The Attack of the Giant Water Bug
In the creeks and ponds of the world — including America — lives an insect that can reach four inches long and bears a pair of giant pincers and a beak for injective digestive enzymes into its victim...
The Artful Amoeba
A Blog About the Weird Wonderfulness of Life on Earth
Wonderful Things: The Hidden Beauty of the Horse Dung Fungus
Note: This is the third installment in the “Wonderful Things” series. What you are about to see is a truffle-like (although it seems to fruit above-ground) fungus called Pisolithus tinctorius...
American Pecan Truffle May Be Coming to a Plate Near You, By Way of Extremely Cute Courier
With a winning combination of cuteness, digging-osity, and the precision focus of a heat-seaking missile, Este the truffle dog has helped blaze a trail together with scientists that could both enliven American diets and help support American pecan growers...
Chocolate Frosty Pod Rot and You
Coffee drinkers recoiled in horror when news that their favorite plant had come under serious attack by a fungus called rust this year. The news came close on the heels of news that the bacterial disease huanglongbing is devastating the Florida citrus industry, driving up prices and threatening quality...
Evolution
Glass Sponges Poriferify — and Beautify — Impoverished Antarctic Neighborhood
Glass sponges are taking over a newly sunlit strip of Antarctic marine real estate at a blistering clip, surprising biologists who had no idea they had it in them.
Evolution
How the Fleas’ Next of Kin Ended up Living on a Liverwort in Alaska
Beware the Giant Paintbrush, Little Insect Way, way down in the southeast corner of Alaska lies Prince of Wales Island, the fourth largest in the United States.
Evolution
How the Fleas' Next of Kin Ended up Living on a Liverwort in Alaska
Beware the Giant Paintbrush, Little Insect Way, way down in the southeast corner of Alaska lies Prince of Wales Island, the fourth largest in the United States.
Evolution
Wonderful Things: Don't Eat the Pink Snow
If you stumbled one midsummer on the melting snow in the image below, what would you imagine produced the strange color? Translated German caption: "Snow area with Chlamydomonas nivalis (snow blood) near Abisko (Northern Sweden)" Creative Commons Ökologix...
Evolution
Green Alga Found to Prey on Bacteria, Bolstering Endosymbiotic Theory
A green alga with throat- and stomach-like structures can swallow and digest bacteria when deprived of light, further bolstering Lynn Margulis's widely accepted idea that the origin of the plant-powering chloroplast was a fortuitous bout of indigestion.Termed "Endosymbiotic Theory", the idea is that early nucleated cells called eukaryotes ate bacteria that managed to escape digestion but also couldn't escape their captors...
Evolution
Is This Spindly Fossil a 3-Billion-Year-Old Eukaryote?
One of the planet's former dominant species? A proposed microfossil from Western Australian Quartzite. To preserve the detail in this image in the space I have, I cropped the image and moved the scale bar, but preserved its proportion to the image...
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