‘Community’ is one of those words that has different meanings in science & general use. Every time I set an essay that asks students to talk about biological communities, someone will tell me about ant communities, or monkey communities, or human communities. But a biological community is a group of populations from several different species, living & interacting […]
Continue readingCategory: ecology
of ant hotels and homicidal figs
One of several highlights of our holiday was a guided tour of part of the Daintree National Park. There was so much to see! But we’d probably have walked straight past some wonderful plants & animals if it wasn’t for our guide, Ross. For example, the first time we encountered a Boyd’s forest dragon, all […]
Continue readingspeciation in darwin’s finches
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 readingtopical 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 […]
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