Did You Know?

All wild bees, not just honey, are essential for good crop pollination providing up to two thirds of all pollination and they continue to disappear. Wild insect pollinators are key to maintaining biodiversity where they enable the reproduction of the majority of wild plants.

We received lots of positive feedback on our annual Website Visitor Survey. While there were many adults respondents, there were also a handful of middle school students who responded while trying to make it through the home stretch of a very challenging year.

When the world went on lockdown in early 2020, economic activity slowed and there was a steep decline in shipping traffic. The ocean is filled with animal sounds – whistles, songs, bellows, clicks, and more – and the sounds of storms and earthquakes. Added to that is noise pollution from ships.

Purple has always been a ‘royal’ color that originally came from snail slime. You heard right: snail slime!Archeologists have dated “royal” purple garments dyed with snails to as old as 1,000 B.C and only three species produce this dye.

In 2017 a nine-year old in New Mexico tripped and fell. What Jude Spark tripped on, he found out later, was the skull of a rare stegomastodon (an elephant-like creature) from 1.2 million years ago.

The idea of “natural” or “wild” lands is a myth. Scientists released a study showing that about three quarters of terrestrial nature has been shaped over 12,000 years by the land use of Indigenous and traditional peoples. Those land use practices included burning, hunting, species propagation, domestication and cultivation.

Just like us, coral reefs have microbiomes that keep them healthy. Researchers, like our Featured Scientist, Colin Howe, study the microbiomes of coral reefs. They aim to identify microbes on specific reefs where they can discover how corals’ microbes help them become more resilient in the face of human-caused climate change and pollution.

Sea Star Wasting Disease (SSWD) has decimated sea star populations around the world. Since the epidemic of dead, dissolving sea stars was discovered around 2013, scientists have been trying to figure out the cause of the disease.

There is a squid so HUGE it has made sucker scars on sperm whales found washed ashore.

The Great Barrier Reef in Australia has lost  half of its coral in the last 25 years. Along its entire length (1,429 miles over an area of approximately 133,000 square miles) coral bleaching has destroyed the reef.