Recently, I had an enjoyable chat with Graeme Hill on the subject of sleep. Also on the show was Karyn O'Keeffe, whose research interests are with the physiology of sleep (& the lack of it). My segment focused on the evolution of sleep and yes, I did quite a bit of reading in preparation! Sleep […]
Continue readingTag: animal diversity
leech ‘therapy’ redux
Back in 2012 the Herald ran a series on alternative 'therapies' that included a somewhat uncritical piece on the use of leeches – the practitioner concerned claimed, for example, that they could be used to 'treat' diabetes. I blogged on this back then, as did fellow Sciblogger Siouxsie Wiles, & the criticisms we made then still stand. […]
Continue readingmelibe engeli – the strangest thing i’ve seen in ages
I mean, really – have you ever seen something like this before? Melibe engeli is a type of sea slug, and a most unusual one. Its body is partly translucent, and has projections called cerata, themselves covered with smaller projections called papillae, down both sides. The animal is an active hunter – but what a […]
Continue readingrun! well, amble! the giant carnivorous snails are coming!
There’s a lovely, life-size bronze sculpture of a Powelliphanta land snail sitting on my china cabinet. I love it because a friend made it for us – and because snails in this genus are rather special, for they are all carnivorous. Now, I ‘knew’ this fact, but I’d never actually seen one feeding. Snails being normally rather […]
Continue readingattack of the zombie snails
The semester's begun, teaching has started, admin isn't letting up any time soon, & there are days when I feel like a zombie by home-time. So it seems entirely appropriate to revivify a post I wrote 3 years ago, on that very subject. Honestly, sometimes I think the zombie apocalypse is already here. Certainly zombies […]
Continue readingtunicates – apparent simplicity belies a complex past
Tunicates are more commonly known as 'sea squirts' – little blobby marine creatures that squirt water when you touch them (hence the name). We don't hear about them often, except perhaps when they make the news for all the wrong reasons. But from an evolutionary perspective they are fascinating little creatures – and it's largely […]
Continue readinghow do hedgehogs mate, and other sensitive questions of that ilk
So, last night I was asked how hedgehogs mate. The obvious answer was, carefully! My interlocutor suggested that perhaps face-to-face was most likely, but as far as I know, very few species (& that short list includes our own) do that. It turns out that care is indeed needed, for the male approaches the female […]
Continue readinga friday butterfly
Occasionally it's nice to just post a pretty picture. This is one that I took back in July 2015, while we were in France. We'd gone to visit the ruins of of an old Cathar castle called Peyrepertuse and there, on one of the scraggly plants growing on a patch of gravel by the side […]
Continue readingis it a drone? is it a giant mozzie?
No, it's one of New Zealand's big dragonflies, most probably the bush dragonfly Uropetala carovei, and colloquially known as the "Devil's darning needle" (presumably because of their colour & size). And indeed, they are large creatures, as you'll see from the photos. The adult dragonfly is the biggest dragonfly in NZ at nearly 90mm long, […]
Continue readingthe bedbug genome and their bloody habits
Once upon a time, I wrote about traumatic insemination in bedbugs. (Those of my friends who are still traumatised by learning about the reproductive habits of various slug species may not wish to follow that link.) Now, two papers just published in Nature Communications describe the results of sequencing & examining the genome of the […]
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