Fear of Mountain Lions

By: | August 28, 2026

This post came out a few years ago exploring anxiety and big, wild cats. At that point, there had been no deaths this century from mountain lions in Colorado where I live. New Year’s Day this year that statistic changed when a woman was attacked while alone on a hiking trail not far from the town of Estes Park. Forensics pointed to asphyxiation, meaning the lion had her throat in its jaws and closed off her airway.

Statistically, one should worry far more about cows than mountain lions. Annually, domestic cows in the US kill ten to twenty people — trampled, gored, or by vehicle collisions — while around thirty human deaths have been recorded from mountain lions since widescale recording began in the 1880s. Chances of being killed by a cat in the Americas is negligible, but clearly it’s not zero. Is it worth freaking out?

My wife pieced together a kill in our driveway, sending me pictures of deer tracks posed in a casual walk followed by a sprawl, deer fur in the snow, and faint signs of melt, a couple hours old at most. The next picture was of cat tracks the size of an adult human palm, a good sized mountain lion dragging the deer. A path like that of a saucer sled was left down the drive where the mountain lion gripped the deer’s throat in its teeth and pulled it a couple hundred feet to the canyon’s edge below our house. My wife took pictures and video all the way, and where it hauled the body over the snowy rimrock, her text said she stopped following it. If she were with me she might, but alone no way.

Later, we laid together in bed in the flicker-light of a fire and she recounted finding fresh tracks and studying the kill pattern. The deer, she said, were coming through together, a line of them, no sign of scatter before the attack, so it was swift, not a chase. The kill, she said, struck her as quick, quiet, dutiful, and done.

It happened right behind the house, between the firewood and solar panels, which gives a person pause going out for wood or clearing snow from the panels. We see plenty of cat tracks around here, benches of rimrock in a high desert piñon-juniper biome, perfect place for travel and ambush. In winter they follow deer like sharks trailing a shoal. When deer tracks are around, there will be mountain lions. The rest of the time, snow is mostly blank.

Lately, we’ve been seeing lots of deer tracks and a fresher mountain lion moving through. I go out for wood not afraid so much as aware. I don’t often worry about being attacked. When deer and elk populations dwindle in mountain lion terrain, they tend go down in size, targeting porcupines and house cats. Attacks on humans are rare. Where we live, deer and elk are plenty and lion health is generally good, making a physical confrontation with humans less likely. Bad encounters tend to come from starving or curious juveniles or elders barely holding onto their teeth, not a cat that takes down a full-grown mule deer in a single pounce.

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Are Jumping Spiders Capable of Innovation?

By: | August 26, 2026
Betsy Mason

Innovation is one of those abilities we used to think only humans possessed. But you’ve probably heard about the creative problem solving of New Caledonian crows who are able to build tools by bedding wires to fish food out of holes. Captive orcas have been observed chewing up the dead fish they are fed and spitting them onto the surface of their pools to attract gulls that they then prey on. And elephants are known to pile logs onto electric fences to create a safe crossing.

Most animals that are widely considered capable of innovation are mammals and birds, and scientists point to three things these these species have that are likely prerequisites for this ability: big brains, long lifespans, and complex social lives. 

Spiders, on the other hand, are tiny, short-lived, and mostly solitary. They seem like unlikely innovators, but a new study suggests we may have underestimated spiders’ cognitive capabilities. Again.

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Baltimore in August

By: | August 24, 2026

Baltimore in August: I was out on my early-morning walk, I don’t even know the temperature or humidity or feels-like combination, I’ve given up caring but all numbers were high, and I ran into a neighbor going the same way so we walked together for a bit. We were neither one of us built for physical movement in this weather and we were both panting. Neighbor, lying through his teeth: Nice that it’s getting cooler out every day. Me, also lying: Summer’s winding down. You do what you must to get through it. I’m apparently running this post every August because, as I said, given up — August 17, 2022; August 23, 2024; August 20, 2025; and today — because as I also said, you do what you must to get through it.

