Fun Fact: Niagara-on-the-Lake was first called Butlersburg! The British government send a surveyor to lay out a military grid for a town in 1781 at the mouth of the Niagara River. (Surprisingly, the first Europeans to document the area already visited a century earlier
There are 125-150 different species of maple trees in the world and about two thirds are located in China. Maples like deep, moist, and fertile soils, but are also adaptive growers great for boulevards, parks, and backyards. Canada actually only has 10 native species and they range from shrubs (vine maple) to 40 meter tall trees (big leaf maple).
The Niagara Gorge was the "silicone valley" of the late 1800's. Discussed at length in the tour, in summary, there was so much power to be gleaned from the falling water using hydroelectric generators that large industries swarmed to take advantage of that. However, the question begs, what did people use for electricity before the use of...
Did you know that bats are super diverse and account for 1/5th of all mammals! There are so many funny looking bats and they include white bats with yellow noses and ears, the trumpet-nosed bat, sucker-footed bats, and more. The bumblebee bat is one of the smallest mammals in the world weighing in at only 2 grams, it lives in Thailand....
This blog post may not be what you expect since it is not about birth and death, but rather about transformation. How does altering one aspect transform a relationship and thereby an ecosystem? Let's jump right in.
There are four ways an animal can survive the cold dark winter months in Niagara. They are;
To start off it is interesting to note is that the word canal was originally used in the fifteenth century to describe a tubular passage for fluids, and is closely tied to the words channel and cane. In case you were wondering, a canal is man made while a channel is natural. Since ships cannot pass through waterfalls such as...
When you see a fungus, most of the time you only see it's genitals. Yes, that's right. The fruiting body, the part of the fungus that produce spores, sprouts up while the rest of the fungus is hidden in a log or underground. A fungi is different from a plant in that it does not photosynthesize. It differs from bacteria...
Bjorn Lomborg leads a team that uses economics to determine the best way to save the planet. He introduces the idea of rank ordering the UN's sustainable development goals using a cost benefit analysis; with every dollar you put in you can do this amount of good, so where do you get the most out of your dollar? Stretching...
Is the universe conscious? We have probably all seen plants grow towards light and know that a seed senses gravitational pull to know which way is up. You may have even have heard that plants like classical music. Botanists, farmers, and greenhouse growers have shown peanuts, rice, tobacco, tomatoes, soy and corn actually growing better when...