The intrepid reporters from Number 8 Network e-mailed the other day. "What are you reading?" they asked; "after all, it’s the holidays & you must have heaps of time to put your nose in a book." Which is sort of right, it is the Christmas/New Year break, but the days just seem to fly by […]
Continue readingCategory: plant structure
biological 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 readingpesky little hoppers
With the new house came a long drive lined with agapanthus. My mother would have said, "the dreaded agapanthus", & she wouldn’t have been far wrong. I don’t like the things very much; they spread very vigorously & I tend to view them as a weed. (I see from Te Ara that Biosecurity New Zealand was […]
Continue readingstunning biological image #2
I teach a bit of botany, to our first-year students. I really enjoy the subject & hopefully some of that rubs off 🙂 Anyway, I’m always on the lookout for new images to use in my lectures, & tonight I came across this stunning photograph by Eckhard Völcker, who has very kindly given his permission for me […]
Continue readingyes, we have some bananas
Prominent creationist Ray Comfort once (in)famously commented that the ‘design elements’ that make up a banana, including its so-convenient shape, are evidence for the existence of a Designer. A comment that has been pretty resoundingly debunked – unsurprisingly, since the banana-as-we-know-it is due in large part to the hand of man, selecting for those features […]
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 […]
Continue readingazolla & endosymbiosis
There are other photosynthesisers besides Volvox, living in our fishpond. Bigger plants include waterlilies, various sedges, & Elodea. And at this time of year the surface is covered by a carpet of duckweed, but when summer comes the Azolla will tend to take over. Sometimes called ‘water fern’, Azolla contains an endosymbiont, a cyanobacterium (blue-green alga) that lives within […]
Continue readinghow a little green ball of cells controls where it’s going
In one of our first-year biology labs the students spend a bit of time looking down the microscope at various algae & protozoa. Some of their samples come from a container of interestingly weedy water from my fishpond. Not only is the pond covered with duckweed & Elodea, but it turns out to have a wide range […]
Continue readinglearning in lectures is a two-way street
I really enjoy my first-year bio classes, & one of the reasons for this is that the students respond to my questions and ask questions of their own. I’ve just read Marcus’s excellent post on what he’s learned from his students & it’s spurred me to write a bit about this too.
Continue readingwhy don’t students study plants?
I was going to write about yesterday’s dreadful Herald headline on the risks of multivitamin pills (which implied that women taking multi-vits are at a hugely increased risk of breast cancer) – but Jim McVeagh beat me to it. So…
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