I have nothing good to say about Baltimore in August. Ok, the farmers’ market is moving into high season, peaches & tomatoes, also okra — that’s good. Digression: I spent childhood on a small farm in the midwest making internal proclamations and declarations about freezing corn and canning applesauce in a hot kitchen, like, if I ever get outa here I’m never doing this again, not me. Until decades later, I ran into the irrevocable fact that peaches and tomatoes have a few-weeks’ season and the rest of the year aren’t worth eating, so now I’m freezing peach crisp and tomato sauce and apologizing to the sweaty irritated young Ann. Anyway, I think that’s it for anything good about Baltimore in August.

The sun is out, temperatures are in the 90s and dew points are in the 70s, dew points being the temperature at which water condenses out of the air so that was 20 degrees ago — meaning that gills would have been the better evolutionary option here because the air is 52.76% water. At these dew points, the air is holding all the water it can so you can’t cool by sweating; these dew points, says our beloved Capital Weather Gang, are not just oppressive but offensive and “very gross.” Digression: I asked a neighbor who was a public health scientist just back from equatorial Africa what it was like there and she said, “About like here.”

Nights might get down to the upper 70s, same dew points; another neighbor had a friend visiting from California ask when the evening would cool off, and the neighbor just snorted. Digression: once I asked my gyn when I was going to stop having hot flashes and she too just snorted. So anyhow, that’s the Baltimore days and nights.

The afternoons, however, are terrifying, due to a hair-raising alliance between physics and chemistry. More heat means more action in the air and less density, meaning as we all know, that hot air rises. More water — for chemistry reasons having to do with molecular weight that I don’t understand — also means less density, also rising.

So whooop, up she goes, wet hot air, rising rising, juicing up the atmosphere, and the more juice, the more convective instability — digression: I read that phrase first as “collective instability” which, yes, we are, aren’t we — which is measured as CAPE, Convective Available Potential Energy, the operative words being “potential energy.” Because that wet hot air rises up into the high atmosphere where it’s cooler, then condenses and carries all that juicy potential energy into thunderheads which grow crazy big, bigger every minute, blooming over the city like an alien invasion.

And inside those thunderheads, all the molecules and things get charged and the electric fields get more intense and the energy that’s been potential now just lets loose, the fields discharge and become lightning, also in a way I don’t understand but neither do scientists. Lightning heats the air to 55,000 degrees until the air explodes into thunder, and the closer in time the lightning is to the thunder, the more it seems personal. Digression: a neighbor and I were on his porch, the neighbor holding his cat, and a simultaneous lightning/thunder hit, CRACK BAM, and the cat exploded like thunder out of my neighbor’s hands, and the rest of my life I’ll remember that cat, feet outstretched, hanging like a bat in the air above us.

Anyway, afternoons in Baltimore: watchful anxiety, the thunderheads get bigger, the chances of storms go up and up until finally and with some probability all hell breaks loose, physics and chemistry unconstrained by human convenience.

Windows rattle, transformers blow up, trees crash down, the power goes out — recently for days — and so does the AC, and you sit there in the dark in a puddle of your own sweat if you can even sweat. Streets flood, and the Capital Weather Gang repeatedly posts TURN AROUND DON’T DROWN; flights are delayed, then cancelled, then you can’t get home until the afternoon of next Thursday when thunderstorms will again be likely — these weather patterns are stable — and flights will be cancelled again.

The best you can say about Baltimore is that it’s not in the midwest where cells of convection become supercells and your house gets blown into the next county. So I guess that’s a second good thing about August in Baltimore — catastrophes here, as with so much else, are not sensational; here we have Armageddons but they’re unassuming.

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Chuck Patch via Flickr Creative Commons: Baltimore’s Artscape, when it’s so routinely hot and/or rainy, it’s called Artscape weather.
Yianni Mathioudakis, also Flickr Creative Commons: also Baltimore

Tremors

By: | August 19, 2026
A view of the Alaska Railroad after the Great Quake of 1964. USGS photo

Two days after I moved with my family to the middle of Alaska I learned about the earthquakes.

Every 15 minutes or so, monitoring stations in the state detect one. Most aren’t large, or even felt far beyond their epicenters. Some begin far out to sea and appear as barely more than a tiny spike on a graph somewhere. Often they occur in the southeast, hundreds of miles from the small town near Fairbanks where we now live. In a very active period, tens of thousands of quakes may register, and in 2018—a banner year—the Alaska Earthquake Center recorded 54,000. Two days ago, on August 17, the day before my sons started classes at their new school, there were at least 28.

