All posts by JJ Dearborn

This week, throngs of people who are amping up for Discovery Channel’s 25th annual Shark Week. This week long commemoration of all things sharks is aired in 72 countries watched by ~ 30 million viewers and is the longest running program event on cable. Every year schools of shark fans around the world countdown the days in anticipation for this late summer shark line-up and when it arrives they organize home-screening parties, play games, trivia, award prizes, shave their hair, get manicures and generally remain glued to their televisions marveling in the jawsome mystery and power of sharks.

In 1934, William Beebe and Otis Barton made the first historic deep-sea submersible descent off the coast of Nosuch, Bermuda. At the time, they had reached a world record depth of 3,028 feet (923 meters). Beebe and Barton would later inspire ever deeper submersible dive records by many more explorers to come.

Two missions collide: Free, Open, and Global! Wikipedia we love you.

Since 2009, we have been looking at Wikipedia as a way to drive new user traffic to the Biodiversity Heritage Library while improving the content and accuracy of Wikipedia’s articles. This symbiotic relationship has had a few bumps along the way but, our recent attendance at the 8th Annual Wikimania Conference held in Washington, DC, reaffirmed our commitment to increase our Wikipedia efforts which include adding our Flickr images to the Wikimedia commons file repository as well as inserting species citations, and external links to auto-generated BHL taxon name bibliographies. During this week-long conference, we were inspired by the sense of mission, ingenuity and passion that our fellow Wikipedians demonstrated.

Royal Dixon, the author of this week’s book of the week, The Human Side of Birds (1917), had an eclectic background. His formal credentials included botanist at the Chicago Field Museum, ornithologist, lecturer for the NY Board of Education, science journalist and author of several books– all of which sought to put a human face on nature. He was also a dancer, thespian, political writer and founder of the First Animal Church in America.

If you are an American, you know who Smokey the Bear is. He’s the bear in the ranger hat who has been adamantly spreading the same message for 70+ years: “Only YOU can prevent forest fires” — and he’s been pretty successful.

Deep sea dredging, as a means of scientific discovery, was popularized after the Challenger Expedition (1872-1876) came back to port in Spithead, Hampshire in the United Kingdom. In four years, the scientifically outfitted steamboat had circumnavigated the globe, traveled a total distance of 68,890 nautical miles, and along the way had picked-up 4,700+ previously unobserved and unnamed species.