A comment on my post about human pheromones got me thinking a bit more about the topic 🙂 Just how much do we know about these signalling chemicals & our ability to detect them? Many animals use scent as a basis for communication. Many female moths release a sexual pheromone that males can detect from […]
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the scent of fear
Like other animals, humans produce pheromones – chemical signals released by one individual that carry information to another. (Unlike other animals, we also spend a lot of time & money modifiying those pheromones: bathing, deodorants, perfumes…) However, while the significance of pheromones in other animal taxa has been studied fairly thoroughly, there’s been less scientific […]
Continue readingwait until you can see the whites of their eyes
I was in a schol bio tutorial the other day & one of the students asked a really intriguing question – one that I hadn’t really thought about before. Apparently the class had watched the series Walking with cavemen a few weeks ago, & at some point (she couldn’t remember which species it was) the narrator […]
Continue readinghierarchies among our furry friends
September 1. Spring is (officially) sprung, the grass is riz, & the puppy is jumping all over the place. (In quite a different way from Bella – Ben gets up on his hind legs & prances. Must be a poodle thing.) But his arrival has rather upset the social order. Having pets of two different […]
Continue readingzombie attacks and worms with luminescent bombs
Every so often someone writes a paper with a really eye-catching title. I’ve come across two of these this week: When Zombies Attack! Mathematical modelling of an outbreak of zombie infection (no, honestly, I’m not making it up! You can read the original paper here) and Deep-sea, swimming worms with luminescent ‘bombs’ (Osborn, Haddock, Pleijel, Madin & […]
Continue readingwatch where you pee
This afternoon, while I was sweating out my frustrations via one of the gym’s cross-trainers, I listened to the May 20th podcast from The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Among other things, they discussed the candiru, a small freshwater Amazon fish that allegedly swims up the urine stream of someone urinating (stories aren’t clear as to whether you […]
Continue readingblindfold squid & other fascinating things
You might know that squid can change the colour patterns on their skin. But how does this happen? & if the changes are in relation to a changing colour in the environment, how do squid know about this – do they see the change, or sense it in their skin? (Hence the ‘blindfold squid’ of my title.) […]
Continue readingsnakes & spiders & solenodons – oh my!
Now here’s a weird-looking little beastie: It’s a solenodon (although to me it looks a bit like those big rats – the Rodents of Unusual Size – in the fire-swamp scences of The Princess Bride… gosh, I enjoyed that movie!). And its chief claim to fame is that it’s a venomous mammal. Snakes, blue-ringed octopuses, spiders… there […]
Continue readingfossil poo & moa diets
When I was looking for the original paper for my post on moa feather colour & reductionism, I found a whole lot of other equally interesting stuff. As one does. (It’s just so easy to wander off down some interesting side path & get completely distracted from the original task…) One of those ‘other’ papers […]
Continue readingspeciation in the here-&-now
One of the arguments commonly levelled against the idea of speciation is that we can never see it happening. That argument is simply incorrect, & some time soon I guess I should at least give you some links to evidence that supports my statement. But in the meantime, I’ve just come across another apparent example […]
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