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461 After the divers suit up, they each grab a mesh bag. I tell them that they look like they’re going scalloping and Dr. Nathan Johnson says that, actually, he had done just that over the weekend. Recreational and professional lives align. Scallops in Crystal River over the weekend, freshwater mussels in the Apalachicola River today. Nathan is a mussel biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

161 This past weekend, many of us stared at our flowers for the Great Southeast Pollinator Census. We saw bees and butterflies, of course. Maybe you added a few ticks in the “Flies” or “Wasps” boxes. Did anyone see “Other Insects?” What I want to know, more than anything else, is whether anyone saw their pollinators devoured by those other insects. Or a spider. Or, perhaps, devoured by another pollinator.

229 The day we recorded this podcast episode, I set a record for the least amount of ground covered in a WFSU Ecology field outing. As one of my guests told me, you don’t burn a lot of calories as a mycologist. We spent two hours looking for mushrooms at Wakulla Springs State Park, and you can see how many we found in the banner image above. We walked maybe 100-150 feet. When we think of ecosystems, we think of plants and animals first.

210 As we were planning what I’d write for my first post on this blog, I expected an excursion of maybe a stroll of a mile or two while snapping photos of cool plants and animals. But once WFSU Ecology Producer Rob Diaz de Villegas and I set out at Shoal River Headwaters State Park, that assumption was turned on its head. The park exists to protect the headwaters of the Shoal River, a part of the Yellow River watershed that eventually flows into Pensacola Bay.

331 In 2026, most of Florida experienced Extreme (D3) or Exceptional (D4) Drought, and as of July, this has persisted in many areas. The effects are visible in water bodies connected to the Floridan aquifer. Spring flow is down in the Suwannee River basin, compounding decades of aquifer withdrawals that have placed the Suwannee on the Ten Most Endangered Rivers in the United States, a list released annually by American Rivers.

No, it’s not a separate blog, but a place for students to find their ecological voice. The WFSU Ecology Blog has always featured younger contributors. Graduate students and undergrads, biology students, English majors, media production majors, artists, and even one high school student. The goal of this blog is to connect north Floridans to their wild lands and waterways. This has also been a place for writers and media-makers to learn to tell those stories.

144 Last year, I discovered a population of a rare bee. Melissodes mitchelli specializes in prickly pear flowers, which limits where and when we might find it. I found the bee, by chance, in the Munson Sandhills, the only population of the bee in the Florida panhandle. But north Florida has a few intact sandhill habitats, and prickly pears also grow by beach dunes as well. Naturally, I wanted to find the bee in other locations.

149 What follows is a discussion I’ve wanted to record for some time. Not long after we started covering archaeology on the Ecology Blog, I met Misty Penton. Misty is the storyteller and tradition keeper for the Muscogee Tribe of Florida, and she’s a bioarcheologist. Over the years, she has told Muscogee stories on the blog and with the WFSU Education team. Off camera, we had talked about her and her father’s native perspective as archeologists, uncovering a past that was part of their heritage.

129 You may have just walked up to the WFSU Public Media front door and wondered, “What’s with these cool nature murals?” You then might have clicked on the QR code we drew on one window, and here you are! If you want to know who drew these murals, and what plants and animals you’re seeing, we have answers. More importantly, I want to tell you why we embarked on this artistic collaboration.

We go to Bald Point to talk to Susan Cerulean about her new book, a …