Happy Pi Day! The importance of 3.14 in nature
Pi pie (Photo by Wikimedia Commons, Paul Smith)
March 14: it has many of us sharing photos of pies, Π and pies with Π on them. But our fascination with the number 3.14 goes beyond a good excuse to eat baked goods. The mystery and wonder of pi is evident everywhere around us, including in...
The making of a bison song
Bison and a sunset at OMB, SK (Photo by Jason Bantle)
Matthew Braun is program director for the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s (NCC’s) Working Landscapes Program in Saskatchewan, and Simon Neufeld is director of research and development for Earth Alive Clean Technologies in Quebec, a...
Hey [name I don’t yet know], mind if I take a picture of you?
Two crane flies on a wild bergamot leaf (Photo by Wendy Ho/NCC staff)
The other week while checking out the wild bergamot in my backyard for powdery mildew, I noticed a big insect perching motionless on the plant’s long serrated leaf. I thought it was a giant daddy long-legs (aka cellar spider). Upon closer...
Talking data: How community science informs conservation
Volunteer capturing data with a smartphone at a NCC BioBlitz event (Photo by Brent Calver)
What comes to mind when you hear the word data? For many, data conjures ideas of numbers and computers, with scientists performing complex statistical analyses. While that generalization is reasonably accurate, it is important to understand that...
Diving into winter hibernation
Northern map turtle (Photo by D. Gordon and E. Robertson)
It’s official: winter has made its way across Canada, and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Humans layer up to brave the cold, and migratory birds make their way to warmer climates, but turtles have their own way of toughing out the...
Isolating the melody amidst a cacophony: How science writers aim to anchor their readers in their own experiences
Good writing in science communications is more than just piling on the facts (Photo by Photo by Tatiana Syrikova from Pexels)
I used to love winding up the Beatrix Potter music box on my childhood dresser to hear the metal tines pluck out Hoagy Carmichael’s 1930 fox trot song, “Up a Lazy River.” I had no idea who Hoagy Carmichael was at the time, but I...
Discoveries in little-known fungi: Adventures in looking at lichens
Opegrapha parmeliiperda, cross section of one fruiting body showing four-celled spores developing inside spore sacs; blue colour result of treatment with potassium hydroxide followed by Lugol’s iodine solution. (Photo courtesy of Kendra Driscoll)
I used to think that scientists understood the basics about most living things on Earth, that new species were all discovered long ago by people like Linnaeus and Darwin. Maybe you could find new species in the most remote corners of the planet,...
What we know about lake-safe sunscreen
Shoreline of a lake (Photo by Salome Guruli via Unsplash)
I always felt very lucky that I didn’t inherit my mother’s propensity to sunburn. I wore sunscreen constantly as a child because I was afraid I’d turn crispy from mere moments in the sun. To this day, I always wear sunscreen on...
Unlikely animal pairings: Part two
Brown-headed cowbird (Photo by David Dodd CC BY-NC)
This is part two of a two-part series on unlikely animal pairings. Check out part one, the hunting partnership between an American badger and a coyote, here. Another unlikely animal partnership features a bird that is known to take advantage of...
Unlikely animal pairings: Part one
Coyote (Photo by Paul Turbitt)
Have you ever seen the internet stories entitled “unlikely animal friends”? Usually, they are stories about a dog and a cat that sleep together, but sometimes they are about more exotic couplings, like an ostrich and a giraffe, or a...
