I'm currently supervising a graduate student who's writing a review of the literature on tool use in wild chimpanzees. This has become a most enjoyable interaction: it's a topic I've been interested in for quite a while now, so the supervision role is an excuse to extend my own knowledge, and it's great helping the […]
Continue readingI've just come across a most excellent article by the Genetic Literacy Project. In it, Nicholas Staropoli notes that a proportion of the human genome actually has viral origins. This might sound a bit strange – after all, we tend to think of viruses as our enemies (smallpox, measles, and the human papilloma virus come […]
Continue readingSo, I own a pocket wolf. … … Oh, OK, I own a little black mini-poodle. But, like all dogs, he has the same number of chromosomes as a wolf! There've been several articles posted recently about the evolution of domestic dogs. While we've tended to think that domestication didn't begin until humans began to […]
Continue readingTunicates are more commonly known as 'sea squirts' – little blobby marine creatures that squirt water when you touch them (hence the name). We don't hear about them often, except perhaps when they make the news for all the wrong reasons. But from an evolutionary perspective they are fascinating little creatures – and it's largely […]
Continue readingOnce upon a time, I wrote about traumatic insemination in bedbugs. (Those of my friends who are still traumatised by learning about the reproductive habits of various slug species may not wish to follow that link.) Now, two papers just published in Nature Communications describe the results of sequencing & examining the genome of the […]
Continue readingBy now many of you have probably seen images of green-glowing zebrafish, or pigs whose snout & trotters glow in the dark. In both cases the animals are genetically modified and are expressing a fluorescent protein originally sourced from a jellyfish. (The body form of a jellyfish is a medusa, while that of sea anemones & […]
Continue readingWhen I was a kid I used to collect shells on the beach – got my Girl Guides 'collectors' badge & everything 🙂 So I really enjoyed reading this post over on Sciblogs NZ. And that in turn reminded me of an article I saw recently on microsnails. According to that article, "Microsnail" is the […]
Continue readingIn 2012 the world was introduced to some of the smallest-known vertebrates: tiny chameleons. My good friend Grant wrote about them at the time, & I set an essay assignment for my first-years on these tiny beasties. How tiny is tiny? The following images are from the original paper, published in PLoS one by Glaw, Kohler, […]
Continue readingWell, probably not1, in the sense that most would place on the term 'tummy bug' (where a close proximity to the toilet is a Good Thing), but it turns out that he did have some rather interesting intestinal bacteria. Ötzi is perhaps better known as the 'Iceman', who died around 5,300 years ago in the […]
Continue readingI've never heard of gribbles before, & did wonder if they were in some way related to tribbles (or a certain US politician's hair…). But no, it turns out that gribbles are small, wood-boring crustaceans. And they look rather cute: Image by Prof Simon McQueen-Mason & Dr Simon Cragg However, their cuteness should not obscure […]
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