All this seismic action is generated by subduction, the process by which one of the earth’s massive crust plates slowly slips beneath another. In Alaska’s case, it’s the Pacific Plate pushing under the North American Plate, upon which the state sits. This movement isn’t smooth but stubborn and sticky, calling to mind—on a far small scale—the frustration of trying to force open a swollen old window frame. Tension builds along the zone where the two plates meet, and when this pent-up energy is released it pulses through the earth, sometimes close to the surface but often miles deep, where the resulting shock may be less than obvious, or even go unnoticed. 

In Alaska, several of this week’s quakes were detected more than 50 miles down, within the region of relatively solid rock called the mantle. Many others were triggered much nearer to daylight. The one I’m thinking of happened just 3 miles below the surface, and less than 10 miles from my house. 

*

When the quake struck, the five of us had just returned from an ice cream social at my sons’ school. This visit, on the evening before their first day, had caused tremors of its own, and brought home to the kids what was really happening—which is to say they finally understood that we were not going back to Brooklyn. Here were their smiling teachers, their classrooms clean and bright with posters, pictures, and maps. Here were their names, written on cards at the tops of their desks. And crowds of other students, too, most of them striding down the hallways with the confidence of those who’d returned, not the hesitant shuffle of us newbies. At a certain point my middle kid turned to me and said with an adult’s firmness, I am not coming here tomorrow. 

These were the waves in which my partner and I were adrift at about around 6 p.m. We were kneeling on the floor, dividing up packs of crayons and colored pencils, erasers and scissors and boxes of Kleenex?—all the stuff you need these days for a successful elementary school education. The middle kid stomped toward the stairs of our rented house. You could feel him coming, feel his mood riding through the floor, shaking the joists. I looked at our neat little piles and worried. But he ignored them and growled I’m not going. Then he ran into the family room, and the rumble faded into thick carpet pile, the kind laid down against long, cold winters.

I felt for him. A few months earlier he’d been a pre-K kid in the New York public school system. Zohran Mamdani was his mayor, the Knicks were his team. He’d been loved. Embraced. That was bedrock. Now he knew not a single classmate and found himself surrounded by more trees than he’d ever seen in his life. Where were the buildings, the pigeons, the sirens? Where were his friends? Why was no one walking anywhere? Why had we done this?

Somewhere below us the earthquake passed. We didn’t notice. The world was already spinning.

*

The real power of an earthquake is measured in magnitude. The higher the magnitude, the stronger the quake, though strength doesn’t necessarily equal destructive power. In 1964, the Great Alaska earthquake registered a magnitude of 9.2. It shook the ground for nearly five minutes and generated an enormous tsunami, which killed more than 100 people. The quake’s energy then rattled onward, through the crust and around the world, raising waves and sinking small boats as far away as Louisiana. There has never yet been a quake so powerful, though we’ve seen many deadlier, including ones earlier this year in Colombia and Venezuela. By way of comparison, the Great Tōhoku earthquake of 2011 struck Japan with a magnitude of 9.1. Collapsing buildings and the following tsunami killed some 15,000 people.

The earthquake that happened near our house was a baby, registering at 0.7 magnitude. Not long after it ended the Alaska Earthquake Center posted a few details about the event. Nothing much more than depth, location, time. I noticed, near the center of the page, a prominent clickable button. It read, Did You Feel It? 

By then the kids were in bed and the day was done, though the aftershocks of our evening were still rolling in, shaking our home and our hearts. For a moment I let the mouse hover over the button, then I swiped it away

*

This post marks my one-year anniversary as a member of the LWON crew, and it’ll be my last post, at least for the time being. For the next few years I’ll be teaching journalism at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and most of my free time will be aimed at this work. I hope to return one day, and in the meantime I’ll be keeping up with the stories my wonderful colleagues post here. Thank you for reading, for being here!

Debunking Hollywood: Human Hibernation

By: | August 17, 2026

Debunking Hollywood is LWON’s very occasional series that takes a hard science look at common TV and movie tropes. This instalment originally appeared in August 2017.

Nothing says interstellar travel like a hibernation pod. The heroes of the 2016 holiday blockbuster Passengers, played by Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, embark on a century-long journey to an planet outside our solar system. Hibernation pods extend their lifespans for the long trip, but they wake from torpor 90 years earlier than scheduled. Then they set about trying to fix the ship and trying to put themselves back to sleep.

