Make your pledge right away and get a pair of these eco-friendly, high-performance socks. The pledge will warm your heart, and the socks will keep your toes feeling cozy.
We only have five pairs to give away right now. An update will let you know when they’re gone, but don’t let that stop you from pledging.
From $10 on up we’ve got fun thank you gifts, s
uch as postcards and care packages from Thailand, not to mention limited edition prints.
Teko Socks are made from organic meri
no wool, using wind power. They look and feel nice too!
My colleague Joanna Nasar and I embark on a new project, “Cat in Water,” to track and document the elusive fishing cat. Learn more about the expedition, and stay tuned for more cross-postings as the project continues. First up…a new population of this rare cat has been discovered in Thailand. Check out Cats Discovered.
Finally, an idea to show the progress of conservation. My first contribution to Nature Needs Half goes live. Watch the trailer and find out how Nature Needs Half could apply to your home.We can reach the goal, one piece at a time.
Daphnia pulex (water flea) with a brood of genetically identical future offspring. (Photo/Paul D.N. Hebert, University of Guelph)
In an interesting science factoid of the week, researchers at the University of Guelph have just found the animal with the most genes.
Ringing in at a whopping 31,000 genes, the winner is a near-microscopic crustacean called daphnia, or water flea. In case you’re wondering, humans tally a mere 23,000, about 8,000 less than this little aquatic critter.
“Daphnia‘s high gene number is largely because its genes are multiplying, by creating copies at a higher rate than other species,” said project leader and CGB genomics director John Colbourne in a press release. “We estimate a rate that is three times greater than those of other invertebrates and 30 percent greater than that of humans.”
So let that be a lesson. Just because you’re little, doesn’t mean you can’t be big at something.
A drongo in the Kalahari. (Photo/Andy Radford, University of Bristol)
Drongos, African Kalahari Desert birds with a penchant for thievery, are taking a turn towards the avian equivalent of organized crime, a new study finds.
The victims in this case, pied babblers, have long contended with the risk of drongos popping in to make off with the babblers’ hard-earned insect prey. Now it seems a set of behaviors have evolved that are taking this interaction from a purely parasitic relationship to one of more mutual benefit. Researchers found that the drongos form protection squads for foraging babblers, keeping an eye out for trouble and strong-arming danger when it arrives.
“Like any good gangster,” says Andrew Radford, a scientist with the University of Bristol who led the research team, “as well as lying and stealing, the drongos also provide protection by mobbing aerial predators and giving true alarm calls on some occasions.”
That means pied babblers can spend less time watching for predators and more time looking for prey. The relationship is not without its caveats. Drongos still aim to take advantage of babblers, crying wolf to scare the babblers and grab the insects. The babblers likely put up with it, the researchers say, because the benefit of not having to worry about predators outweighs the cost of the drongos’ antics.
The research, which is a collaboration with the Universities of Bristol, Cambridge and Cape Town, is published online in the current issue of Evolution.
Andy Radford (University of Bristol) and a pied babbler in the Kalahari. (Photo/Matthew Bell, University of Cambridge)
A pied babbler in the Kalahari. (Photo/Andy Radford, University of Bristol)
I recently made like the prodigal daughter and traveled back to my hometown after more than a decade absence. The salty air smelled like memories as I bobbed on a boat in Virginia Beach, Virginia’s, Lynnhaven River. As an emerging photographer with the International League of Conservation Photographers, I was home to participate in one of their Rapid Assessment Visual Expeditions, or RAVEs, where teams of photographers fan out across a geographic area at risk in order to document and raise awareness of the environmental issues taking place there.
On this trip, I returned to my nature roots to help document environmental issues of the Chesapeake Bay, and support a campaign by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to pass the Chesapeake Bay Clean Water and Ecosystem Restoration Act. One of my first stops was an Oyster Roundup, one of the local efforts by residents and the CBF to help bolster struggling oyster populations. Check out the video and some photos here, and see what some of the other photographers have been up to at the iLCP blog.
The researchers found total water loss in the desert-living Pipistrellus kuhli was just 80 percent of other nondesert species. (Photo/Sahi Pilosof)
Desert-dwelling bats lose water at a slower rate than non-desert bats, a new study finds. And their secret appears to be skin deep. Researchers from the Ben-Gurion University in Israel looked at the desert bat Pipistrellus kuhli, and found that the amount of fat in the skin helped stem water loss. Animals typically lose water through evaporation from the skin or from the mouth and nose when breathing. This finding helps explain how an animal with bare wings that expends so much energy in flight can survive in such an arid environment. Researchers, lead by Dr. Muñoz-Garcia plan to look at eight other species of desert bat to see if the same holds true for them.
Sagebrush country, it kind of makes you itchy and scratchy just looking at it. This is a place where every footstep crackles, and there are no forests to shelter under. You’d never realize that where you’re standing used to lie at the bottom of the ocean.
Look to your feet, the rocks and soil, and you’ll quickly see otherwise. Rocks crumble away revealing more fossil than straight rock. The remains of the ancients run thick through this ground, giving rise to a new ecosystem remarkable for its hardiness and coveted for its carbon.
Here, the faint lemony fragrance of the sage floats in on the breeze. Antelope bolt for the hills, and the “drip-thoink” calls of male sage grouse echo across the dawn as they try to win the hearts, or at least reproductive rights, of their ladies.
Nearby Craig, Colo., boasts the largest coal-fired power plant in the state with a 1,304 megawatt capacity. Open pit coal mines and natural gas development serve as a backdrop to rolling hay fields and seemingly endless expanses of sagebrush.
The sagebrush is not endless however. It’s shrinking faster than people know it exists. So here’s my attempt to give it some props. Even if it’s difficult to stand before the sagebrush sea in awe like you would Yosemite and Yellowstone, you can’t help but respect the wilderness that insists on living there.
This isn’t your fluffy, lush Walden Pond wilderness. This is your crawl from a dried up seabed, live where others can’t sort of wild. You fall asleep to shorts and t-shirt kind of weather and wake to 50mph winds and blizzard kind of havoc. But if you have the guts to stop your car and venture out for awhile, you’ll understand that this place fights for every moment of its existence, and it kicks ass.
Two girls in a jeep rumble around the country roads of Nebraska to check out the spring sandhill crane migration and can’t believe their eyes. Be careful. Watching this might make you a craniac.
The Nature Files 