Category: Biodiversity News

Karsten et al, reporting in this month’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Subscription required for full access), describe the extrodinary life history of a chameleon species Furcifer labordi which spends more time incubating in the egg than living outside it. F. labordi’s incubation period is 8-9 months, they reach sexual maturity within 2 months of hatching then live for a further 2-3 months.

Because they are annually hatching as one age cohort, they all die off within a short space of time prior to replacement in the next life cycle by their incubating offspring. This life history strategy is unkown in over 28,000 other tetrapod (four limbed) vertebrate species but might explain the incidence of rapid deaths of chameleons in captivity.

Dian Fossey’s first article in National Geographic has been republished online. Originally in the January 1970 issue of National Geographic, her front-line account of gorillas in Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda is as fresh and compelling now as it must have been to the readers who got their copies of National Geographic back in 1970. Dian’s impassioned call for action is unfortunately as relevant today as it was 38 years ago:

“Money alone will not solve the problem. Conservation groups and political authority must join in concerted programs if this three-nation area and its wildlife are to be saved from human trespassers.

Such help is overdue. I only hope that Rafiki, Uncle Bert, Icarus, and my other forest friends can survive until it comes.”

The July 2008 National Geographic brings a heart-wrenching update on the fate of Gorilla’s in Virunga National Park, DRC. I’ve been an on-off subscriber to National Geographic for 10-15 years – it’s the quality of articles like this that keep drawing me back.

Research staff at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa have been studying a rarely seen Colossal Squid caught by fishermen off the Antarctic coast last February. They found that it has eyes measuring 27cm in diameter – the largest eye found to date!

There are regular updates on the Te Papa Blog and videos of the ongoing examination.

I wonder if NHBS is the only bookshop in the world with a Cephalopods Category on our website?

Christopher Helm, ornithologist and publisher, passed away on the 20th of January 2007. His legacy lives on in the highly acclaimed range of field guides and other natural history titles published under the ‘Helm’ imprint and well known to birders around the world. The latest Helm title, published just after the sad news of Christopher Helm’s death, is the Birds of Northern South America. Read full obituaries in the Times and Independent newspapers.

In a really excellent piece in the Guardian, Robert Macfarlane argues that we must reconnect with our environment through classic works of wildlife literature.

The suggestion – which echoes a similar call made by Lopez exactly 20 years ago in America – is that a series of classic works of nature writing from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland should be established and published. Such a series would not kowtow to the doubtful idea of a “national” literature. Instead, it would be a series of local writings, which concentrated on particular places, and which worked always to individuate, never to generalise. It would not vaunt a little-islandism, nor would it be blind to the spoliation of the landscape which has occurred. It would not adore landscape as a site for the exercise of middle-class nature-sentiment – a gymnasium for the sensitive.

It would, however, honour a form of care, and a form of attention, to the landscapes of the British Isles. It would discover in landscapes values which transcend the commercial and the consumerist. And it would restore to visibility a tradition of nature writing which has slipped from view these past 50 years.