The Scribble Climate Experiment: Phase Two

In case you don’t recall, Phase One involved a shaky estimate of herbaceous stem density in the sideyard of Scribble Central Command: approximately 126,000 shoots of tenacious (though pretty) weeds.
Phase Two actually began the same day, with an attempt to estimate biomass rather than blithely quote shady statistics about “stems.” I was after dry biomass, [...]

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Carbon Storage Stymied in Twilight Zone

Every year, microscopic phytoplankton turn about 50 billion metric tons of carbon into plant life. Much of that carbon comes straight out of the atmosphere. On the surface of things, that sounds pretty good – but a paper in today’s Science reports that below the surface it’s rather more complicated.
The study – called VERTIGO, in [...]

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Virtual Birding for the Feederless Masses

A computing team at Berkeley and Texas A&M has finally enabled us to go birding in someone else’s backyard. Their project – the vaguely naughty-sounding Cone Sutro Forest Collaborative Observatory for Natural Environments project – takes you out onto Craigslist founder Craig Newmark’s back deck and puts a pan-tilt-zoom camera at your fingertips. There’s an [...]

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Let’s Get Back to Being Critical (Thinkers)

Paper in a recent issue of Climatic Change: Understanding public complacency about climate change: Adults’ mental models of climate change violate conservation of matter
And we’re not talking about out-of-touch middle Americans, either. We’re talking 212 MIT grad students. When asked to anticipate CO2 levels under two emissions scenarios, more than 3/4 gave answers that [...]

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Bees, Flowers Enter Tongues Race

And now for something completely different: Small bees with big tongues.
Ecological fieldwork consists of fascinating questions answered with excruciating amounts of work. Take this study, by Brendan Borrell of the University of California, Berkeley. His aim: to understand nectar drinking in orchid bees ranging in size from teensy (50 mg) to just pretty small [...]

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Jays, Crows Enter Arms Race

Jay attacks crow with spearlike object of its own making. Crow wrests object from jay (thus, disarming him). Picks it up and goes on the offensive.
This rather startling report of armed combat among birds, from veteran jay scientist Russ Balda in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology, was seized upon and ably reported by Joe [...]

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The Scribble Climate Experiment: Phase One

***Spoiler alert: If you are my landlord, you might be a bit alarmed at some of the following***
A couple of months ago the landlords of Scribble Central Command fell behind on the lawnmowing schedule, and the tenants of SCC didn’t pick up the slack. It was the middle of the rainy season, and the next [...]

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Rats vs. Rotifers on New Zealand Islands

Let rats loose on an island and they don’t just scamper around eating birds’ eggs, a study reports in a recent Ecology Letters. They cut nutrient levels, make the soil nearly 100 times less acidic, and topple populations of six out of eight kinds of – well, let’s call them creepy crawlies (springtails, rotifers, nematodes, [...]

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Video Gnarliness

 
Santa Cruz has been humming this week under the combined magic of a big northwest and a big south swell. Some of those same northwest waves marched in on Oahu’s north shore, where the videocameras were perfectly positioned.
A big, orderly swell chugging calmly ashore can fool many an onlooker into underestimating its difficulty. This video [...]

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Video Marvelousness

To keep you patient folks going while the Scribbler does something profitable, here’s a no-frills video of a strange Peruvian hummingbird. It’s called the marvelous spatuletail, and to find out why you really do need to see the bird in action.
I’ve always loved when strange words find themselves perfectly applied in naming outlandish birds. “Marvelous” [...]

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