Mushrooms of the Tucson Basin

By Jack Dash The Sonoran Desert is known for its strange and wonderful organisms like giant saguaro cacti, resilient desert tortoises, scavenging vultures, venomous Gila monsters and rattlesnakes, and so many more. But did you know the desert is also home to a variety of fungi? In fact, you’ll find fungi everywhere, from deserts to…

Sharing is Caring in the Sonoran Desert  

By Catherine Bartlett, Education Program Manager  What do limp lizards, a bundle of bats, and fresh fecal samples have in common? Love. Well, maybe not love exactly but each can certainly be seen as an act of generosity in the animal world. Of the five love languages (words of affirmation, quality time, physical touch, acts of service, receiving gifts) animals exhibit each, in some…

Weaving the Web of Life

Do you recall the grade school diagrams illustrating a simple food chain? This predator eats that prey and that prey eats plants, and plants obtain their energy from the sun and nutrients from soil. Arrows represent one organism eating another. Food chain diagrams help us visualize the flow of energy through an ecosystem. While the…