modern Arctic Explorer and Supporter of Science
Field research team excavating Devonian fossils at the site in the Canadian Arctic where they found Tiktaalik roseae. Credit: Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University
The researchers named the new fossil fish species Holoptychius bergmanni in honor of the late Martin Bergmann, former director of the Polar Continental Shelf Program (PCSP), Natural Resources Canada, the organization that provided logistical support during the team’s Arctic research expeditions spanning more than a decade. Bergmann was killed in a plane crash in 2011 shortly after the team’s most recent field season in Nunavut.
“We decided to choose Martin Bergmann to honor him, not ever having met him, but with the understanding that his work with PCSP made great strides in opening the Arctic to researchers,” said Downs. “It’s an invaluable project happening in the Canadian Arctic that’s enabling this type of work to happen.”
Bergmann’s organization assisted the research team with many aspects of expedition logistics including difficult flight operations to carry supplies and research personnel to remote research sites on Ellesemere Island. Daeschler described the pilots as capable of landing a Twin Otter aircraft almost anywhere, as long as the ground was solid – a condition they tested by briefly touching down the airplane and circling back to see if the tires left a deep mark in the mud.
Daeschler and colleagues intend to return to Ellesemere Island for another field expedition in the summer of 2013 to search for fossils in older rocks at a more northerly field site than the one where they discovered T. roseae and H. bergmanni.
A Deeper Look at the Devonian
Daeschler and a different co-author described another new species of Devonian fish in addition to H. bergmanni, in the same issue of the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences. More information about this new placoderm from Pennsylvania is available at the Drexel News Blog.
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Some days, Barbie Izquierdo said she read pizza menus and looked at the pictures of food to distract herself from hunger pains while she went without eating so her two young children could have enough. Izquierdo, a young single mother in Philadelphia, earned too little to put healthy food on the table, even with the help of assistance programs such as food stamps.
Izquierdo is a protagonist in a new documentary film, A Place at the Table, which chronicles three individuals’ stories to bring to light the often-hidden realities of hunger in America.
The film, premiering March 1, 2013 in theaters, on iTunes and On Demand, interweaves these personal stories with insights from experts, ordinary citizens and anti-hunger activists.
Izquierdo’s story begins with her challenges feeding her children, dealing with health problems and trying to build a better life for her family. Her story goes beyond the day-to-day struggles, however, because Izquierdo is a participant in “Witnesses to Hunger,” a community-based participatory research and advocacy project developed by Dr. Mariana Chiltonat Drexel University’s School of Public Health to document the complex issues surrounding food insecurity, poverty and children’s health.
Above: Film trailer video for A Place at the Table
Izquierdo was one of the initial 40 women to join “Witnesses” at its launch in Philadelphia in 2008. Chilton formed this group to encourage participation of people who have experienced food insecurity and hunger first-hand. These mothers use digital cameras to frame the issues most important to them and their children. They use photographs and testimony to inform policymakers and make changes in their communities.
The film documents Izquierdo’s trip in 2009 with Chilton and a group of Witnesses to Washington, D.C., where they testified before legislators and displayed their photos at the nation’s capital.
Above: Witnesses to Hunger 2009 Congressional briefing
“Chilton’s vision to give cameras, and a voice, to the women of Witnesses to Hunger inspired us in our own effort to give those families a voice in the national dialogue,” said co-director/producer Kristi Jacobson in press materials prepared for A Place at the Table.
Chilton acted as a conduit for the filmmakers to connect with many women struggling with food insecurity, including Izquierdo. Jacobson added that a key moment for the filmmakers was when one of the associate producers, Julie Kohn, watched footage of Izquierdo and began to cry. “They were the same age,” said Jacobson. “And Julie was so moved by Barbie’s struggle. She related to her, despite their different backgrounds. It helped us to see how relatable Barbie was as a young person facing daunting obstacles.”
The film also features Chilton’s research as the principal investigator of the Philadelphia site of Children’s HealthWatch, a multi-site surveillance study that monitors the health and well-being of young children under the age of four. In this age range, children are in a period of rapid brain growth and development. Therefore, even mild-to-moderate under-nutrition can have long term negative consequences.
Above: Barbie Izquierdo talks about participating in the film, at the White House in 2012
Through stories like Izquierdo’s, and those of Rosie, a fifth-grade student in Colorado, and Tremonica, a second-grade student in Mississippi, the film reveals the serious economic, social and cultural implications hunger poses in the United States and the systemic issues that cause inequality of access to healthy food. Moreover, the film shows that this is a problem that America has solved in the past, and can solve again.
A Place at the Table was co-directed and produced by Jacobson and Lori Silverbush. The film’s executive producers are Tom Colicchio (TV’s Top Chef), Participant Media’s Jeff Skoll and Diane Weyermann and Christina Weiss Lurie and Jeffrey Lurie (owners of the Philadelphia Eagles).
Rachel Ewing 