… or something like it anyway! Leopard slugs, like other terrestrial slugs & snails, are hermaphrodites. They produce both eggs & sperm, but must exchange sperm with another slug in order to fertilise their eggs. (This reproductive strategy means that an amorous snail doesn’t have to find a partner of the opposite sex, it needs […]
Continue readingTag: animal behaviour
the world of ants
We’ve ‘got’ ants at our place at the moment – the other day we came home to a thick black column that stretched from a chink in the woodwork around the french doors, all the way across the dining room & into the pantry. Determined little beggars! I suppose we should count ourselves lucky, as […]
Continue readinggreen sea slugs & endosymbiosis
A couple of years ago I sat in on a colleague’s botany lectures & was enchanted to hear about a green sea slug – green, because it eats algae & sequesters the algal chloroplasts within its own cells. A solar-powered sea slug!
Continue readingdolphin vs squid
People seem to have a fascination with dolphins – they often interact positively with humans, & they show a wide range of complex & adaptable behaviour patterns. A new paper (Finn et al. 2009) describes complex prey handling in a wild bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus) off the South Australian coast. Given that it’s fairly hard to […]
Continue readingbone-eating worrrms!
‘Worms’ is a very general term that we tend to use for the variety of invertebrates that are soft-bodied & have a tubular body with a mouth at one end & an anus at the other. The familiar earthworm belongs to a group of worms called the annelids – worms with segmented bodies. There are […]
Continue readingthat’s not what the textbooks say should happen!
Islands can be home to rare and unusual species, which have often evolved in isolation for extremely long periods of time. On many – particularly oceanic islands – there may be no native land mammals, except, perhaps for bats. So when mammalian predators do make it to these islands the effects can be devastating. (Incidentally, […]
Continue readingthe six-million dollar cockroach
Happy New Year, everyone 🙂 I was idly looking around for something to write about (definitely in holiday mood at the moment!) & came across a couple of websites that you might enjoy. And they’re even educational…
Continue readingthe strange case of the floating mud snails
Many year 13 Biology students will spend some time during the school year on a plant or animal study. Often the organisms you’ll study will be something like slaters, or duckweed, because they are easy to keep & study in the classroom. But that’s not always the case, & today I thought I’d write about one […]
Continue readingdo insects see the world as we do?
Insects and humans (& in fact all other animals with eyes) use the same visual pigment – rhodopsin. But in other ways, insect & mammal eyes are fundamentally different. The insect eye is a compound eye that comprises many individual units, while ours is a camera-type eye. And these structural differences have a considerable impact […]
Continue readingthe consequences of vision
You learn something new every day. One of the big talking points in palaeontology is the ‘Cambrian explosion’ – the seemingly rapid appearance (over ‘just’ a few million years!) of complex animal life, which occurred around 490-540 million years ago. Discussion ranges over the causes of this diversification and whether the apparent ‘explosion’ really happened […]
Continue reading