Biodiversity

Here for ROM for the Holidays, it’s the long-awaited return of the Earth Rangers Studio Winter Wonderland in Life in Crisis: the Schad Gallery of Biodiversity!

It’s that time of year!  ROM for the Holidays is finally here, and we’ve been hard at work in the Keenan Family Gallery of Hands-on Biodiversity (HOB for short) getting some new hands-on activities ready to go.

First up is the brand-new, never-before-seen touch table that we put together in honour of our lost baby bison.

I love sharing the cool secrets of the ROM with visitors, so it really made my day when our Name the Queen Bee Contest winner Kaitlyn visited the ROM with her mom and her brother Kynan (who also happened to be our third place winner).

To educate and foster appreciation for these much-loved colourful insects, the City of Toronto, in partnership with the ROM and Livegreen Toronto, has published a new book, Butterflies of Toronto: A Guide to their Remarkable World. With hundreds of full-colour photographs, this new publication shares the local history of butterflies and details on where they live in Toronto. It is part of a Biodiversity Series being produced by the City to commemorate the Year of Biodiversity 2010.

We love picnicking outside in the summer but in August and September our meals are inevitably cut short because of wasps. What are they and what can we do about them?

Primates have been at the forefront of The Life in Crisis: Schad Gallery of Biodiversity these days.

This is my second posting that takes a closer look at some of the critters that share our spaces. Here I examine one of our most common household guests, the carpet beetle. The larvae look like tiny, furry, ‘caterpillars’.

Larva of a carpet beetle, family Dermestidae, also known as skin or hide beetles. Drawing: copyright ROM.