Yes, I have to do this:
This is actually the first specimen I’ve found this year, which was a slight frustration since there was a particular image that I wanted and couldn’t find a model. Just in case it wasn’t immediately apparent, this is a southern black widow, Latrodectus mactans, distinguished from the northern variant (we have both here) by the lack
In a previous post detailing the difficulties and uncertainties of tracing our hominid ancestors, I kind of led up to a question, expressed now in this post: Why should we bother? It’s a lot of effort to determine something that happened in the past, which is highly unlikely to have much
I’ve been watching the autumn colors developing slowly, wondering what this year’s conditions are going to be like. The pursuit of “peak colors” is a routine activity for anyone who chases landscape images, and some photographers and painters are quite dedicated to it, ensuring that they’re in a prime location in time to see the best displays. I’m
Over at the New York Times, Carl Zimmer has an article on the difficulties of pinning down hominid species, which illustrates an interesting perspective in biology, but is unfortunately a little too brief. There are a couple of factors at play, and no easy way to resolve them.
The very first thing to bear in mind is that ‘species’ is an arbitrary distinction in many ways. The word was
If you’ve had trouble getting in, or receive a new post that you saw two days ago, I’m here to take the blame. In trying to correct some stupid error message coming up since the last round of upgrades (that did not disappear when I rolled back,) I messed up some stuff and had to restore from a backup file. So a post I made two days ago is about to reappear.
Meanwhile, if you get some
I was about to pick up a plastic storage bin out in the yard today when I noticed a little crab spider perched on it, so naturally I went to get the camera. He (yes it’s a male) was amusing himself by trying to balloon away, casting a webline into the wind until it was carried off, whereupon
The weather has been spastic as all git-out, and I’ve actually postponed meetings with a couple of students because it’s been raining frequently and unpredictably, despite many meteorologist’s claims otherwise. Yesterday as the weather cleared I got out to a park that I don’t visit too often, having left early to beat the rush hour traffic, and had some time
At 12:06 am this morning, I find out that yesterday was National Grouch Day, a holiday I could actually get into, and I missed it. I even had a student and thus was on better behavior than normal, so I was extra cheated.
I just checked there is no National Spider Photographer Day, and no National Godless Heathen Day, so this was my one chance to shine, and I missed it. Someone can
I’m sorry, it’s what I’m finding to photograph.
So about a month ago I mentioned that the green lynx spiders (Peucetia viridans) that I’d been observing had all made egg sacs one on the dog fennel plants, one on the butterfly bush, and one on the rosemary bush. They have all since hatched, and I’ve been watching the new spiderlings
Note: I’ve had this is draft form for several days, tweaking it and waiting for a good opportunity to put it up I try to rotate and space out posts, and just recently put up another of the numbered series posts. Then this morning, Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution Is True posted virtually the same sentiment, and now I look like I’m copying him. So here it is anyway.
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