While the Xerces Society’s “Bug Banter” podcast is consistently interesting and informative, I found the 7 January 2025 episode “The Power of Policy: Insect Protection Through State Authority” particularly so.
Begun in 2020 with Dr. Kostas Kampourakis’ “Understanding Evolution” (now in its second edition), the Understanding Life series numbers twenty-six volumes – or at least it will with the publication of Dr. Han Yu’s “Understanding Visuals in the Life Sciences” later this month.
Whenever I wish to learn about how wild fires behave in different parts of the United States, I take one of the volumes of Prof. Stephen J. Pyne’s unrivaled To The Last Smoke Series from University of Arizona Press. Not surprisingly, this past week had me reaching for the volume “California; A Fire Survey.”
In 2018, when the Southern Resident Orca given the human name of Tahlequah by observers gave birth to a calf that soon died and that she subsequently carried on her head for seventeen days, endangering her own life in the process due to the difficulties the act caused in her eating enough to recover from the birth, journalists from around the world flooded the airwaves and Internet with stories of her mourning, her sorrow, her grief, how much she was like a human mother whose own child had died.