ecology
grrlscientist | October 5, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that are or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle bird pals, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will…
grrlscientist | October 3, 2008tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, bird education
Today's featured project is below the fold.
This is a rural high-poverty school in North Carolina. The teacher is a bird watcher who also lives with pet birds, and she seeks to instill this love for birds into her students. In this proposal, she and her students will learn about the diets of owls by dissecting owl pellets and examining the remains of insects and bones from small animals that the owls cannot digest.
"Whooo's in the Forest?" Part II
I teach a…
awild | October 2, 2008
Prenolepis imparis - The Winter Ant
Champaign, Illinois
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon 20D
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper
grrlscientist | October 2, 2008tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, bird education
One of the highest poverty areas in America is in Washington DC, our nation's capital. That's just disgusting. But we do not need to let the kids who live there succumb to the rampant despair of broken dreams, poor health and poverty. This proposal seeks to give these kids wings by teaching them about birds. Birds are a magical gateway into biological sciences; drawing kids into learning about the wonders of evolution and behavioral ecology and conservation. I know…
grrlscientist | October 1, 2008tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, bird education
Mrs. G is seeking supplies for a microbiology lab. I, as a microbiologist, recognize the value (and the intense fascination!) of teaching students about the natural world, particularly microbes!
I teach 7th grade Science in a school where the majority of the students are classified as Title 1, meaning that they need remedial help with their basic skills. Even without that classification, students this age are hard to motivate, especially in the content area of…
clock | September 30, 2008As the month of September is coming to a close, and the topic of the month in PLoS ONE is bats, we decided to end the focus with a Journal Club.
Starting today, and lasting a week, there will be a Journal Club on this PLoS ONE article - Bats' Conquest of a Formidable Foraging Niche: The Myriads of Nocturnally Migrating Songbirds by Ana G. Popa-Lisseanu, Antonio Delgado-Huertas, Manuela G. Forero, Alicia Rodriguez, Raphael Arlettaz and Carlos Ibanez:
Along food chains, i.e., at different trophic levels, the most abundant taxa often represent exceptional food reservoirs, and are hence the main…
grrlscientist | September 29, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that are or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle bird pals, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will…
chaoticutopia | September 28, 2008Since this party is being held in my house, I imagine someone is certain to mention the giant squid in the bathroom. If you can’t make it, it won’t be you--but you can still have that same sort of undersea experience.
Here’s a game review I wrote a while ago for JayIsGames, that was never published because JohnB beat me to the punch. It may not exactly be a "party favor" per say, but it is a lovely game.... maybe even more so than my bathroom!
What happens when an oil tanker crashes into a coral reef, and the EPA fails to act in time? Well, if you’re talking about Kaleidoscope Reef, the…
grrlscientist | September 21, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that are or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle bird pals, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will…
grrlscientist | September 14, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that are or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle bird pals, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will…
hrynyshyn | September 12, 2008By now, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's hypocritical position on budget "earmarks" is a part of the American political landscape. The former earmark champion is now the ostensible earmark slayer. Whatever. Unfortunately, a lot of science is funded through earmarks, so we should be careful what we wish for when it comes to reforming government. For example, Politico's Ben Smith has produced a list of scientific research earmarks that Palin recently requested, including $1 million for rockfish research along with:
⢠$400,000: Alaska Invasive Species Program: Continues to comprehensively prevent,…
grrlscientist | September 7, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that are or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle bird pals, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will…
mikethemadbiologist | September 4, 2008A recent paper examined if use of the antibiotic cotrimoxazole was correlated with resistance in three different bacterial pathogens, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae, and Moraxella catarrhalis. To quickly summarize, in one species, S. pneumoniae, resistance was correlated with use, whereas it was not for the other two species. While the study is fine for what it is, it inadvertently highlights a problem most surveillance systems have:
they don't incorporate genetic information.
Without genotypic information, we don't really know what happened. Is the correlation spurious,…
grrlscientist | September 1, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that are or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle bird pals, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will…
mikethemadbiologist | August 27, 2008If there was a crucial tile in the Jenga Pile o'Shit (also known as the recent financial meltdown), it was the cratering of Bear Stearns stock. I can't have been the only one who thought, "Damn if I had only shorted Bear Stearns...." Turns out some anonymous investors did just that under some...unusual circumstances:
As the story lacked prurient interest, it was left to Bloomberg.com tounearth persuasive information that the Wall Street firm was seemingly brought down by a conspiracy that netted its participants a profit of upwards of $250 million on an investment of $1.7 million in a week…
clock | August 26, 2008
Thanks Bill for drawing my attention to iNaturalist which has the makings of an awesome site!
What is it?
It is essentially a Google Map where people can add pins every time they see an interesting critter: a plant, fungus, animal, etc. What is recorded is geographical coordinates and time when it was posted.
Moreover, people can link from the pins to pictures of the sighted critters if they upload them on Flickr (nice way to interlink existing social networking sites instead of reinventing the wheel). And they can put additional information, e.g., description of the habitat where they saw…
grrlscientist | August 24, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that are or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle bird pals, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will…
awild | August 21, 2008
On my recent visit to the coastal forests of Kwazulu-Natal I noticed basketball-like growths on many of the Acacia trees. In North America, any large gray ball you see hanging off a tree branch is liable to be a hornet's nest. In South America, it's probably a carton nest of fierce little Azteca ants. The equivalent in South Africa? I didn't know.
A little bit of poking around in the acacias revealed the culprit. It was Crematogaster tricolor, an orange ant about half a centimeter long:
They didn't appreciate the disturbance, apparently, because they came after me without…
clock | August 18, 2008Save the planet? Buy it:
Millionaires are purchasing entire ecosystems around the world and turning them into conservation areas. Their goal? To stop environmental catastrophe.
But will they know how to do it well? Will they inject some of their own incorrect ideas into their projects? Who will they listen to when designing these? Will their kids continue?
grrlscientist | August 17, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase. This edition is absolutely packed with book titles that you will want to read!
FEATURED TITLE:
James, Jamie. The Snake Charmer: A Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge. 2008. Hyperion. Hardbound: 260 pages. Price…