Usually infectious disease is a one-way street—and human beings are at the end. New viruses begin in wild animals—like monkeys or chickens—before they mutate and cross over to human beings. HIV, West Nile, SARS, H5N1, H1N1—just about every new infectious disease over the past several decades had its start in animals before …
wildlife
One Baby Gorilla Is Rescued From Poachers—But Others Aren’t So Lucky
It’s easy enough to get the public interested in the great apes when you plaster James Franco’s handsome face on a movie poster and promise visual effects on the level of Lord of the Rings and King Kong. But these animals get other types of attention too – the wrong kind. On Sunday a baby mountain gorilla named Ihirwe was …
Why the Apes Aren’t Going to Rise
The new film The Rise of the Planet of the Apes—a title with way too many prepositions—asks us to accept an absurd premise: James Franco as a genius neuroscientist. Oh, and it also expects us to accept the possibility that apes could become super-smart, enabling them to overthrow humanity as the dominant species on the planet, …
Why It’s a Bad Idea to Fish Out the Bottom of the Marine Food Chain
I’ve been spending much of the last couple of weeks doing radio and other media for my aquaculture cover in TIME. Everyone wants to know the same thing: is fish farming really sustainable? “It depends” isn’t a very satisfactory answer, so I’ve been focusing on the efforts of some in the aquaculture industry to raise fish more …
Melting Arctic Ice Takes Its Toll on Polar Bear Cubs
Sometimes I wonder how the polar bear became the poster animal for climate change. These are ferocious beasts—they’ve even be known to engage in a little cannibalism when food gets tight. They’re far from the only animals that may be suffering because of climate change—just ask the Panamanian golden frog—and few of us will ever …
How Human Beings Are Downgrading Life on Planet Earth
We live in the Anthropocene, as some scientists have come to call our new geologic era. The term acknowledges the fact that human beings—nearly 7 billion strong and growing—have so much influence over the life, geography and even chemistry of planet Earth that we’re now essentially responsible for the whole show. For good and for …
Hold the Armadillo Burger — It Might Just Give You Leprosy
Crossposted from Healthland:
It can sometimes seem that we spend most of our journalistic time trying to scare you. Or maybe that’s just my posts — I tend to get the environmental danger of the week. But, sorry to say, I’ve got another thing for you to be frightened of, and it’s something you might not expect: armadillos.
That’s …
Whales in Motion
“They say the sea is cold,” D.H. Lawrence wrote, “but the sea contains the hottest blood of all.” Whales aren’t just physically majestic, but as warm-blooded mammals who give birth to live young, they provide a human link to an underwater region that can often feel so alien. Still, between the last vestiges of whale hunting and …
GoDaddy CEO on Shooting an Elephant: I’m Not Sorry
GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons ignited an Internet firestorm when he uploaded a video of himself hunting and killing an elephant in Zimbabwe. What video? That would be this one:
[vodpod id=Video.5877956&w=425&h=350&fv=]
So is Parsons sorry for the elephant hunt—or at the very least, sorry that he put it up on the Internet? Absolutely …
The Economic Cost of Losing Bats
It can be hard to feel much sympathy for bats. Like snakes or spiders or sharks or bunnies (OK, maybe the last one is just me), there’s something primordially alarming about bats, something that activates the lizard part of the brain and shutters empathy. Bats aren’t actually “flying rodents,” but you likely won’t see them on the …