Hello all. This is my official first post now that I am a blogger with the animal department. Where Sherry has her “Spotlight” and Marilyn has her “Creature Feature”, I have decided to do a “What is that?!” category. We do not have this animal at the museum but, it is an interesting type of animal I thought I would share. (Cordylus cataphractus) Picture by Cindy Shuttleworth Its called a Armadillo Lizard and is native to Southern Africa. What makesRead more
Posts filed in: Education
Yet one more hurdle
As much as I love red wolves, Sherry often times sends me updates on the happenings inside the red wolf Species Survival Plan and Recovery Program. Sometimes she sends me good news about the breeding program, or maybe just cute pictures of our wolves like the one below. But recently she sent me an email about a news release that was disturbing. The release discussed the increase of a reward to anyone who has information about two missing red wolves.Read more
Bear Aware!
Next week is Bear Awareness Week, and the North Carolina Piedmont Chapter of the American Association of Zookeepers (AAZK), of which several museum keepers and several keepers from the Duke Lemur Center are a part of, will be heading up our activities this year. Bear Awareness week is a week dedicated to learning about bear behaviors, spreading knowledge about bear species and their plights (6 out of 8 bear species are in danger of extinction), and learning how to cohabitateRead more
Chinchilla Chillin’
As you well know by now, Nimbus the super adorable rabbit has been living in the building instead of the farmyard where she’s usually found. She’s still doing ok, she has good days and bad days, but she’s eating well and gets extra love and attention since she hangs out where we are for a lot of the day. Her being in the building has also given her the chance to make some new friends with some of our animalsRead more
Big Word of the Month: El Niño , Southern Oscillation
A question to ponder: Why would the temperature of the ocean water off the coast of South America cause a woman in Chicago to re-consider her purchase of soybeans? For this month’s episode of Big Word of the Month, I want to discuss my favorite oceanic/atmoshpheric phenomenon (you have one too, right!) . Climate scientists use the term El Niño , Southern Oscillation to describe the complex relationship between the patterns of atmospheric pressure over the Pacific Ocean and theRead more
Big Word of the Month: Evaporative Cooling
The big talk around the museum lately has been the weather for obvious reasons! Being cold got me thinking about the physics of heat loss, so for this month’s BWOM post I thought I would talk about evaporative cooling. When water changes from one state to another energy is either released or absorbed; as water moves from solid -> liquid ->gas energy input is required at each transition.You might think of evaporative cooling as an issue for the summer time.Read more