Burmese pythons are eating machines. An adult snake can grow to nearly 20 ft., and it can eat everything from raccoons to bobcats to deer to alligators, killing its prey by constriction and then swallowing them whole. On the …
Animals
Bat Signal: More than 5 Million Bats Dead From White-Nose Syndrome
An animal apocalypse is happening right beneath our noses in the Northeast. Since 2006, bats throughout New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Jersey, Indiana and other states have been infected with a deadly white-nose fungus that …
Zom-bees: How Parasitic Flies Are Turning Honeybees into the Buzzing Undead
From the Nature Is Scary file: researchers from San Francisco State University announced this week in a new study that honeybees are being turned into “zombies” by parasite flies. The fly—known as …
Animal Actors: Why Wild Beasts and Hollywood Don’t Mix
My weekly Going Green column—one day late because of the New Year’s holiday—is up on the Time.com mainpage. Prompted by holiday films like We Bought a Zoo, I’m exploring the role of wild animals in Hollywood, asking whether …
Conditions of Life: How Climate Change Has Driven Evolution
We are the products of our environment — and that goes for egrets and elephants as much as human beings. The history of all life on this planet has been one of change and adaptation. The environment changes, and life adapts. …
Frankincensored: How a Venerable Christmas Gift Could Be Headed for Extinction
In the days before Amazon Prime, your Christmas gift-giving options were somewhat more limited. So it that the three wise men in the Biblical account brought local gifts to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem: gold, frankincense and …
Winning the Conservation War: How to Manage the World We’re Stuck With
I have a Going Green column over on the Time.com mainpage today, and it’s a review of a new collection of essays called Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Readers of this blog are probably familiar …
The DMZ After Kim: What Change in North Korea Could Mean for One of the World’s Richest Wildlife Refuges
No one knows what will follow the apparent death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. The Hermit Kingdom remains a black box to experts—especially Americans—and while early reports suggest that Kim’s third son Kim Jong-un …
Blood Money: Tsunami Recovery Funds Go to Japan’s Whaling Industry
Our Krista Mahr has a post over at Global Spin on news that nearly $30 million worth of Japanese post-tsunami aid is going to the country’s controversial whaling industry. Ironically, one of the (few) positive effects of the …
Is Shark Fin Slowly Becoming Passé in Hong Kong?
It was the go-to soup for emperors of centuries past — a tradition revered in Chinese culture that ultimately symbolized wealth, status and prestige. But as China has gotten richer, shark fin soup consumption has increased. And …
