The first thing I noticed on my visit to Puebla was the dust. The dust comes from many sources. The fallow agricultural fields. The desert. The active Popocatepétl volcano. The two million inhabitants of the city and their automobiles. The air is windy and dry in the winter, so the valley sits constantly under a…

I’m traveling in Mexico this week, so a short post – check out the British Ecological Society’s annual photo contest! My image of Death Valley was the runner-up, and several other images were featured. You can see all the images at the BBC’s website.

A full moon in the Sonoran desert is a beautiful thing, lighting up canyons and cacti in an unearthly shade of light that is unseen during the day. The transition from full to new has biological consequences, too. Many animals’ behavior changes depending on the levels of light available in the night. The foraging behavior…

Quiz time – in the map below, can you name the two species whose distributions are shown in red and blue dots? You can see that the occurrences of A are associated with warmer temperatures, whereas the occurrences of B are associated with colder temperatures and higher latitudes. Whatever you guessed, you were probably wrong.…