Over on ‘of trees and birds and other things’ Jarrod points out why it’s not a terribly good idea to base your view of a scientific issue on a single story in the popular press… (& hat-tip to David Winter on the atavism, who alerted me to this new evolutionary blog!) For the teachers & students […]
Continue readingCategory: ecology
you could probably sell anything with the right sales pitch
My post about zeolite & the supposedly ‘chemical-free’ nature of various dietary supplements containing the stuff led to some interesting comments, & generated a few ‘I wonder if…’ moments. After all, as Krebiozen said (in the comments thread to that post): With the right sales pitch you could probably persuade some people that eating feline […]
Continue readingwe saw koalas!
We’ve just got back from a holiday over in Australia – hence the lack of blogging after the last burst. (If I’d done anything work-related I suspect I’d have experienced a rapid divorce!) Of course, before we left our friends were all saying "we hope you spot some koalas." We hoped so too, but after […]
Continue readinga mammoth resurrection task
I spent Saturday down in Hawkes Bay, running at Scholarship Biology preparation day at Lindsfarne College. (I would have spent Sunday happily idling through the lovely Art Deco parts of Napier, & visiting a few vinyards, but the weather forecast made me reconsider this option & I ended up driving back to Hamilton once the […]
Continue readingbiological oddities, including the naughty bits
Last night I gave a talk up in Auckland, on various biological oddities (mostly from the animal kingdom and, all right, mostly to do with s*x). You can slip a lot of serious science in once the audience’s attention has been captured by the naughty bits! (I would hate folks to think that biologists are […]
Continue reading“1080 poison gets tick from report”
Thus said a headline in today’s on-line Herald. Presenting the report, Commissioner from the Environment, Jan Wright, commented that "without 1080, our ability to protect many of our native plants and animals would be lost." So I thought this was a good time to re-post something I wrote earlier on the subject of 1080.
Continue readingwaiter, there’s a fish in my cucumber!
My sea cucumber, that is. I was going to write something full of snark about the current brouhaha around predictions that the world is going to end on May 21st. But Darcy has beaten me to it! So instead (from the Echinoblog, and via PZ) I offer you… [drumroll]… the sea cucumber with fish residing in its nether […]
Continue readingmy mother said…
… 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 readingcan 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 readingsomething old & something new
Due to popular request (oh, all right, one of my colleagues asked), I thought I’d upload some pictures of the old & new fishponds. Meant to do it when I first wrote about the Great Goldfish Shift but for some reason our VPN server kept cutting me off when I tried to upload the images, […]
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