MetaFilter posts tagged with nature

Time to get in the water, ya?

Hypnotic Chick — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:39:13 -0800

National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen (pre vi ously) relates the harrowing tale of a sweet, insistent, and ferocious lunchmate (note - clip begins with a dramatic drumbeat, mind your speakers) As a side note, jontyjago has shown us that human/leopard seal encounters do not always end well.

Animal Grief

Joe Beese — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:16:14 -0800

Grief among gorillas, chimpanzees, elephants, and magpies.

An irruption! Of owls!

jessamyn — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:33:32 -0800

"[Irruption] is the term birders use to describe an unusual mass movement of birds into an area. But even that big word fails to capture what happened last winter when thousands of owls descended on northern Minnesota." The irruption of 2004-5 was big news, with its own symposium and many people reporting the Minnesota trees "dripping with owls" People trekked to the famous Sax Zim Bog to see and photograph some of the 1700+ great gray owls forced south by the mouse crash. People have been speculating that perhaps we are due for another this year.

Great photographers

Matthias Rascher — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 08:28:41 -0800

Great photographers: Clark Little (surf photography), Nick Brandt (mostly African wildlife), John Hyde (mostly wildlife and Alaska), Veronika Pinke (landscapes), Dale Allman (miscellaneous; particularly beautiful are his Australian cityscapes and the HDR/DRI photos), Ansel Adams (the undisputed master of nature photography who died in 1984; famous quotes: "You don't take a photograph, you make it.", "A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words. "), Michel Rajkovic (mostly marine landscape, exclusively in black and white). And again, as a tribute to a gifted artist who died far too early, the work of Bobby Model (adventure photographer). Last but not least: Onexposure, probably the biggest collection of quality photography on the net.

RIP Bobby Model

Matthias Rascher — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 15:39:34 -0800

Bobby Model, brilliant adventure photographer, died Wednesday, September 16, 2009, at the age of 36. Here are some examples of his beautiful work.

A Compendium and Bestiary of the Unusual and Bizarre

anastasiav — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:23:05 -0800

The Ever So Strange Animal Almanac

The end of a historic car graveyard in Kaufdorf

kudzu — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:09:19 -0800

A car graveyard in Kaufdorf, near Bern is home to 500 abandoned and decaying cars mostly from the 1930's to 1960's. It has not been touched for over 30 years and has some rare flora and founa. The opportunity to take stunning photographs is unparalleled, but it is causing environmental issues which results in an auction this September. It was a struggle between history, nature and European law. History and nature lose. Flickr hyve mind photo's.

If you found a dead whale, how would you dispose of the body?

Salamandrous — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:56:42 -0800

When whales die: Yesterday, a 20-30 foot whale washed up a shore in New Jersey. Officials are going to deal with it by cutting it up into small parts and burying it. In previous incidents, officials tried to explode it into bits that were meant to fall in the ocean and get eaten by seagulls, but that didn't work out [YT] so well, especially for nearby spectators. Even if you want to let it decompose naturally, you have to be careful for spontaneous explosions due to gassy buildup. Especially when transporting it in busy city streets. Oops. When whales die in the ocean, on the other hand, their bodies eventually fall to the sea floor and can start mini ecosystems, where female pink glowstick-like sea worms that harbor the male pink glowstick sea worms inside their bodies live, eat whale bones, and propagate. (Previously on Metafilter: Taiwan explosion)

"Natural communities and ecosystems possess inalienable and fundamental rights to exist, flourish and naturally evolve..."

homunculus — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:10:18 -0800

Sued by the forest: Should nature be able to take you to court?

World's Oldest Penis

Dilemma — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:00:08 -0800

Australian scientists have found the world's oldest penis. Published Monday in the online version of Nature, the discovery of the 400 million-year-old clasper in an ancient fish specimen shows that animals were gettin' it on earlier than previously thought. Says one study author, "We were surprised because it's so big. We were expecting something smaller." SFW

