Achievement Standard 90716 expects you to know something about a range of animal behaviours, including intraspecific relationships (territoriality, cooperative interactions, reproductive behaviours, hierarchical behaviour, competition for resources) – & the relationship between behaviour patterns & environmental factors. Quite a range of stuff there – although it’s worth remembering that these are not isolated, stand-alone categories. With […]
Continue readingCategory: animal behaviour
male polymorphisms & mating systems
Before I got sidetracked into mating behaviour in slugs & snails, I was mulling over the idea of writing about something equally complex – the area of male polymorphisms & mating systems. So here we go.
Continue readingsnail s*x toys
This tale follows on from that piece on leopard slug courtship from a few days ago. I commented then that copulation in garden snails is generally preceded by (among other things) pushing ‘darts’ into each other’s bodies. There’ve been various explanations for this odd behaviour (I mean, it sounds painful!), including the suggestion that the […]
Continue readingleopard slugs: s*x on a bungy cord
… or something like it anyway! Leopard slugs, like other terrestrial slugs & snails, are hermaphrodites. They produce both eggs & sperm, but must exchange sperm with another slug in order to fertilise their eggs. (This reproductive strategy means that an amorous snail doesn’t have to find a partner of the opposite sex, it needs […]
Continue readinga hearing chair – retraining the senses
Reading Simon Ing’s book, The eye, I was intrigued to hear about the possibility of learning to ‘see’ through the skin on your back. It involved a ‘vest’ bearing a set of rods with little actuators, controlled by a camera & computer. An image from the camera was converted into a fairly low-res image in the […]
Continue readingthe world of ants
We’ve ‘got’ ants at our place at the moment – the other day we came home to a thick black column that stretched from a chink in the woodwork around the french doors, all the way across the dining room & into the pantry. Determined little beggars! I suppose we should count ourselves lucky, as […]
Continue readinggreen sea slugs & endosymbiosis
A couple of years ago I sat in on a colleague’s botany lectures & was enchanted to hear about a green sea slug – green, because it eats algae & sequesters the algal chloroplasts within its own cells. A solar-powered sea slug!
Continue readingdolphin vs squid
People seem to have a fascination with dolphins – they often interact positively with humans, & they show a wide range of complex & adaptable behaviour patterns. A new paper (Finn et al. 2009) describes complex prey handling in a wild bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus) off the South Australian coast. Given that it’s fairly hard to […]
Continue readingbone-eating worrrms!
‘Worms’ is a very general term that we tend to use for the variety of invertebrates that are soft-bodied & have a tubular body with a mouth at one end & an anus at the other. The familiar earthworm belongs to a group of worms called the annelids – worms with segmented bodies. There are […]
Continue readingthat’s not what the textbooks say should happen!
Islands can be home to rare and unusual species, which have often evolved in isolation for extremely long periods of time. On many – particularly oceanic islands – there may be no native land mammals, except, perhaps for bats. So when mammalian predators do make it to these islands the effects can be devastating. (Incidentally, […]
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