Insects and humans (& in fact all other animals with eyes) use the same visual pigment – rhodopsin. But in other ways, insect & mammal eyes are fundamentally different. The insect eye is a compound eye that comprises many individual units, while ours is a camera-type eye. And these structural differences have a considerable impact […]
Continue readingCategory: animal behaviour
the consequences of vision
You learn something new every day. One of the big talking points in palaeontology is the ‘Cambrian explosion’ – the seemingly rapid appearance (over ‘just’ a few million years!) of complex animal life, which occurred around 490-540 million years ago. Discussion ranges over the causes of this diversification and whether the apparent ‘explosion’ really happened […]
Continue readinganimal communication
I was sorting some papers today & came across some notes I wrote for a lecture about animal communication. And I thought they’d make a good subject for a blog.
Continue readingwhy play?
And the answer isn’t necessarily, ‘for fun’ 🙂
Continue readingunforseen consequences of megafaunal removal
It can be hard to predict the outcomes of human interference in an ecosystem, even when it’s done with the best of intentions. This paper looks at the unforseen consequences of removing large herbivorous mammals from part of an African savannah, & demonstrates just how complex ecosystem interactions can be.
Continue readingegg-eating foxes
Animals may put food away for a rainy day – or at least, for a time when supplies are in short supply. Squirrels do it, storing nuts in hollow trees or holes dug in the leaf litter. How many they find later is another matter! But I didn’t know that foxes are also into caching […]
Continue readinglong-legged (weta) males have more s*x
Here’s a neat bit of research that I was alerted to while reading the newspaper: a team of scientists studying the Cook Strait giant weta (Deinacrida rugosa) found that smaller males with longer legs are much more successful in gaining copulations (Kelly et al. 2008). (There’s a lot of information & pictures on NZ soil invertebrates […]
Continue readingmating systems in takahe
Takahe (Porphyrio hochstetteri) are one of the world’s most endangered birds. There are only around 120 still surviving in Fiordland, although a few more now live on predator-free islands off the New Zealand coast. (If you go to Tiritiri Matangi Island in the Hauraki Gulf you’ll be bound to see them.) But while the birds […]
Continue readingthe joys of essay-marking (no, seriously)
One of the benefits of reading (& marking) students’ essays is that you find a whole pile of new papers that are worth reading. (I expect them to go to the scientific literature for information & examples, and support for their ideas, & I will confess to getting just a leetle tetchy when they don’t….) […]
Continue readingculture in chimpanzees
When Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees making tools, it became clear that here was yet another example of the continuum between humans and non-human primates. Use and manufacture of tools was not something that distinguished humans from their close relatives, & chimps could be said to have a form of culture. Now here’s a paper that […]
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