Eqalussuaq If you watched Jeopardy! last week you may recall one particular clue that stood out to the nature-lovers among us: “A very old vertebrate the Greenland shark takes nearly 150 years to reach this; for humans it’s around age 10 or 11” The Greenland shark – image by NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program The correct response: What […]
Groundhogs Polish your incisors and prep your shadows, it’s almost Groundhog Day. 1993’s Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray The groundhog, also known colloquially as a woodchuck, is a large, lowland rodent that shares a family with marmots and large ground squirrels. Marmota monax resides in the eastern United States and most of Canada; the tail of its range extends
WildEarth As much as I enjoy exploring the world with my own eyes and ears, I also love engulfing nature media. Great photography, such as Unnatural Lighting (Issue 94), kindles similar feelings to reading poetry. The same is true with moving pictures. I can watch David Attenborough-narrated films nearly endlessly. My internal globetrotter can devour hours
Wild Turkeys O, peace! Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him: how he jets under his advanced plumes! – Shakespeare, Twelfth Night Here in the United States, we are on the precipice of Thanksgiving, which falls on the fourth Thursday of November. Traditionally, the protein of choice at feasts and banquets far and wide is
The Tasmanian Devil Repossesses If you’re like I am, your first awareness of a Tasmanian Devil arrived thanks to the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies character often nicknamed Taz. He grunts, growls, and sucks up anything and everything through his tornadic locomotion. The figure first appeared in 1954, but really picked up cultural steam when it reappeared in the 1990s.
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Sand Cats Today we celebrate Felis margarita. No, not a cat named after a tequila cocktail, but a species named after the French general Jean Auguste Margueritte. May I introduce the adorable Sand Cat, also sometimes dubbed the Sand Dune Cat. Sand Kitty – photo by Payman Sazesh This small, wild cat resides in the sandy and stony
Moose, Meese, Mooses Way back in the 42nd episode of the newsletter, we explored the gorgeous Gekko gecko, otherwise known as the tokay gecko. I came upon that beauty through photographs but loved the nearly identical scientific nomenclature, which got me thinking about tautonyms. A tautonym is the term for a doubled taxonomic name, and its
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Nature’s Mothers This weekend is Mother’s Day. To celebrate I thought it might be fitting to send you some videos of mothers and children in the natural world. But how do you narrow that to a few examples? It’s like typing in “cat” or “dog” in a search engine and trying to rummage through the
Snapping Shrimp As submarines became a staple of battle in the World War era and sonar matured into a necessary tool, humans began to notice something odd in the depths. Something very weird was messing with our ability to hear sufficiently underwater. It wasn’t a Kraken; it wasn’t dolphins; it wasn’t whales. It was a
The Grand Canyon as Evolutionary Force* Certain spots on the globe are well known for their geographic isolation. The concept is easy to visualize simply by imagining an island. If an area is physically isolated from other spots very often there will be a drastic effect on the evolution of life in the region. Two
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