When I first saw the acoustic tag, I couldn’t imagine inserting it under fish’s skin. It was the size and shape of the SPF 45 ChapStick that was melting in my pocket. The tag would soon be surgically implanted into a Nassau grouper, a medium-sized fish, but Dr. Rick Nemeth, and his team at University…
I first heard about Born to Run, the Chris McDougall book that sparked the barefoot running craze, during my freshman year of college in 2012. At the time, before I got bogged down with trivialities like torn anterior cruciate ligaments (turns out those really matter), I was a running fiend. I ran every day. On…
On the muddy grounds of the deep ocean, sea cucumbers are playing nanny to young king crabs. But are they being compensated?’ These sea cucumbers, commonly known as sea pigs, are bottom-dwelling creatures that look like grapefruit jelly with legs and could fit in the palm of a hand. Juvenile King crabs are around half…
Every night as Marshall Hinsley walks through his farm in Texas, hundreds of tiny bright dots light up the land when he shines his flashlight into the distance. “It’s like glitter,” he says. “Those are all the eyes of spiders just blanketing the landscape.” Hinsley’s farm didn’t always dazzle. The spiders – and a zoo…
I recently photographed a banana slug for a short article I was writing about banana slug slime for the Santa Cruz Hilltromper, a website for nature lovers in the area. “Okay, now turn your head to the left… down a little… actually can you crawl up this rock a bit more for me? I’d really…
The latest news release by the U.S. Forest Service reads ominously: the Sierra Nevada has over 100 million dead trees. Swathes of standing dry trees infested with insects populate the Stanislaus, Sequoia, and Sierra National Forests. Climate change, a five-year drought and bark beetle attacks have together resulted in what the Forest Service has called…
I stood with my feet buried in sand, staring at the ocean waves as they touched the beach. It was mid-October. To my untrained eye, the Monterey Bay shoreline looked like a child’s bubble bath. To California Fish and Wildlife scientists, it was a terrible déjà vu. Nine years ago, an algal bloom wreaked havoc—and…
She stood at the fire line, waiting. The sky blurred just above the hill, introducing the arrival of the flames. Crackling patches of yellow and red crept their way down the hill toward her. She heard an ensemble of croaking. A bunch of fast-moving black dots, soon turned into recognizable outlines. Hundreds of Pacific Chorus…
Twice a day the rocky Pacific coast traps seawater in pools as the tide rolls in and out. Compared to the ocean, the puddles are so small and innocuous that it seems nothing momentous could possibly be happening there, but there is. It turns out tiny black turban snails may be getting a buzz from…
I watched nearly 2,000 baby olive ridley sea turtles hatch while working on a sea turtle conservation project in Costa Rica. Most of them were born in our human-made hatchery from wild eggs we had relocated— each hatchling crawled and tumbled upon dozens of siblings in a sheltered plot, eager to be free. Others were…
