Happy 7th Bloggiversary!

Today is the 7th Bloggiversary of the ISW. You might have noticed there is not as much blogging going around here compared to last year - that's because I've been pretty busy with more official, Massachusetts-centric blogging duties over at the Massachusetts Introduced Pests Outreach Blog, as well as the maintenance of the MIPOP website and the Massachusetts Asian longhorned beetle Cooperative Eradication Program website. The ISW is not going anywhere, but the daily posting frequency has evolved to more of a weekly thing. To stay abreast of breaking invasive species news stories as they happen, consider subscribing to the ISW Twitter feed.

Happy New Year!

The ISW 2009 Wall Calendars are threatening to become irrelevant. I've knocked a buck off the price (hey, I only make $2 per calendar so there's not a lot of markup to work with). As always, I donate all proceeds I get from Cafepress to non-profit organizations doing work with invasive species.

Get yours today!

2009 Calendars Are Here!

The 2009 Invasive Species wall calendars are here, ready to be printed, sent to you, and hung lovingly (or hatefully!) on your wall or the wall of your favorite invasive species addict. The calendar features a variety of invasive plants and animals, from purple loosestrife to the Asian shore crab. All profits cleared from the sale of these calendars will be donated by me to an environmental group doing invasive species work.

Twitterific

The ISW twitters breaking invasive species news. Want to be the first to know when something bad shows up? Follow the feed.

Pontificating On Perennial Pepperweed

Found an interesting article in the Boston Globe about the perennial pepperweed (Lepidium latifolium) invading coastal wetlands in Massachusetts. It details ongoing efforts by the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge to protect wetland habitat from invasive plants while also engaging local volunteers in the project. And oh, look, they've quoted some smart biologist in the article! ;-)

Postal Service

In case you are wondering why the posts aren't quite so "daily" here at the ISW, it is because I have a new job that came with a new website and I have been blogging a bit over there. The Massachusetts Introduced Pests Outreach Project is, as you can guess, focused on the state of Massachusetts, so the flavor of the posting there is decidedly New England-centric. Feel free to stop by.

Feeds You Need

It's Blogroll Amnesty Day. When you're done shedding all those old, unread blogs, why not pick up a nice new coat of shiny science blogs to try on? I've got a few suggestions below, the caveat being that I'm partial to blogs that offer full posts in their RSS feed, so those that force me to click through did not make the list:

• Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog. I love this blog and I'm not even sure why! It's so darn interesting to be reading about Golden Rice one day and the rediscovery of an ancient Cambodian pepper the next. The folks that run ABW are really good at rounding up relevant links.
• Niches. How Wayne manages to put up such large posts so regularly, I'll never know. But he's been doing it for years, posts spanning topics from ecology to climate change to his enduring battle with Japanese stiltgrass. Once Wayne went away on vacation and left up a link to a webcam which featured footage of several cats running around his house with knocked over tables and such. Good times.
• The Voltage Gate. The SciBlings don't really need any more publicity, but I couldn't help but mention TVG as one of my favorite reads. Great science writing, some great nature writing, and an odd affinity for World of Warcraft creatures. Really just great writing all around.
• The annotated budak. Go for the excellent photos, stay for the excellent nature blogging. Actually, budak posts on a variety of topics including arthropods, coastal ecosystems, and his travels. budak also send in lots of stories to the ISW so maybe I am a bit biased, but really, look at this velvet ant!

Any good-but-lesser-known science blogs I've missed? Post 'em in the comments.

Tangled Bank is Here!

A new edition of the Tangled Bank blog carnival is up at The Innoculated Mind. Lots of good stuff, as usual.

Wide Open Lab

I am pleased to announce that my post "Square Pegs" has been selected for the 2007 science blogging anthology "Open Laboratory 2007." It is an honor to be chosen as there are not only many fine posts that will be sharing the pages, but also many more fine posts that were submitted but did not make it in this year.

