Plants and Animals

An entire business focused on pet frogs may be the ultimate long-tail venture. Josh Williard’s company, JoshsFrogs.com, breeds and sells frogs and the products that support them. Founded in 2007, Josh’s Frogs has scaled to 90 employees across two Michigan-based facilities. “We’ve been growing by leaps and bounds,” he told me, seemingly in frog-speak. Selling frogs, while unique, has many …

Oases are centers of biological and cultural diversity in the Sahara Desert (Mides, Tunesia). Credit: Antonio Santoro A research team led by Prof. Dr. Klement Tockner, Director General of the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung and Professor of Ecosystem Sciences at the Goethe University Frankfurt, has investigated the relationship between cultural and biological diversity for selected oases in the Sahara. In …

Wildfires can spread quickly and burn thousands of acres of land in just a matter of hours. These blazes can not only wreak havoc on human communities, but they can also affect wildlife and their habitats. “Our planet has burned for millenia so animals have inherent adaptations to deal with wildfires. However, as with any disturbance, there are always winners …

Ecology is the study of the complex interactions between organisms and their nonliving environment. In the case of a bird, that means climate, habitat, other birds that compete with them, animals and plants that they eat, predators that pursue them and anything that modifies their habitat. An example of the complexity of these relationships comes from a study in the …

Identifying an area’s inhabitants by vaccuming their DNA out of the air: That sounds like something from a science fiction story. But a study published in the journal Current Biology explains that scientists found that air quality monitoring stations also pick up lots of DNA. That can reveal which plants and animals have been in the area. As animals and …

Exploration is at the heart of Starfield. Surveying the planets you visit not only gives you vital information on the mineral resources you can find, but the plants and animals you can encounter too. This forms the basis of your resource collection, allowing you to craft items, upgrades and kit out your houses and bases with equipment …

Exploring planets and registering the native species you find is a key piece of gameplay in Starfield. To do so, you need to scan the various plants and animals you encounter. While it seems like an easy enough task, it’s a bit more complex than it first appears and is required to complete planet surveys and receive survey slates. Here’s …

It seems like Roald Dahl may have been onto something after all: if you hurt a plant, it screams. Well, sort of. Not in the same way you or I might scream. Rather, they emit popping or clicking noises in ultrasonic frequencies outside the range of human hearing that increase when the plant becomes stressed. This, according to a study …

Body Eagleville, Mo. – The past and present role of native grasslands in the rolling hills of northwest Missouri will be celebrated at a free Prairie Day event on Saturday, Sept. 9, at Dunn Ranch Prairie and Pawnee Prairie near Eagleville. Visitors can tour exhibits and display tables, take wildflower walks, and ride on a wagon to see bison grazing …

All September long, Plano Parks and Recreation is looking to area residents to find and record sightings of pollinators in Plano parks. All September long, the National Park and Recreation Association is hosting their annual Parks for Pollinators Bioblitz, which allows the public to help find and document area pollinators. Area residents can download the iNaturalist app, create a …