One thousand, two hundred and fifteen years ago, upon the slope of a volcano in the Aomori prefecture of Japan, a shrine was built. Beside that shrine, a small pool was made from a natural spring, providing a water source for visitors to the shrine and their horses. These features would be maintained for 1000 years, a sanctuary for a tiny shrimp whose world had turned inhospitable.
With a range ringing around the north pole, a denizen of the Arctic and a holdover from ice ages passed, the reindeer (or caribou in North America) is the world's most northern deer species. Though famed for pulling Father Christmas’ sleigh across the sky, reindeer’s true powers lie in their adaptability in harsh habitat. Whilst …
Continue reading Will Reindeer Be Resilient to a Warming World?
Hear ‘cheetah’ and picture paws pummelling upon the grasslands of Africa. But this cat is not as inherently African as many imagine. One subspecies exists in central Iran, the relic of a population which once spanned from Egypt to India. For over a decade, experts have explored bringing the cheetah back to India. But as the native Asiatic cheetah teeters over the precipice to extinction, animals would have to be sourced from Africa. Does the return of cheetahs to India threaten the subspecies that's actually native there?
We may awe at the elephant, fear the leopard, be transfixed by the butterfly and celebrate the kingfisher, but none of these species define their habitats as strongly as the trees they live amongst. Wherever present, the density, height, soil impact and species composition of a tree community allow the denizens of that habitat to …
Continue reading Double-Edged Sward: The Tulip Tree Forests of Puerto Rico
In 1901, John Tunney collected an animal he didn’t recognise. He sent it off to his benefactor in the UK, where the specimen joined thousands of other items as part of the famous Rothschild collection, and disappeared from all knowledge. Until two centuries later, when researchers at the British Museum of Natural History rediscovered Tunney’s …
Novel Ecology 