Back in the late ‘90s, a teacher made a boo-boo. After completing a lesson on crayfish, the teacher dumped them into Pine Lake. Unfortunately, these weren’t ordinary crayfish. Well, not ordinary for this part of the country. And so, the red swamp crayfish started taking over the crayfish niche in the lake, according to Julian Olden, a freshwater ecologist with the University of Washington. Now Olden, with the help of volunteers from around the lake, aims to stop them. Read more about this effort in the Sammamish Review.
Snailfish aren’t exactly the darling of the deep ocean. Long and pink, with a gelatinous coat that makes them more squishy than scaly, the females have a curious habit: they unceremoniously inject their eggs into the body cavity of Golden King crabs. UW junior Jennifer Gardner suspects it’s a small quirk of nature that could have a large impact on Alaska’s crab fishing industry. Read more about Jennifer’s research, and the support she receives from generous donors that makes her work possible.
Read the Jan/Feb 2013 issue of The Insider – which includes highlights on recent awards and fellowships received by our faculty and staff, upcoming events you may be interested in attending, some funding opportunities for research, acknowledgements of new gifts from generous donors, a spotlight on one of our faculty, and much much more!
The number of confirmed gray wolves and wolf packs in the state nearly doubled during the past year, according a new survey, which based on field reports and aerial monitoring in 2012 found at least 51 wolves in nine packs, with five successful breeding pairs. Read more about this survey and what it means for wolf populations in the state.
Once trapped and poisoned to extinction, Washington wolverines are making a comeback.Their recovery here has new importance as climate change is predicted in the future to melt much of the deep, late snow cover wolverines need to survive. Read more about their comeback in the Washington wilds.
It came out of Siberia, swirling winds over an area that covered almost the entire Arctic basin in the normally calm late summer. It came to be known as “The Great Arctic Cyclone of August 2012,” and for some observers it suggested that the historic sea ice minimum may have been caused by a freak summer storm, rather than warming temperatures. But new results from the University of Washington show that the August cyclone was not responsible for last year’s record low for Arctic sea ice. The study was published online this week in Geophysical Research Letters. Read more about this.
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