MARINA ZURKOW
Spineless, Juli Berwald book “Jellyfish Blooms: advances and challenges” link As jellyfish interactions with humans increase in coastal waters, there is an urgent need to provide science-based management strategies to mitigate the negative socioeconomic impacts of jellyfish blooms and to exploit potential benefits of their ecosystem services. This Theme Section presents the latest advances in…
To kick the jellies off, I found on the NSF site a great primer on jellyfish: Gulf of Mexico THE BIGGEST DEAD ZONE IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE The white sands and sparkling emerald waters of the Gulf of Mexico’s beaches belie a dirty little (open) secret: a huge Dead Zone that is devoid of almost…
New year, new thread, I’m on sabbatical from ITP, and starting almost 3 months of deep research out of town – in the Gulf of Mexico, and in Minneapolis for a new umbrella project called Making the Best of It. Here’s a nano description: Making the Best of It is the umbrella concept for a series of regionally site-specific…
Design I worked on with the OISC Education and Outreach Committee, for the upcoming Eat Invasives meal produced by Institute for Applied Ecology. Trying to move the invasives conversation from “Aaaah! Alien Invaders!” and xenophobia, to human agency. Great collaboration with Carolyn Devine!
I teach a 7 week class called Interspecies – David Tracy’s made a deceptively simple array of spider eyes, and has been wearing them enough to be accustomed to seeing behind himself. Umwelt is a tough thing- some compromises as you reach for empathy or understanding. He says this is his “proof of concept for…
YEP. How is this possible? From Oregon Metro today, Zoo releases 850 endangered butterflies into wild Precious excerpts: Once common along the Oregon coast, the Oregon silverspot was reduced to four Oregon populations by the 1990s. The species was listed as threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1980 – one of two Oregon butterflies…
“Frog Once Used in Pregnancy Tests Spread Deadly Fungus” A species of frog that was used from the 1930s to the 1950s in human pregnancy tests is a carrier of a deadly amphibian disease that is now threatening hundreds of other species of frogs and salamanders. … The pathogen the frogs are spreading is a…
These days, very little would make me happier than to get on the train that asks Americans to reconceive their relationship to beef, by removing the cow at the end of the line. Just NOW on the NYT site, “Engineering the $325,000 Burger.” The idea of creating meat in a laboratory — actual animal tissue,…
This just in from Venue, an online mag produced by StudioX. INVISIBLE FENCES: AN INTERVIEW WITH DEAN ANDERSON (10 gallon) hats off to Studio-x for mixing urban and non-urban considerations of architecture. I’ve been ruminating (yes) about how to better interface with and represent ecocritical investigations on remote public lands, and have the work BE more salient…
From the NY Times today Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it — kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat….
One of my UrbanNature Interventionist students suggested this film – it’s at once shmaltzy, beautifully shot, and umwelt-shifting! Here’s chapter one, but you can watch the full 50 minute doc at Nature/PBS. It premiered in Nov 2011. Watch My Life as a Turkey on PBS. See more from Nature.
Knowing more of what I am starting to know, a lone wolf is not a romantic beast. His or her status is a walkabout, but when you walk a territory mainly devoid of potential companion alliances, what is your world like? My heart hurts; I’m not even sure what my own loneliness feels like. Gray…
Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness, Just Like Us George Dvorsky, IO9, Aug 25, 2012 An international group of prominent scientists has signed The Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness in which they are proclaiming their support for the idea that animals are conscious and aware to the degree that humans are — a…
From The New York Times, May 22 2012: “They were totally silent, very quick and highly effective.” The monkey population of Delhi has grown so large and aggressive that overwhelmed city officials have petitioned India’s Supreme Court to relieve them of the task of monkey control. “We have trapped 13,013 monkeys since 2007,” said R….
Stupid Animal Trick: Flying Sheep and Deer Among Hawaii’s Islands – NYTimes.com. From the Maui News: A helicopter pilot is pleading guilty to illegally flying deer from Maui to the Big Island, shedding light on a mystery that has been bewildering Hawaii: how did axis deer, an animal that can’t swim across the ocean,…
The New York Painter Allen Hirsch — Q&A – NYTimes.com. The aluminum portrait and larger-than-life photographs on the roof and adjacent to the restaurant La Esquina… are … an homage by the New York City painter Allen Hirsch to Benjamin, his capuchin monkey who died at the age of 14, that is as much a…
Mocking the beaver as a “dentally defective rat,” a Conservative senator proposes that it be replaced by the endangered polar bear as Canada’s national emblem. via On Our Radar: Flooding in Bangkok – NYTimes.com.
Incredible photo, but really awful events. A man who collected several dozen exotic animals in Ohio released them all and then killed himself. There should be stringent laws on keeping exotic animals… even in zoos.