Jennifer Marohasy

 “THE trail we were on is at the treeline, 8 or 9 thousand feet.  Most of the time it’s buried under 6 to 10 feet of snow, so not too many people get up their until late spring or early summer…   First people in are rangers who maintain the trail by removing tree falls or [...]

THE spur-winged plover, Vanellus miles, has a distribution that extends from New Guinea along the east coast of Australia to New Zealand. 
The wader self introduced to New Zealand in the 1930s, and has expanded its range in Australia as well as New Zealand over the last few decades.
Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace suggested the current [...]

An analysis of egg industry data has confirmed there are not enough free-range layer hens in Australia to produce the number of eggs labelled free-range.  Read more here.  The picture shows Jennifer nursing a free range chicken.

GREEN tree ants, Oecophylla smaragdina, don’t leave their dead lying around. 

BOGOTA – African zoologists are in Colombia to advise local authorities on what to do with dozens of hippos roaming around the abandoned zoo of late drug lord Pablo Escobar in the north of the country.  Read more here.

RECENTLY the Australian Department of Climate Change released a report suggesting that global warming would severely threaten many native species.
While it is currently very fashionable to emphasis the influence temperature can have on the distribution and abundance of plant and animal species, let’s not ignore the very broad geographic ranges of many species, or the words of [...]

Dolphins are notoriously cheeky creatures. What if the decision to splash the water on people was that of the dolphins? Can this woman sue the dolphins.  More here.

IN the Sierra Nevada, there are Whitebark Pines, Pinus albicaulis, thought to be thousands of years old now growing at an altitude where seedlings can’t survive winter. So, they reproduce from suckers. Larry Fields told us the story earlier this week.
On the Eyre Peninsula, South Australia, there are Black Oaks, Allocasuarina cristata, also growing near [...]

THE last Ice Age killed off all of the coniferous trees in Finland. After the ice sheet retreated, trees from elsewhere – like the Scots Pine – gradually colonized the vacant niche. On a smaller scale, the same thing happened in many high mountains of the Earth’s temperate regions, including the Sierra Nevada Range of [...]

A beluga whale saved a drowning diver by hoisting her to the surface, carrying her leg in its mouth.  Read more here.