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There were a lot of neat miscellanous exhibits at the VLM, including an indoor bee hive, fossilized dinosaur tracks, and this nifty display of a snake’s fangs opening and closing:

Fangs

I finally managed to get some photos of a river otter. These are the most playful animals of the all, always hamming it up for vistors. The only problem is that they are so spastic, it’s impossible to get a photograph of them. I usually come home with lots of blurs on my camera. I got three photos of this one, nothing spectacular, but it was nice to have something since this was my fourth attempt photographing this animal:

River Otter

Check out the complete flickr set here and here.

Eastern Newt

The Virginia Living Museum, like zoos and other natural history museums, recreates many different ecological niches indoors, where visitors can get up close and admire the biology in detail. There’s a sense of wonder in admiring the uniqueness of life without it being able to run away and hide.

Hermit Crab

As nice as it is taking in these details, there’s still nothing like encountering life outside, in its natural environment. There’s a little jump in your heart when you catch a glimpse of something scurrying away or diving below the surface. Seeing life in a museum or zoo is fascinating, seeing it in the natural world is exciting.

Check out the complete flickr set here and here.

Eastern Snapping Turtle

Swamps, like deserts, are a metaphor for awful things in life. We get bogged down in swamps, monsters come out of swamps, to “swamp” a person is to capture them in a quagmire of responsibilities. But this derision of swamps is very anthropocentric, and I like the old German proverb, “Where there are no swamps there are no frogs.”

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Striped Burrfish

The Virginia Living Museum reminds me very much of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, where the focus is on the natural world specific to the state. Like NCMNS, the VLM divides its exhibits into ecosystems found in Virginia, from the coast all the way up into the Appalachian Mountains, and the incredible wealth of biodiversity found between them.

Sting Ray

I’ve started this collection off with the Chesapeak Bay and Coastal Plain, and will work my way into the Mountains next week. If you ever want to be enchanted by the world of life in your own local, find a museum like one of these to peruse.

Check out the complete flickr set here and here.

When Vicky was searching through children’s variations on the Google logo for her Google Doodle Trees post, one logo caught my eye. It was a wish to “Bring back the dinosaurs.” I know the kid was talking about bringing back the dinosaurs in the sense of Jurassic Park, but I doubt the child realized that the dinosaurs really never left the Earth. In fact, the dinosaurs are all around us, they just evolved into something more well-suited to the changing environment:

Indian Peafowl (Peacock)

While admiring the Peacocks in the aviary, I overheard a woman tell her friend, “How can anyone look at that animal and say there ain’t no God?” Putting the double-negative aside, I thought about the incredibly fascinating the process of sexual selection that led to the Peacock’s tail. Sexual selection doesn’t disprove the existence of god, but it does disqualify the mere existence of a peacock’s tail as proof of god’s existence.

As long as we’re challenging paradigms, let me remind everyone of one of my favorite examples of homosexuality in nature, the flamingo. Here’s an animal with a well-documented habit of forming non-traditional relationships with its fellows. Two male flamingos will often pair-up, taking eggs from females or females will even give them their eggs, and then the males will raise the chicks. The evolutionary advantage to this arrangement is that two male flamingos can secure more territory than a male-female pair.

Remember, you can’t spell flamingo without “flaming.”

: )

Check out the complete flickr set here.

“Sunshine all the time makes a desert.”
- Arab Proverb

Cacti

Deserts are the metaphor of choice to describe anything bleak, barren, and devoid of life. The word is synonymous with wasteland. It’s a place where prophets go to spend 40 days and nights in fasting and isolation. Life might be sparser in the desert, but it’s also an environment of remarkable biodiversity, and much of the diversity found there exhibits fascinating geometry and emergent patterns.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Greta oto aka. Glasswing Butterfly

As climate change raises the average temperature of the Earth, the subtropical environments will become tropical, as plant hardiness zones move toward the poles. Tropical zones, like the Amazon Rainforest, unfortunately, have nowhere to go.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Century Plant

According to W.H. Barreveld, without the date palm, the human race would not have been able to migrate out of Africa. Dates provided an energy-dense food for journeying across the desert, are mentioned 30 times in the Bible, and 22 times in the Quran. Every part of the palm, its wood, leaves, fruit, and nuts are useful, and civilization has been relying on them going back more than 5,000 years with the Mesopotamians.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

The Horticultural Gardens in Amsterdam is a suprisingly small garden, however, incredibly rich in biodiversity.

Fuchsias

And what a fascinating collection of specimens too. There’s the giant rubarb, the southern ash tree grafted onto a northern ash to allow it to survive the colder climate, the semicircle of systematics, the Wollemi pine a living fossil, and more to follow as I get further sets uploaded.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Rainbow Following us Out of the City

There are some incredibly progressive cultural values in the Netherlands, as well as demonstrations of enlightenment values. I previously covered the NEMO Science Center, a children’s science center that had sex displays. There were Obama posters everywhere, wind turbines, as well as bicycles, rows and endless rows of bicycles… dorkiest bicycles you’ve ever seen. : )

Einstein on Currency

This is not to say what I saw in Amsterdam was more cultured than America, our museums are bigger, more diverse. Not better, but the stereotype of Europeans having more culture than we do is just that, a stereotype.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

To understand the success of insects is to appreciate our own shortcomings. —Thomas Eisner

They crawl, they fly, they swim. They communicate with dance, chemicals, and sounds. They act alone or gather together into superorganisms. They possibly represent 90% of the differing life forms on the planet.

Insect in Amber Credit: Moi

Check out the complete flickr set here.

With final exams, school projects due, work projects due, and the rest of life, I’ve been stressing and slacking on uploading science photos to my flickr account. I’m glad I took the time to get to it tonight for an hour or so of naturalist zen. Lacking anything more profound, I’ll just say this:

Butterflies are pretty.

Spicebush Swallowtail Papilio troilus Credit: Moi

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. ~Rabindranath Tagore

Butterflies are self propelled flowers. ~R.H. Heinlein

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly. ~Richard Buckminster Fuller

Love is like a butterfly: It goes where it pleases and it pleases wherever it goes. ~Author Unknown

See the complete flickr set here

PDF of the Butterfly species at the exhibit here

Just a quick post to get the remaining miscellaneous photos from the NEMO Science Center online. There was elecricity, engineering, and water-power exhibits, as well as various displays that didn’t fit into any particular category, like how the center’s roof had some displays that were architectural, but not exactly science-focused.

In the below photo, Vicky is reflecting light from a mirror to solar panels on the bottoms of suspended cardboard planes to power their propellers and make them fly.

Vicky Powering Solar Planes to Fly

See the complete flickr set here.

Facial Expression Reader Vicky 85% Happy, 3% Disgust, 2% Fear, 1% Sad

It’s amazing that the organ most responsible for the success of our species is the one we know the least about. While we have come a long way, abandoning the cartesian duality and stepping out of the false dichotomy of the nature versus nurture debate, we still don’t know exactly how memories are encoded in the web of neurons or how much of our behaviors are hard-coded.

But we are able to observe these behaviors. We can see how our brains react to optical illusions, and infer the underlying components. We may observe how individuals respond to authority and social zones, whittling out the evolutionary advantages these reactions confer on us. Is the human brain like a black box, where we must learn its inner workings from its external manifestations? Or will we have more luck dissecting the molecular components?

See the complete flickr set here.