(Note: As always, click image for better versions – these are heavily compressed)
Emerald Isle, NC
Last weekend we had a short but nice going away get-away with some friends (psychology graduate students, a parole officer, and a lawyer/rockstar) in Emerald Isle, North Carolina.
My dorky goal was to find more fossilized shark teeth (see [...]

As someone who has been a lifelong fossil collector, I have a terrible, unforgivable sin to admit: I lived for eight years in North Carolina and never knew of the existence of Aurora, NC.
Mind you, since moving here for graduate school, fossil hunting had fallen off of my priority list, largely owing to the fact [...]

I’m back!!!
Oh…you never realized I was gone?
Ah well, that’s ok, because I AM back – back from a stressful few months of wondering where I would end up, how I would feed my babies (i.e. cats) and their baby-momma (my wife – yeah that does sound rather gross), and several dozen unknowns also thrown into [...]

Spring is Here!
Days like these remind me what I love so much about the South…warm Springs exploding with life.
This edition of my series of Nature Walks is a big one. I took all of the following images over the past few days – some on my lunch break, some at the NIEHS campus, some at [...]

Today I witnessed (and was an integral part of) one of the strangest and coolest insect-related events I’ve been privy to.
My wife and I are trying to get our home fixed up to be put on the market.  One of the things we will be doing is repainting our front porch. Unfortunately, our porch is [...]

There’s one particular event of every summer in the South that I always await with great anticipation: the emergence of the millions of annual Dog Day cicadas (Tibicen canicularis).
It’s not just the event itself that I love. The cicadas are certainly wonders in themselves; but for me, they are more than just insects of the [...]

This weekend my wonderful wife arranged a date night for us. And how awesome does it make her that it consisted of the single most breathtaking documentary I’ve ever seen – “Under the Sea 3D,” a stroll through the evolution of life at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, followed by a heaping plate of [...]

Here’s a big congratulations to Miriam Goldstein of The Oyster’s Garter fame, who managed to get a truly fascination article published on Slate.com.
Her article, entitled “Motion in the Ocean” is all about the Valentine woo-pitching (quote: “making the beast with two beaks”) of squids off the California coast. I highly recommend the read, and be [...]

Happy 200th birthday, Charles Darwin!
Happy 200th birthday, Abraham Lincoln!
Happy 150th anniversary, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life!
And here’s to a happy Darwin Day and upcoming Valentine’s Day to everyone else.
As a part of my own contribution to the Blog for [...]

Since, it seems that I’ve been on an art post kick for the last two days, I thought I’d toss one more out for you. This is on oldie for me, but I’m betting that few if any of my current readers have seen it.
Way back in 2006, a buddy of mine (Joshua Robertson) was [...]

It is well past time that I used my connection with you ocean/invertebrate blogging types to point you all to one of the most artistically talented branches of my family tree.
My cousin, Steven Garrison, has been an accomplished sculptor and artistic engineer for as far back as I can remember. My favorite of his types [...]

Do you love invertebrates as much as I?
If so, make your way now over to the resurrected Circus of the Spineless, a blog carnival devoted to the world of invertebrates, hosted this 35th edition by Kevin Zelnio of The Other 95% and Deep Sea News.
And to my old ecology/zoology professor, Dr. Matt Moran – thank [...]

I fear nothing.
No, that is not statement of my own masculine machismo, which I generally lack. In fact, if you were to stick a fuzzy kitten or a baby before me, you would find me near-instantly reduced to fawning and cooing like a 5-year old girl. I’m not ashamed of that.
No, what I mean is [...]

I just got home and happened to look up into the corner of my porch today, when what do I see but a Northern Black Widow (Latrodectus variolus) tending her egg case above my steps.
I have seen hundreds of black widows at my house (see some really cool closeups in my previous post on black [...]

I witnessed a pretty awesome display today by my friendly neighborhood Golden Garden Spider (Argiope aurantia), that I had never before seen. In fact, I had no idea that spiders would make such defensive displays.
As I approached her web, I noticed the web start to vibrate back and forth in quite an exaggerated fashion. [...]

It now appears that the lowly worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, has evolved a new sensory perception heretofore unknown to science. In the current issue of PLoS Biology, Stacey L. Edwards, Kenneth G. Miller, and others have shown that these nematodes can detect ultraviolet light using receptors completely unlike any other light receptive molecule in visual systems. [...]

First, for the last two summers my property has been overrun by the Northern Black Widow (Latrodectus variolus). These are distinguishable from the Southern Black Widow (Latrodectus mactans) by the fact that Northern Widows have broken hourglasses on their abdomen, while Southern widows have complete hourglasses. Note the broken hourglass on the female below.

Next [...]

This is a story for you to read while eating lunch.
So as you all know I went fishing this weekend.
What you don’t know is that in the process of catching fish I saw one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen.
I was catching small bream (sunfish) to use as bait to catch catfish when [...]