When an Animal Dies in a National Park, what does the Park Service Do with it?
I'm always excited to see an animal in nature — even when it’s dead.
Not everyone feels that way, and you may wonder why the park staff doesn’t remove carcasses to make a prettier and safer experience for the viewers, like a city public works department cleaning public streets.
Well, there are reasons for that. What a park decides to do with a carcass depends largely on the circumstance, science, safety, and pragmatism.
Hurricane Ian was still churning toward Florida on Sept. 27 when CNN anchor Don Lemon asked one of the nation’s le
My latest for PolitiFact! This one isn't really a fact-check because it's more like, "people have said things with implications, but whether those implications are correct is complicated." Specifically, this was written in response to an exchange where a journalist asked the Acting Director of the National Hurricane Center about the connection between climate change and Hurricane Ian, and critics said the NOAA person "shut down" the journalist.
But, does climate change cause hurricanes?
Here's a good quote:
"The problem is akin to having a grandparent who dies of lung cancer and who had smoked two packs a day," Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist with a specialty in hurricane physics at MIT, wrote in an email. "You can say that his smoking made his cancer more likely, but some people who never smoked still get lung cancer, and some who smoked heavily lived until well into their 90s.
"Climate change has made intense, highly precipitating storms like Ian more likely."
I find that's true with most things. There is never one single cause of anything good or bad - another example is a car crash. Did you crash because you didn't get enough sleep last night, the other car was going a little too fast to respond in time, the road was just a little wet? Last time you drove under those conditions you were fine, why did you crash this time? Maybe if one of those elements hadn't been there the crash wouldn't have happened. Or maybe there would have been another problem, maybe the crash would have been worse. That's why we try to mitigate risk on multiple levels (seatbelts, speed limits, etc) even though a lack of those things won't "cause" accidents.
But I should point out, the connection between climate change and hurricanes is quite a bit more complicated than the connection between smoking and lung cancer, at the moment anyway. Read the article for more detail.
The chytrid fungal pathogen Bd causes a dangerous skin infection and spreads easily.
Imagine someone in your neighborhood buys a salamander for a pet – not a completely unlikely scenario in a country that imports more than 3.5 million amphibians every year. Salamanders are cute, small, and interesting pets, although they require specialized care. They’re appropriate for small living situations and a Covid-reduced world.
Every so often, however, one of those salamanders has a fungal pathogen. An owner might not know that the animal is infected if it’s without symptoms, or pre-symptomatic. But as everyone on Earth knows now, asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic carriers can spread a lot of disease. The salamander owner in your neighborhood could unwittingly release a diseased pet, or even just throw infected pet water in the yard. Something like this, scientists say, is just what has happened recently in California.
Sightings of coyotes with steely irises are sporadic and rare, so no one is sure how many individuals there are in the park or if their population is increasing or decreasing.
Why adult coyotes have blue eyes sometimes! Maybe it has something to do with domestication or...? What do you think?
This is one of my 4 articles in the spring issue of Bay Nature Magazine!
Basilosaurus, which means “King Lizard,” was actually a whale that lived 30-45 million years ago. Scientists have also just published a paper indicating that it was likely apex predator.
If you care about the environment, it’s time to start talking about the 640,000 tons of discarded fishing gear killing ocean creatures
We love whales just as we love turtles and sharks, calling out for change when we see the animals with straws stuck in their nose or having their fins cut off for soup. And yet, despite the very well-documented pervasiveness of fishing gear as a fatal and copious presence in the ocean, having killed hundreds of thousands of the animals we love, it is not often part of the public conversation regarding ocean plastics.
Why?
(NOAA)
(World Animal Protection)
(WWF)
(World Animal Protection)
Shout out to the 650k+ marine mammals (to say nothing of turtles and sharks) killed and seriously injured in derelict fishing gear outside the US. Maybe all the talk about straws is a distraction--but it was actually supposed to be a starting point to a conversation about consumers reducing ocean plastic.
While derelict fishing gear is mostly an industry issue, consumers can always vote with their dollars (and vote with their votes) to improve regulations in the industry. There are some initiatives going on to reduce this issue; read the article for details.
