Biodiversity
milhayser | April 14, 2016On Pharyngula, PZ Myers doesn't just want cut your grass—he wants to tear it out by the roots and leave it to rot in the sun. He quotes J. Crumpler on The Roaming Ecologist, who calls lawns "sterile, chemically-filled, artificial environments [...] that provide no benefits over the long term; no food, no clean water, no wildlife habitat, and no foundation for preserving our once rich natural heritage." To make matters worse, lawnmower use adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, while beautiful bermuda grass requires a lot of H2O in a world that is increasingly insecure about water. During the…
milhayser | March 16, 2016Would it surprise you to learn that the top movie at the North American box office, a computer-animated family film made for children, is a nakedly racist allegory, a celebration of the urban police state, and an insult to the entire animal kingdom and the natural world at large?
The premise of Zootopia is simple: a country bunny named Judy (yes, she's a rabbit) leaves her parents and her hundreds of siblings behind for a life in the big city. The difference between rural and urban living is the first ugly dichotomy the film establishes: farming carrots with your family is framed as a dead-…
milhayser | September 23, 2015You can almost hear the sound of PZ Myers' palm hitting his face as "a couple of vegetarian philosophers with no knowledge of biology" urge humanity to end predation worldwide—so that no more zebras have to suffer at the fangs of a lion, and no more mice at the talons of an owl. Their plea on behalf of prey species, inspired by the model culling of Cecil the lion, calls carnivory simply 'unnecessary;' PZ writes, "it’s as if they are completely unaware of the fact that predation maintains and increases biodiversity, or that there’s more to wildlife than mammals and birds, or that life is a…
milhayser | August 14, 2013Life has been growing on Earth for about 4 billion years, and during that time there have been a handful of mass extinctions that have wiped out a large percentage of complex lifeforms. Asteroid impact, volcanic eruption, climate change, anoxia, and poison have dispatched untold numbers of once-successful species to total oblivion or a few lucky fossils. Species also die off regularly for much less spectacular reasons, and altogether about 98% of documented species no longer exist.
Cry me a river, you say, without all that death there would have been no gap for vertebrates, for mammals, for…
pronald | April 1, 2012I am so looking forward to the talks tomorrow.
Linda Buck! Sharon Long! Mary-Claire King! and more...
Frontiers in the Life Sciences: a Symposium Celebrating Excellence
sb admin | April 1, 2012I am so looking forward to the talks tomorrow.
Linda Buck! Sharon Long! Mary-Claire King! and more...
Frontiers in the Life Sciences: a Symposium Celebrating Excellence
sb admin | March 10, 2012The New Earth Archive is a resource network of powerful, inspiring books on climate change, sustainability, social justice, and human nature.The students ask you to vote for up to 15 of your favorite books.
So pleased, Tomorrow's Table made the list!
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/808430/neweartharchive-ballot
Whoie Earth Discipline, by Stewart Brand is also on the list and so are many other great books.
Please spread the word. Thanks for your support.
The New Earth Archive was developed by students at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and supported by Paul Hawken and other leading…
sb admin | January 31, 2012Applause for Plant Physiologist Helen Stafford who left the Reed College Biology Department $1M. As a woman scientist in the 1950s, Stafford was ineligible for many jobs. Reed College, not deterred by her sex, offered her a position. She went on to establish a successful career and inspired many young scientists. Here is a short story of how she influenced my career.
The windowless room, dank an dark, was not an obvious place for inspiration. I took notes, wondering if I would be able to glean anything meaningful from Professor Helen Stafford's (1922-2011) meandering lecture. I was skeptical…
pronald | August 17, 2011Generalizing about "GMOs" is almost completely useless. Each food we eat and each farm is so different that the genetic technologies and farming practices needed to optimize sustainability must be different too. That is why each crop (GE or conventional) must be looked at on a case-by-case basis, using science-based evidence.
I recently wrote a short Scientific American guest blog post for their "Passions of Food" day examining how cotton genetically engineered to express the organic protein Bt is affecting agriculture today. Thanks to Bora Zivkovic, former ScienceBlogger, for this…
hrynyshyn | April 4, 2011A new review paper in Nature makes a stab an answering the question "Has the Earth's sixth mass extinction already arrived?" In an apparent effort to satisfy a variety of audiences with different evidentiary and skepticism standards, Nature and the reviews authors, led by Anthony D. Barnosky of the University of California, Berkeley, offer a variety of phrasings.
First we have the paper's abstract, which wraps up with:
Our results confirm that current extinction rates are higher than would be expected from the fossil record, highlighting the need for effective conservation measures.
Then we…
pronald | September 21, 2010The most devastating impact on biodiversity is caused by agriculture. Farming is already the greatest extinction threat to birds, and its adverse impacts look set to increase, especially in developing countries (Green et al. 2005).
