Squirrelmania!

Interesting story. In Cayman, it is the green iguana that is the charming invasive species - as native Philadelphian/New Yorker, I am amazed by tourists that want to take pictures of squirrels (and charmed by presence of black squirrels in Ottawa), but really they are a pest....

"Life as a tube"

Let us welcome our new snake overlords.

Lost in the fog

A glorious case of mistaken identity. (Via Jane.)

"Fosberg's love grass, Franciscan manzanita, giant Palouse earthworm"

From Lydia Millet's (lovely, bleak) How the Dead Dream (highly recommended):

What wings lifted him then, what banks shored him up along the river of work? Not the mechanics of the deal: rather it was the faces and the words of those he moved through and past and with in seeking his object, the nuance of his own approach in knowing and predicting the impulses and calculations behind them, that captured his interest. In pitching his company's plans or services it fell to him to read the tics and quirks of investors as he sat across from them in restaurants, county commissioners as he rode the elevator beside them, urban planners across tables in well-lit rooms. He caught the small tells that accompanied a lie, the fluster and the cover-up that followed an inadvertent truth, the way these varied among persons: but he was most astute in that he gave the appearance of being caught up in his own velocity when in fact his mind was carefully fixed on the other.

Although always watchful, always wedded to the close observation of detail, he pretended otherwise. He projected a confident nonchalance, an air of serene neutrality, and with this attitude would casually make reference to vast sums. The rules for his own comportment were few and simple, and first among them was, always speak as though unimpressed by large figures; always convey the impression that the grandiose is commonplace.

And so it will be.

There is also an unusually beautiful list of names in the acknowledgments...

"The nail of Nome"

Gene sequencing retroactively corroborates Nabokov's controversial thesis about the evolution of the Polyommatus blues (the piece is by Carl Zimmer for the New York Times):

At the end of a 1945 paper on the group, he mused on how they had evolved. He speculated that they originated in Asia, moved over the Bering Strait, and moved south all the way to Chile.

Allowing himself a few literary flourishes, Nabokov invited his readers to imagine “a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine.” Going back millions of years, he would end up at a time when only Asian forms of the butterflies existed. Then, moving forward again, the taxonomist would see five waves of butterflies arriving in the New World.

Nabokov conceded that the thought of butterflies making a trip from Siberia to Alaska and then all the way down into South America might sound far-fetched. But it made more sense to him than an unknown land bridge spanning the Pacific. “I find it easier to give a friendly little push to some of the forms and hang my distributional horseshoes on the nail of Nome rather than postulate transoceanic land-bridges in other parts of the world,” he wrote.