urban
dr. dolittle | June 6, 2013 Blackbird image from: Ernie Janes/naturepl.com
A recent study has provided some evidence supporting the hypothesis that light and noise pollution alters the biological clocks of birds living in cities (compared to birds living in rural areas).
Dr. Dominoni (Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Germany) and colleagues used radio-pulse transmitters attached to European blackbirds (Turdus merula) living in Munich, Germany (city) and those living in a forest nearby to track the animal's activity levels. They found that blackbirds living in the city showed significantly increased activity an…
edyong | July 27, 2009Cities are noisy places. If you ever get annoyed by the constant din of traffic, machinery and increasingly belligerent inhabitants, think about what songbirds must think. Many birds rely on songs to demarcate their territories and make their advances known to mates. They listen out not just for the sounds of seduction or rivalry, but for approaching predators and alarm calls that signify danger. Hearing these vital notes may be the different between life and death.
Last year, I wrote a feature for New Scientist about the effect that urban noise has on songbirds. Those that can't make…
edyong | May 19, 2009While the rapid expansion of human cities has been detrimental for most animals, some have found ways of exploiting these brave new worlds and learned to live with their prolific inhabitants. The Northern mockingbird is one such species. It's very common in cities all over America's east coast, where it frequently spends time around humans. But Douglas Levey from the University of Florida has found that its interactions with us are more complex than anyone would have guessed.
The mockingbird has the remarkable ability to tell the difference between individual humans, regardless of the…
bioephemera | April 4, 2009
Aquasaurus
paint, resin, steel
Jitish Kallat, 2008
At first I thought this piece by Indian artist Jitish Kallat was an oil tanker truck, and that it represented some sort of play on "fossil fuels" (and perhaps the morbidity of the behemoth domestic auto companies). But apparently that was my American bias at work.
It's actually a water tanker, entitled Aquasaurus, and it represents the rapid transformation of urban India:
Aquasaurus is a monumental seven-metre long skeletal sculpture of a water-tanker morphing to become prehistoric creature that personifies the radical transformation of…
tqa | November 18, 2008
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about the role that the Community Reinvestment Act played (or, rather, did not play) in causing the current global financial meltdown. I was planning to get out of the issue there, but a really nice article by Devilstower over at Daily Kos sucked me back in. During the time when I wasn't paying any attention to the issue, the right wing noise machine added a new villain to their attempts to blame Wall Street's mess on the left: ACORN.
In 1977 Democratic President Jimmy Carter passed the Community Reinvestment Act to provide housing to poor people. In the…
zooillogix | October 1, 2008A report published yesterday by the Wildlife Conservation Society shows that black bears living in urban areas weigh more, get pregnant at a younger age, and are more likely to die violent deaths.
The study tracks 12 bears living in Lake Tahoe over a 10 year period and compares them to 10 bears living in surrounding "wildland" areas. The urban bears weighed an average of 30 percent more because their diet was delicious, fatty, garbage - basically the same stuff you eat. While the bears in the wildlands typically gave birth between 7-8 years of age, some of the skanky city bears first…