ecology
grrlscientist | July 18, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature, environment and behavior books and field guides that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "…
grrlscientist | July 14, 2010tags: The Oil Spill's Unseen Culprits, Victims, health, environment, ecology, pollution, oilspill, BP, acidification, Gulf of Mexico, dispersants, Carl Safina, TEDTalks, TED Talks, streaming video
The Gulf oil spill dwarfs comprehension, but we know this much: it's bad. Carl Safina scrapes out the facts in this blood-boiling cross-examination, arguing that the consequences will stretch far beyond the Gulf -- and many so-called solutions are making the situation worse.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading…
tsmith | July 13, 2010Blogging from Atlanta at ICEID, the perfect venue to highlight today's story in the NY Times by Carl Zimmer discussing gut microbes in health and disease--including an introduction focusing on fecal transplants to treat Clostridium difficile infections. If you're at ICEID, be sure to swing by several posters in both sessions today showing new work (ours and others') on zoonotic MRSA.
grrlscientist | July 11, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature, environment and behavior books and field guides that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "…
awild | July 2, 2010
Leptinotarsa decemlineata
Urbana, Illinois
Meet the Colorado Potato Beetle.
If I had to make a list of ten insects all people should know, I'd probably put this one on it. Leptinotarsa decemlineata is a walking case study in evolutionary ecology.
Anyone with a potato patch will recognize this large, pin-striped beetle as a particularly voracious consumer of potato leaves. And that's true- the insect is a major agricultural pest. But it has only been eating potato plants for 150 years or so. Before that, L. decemlineata was an obscure insect found in the mountains of western North America…
grrlscientist | July 1, 2010tags: Following The Mercury Trail, health, environment, ecology, pollution, PCBs, DDT, heavy metals, red tide, human sewage pollution, Stephen Palumbi, TEDTalks, TED Talks, streaming video
There's a tight and surprising link between the ocean's health and ours, says marine biologist Stephen Palumbi. He shows how toxins at the bottom of the ocean food chain find their way into our bodies, with a shocking story of toxic contamination from a Japanese fish market. His work points a way forward for saving the oceans' health -- and humanity's.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks…
grrlscientist | June 27, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature, environment and behavior books and field guides that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "…
laelaps | June 24, 2010
The nearly complete skeleton of a Steller's sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas) - it is missing bones from the wrist and hand. From Woodward, 1885.
It did not take long for the last remaining population of Steller's sea cow to be driven into extinction. Discovered by the German naturalist Georg Steller around the Bering Sea's Commander Islands in 1741, this enormous and peculiar sirenian became an easy target for Russian hunters. By 1768, it was gone. (The marine mammal would not be scientifically described until 1780, and today it is formally known as Hydrodamalis gigas.) Yet, despite the clear…
grrlscientist | June 20, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature, environment and behavior books and field guides that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "…
laelaps | June 16, 2010
A golden-mantled ground squirrel (Spermophilus lateralis), photographed in Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah. Though abundant at the Samwell Cave Popcorn Dome, California site during the Late Pleistocene, its numbers in the area decline at the beginning of the present Holocene epoch.
"One of the penalties of an ecological education", the naturalist Aldo Leopold once wrote, "is that one lives alone in a world of wounds." Few knew this better than he did. Despite becoming a celebrated advocate of wilderness for its own sake during the early twentieth century, Leopold began his career by…
laelaps | June 15, 2010
The skull of Mosasaurus hoffmani. From Lingham-Soliar 1995.
On my first trip to the Inversand marl pit in Sewell, New Jersey, I didn't find the wonderfully preserved Dryptosaurus skeleton I had been dreaming of. I picked up a number of Cretaceous bivalve shells and Paleocene sponges, but other than a few scraps of "Chunkosaurus" my excavations didn't yield very much. Before my paleontology class left the site, though, we took a walk by the spoil piles - great green mounds of sediment that had already been mined for glauconite. It had recently rained, and little pillars of the sandy green…
laelaps | June 14, 2010
A drop in the bucket - a massive pile of bison skulls about to be ground into fertilizer, photographed circa 1870. From Wikipedia.
From almost the very start, wolves were not welcome in Yellowstone. When the national park was established by the United States government in 1872 the bison population had crashed - a victim of westward expansion, the fur trade, and the desire to deprive native people of an animal important to their existence - leaving the area's wolves little recourse but to begin preying upon local livestock. This did nothing to help their reputation. Already seen as nature's…
grrlscientist | June 13, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature, environment and behavior books and field guides that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "…
laelaps | June 10, 2010
"Dinah", a young female gorilla kept at the Bronx Zoo in 1914. From the Zoological Society Bulletin.
Frustrated by the failure of gorillas to thrive in captivity, in 1914 the Bronx Zoo's director William Hornaday lamented "There is not the slightest reason to hope that an adult gorilla, either male or female, ever will be seen living in a zoological park or garden." Whereas wild adult gorillas were "savage" and "implacable" beasts which could not be captured (a photo of a sculpture included in Hornaday's article depicts a gorilla strangling one man, brandishing another about with its other…
grrlscientist | June 9, 2010tags: ecology, marine biology, conservation biology, endangered species, habitat preferences, Northern Bluefin Tuna, Atlantic Bluefin Tuna, Thunnus thynnus, Yellowfin Tuna, Thunnus albacares, fisheries, PLoS ONE, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, journal club
An adult Atlantic (Northern) Bluefin Tuna, Thunnus thynnus.
A recently published study, intended to provide data to commercial fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico so they maximize their catch of Yellowfin Tuna, Thunnus albacares, whilst avoiding bycatch of critically endangered Atlantic (Northern) Bluefin Tuna, Thunnus thynnus…
laelaps | June 7, 2010In the part of suburban New Jersey I grew up in, almost every other school took the cougar for its sports team mascot. There were the Carl H. Kumpf Middle School Cougars, the Cranford High School Cougars, and the Kean University Cougars, among others. Nevermind that cougars were extirpated from the state long ago - they were a top choice as symbols of the agility, cunning, and ferocity sports teams like to believe they channel. The use of such totems extends beyond sports. Exxon tells us we can "put a tiger in the tank" by using their fuel, and many people adorn themselves with clothing or…
grrlscientist | June 6, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
clock | June 5, 2010According to a new paper showing temporal and spatial patterns of migratory routes and spawning grounds of bluefin tuna, they were in the Gulf of Mexico spawning at the moment the oil well exploded and all that oil started gushing out (and then dispersed with toxic chemicals).
Nobody is fishing there now, and no professional media or amateur reporting or photography are allowed, but I am assuming some of the radiotransmitters in some of the individuals may still be operational and that data from the area, during the spill, will become available in the future.
grrlscientist | June 5, 2010tags: ecology, marine biology, conservation biology, endangered species, environmental toxicology, seabirds, marine mammals, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, journal club
Bird rescue personnel Danene Birtell (L) and Heather Nevill (R) hold an oiled brown pelican, found on Storm Island in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, that will be washed at the treatment facility at Fort Jackson, Louisiana, USA. BP has contracted bird rescue groups to rehabilitate wildlife affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The birds are examined, thoroughly washed and then allowed to…
grrlscientist | May 30, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…