Green Options

Herbs and spices like thyme, rosemary and mint, usually used to flavor food, can also offer a green alternative to synthetic pesticides.

Research has shown that oils derived from the herbs interfere with insect nervous systems, causing them to spasm haphazardly until they die. Best of all, these all-natural pesticides are inexpensive to produce.

A remarkable dragonfly migration stretching between 14,000 and 18,000 kilometers has been discovered which spans the Indian Ocean.

The migration is by far the longest known insect migration, dwarfing the 7,000km journey of monarch butterflies. Millions of dragonflies make the epic migration every year, which spans from India to the Maldives, the Seychelles, Mozambique, Uganda and back again.

Perhaps the only thing more amazing than the migration is that it has somehow dodged scientific discovery until now. “This just illustrates how little we still know about the natural world,” said Charles Anderson, discoverer of the mass migration.

A major infestation of the mountain pine beetle, a scourge stretching from New Mexico, in the U.S., to British Columbia, Canada, has been turning vast areas of formerly green pine forests to rust red, and slowly killing them.

The beetle infestation has been growing “exponentially” since 2006-07, according to the Forest Service management team in Laramie, Wyoming, and has so far claimed millions of acres of pine forest in Montana, Colorado, and Wyoming. North of the border, British Columbia has already lost over 33 million acres of lodgepole pine forest due to the ravages of this type of bark beetle. And more recently (in 2008), Alberta province is come under threat due to an aberrant wind storm that apparently lofted the beetles across the continental divide.

You’ve worked hard getting that garden planted and tending it with care, but inevitably nature takes its course and the bugs find those veggies. Is it any surprise they’d want to eat the delicious fruits of your labors? You can’t blame them, after all. But you can prevent pest damage and control problems.

Applying eco-friendly insect repellent on my son’s skin is like applying sunscreen:  he hates it!  Luckily, we rarely need it do to a predictable evening wind on our property, but when we go camping or visiting friends, it’s a different story.  He’s also a compulsive scratcher, so avoiding the mosquito bites all together prevents this problem as well.  Don’t Bite Me! offers a unique approach to this problem with a skin patch.

Don’t Bite Me! is a skin patch that offers up to 36 hours of protection from insects for your entire body, and it is safe for children. It has only two ingredients:  vitamin B1 and aloe!

Don’t Bite Me! uses a discreet, all-natural transdermal skin patch to deliver a blend of protective Vitamin B1 and aloe combination throughout the body. Excess B1 is secreted through the body’s pores, creating a scent that is almost undetectable to humans, but offensive to mosquitoes.  This scent forms a protective barrier around the body that shields the user from mosquitoes and other biting insects. Aloe, the other active ingredient, accelerates the absorption of the B1 and serves as an anti-inflammatory. Don’t Bite Me! is also environmentally friendly and waterproof, perfect for lakes or pool parties!

UPDATE: We’ve got a new Green Porno contest running… check it out.

If you’ve had dreams about Isabella Rossellini wandering through a forest of enlarged animal penises (peni?), either you need to get to the shrink quickly, or you’ve been watching Sundance Channel’s Green Porno series very regularly. If the latter’s the case, let’s see how much you’ve picked up…

Name that Schlong

Take a look at the picture above. The arrow in the picture is pointing out a specific species’ penis. Know what it is?  Name it… in the comments. Need help?  Check out the main contest post at Sundance’s SUNfiltered blog (disclosure: I’m a blogger there).

Researchers at the University of Florida are reporting that the enzymes in the guts of termites could provide a powerful tool for making ethanol from non-food woody plants.

In an upcoming review paper, professor Michael Scharf details how termites — which cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to houses in the US alone each year — might actually prove useful for something that most people could never have envisioned.

Through millions of years of evolution, termites have filled a niche in the animal world that takes precise chemical coordination between the digestive enzymes and microbes in their guts to turn the wood that they eat into sugars which can then be used to “fuel” the termite.

It is this seemingly easy transformation of wood into sugar in the termite guts that holds the promise for future ethanol production, because, once you have the sugar, it’s easy to make ethanol through fermentation.

Katydids visited our back porch on the past several weekends. The way their bodies were designed to look like leaves impressed me, and also made me think about how much of a conundrum these insects are. In fact, it made very confused as to my beliefs in evolution and god. In the end I suppose that the concepts are compatible. But what a marvel to see something designed to be so camouflaged as a katydid.

After looking on Wikipedia, I learned that there are approximately 6,400 species of katydids around the world. I wanted to see more of these fascinating insects, and so I searched for photos on Flickr. What you see here are some of the more beautiful and interesting photos I found, combined with several of my own.

Five Funny Reasons to Love Mosquitoes

I’m a mosquito hunter. If you’ve seen the Monty Python sketch, then you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, just scroll down. For me, there’s nothing more maddening than the high-pitch whine of a mosquito in my ear just as I’m drifting off to sleep. On any given night during mosquito season, you can find me prowling the house under-shorts (Shh! Don’t tell.) stalking my prey.

However, this morning I had an epiphany. It took one particular mosquito buzzing in my ear at 6:30 on this particularly beautiful early fall morning to make me understand that mosquitoes aren’t really all bad. Like Cat Stevens before the Qu’ran, “I think I’ve seen the light.” Now, I’m not saying I won’t ever smack another skeeter. But I might also start a new amnesty “catch and release” program in my household because I now have five reasons to love mosquitoes.

Do I have you attention? Okay, good. Now, get your mind out of the gutter and instead turn your thoughts to the sex life of insects and other creatures. Isabella Rossellini has created an eight-part short film series titled “Green Porno” in conjunction with Robert Redford’s Sundance Channel.

These eight film shorts premiered back in May on sundancechannel.com, and they have been shown on the Sundance Channel. Starting today they will be made available worldwide through sundancechannel.com/greenporno. Two of the short films, Snail and Worm, are also available on YouTube starting today.

In addition to making these unique and irreverent film shorts more widely available, the Sundance Channel website is launching an interactive quiz, “What Kind of GREEN PORNO Star are You?” Turns out, I’m a dragonfly. According to the quiz:

Free and clean is how you run your life. Free–You’re the founding member of the Mile High Club. You know nothing about the sky being the limit.

True about me? I’m not telling.

German biologists have discovered an hitherto unknown ant species, believed to be the oldest on the planet, deep in the Amazon rain forest.

Field researchers from Karlsruhe’s Natural History Museum who made the discovery near Manaus, Brazil, say the species, which resembles miniature wasps and looks like no other, may date back around 120 million years, according to Reuters.

Martialis heureka, nicknamed the “Ant from Mars” due to its unusual features and heureka from its surprising discovery, the ants themselves are eyeless, pale in color, subterranean, and predatory, according to Wikipedia.