First of all, let’s talk about this ‘waking’ from hibernation business. Hibernation may involve lying down with ones eyes closed, but there’s no sleeping going on; In fact, a long stretch of it leaves the body sleep deprived. If this movie were true to life, the first thing that would happen when Jennifer Lawrence opened her long-lashed eyes in the hibernation pod would not be her listening to the ship computer’s crew update. It would be her closing those long lashes again and descending straight into sleep.

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Categorically Yes … and No

By: | August 14, 2026
Don’t I know you? (Trees in the Sierra Nevada)

Isn’t it satisfying to know the names of things? I just got back from a backpacking trip to the Sierra Nevada with a bunch of geologists. I learned that those pink rocks are full of piemontite, the green mineral around it is called epidote, the gray stuff is andalusite, and those long white crystals are wollastonite. The name is just the first part, of course: The geologists could rattle off the chemical formulas and knew at what temperatures and depths the minerals formed, which tells them the history of the rocks before they were uplifted and eroded so we can poke at them today. But the first part of knowledge, for a lot of things, is identifying, categorizing, naming. 

The one thing I wished I’d brought with me was my pocket-sized Pacific Coast tree finder (you always forget something). I last backpacked in the high Sierra in my 20s, and the trees were all familiar, but I couldn’t quite recall their names, like I was attending a big-number college reunion. I could tell a juniper from a fir from a pine, and I knew that the length and number of needles in a cluster distinguishes different pine species. Recognizing that these are like these is one thing, but I wanted the names. 

The birds were easier; I’ve had more experience with them. Hello, mountain chickadees with your white eyebrows! Kraa-kraa-kraa to you, too, Clark’s nutcracker. Oh, look, there’s a dipper! They are basically aquatic songbirds—seriously, they swim—and they live in mountain rivers. You know you’re in a good place if you see a dipper. 

Our brains are eager to categorize and name things. Psychologists call this tendency “psychological essentialism,” the idea that there are certain qualities we can use to assign things to their proper groups. It’s satisfying to identify something, to figure out whether you’re looking at a Carolina chickadee or a black-capped chickadee (which is harder than it sounds). 

But of course psychological essentialism can be pathological. Some people are way too committed to certain categories: boy/girl, black/white, sick/healthy, citizen/foreign, us/them. They’re upset when someone switches categories, refuses to be captured by one, or rejects the categorization scheme altogether. Appealing to essentialism is one way to rile up bigots and get them to vote. I’m not talking about people who stumble over new pronouns; we were all taught overly categorically. But we can all learn to reject the burning bigotry of gender essentialism, the insistence that there are non-overlapping, firmly bounded groups of “male” and “female,” and they get to decide who belongs in which group. Gender essentialists are wrong about a lot of things (so many things), and one of them is their appeal to biology (chromosomes are not definitive) or nature. 

Nature abhors a category. Plenty of animals switch sexes or have functionally more than two. As Agustín Fuentes points out, the whole entire purpose of sexual reproduction is variation. The basic categorical unit of taxonomy is the species, and we don’t even have a comprehensive definition of it. Ornithologists split and lump species all the time. Black-capped and Carolina chickadees hybridize, and their offspring are perfectly fertile, thank you. Gulls hybridize in many directions (gulls really get around). It’s satisfying to know the name of something, sure, but even more fascinating when something defies the limits of its name. 

Anyway, I guess I’m saying there are two categories of categories: those that are useful and those that are harmful. And categories can switch between the two depending on how we use them. It’s up to us to use them correctly and protect one another from those who don’t. 

Perfect Things

By: | August 12, 2026

We were walking past a line of shorebirds on the harbor’s breakwater when my son stopped me and pointed. “Does that bird only have one leg?”

About two dozen black turnstones — I didn’t recognize them at the time, I had to use All About Birds later — faced into the wind, broadside to the incoming waves. One of them was standing on one leg.

We peered at the bird. Was that another leg tucked up against its belly? Hard to say. We studied the other birds. Most of them were standing on one leg, too. “That would be a lot of one-legged birds,” we told each other. We tried balancing on one leg. “Seems tiring,” we agreed.

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