Nature

Blind Descent: The Quest to Determine the Deepest Place on Earth  by James M. Tabor, Random House, 2010.  Deep Caves This is about the competition to find the deepest cave on Earth. It focuses mainly on Oaxaca State in Mexico and the Caucasus Mountains.  Note: Aguacate & Charco & Cheve are neighboring caves in the Sierra Juárez mountains in Oaxaca, Mexico. Diving One of the main challenges in exploring deep caves is the sumps: parts of caves that are filled with water. This

Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D. Seeley,Princeton University Press, 2010.

The Secret Lives of Bats: My Adventures with the World's Most Misunderstood Mammals  by Merlin Tuttle, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.

Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival by Bernd Heinrich, Ecco, 2019. The naturalist Bernd Heinrich describes the variety of strategies adopted by animals to survive the cold.  Ways of Dealing with the Winter Cold feathers as insulation from air and water thick coat of winter fur lowering blood freezing point with glycerol and sorbitol increasing amount of hemoglobin in the blood hibernation building shelters, burrows, nests, woodpecker holes, beaver lodges leaf shed

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf, Vintage, 2016. Naturalist Humbolt was one of the first people to promote ecology, conservation, curiosity, naturalist, respect for indigenous people. He wrote long and detailed books about his explorations. They had a wide impact. Places in South America He Visited Orinoco River in Venezuela Lake Valencia in Venezuela Chimborazo mountain and Cotopaxi volcano in Ecuador Quindio Pass in Colombia Rio Mag

Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, Knopf Doubleday, 2001. The author tells of his travels in Alaska and northern Canada and the many animals he observed: Mammals muskox harp seal snowshoe hares tundra voles narwhal whales Birds snow geese rock ptarmigan gyrfalcon Ivory gull Hoary redpoll finch Insects Sawfly Parasitic wasp Mosquitos

The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth's Future  by Paul Sabin, Yale University Press, 2014.  Summary   Contrary to the predictions of Paul Ehrlich, the population bomb never exploded. Since the Earth’s natural resources are finite, there is naturally a fear that we will eventually run out of them. As they become more scarce, it would be expected that they would become more expensive. On the other hand, as the technology for locating and extracting nat

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures  by Merlin Sheldrake, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2021.  Symbiosis Algae + fungi = lichen.  Lichens dissolve rocks with acids and absorb their minerals.  While the symbiosis between algae and fungi called lichen is well known, the symbiosis between land plant roots and Mycorrhizal fungi is more important. MF help plants absorb nutrients from the soil. Mycorrhizal hyphae are much finer than the

Snowball Earth: The Story of the Great Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life as We Know It  by Gabrielle Walker, Crown, 2003.  Earth Freezing Over:  In the 1960s Russian climatologist Mikhail Budyko considered the possibility of the Earth freezing over forever. Once the ice forms it reflects sunlight back away from the Earth, so the Earth cools: a positive feedback loop. Budyko thought that there was no way that this scenario could be reversed, so it must never have happened.