Every so often someone writes a paper with a really eye-catching title. I’ve come across two of these this week: When Zombies Attack! Mathematical modelling of an outbreak of zombie infection (no, honestly, I’m not making it up! You can read the original paper here) and Deep-sea, swimming worms with luminescent ‘bombs’ (Osborn, Haddock, Pleijel, Madin & […]
Continue readingTag: animal behaviour
watch where you pee
This afternoon, while I was sweating out my frustrations via one of the gym’s cross-trainers, I listened to the May 20th podcast from The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Among other things, they discussed the candiru, a small freshwater Amazon fish that allegedly swims up the urine stream of someone urinating (stories aren’t clear as to whether you […]
Continue readingblindfold squid & other fascinating things
You might know that squid can change the colour patterns on their skin. But how does this happen? & if the changes are in relation to a changing colour in the environment, how do squid know about this – do they see the change, or sense it in their skin? (Hence the ‘blindfold squid’ of my title.) […]
Continue readingsnakes & spiders & solenodons – oh my!
Now here’s a weird-looking little beastie: It’s a solenodon (although to me it looks a bit like those big rats – the Rodents of Unusual Size – in the fire-swamp scences of The Princess Bride… gosh, I enjoyed that movie!). And its chief claim to fame is that it’s a venomous mammal. Snakes, blue-ringed octopuses, spiders… there […]
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 readingspeciation in the here-&-now
One of the arguments commonly levelled against the idea of speciation is that we can never see it happening. That argument is simply incorrect, & some time soon I guess I should at least give you some links to evidence that supports my statement. But in the meantime, I’ve just come across another apparent example […]
Continue readingwhat turns on zebra fish
Achievement Standard 90716 expects you to know something about a range of animal behaviours, including intraspecific relationships (territoriality, cooperative interactions, reproductive behaviours, hierarchical behaviour, competition for resources) – & the relationship between behaviour patterns & environmental factors. Quite a range of stuff there – although it’s worth remembering that these are not isolated, stand-alone categories. With […]
Continue readingmultilingual bacteria & glowing squid
Did you know that there are more bacterial cells on & in your body, than there are cells that are ‘you’? Well, there are. And those bacterial cells don’t live in isolation, endlessly dividing & dividing & dividing… They communicate with each other. (I did know that, having read Carl Zimmer’s wonderful book Microcosm – but not […]
Continue readingmale polymorphisms & mating systems
Before I got sidetracked into mating behaviour in slugs & snails, I was mulling over the idea of writing about something equally complex – the area of male polymorphisms & mating systems. So here we go.
Continue readingsnail s*x toys
This tale follows on from that piece on leopard slug courtship from a few days ago. I commented then that copulation in garden snails is generally preceded by (among other things) pushing ‘darts’ into each other’s bodies. There’ve been various explanations for this odd behaviour (I mean, it sounds painful!), including the suggestion that the […]
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