Ecology & Zoology

Look how epic this little guy is! He is a crab — and if you asked him, the fiercest warrior that ever lived. While that may not be strictly true, crabs do have the heart of a warrior and will raise their claws, sometimes only millimetres into the air, to assert dominance over their world.  Crabs are decapod crustaceans of the Phylum Arthropoda.  In the Kwak'wala language of the Kwakiutl First Nations of the Pacific Northwest, this brave fellow is ḵ̓u'mis — both a tasty snack and familiar to the supernatural deity Tuxw'id, a female warrior spirit. Given their natural armour and clear…

These delightfully friendly and super smart fellows are Dall's porpoise. Porpoise are marine mammals who live in our world's oceans and breathe air at the surface, similar to humans. They have lungs, inhaling and exhaling through a blowhole at the top of their heads instead of through their snouts. In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, a blowhole is known as a ka̱'was, whether on a dolphin (porpoise) or whale and a porpoise is known as a k̓ulut̕a.  In the Pacific Northwest, we see many of their kind — the shy,…

Citrus canker, caused by the bacterium Xanthomonas citri, was first identified in the United States near the Florida-Georgia border in 1910 and then raged across southern states.  It was considered eradicated in 1933, thanks to chemical intervention, but in 1995 it was found again in Miami-Dade County, Florida. This time, Florida found it impossible to eliminate and worked on containment. It moved to Louisiana in 2014 and 2016, USDA confirmed the presence of the Asiatic A strain, a more severe form of citrus canker, on two sour orange trees in Houston. From there it made its way to the…

Urban people may believe nature is balanced and peaceful and pristine but biologists know that nature really just wants to suck the nutrients from your dead corpse. Insects have more nature to worry about, in the form of the delicate stalk and pretty white flowers of Triantha occidentalis, the first new carnivorous plant to be identified by botanists in 20 years. It is notable for the unusual way it traps prey with sticky hairs on its flowering stem. Triantha occidentalis in a bog at Cypress Provincial Park, British Columbia, Canada. Credit: Danilo Lima The plant grows in nutrient-poor, boggy…

Honeybees die each year in great quantities and some years are worse than others. Since they are a big business, primarily as roving pollinators for crops that need them at a certain time (like almonds(1) there is always a concern about how to keep losses low. Causes of death were once a moving target. For as long as records of bees have been kept, there have been reports of extraordinary die-offs, recorded all the way back to the Dark Ages. Now we know the big problem are pests like varroa mites but there are also concerns about harsh winters, land use, and some environmental groups even try…

(Inside Science) -- When you first hear it, a cicada chorus may sound like simple buzzing. But to a cicada, that cacophony is full of meaning.  There are three species in Brood X, the cohort of 17-year cicadas now emerging in much of the eastern U.S. Members of each species congregate with their own kind and talk to each other with their own species-specific sounds. Males sing to court females and "jam" the songs of other males, while females make clicks with their wings to encourage or repel suitors.  Humans can learn to decode these sounds. John Cooley, a biologist at the…

In the bizarre maze of modern cultural geopolitics, European progressives spend a lot of time rending garments about their history of colonialism, slavery, and exploitation while engaging in it - using financial blockades if former colonies do not comply. If a small trading partner wants to export food to Europe, it cannot use any science that Europe bans, and European progressives have a level of control over science that American activists only wish they could attain. There's one big big problem with that; it cripples small countries. They are already at a disadvantage that science can…

The latest numbers on honeybee colonies have been released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and they show that the Beepocalypse we keep being warned about has been postponed for another year. Instead of going extinct, as activist fundraising campaigns assured us would happen unless efficient targeted seed treatments were replaced by mass spraying of plants with antiquated pesticides still certified "organic", bees are doing great. The only fluctuations are "statistical wobble" that can happen any time - or due to economics. Honey production was down in 2020, like every sector of the…

Most dog owners will say that dogs understand tone, and interpret that rather than words, and that most dogs do not learn words (i.e. names of objects), unless extensively trained, but a new analysis shows that is not always the case. Some dogs have some exceptional abilities and can learn new words after hearing them only four times. A new study by the Family Dog Project is just what it sounds like; investigating dogs who seem to learn words in the absence of any formal training by simply being exposed to playing with their owners in the typical way owners do, in a human family. The results…

A new meta-analysis finds what scientists outside the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health have long known - alternatives to medicine, now called Integrative Medicine after failing as Complementary and Alternative Medicine after failing as Traditional Medicine after failing as Folk Medicine, are not just useless, they are ecologically reckless. The paper in Mammal Review only look at mammal species and still found that 155 commonly used in Traditional Medicine (Chinese, African. Latin American, also bought by people in America who…