Blue Planet Journey

  A mother and her baby (joey), collected and displayed. One of the sad things about scientific collections is that young mammals and birds are also collected. In the famous wildlife dioramas at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, there are numerous examples of young animals being collected. It's important to note that most if not all of these young animals were collected decades ago, when the sentiment regarding the collection of young was not negative. I wonder about the actions and conversations of these collectors of yore. Did they go out looking for young to trap or shoot? Did they wake up in the morning with a "to do" list that included the collection of young wildlife? Did they collect orphaned young as a humane alternative to predation or starvation? Whatever the case, the result is that there are young - some very young - mammals and birds in the dioramas. It's not my intent to chastise these collectors from the 1940s-1970s, but rather to note that colle...

  Big Pine Key is one of larger islands of the Florida Keys, and home to the National Key Deer Refuge . This diorama  is located in James Hall on the third floor of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. As with many dioramas, the focus is on a few species, but there is more to see.   The foci of the diorama are the Great White Heron (a white subspecies of the Great Blue Heron ),  American Crocodiles (as opposed to American Alligators ), the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake , and the Tricolored Heron , with the rattlesnake and the crocodile locked in a lethal embrace. As with many dioramas, there is more to be seen than just the featured species. Here's what I found, aside from the herons, crocodile, and snake: Horseshoe crab . Most people don't recognize the importance of this animal to both birds (particularly the Red Knot) and humans. Horseshoe crab blood being harvested to extract Limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL),a reagent that detects bacterial and fungal cell-...