Green Screen: Saving Your Skin—And The ReefsJune 24, 2008 – Sunscreen may spare your skin, but when it inevitably rinses off in the waves, it’s an eco-nightmare. Up to 6,000 tons of the goop end up in oceans every year, according to a 2007 Italian university study, and the chemicals are bleaching coral reefs at an alarming rate. Two Mexican marine parks have banned traditional…
Twisting the cuttlefishJune 17, 2009 – The “common cuttle-fish.” From Mysteries of the Ocean. About three decades before On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection would forever change biological science, the aspiring young naturalists Pierre-Stanislas Meyranx and Laurencet submitted a paper on mollusks to France’s prestigious Academie des Sciences. For weeks they waited for a patron from within […]
Obama Creates New National TrailJuly 22, 2009 – President Obama recently signed a bill that would create a trail from Montana’s Glacier National Park (above) to the Pacific Ocean at Washington’s Cape Alava. The 1,200-mile Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail is part of the “dream of a transcontinental pathway across America,” according to Ron Strickland, who proposed the Pacific Northwest Trail in 1970.…
The Shoulder Bone's Connected to the Ear Bone…October 15, 2008 – [10/16/08 Correction appended: see end of post] When our ancestors moved ashore some 360 million years ago, they underwent a lot of changes as they evolved from ocean-swimming fish to land-walking tetrapods. For one thing, they needed feet instead of fins. Paleontologists have discovered a series of fossils that document the early evolution of limb […]
Laelaps Movie of the Week: Jaws 3-DNovember 03, 2007 – During the 1990’s I can scarcely remember a time when one television station or another wasn’t playing at least one of the four JAWS movies, TBS, TNT, or WPIX often devoting an entire day to films about killer oceanic creatures. Still, of the four films JAWS 3 (or 3-D, if you like) was one of […]
In the Bahamas, Invasive Fish May Become Dinner to Restore EcosystemAugust 10, 2009 – Text by Alyson Sheppard; Photograph: Wolcott Henry, National Geographic Animals Populations of lionfish, a football-size predatory fish native to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, are exploding in coral reefs in the Bahamas, threatening to destroy native fish schools and the local snorkeling, diving, and kayaking businesses. “With the quantities of lionfish that we’ve found in…
