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I want to visit a South Pacific Island

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  Venture inland on a high volcanic South Pacific island, and you enter a world that appears to be built around absence, but the biodiversity can be vast: Almost no native land mammals, which means that birds, reptiles, and insects have expanded to fill the niches that foxes, badgers, and deer occupy elsewhere. Flying foxes, the size of dogs, and fruit bats the size of small cats, hang from the canopy by day and reign over pollination and seed dispersal at night. Kingfishers and lorikeets work the branches below. Geckos and skinks patrol the detrital undergrowth. A large flying fox bat. The most astonishing resident to me is the coconut crab, the largest land invertebrate on Earth. It climbs trees, cracks open coconuts with its claws, and can live for sixty years. If you see one moving through the forest at night, you might wonder what planet you are on. This is planet Earth. Coconut crab hanging out on a garbage can. On an atoll, the interior shrinks to almost nothing, a narr...
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Not Every Scientists Wears a Lab Coat

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  Alexander Von Humboldt resting after inventing nature :-)  On the many ways science actually gets done You may have taken that science course and been taught science as a procedure. You ask a question, form a hypothesis, design an experiment with a control group, collect data, and draw a conclusion. It is tidy, it is logical, and it describes how science works at a specific set if steps, that are rarely actually followed in that way. And beyond even mimicking the scientific method a huge amount of science, particularly foundational science knowledge, was and is produced by people who never ran a single controlled experiment. E.W. Gudger, a zoologist of the early twentieth century, spent decades building a careful catalog of what was actually known about whale sharks. He understood that simply establishing the facts of a creature's existence and habits was itself a major scientific contribution. He was right. And he was in good company. Cataloging Before you can ask why thing...
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