It’s Fieldays time again (my excuse for not writing something ‘solid’!). This time round the theme is ‘my land, our environment’. Many of my colleagues are doing work on issues directly related to this theme – & they have an international reputation for the excellence of what they do. Anyway, the challenge was to represent some […]
Continue readingCategory: ecology
anhydrobiosis in antarctic organisms
I was vaguely contemplating writing about a question in last year’s Schol paper, to do with antifreeze proteins in polar fishes, when a journal alert popped up in my in-box. It was for a paper entitled How do terrestrial Antarctic organisms survive in their harsh environment? (Wharton & Marshall, 2009). The uni has an extensive Antarctic […]
Continue readingmultilingual bacteria & glowing squid
Did you know that there are more bacterial cells on & in your body, than there are cells that are ‘you’? Well, there are. And those bacterial cells don’t live in isolation, endlessly dividing & dividing & dividing… They communicate with each other. (I did know that, having read Carl Zimmer’s wonderful book Microcosm – but not […]
Continue readingthe world of ants
We’ve ‘got’ ants at our place at the moment – the other day we came home to a thick black column that stretched from a chink in the woodwork around the french doors, all the way across the dining room & into the pantry. Determined little beggars! I suppose we should count ourselves lucky, as […]
Continue readingdolphin vs squid
People seem to have a fascination with dolphins – they often interact positively with humans, & they show a wide range of complex & adaptable behaviour patterns. A new paper (Finn et al. 2009) describes complex prey handling in a wild bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus) off the South Australian coast. Given that it’s fairly hard to […]
Continue readingbone-eating worrrms!
‘Worms’ is a very general term that we tend to use for the variety of invertebrates that are soft-bodied & have a tubular body with a mouth at one end & an anus at the other. The familiar earthworm belongs to a group of worms called the annelids – worms with segmented bodies. There are […]
Continue readingwhy things got bigger
The earliest fossils we have are of prokaryotes – a major taxonomic grouping that includes both bacteria and members of the Archaea (things like blue-green algae, aka cyanobacteria). And like modern prokaryotes, those early life-forms were tiny. Most of us are far more familiar with some of the eukaryotes, and perhaps a major reason for […]
Continue readingthat’s not what the textbooks say should happen!
Islands can be home to rare and unusual species, which have often evolved in isolation for extremely long periods of time. On many – particularly oceanic islands – there may be no native land mammals, except, perhaps for bats. So when mammalian predators do make it to these islands the effects can be devastating. (Incidentally, […]
Continue readingthe 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 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 reading