In 2003, an army of 350 scientists and volunteers swept out across Central Park. Their mission, called a BioBlitz, was to find as many species as possible over the course of 24 hours. At the end of the day, they had compiled a catalog of 836 species of plants and animals.

It’s impressive that Central Park–an 843-acre island in an ocean of Manhattan concrete–can play host to so many species. But that’s hardly a complete inventory of the biodiversity of the place. Along with its plants and animals, Central Park is home to invisible wildlife too.

Continue reading “The Central Park Zoo Hidden From View” →

Recently I’ve  been writing a fair amount about plants–what they can tell us about the deep history of life, as well as what life will be like for them in the near future.

Tomatoes, dahlias, and many other cultivated plants can fall victim to a strange infection. The pathogen is not a fungus or a bacterium or even a virus. Instead, it’s a naked snippet of genes known as a viroid. A team of scientists is convinced that viroids are relics of the earliest stages of life on Earth, a form of life that evolved before the dawn of DNA. For the rest of the story, see my column in the New York Timesmy column in the New York Times.

Viroids will still be a fact of life for plants in the next century–but so will a rapid shift in the climate. What will happen to plants when the temperature in their current range changes? Will they be able to colonize places further from the equator where they can still thrive? Or will they be unable to get there fast enough? In another piece for the New York Times, I investigate the question by looking at one plant in particular, the magnificent whitebark pine. Check it out.

Continue reading “Pines and Viroids: On The Deep Past And Imminent Future of Life” →

Recently I had the pleasure of working on two videos that are now online. I’ve embedded them under the fold.

First up is an animation from TED-ED. I worked with them on a piece explaining where new genes come from, based on some of my articles (such as this and this).

There’s a unity to life. Sometimes it’s plain to see, but very often it lurks underneath a distraction of differences. And a new study shows that there’s even a hidden unity between our slipped disks and the muscles in a squirming worm.

Scientists call this unity “homology.” The British anatomist Richard Owen coined the term in 1843, sixteen years before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species.  Owen defined homology as “the same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function.” For example, a human arm, a seal flipper, and a bat wing all have the same basic skeletal layout. They consist of a single long bone, a bending joint, two more long bones, a cluster of small bones, and a set of five digits. The size and shape of each bone may differ, but the pattern is the same regardless of how mammals use their limbs–to swim, to fly, or to wield a hammer.

Continue reading “What Slipped Disks Tell Us About 700 Million Years of Evolution” →