Scientific American, June 30, 2008

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If you visit Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, you may hear high, lonesome howls of wolves. You may even be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a distant pack racing through the forests. But when you show off your blurry pictures back home, what species should you boast that you saw? Depending on the scientist you ask, you may get a different answer. Some may even offer you a few different answers all at once.

In the 18th century European naturalists dubbed the wolves of Canada and the eastern U.S. Canis lycaon, because they seemed distinct from Canis lupus, the gray wolf of Europe and Asia.

Continue reading “What Is a Species?” →

Slate, June 20, 2008

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Aristotle didn’t have a high opinion of the octopus. “The octopus is a stupid creature,” he wrote, “for it will approach a man’s hand if it be lowered in the water.” Twenty-four centuries later, this “stupid” creature is enjoying a much better reputation. YouTube is loaded with evidence of what some might call octopus intelligence. One does an uncanny impression of a flounder. Another mimics coral before darting away from a pushy camera. A third slips its arms around a jar, unscrews it, and dines on the crab inside. Scientific journals publish research papers on octopus learning, octopus personality, octopus memory.

Continue reading “How Smart Is the Octopus?” →

Yale Environment 360, June 13, 2008

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Last November, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its fourth report, a sprawling synthesis of what climate scientists know about global warming. The message was starkly grim–but to appreciate it, you had to spend some time unpacking carefully assembled passages like this:

“There is medium confidence that approximately 20-30% of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average warming exceed 1.5-2.5oC (relative to 1980-1999). As global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5oC, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe.”

Continue reading “Biodiversity in the Balance” →

The New York Times, May 6, 2008

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“Why are humans so smart?” is a question that fascinates scientists. Tadeusz Kawecki, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Fribourg, likes to turn around the question.

“If it’s so great to be smart,” Dr. Kawecki asks, “why have most animals remained dumb?”

Dr. Kawecki and like-minded scientists are trying to figure out why animals learn and why some have evolved to be better at learning than others. One reason for the difference, their research finds, is that being smart can be bad for an animal’s health.

Continue reading “Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better” →

The Boston Globe, April 28, 2008

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Casey Dunn has gathered his share of weird animals. He dredged up sea spiders that live around the docks in Waikiki. He dived to the sea floor to scoop up mud, in search of bizarre, spiny creatures called kinorhynchs that are smaller than a grain of sand.

Dunn, a biologist at Brown University, hunts for weird animals to get his hands on their DNA. Hidden in their genes is a record of the history of the entire animal kingdom, some 700 million years of evolutionary change.

By analyzing the DNA of dozens of different kinds of animals, he and his colleagues have made some astounding discoveries about animal evolution. For one thing, the common ancestor of all living animals may have been more complicated than once thought.

Continue reading “Tree of life continues to evolve” →