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Discover fascinating facts about the spiders in your backyard! The Kennebec Estuary Land Trust (KELT) welcomes Dana Wilde, author of A Backyard Book of Spiders in Maine, to speak about Maine’s diverse and captivating spider species on Thursday,...
Dana Wilde: Along came a spider By now it’s more or less accepted medical wisdom that pets provide emotional nourishment for humans, writes Dana Wilde. Share A jumping spider in temporary solitary confinement. Within an hour of its capture, it started building a silk retreat. Photo by Dana Wilde As usual by this time of year, the cat has cabin fever. He follows us around the house with his big fat orange face, complaining about it. He sits by the door urging us to let him outside. When we open it, he sees there’s still snow and marches disgusted back into the living room, like it’s s...
Dana Wilde: Spiders in space What would happen, Dana Wilde asks, if you plunked spiders into a weird environment — like outer space? Share On the left, the first web built by the Larinioides patagiatus spider on the International Space Station in 2008. On the right, the first web built by the Metepeira labyrinthea spider partially destroyed Larinioides’ work. Photo courtesy of NASA Weird things happen in outer space. Weightlessness is, by all accounts, the strangest new world for astronauts. It’s a factor in everything from space sickness to disorientation to psychological disruption...
Dana Wilde: The death of the great auks We like to think we’ve come a long way in conservation. Which we have, sort of, writes Dana Wilde, but the Earth is right now undergoing its sixth mass extinction event. Share The great auks were a flightless bird that went extinct on or about June 1844. For an evolutionary disaster, the date sounds suspiciously precise, I know. But it’s probably more or less accurate. A stuffed great auk is one exhibit in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, Scotland. Wikimedia Commons photo courtesy of Mike Pennington Pinguinus impennis was known ...
Dana Wilde: Poppop’s got a brand new jeejah It's hard to remember what life was like before syntactic devices, but it existed, writes Dana Wilde. Share Photo by Dana Wilde As this weird, weird pandemic (among other things) year comes to an end, there’s been a lot of chaotic discussion about our relationship to technology. For my own part, I feel like I’m living in a science fiction novel. My 4-year-old grandson seems more at home in screens and keyboards than I am. Not that I’m literally from another planet. But the distance from here to the 1970s — much of which I remember like ye...