Browsing: Ecology

Michael Lucid photographs samples found during the Multispecies Baseline Initiative (MBI).Ben Goldfarb In 2010, Michael Lucid, a biologist with the Idaho Department of Fish & Game, captured a surprise in a beer-baited gastropod trap—a slug that didn’t genetically resemble any of the ones he’d caught before. On a hunch, Lucid sent the mysterious invertebrate to […]

My queen was a dud, and her replacement had been murdered.

Three of the rare Przewalski’s horses that now roam the area near the Chernobyl nuclear plant.Sergey Gaschak After a fatal series of errors and malfunctions in the early morning of April 26, 1986, the core of the Chernobyl nuclear facility melted down and then exploded, killing 31 workers at the plant. The accident spewed massive […]

Most creatures flee storms, but some thrive because of them.

Scientists have seen the future and it is “grolar bears.”

To explain her motivations as a writer, Anna Badkhen quotes the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert: “you have little time you must give testimony.” Badkhen recently stopped by the Nautilus office to sit for an interview and take us behind the scenes of “The Men Who Planted Trees,” her cover story for the Spring 2014 Nautilus […]

The health of an ecosystem in the Earth’s own words.

A lesson in home improvement.

A resourceful eastern fox squirrel eating pizzaCourtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County In West Los Angeles, just across the 405 freeway from UCLA, sits a hospital that’s been serving veterans for more than 100 years.  Back in 1904, it housed veterans from the Civil and Spanish-American Wars and was called the “Sawtelle Veterans […]

The hybrid ecologies of Frankfurt Airport show us how homes and borders intersect.