What should be the poster-being for world conservation for the year 2008? How about the frog? The frog has been in the news for a long time now, with regard to environmental issues, and it isn’t going away any time soon, hopefully! Frogs are very sensitive to changes in their habitat, and because of that, frog species have been going extinct at rates unseen in any other creatures. They truly are the canaries in the mine shaft!

• Year of the Frog

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Happy New Year’s Eve everyone! It’s time to make those resolutions for the brand-new, shiny year that is at our doorstep. I think a little list of things we would really like to do can help focus us, as the days and weeks of 2008 scream by. I know mine has to be realistic, if there is to be any hope of getting most of them done, but if I don’t meditate a little on what I really believe I should do before the next 365 days disappear, then I wind up with a half-hearted, disorganized muddle of wishes. So, here is one thing I am adding to my list, something I have been thinking about all of 2007. I am going to plant at least one tree, hopefully more than one, in my yard. My motivation is to give more shelter to the birds I like to feed and observe, and a thoughtfully chosen tree can do just that for my little peeps. Maybe you can do the same? Here is a website that details good trees and plants for birds:

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Ok, the title to this blog article may seem a bit euphoric, but, what the heck. One thing I’ve learned, the older I get, is that it is very important to drink in as much positive news as you can reliably get, just to keep from getting bogged down in the negative and then stewing in one’s seeming “helplessness”. I try not to buy into that, because after that, what’s left?

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I joined ‘The Wilderness Society” today. So, who are they, what are they about, and why should you give them your support? It’s simple, really. It’s all about conservationists with energy and attitude, to quote: “We’re spirited people protecting America’s Wilderness since 1935 through the potent combination of science, advocacy and education”. Science, oh yes! As any thinking person will agree, life isn’t very black and white, and that means we need to think all that much harder about how we live our lives and how we treat our planet. The grey areas are everywhere, places where the applications of science have led to environmental problems, but also where scientific applications have been the solutions to those same problems. As a scientist, I love many of the places that science has taken us, but, I also understand that the best way to responsibly roll out our innovations is with a scientifically well-educated public, one that understands how the scientific method works, is well-read on scientific current events, and one that cares how we humans are affecting the environment.

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A really interesting article has been written by NATALIE ANGIER for the New York Times on various ways that animals and insects take advantage of the environment, and each other, in order to get a chemical leg-up on their competitors or pass on advantages to their young. I didn’t know that male cardinals and house finches used carotenoids found in berries to enhance their bright, red, new batch of feathers in the spring.

• Bio-Shenanigans

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Extra, extra, read all about it, beavers are inconvenient! I mean really, all they do is chew on trees and dam-up the streams where-ever they go, those varmints! Oh, wait, they’re BEAVERS, that’s their job. It’s pretty pathetic when you aren’t allowed to exist because you cause humans too much inconvenience and bother. I think we homo sapiens need to get our brains wrapped around the idea that we aren’t the most important beings on the planet, that we can and should rearrange our lives to accommodate the vast diversity of flora and fauna on this world, or face the ugly consequences of a barren, humans-only desert.

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Here is a thoughtful little blog article on the topic of water conservation, something close to my heart. I find it fascinating that people tend to take water for granted in much of the United States. Water, such an abundant resource, in places, and so very scarce in others. This article provides links to some interesting studies with regard to water usage in a handful of countries, and what is being done to regulate this precious resource. I found it very interesting that power-generation plants use the most water, for cooling. It’s pretty easy to see that we humans are butting up against problems of scale, now that there are so many of us (over 6 billion), and our numbers are still going up. If that trend holds, we will have a few scale problems related to basic living to solve, such as water for everyone (a must), food for all (ditto), and someplace for all of us to live. It is clear that technology has helped us in a lot of ways, but, if we fail to enact that technology in a timely way, that doesn’t really do much to help people around the globe, and here at home. We humans tend to be lazy, put off planning until the merde hits the fan, not to mention the fact that planning for the future is not always easy, since things tend to change over time in ways that aren’t always predictable. Well, we will get the chance to see how Atlanta’s real-life water emergency plays out. I may be getting the wrong impression from the news, but everything I’ve read sounds pretty bad. We shall see.

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Found only on the islands of Hawaii, Molokai, Oahu, and Maui, the ‘Happy-Faced Spider‘, or nananana makaki’i (face-patterned spider) in Hawaiian, has a very unique pattern on its body, believed by scientists to discourage birds from making it into a snack.

• The Happy-Faced Spider

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Archaeologists have discovered the earliest evidence of human ritual, with events having taken place up to 100,000 years ago. That is about 60,000 years earlier than evidence for ancient European rituals.

• Evidence for Very Early Human Ritual

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Nice and fresh. Well, not really, but it is one of the most preserved dinosaurs ever found. It was discovered in North Dakota in 1999, and is yielding important information about its skin color, flexibility and internal organs. Yes, it is one of the rare dinosaurs where fossilization of the internal organs occurred, thereby giving scientists a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a beast that lived somewhere around 65 to 67 million years ago.

• Duckbilled Hadrosaur

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