Behind the paper: taxonomy and conservation of grassland earless dragons

I’ve used some of these photos in previous posts (here and here), but now I need to post an update. This little dragon is now known as the Monaro grassland earless dragon. I’m excited to be a co-author on the paper, published last week in Royal Society Open Science (open access), that describes this species….

Conservation in action: videos and teaching resources

I’m a fan of celebrating conservation success stories and sharing conservation optimism. In fact I’ve written about this before. Today, I want to share some wonderful teaching resources, that also highlight some reasons for hope in wildlife conservation. A little while back, I asked twitter to recommend short videos about mammal conservation in Australia, to…

The Future of Wildlife Management?

I recently attended the Western Black Bear Workshop and like many of these meetings the theme was on how to reduce human-bear conflict.  The workshop is mostly a forum for managers from different states and provinces to gather and exchange ideas on management problems and solutions, population trends, and hunting regulations.  I tried to capture…

Rhino Conservation: Dehorning Demand

There are five living species of rhinoceros: black (Diceros bicornis), white (Ceratotherium simum), Javan (Rhinoceros sondaicus), Indian (Rhinoceros unicornis), and Sumatran (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) rhinos.  And not too long ago there was a woolly rhino (Coelodonta antiquitatis) that roamed northern Eurasia until it went extinct ~14,000 years ago.  The IUCN lists black, Javan, and Sumatran rhinos as…

How the sugar glider got to Tasmania and why this is bad news for difficult birds

When is a native species also invasive, and how can we tell? This may seem a strange question, but it highlights the difficulty we sometimes face determining the boundaries of the area in which a species naturally occurs. Especially when detection is imperfect and those boundaries may change over time. Animals move. Plants move. Sometimes…

Does Biodiversity Matter?

Through fashion, I showed you how scientists calculate biodiversity and what it means. While some areas of the world are naturally more diverse than others – one thing is true: we are losing biodiversity at an alarming rate due to manmade causes. We are currently in the sixth mass extinction event to ever happen on…

Interpreting the Biodiversity of Your Wardrobe

I love fashion, especially garments with animals on them. I wear so many of them, that my boss asked me about the biodiversity of my closet. I was genuinely curious so I counted all the plants, animals, and any other life forms that I could spot and calculated the Shannon Weiner Index, a real index…

The Intersection of Conservation and Urban Evolution

I recently wrote about the new field of urban evolution which seeks to understand how diverse species have responded to the vast environmental changes related to urbanization.  I now want to focus on biodiversity conservation in urban environments. You don’t have to be a conservation scientist to intuitively understand that species composition and biodiversity are…

The Best Thing You Can Do for the Environment That Almost No One is Talking About

For Earth Day 2016, the Wildlife SNPits scientists wrote a series of daily blogs on easy things you can do to help the environment. One of the topics I wrote about was taking kids outside. It’s not the most intuitive thing you’d think of when helping Mother Earth, but this little act makes a really big…

Is Model Emily Ratajkowski Hurting or Helping Sea Turtles?

*This post was updated on April 6th, 2017.  I get a daily alert from Vogue magazine (I know, shocking!). Today, I clicked on a link to check out model Emily Ratajkowski’s vacation photos from Mexico and was shocked to see her Instagram holding a baby sea turtle. This is bad for so many reasons. I am writing…

CRISPR for Conservation

I’ve got this feeling that CRISPR is the next PCR.  Have you ever met someone who was an early adopter of PCR?  No, I mean an early adopter of PCR where the technique required three water baths, a swivel chair, a stop watch, and AN ACTUAL PERSON to move the reaction tubes between water baths every…

What We’re Reading- Feb 17, 2017

Endangered Populations Growing in Size But Still at Risk The Little Spotted Kiwi (Apteryx owenii) is a near threatened bird species that once inhabited forests throughout New Zealand, but is now constricted to near shore islands devoid of introduced predators.  Each of the eight islands the birds now inhabit was founded by a different number…