Mad Metazoa

The post where the saga begins Caption: Wait a minute, isn't that the crab from the blog? How meta...zoa. Image: Gunnar Tribelhorn Here’s the easy part; today marks the official launch of the blog Mad Metazoa , where I intend to cover all sorts of topics relating to the fields of animal behavior, nature, and scientific philosophy more broadly (I may even stray into the infernal world of politics from time to time). What authority do I have in writing about these sorts of things? That's where it gets trickier. Justification has long evaded my capture; yea, some earlier iteration of the blog would already exist if I’d managed to nab it before. I can answer the inevitable questions about the name, however, and maybe somewhere in this explanation a bit of justification will reveal itself. A name of two parts will require two explanations. I’ll start with the latter. ‘Metazoa’ is an old name, bestowed by the great illustrator-naturalist Ernst Haeckel in 1874 to differentiate the uni...