One of the nice things about reading books by great science writers is that I just know I’m going to learn lots. I’ve just got back into Nick Lane’s latest book Life Ascending (it’s been my lunchtime reading at work & recently other things have intruded…). Lane has a lovely lyrical way of writing that I really […]
Continue readingTag: animal behaviour
a question of isolation
I spent a lot of last weekend marking exam papers from my first-year bio students. Most of them chose one of my essay questions (it’s a team-taught paper & they had a choice of 3 essays in my section), & today one of the class told me that she’d really liked that question because it […]
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 readingself-grooming in cows
From time to time my Significant Other’s thoughts turn to life in the country. This can manifest itself in the purchase of lifestyle-block magazines. I was flipping through one this morning & came across an item on self-grooming in cows, & thought I’d look into it a bit further as it seemed to fit with my […]
Continue readingteaching old cows new tricks
I originally wrote the material in this post for the Science on the Farm website. It’s re-posted here because I thought it might be an interesting extension for those of you currently studying animal behaviour. Automatic milking is an exciting technological innovation facing the dairy industry in New Zealand, with the potential to affect farming lifestyles […]
Continue readingblood-sucking vampire moths!
On the way to work this morning I was listening to a Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, & one of the topics under discussion was vampires. Vampire moths! How cool is that? Vampire bats I know about, & vampire finches, but blood-sucking moths? I had to find out more…
Continue readingmore musings on human pheromones
A comment on my post about human pheromones got me thinking a bit more about the topic 🙂 Just how much do we know about these signalling chemicals & our ability to detect them? Many animals use scent as a basis for communication. Many female moths release a sexual pheromone that males can detect from […]
Continue readingthe scent of fear
Like other animals, humans produce pheromones – chemical signals released by one individual that carry information to another. (Unlike other animals, we also spend a lot of time & money modifiying those pheromones: bathing, deodorants, perfumes…) However, while the significance of pheromones in other animal taxa has been studied fairly thoroughly, there’s been less scientific […]
Continue readingwait until you can see the whites of their eyes
I was in a schol bio tutorial the other day & one of the students asked a really intriguing question – one that I hadn’t really thought about before. Apparently the class had watched the series Walking with cavemen a few weeks ago, & at some point (she couldn’t remember which species it was) the narrator […]
Continue readinghierarchies among our furry friends
September 1. Spring is (officially) sprung, the grass is riz, & the puppy is jumping all over the place. (In quite a different way from Bella – Ben gets up on his hind legs & prances. Must be a poodle thing.) But his arrival has rather upset the social order. Having pets of two different […]
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