Sea Monster

Tag: science

  • Belize field log 2012: Witness to a murder

    [The fourth installment, and I’ll confess my favorite, in our New York Times “Scientist at Work” field log.] Sunday, July 8 As the sun breaks the horizon, I sit in a wooden chair at the edge of the backreef, an eye on the weather horizon, gratefully sipping the first strong coffee and gauging what the…

  • Belize field log 3: Journey to the center of the reef

    [The third installment in our New York Times “Scientist at Work” field log.] Collecting shrimp is a complicated business. I am not as seasoned as my colleagues, but I quickly learn how tedious it can be. After taking a photograph and estimating the volume of a sponge, we have to locate every shrimp inside. Synalpheus…

  • Belize field log 2: Social breakdown on the reef

    [The second installment in our New York Times “Scientist at Work” field log.] Wednesday, July 4 Our hunt yesterday produced a good haul of shrimp species, but, alas, none of the social ones we’re searching for. I worked with my former Ph.D. student, Tripp McDonald, long into the night identifying the shrimp. Though little known…

  • Belize 2012 field log 1: Snapping Shrimps and Hidden Sponges

    [Our team has just returned from a 10-day research trip to the Belize Barrier Reef, searching for social sponge-dwelling shrimp in a long-term study of these curious animals as models for understanding the evolution of altruism and cooperation. The New York Times “Scientist at Work” feature is posting updates from our field log. We reprint…

  • Will this be the end of the Aquarius Reef Base?

    Next week a team of aquanauts including Sylvia Earle will live and work underwater for 6 days inside “America’s Inner Space Station” aka the Aquarius Reef Base. It’s the world’s only undersea research station and its future is looking shaky – unless new funding is found the station will be closed. In an effort to…

  • Biodiversity and the battle for Planet Earth: The graphic novel

    [Editor’s note: It’s been a big month for the science of biodiversity and an exciting time to be a part of it. Last week, Nature came out with its issue commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Rio meeting that first put biodiversity on the world’s radar screen and spawned the Convention on Biological Diversity. The…

  • North Carolina legislature makes history yet again, proposing to outlaw sea level rise

    [Editor’s note: OK, I know we live in crazy times, and getting crazier by the day. But this one is so utterly, bat-doo insane, masochistic and over-the-top that I can’t resist and must quote verbatim. By Scott Huler at From Scientific American blogs. John, Craig, Kevin Z, Andrew, et al — what the ___ is…

  • Happy International Day for Biological Diversity!

    Not only that but Marine Biodiversity (yeah, it caught us by surprise too — I think the Convention on Biological Diversity needs some marketing advice . . .) Anyway, they have a cool logo which is worth a post in its own right. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, today, 22 May 2012, is the official International…

  • Online Encyclopedia of Life hits a million pages

    The Encyclopedia of Life has hit a million pages!  From ScienceDaily: The Encyclopedia of Life has surged past one million pages of content with the addition of hundreds of thousands of new images and specimen data from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). Launched in 2007 with the support of leading scientific…

  • Twilight of the giants in taxonomy

    [Adapted in part from my recent review at Faculty of 1000] In an important sense, nothing exists until it’s given a name.  And in the living world of organisms, names—official, scientific names—are assigned by unique creatures called taxonomists, experts in the minutiae of structure and biology of particular groups of organisms, working according to a…