Tag Archives: musk ox

On The Trail Of The World’s Fluffiest Alien: The Musk Ox

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Image Credit: Hannes Grobe, CC BY-SA 2.5, Image Cropped

Last month I found myself in the middle of Norway’s Dovre mountains. It’s a gorgeous region, with picturesque landscape stretching out well beyond the limits of human vision, which applies to a lot of Norway in all honesty. My family chose Dovre as our stopover though, because it’s the home of the musk ox.

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Aliens & Invaders & Exotics, Oh My: The Language of Invasive Biology

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The Burmese python, which has spread throughout the Everglades in Florida as a result of accidental or intentional releases by pet owners (Image Credit: US NInvaders, Aliens, and tational Park Service, Public Domain Mark 1.0, Image Cropped)

Language is important. It’s a lesson many biological scientists would have learned a long time ago if we hadn’t kept social sciences at such a wary arm’s length. Ecologists have a tendency to label and relabel ecological concepts (anyone up for a debate about the word ‘niche’?), species and even global phenomena (think global warming vs. climate change) based on anything from shifts in public perception to new findings that challenge our earlier labels.

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10 Great (And Not-So Great) Social Distancers of the Animal Kingdom

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In the time of a global crisis like the one we’re in now, it’s more important than ever that we pay attention to what scientists are saying.

However, my colleagues and I are ecologists, and as such don’t really have as much practical advice for you as epidemiologists and sociologists do right now. All we can really say is stay at home, and practice physical distancing (NOT social distancing, we need each other more than ever right now).

However not all species have the comfort of being social without being close to each other. So in the name of providing some entertainment in difficult times, I gathered a bunch of colleagues together to figure out how some of their study organisms would cope if the need to socially distance was imposed on them.

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