The Smaller Majority

A portrait of a marine iguana

Sharlena Wood, a Canadian artist whose beautiful paintings have already been featured on this blog (here and here), did it again. Using a charcoal drawing technique she produced an outstanding portrait of a marine iguana by imaginatively reinterpreting one of my photos from the Galapagos Islands. This drawing is part of a series of portraits…

Helmeted katydids

Porgera, a gold mine in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, is not a pleasant place for a biologist, especially if you are aware of the massive environmental damage of its operations, or the frequent human right violations that this mining camp is known for. But we had no choice but to sleep with the…

New life

Today marks the first anniversary of The Smaller Majority blog which, to my delight and surprise, has been steadily gaining readership. I am grateful to all who visited these pages over the last 12 months, especially those who kindly left the wonderful, insightful, occasionally snarky comments under many of the 130+ individual stories – keep’em…

Night callers

At first I didn’t know what woke me up. The night was silent and nothing but a faint warble of tree crickets could be heard outside my tent. For a few of minutes I just lay there, foggily trying to figure out what disturbed my sleep but soon started to drift off. Suddenly, there it…

The miracle of parallel evolution

I have been going through photos taken during a recent trip to Mozambique, and every now and then I am struck by the similarity of some of the African organisms to their counterparts on other continents. One of the best such examples is that of Neotropical glass frogs (Centrolenidae) and some African reed frogs (Hyperoliidae)….

There is a fly in my car

“Honey, what died in my car?” I called my wife a few days ago, after the stench had become overwhelming. For a few days after returning from a long trip to Mozambique I had tried to pretend that the god-awful smell in my car was just a figment of my imagination. Alas, opening windows or…