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The Value of Mutations

The crested duck is host to a mutation that can be lethal.
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#ForewordFriday: Get Your Hands Dirty Edition

With spring finally starting to show its face, we're thinking about everything that's green and growing. But as Yvonne Baskin shows in Under Ground: How Creatures of Mud and Dirt Shape Our World, we'd be nowhere without that most overlooked of substances: dirt. In the first chapter, she introduces an amazing world that holds two-thirds of the planet's biodiversity, from gigantic fungi to ancient microbes that can live in boiling hot springs or under sheathes of polar ice.
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The Cockle Collectors

In the Esmeraldas region of northern Ecuador a large mangrove reserve has been created, within which several villages have custodianship of the forests. Here traditional ways of mangrove-dependent fishing continue, including picking cockles from the mud around the mangrove roots.
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A Conchera Speaks

In May 2009 I set out on a two-month “state-of-the-forests” mangrove tour of the Americas. I wanted to document the plight of mangroves in the region and assess the impact of their loss on the thousands of coastal people who rely on these forests for food, shelter and livelihoods.