“It's going to be a bad year for bugs.†Last month, I was frequently reminded of this expression as a seemingly endless supply of caterpillars feasted happily on the sunflowers from our most recent study. We were in a month-long, losing battle against these numerous and voracious critters! For the past year and a half,
As my avid followers will recall, I ended my previous blog post with a brief discussion on the important distinction between acclimatization and adaptation. That blog post featured an in-depth look at acclimatization using my recent trip to Nepal as an example. For this blog post, I will focus on adaptation. Adaptation has quite a
This past November two friends and I embarked on the Three Passes Trek, a hiking trail through Nepal that crosses, you guessed it, three mountain passes. The trail experiences drastic elevation changes, ranging anywhere from 9,000 to 17,500 feet. On Day 12 of our travels, I was struggling to fall asleep in Gorakshep, a small
‘Tis the season for one of my favorite holiday traditions: selecting and decorating a Christmas tree. This annual holiday festivity became popular and widely adopted worldwide in the late 18th century as people started displaying ornately decorated evergreen conifer species (i.e. pines, spruces, firs) in their homes. Although the Christmas tree tradition now includes fake
Florida torreya's (Torreya taxifolia) current habitats are threatened by climate change. The Torreya Guardians, a self-organized group of scientists and informed citizens, took it upon themselves in 2008 to move this tree species to new, suitable habitats north of its native range. This was the first assisted migration of an endangered species in the United
