Blue Planet Journey

  Caroline at Victoria Falls, on the Zambezi River, Zimbabwe. Waterfalls! Large waterfalls command our attention, with sound and spray. They can thunder to the extent that you can't have a conversation with a person standing next to you. You actually can feel the force of the water cascading over the edge. And small waterfalls are the provenance of poets and lovers. Water trickling down a rock face and dripping into a pool is mesmerizing, inspiring, and calming. No matter where you are, the same physical principles are involved. Water flows downhill. When that downhill is abrupt, you have a waterfall.  . Little Logan River, Logan, Utah. Gocta Falls, Peru, one of the tallest waterfalls in the world. The sound was deafening. Blue Mountains National Park, New South Wales, Australia. . Hanakapiai Falls is a 300-foot waterfall on the Na Pali Coast of Kauai, Hawaii. Nugget Falls, Mendenhall Glacier, Juneau, Alaska. Dunn's River Falls, Jamaica. Dominica. Great Falls Park (Maryland si...

Photo of Giant Anteater ( Myrmecophaga tridactyla) , Copenhagen Zoo, by Malene Thyssen . I was looking at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science's anteater exhibit, when I got an epiphany. And it relates to... reef fish. As a diver, I am mesmerized by the sheer variety of fish colors and patterns on a reef. I hear marine biologists talk about reef fish eyespots or ocelli, a "phylogenetically widespread, conspicuous marking that has been shown to effectively reduce predation, often through its resemblance to the eye" (see  Hemingson et al 2021 ). A Princess Damsel , Pomacentrus vaiuli , at North Murion Island, Ningaloo Marine Park, Western Australia. Note the obvious eyespot located above the caudal peduncle. Andrew Photo by J. Green / Reef life Survey. Although eyespots in reef fish are hypothesized to have a number of functions, the general consensus is that eyespots found behind the dorsal fin "align more strongly with the deflective function; where eyespots di...

  Big Pine Key is one of larger islands of the Florida Keys, and home to the National Key Deer Refuge . This diorama  is located in James Hall on the third floor of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. As with many dioramas, the focus is on a few species, but there is more to see.   The foci of the diorama are the Great White Heron (a white subspecies of the Great Blue Heron ),  American Crocodiles (as opposed to American Alligators ), the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake , and the Tricolored Heron , with the rattlesnake and the crocodile locked in a lethal embrace. As with many dioramas, there is more to be seen than just the featured species. Here's what I found, aside from the herons, crocodile, and snake: Horseshoe crab . Most people don't recognize the importance of this animal to both birds (particularly the Red Knot) and humans. Horseshoe crab blood being harvested to extract Limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL),a reagent that detects bacterial and fungal cell-...