Wild Nature Institute is the nonprofit creation of wildlife biologist Monica Bond and quantitative ecologist Derek Lee. They live and work for much of the year in Africa, where they study and inventory iconic and threatened wildlife populations such as the Masai Giraffe, which is rapidly declining due to lost habitat, disease and illegal hunting.

Ken Layne: Hello, Derek Lee! Because you are traveling between Nairobi and Zanzibar and I'm on the other side of the planet, maybe we'll do this in email format? So what is it that you and Monica do in Africa? This past week sounds like it held a lot of safari travel and [...]

Is this carnivorous scorpion-eating mouse the only American rodent who howls at the moon? Sure, why the hell not.

And how was your nutso, record-smashing, disconcerting Snowtober? One hopes you weren't trapped on a diverted plane for seven hours or a victim of the (bizarre) Amtrak shutdown or one of the three million without power or, you know, one of the nine dead. Happy… Halloween?

Photograph by Rachel So

As you know, our otter friends in New Zealand, together for 15 years in the delicious waters of New Zealand, died within an hour of each other. What you may not realize is that Daz and Chip were essentially recreating "Untitled (Perfect Lovers)," a minimalist lump-in-your-throat-when-you-realize-what-it's-about work of art by Cuban-American conceptualist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Articles at Nature magazine's website are often great fun to read. This one, though, a "letter abstract" about (I think) how shrimp's eyes work better than camera lenses, is clearly intended for an audience with more than a layman's understanding of the subject matter: "Here, we report a biophysical mechanism that creates a natural full-visible-range achromatic quarter-wave retarder in the eye of a stomatopod crustacean. Analogous, man-made retardation devices are important optical components, used in both scientific research and commercial applications for controlling polarized light. Typical synthetic retarders are not achromatic…." Boy. Actually, that is kinda fun to read, once you've given up on understanding and let it flow [...]

Crack bit of paleontological detective work detailed in a new Nature article about Anomalocaris, a three-foot-long shrimp-like creature widely believed to have dominated the seas of the Paleozoic era's Cambrian period by "hunting and eating hard-shelled prey such as trilobites." In a recent computer-assisted analysis of fossilized Anomalocaris mouth parts, Amherst College's Whitey Hagadorn determined that the "Tyranosaurus rex of the Cambrian" lacked the chomping power to match its reputation. "Everyone shows it grabbing trilobites and munching them. Like a cookie monster," Hagadorn says. "Not possible." Hagadorn suggests Anomalocaris subsisted on a softer diet of jellyfish and worms, or maybe just filtered plankton. In turn, Hagedorn's colleagues insist [...]

Some 20,000 polar bears are left on Earth, their only planet, and most of them live in the Canadian Arctic. While the bears have been distracted by the melting away of polar ice and their entire habitat, humans at a meeting in Thailand have decided that's it's okay to continue killing the endangered animals to sell their parts on the international market for bits of endangered animals—bearskin rugs and claws and "other body parts."

The United States delegation proposed not hunting the polar bear to extinction. Although the ban had the backing of Russia, which also has a declining polar bear population in its arctic zone, the Convention [...]

Antarctic Beech Fairy Ring #1211-P1020362 (12,000 years old, Queensland, Australia)

For the past six years, Rachel Sussman, 37, has devoted her life to chronicling the oldest living things in the world before they disappear. A photographer by training and hedge scientist by necessity, her photos are a mix of Annie Liebovitz and Ansel Adams: portraits whose subjects happen not to be human. Sussman has chased down nearly three dozen different organisms, a 400,000-6000,000 year-old bacteria in Siberia, a 2,000-plus year-old olive tree in Crete, and some 3,000 year-old lichen in Greenland, to name a few. She spent February and March chasing down 5,000-year-old moss in Antarctica. [...]

The BBC nature series Frozen Planet starts next week on the 26th. It will of course be amazing. Watch this sneaky penguin steal his neighbors rocks!

"Apparently scientists now think that a pitcher plant they had assumed was so large that it ate shrews is actually a shrew toilet. And just to illustrate that point further, here is a shrew taking a dump in one. UGH! Look at his little guilty, smiling face. Have some decency, you shrew!"

"Nitrous oxide (N2O) has become the greatest threat to the ozone layer, a new analysis suggests. The ozone-destroying abilities of the gas have been largely ignored by policy-makers and atmospheric scientists alike, who have focused on the more potent chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)-historically the dominant ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere." So says Nature magazine, reporting on the work of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado (figures.)

"As communities from Buffalo to Milwaukee struggle with shuttered factories and vacant neighborhoods, some have turned abandoned properties into parks, gardens and other open space, even going so far as to plow under entire neighborhoods."

"Biologists first encountered the cancer in the late 1990s. The tumors grew on the devils’ faces or inside their mouths, and within six months the animals were dead. The first cases appeared in eastern Tasmania, and with each passing year the cancer’s range expanded westward. When scientists examined the cells in the tumors, they got a baffling surprise. The DNA from each tumor did not match the Tasmanian devil on which it grew. Instead, it matched the tumors on other devils. That meant that the cancer was contagious, spreading from one animal to another." —Nature, in all its weird and terrifying glory, is killing off the already endangered Tasmanian [...]