by Greg Mayer We’ve noted a number of times here on WEIT the great things that have been done using camera traps to survey rare and endangered species, especially felids. Age Kridalaksana of the Center for International Forestry Research has gotten pictures and produced a video of his successful search for the Javan leopard, Panthera […]
This is one of those times when scientists discover a structure whose function is absolutely mysterious. Piotr (Peter) Naskrecki, an entomologist, photographer and author working the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, is currently in Mozambique, documenting his adventures at a website called The Smaller Majority. Piotr is one of the best animal photographers ever, […]
“Crypsis,” as you should all know by now, is just a fancy scientific word for “camouflage.” Often cryptic animals will hide from predators by mimicking their background, but here’s a case in which one part of an animal mimics the other. Have a look first and see if you can figure out what’s going on. […]
This, taken yesterday, is from our anonymous reader who lives in a beautiful part of Idaho. His explanation of the photo: This is an HDR photograph — high dynamic range, a composite of three photos at different exposures. It would have been impossible otherwise. The full-resolution version of the original image is drop-dead stunning. Click […]
I usually end the week (a long one this time!) with a kitty, but three readers sent in nice animal photos, so I’ll post those instead. But the cats will come out tomorrow: bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be cats. First, reader Pete Moulton sent a lovely but grisly scene from nature (click […]
I’m very pleased that posting of some some readers’ photographs has inspired others to send me their nature photos. If you’ve got good ones, send them along, but I reserve the right to choose which ones to publish. This one clearly made the cut. Reader John Chardine, a professional bird photographer, sent me a picture […]
Our reader/photographer in the beautiful wilds of Idaho has been monitoring a nest of bald eagles (two chicks, I believe), and sent these photos of one parent taking wing:
The caption of this Twitter picture reads: I’ve been looking at this photo of an owl being weighed for nearly 3 minutes and I might never stop. For you non-metric types, that’s 3.25 ounces. In other words, it would take five of these owls to make a pound.
Clearly, the advantage here is to the stoat. Look how fast that damn thing is! A stoat is another name for the short-tailed weasel (Mustela erminea), which, when it turns white in winter, is known as the ermine. This play behavior prepares the young stoat for its life as a vicious predator. To see that […]
Courtesy of alert reader QOS., I learned about an old bit of research from 2005, reported in the Harvard Gazette, purporting to answer the question above—but probably not succeeding. But let’s leave that aside for the nonce and learn a bit about narwhals. For reasons that elude me, they seem to have become the iconic […]
