LIZZIE WADE

A Writer of Science & Culture
Condors Bred in Captivity Need Our Tough Love: The Testimonials "The best piece on condor puppet rearing that you’ll read today." —Christopher Shay "Smart, provocative piece by @lizzie_wade" —Elizabeth Kolbert (Aside: My hero Elizabeth Kolbert knows my name and typed it with her very own fingers!) "the allegory of the cave reference made me do a backflip of happiness” —Ross Andersen "weirdly compelling" —@grammar_girl "That condor article started out normal and then got VERY REAL about puppets and life and death. Woah." —Commenter, The Toast Convinced? Read it at Aeon.

Condors Bred in Captivity Need Our Tough Love: The Testimonials

"The best piece on condor puppet rearing that you’ll read today." —Christopher Shay

"Smart, provocative piece by @lizzie_wade" —Elizabeth Kolbert (Aside: My hero Elizabeth Kolbert knows my name and typed it with her very own fingers!)

"the allegory of the cave reference made me do a backflip of happiness” —Ross Andersen

"weirdly compelling" —@grammar_girl

"That condor article started out normal and then got VERY REAL about puppets and life and death. Woah." —Commenter, The Toast

Convinced? Read it at Aeon.

aeonmagazine: Although few people now doubt the wisdom of saving California condors by raising them in zoos, critics of the programme were right about one thing: captive breeding does, in fact, risk altering the essence of a wild species. So does that make a puppet-reared animal a miracle or tragedy? It’s both – or maybe neither. Puppet-rearing blurs the same categorical lines as puppet theatre does. When we must capture all the wild condors and raise their children for them, what is the difference between survival and extinction?  I wrote about two of my favorite things—condors and puppet rearing—for Aeon.

aeonmagazine:

Although few people now doubt the wisdom of saving California condors by raising them in zoos, critics of the programme were right about one thing: captive breeding does, in fact, risk altering the essence of a wild species. So does that make a puppet-reared animal a miracle or tragedy? It’s both – or maybe neither. Puppet-rearing blurs the same categorical lines as puppet theatre does. When we must capture all the wild condors and raise their children for them, what is the difference between survival and extinction? 

I wrote about two of my favorite things—condors and puppet rearing—for Aeon.

My new apartment.

My new apartment.

Living my best life, in Chiapas.

The bottle gourd comes in two subspecies linked to their geography: one from Africa, where the plant first evolved, and one from Asia. Researchers have long wondered whether the New World bottle gourds are more closely related to the African or Asian subspecies. If they could build a bottle gourd family tree, they thought, they might be able to figure out how the plant reached the Americas in the first place. Did it float over on ocean currents from Africa, the prevailing assumption until about 10 years ago, or did humans carry the plant with them when they walked across the Bering land bridge from Asia?

Scientists Solve Mystery of Word-Traveling Plant - Science

Only one bee failed to fly above 8000 meters, and two even remained airborne above 9000 meters—more than 100 meters higher than the peak of Mount Everest. 

My exploration of what’s above your head continues over at Science.

“The Mexican government and the Mexican people have done what needed to be done [to protect the butterflies], at great cost. But all those things aren’t going to ensure the survival of the migration.”…Vidal and others say it’s the U.S. government’s turn to take action. Mexico must “energetically demand” that the United States reform its agricultural policy with an eye toward preserving milkweed, Vidal says. In the meantime, watching fewer and fewer monarchs arrive in Mexico each winter “is like water escaping from our hands without a way to stop it,” says Alfonso Alonso, a conservation biologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., who studied the monarchs as a graduate student. Monarch Numbers in Mexico Fall to Record Low - Science

“The Mexican government and the Mexican people have done what needed to be done [to protect the butterflies], at great cost. But all those things aren’t going to ensure the survival of the migration.”…Vidal and others say it’s the U.S. government’s turn to take action. Mexico must “energetically demand” that the United States reform its agricultural policy with an eye toward preserving milkweed, Vidal says. In the meantime, watching fewer and fewer monarchs arrive in Mexico each winter “is like water escaping from our hands without a way to stop it,” says Alfonso Alonso, a conservation biologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., who studied the monarchs as a graduate student.

Monarch Numbers in Mexico Fall to Record Low - Science