17 Years to Hatch an Invasion

Posted on May 9, 2013May 21, 2020 by admin

The New York Times, May 9, 2013

From North Carolina to Connecticut, billions of creatures with eyes the color of blood and bodies the color of coal are crawling out of the earth. Periodical cicadas are emerging en masse, clambering into trees and singing a shivering chorus that can be heard for miles.

What makes this emergence truly remarkable, however, is how long it’s been in the making. This month’s army of periodical cicadas was born in 1996. Their mothers laid their eggs in the branches of trees, where they developed for a few weeks before hatching and heading for the ground. “They just jumped out and rained down out of the trees,” said Chris Simon, a cicada biologist at the University of Connecticut.

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The Rise of the Tick

Posted on April 30, 2013May 28, 2020 by admin

Outside, April 30, 2013

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I’m tailing a Ford pickup truck along the eastern bank of the Connecticut River. When we reach a sign for Lord Creek Farm, the pickup turns off the road and I follow up a dusty driveway. We park in the shadow of an enormous red horse barn, next to paddocks full of jump gates, where riding lessons are under way.

I get out of my car and climb into the passenger side of the pickup. It’s driven by Scott Williams, a wildlife biologist from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven.

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Bringing Them Back To Life

Posted on April 23, 2013May 21, 2020 by admin

National Geographic, April 23, 2013

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On July 30, 2003, a team of Spanish and French scientists reversed time. They brought an animal back from extinction, if only to watch it become extinct again. The animal they revived was a kind of wild goat known as a bucardo, or Pyrenean ibex. The bucardo (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) was a large, handsome creature, reaching up to 220 pounds and sporting long, gently curved horns. For thousands of years it lived high in the Pyrenees, the mountain range that divides France from Spain, where it clambered along cliffs, nibbling on leaves and stems and enduring harsh winters.

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A Virtual Pack, to Study Canine Minds

Posted on April 22, 2013May 21, 2020 by admin

The New York Times, April 22, 2013

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In 1995, Brian Hare began to wonder what his dog Oreo was thinking.

At the time, he was a sophomore at Emory University, where he was studying animal psychology with Michael Tomasello. Dr. Tomasello was comparing the social intelligence of humans and other animals.

Humans, it was known at the time, are exquisitely sensitive to signals from other humans. We use that information to solve problems that we might struggle to figure out on our own.

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Interbreeding With Neanderthals

Posted on March 3, 2013May 21, 2020 by admin

Discover, March 3, 2013

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David Reich, a geneticist at the Harvard Medical School, has redrawn our species’ family tree. And today, in his office overlooking Avenue Louis Pasteur in Boston, he picks up a blue marker, walks up to a blank white wall, and shows the result to me. He starts with a pair of lines — one for humans and one for Neanderthals — that split off from a common ancestor no more than 700,000 years ago. The human branch divides into lineages of Africans, Asians, and Europeans, and then into twigs for smaller groups like the people of New Guinea or the residents of the remote Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. Reich also creates a branch off the Neanderthal line for the Denisovans, a paleolithic lineage geneticists discovered only a few years ago.

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