STUDENT LIFE
THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF WASHINGTON UNIVERSIT Y IN ST. LOUIS SINCE 1878 Do seven-year-olds really have more spirit than WU sports fans? Columnist Allie Wieczorek comments in Sports. Page 6.
Poker mania! Sports wraps up parts two and three of its three-part series on the poker phenomenon at WU. Page 7.
VOLUME 127, NO. 4
Columnist Joshua Trein explores the explosive debate and discourse surrounding Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Page 5.
Washington University students do have school spirit—they just show it in quirky, idiosyncratic ways. See Sports for details. Page 10.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2005
WWW.STUDLIFE.COM
Hurricane students seek WU admissions By Laura Geggel and Brad Nelson News Staff Four days after Hurricane Katrina devastated student move-in at Tulane, Loyola and other universities along the Gulf Coast, students have been frantically searching for colleges that will temporarily enroll them until their campuses are deemed safe for return. “We have had so many calls today that it overloaded our phone bank, we’ve had more than 150 inquiries over the past three days,” said Robert Wiltenburg, the dean of University College. Most students applying to the University will be placed in the Visiting Students Program and remain at University College for either a semester or a year. “Frequently [the program] will be for someone who is a St. Louis native who had been going somewhere else but has pressing family reasons to be back in St. Louis,” Wiltenburg said. The program, which usually accepts 10-15 students a semester, will try to accommodate as many students affected by the hurricane as possible. “We don’t know yet exactly what [the fi nal acceptance numbers] will turn to because we’re still in the process of meeting with the students and their parents and evaluating their situations,” Wiltenburg said. Ap-
proximately 12 students have been accepted into the program as of yesterday. Almost all of the students applying for the University College Visiting Students Program are undergraduates. “The graduate students are in a different situation, if they’re writing a dissertation, they might need [specific] library faculties,” Wiltenburg said, adding that an equal number of freshmen and upperclassmen students have been requesting admittance information. In an e-mail to the University community, Chancellor Mark Wrighton announced that “Washington University will be accepting some of these students on a visiting, non-degreeseeking basis and also will be offering library privileges and work space to graduate students and scholars.” He noted that the University has “already heard from some of these students, including many from the greater St. Louis region.” One of those is the son of Steve Fazzari, the chairman of the economics department. Fazzari, who’s son Anthony was about to complete his senior at Tulane University, said he’s had some communication with the admissions office here about his son enrolling in the school for semester. “They’re very helpful. They’re very accommodating. They’re doing everything they
can,” he says. But Fazzari and his son won’t make a decision about plans for the upcoming semester until Anthony returns home tomorrow from Dallas, where he went to ride out the hurricane. In the meantime, Tulane administrators are gathering in Houston to form a game plan for the next few months. “Obviously, he would prefer to go to his own school. He’s a senior, he’s pretty far along with the credits he needs to take.” Fazzari said. “So we’re waiting for Tulane. They haven’t communicated with anybody. Nobody thinks they can mount a semester at Tulane.” When he returns to New Orleans, Anthony will come back to an apartment – the condition of which is unknown – in which he left almost all of his belongings. “He left Saturday night, took his laptop, a few days clothes, threw them in the back of the car and went off,” Fazzari said. “All the other stuff is sitting in a second floor apartment.” University representatives will also discuss the possibilities of a University-wide response to Hurricane Katrina in a meeting this afternoon. Student groups are invited to send representatives to the meeting, which will take place from 1-3 p.m. in McMillan Café.
MICHAEL AINSWORTH | KRT CAMPUS
As the National Guard patrols, Louis Jones, left, and Catherine McZeal, right, walk down flooded Poydras St. in New Orleans, on their way to the Superdome on Thursday, September, 1, 2005, days after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans.
MOUNTAIN OF SUPPLIES PRECEDES SERVICE FIRST
Katrina sends gas prices skyrocketing By Shweta Murthi Contributing Reporter
DAVID HARTSTEIN | STUDENT LIFE
Students began organizing this mountain of cleaning and painting supplies on Thursday morning to get ready for Saturday’s annual Service First program. Service First provides new students at the University with an opportunity to volunteer at schools and other locations around the St. Louis area, and is followed by a community service fair on the South 40.