The Wealth of Nature

symbollocks — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:15:01 -0800

Recently, John Michael Greer has been exploring a little known idea of the deceased economist E.F. Schumacher (a student of the oft-discussed Keynes). "Schumacher drew a hard distinction between primary goods and secondary goods. The latter of these includes everything dealt with by conventional economics: the goods and services produced by human labor and exchanged among human beings. The former includes all those things necessary for human life and economic activity that are produced not by human beings, but by nature. Schumacher pointed out that primary goods, as the phrase implies, need to come first in any economic analysis because they supply the preconditions for the production of secondary goods. Renewable resources, he proposed, form the equivalent of income in the primary economy, while nonrenewable resources are the equivalent of capital; to insist that an economic system is sound when it is burning through nonrenewable resources at a rate that will lead to rapid depletion is thus as silly as claiming that a business is breaking even if it’s covering up huge losses by drawing down its bank accounts." The series of essays so far: Survival Isn't Cost-Effective - (In which he tears apart one of the most proposed solutions for peak oil - ecovillages and lifeboat communities.) "The unstated assumption seems to be that as soon as the intrepid residents of such a community move into their solar-heated cohousing units, start up the wind turbines and the methane generators, and get to work harvesting tree crops from the permacultured landscaping all around, industrial civilization will disappear in a puff of smoke and take its taxes, debts, and miscellaneous expenses with it. Pleasant though the prospect might seem, I am sorry to say that this isn’t going to happen." The Thermodynamic Economy - (In which he tackles tackles the problem of stagflation.) "He [Schumacher] pointed out that for a modern industrial society, energy resources are not simply one set of commodities among many others. They are the ur-commodities, the fundamental resources that make economic activity possible at all, and the rules that govern the behavior of other commodities cannot be applied to energy resources in a simplistic fashion. Commented Schumacher in Small is Beautiful: 'I have already alluded to the energy problem in some of the other chapters. It is impossible to get away from it. It is impossible to overemphasize its centrality. [...] As long as there is enough primary energy – at tolerable prices – there is no reason to believe that bottlenecks in any other primary materials cannot be either broken or circumvented. On the other hand, a shortage of primary energy would mean that the demand for most other primary products would be so curtailed that a question of shortage with regard to them would be unlikely to arise' (p. 123)." Where Economics Fails - (Where he explores the misapplication of the idea of supply and demand.) "the theoretical relationship between supply and demand functions only when supply is not constrained by factors outside the economic sphere. The constraints in question can be physical: no matter how much money you’re willing to pay for a perpetual motion machine, for instance, you can’t have one, because the laws of thermodynamics don’t take bribes. They may be political: Nazi Germany had a large demand for oil from 1943 to 1945, for example, and the Allies had plenty of oil to sell, but anyone who assumed on that basis that a deal would be cut was in for a big disappointment. They may be technical: no matter how much you spend on health care, for instance, sooner or later it’s going to fail, because nobody’s yet been able to develop an effective treatment for death." The Wealth of Nature - (In which he explains why Adam Smith was wrong to say "The annual labor of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessities and conveniences of life.") "Thus Adam Smith’s dictum cited earlier badly needs reformulation. The product of the natural environment of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessities and conveniences of life; the annual human labor is simply the energy input required to turn some of that product into forms useful for human beings. The wealth of nations, it turns out, is ultimately the wealth of nature, and the sooner the value of natural cycles and primary goods is taken into account, the better chance our descendants will have of avoiding the self-defeating habits that are pushing modern industrial system down the long road to collapse."

"Dont let the fire rush to your head..."

KevinSkomsvold — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:46:41 -0800

Framed by a circle of clouds, this is a stunning illustration of Nature's powerful force. A plume of smoke, ash and steam soars five miles into the sky from an erupting volcano. The extraordinary image was captured by the crew of the International Space Station 220 miles above a remote Russian island in the North Pacific.

"...a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals."

jquinby — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:00:28 -0800

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. " - Henry Beston, naturalist and writer. The quote, often seen in veterinary waiting rooms, continues:

We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Henry Beston (1888 - 1968) wrote a variety of books - including fairy stories - but is probably best known for The Outermost House, which chronicles a year spent in a tiny 20'x16' shack on the outer tip of Cape Cod. His only companions were the various migrating birds, the sea and the constant shore patrols of the nearby Coast Guard station. He had gone there to spend a bit of time spiritually recovering from his service in WW1, and ended up creating a masterpiece of American nature writing.

