(I did wonder about using all Ks for that title…) In studying the animal behavior part of the curriculum, you may well have read about courtship & mating systems. In many cases it’s the male that initiates courtship, & sometimes they use very elaborate displays to catch the female’s eye. Think of birds-of-paradise and bower […]
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a sponge makes the top 10
Sponges are strange organisms – classified as animals, they definitely look the odd one out. I rather like them: no real tissue development, no organs, immobile, & a growth habit that looks distinctly plant-like. Instead, what you get is an organism formed from just a few types of loosely-organised cells, all sitting (& moving) on […]
Continue readingthe camel’s hump
Right now, like many of my colleagues, I’m busy marking end-of-semester exams. (In my case this process is complicated by the worst cold I’ve had in ages…) However, I’m happily procrastinating – as far as the marking’s concerned – because something a student wrote in an essay triggered this post 🙂 One of my essay […]
Continue readingmore on bone-eating snotworms – the fossil years
A while back I wrote about some fascinating little deep-sea creatures – the ‘bone-eating snot-worms’ (Osedax sp.) that colonise the corpses of dead whales falling to the ocean floor. Now Brian Switek, over on Laelaps, has reviewed a paper suggesting that this bone-boring habit has been around for millions of years. The evidence is in the […]
Continue readingcross-species hanky-panky
My first-year students & I are currently studying plants. This is actually something of a balancing act from my perspective as a reasonably large proportion of the class didn’t study the ‘diversity in plant structure & function’ standard back in year 12 (or don’t remember doing so), so I’ve got to bring them up to […]
Continue readingthe oversized naughty bits of female spotted hyenas
When I visited Pharyngula today I saw that PZ had posted a video about spotted hyenas. Female spotted hyenas. And that reminded me of one of the late Stephen Jay Gould’s wonderful essays on the same subject. (Gould remains one of my favourite science writers -although, having said that, I do find some of his later […]
Continue readinggrumpiness is best?
Today’s Herald carried a story from the UK’s Telegraph, which looked at some research into the social behaviour of chimpanzees & bonobos (‘pigmy’ chimanzees). And – as usual – extrapolated from this to people… Grumpiness, it told is, was a sign of a more ‘advanced’ nature, whereas the happier, more peaceable bonobos were ‘less evolved’.
Continue readingrather nice zoological videos
Over at Terrapin Procrastination there is a lovely long list of zoological videos for you to watch. (I don’t know whether or not to thank PZ for directing me there – right now I don’t have time to procrastinate!). My favourite description from the list would have to be ““sea angel” (pelagic nudibranch) kills and […]
Continue readinga wide froggy mouth – but not on a frog
When I was an undergraduate a joke about wide-mouthed frogs went the rounds… Frog mouths are quite interesting, actually. Look into that gape & you’ll see a tongue (which is rooted at the front of the mouth, allowing it a greater forward reach). Back of the tongue is the glottis, opening into the trachea, & […]
Continue readingcassowaries: crucial to rainforest ecology
This is the only photo we got of a cassowary, on our recent jaunt to Australia. (I’ll stop rubbing it in soon, I promise!). She was sitting in the corner of an enclosure at the Habitat in Port Douglas. Like our own kiwi, cassowaries belong to the ancient flightless group of birds known as ratites. Cassowaries […]
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