From the archives

San Diego's mosquitos, ferrets, sea lions

The non-native eucalyptus, Carrizo Badlands

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It’s the unglamorous beetle I love the most! Not the bee and its honey, not the ant and its industriousness (and its feature movies), not the butterfly and its brilliant colors.

  • Deadly Mosquitoes Breed in Our Urban Drool

  • Of the 40 “sentinel chickens” used for early detection, 13 have converted to West Nile, including all 10 in Los Peñasquitos Lagoon, 2 in Oceanside, and 1 in the Tijuana River Valley. In the past, no more than 1 chicken had converted.
  • By Geoff Bouvier, Jan. 21, 2009
West Nile mosquito. She’s turned left off Garnet Avenue in Pacific Beach and parked her truck alongside gutter water running down Olney Avenue and turning onto Oliver Avenue. "You’d be surprised how much of this ‘drool’ is attractive to mosquitoes.”

  • Ferrets Eat Babies. They Shred Human Tissue. They Drink Blood.

  • The larger problem now is what Wright notes as a general tone of apathy among San Diego’s ferret keepers. “Since there’s been no enforcement — the last ferret bust in San Diego was over a year ago — no ferret owners are working for legalization.”
  • By Dave Good, May 9, 2012
"My sister is an attorney. She told me to lose the ‘I Love Ferrets’ license bracket, because it gave police probable cause to search the car on a traffic stop.” (Howie Rosen)

  • La Jolla Cove is becoming a sea lion cesspool

  • ...and there’s not much to be done about it
  • The small number of sea lions that swimmers used to enjoy watching frolic some years ago has turned into a colony of as many as 300, ranging in size from 100-pound females to 900-pound bulls.
  • By Caitlin Rother, Jan. 15, 2014
Keith Merkel, a biological consultant hired by the city, says, “The thing about people is they’re willing to pet anything until they get bit.”

  • Everybody's Got a Favorite Bug

  • "I asked Bob Parks to name his favorite wasp. Ammophila: after all these years. Perhaps it was her (the wasp Parks was observing was a female) shape that first drew his attention. One naturalist has written: “…her abdomen looks like a pear on the end of a length of string. Nevertheless, she is graceful and svelte."
  • By Thomas Lux, April 11, 2002
Bob Parks is almost completely self-taught — as a photographer, as an entomologist, lepidopterist, herpetologist, etc.

  • The Fall of King Eucalyptus

  • Apart from the 150 acres of coastal sage scrub preserved in Florida Canyon, the landscape of Balboa Park's 1172 acres is a wholly unnatural creation, filled with species imported from every continent except Antarctica.
  • By Jeannette De Wyze, May 24, 2007
Kate Sessions Balboa Park Nursery. You could live in San Diego all your life and never notice the inconspicuous sign that marks the nursery's entrance just down the hill from the Frisbee golf course on Pershing Drive. (Alan Decker)

  • The Nothing That Is Not There And The Nothing That Is

  • The person who'd led me into this cave was undoubtedly one of the premier natural scientists in San Diego, Jerry Schad. The woman, whose tone had turned faintly more confident in the wider, slightly brighter space — "We should have brought a flashlight" — was Schad's friend, Chong Yim.
  • By Geoff Bouvier, March 15, 2007
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Canyon Sin Nombre. "We're going in there," Schad said excitedly, indicating an opening between two rock faces, and then we parked. (Frank Glaser)
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