Jennifer Howard

In my latest foray for the Chronicle Review (“Creature Consciousness,” Oct. 18, 2009), I take a look at the field of animal studies, which has taken hold in many corners of the humanities and social sciences. By animal studies I don’t mean animal rights, articulated so forcefully by the likes of Peter Singer and Tom Regan. Philosophers and literary scholars working in animal studies have an agenda that might be revolutionary; they want to overturn the anthropocentric models of humanism and substitute a very different way of thinking about how human animals relate to other creatures. I also take a… Read more...

What’s happened to all the acorns? The D.C. area, famous for its trees, is usually full of nuts this time of year (no jokes about Congress, please). Not this fall, the WaPo reports: The idea seemed too crazy to Rod Simmons, a measured, careful field botanist. Naturalists in Arlington County couldn’t find any acorns. None. No hickory nuts, either. Then he went out to look for himself. He came up with nothing. Nothing crunched underfoot. Nothing hit him on the head. Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins…. Read more...

…already unfairly maligned as suicidal, and now hit hard by climate change. The BBC reports on a new study that finds wetter winters in southern Norway, “a bleak prospect for the region’s lemmings.” Scientists think that the snow is no longer stable enough to provide the animals with winter shelter. And the suicide myth? Rather than hibernating, lemmings spend the winter living in the space between the ground and a stable layer of snow above. Dry winters would allow large numbers to survive until spring, resulting in a population explosion. On occasions, there were so many that snowploughs were deployed… Read more...

The BBC has a thoroughly depressing (but worth reading) article on its website today about how human activity is making the oceans too noisy for dolphins and whales to communicate, with serious repercussions for their breeding-and-feeding habits. The Beeb reports on a new report from IFAW, the International Fund for Animal Welfare: Noise generated by ships’ engines and propellers, and by seismic airguns used in oil and gas exploration, produce a range of frequencies that can interfere with both these groups of species, IFAW concludes. Its report—Ocean Noise: Turn it down—cites research showing that the effective range of blue whales’… Read more...

She’s an Argiope aurantia, also known as a writing spider because of the stabilimenta or zig-zag patterns the species weaves into its webs. You can see some of them in the pic. My son spotted her on our lavender plant a few weeks ago, and she’s come to be kind of a family friend. But I haven’t seen her since Hurricane Hanna blew through last weekend. I hope she’s okay. The lavender looks lonely without her…. Read more...

Everybody gets it wrong sometimes. (Via PlayShakespeare.com.)… Read more...