Wild Connection

Welcome back everyone and this episode is really special. A few years ago I had the honor and privilege of meeting Dr. Thomas Rashad Easley aka RaShad Eas. He is a certified diversity consultant and the Assistant Dean of Community and Inclusion at the Yale School of the Environment but he is so much more. He’s also a passionate human being, a former campus pastor, a scientist, a forester, an autho...

Welcome back everyone. This is episode 17 and this week I’ve got a special guest who is going to talk about something happening right now. You say cicada I say cicada and Dr Floyd Shockley says cover your ears because it's going to be LOUD.   Right here in the United States, primarily along the eastern seaboard it was a magical time beginning around mid-May. Brood 10 was emerging and this only hap...

Welcome back to Wild Connection: The Podcast. I’m your host Dr. Jen and this week I am back with Dr. Jeffrey Lockwood, Prof of Natural Sciences and Humanities at the University of Wyoming. He’s also a librettist and This week we are talking all about locusts. From the Pharaohs of Egypt to the cattle farmers of the present, locusts have a pretty bad reputation. We’re talking a plague of biblical pr...

Today's episode is all about insects and is a theme for the next 3 weeks. I discovered Dr. Jeff Lockwood, a Professor of Natural Science and the Humanities at the university of Wyoming, when I was doing research for episode 9, Love is a Battlefield, I came across his work sharing how insects have been used as weapons in human warfare. That stopped me in my tracks and I knew I had to dig deeper. Af...

Today's episode tackles a BIG question: What is cognition and consciousness and do other species have it? That's not all though, my guest Dr. Kristy Biolsi, Associate Professor of Psychology at St. Francis College (@SFCNY) in Brooklyn Heights NY and co-founder and Director of the Center for the Study of Pinniped Ecology and Cognition ( C-SPEC ) talks to us about what she's discovering about the co...

This week its all about volcanoes. And not just about eruptions, of which there have been two significant ones recently. There is so much interesting history surrounding how people cope and live around such a potentially dangerous natural phenomenon and the societal factors that shape who is impacted, who recovers and who doesn’t when there is an eruption. To tell us about all of that is a brillia...

Welcome back everyone. This week is Part 2 of my interview with geographer Dr. Jacob Shell.  He specializes in human transportation networks that rely on animals. His book, Giants of the Monsoon forest: Living and Working with Elephants, is a thought provoking read. If you haven’t heard part one, please do listen as that’s where we talk about the history of humans using elephants, talk about why A...

Hi everyone. This week is Part I of a 2 part interview I had with Dr. Jacob Shell is a geographer that specializes in transportation networks and the interface between humans and other animals when it comes to getting around. We talk about one of his books, Giants of the Monsoon Forest: Living and Working with Elephants. His work and this book really examines so many aspects of how connected we al...

It is Earth Day tomorrow April 22, so this episode is coming out a little late. As a celebration of Earth Day,  my guest Dr. Gary Shapiro and I talk about orangutans, the not for profit that he co-founded with his wife, and how becoming aware and researching the nuances of the difficult ecological problems we are facing is something we should all commit to this Earth Day 2021.    To learn more abo...

Today I am talking about insects, their weapons, how they are used in love and war, and how some scientists curious about why insects have elaborate weaponry use a bit of creativity to get some answers. One of those scientists, Dr. Zach Emberts is my guest today. He studies animal behavior and the evolution of anima weapons with a focus on insects.    Dr. Emberts is a National Science Foundation P...

In this episode I talk with  Dr. Adam- Hartstone-Rose whose bustling functional morphology and comparative anatomy lab at NCSU is not just giving us insights into the relationship between jaws and diet but is a place of mentoring for the next generation of scientists.  If you are digging the show subscribe and share it so others can enjoy it too. You can follow the show on Itunes, Google Play, or...

This episode is about our relationship to nature, how no matter how passionately you care about the planet you are complicit in its destruction by merely existing, and what, in face of calamity can we actually do about it?  Nathaniel Popkin,  novelist, essayist, editor, documentary writer, and critic has released a new book called To Reach the Spring: From Complicity to Consciousness in the Age of...

This episode is all about butterflies, or the pandas of the sky. Check out this cool art I had my friend and artist extraordinaire, Kry Hookuh create. You can check out her work at kryshookuhdoodles.com and follow her on Instagram @kryhookuh With the release of two new papers looking at what is happening to butterflies as a consequence of climate change, Katy Prudic , Assistant Professor of Data a...

This week's episode explores what we know about language, cognition and emotional intelligence in other animals. I talk with Con Slobodhcikoff,  CEO of Zoolingua and author of Chasing Dr. Doolittle: Learning the Language of Animals. You can find out more about Dr. Con at his website https://www.conslobodchikoff.com  and you can order a copy of his thoughtful and provocative book here . He is at th...

Welcome to the fourth episode of Wild Connection The Podcast. In this episode I share a little about how I came to even study animal behavior, some of my early experiences with great apes, and talk with literary scholar Gregory Tague about what he calls an ape ethic.  I got my start as a volunteer for the Center for Great Apes ( https://www.centerforgreatapes.org ), a sanctuary dedicated to provid...

Happy Valentine's Day! While other animals celebrate their unions more than once a year we humans have taken the single anniversary, single holiday, and otherwise infrequent approach. Our dating lives are filled with challenges and the same is true for other species. Like so many other species, we have to figure out how to date and mate successfully. As hard as that is, talking about it seems even...

This episode is about bioluminescence, why animals have it, the recent discovery that loads of mammals might just glow, and how the idea for one human invention was sparked by a creature that glows. When the story broke recently that Tasmansian devils are bioluminescent they joined the ranks of the platypus, the puffin, and quite a few other species. I knew it was time to get to the bottom of why...

  To start off the very first season I was able to snag an interview with Dr. Julie Meachen, vertebrate paleontologist specializing in Ice Age carnivores who is an Associate Professor of Anatomy at Des Moines University. Her and her collaborators have been in the news a lot lately. We’ll also get to talk about all the exciting discoveries she and her collaborators are making a little later in the...