Calypte anna: Anna’s hummingbird
I love the melodious scientific name for this little hummingbird, a species native to the West Coast. The genus name, Calypte, probably comes from a Greek word for veil, a reference to […]
Category Archives: nature
At Crater Lake, ‘exclamations of wonder and joy akin to pain’
This image of Crater Lake, shot with my point-and-shoot camera, doesn’t come close to conveying the numinous power of this place – not even the finest photography can do that. […]
Boars gone wild: Chernobyl edition
For wildlife, earth’s worst nuke disaster site continues to prove safer than living anywhere in range of humans. Ever since the 1986 Chernobyl accident, people have been almost entirely excluded […]
What turtles looked like before the evolution of shells
This one is 240 million years old, from the Triassic period, collected in Germany. The discoverers named it Pappochelys, which is derived from Greek words for ‘grandfather’ and ‘turtle’. These […]
Candid camera trap
These images, which I’ve edited a bit in Lightroom, are some of the gems from Snapshot Serengeti, a project that amassed 1.2 million sets of photographs from motion-sensor activated camera traps […]
Washington gets a tyranosaur
Not many dinosaur fossils turn up in the Pacific Northwest, but Washington’s finally got one – and wouldn’t you know, it’s a tyranosaurid. The scientists who collected it are pretty […]
Maze runner: what an oversized bug penis reveals about evolution
“We then experimentally shortened the penis using scissors, without harming the male. We show that the shorter the penis after cutting, the lower a male’s reproductive success.” – Dougherty et. al. […]
A salmon retires
I am so happy to know that some salmon get to retire from the whole “epic migration” thing. In one species – the Dolly Varden char – the oldsters actually […]
Organic, 100% natural GMOs
The legendary scientist Jane Goodall came through my town recently and made headlines by talking about the dangers of genetically modified organisms, in her words, a “shocking corruption of the […]
200 years after the largest volcanic blast in history
Some 10,000 died in the immediate catastrophe of raging pyroclastic flows and tsunami waves when Tambora erupted on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia on April 10, 1815. Croplands were so […]
