Ecology & Zoology

Octopus Day 2010 finds me in La Paz, Mexico, eating a homemade corn tortilla with Oaxacan cheese. It is extremely delicious. After the trip to Madagascar, where I found that dairy is just not part of…

"Anti-science" or "cautious" ... how you regard skeptics of positions that are ethically or scientifically subjective is often a matter of how you already believe.   If you are a Republican…

Humboldt squid: news when you see 'em, news when you don't. Now, the mystery deepens: It seems the Humboldt squid, the locusts of the ocean, have vanished from the Pacific north of California this…

Evolutionary detectives have used century-old bits of DNA from museum specimens to find a place for the extinct passenger pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, in the family tree of pigeons and doves,…

US News&World Report has a nifty writeup from the NSF about research on Humboldt squid, featuring my PhD advisor and various collaborators. Both the title and the subtitle make me laugh…

If you're a squid, that is. Apparently squids of the species Martialia hyadesi like to eat oily fish. They're messy, so they leave oil in the water, which floats to the surface. Grey-headed…

Humboldt squid have gotten so much press off the west coast of the Americas that pretty much any big squid found in these waters is immediately labeled a Humboldt. For example, a Mr. Anderson and his…

Geoffrey Lean, the hard-pressed environmental correspondent of the Telegraph, has comein for some stick again.  He publishedRubbish saves birds, a major study finds And this was typical of…

The dissertation is complete, the post-dissertation vacation is finished, and Squid-A-Day is back, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed! And oh boy, have I got news for you. It's no accident that Squid-A-Day…

A 36-million-year-old penguin fossil from Peru shows the new giant penguin's feathers were reddish brown and grey, much different from the black tuxedoed look of living penguins - and it had scales.…