The articles listed here all highlight unique or lesser-known tidbits of information about animals and wildlife from around the web. You'll find video lectures by zoologists, profiles of scientists that study animals, discussions with natural history enthusiasts, book reviews, wildlife research insights, and a links to the latest wildlife web resources.
December 3, 2008. Alfred Russel Wallace was a self-taught naturalist who is best known for developing a theory of evolutionary origin at about the same time Charles Darwin was putting the finishing touches on his theory of natural selection. Wallace's theory is now vastly overshadowed by Darwin's convincing dissertation on natural selection. But Wallace's thwarted theory represents only a small part of his many accomplishments.
December 1, 2008. Scientists suspect that the green sea slug (Elysia chlorotica) is guilty of kleptoplasty—the stealing of genetic material from another organism. For some time, experts have known that the green sea slug acquires chloroplasts from the algae it eats. The sea slug stores those chloroplasts in cells that line its gut. There, they act as miniature powerhouses, converting sunlight into sugar. Yet scientists have been puzzled as to how the chloroplasts continue to function on their own.
Amphibian populations around the world are in decline due to multiple factors, but one of the most serious threats they face is Chytridiomycosis, a fatal disease caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. To combat Chytridiomycosis, conservationists have resorted in some instances to capturing vulnerable amphibians from the wild and placing them in captivity.
If you're interested in vertebrate paleontology in general (and the evolution of the first tetrapods in particular) then you might want to take an hour out of your day and watch this lecture by Neil Shubin. In it, Dr. Shubin describes his research in the Canadian Arctic and the 2004 discovery of Tiktaalik roseae, a 375-million-year-old fossil that fits into an interesting gap in the fossil record between fish and terrestrial tetrapods.
November 8, 2008. I stumbled across three superb wildlife photography galleries at the National Geographic website and thought they were simply too wonderful not to mention here in my blog.
The BBC has posted an online gallery of images from their 2008 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. The top prize went to National Geographic photographer, Steve Winter for his image of a snow leopard in its natural habitat. Other prizes went to Catriona Parfitt (Young Photographer of the Year), Antoni Kasprzak (Bird Photography), and Stefano Unterthiner (Animal Potraits).
October 8, 2008. Mantis shrimp (Order Stomatopoda) are a group of marine crustaceans that possess powerful appendages enabling them to strike or spear their prey with overwhelming force. The mantis shrimp spearing and striking behavior captured the interest of UC Berkely biologist Sheila Patek, who set out to measure the speed at which mantis shrimp unfurl their appendages during an attack.
October 4, 2008. Biologist Robert Full is, in some respects, a podiatrist to cockroaches and geckos. His research aims to understand how evolution, over the course of millions of years, has engineered feet of all shapes, sizes, and functions. To that end, Dr. Full uses slow motion video to record cockroaches sprinting across a wire mesh—such footage helps him decipher how cockroaches prevent their legs from slipping through the holes in the mesh.
Linda Rayor, a senior research associate of arthropod behavior at Cornell University, has an infectious passion for arachnids. She teaches a much-loved course in spider biology at Cornell, in which her engaging teaching style seldom fails to turn spider-fearing arachnophobes into inquisitive and enthusiastic arachnophiles.
September 11, 2008. I always enjoy finding out about people who combine a love for wildlife with a passion for artistic expression. Fish biologist and photographer Mary Edwards is the perfect example of someone who does just that. As a fish biologist, Edwards studies many aspects of salmon, from their anatomy to their mating behavior.
September 5, 2008. The way scientists organize the tree of life is an ongoing exercise in taxonomic topiary. There have been many esteemed minds that have weighed-in on the subject of classification—Aristotle, Carolus Linneaus, Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, and Carl Woese, to name a select few. And there has been much disagreement and debate along the way as to how living beings should be sorted and labeled.
October 19, 2007. In 1994, the Clinton Administration established the Northwest Forest Plan as a means of managing logging activities within the range of the northern spotted owl, a threatened species in America's Pacific Northwest. Under the plan, some lands within the owl's range were open for logging but nearly twice as much was protected in order to ensure the rare owls’ had sufficient hunting grounds.
