This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
In The Wrong Hands. By Ryan Gabrielson. Published by California Watch/Center for Investigative Reporting.
Reviewed by Deborah Blum
January 23, 2013
Continue reading “Great Investigations Deserve Great Ebooks”
In thirty years, Tasmanian devils may be gone from the face of the Earth. If they do vanish, they will be wiped out in a fashion unlike any other endangered species we know of. The marsupials have developed a cancer that acts like a parasite, jumping from host to host.
In today’s New York Times, I take a look at what scientists are now learning about this strange contagious tumor, and the desperate measures they’re going to in order to protect the species from its unique devastation.
[Image: Arthur Chapman, Flickr/Creative Commons]
Originally published January 22, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.
The New York Times, January 21, 2013
In November, a team of biologists journeyed to Maria Island, three miles off the Australian island state of Tasmania, taking with them 15 plastic cylinders. They loaded the cylinders into S.U.V.’s, drove them to an abandoned farm and scattered them in the fields.
Before long 15 Tasmanian devils emerged from the containers, becoming the first ever to inhabit the island.
“All indications are that they’re doing very well,” Phil Wise, a government wildlife biologist who leads the project, said of the devils — fierce-looking, doglike marsupials that have become an endangered species on the much larger island for which they are named.
Twenty eight years ago, the first coyotes arrived in Newfoundland. They had come a long way.
Up until the 1800s, coyotes lived mostly in the southwestern United States, and in low numbers in the Midwest. To the east and north, wolves shut them out of their forests. But when farmers and trappers exterminated wolves in much of North America, the coyotes began to expand their range. By the 1970s, they had reached the far corners of New England. In the winter of 1985, there were reports in Newfoundland of wolf-like animals traveling across the ice to the Port au Port Peninsula. In 1987, a car hit one of the animals, and it was confirmed to be a coyote pup. The coyotes had come about as far east as they possibly could.
Meredith Palmer writes, “I am currently working on Guam studying the invasive Brown Tree Snake. I graduated with my B.A. in Zoology in 2011 and have spent the last year or so in Africa studying large mammals, in the Caribbean examining guppy evolution, and in Canada digging up dinosaurs. And now I find myself in the Pacific! The plan, however, is to attend graduate school next fall. Although I majored in zoology, I always had an interested in paleontology born out of cold, rainy childhood summers spent cracking shale in New England with my geologist parents. Dicranurus is one of my favorite trilobite species, and the design is modeled after scientific plates in the publications of Barrande, a Boehmian paleontologist from the 1800s.”
Barrande’s beautiful illustrations are posted on the Smithsonian’s web site. For more on the glorious vanished trilobites, visit A Guide to the Order of the Trilobites.
You can see the rest of the Science Tattoo Emporium here and in Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.
Originally published January 20, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.