Biology Things: Get in The Water

Schindler in arm cast (from a float plane accident)  David Schindler grew up in a small town in Minnesota, in the Red River Valley. His father farmed potatoes and sunflowers. His mother taught music. It was the kind of upbringing where you fixed things yourself, or they stayed broken, and Schindler later credited that farm logic with allowing him confidence in tinkering, in taking things apart to understand how they worked. Minnesota is on the edge of the Canadian Shield, ancient Precambrian rock that is the core of North America. Lakes are everywhere up here. In High School, he took a month-long fishing trip into northwestern Ontario, into the boreal lakes cut from the Precambrian rock. Something about the place must have resonated with him. In college, Professor Gabriel Comita gave him his first real research opportunity, studying lake food web energetics, and that was enough. He was off.  In 1962, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and went to Oxford. He began working under Nikola...

  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...

  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...