Nature's Elegant Solutions

netbros — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:12:04 -0800

Imagine nature's most elegant ideas organized by design and engineering function, so you can enter "filter salt from water" and see how mangroves, penguins, and shorebirds desalinate without fossil fuels. That's the idea behind AskNature, the online inspiration source for the biomimicry community. The featured pages are a good starting point. Cross-pollinating biology with design. Biomimicry is the science and art of emulating Nature's best biological ideas to solve human problems. Non-toxic adhesives inspired by geckos, energy efficient buildings inspired by termite mounds, and resistance-free antibiotics inspired by red seaweed are examples of biomimicry happening today.

400 Years Ago

netbros — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:35:41 -0800

Have you ever wondered what New York was like before it was a city? Find out at The Mannahatta Project, by navigating through the map to discover Manhattan Island and its native wildlife in 1609. “The goal of the Mannahatta Project has never been to return Manhattan to its primeval state. The goal of the project is to discover something new about a place we all know so well, whether we live in New York or see it on television, and, through that discovery, to alter our way of life. New York does not lack for dystopian visions of the future…. But what is the vision of the future that works? Might it lie in Mannahatta, the green heart of New York, and with a new start to history, a few hours before Hudson arrived that sunny afternoon four hundred years ago?”

A World in a Drop of Water

Orb — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:04:18 -0800

Microworld by Licht. More of Paul's macro droplet shots can be seen at his Flickr gallery and others' macro droplet shots in the Refractions in Liquid Drops group pool.

"Grab a chance and you won't be sorry for a might have been."

rollbiz — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:55:05 -0800

The Dzrtgrls explore mines, ghost towns, rockhounding spots, petroglyphs, geocaching and metal detecting sites, and take lots of great pictures in the process.

Swamp Thing, I think I love you

kliuless — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:55:31 -0800

Slime Molds Show Surprising Degree of Intelligence - A creature with no brain can learn from and even anticipate events. (via)

Nature Cause by Human Culture

netbros — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 07:12:41 -0800

Next Nature is the nature caused by human culture. The technological world has become so intricate and uncontrollable that it has become a nature of its own. Scientific research into nanotechnology, genetic manipulation, ambient intelligence, tissue engineering... all of these young research fields radically interfere with our sense of what is ‘natural’. Here's a visual introduction into next nature. Real nature is not green. There’s precious little nature left that has remained untouched by humans: perhaps a bit here and there on the ocean floor, the South Pole, or the moon. Old concepts like nature and culture, human and animal, and body and mind seem inadequate for understanding ourselves and the technological society we live in. Cloned babies, rainbow tulips, transgenic mice afflicted with chronic cancer to serve medical science: are they natural or cultural?

Wild Wonders of Europe nature photography

cog_nate — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:17:42 -0800

Wild Wonders of Europe "wants to show that Europe really is not about just highways and cities. But today, many seem to know more about nature in Africa or in America, than in Europe, because that is what’s on TV. The European natural wonders are still very little known to the World. We want to change that." 58 nature photographers are working on the project, and there are 29 galleries representing 16 countries thus far, with more to come. [via]

Requiem for the steppenwolf

hortense — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:35:46 -0800

The Berkutchi is a falconer who hunts with the Golden Eagle Music

Little Armored One

iamkimiam — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:56:06 -0800

What can jump 4 feet straight up, births identical quadruplet pups nearly every time, can curl itself into an armor-plated ball, walk underwater for up to six minutes and can swallow air until it bloats to double its size to float? Dasypus novemcinctus, of course! A place for all things armadillo: DilloScape Armadillos and humans are the only mammals susceptible to leprosy: Armadillos and their role in the study of Hansen's Disease From Mayan Legend, to Texas, and beyond: The Biogeography of the Nine-Banded Armadillo One armadillo's sad story: Otis is Resurrected! Also, Armadillo games, Flickr pool.

SpaceTime TV: Free Videos on Heaps of Topics

Effigy2000 — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:37:42 -0800

SpaceTimeTV collects and lets you watch all the best educational videos online from full length documentaries (such as the 50 minute long Is There Life on Mars) to short video clips such as this one on glaciers and global warming. There are hundreds of videos on topics including history, space, technology, and nature.

How Cities Hurt Your Brain

jon_hansen — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:33:55 -0800

Recent research has found that living in a city may be bad for your brain. Compared with natural settings, cities over-stimulate us and impair our memory and cognitive functions.

I, for one, welcome our new mycological overlords

kliuless — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:54:27 -0800

Mushrooms Save the World (long form) -- Paul Stamets on mycelia. Previously: 1 2 3 [bonus: slime molds]