Articles

Many mangrove restorations fail. Is there a better way?

Coastline-protecting mangroves aren't just essential habitat for flats species, they're sponges for greenhouse gases. Planting right and involving local communities are key to saving them.

by Katarina Zimmer - Wednesday, Oct 27th, 2021

Photo: F. Reddy

If any single event was a watershed for conservation of the world's mangrove forests, it was the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. The day after Christmas that year, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake thundered along a fault line on the ocean floor with a force that sent waves — some a hundred feet high — surging toward the densely populated coasts encircling the Indian Ocean. The disaster took more than 225,000 lives.

The old one

One poor decision can change your role from predator to prey

by Johnny Carrol Sain - Friday, Oct 22nd, 2021

Photo: Johnny Carrol Sain

While my state still boasts of woodlands, plains, and waterways with wildlife abounding, the region is a far and primal cry from the fauna-filled wilderness it once was. Prior to Euro-American settlement, Arkansas was a documented home to elk, American bison, red wolves, and mountain lions. Though we’re a few hundred miles southeast of their known historic range, I’d imagine a stray grizzly or two wandered down the Arkansas River in search of new territory.

A fly that lives up to its name

And how to tie it

by Chris Hunt - Wednesday, Oct 20th, 2021

Photo: Chad Shmukler

In 1922, Leonard Halladay tied up a mayfly imitation on the banks of Michigan’s Boardman River, and then handed the fly to his friend Charles Adams to take with him fishing. The rest is history, as the fly old Chuck tied on at the river proved to be an excellent attractor dry fly, and now, bearing the angler’s last name, is recognized as perhaps the best dry fly ever crafted.

To our lost fish

Many of the fish we feasted on just years ago are now gone—which will be the next to go?

by Charles Witek - Monday, Oct 18th, 2021

Artwork symbolizing the demise of the North Atlantic cod fishery, featured in the exhibit "On the Water" in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. This piece and others like it were crafted by fisherman Dan Murphy of Dunville, Newfoundland (photo: M. Tindc / cc2.0).

I’m interested not only in fish, but in food, and I’ll sometimes find myself reading a book about some aspect of food history, the development of American cuisine, or something of that sort. Right now, I’m reading Lost Feast, by Lenora Newman.

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