Featured image from https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/animals-and-plants/native-animals/native-animal-facts/brush-tailed-possum Recently I shared this Spinoff article about extinction on Twitter, & tagged the Science Learning Hub as the NZ focus makes the article a good fit with their mahi supporting student learning. But I was somewhat surprised to have someone else pop up saying that they wouldn’t read it because, […]
Continue readingThis gorgeous little insect is a female Australian bag moth (Cebysa leucotelus) – in this image she’s sitting on the netting we’re using to keep the late-season cabbage butterflies off our brassicas, but I suspect that normally she’d have been a little harder to spot. After all, from the tips of her antennae to the […]
Continue readingI suspect many of those reading (like many of my friends) will have watched the series The Last of Us. (I haven’t, because I’m fairly sure I’d be spending a fair bit of time with my eyes shut!¹) What you might not realise is that the fungal “protagonist” (for want of a better word) is actually […]
Continue readingWhat is a mastodon, anyway? Like mammoths (on the left in the image above), mastodons were common during the last ice age, but the two elephant-like creatures are fairly distant relatives. The more-familiar mammoths were close cousins of modern elephants (a fact that is of interest to those considering doing a Jurassic Park on mammoths – […]
Continue readingWhen I wrote this, 5 years ago, pangolins were in deep strife due to human greed & stupidity (plus a side order of habitat destruction). I saw this bittersweet video on Twitter today, & thought I’d repost my original article, since nothing has changed. Baby Pangolin ❤️ pic.twitter.com/DyuRU6OwYm — Sunlit Rain (@Earthlings10m) February 12, 2023 […]
Continue readingImage from Science News, courtesy S.Mitoh Autotomy. There’s a word you don’t see every day – but those familiar with lizards may well have seen the result. For autotomy is the scientific name for what I suppose we could also call “self-amputation”: the process whereby an animal deliberately sheds a part of its body (a […]
Continue readingOn Friday we went for a walk in the Karangahake Gorge, and were very happy to discover (during the Windows Walk) that there are glow-worms in the darker parts of the mine workings. (Strictly speaking they’re glow-maggots as they’re the larvae of small flies/midges, but that is perhaps less attractive to the ear 🙂 ) […]
Continue readingThis is a post of two parts: the interesting tale of convergence involving crab-like creatures, and the very poor – nay, crappy (because I like the alliteration) – headline on a popular article about it. Part 1: the history of carcinization in crustaceans, described in this 2017 paper in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society […]
Continue readingI wrote this post a couple of years ago, but I think it’s worth revisiting it. Why? Because these crayfish are in the news again – apparently they’ve “taken over” a Belgian cemetery (or, more correctly, the waterways in that cemetery). Local scientists believe that someone must have had the crustaceans in a home aquarium […]
Continue readingMidas cichlids (Amphilophus spp.) are a popular aquarium fish, but in the wild they’re found in South America, ranging from Nicaragua to Costa Rica. The 2018 Schol Bio paper included a really interesting question about a Nicaraguan ‘species complex‘ of these fish, based on a paper in Nature Communications. and a monograph in Cuadernos de […]
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