With National Pollinator Week behind us, it may be easy to focus on other issues and forget that pollinators need our help to bounce back. While many people only envision little honeybees when they think about pollinators, they couldn’t be a more diverse group of animals, including mammals, birds, insects, and even reptiles! Here […]
By Tim McSweeny and Dan Brooks, Ph.D. Last year Houston was devastated by Hurricane Harvey, with flooding covering streets, bayous and communities throughout Houston after the storm deposited about three feet of rain. One of the many parts of the city affected by the storm was the colony of Free-tailed bats living under the […]
Echolocation is a process in which sound waves and echoes are used to determine where various objects are in a given space. Bats use echolocation to navigate and find food when it is dark outside. Bats produce soundwaves out of their mouths or noses. These sound waves hit nearby objects and bounce back to […]
Dan Brooks, Ph.D. HMNS Curator of Vertebrate Zoology The Frensley/Graham Hall of African Wildlife, built 2002-04 was a new variation of a common traditional theme at HMNS, in that we wanted to portray more than just the Serengeti ecosystem. Prior versions of the hall focused on the Serengeti, which while a very important […]
The National Weather Service reported last week that 35 trillion gallons of water fell in the state of Texas during the month of May. The ground is soaked for what may well be weeks to come, our bayous have swollen far beyond their usual limits and residents in Harris and Ft. Bend counties continue to […]
by Melissa Hudnall Texans! Want to see exotic birds? Look out the window! Want to see 250,000 bats? Just go outside tonight and look up! As a wildlife teacher and outreach presenter for the museum, I’ve had a chance to talk with future generations about the amazing wildlife found in Texas. Usually students think you have […]
For the next several paragraphs, we’ll be talking about a few very special flying creatures (and some others) that are called pollinators — to whom we owe huge thanks for providing much of the food we eat! Without these pollinators to carry their pollen from flower to flower, plants could not form fruits or seeds […]
For bats being amazing examples of evolutionary resilience and fascinating, intelligent creatures with complex, long lives that perform invaluable ecological roles, we humans don’t seem to appreciate them very much. They’ve had a bad rep in cultures around the world due to their association with the night for millennia, but what’s this based on, really? […]
Bats have frightened, awed, and inspired for millennia. Leonardo da Vinci used the bat’s amazing wing structure as inspiration for his version of the ornithopter — a machine which flies using flapping bird-like wings. No one knows for sure if he ever built or tested his invention, but Cardanus, a contemporary of Leonardo wrote that […]
