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Gene Silencing by MicroRNAs – Katharina Petsche (2015)

November 21, 2017 at 8:25 am / Evolution, Molecular Nature, Video

Welcome to another post of Molecular Nature series highlighting a gene silencing mechanism known as RNA interference. The animation was produced by Katharina Petsche. The discovery was made by Craig Mello and Andrew Fire who shared 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Please keep in mind that this video is quite advanced in content and assumes the viewers know about basic molecular biological concepts such as the Central Dogma of Biology. RNA interference (RNAi) is a process used by […]

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Chain Forming Leptogenys Ants from Cambodia – Stephane de Greef (2014)

November 15, 2017 at 10:00 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, Short Observations, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

The ant behavior described in these observations were first recorded by citizen scientists in Cambodia (see the original recording at the end of this post) where ants have been shown to form chains to transport large prey. The level of cooperation is so striking that myrmecologists scrambled to find out whether it is genuine. Two researchers have successfully documented the behavior by filming them in Angkor Thom, Siem Reap, Cambodia. Self-assembling cooperation in ants is known to take many interesting […]

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48 Cantones: The Mayan Forest – Thomas & Julian Moll-Rocek (2014)

November 10, 2017 at 8:11 pm / Human Nature, Video

In their documentary, Thomas & Julian Moll-Rocek explore the Mayan Cosmovision. For Meso-Americans this is a worldview that integrates the structure of space and rhythms of time into a unified whole. In Guatemala’s western mountains, in the state of Totonicapán, a large community forest has prospered for centuries adjacent to densely populated valleys. The Mayan forest cover the hills and the mountain ridge. The management of local resources by the Mayan community provides a counter-argument for the ‘tragedy of the […]

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Development of a Salamander Embryo – Yale University Department of Anatomy (1920s)

November 10, 2017 at 4:08 pm / Evolution, Molecular Nature, Technical Notes, Video

Everyone of us started life from one single cell formed by the fusion of an egg and a sperm. That single cell gave rise to every structure in our bodies. How did that happen? Salamanders are known to be able to regenerate limbs while frogs and lizards cannot. How and why? The time lapsed footage of salamander embryos developing from single fertilized eggs forms the basis of our morphological understanding of animal development. The footage recorded by Yale University researchers […]

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Dingo of the Australia – Adam Geiger (2013)

October 30, 2017 at 12:35 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Dingo (Canis lupus dingo) appears in the archaeological record of Australia at 4230 years before present. They ruled the continent as apex predators together with the now extinct Tasmanian tiger within the last few thousand years. Dingoes successfully colonized the continent spreading into diverse habitats including tropical rainforests, temperate Eucalyptus forests, mountainous highlands and grasslands. The only exception is the dry inhospitable central deserts. Dog domestication is the earliest among other animals going back to 40,000 years ago. The Dingo […]

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Run Hide be Invisible – Revealing the Leopard – PBS/NATURE (2010)

October 22, 2017 at 12:16 am / Natural history, PBS Nature, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

The Leopard (Felis pardus Linnaeus, 1758) is one of the most successful big cats of our time. It’s ability to adapt to different climates and habitats enabled spreading out of Africa into Asia. They live in diverse habitats such as forests, subtropical and tropical savannas, grasslands, rocky and mountainous regions, and even deserts. The leopard can live in both warm and cold climates. It has a very broad food base ranging from insects to large mammals. In Africa this cat […]

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How mountaintop mining affects life and landscape in West Virginia – PBS (2017)

September 15, 2017 at 11:15 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Global Patterns, Video

Coal has been one of the work horses of power generation but its dominance is dwindling. In 2016 U.S. coal energy industry employed around 160,000 workers while solar energy production employed around 370,000. Coal has been a massive contributor to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leading to mercury pollution with subsequent biomagnification throughout the food chain, ocean acidification and global warming. Some geologists propose that fossil fuel use including coal may be accepted as an indicator for […]

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Total Solar Eclipse in North America – Path of Totality – NASA/SVS (2017)

August 7, 2017 at 8:34 am / Global Patterns, Video

During the August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse, the Moon’s umbral shadow will traverse across the North American continent, from Oregon to South Carolina. Transition from west to east coast will last a little over 90 minutes. Along the path of totality, observers will see the Moon completely obscure the Sun for about two and a half minutes. The math used to calculate the trajectory of the eclipses to create maps such as the one featured here was worked out […]

