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 readingTag: animal diversity
how 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 […]
Continue readingpolyps + glowing proteins + hosts = disco snails!
By now many of you have probably seen images of green-glowing zebrafish, or pigs whose snout & trotters glow in the dark. In both cases the animals are genetically modified and are expressing a fluorescent protein originally sourced from a jellyfish. (The body form of a jellyfish is a medusa, while that of sea anemones & […]
Continue readingsnail s*x toys
This morning when I went out to feed the goldfish, I encountered a pair of snails in flagrante delicto. I resisted the urge to step on them 🙂 However, I was reminded of a post that I wrote several years ago, on the sexual habits of snails, and thought it was worth a repost. So here goes: […]
Continue readingthe speed of a chameleon’s tongue
In 2012 the world was introduced to some of the smallest-known vertebrates: tiny chameleons. My good friend Grant wrote about them at the time, & I set an essay assignment for my first-years on these tiny beasties. How tiny is tiny? The following images are from the original paper, published in PLoS one by Glaw, Kohler, […]
Continue readingspiders as wasp incubators
A few days ago there was a story in the Herald about an Australian huntsman spider that had been found by NZ's border security workers at Auckland airport. With a legspan of up to 15cm these are not small creatures! And yes, we do have them in NZ as well, but they're a different genus: NZ […]
Continue readingshipworms, pillbugs and gribbles – oh my!
I've never heard of gribbles before, & did wonder if they were in some way related to tribbles (or a certain US politician's hair…). But no, it turns out that gribbles are small, wood-boring crustaceans. And they look rather cute: Image by Prof Simon McQueen-Mason & Dr Simon Cragg However, their cuteness should not obscure […]
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