Ecology & Zoology
Biologists from the American Museum of Natural History and the City University of New York have found that grizzly bears are roaming into what was traditionally thought of as polar bear habitat, the Canadian province of Manitoba, where they are officially listed as extirpated. The preliminary findings were published in Canadian Field Naturalist and show that sightings of Ursus arctos horribilis in Canada's Wapusk National Park are recent and appear to be increasing in frequency.
A grizzly bear sighting in August 2008 spurred researchers to look through records to get a better picture of the…
Here’s why you don’t kill the spider… why should you?The typical, first answer is that it bites.Or that it’s creepy.Or that it will crawl into your mouth at night… um… well – first things first.
Spiders almost never bite people.
Many couldn’t if they tried. Those that can, typically won’t. Spiders bite to eat. Just like we do. But it’s more than that...
When they eat, spiders bite, but they don’t chew. That’s an important thing to understand for people who are nervous about spiders (you know who you are).
Imagine if you could bite but not chew. If you got a big bite of peanut…
What to look for in the next decade, as far as squid are concerned? Certainly new species will be discovered and described. Fisheries will probably spring up for species that have never been fished before. These will boom, and probably bust.
But the real question on everyone's mind: will we have a giant squid in an aquarium by 2020?
I don't know about you but, personally, I can't get enough of giant squids: great Routemaster-sized carnivores with bone-snapping beaks, eyes the size of dinner plates and churning tentacles.
See? It's not just me! This quote comes not from a teuthologist…
When I am out doing bug programs I am often asked (with a slow-down-to-look-at-an-accident wince); “where do you keep all these bugs? Do they stay at your house?” I explain about the shelves with the lights, or the bug room and usually digress into a shopworn lecture on respect and the difference between invited and uninvited guests.
And the position I take on respect is this: that respect is a matter of making good decisions based on your understanding of the situation. The better you understand, the more respectful your decisions will be (unless you’re…
About once a week, my legges taken me (in a Middle English sort of way) over to lunch in the common room of our Department of Agriculture, where a kindly member of staff leaves copies of journals for us to read. One that has taken my interest recently is the June 2009 issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution, in which I have read two reviews whose contents I will summarize. The first of these is:
The jellyfish joyride: causes, consequences and management responses to a more gelatinous future
by Anthony J. Richardson, Andrew Bakun, Graeme C. Hays and Mark J. Gibbons http://dx.doi.…
My colleague, the Tortoise Cat, always attempts to alert me whenever a lone wild rabbit prances by our back steps in the wee-most moments of the dawn. But I have been too slow, so far, to catch even a fleeting glimpse of that cottontail bouncing away, into the shadows.
Later, in broad daylight, the tale-tale snow-prints of a fleeing cottontail rabbit jump out at me. I ponder what this bunny neighbor might have been zig-zagging away from in such a rush.
The large prints of the rabbit's long rear paws landed way ahead of the tiny holes made by the dainty front pair (that were already leaping…
The diversity of corals harboring unusual species of symbiotic algae in the warm waters of the Andaman Sea indicates that coral reefs and the ecosystems dependent on them may persist despite climate change, according to a new study in the Journal of Biogeography.
The researchers say the comprehensive survey, which included analysis of the corals and symbiotic algae living in the cooler western Indian Ocean and Great Barrier Reef area of Australia, is unparalleled by any other study.
"The fact that the Andaman Sea and other regions around Southeast Asia are home to such a high…
Oh yeah, and my adivsor was totally on NPR yesterday, check it out. In terms of press coverage, we are so lucky that we work with charismatic, edible megafauna.
The opening sentence of Wikipedia's article on the man seems fairly encompassing:
Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was a writer, public speaker, philosopher, psychonaut, ethnobotanist, art historian, and self-described anarchist, anti-materialist, environmentalist, feminist, platonist and skeptic.
However, it doesn't say anything about cephalopods, and that is a serious oversight. Apparently McKenna believed that they were the totemic images. Really. See, I got this quote off the SF Chronicle's blog:*
I believe that the totemic image for the future is the octopus. This…
It appears that the act of voluntarily sharing something with another is not entirely exclusive to the human experience. Researchers writing in Current Biology observe that bonobos—a sister species of chimpanzees--consistently chose to share their food with others.
In the study, bonobos had to choose whether to eat some food by themselves or to give another bonobo access to it. The test subjects had the opportunity to immediately eat the food or to use a "key" to open a door to an adjacent empty room or a room that had another bonobo in it. The test subjects could easily see into the adjacent…