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Burmese pythons are eating machines. An adult snake can grow to nearly 20 ft., and it can eat everything from raccoons to bobcats to deer to alligators, killing its prey by constriction and then swallowing them whole. On the jungle food chain, Burmese pythons rest near the top. Burmese pythons are also — as the [...]
Dedicated followers of this blog—thanks both of you—know that one of my areas of obsession is invasive species. That’s partially because they’re so often funny—example number one being the flying Asian carp, which I’ll get to in a moment. But invasives are a biological and visible consequence of our ultra-connected world, a symptom of humanity’s [...]
More frequent readers of this blog know that I’m obsessed with two things: Philadelphia sports and Asian carp. I even see some similarities between the two—Phillies fans, like Asian carp, are seen by some as an invading horde infiltrating territory that doesn’t belong to them. (Like the Asian carp, the fans are generally peaceful but [...]
I’ve written a few times in the past about invasive Asian carp, the Chinese natives who were imported for fish farms in the Midwest, only to escape and make their way up the Mississippi River. They’re now knocking on the door of the Great Lakes, and a few of them may have even slipped past [...]
The dreaded Asian carp are back in the news today. The five Great Lakes states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Ohio—suing to beef up anti-carp defenses scored a legal victory yesterday: On Monday, a federal judge held an initial hearing and scheduled more hearings for expert testimony in early September. The Michigan attorney general’s office heralded [...]
My magazine story on invasive species and the Asian carp is out today, but you’ll have to go to a magazine newsstand to read it—paywall? (You remember what newsstands look like right? Or perhaps not.) But you can check out a photo essay from Benjamin Lowy on last week’s Redneck Fishing Tournament. I think I [...]
As fish go, silver carp—one of several species that fall under the general term Asian carp—have a lot going for them. They are voracious feeders, they can grow to more than 40 lbs. and their bony bodies mean few Americans want to eat them, so they can escape the overfished fate of their more filletable cousins. [...]
Scientists have been puzzled about a strange disease that began attacking bats in New York state in 2006. The bats would suddenly awaken from hibernation in midwinter, their faces covered in a white fungus. Already weakened, they struggle to find food and die in large numbers. Called white-nose syndrome (WNS), the disease has spread rapidly [...]
I’ve written before about fears over the voracious Asian carp, an invasive species that has moved up the Mississippi and now seems to have made its way into the Great Lakes, where it could cause significant havoc. Scientists have been warning for months about the threat the carp—a family of freshwater fish native to China [...]
