From the monthly archives:

August 2009

Gone Slime Mold Huntin’

August 30, 2009

In yet another sign of what an incredibly big dork I am, I have arranged to go slime mold collecting with Rocky Mountain National Park’s volunteer slime mold expert. We will be going to an undisclosed mountainous location well outside the park. I am bringing my shockingly inadequate camera but if I find anything worth [...]

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Two Sides to Every Worm: the Polychaete Nereis

August 29, 2009

In honor of our foray into the world of polychaete worms this week, I thought I’d share some closeups of a polychaete that has been the subject of many an invertebrate lab dissection: Nereis.
In this first video you can see our subject looking kind of cute and shy (awwww!). Pay attention to the dorsal (top) [...]

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Have You Seen This Creature?

August 25, 2009

‘Cause scientists sure haven’t. And they really, really want to. The creature in question is Paleodictyon nodosum. And before you do anything else, go check out this article in the New York Times by William J. Broad and take a gander at it. If this is a blog about the weird wonderfulness of life on [...]

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The Swimming Green Bomb

August 22, 2009

UPDATE: Now with fabulous Swima photos courtesy lead scientist Karen Osborn!
. . . Is not the name of a new DARPA grant project. All over teh intert00bz this week was the story of a newly discovered group of annelid polychaete worms following the publication of a paper describing them in Science. Remember annelids? Segmented [...]

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The Biology and Taxonomy of a Second Grade Primer, 1897

August 15, 2009

In my last post I discussed Carol Yoon’s recent article and book on the decline of taxonomy among scientists and the public. Taxonomy, which could easily be a dinner conversation subject and hobby for most of the 19th century (TR had quite extensive collections in his youth, for example), has virtually vanished among the general [...]

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Who Are You Calling a Slime Mold?

August 14, 2009

That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, claimed Juliet, but could she say the same for a nameless rose? Perhaps not. In case you missed it this week, fellow Cornell alum and science writer Carol Kaesuk Yoon produced a lovely article in the New York Times adapted from [...]

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More Bad News for Bats: Marburg Virus Edition

August 8, 2009

As if the bats of the world didn’t already have enough to contend with, what with their bad (albeit sometimes deserved) rap for rabies and drinking human blood, numerical decline thanks to habitat loss, and the White Nose Syndrome that is anihilating the bats of eastern North America (and maybe eventually all of North America), [...]

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Lichen, Take Me Away!

August 4, 2009

You may think that if you’ve seen one lichen, you’ve seen them all. Oh, so not so. Yes, many of them do resemble your common leathery grey-green patches plastered on trees like bark band-aids. But there are so many, many more. If you look around, they are everywhere, and they are gorgeous. Today I bring [...]

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The Hungry Amoeba

August 2, 2009

Oh, those wily amoebae. I think we’ve all had days like this at the office. Some sensitive viewers may find this disturbing, although no more disturbing, I suppose, than watching a gazelle get chased down by a cheetah on the Discovery Channel.

The poor little guy who gets it in this video is a little ciliate [...]

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