Tangled Bank is Here!

A fresh edition of the Tangled Bank blog carnival is up at Ouroboros, check it out!

2008 Calendars Are Here!

The Invasive Species Weblog 2008 Wall Calendar is now available for purchase at Cafepress:

The calendar features more than a dozen invasive plants and animals, each depicted in an 11 x 8.5 inch full-color photo. Among this year's selections are Black Swallow-wort, Mute Swan, and Yellow Starthistle. If you click through you can see a preview of all twelve months.

The ISW store is also chock full of many more gifts for your favorite weed geek. All (meager) earnings received go to charity or back to ISW readers as contest prizes.

Click It Or Tick It!

There is still time to vote for the Invasive Species Weblog in the Best Science Blog category of the 2007 Weblog Awards. Go on, click it, you know you want to!

Voting ended with the ISW in 5th place...and then somehow two hours later the ISW was in 6th place. Either way, it was good just to be a finalist, and to see all the new visitors that stopped by over the past week!

You Can't Win If You Don't Play

The Invasive Species Weblog has made it to the finalist round of the Best Science Blog category of the 2007 weblog awards. It is an honor just to be nominated, especially given that there's not a chance the ISW will be victorious in a battle that includes the likes of Pharyngula and SciGuy. But hey, if you're here via the awards pages, thanks for stopping by, enjoy your stay, and I hope you learn something while you're here.

Update: The polls are now open. Vote here!

Working Class

The efforts of BIO 648, my invasive species class from last semester, can finally be seen online! Check out their class project, a set of seven species profiles full of information about the biology, ecology and management of plants and animals that are up-and-coming invaders in the New England region. A semester's worth of research went into this project and I think it shows in the quality of the profiles. Congrats everyone!

Weekend Egoblogging

Every once in a while I get tagged with a meme, and every once in a longer while I indulge my ego and respond...

The Animal Meme:

• An interesting animal I had: That's easy - my parrot. Clicker is a Senegal parrot, a pet store mascot my husband and I adopted from my dad when he closed his pet store several years ago. At first we balked at taking him, mostly because of my allergies, but my dad was pretty insistent and we have not regretted it one bit. He is a lot of fun to have around and is quite talented at learning new noises to mimic (he has a full repertoire of bodily functions he can imitate). Clicker is quite a popular little bird who even has his own MySpace page...and has at least 3 times more MySpace friends than I do.
  
  
• An interesting animal I ate: Hmm...I guess that would be alligator, when I was in New Orleans. It tasted like calamari.
  
  Being an (eccentric) invasive species biologist, I keep a life list of invasive species I have eaten. The animal part of the list is sorely lacking. I'm still looking for someone to venture into Chinatown with me and find a place that serves carp. A man from Asia that was at the last GISIN meeting insisted it is quite tasty!
  
  
• An interesting animal in the Museum: When my husband and I were first dating, we did a lot of crossword puzzles together. One that was particularly stumping us included a clue of "hoofed animal." We ended up solving it via the cross-clues - it was "aoudad." We were convinced it was some made-up creature, but later that month we visited the Academy of Natural Sciences, and in their taxidermy exhibit was a big fat aoudad!
  
  
• An interesting thing I did with or to an animal: Having worked in a pet store, it used to be part of my job to feed animals to other animals. I've fed mice to big snakes, goldfish to little snakes and turtles, and crickets to tarantulas. Watching animals catch and eat live prey is an interesting, if brutal event.
  
  
• An interesting animal in its natural habitat: Again, being an invasive species biologist, I am going to interpret this a bit loosely and consider animals in nature. There are too many examples of interesting invasive species, but I have managed to narrow it down by restricting the topic to things I have video for. So here's a cane toad wiggling its toe to attract (and eat!) its young, a red fox in Australia trying to grab a wallaby, and the gruesome story of introduced house mice gobbling up live albatross chicks on Gough Island.