About a year ago, I decided that keeping track of bloom dates, bird arrivals and other natural events would help me grow as an amateur naturalist. “According to my sources and personal records,” wrote a local naturalist celebrity, “this is the best spring for mountain laurel blooms here in the past fifteen years.” I grinned […]
Eco
Judas knew what he was doing when he double-crossed his friend Jesus. “What will you give me if I betray him to you?” he asked the conspiring priests in the famous Bible story. The story of the Judas Goat is more tragic. She had no idea that she was leading her friends to their deaths. […]
This is the third installment of the occasional series Thank God It’s Penis Friday. The first was on banana slug sex; the second on Iceland’s Phallological Museum. Today we are going to talk about penis bones. The penis bone, or baculum, is the supportive bone in the penises of most mammals. Relax, you didn’t miss anything: humans […]
To walk from the Charles Darwin Research Station to the center of the town of Puerto Ayora, on Santa Cruz Island, simply follow the “T-Shirt Mile,” a sleepy stone road lined with dozens of souvenir shops. Mugs, onesies and shot glasses pay tribute the town’s only famous resident, a century-old giant tortoise named Lonesome George. […]
This is the third installment of a six-week series about my recent trip to the Galápagos. You can read the first post, about tortoises and donkeys, here, and the second, about eerie mounds of black coral, here. If you go to the Galápagos, and even if you go, as I did, in a herd of clumsy American tourists, […]
This is the second installment of a six-week series about my recent trip to the Galápagos. You can read my first post, about tortoises and donkeys, here. At dawn on June 6, more than 30 years after Lynn was chasing tortoises at the top of Alcedo, our boat anchored near the volcano’s base in Urbina Bay. By […]
Every Monday for the next six weeks I’ll be posting about my recent trip to the Galápagos. After a week on a big boat, hopping from one imposing volcanic island to the next, I saw most of the odd creatures that Charles Darwin famously wrote about: century-old tortoises, finches with beaks of all sizes, swimming […]
I first encountered lionfish on Carrie Bow Cay, a hurricane-battered scrap of an island 15 miles off the coast of Belize. The rotating crew of biologists on Carrie Bow work hard and play hard, and one popular form of play is lionfish hunting: spearing, cooking, and enthusiastically devouring these stripey fellows on the left. Lionfish […]