Thus one of the global challenges for the next century is the need to develop high-yielding varieties that require minimal inputs, so that impacts on biodiversity can be minimized.
An alternative to the "high-input" approach is to expand the number of organic
farms. Because organic farmers do not use synthetic pesticides, their farms support
higher levels of…
pronald | July 27, 2010British kids can more easily identify Japanese cars than native plants and animals, says moderator, Robert Draper here at the Aspen Environment Forum, sponsored by the National Geographic and the Aspen Institute.
American children not readily exposed to nature are more prone to depression, obesity and attention deficit disorder. This is a global phenomenon. What else happens when there is a growing disconnect between a modern society and the biosphere?
Can we draw a link with this disconnect and the loss of biodiversity at an unprecedented rate? By 2050, the majority of our citizens will…
pronald | July 27, 2010Brilliant talk by photographer Joel Sartore here at the Aspen Environment Forum, sponsored by the National Geographic and the Aspen Institute.
"What can I do to get people to care about the environment? I want people to fall in love with these animals as much as I did so the world pays attention. I need to do a better job but what else can I do? Why should anyone care about mussels? Because they filter our water. We need these things to keep our planet healthy.
We need to take care of our pollinating species. Without pollinators we have to use paint brushes to pollinate our orchards by hand…
grrlscientist | June 28, 2010tags: Evolution in Action by AMNH, Congo River, fishes, AMNH, American Museum of Natural History, evolution, variation, biodiversity, Melanie Stiassny, streaming video
This video tells the story of speciation in Central Africa's roiling, rapid Lower Congo River. This river is home to an extraordinary assortment of fish -- many truly bizarre. This new video by Science Bulletins, the American Museum of Natural History's current-science video program, features Museum scientists on a quest to understand why so many species have evolved here. Follow Curator of Ichthyology Melanie Stiassny and her…
grrlscientist | June 25, 2010tags: Inside the Collections: Ichthyology at AMNH, fishes, AMNH, American Museum of Natural History, evolution, variation, biodiversity, Melanie Stiassny, streaming video
This video is the first of a new series of behind-the-scenes looks at the collections at the American Museum of Natural History. In this video, Melanie Stiassny, Axelrod Research Curator in the Department of Ichthyology, takes us through the Museum's vast collection of fishes.
The Department of Ichthyology, one of the four departments within the Museum's Division of Vertebrate Zoology, houses a collection that comprises more…
cwilcox | April 21, 2010When we think about the vast diversity of life in the ocean, we automatically picture pristine coral reefs teeming with life. This is especially true for rich, tropical locations like Hawaii. What we don't think of are the deep, dark depths of the canyons that lie just beyond the shallow paradises we know and love. Scientists have known for years that these deep water locations may contain a wide variety of species, but don't talk about them as much because no one had ever explored them to see what species lived there. Now, thanks to researchers from the University of Hawaii's School of Ocean…
awild | April 19, 2010Strumigenys rogeri in the leaf litter
In 1982, a small journal called The Coleopterists Bulletin carried a two page note by beetle expert Terry Erwin that increased- by an order of magnitude- the estimated number of species on the planet. Erwin crunched some back-of-the-napkin numbers based on the tree specificity of arthropods he'd collected in Panamanian tree canopies and the richness of tropical tree species worldwide to surmise that the earth should hold 30 million species. An impressive bump from the 1 to 2 million that was the going estimate.
Later research on canopy arthropods (For…
worldsfair | January 12, 2010If so, you should join this facebook group. Or to discuss further, please go to http://friendfeed.com/phylomon.
Here's part of what started this group and project: a friend of mine passed on this "letter to Santa:"
It quite nicely demonstrates an issue with advocates of biodiversity - that is, what can we do to get kids engaged with the wonderful creatures that are all around them? They obviously have the ability and the passion to care about such things, but it appears misplaced - they'll spend a ton of resources and time tracking down fictional things, when they could easily do the same…
grrlscientist | July 30, 2009tags: biodiversity, conservation, endangered species, Encyclopedia of Life, TEDTalks, E.O. Wilson, streaming video
As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TEDTalks Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of all creatures that we learn more about our biosphere -- and build a networked encyclopedia of all the world's knowledge about life [24:22]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
evolvingthoughts | May 11, 2009Again, the press are talking about "the missing link". Let's get one thing clear. There is no missing link. Rather, there are an indefinite number of missing branches. To have a missing link, you need to visualise evolution as a chain. If there's a gap in the chain, then you have a missing link. But evolution, at least at the scale of animals and plants, is mostly a tree. And all we see are individual nodes of the tree, the extant species that form, in Darwin's metaphor, the leaves of the living tree, and the extinct species that form branching points deeper in the tree. But we do not have…