Inquiry into Nature in the Spirit of John Ray
These are quick stories or news items with less commentary. These may be short stories or comments about other natural history stories from other sources
The book of Job, which is an exploration of the problem of human suffering, contains some of the most descriptive language about the natural world in all of Scriptures. Job 39 in particular sees God using the natural history of multiple animals including the mountain goat, deer, donkey, ostrich, horse, hawk and eagle to illustrate […]
I’m posting a short follow-up to a story about huddling penguins that I wrote about a few weeks ago (Heat-sharing Huddling Penguins – A Benefit to Selfish Behavior?). I was pointed to a really fascinating set of videos that show emperor penguins in the process of forming huddles. You can see these videos embedded in […]
In a paper entitled, “Modeling Huddling Penguins” in PLosOne (an Open Access journal) a few months ago mathematicians take on a difficult question in biology: Do individuals organisms make decisions to share a resource for the greater good (altruism) or do they generally act only as selfish individuals. It is very difficult to test the cause […]
I would like to take a small diversion from my usual material on this blog to do a little backyard natural history. Our new home has almost a half acre of grass which abuts to our neighbors yard which is several acres of hardwood forest. In researching our home I found out that our […]
One of the stranger behaviors of termites was reported this past week and a summary can be found in a note in Nature. This report contains a description of exploding termites! How, and probably more intriguing, why would a termite explode and commit suicide?
An interesting new resource for research into 17th century natural history has been made available this year in the form of the first of what will be 10 volumes of the monumental work Biblia American by Cotton Mather (1663-1928). The first volume coves this American puritan’s commentary on Genesis. Unfortunately the book is rather expensive […]
