PEREGRINE PULP

People love bees. Most folks are particularly enamoured with those colony bees who gift us honey but who make up just 5% of bee species and tend to neglect the far more numerous solitary variety comprising the overwhelming majority of bee diversity . But how many bee species are there? Of course it is very difficult to estimate the number of unknown organisms. What we do know is that to date we've identified something like 2.1 million total species. And somewhere on the orde

Back in 2019 I wrote about bison. I noticed that the numbers and circumstances commonly offered relating to the historic abundance and eventual disappearance of this species, who at one time thrived across nearly the whole continent but were rapidly reduced to almost zero, made little sense. If you’ve never come across it, the usual version of events deviates little from what is found on the US National Park Service website: Bison herds in the western United States were so m

When I was studying Environmental Communication (it was maybe a 200-level course in undergrad, back in the 2000s) we talked about the great problem with climate change, from a communication standpoint, being that it was so slow moving and effectively invisible. And one of the remedies to that was seen as the adoption of the highly charismatic and imperiled polar bear as a symbol. Famous commercials , investigations, news articles , documentary films , and TV series highlighti

What Victoria lacks in cultural or economic might she makes up for in geography, climate, flora, and fauna. If you’re from Victoria, or...

You can’t spend time anywhere near the Salish Sea without hearing about the mystery feet. Averaging about one a year, sneakers with...

The West Vancouver Streamkeeper Society  was established in 2001. Their objective is to restore and sustain local aquatic wildlife...

Somehow I missed obelisks . Well, I suppose everyone missed it — or them . Discovered in human gut and oral bacteria, researchers...

We’ve never really known a lot about blue whales  ( Balaenoptera musculus ); yes, despite our long history near and on the sea, blue...

Maybe twenty years ago I was writing about the strangeness of finding myself labelled an ‘atheist’. To begin with, I argued that labelling others was a weird practice, and that gifting someone membership in a group that they themselves haven’t or wouldn’t was a mode of conduct we probably wanted to avoid. (No, I couldn't have imagined the era we were about to enter. And you can imagine my consternation.) But, if you still insisted, then it seemed to me like framing things in

A team of researchers from Conservation International conducted a survey in the heart of Peru during the summer of 2022. Their rapid assessment bulletin was just now published . In their report, Conservation International’s Rapid Assessment Program  team (a kind of biologist Special Forces unit, like the Green Berets but instead of suppressed rifles and thermal goggles they come carrying microscopes and PhDs in butterfly reproduction) revealed a remarkable diversity in Peru’s

The Quinsam River, just outside Campbell River  on Vancouver Island, has just seen the highest pink salmon return in a decade . And this...

According to the IUCN Red List , more than 45,000 species on Earth are currently threatened with extinction. Particularly threatened are...

In 2020 a massive wildfire, known as the CZU Lightening Complex Fire , broke out in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Initially, several small fires were sparked by lightening. Those fires eventually grew and coalesced into one much larger conflagration. Part of that fire surrounded and consumed the ancient old-growth forests of Big Basin Redwoods State Park , along California’s central coast, just south of San Francisco and north of Monterey Bay. Though ignited by an unusual lightn

You’ve heard about the devastations to the world’s reef ecosystems. Most notably, the Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s east coast saw...

I imagine that it is as true for you as it is me that almost everything I thought I understood from prior education turned out to be far from the whole story or even entirely wrong. Occasionally this occurrence is innocent and happens because we’ve learned more over time or because the author or teacher felt they needed to simplify for their learners. At other times the person who wrote the book or taught the lesson simply didn’t know what they were talking about or never loo

The killer whale is the largest known species of dolphin. This exposes its common name as a rather silly one. ( Silly, just like so many others, such as the: mantis shrimp [not a shrimp or a mantis], electric eel [not an eel], starfish or cuttlefish [not fish], sea cucumber [not a vegetable, though it sure looks like a disembodied rectum], king cobra [not a cobra], horny toad [not a toad, maybe horny], red panda [not a panda], koala bear [not a bear], maned wolf [not a wolf]

You may have heard something about the Sea Star Wasting Disease (SSWD) epidemic that came to the Pacific coast of North America in 2013....

Twenty-nine months into this pandemic I'm still running into folks who think that being immunized means they're immune to infection and...