For fish: Is bigger really better? By Laura Geggel News Editor Is being big really worth it? If you were a male mosquito fish, you might not be so sure, according to the new research of a Washington University PhD candidate. Males with a larger gonopodium, the technical name for the reproductive organ of that species of fish, tend to attract more attention from females. However, these well-endowed fish are also easy prey. The drag from an extra-long gonopodium decreases a fish’s burst speed when escaping from predators. “The larger the gonopodium the lower the burst speed,” said Brian Langerhans, a PhD
candidate in evolutionary ecology at the University. “If you compare a cross population, it can be as much as a 20 percent difference in speed. It’s actually quite an impact, but so far it’s hard to say exactly because there are a lot of other traits acting at the same time,” Langerhans said. Male mosquito fish are one of the few fish belonging to the family poeciliid, including guppies and other fish that bear live young. Unlike most fish, which spray semen on already laid eggs, poeciliid males physically inseminate the female. “The gonopodium is a modified anal fi n that’s basically a sperm transfer organ,” Langerhans said. “After copulation occurs, the females bear live young [that] develop
from egg to larva to actual juvenile fish inside her body.” Langerhans raised and mated fish in captivity fi rst to prove that gonopodium size is indeed a heritable trait. “Basically, I showed that the pattern in the wild is also maintained when they were raised in the lab,” Langerhans said. Focusing on the evolution of fish body shape, Langerhans compared mosquito fish in predator-free zones in captivity to the survival-of-thefittest conditions of the wild. “Fish at a site without any type of predatory fish at allthey have a pretty big gonopodium. And the gonopodium is, on average, 15 percent larger than at a site you fi nd with predators,” he explained. Langerhans devel-
oped a mate-choice experiment for the female fish in captivity. Just as in the wild, the females exhibited preference for the male with the larger gonopodium, spending 81 percent more time directly interacting with him than his smaller-sized counterpart. Females also approached the large-gonopodium male 28 percent more times than the small-gonopodium male while fl itting around the tank. Yet predators like the sun fish and large mouth bass in Texas and the barracuda in the Bahamas constantly threaten mosquito fish with excessive baggage. Thus the mosquito fish dilemma; pre-mating sexual selection drives favors larger gonopodia, whereas
See FISH, page 3
Already reeling from soaring summer gas prices, Missouri residents were hit again with over a thirty-cent increase per gallon after Hurricane Katrina shut down nearly a dozen major crude oil refi neries in the Gulf of Mexico. As of Monday, nearly 12 percent of the American refi ning capacity has been shut down completely. “Thirty cents is pretty significant,” said Steve Fazzari, chair of the economics department. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes up another 10 to 20 cents higher. But compared to the rest of the nation. “The big problem is that there is no excess capacity elsewhere. In a normal market, if there’s a disruption it could be picked up by other refi neries. But the US market doesn’t have the slack,” Fazarri added. Fazarri said he expected prices to lower in a month or two after refi neries in the Gulf of Mexico resumed production.
President Bush opened up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on Wednesday that was secured specifically for times of national emergencies. But Fazarri says this will have no impact on prices “If the bottleneck is on refi nery capacity rather than oil reserves, then dumping more oil on the market [through the Strategic Petroleum Reserve] will not affect the consumers of the oil market,” he said Hurricane Katrina has affected more than just crude oil, however. The storm damaged several underground pipes that bring in natural gas. Limited access to the affected areas has made it increasingly hard to determine the extent of the crisis. Many power plants use natural gas to generate electricity; however it cannot be easily imported from overseas. George Csolak, from Laclede Gas Company, which provides natural gas to the greater St. Louis
See GAS, page 3
MIKE CARDEW | KRT CAMPUS
Judy Williamson and her son, Tony Neel, contemplate their next move after finding the gas station they were in line at had closed for the night in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on Wednesday August 31, 2005. Gas prices around the country are surging because of the loss of Gulf Coast refineries in Hurricane Katrina.