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 readingCategory: ecology
happy 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 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.)
Continue readingbeery bladders & other oddities
Beery bladders… yes, OK, if you drink enough beer your bladder will fill up, but that’s not the focus of a delightful post by Scicurious on Neurotic physiology. It’s a tale of how doctors followed their noses to find that several seriously ill patients had yeast infections – and a decidedly beery odour. And no, they […]
Continue readingour lives with dogs, & other interesting reading
I have a dog. As a result, papers to do with dogs tend to catch my eye 🙂 On his blog Neuroanthropology, Greg Downey reviews an upcoming book by Pat Shipman and discusses humanity’s long relationship with canines. Beginning with the point that "the first animals domesticated were not food sources, but a fellow predator and […]
Continue readingfungal parasites & zombie ants
Parasites are ubiquitous. I remember watching a video (years ago, while I was teaching at secondary school) about parasites that make humans their home. Lice, eyelash mites (yes, really!), various intestinal worms… I tell you, I had psychosomatic itching for days after seeing that! Then I got my hands on Carl Zimmer’s wonderful book, Parasite Rex – […]
Continue readinga solar salamander
This is a new story & potentially a very exciting one (& I must thank Grant for drawing this story to my attention!). A Nature News item (Petherick, 2010) describes the discovery of green algae apparently living within the cells of salamander embryos. I’ll wait with interest for the published paper, but if this finding’s […]
Continue readingnorthern rata – first it’s an epiphyte, then it’s not
Last year’s Level 3 paper on ‘plant responses & animal behaviour’ (AS 90716) had a question on northern rata – rather a lovely tree; I remember that we had one on our section back in Wairoa, when I was a kid. For some reason that tree & the big totara next to it had been left […]
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