This afternoon the daughter sat Level 3 Biology (she seemed to quite like the paper). She said that one of the questions was about Darwin’s finches, based on some of the work of Peter & Rosemary Grant, who’ve been studying finches on the Galapagos Islands since 1973. During that time they’ve trapped, measured, banded & […]
Continue readingCategory: ecology
topical 1080
A couple of years ago now, we held a Cafe Scientifique with the topic 1080 – friend or foe? Topical then (it drew a large crowd, wtih people from both sides of the debate) & just as topical now. On the one hand, 1080 is promoted as our current best option for the control of possums, […]
Continue readingwolves in the cross-fire
A while back I wrote about the wolves of Yellowstone & what they can tell us about the ecological impacts of a top predator. Wolves were reintroduced to the US’s Yellowstone National Park in 1995, after an absence of around 50 years, & wildlife biologists were having a field day (pardon the pun!) examining the […]
Continue reading(i’ll say it again) dose really does matter!
While doing a little bedtime reading I came across a recent post by Orac that deconstructs some anti-vaccination nonsense spouted by a blogger (writing about some upcoming H1N1 flu vaccines) in the US. I don’t want to repeat it all – pop over to Orac’s place for the whole post. But one bit of foolishness […]
Continue readingplant growth responses to touch
Commenting on my last post about plant behaviour, Jim mentioned a paper by Marian Smith on plant responses to being touched or shaken. Unfortunately I couldn’t get the link to work, but I did a Google Scholar search on the name & topic & got this: Plant growth responses to touch – literally a ‘hands-on’ exercise! […]
Continue readingthe lost city & life undersea
I do love the fact that there is always something new to learn. And often, to pass on to my students. Like the ‘Lost City’ – a surreal landscape of ghostly white towers that’s formed around alkaline vents deep under the Atlantic Ocean. Now, I know about the ‘black smokers’ – fragile black towers belching […]
Continue readingfrom the ‘letters to the editor’ – vaccines & ear infections
A couple of days ago our local paper carried a letter that included the bald statement: "vaccines cause ear infections." My first response to that one was: citations, please! That sort of statement is incredibly dangerous, because it’s essentially saying, don’t vaccinate if you don’t want your kids to get ear infections. (The letter writer […]
Continue readingfossil poo & moa diets
When I was looking for the original paper for my post on moa feather colour & reductionism, I found a whole lot of other equally interesting stuff. As one does. (It’s just so easy to wander off down some interesting side path & get completely distracted from the original task…) One of those ‘other’ papers […]
Continue readingscience on the farm: “my land, our environment”
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 readinganhydrobiosis 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 […]
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