If you ever want to experience a different world, climb a mountain in the desert. Here in southern Arizona, you’ll see an immediate shift from low desert plants like saguaro, cholla, and creosote to intermediate elevation plants like yucca, juniper, and oak, all the way to high-elevation plants like Ponderosa pine and aspen. Adaptations to…

One of the many living things you usually don’t notice in the desert – a specimen of the leaf-footed bug in the genus Chelinidia (family Coreidae; identification courtesy Joe Cicero at the University of Arizona). On a hike this past weekend, a middle school student found this beetle inside the stalk of a dead agave…

Sunset on a cold winter’s day. Look at the branching patterns on these trees – are they fractals? A fractal is anything that has self-similarity, meaning that you can zoom in or zoom out on the object without changing it – no scale is any more important than any other scale. Every part replicates every…

What kinds of organisms do you see here? You might think that these are simply small flowering plants (angiosperms), but you’d be wrong. Most species of plants – about 250,000 out of 300,000 total – are flowering plants. But these are not! You are seeing a mix of other organisms here. The dark and light…