Word: biologists
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...with oil. Certain bacteria "eat" oil, but they grow slowly in Alaska because of the cool water temperatures. Inipol speeds the reproduction of the oil-consuming organisms, and once Exxon began spraying it on with pump-driven wands, beaches showed considerable improvement. "I was impressed with Smith Island," says biologist Jill Parker of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "Before, you couldn't walk on it. It looks so much better." Exxon treated some 70 miles of shoreline with Inipol, almost half the area in the sound that was either heavily or moderately oiled...
...real prehistoric," says Fordham University biologist Mark Botton, a New York Giants cap perched on his curly black hair, as he ambles down the beach just feet from the frenzy. "We call it a random-collision process," he says, describing the orgiastic mating ritual of the world's largest population of horseshoe crabs. "It's just like billiard balls...
Which is a biologist's way of saying horseshoe crabs are repulsive. The scientific name, Limulus polyphemus, loosely translates as "slant-eyed Cyclops." But horseshoe crabs are not really crabs at all. They are arthropods, distant relatives of scorpions and spiders...
While fond of his cat, British biologist Peter Churcher looked askance at its practice of dragging small mammals and birds into his Bedfordshire house and devouring them under the kitchen table "to the sound of crunching bones." One of Churcher's associates, John Lawton, a professor of community ecology at the University of London, was similarly impressed by his own cat's predatory pursuits. With the natural curiosity of true scientists, they decided to look further into the depredations of felines. If all the domestic cats in Britain caught as much prey as theirs did, the two men reasoned, they...
...LaBudde, a biologist with Earthtrust, a Honolulu-based wildlife protection group, describes drift nets as "the single most destructive fishing technology ever devised by man." Drift nets work by entangling sea life in their nylon mesh. Ships later reel in the nets, taking out the squid or fish and discarding unlucky marine bystanders. It is like hunting for deer by poisoning every animal in the forest...