Happy New Year, everyone 🙂 I was idly looking around for something to write about (definitely in holiday mood at the moment!) & came across a couple of websites that you might enjoy. And they’re even educational…
Continue readingCategory: animal behaviour
the strange case of the floating mud snails
Many year 13 Biology students will spend some time during the school year on a plant or animal study. Often the organisms you’ll study will be something like slaters, or duckweed, because they are easy to keep & study in the classroom. But that’s not always the case, & today I thought I’d write about one […]
Continue readingdo insects see the world as we do?
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 readingthe 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 […]
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