RECENT POSTS 
Sperm is constant joke-fodder. From the opening credits of the movie "Look Who's Talking" to various Shakespeare passages, we humans never seem to tire of laughing at hordes of competitive little sperm powering past each other in the race towards their final destination. They're unbelievably tiny, simple entities, and yet the outcome of their performance is huge. Or perhaps we just stay fascinated by the dramatic fact that all of our lives began when one of those little guys won a race that has been going on since... Read more
This question seems unnecessary, but let's ask it anyway: Why do we care about water pollution? There are myriad reasons, of course, but a common answer is that we are concerned about poisoning wildlife. Chemicals in both industrial and residential wastewater are potentially toxic to an array of species and can alter the functionality of entire food webs. We should not toxify nature. Of course poisoning wildlife is bad. We are (rightfully) so concerned about how many animals die as a result of human... Read more
Everyone has experienced the effects of stress: fidgeting, sweating, inability to focus, gain or loss of appetite, racing heartbeat, and so on. All of these things can happen to us when the adrenal system releases "stress hormones," a process that often disrupts many aspects of daily life. We don't like it. Our aversion to stress has sparked a cottage industry of self-help books, seminars, podcasts, videos, and various therapies that claim to teach us how to chill out and stay calm. Although the "symptoms" of stress make... Read more
The human species is a major driver of biodiversity loss across the globe. Occasionally, however, that propensity for extermination can become an advantage for animals that associate with us. What could be better protection from competing species than the presence of a menace that threatens wildlife? Sometimes, being the enemy of an enemy can turn us into a "friend"--or at least the lesser of two evils. This issue was highlighted in recent study involving the samango monkey (Cercopithecus mitis erythrarcus),... Read more
Throughout human history, humans have included wild animals in their folklore, mythology, and daily vocabulary. Animals with especially distinctive traits have likewise become ensconced in modern popular culture and language. Leonine features are considered striking and sexy, outfoxing someone is a demonstration of cleverness, and it is obnoxious to parrot someone in a conversation. Being slothful is unlikely to gain you any respect. Sloths spend the vast majority of their lives nearly sedentary, moving through the canopy at incremental paces.... Read more
Western society is obsessed with metabolism. Magazines bombard us with splashy headlines offering hyperbolic advice on how to boost, rev, fire up, jump-start, enhance, or otherwise maximize our metabolic rates. You should eat six meals a day, or fast two days a week, or drink green tea before every meal, or sleep 9 hours a night, or hang upside down, or use company X’s proprietary powder/capsule/plant-extract to ensure that your metabolism is purring along like a jet. We are... Read more
Aliens are among us, and they don't have to come in the form of little green humanoids to cause problems. Non-native species create major headaches, whether they are introduced intentionally or arrive at far-flung places as stowaways. These "alien" invasive plants and animals can (and often do) wreak havoc on native species, because local organisms often lack the adaptations to deal with a novel predator and/or competitor to which they've never before been exposed. Entire ecosystems have been disrupted... Read more
It is well known that higher quality items tend to be more desired, and often more expensive, than their lower quality counterparts. This applies to everything from tomatoes to cell phones to sexual partners. Social species face a quandary if the quantity of preferred items is limited, however, and competition is especially intense if members of that species commonly mimic each other's choices. For example, if you express a preference for something, you are indicating that you think it's relatively... Read more
Everyone has experienced it: you hear a scream or shout of alarm coming from someone nearby, and instantly you feel your own blood pressure rise. Your metabolism revs up, you scan the area around you, and you might even physically jolt. All of this can happen before you've even observed the potential threat--you're reacting entirely to a cue from another person. We are tightly tuned to react to the alarm signals of others, because a threat to one member of... Read more
Ecology is a mind-bogglingly complex field. As such, ecologists make few "rules"--they're more like "tentative tenets." Nature presents an exception for nearly everything, so even "rules" are often framed less as absolute laws and more as hypotheses to continue testing. One of the best-known "rules" of evolutionary ecology, is Bergmann’s rule, which predicts that endothermic animals found in cooler climates will have larger body sizes than conspecific populations or closely-related species in warmer habitats (Bergmann 1847). Bergmann’s reasoning was that... Read more