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Parasitoid Wasp (Labena grallator) Ovipositing

July 20, 2017 at 11:09 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Short Observations, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Recorded at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Edgewater, MD, USA on July 18th 2017. Here you can see a parasitoid Ichneumon wasp (Labena grallator) searching for a prey living inside a dead branch. She uses her antennae to locate the prey and sets out to drill with her ovipositor straight into the wood. She does a few exploratory oviposition exercise before committing to a full injection. At multiple instances the wasp is chased away by ants. Indeed, in the last […]

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Hover Fly (Spilomyia longicornis) on Eupatorium altissimum (Asteraceae)

June 29, 2017 at 10:33 am / Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Short Observations, Video

Hover Fly (Spilomyia longicornis) visiting Eupatorium altissimum (Asteraceae) filmed in Georgia State Botanical Gardens, Athens, GA, USA on September 16th, 2012. Submitted as a short observation. When we talk about pollination bees immediately occupy our imagination almost as a cerebral Pavlovian reflex. Flies are big component of the insect pollinators yet they rarely get peoples attention. The insect family Syrphidae (aka syrphid flies) has more than more than 6000 species categorized in 200 genera worldwide. They stand out with their […]

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A Deeper Creek – The Watchable Waters of Appalachia

June 28, 2017 at 10:55 am / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Ecofocus Film Festival of Athens GA featured a number of short documentaries including Hidden Rivers of Appalachia filmed on location in Conesauga River by Freshwaters Illustrated. Like birdwatching, riverwatching could be a great immersive activity and have the potential to become a citizen science project. A Deeper Creek shows us how this could be done. Similar to organizing a BioBlitz, snorkeling in a river can generate a lot of informative observations. Rivers have a rich body of natural history and […]

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Open-air Processional Column Termites in Bukit Timah Nature Preserve, Singapore (2016)

June 17, 2017 at 5:05 pm / Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Short Observations, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Social insects are a major force in land habitats. A mature leaf-cutter ant colony can consume leaf material equal to a weight of a cow every day. Termites are another insect group (related to cockroaches) evolved independently to achieve sociality. Their effects on ecosystems in terms of material and nutrient cycling can rival those of ants. Higher termites (family Termitidae) feed on a wide variety of plant-based material, including decaying wood, leaf litter, humus, fungi, lichens, dung, and grasses. Non-wood-feeding […]

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The Diatomist – Matthew Killip (2014)

June 17, 2017 at 12:00 am / Natural history, Video

Klaus Kemp, is a self-taught master of the Victorian art of diatom arrangement. After his first exposure to the intricate patterns of algae by the German microscopist J.D. Möller (1844 – 1907) he was completely hooked. Diatoms are single celled algae. They are the most common form of phytoplanktons and form the base of the aquatic food chains. They represent the earliest plant lineage long before land plants evolved at about 700 million years ago. Their cell walls are made […]

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Seed Dispersal and Habitat Fragmentation | HHMI BioInteractive – Danny Schmidt (2017)

June 10, 2017 at 7:06 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Forests are under intense pressure. In the tropical forests, between 50-90 % of the canopy trees depend on animals for seed dispersal. Even in temperate forests animals such as deer, moose, boar and even bears disperse seeds. Today due to hunting for bush meat many tropical forests are becoming depleted of their seed dispersers. Here in this HHMI documentary, the researchers Andres Link and Carolina Urbina Malo of Los Andes University in Colombia in Colombia track brown spider monkeys to […]

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Keeling’s Curve: The Story of CO2 – Science Bulletins – AMNH

June 7, 2017 at 10:09 pm / Global Patterns, Video

Keeling’s Curve: The Story of CO2 was produced by Laura Allen for the Science Bulletins of the American Museum of Natural History. Science Bulletins is a production of the National Center for Science Literacy, Education, and Technology (NCSLET), part of the Department of Education at the American Museum of Natural History. Ice cores drilled from the glaciers, Greenland and the Antarctic have shown that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere is tightly linked to the average temperature of the Earth. […]

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