The club-winged manakin, a small South American bird, produces unique wing-generated sounds for courtship, trading flight efficiency for the ability to attract females with precise stridulation.
The Club-Winged Manakin: A Bird That Plays Its Wings
The Monsters Under Your Bed: A Halloween Menagerie
The narrative explores the hidden ecosystem beneath your bed, describing dust bunnies as complex microcosms inhabited by various organisms. Dust, mites, beetles, and fungi create a miniature food web, reminding us of life's persistence and evolution in overlooked spaces.
Keep Young and Beautiful: A Natural History of Courtship, Vanity, and the Art of Looking Good
Annie Lennox's song "Keep Young and Beautiful" reflects the irony of beauty as a persuasion strategy rooted in evolutionary biology. Various species, from cleaner wrasses to dung beetles, demonstrate deliberate manipulation of appearance and behavior to enhance mating success, revealing shared evolutionary patterns in beauty and attraction across species.
Understanding Caligula: The Role of Illness and Power
Emperor Caligula's reign from AD 37 to 41 is infamous for its cruelty and excess, shifting from a promising ruler to a tyrant following a mysterious illness. Scholars suggest factors like lead poisoning, encephalitis, epilepsy, genetics, and the corrupting nature of power may explain his decline. His tragic story warns against unchecked authority.
The Hoatzin: Celebrating one of Nature’s Oddities
Photo: Aaron Pomerantz For my last post of 2023, I’m paying tribute to one of my favorite birds: the Hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazin). Along the verdant waterways of the Amazon, a bird that redefines the term 'living fossil' flaps its ungainly way through the foliage. The Hoatzin, the scruffy Goth of the avian world, is a... Continue Reading →
This Is Not My Blog Post. Or, Why the Giraffe Has Two Necks.
What you are about to read is not my writing, not all of it, anyway. It’s been generated by an AI bot with prompts from me. I’m using "frase" technology, because I'm too impatient to wait to be let into the ChatGPT website. So, you get onto frase and scroll down (way down) to the... Continue Reading →
Killing wildlife – one selfie at a time
A friend just emailed me a series of articles which surprised me considerably. Each describes an event in which an animal has died at the hands of somebody - and in some cases many people - grabbing it to take selfies. Here are some examples within the last couple of weeks - warning this isn't... Continue Reading →
Art and the Ethics of Natural History
Having just posted a book announcement on Art and Ethics on the website of ICOM NATHIST Ethics Working Group (click here for that) has given me pause to think about how the ethics of art touches on natural history. There are many facets to this. For instance, wildlife photography. When we sit down to our television... Continue Reading →
Weird Armies
I just discovered, while doing some research, that the Dutch East India Company had a private army. I was surprised to discover that, assuming it had been more like Macy's meets David Livingston. But it makes sense. Given their acquisitive agenda, coupled with the (quite reasonable) opinion of local people that they would rather keep... Continue Reading →
A Clutch of Vampires
In my last post, I wrote about immortality. It occurs to me, however, that I left out one of the most important aspects of this phenomenon occuring in popular culture - vampires. The most recent Twilight series (which I haven't seen, I have to admit) is only the latest point in a long history that... Continue Reading →
ERIC DORFMAN 