Image from Science News, courtesy S.Mitoh Autotomy. There’s a word you don’t see every day – but those familiar with lizards may well have seen the result. For autotomy is the scientific name for what I suppose we could also call “self-amputation”: the process whereby an animal deliberately sheds a part of its body (a […]
Continue readingn July this year, the Seattle Times ran a story on an orca called Tahlequah – she was pregnant, again. And just yesterday, she gave birth. The story is particularly noteworthy because a couple of years ago, Tahlequah also bore a calf, which died, and she then carried the dead baby on her nose for […]
Continue readingMidas cichlids (Amphilophus spp.) are a popular aquarium fish, but in the wild they’re found in South America, ranging from Nicaragua to Costa Rica. The 2018 Schol Bio paper included a really interesting question about a Nicaraguan ‘species complex‘ of these fish, based on a paper in Nature Communications. and a monograph in Cuadernos de […]
Continue readingA few days ago, New Zealand’s Minister of Education announced the wider release of a resource on climate change, which was initially trialled at a Christchurch school during 2018. According to the Minister, children will learn about “the role science plays in understanding climate change, aids understanding of both the response to it and its impacts […]
Continue readingImage source: David P. Hughes, Maj-Britt Pontoppidan – http://www.plosone.org/article/showImageLarge.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0004835.g001 CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17917778 Back in 2010 I wrote about the strange tale of the zombie ants, which do the bidding of their fungal overlords. (They’re not an isolated example; a range of parasites change their hosts’ behaviour. See here and here for example – though as you’ll find, […]
Continue readingI’ve learned quite a bit about spiders over the years. (And I have never been able to understand the “burn it with fire!” some folks take towards these 8-legged creatures.) For example, it turns out that some spiders actively hunt fish, while others are vegetarian! Then, late last year, I came across a couple of […]
Continue readingPeople tend to think that plants don’t do much from day to day – certainly when I asked my first-year students at the start of the course, they were far more interested in animals than in plants. Poor plants! But then, to the casual eye I guess they’re fairly static creatures 🙂 However, it turns […]
Continue readingMy interest in kākāpō way back in my honours year at uni: a guest speaker told us that as far as anybody knew, the last remaining birds were a few males, somewhere in Fiordland. I remember feeling that that sounded really sad – those lonely males booming for females who never came. Shortly after that, […]
Continue readingThe news that school students from across New Zealand are organising the School Strike for Climate on March 15 has been all over the media lately. See this story, for example, which includes the comment that Globally, their message is clear. They are sick of waiting for adults to save their world so they are […]
Continue readingA substantial proportion of the CO2 we release into the atmosphere, via burning fossil fuels, ends up dissolved in the ocean. The impact of this is a change in the ocean’s acidity: the pH drops. According to the Smithsonian, oceans have become substantially more acidic over the last 200 years (the period of the Industrial […]
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