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Henry Weed Fowler must have loved fish.

Ichthyology dominated his entire career. He started as a museum assistant at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1903. Other experts in his field soon recognized his prolific skill. In 1918, an assistant curator at the Smithsonian, Barton A. Bean, reached out to Fowler (then still an assistant) for help identifying fishes collected by the United States Exploring Expedition. Fowler dove into the work. He delivered a lengthy 750-page manuscript in two years, helping to discover 18 new species of fish in the process.

For reference, the average field book here at the Smithsonian Institution Archives is 110 pages.

The weekend looked promising:  a lovely clear Friday night for a drive to Burlington, Vermont, USA from southern New Hampshire to attend the Northeast Natural History Conference (13-15 April 2018).  What could be better than a hotel humming with botanists and zoologists and activities for them?  The conference was packed—five concurrent sessions (often standing room only) and around 140 posters Saturday and Sunday along with workshops (Bat houses anyone?) and demonstrations throughout the weekend.  Students, faculty and naturalists from colleges, universities and small research or rescue organizations presented posters and talks that focused on New England, New York and Eastern Canadian native vertebrates, invertebrates, plant species diversity and distribution, invasive species and wetland habitats.

We’re excited to announce that we will soon be launching full text search on BHL!

Economic botany can, in a nutshell (excuse the pun), be described as the use of plants by people. This relationship spans thousands of years and includes both individuals and cultures – making this subject a rich and fascinating link between botany and anthropology. Economic botany collections can essentially be described using the term biocultural.

The Economic Botany Collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew holds around 100,000 objects from around the globe. Established as the Museum of Economic Botany by Kew’s first official Director, Sir William Jackson Hooker, in 1847, it was cited as a public repository for ‘all kinds of useful and curious Vegetable Products, which neither the living plants of the Garden nor the specimens in the Herbarium could exhibit’.

The Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden has received over $200,000 from a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant awarded to the Chicago Horticultural Society for the conservation and digitization of 62 rare and unique “language of flower” books published in the 19th century. The Lenhardt Library has been a BHL Affiliate since 2014.

The American Daffodil Society (ADS) is a group with international membership that has connected daffodil enthusiasts since its founding in 1954. In the spirit of National Gardening Month, we’re highlighting the ADS’ publication, The Daffodil Journal, which comes to BHL as part of the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project. Early volumes of this quarterly journal from 1964-1968 are currently available on BHL, with more volumes on the way.

Social orders exist throughout the animal kingdom. Comprised of dominant and subordinate individuals, these orders dictate how members of a group interact, influencing everything from food access to mating privileges.

Sometimes, the behavior of the dominant individual is more extreme, and the “alpha” actively inhibits interactions between other members of the group. This sort of “monarchistic dominance” has been reported in male laboratory mice and African lions. The behavior is not restricted to mammals, however.