Like probably everyone reading this, I have always thought that spiders are carnivorous, sucking the precious bodily fluidsA from their prey. I mean, those fangs! And I was wrong, for it seems that some spiders eat some plant material alongside their liquid meals – and some are almost fully vegetarian. A just-published paper (Painting, Nicholson, […]
Continue readingTag: ecology
possum peppering – still totally implausible, seven years on
"Kerikeri award entry turns possums into burning issue", proclaims a headline in the Northern Advocate. The story is about an entry in the WWF-NZ's Conservation Awards for 2017; I hope the judges have a good grasp of science & scientific method. From the article: The entry from Kerikeri promotes a new take on an old-world […]
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 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 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 readingwords and ecology, ecology and words
I love words (to the extent that I've been known to peruse dictionaries for pleasure). The Story of English was one of my favourite TV programs, back (long way back) in the day. So of course when I saw positive reviews for Robert Macfarlane's book, Landmarks, of course I had to get hold of a […]
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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