Snark Week: Moose are dopey and dangerous!

By: | August 13, 2014

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They look so docile, but don’t be fooled. “Assume every moose is a serial killer standing in the middle of the trail with a loaded gun,” says Alaska wildlife biologist Jessy Coltrane. They may be cute in a dopey sort of way, but moose are also huge and powerful. Females weigh between 700 and 1,100 pounds and bulls can hit 900 to 1,400 pounds on the scale. Considering their bulk, moose are remarkably fast runners — their top running speed can hit 30 miles per hour. 

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Moose injure more people in Alaska each year than bears. While some of these injuries stem from collisions with motor vehicles, moose also stomp and kick and these hoof swats can kill. In 1995, a moose stomped to death a 71-year-old man on the University of Alaska-Anchorage campus. What makes moose so statistically dangerous is their numbers. They’re more numerous than grizzly bears and more likely to wander into urban areas. Continue reading →

Snark Week: Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back Into the Henhouse

By: | August 12, 2014

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Our continuing public service for those trusting souls who think animals are cute and loving: a full week of the horrifying truth.

595428651_45febde0f8_bI grew up on a small farm where we raised chickens.  I didn’t always  think they were repulsive.  When I was around 10, I had a 4-H project for which I raised chickens from the get-go; we already had a laying flock but the project was part of my training as a farm kid. Baby chicks are some of the cutest babies on earth, so soft and light you hardly knew you were holding them, making inquisitive little squeaks — eep? eep?  When I turned the lights out on the brooder, where they spent the cold  nights, they’d peep like crazy EEP EEP EEP then all fall asleep at the same minute. Eventually they grew up and began laying – or swanning around being roosters – and only then did I take a good look at their eyes.  They looked back with no interest; in fact, change our relative sizes and they could kill me or not, they didn’t care. If you don’t believe that T. Rexes evolved into birds, just look into the cold, mean, stupid, reptilian eye of a chicken. Continue reading →

Snark Week: Evil Has a New Name – and Buck Teeth

By: | August 11, 2014
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The sun hangs low over the bayou, wavering in the humid evening horizon. Sweat pours off your face as you struggle see into the underbrush. And suddenly you hear it. A rustling in the bushes that turns your veins to ice. “Please, sweet Jesus,” you whisper, “be something else. Please, not here. Not now.”

But it’s too late. You know you’re trapped and your simpering prayers can’t help you. That scene from The Princess Bride – the one in the Fire Swamp – keeps running through your brain as if on a loop. And just then, from the bushes it walks into the clearing. You find yourself face to face with a creature of children’s nightmares.

Continue reading →

Introducing Snark Week, Vol. 2

By: | August 11, 2014

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Welcome to LWON’s second annual Snark Week! In celebration of the responsible and informative shark documentaries on basic cable this week, we have decided to offer five counter stories that will frighten you even more than a great white shark that’s been artificially driven into a frenzy by cameramen chumming the water. Remember, just because something is fluffy and adorable doesn’t mean it’s not secretly plotting to kill you in terrible and gruesome ways.

The Last Word

By: | August 9, 2014

trout finAugust 4 – 8, 2014

Richard and Ann disagree informatively about the nature of a science writer’s duty toward truth and its embellishments. There is a glimmer of hope when Richard strikes on the thought that science writers share subjective truths, whereas scientists have a duty to be objective. Ann disagrees. The debate rages on in our virtual LWON offices.

Some collect flag badges on their backpacks. Helen collects bird species, instead, to tell her where she’s been. Still other people have strong feelings and associations with odd and even numbers, as Cameron’s family schedule demonstrates, in all of its adorable oddness.

Michelle has found that in some instances, fish population numbers and haul volumes tell you more about human quality of life than other economic indicators. Speaking of fish, I test my dad’s theory about the baby fish he buys from hatcheries and pours into lakes to fend for themselves.

Image: Shutterstock

Fish of a feather

By: | August 8, 2014

troutThe teetering, hundred-year-old collection of wooden buildings that form my father’s fishing club in backwoods Quebec is arranged in a row like a Wild West town, where mosquitoes are the hostile locals. To reach his favourite fishing spots, Dad sometimes has to stop his motorized quad in front of downed trees and change into Kevlar trousers to chainsaw his way through.

Nearby lakes without large fish are often stocked with trout for sport – a practice which, after careful study, Dad has adopted on behalf of the club. When I visited a couple of weeks ago – for my son’s fishing initiation – he described his stocking process. He gets to the lake with the juveniles from the hatchery and looks for a spot near the shore where schools of minnows congregate. Then he puts his little bitty lake trout, or what have you, into the water next to the tiny adult fish.

Continue reading →

Follow the Fish

By: | August 7, 2014

79431587_8c0f1f5d83_bFor a landlubber, I’ve been spending a lot of time around fish. Not long ago, I plunged my hands into paddlefish guts for a story about caviar poaching in the Ozarks; last year, I spent several weeks in very fishy places on and around the Mekong River, researching an ongoing project about hydropower development on the Mekong. And last month, I wrote a story about a Berkeley biologist whose work shows how declining fisheries are leading to all manner of social horrors—from terrorism to slavery—in many of the poorest places of the world.

These stories have made me think about the limits of the famous (but apocryphal) advice Deep Throat gave to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they pursued the Watergate scandal: Follow the money. Of course journalists should always ask who’s paying, and who’s benefiting—those are key questions in any story. But money isn’t the only currency that matters. In many parts of the world, it’s important not only to follow the money but also to follow the fish.

Continue reading →

Days Are Numbered

By: | August 6, 2014

Feb1712Around here, we do some things by the numbers. On odd days, the older boy sits on the prime outside seat of the kitchen island and has bedtime stories from his dad; on even days, his younger brother gets these things. On even days, no one has to wash his hair.

But then we run into a problem at the end of the month: sometimes there are two odd days in a row. Continue reading →