The Smaller Majority

Almost mammals

I was rummaging one day through the leaf litter on the forest floor in northern Cambodia, looking for insects, when a small, perfectly round ball rolled from a leaf above, bounced off my head, and landed on the ground in front of me. I picked it up to have a closer look, not sure if…

Mozambique Diary: Shooting bats

My entire last month was a blur of hectic activity, related mostly to the opening of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory in Gorongosa National Park. This kept me from updating the blog, but it was definitely worth it – the Lab is a fantastic facility that will serve as a research base to current and…

Mozambique Diary: The House of Spiders

A guest post by Edward O. Wilson At the end of a long rutted road in the park sits a conspicuous artifact in the midst of wilderness. Built in 1970, the Hippo House was the vantage point, the antigo miradouro, from which well-heeled tourists, cool drinks in hand, watched wildlife herds as they grazed over…

Mozambique Diary: A single breath that changed the planet

About 400 million years ago, in the Devonian, in what was likely a shallow, freshwater pond in some tropical part of the world, a fish made a sound that started a dramatic chain of events, one that culminated in you and me being born. The sound was that of air being sucked in, as the…

BugShot 2014: Sapelo Island, GA

My arrival in Johannesburg has brought a welcome respite from the unbearable winter of New England, and tomorrow I fly to Gorongosa National Park to begin preparations for the official opening of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory on March 27th. Stay tuned for updates and photos! But there is something else that I am very…

Tough as nails

Last night I finally managed to see the movie “Gravity”, which proves to me incontrovertibly that humans are not meant to stick their noses outside the protective layer of Earth’s atmosphere, despite having developed all kinds of high tech space gear (which, incidentally, seemed to have been designed primarily to kill Sandra Bullock’s character.) But…