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An animal apocalypse is happening right beneath our noses in the Northeast. Since 2006, bats throughout New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Jersey, Indiana and other states have been infected with a deadly white-nose fungus that has decimated animal populations. But because it is hard to track bat numbers—and because the disease causes afflicted bats to [...]
From the Nature Is Scary file: researchers from San Francisco State University announced this week in a new study that honeybees are being turned into “zombies” by parasite flies. The fly—known as Apocephalus borealis—deposits its eggs inside the abdomen of a bee. The action is fatal for the bee, as fly larvae eventually hatch and [...]
My weekly Going Green column—one day late because of the New Year’s holiday—is up on the Time.com mainpage. Prompted by holiday films like We Bought a Zoo, I’m exploring the role of wild animals in Hollywood, asking whether lions and tigers and chimps really belong behind the camera. Many experts believe that wild animals are [...]
I have a Going Green column over on the Time.com mainpage today, and it’s a review of a new collection of essays called Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Readers of this blog are probably familiar with the editors, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, a couple of Bay Area bomb-throwers best known for their [...]
No one knows what will follow the apparent death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. The Hermit Kingdom remains a black box to experts—especially Americans—and while early reports suggest that Kim’s third son Kim Jong-un will succeed his father, we can’t tell how long he’ll remain in power, or whether the onetime Swiss boarding [...]
Our Krista Mahr has a post over at Global Spin on news that nearly $30 million worth of Japanese post-tsunami aid is going to the country’s controversial whaling industry. Ironically, one of the (few) positive effects of the massive earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan this past March was that it slowed the whaling trade, [...]
I wrote a piece recently for the paper magazine—sadly behind the paymoat—on the viral ecologist Nathan Wolfe. Wolfe’s Global Viral Forecasting group has set up research teams in hotspots around the world—places like central Africa, China and Southeast Asia—where animal diseases are likely to cross over to human beings. That spillover has seeded most of [...]
The 125-year-old Coca-Cola Company doesn’t like to mess with its brand image. That’s in part because it’s so valuable—according to Interbrand Coke has the best brand in the world—but also because previous efforts to tweak its image haven’t always worked out so well, and sometimes lead to things like this. So perhaps it’s a measure of [...]
Commercial whaling has been banned since 1986, but some still flout international standards by hunting the animals. Japan gets nearly all the attention—and the reality TV shows—in part because it usually takes more than 1,000 whales a year, but it’s not alone. Both Norway and Iceland also hunt a few hundred whales commercially, mostly for [...]
For a delicacy that can command such a high price—and which has caused so much devastation in the sea—shark-fin soup is practically tasteless. I’ve only eaten it once, during a reporting trip to the industrial Chinese city of Wenzhou more than nine years ago. I was writing about the sex toy king of China—king of [...]
