… not to put beans in your ears. But in the case of our fruit-loop of a burmese cat, Fidget, the operative word should have been ‘blowflies’.
Continue readingCategory: animal behaviour
can ducks count?
I’m beginning to think there should be 36 hours in a day – I might be able to catch up with things then! Anyway, I was talking with a colleague this evening about a seminar he’d just done with his MSc students, & he said he’d begun with ‘that duck paper’ as it was a […]
Continue readinga pat a day may help keep the doctor away
Poppa’s been in hospital for the last two weeks. Until he was transferred to a hospital closer to his home we were visiting him regularly, but there was one member of the family that he couldn’t have cuddles with, & he really missed that. And who was he missing? Ben, the little poodle.
Continue readingpesky little hoppers
With the new house came a long drive lined with agapanthus. My mother would have said, "the dreaded agapanthus", & she wouldn’t have been far wrong. I don’t like the things very much; they spread very vigorously & I tend to view them as a weed. (I see from Te Ara that Biosecurity New Zealand was […]
Continue readinggoldfish & duckweed
Well, our happy expectations of duckweed & waterfern carpeting the top of our nice new goldfish pond have been dashed – the little beggars (fish) scoffed the lot! We’ve restocked with weed from the old pond but somehow I suspect we might be doing that for a while. Which shows how ignorant I am about […]
Continue readinghappy new year, & thanks for all the fish
Or so our cats might be forgiven for thinking. For among the many things that have occupied the family’s time in the last couple of weeks (along with moving house, having elderly relations to stay for Christmas, & cleaning up the old house for sale) has been the Great Goldfish Shift.
Continue readinghomos*xual necrophilia by a mallard drake
I’ll bet that got your attention! A little while ago I was running through a seminar with a colleague. It was an end-of-semester trip through various ‘oddities’ in the biological literature, including things like the amazing corkscrew penises of mallard ducks & the tendency of some tree shrews to use pitcher plants as potties. ‘Hmmm,’ […]
Continue readingAlgae & isopods – a unique symbiosis
When I set essays for my first-year students to write during the semester, I try to give them a scientific paper on each topic to start them off. This means that I need to do some extra bedtime reading as I need to select those papers carefully. Today’s post is based on one of those: […]
Continue readingbats and exam questions
The third question in last year’s Schol Bio paper was about bats – specifically, the ecology, behaviour, and evolution of New Zealand’s only two extant native land mammals, the lesser short-tailed bat & the long-tailed bat (Mystacina tuberculata & Chalinolobus tuberculata respectively). The long-tailed bat is a relatively new immigrant, arriving from Australia ‘just’ a […]
Continue readingrolling brown stuff
Today I saw an image that reminded me of a recent newspaper article that discussed a proposal to introduce ‘foreign’ dung beetles into New Zealand. (I’m assuming it’s a follow-up to an earlier news item from 2009.)
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