A Blog About the Weird Wonderfulness of Life on Earth
It's Independence Day here in the United States, and in celebration, today I bring you a short post about some flowers that grow nowhere in the wild in America -- but beautifully resemble certain patriotic displays that are currently banned nearly everywhere here in Colorado due to extreme fire danger.
In 1994, New South Wales National Parks & Wildlife Service Officer David Noble stumbled on some trees in a canyon in an inaccessible part of Wollemi National Park.
Want to learn how to identify some of this stuff? See me. Each summer I teach a course about wild mushrooms for the Boulder County Nature Association.
After nearly two months of wandering the Southern Hemisphere and a few weeks of recovery post-return, it's time to get back into the blogging here at the Artful Amoeba.
Put your gills in the air like you just don't care . . . Christmas tree worms, Spirobranchia giganteus. Creative Commons Nick Hobgood. Click image for link to image and license.
Imagine you are a tiny caddisfly pupa. When you emerge from your pupal case, it is dark, but not pitch black, and high above you, you see the faint glow of a starry sky.
When we left the volcano Rangitoto two posts ago, I promised more Down Under fern excitement. For the six of you still here, here we go!Toward the beginning of my hike I saw signs pointing to a kidney fern glen or gully.
A beautiful young New Zealand fern frond unfolding, with mature leaves at left. (C) Jennifer Frazer. A fern may seem a simple thing. It's a leaf; it sprouts from the forest floor.
A week and a half ago I stepped off a plane and into the Southern Hemisphere for the first time in my life. In spite of 12 hours of cramped legs and loud children heedless of fellow travelers' sleep needs, it was an exhilarating feeling.
Your floor-model animal mitochondrion. Public domain. Click for link. Two billion years ago, around the time atmospheric oxygen levels were rising, one cell engulfed another, and instead of becoming lunch, the ingestee became an Earth-changer and, eventually, a vital part of you: mitochondria.These microscopic cell inhabitants/engines allowed their host cell to suddenly begin to burn oxygen when digesting their food, an energy source that vastly expanded the amount of energy they could harvest from a given morsel of food.
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