Ecology & Zoology

Falcons See Prey At Twice The Speed Of Humans- And What That Means For All Bird Care

You may be aware that film runs at 25 frames per second because humans will then not see it as individual images. These 'blinks per second' are measured in Hertz and some humans can see up to 60 Hz. You may not sleep well if you have a light blin ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 20 2019 - 11:50am

Release The Kraken Genome!

Sailors have told tales of giant tentacled sea monsters for millennia. In ancient times, it was the Kraken. In more recent work, Jules Verne delighted and terrified the public while reading 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. The monstrous Architeuthis dux, the ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 17 2020 - 12:30pm

Plantng Forests Sucks Rivers Dry- And They Never Recover

Microsoft has declared they will become carbon neutral regarding their energy usage by 2030. While their details were sparse, they included electric cars, which still create emissions because 81 percent of electricity is generated using fossil fuels, and c ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 20 2020 - 11:15am

To Remove An Invasive Species Or Not: Determining When Drastic Ecological Interventions Will Go Bad

Pyrus calleryana (Callery pear) is a tree native to China and Vietnam that California government introduced a hundred years ago after natural fire blight wiped out much of the European pear crops grown in the state.  Since the callery pear was highly resi ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 29 2020 - 12:33pm

While Coronavirus Talk Dominates The US, Few Notice 25 Million Africans Being Devastated By Locusts

As desert locusts ravage African crops, EU-funded NGOs maneuver in the Kenyan parliament to leave farmers defenseless. C aught flat-footed by the emergency, the FAO struggles to purchase enough pesticides to avert catastrophe. Experts fear it may be too l ...

Article - James Njoroge - Feb 11 2020 - 12:34am

Mosquitoes: Females Need Blood, Males Need Nectar, Both Need Keen Noses

Mosquitoes rely on sense of smell to get what they need to survive. Females need blood to produce their eggs, so they find a host to bite and spots to lay eggs, while both males and females feed on nectar. Their dominant source of food is nectar from flow ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 13 2020 - 10:00am

How Bird Flocks With Multiple Species Behave Like BTS And Other K-Pop Groups

Despite what you've heard, birds of a feather often don't flock together. In the real world, multiple bird species are often flying and feeding together. In the Amazon, 50 species may travel as a unit. But are birds in these mixed flocks cooperat ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 15 2020 - 8:00am

What Endangered Means To Scientists And What It Means To Environmental Lawyers Are Much Different Things

You might know blue whales are an endangered species while pandas are not. Yet there are 25,000 blue whales and only 2,000 pandas.  There are 100,000 sea otters yet they are still classified as endangered. Who drew that line between endangered and not enda ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Feb 19 2020 - 3:07pm

Not Bamboo, But Knotweed

I garden for a living, besides writing. My last blog referred to bamboo growing in a rock garden outside my back door. But my urban gardening mentor has informed me this plant is not bamboo.  It's Japanese  knotweed. Many consider knotweed an invasive ...

Blog Post - Anonymous - Feb 25 2020 - 1:38pm

Discovered: Henneguya Salminicola, The Only Animal On Earth That Doesn't Breathe

Scientists have discovered a non-oxygen breathing animal, a tiny, less than 10-celled parasite named Henneguya salminicola which lives in salmon muscle. As it evolved, the animal, a myxozoan relative of jellyfish and corals, gave up breathing and consuming ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 27 2020 - 12:12pm