A healthy network of plants and insects is the foundation of a healthy environment for all life on Earth, including people. In Rhode Island, there’s a whole community of programs working on the plant-insect network: studying pollinators, promoting native plants, building sustainable agriculture, and educating… Continue reading
by Robert D. Kenney Three of the previous installments in this Marine Mammals of Rhode Island series have been about seals that occur in our region—harbor seals, harp seals, and gray seals. Gray seals were also the subject of an article in the Fall 2022… Continue reading
The Rhode Island Natural History Survey is excited to announce the return of its periodic publication, the Rhode Island Naturalist. This publication covers local natural history stories written by professional and amateur scientists and naturalists. The Survey will publish two issues per year, Summer and… Continue reading
by Robert D. Kenney Gray seals (“grey” seals in Canada and Europe) are the second most likely seal species to be encountered in Rhode Island, after harbor seals (harbor seals are covered in installment 5 in this series). Unlike harbor seals, which are found in… Continue reading
by Robert D. Kenney I know what you’re saying—“He’s really gone off the deep end now! There are no gray whales in the Atlantic.” That’s sort of true (take your pick about which part), but not entirely. In May of 2010 marine biologists conducting a… Continue reading
by Stephen S. Hale If you reached this page following a link to Stephen Hale’s blog about the Newport Natural History Society, you should know that he developed his blog into a full-fledged article and we published it in our bulletin, the Rhode Island Naturalist… Continue reading
by Stephen Hale Every state has a list of official state symbols, but Rhode Island is unique in having an official state appetizer. At least seventeen of Rhode Island’s state symbols relate to plants and animals and rocks (see table and images). Relative to the… Continue reading
by Robert D. Kenney Humpback whales were not scheduled to be the next installment in this series, but a lot of things have been happening recently, so it seemed like a timely idea to let them cut in line. [Editor’s Note: this was sent to… Continue reading
by Robert Kenney Mother Nature is never quite as neat as we’d like her to be. Common dolphins are a good case in point; over the years they have given me quite a headache. Although I first learned as a graduate student that there was… Continue reading
by David Gregg The $5 term for the ticks and mosquitoes, no-see-ums, deer flies, horse flies, and all that literally bug us while we’re enjoying our outdoors pursuits, collectively, is “haematophagous arthropods.” Mites are in the Acari, a sub-class of the Arachnida (spiders and kin)… Continue reading