Those of you owned by cats will appreciate how accurate this is 🙂 (From i can haz cheezburger)
Continue readingTag: animal behaviour
dogs behaving badly
As someone with a dog in my life, I couldn’t ignore that heading in the Science news alert that hits my in-tray each Friday. Of course, it couldn’t possibly apply to my little Ben 🙂 OCD = Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder – an anxiety disorder; according to the Nationaal Institutes of Health website I linked to here, people suffering […]
Continue readingarctic foxes in arctic winters
I saw a news story today on a bacterium that can withstand very high radiation exposure, freezing cold, & exposure to vacuum. Cool stuff. Said bacterium isn’t alone in this, mind you, as I know from my colleague Allan Green that lichens have had much the same treatment, shot up into space & reviving once in […]
Continue readingfrom elephantiasis to sperm competition
Well, it’s not too great a leap, is it? I thought of this post because over on the Sciblogs copy of my last item we started talking about sperm competition. We got there via Drosophila bifurca.
Continue readingof octopodes & clever horses
Over on SciBlogs Aimee has started a discussion around the apparent psychic powers of Paul, the octopus who’s claimed to have predicted the results of several games in the just-ended soccer World Cup. (Actually, if he could predict the outcomes of games, this would make him prescient, not psychic. Once a pedant, always a pedant, alas!)
Continue readingare octopuses really psychic?
If, like me, you enjoy soccer you’ll have been excitedly following the World Cup games. You will probably have caught some of the other hoop-la – including the ‘news’ coverage of an octopus that purportedly ‘predicted’ the outcome of games involving the German team. Now, I’ve been bemused by the coverage accorded to this cephalopod […]
Continue readingkinky crayfish courtship
(I did wonder about using all Ks for that title…) In studying the animal behavior part of the curriculum, you may well have read about courtship & mating systems. In many cases it’s the male that initiates courtship, & sometimes they use very elaborate displays to catch the female’s eye. Think of birds-of-paradise and bower […]
Continue readinga sponge makes the top 10
Sponges are strange organisms – classified as animals, they definitely look the odd one out. I rather like them: no real tissue development, no organs, immobile, & a growth habit that looks distinctly plant-like. Instead, what you get is an organism formed from just a few types of loosely-organised cells, all sitting (& moving) on […]
Continue readingthe camel’s hump
Right now, like many of my colleagues, I’m busy marking end-of-semester exams. (In my case this process is complicated by the worst cold I’ve had in ages…) However, I’m happily procrastinating – as far as the marking’s concerned – because something a student wrote in an essay triggered this post 🙂 One of my essay […]
Continue readingmore on bone-eating snotworms – the fossil years
A while back I wrote about some fascinating little deep-sea creatures – the ‘bone-eating snot-worms’ (Osedax sp.) that colonise the corpses of dead whales falling to the ocean floor. Now Brian Switek, over on Laelaps, has reviewed a paper suggesting that this bone-boring habit has been around for millions of years. The evidence is in the […]
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