Last night I gave a talk up in Auckland, on various biological oddities (mostly from the animal kingdom and, all right, mostly to do with s*x). You can slip a lot of serious science in once the audience’s attention has been captured by the naughty bits! (I would hate folks to think that biologists are […]
Continue readingTag: ecology
“1080 poison gets tick from report”
Thus said a headline in today’s on-line Herald. Presenting the report, Commissioner from the Environment, Jan Wright, commented that "without 1080, our ability to protect many of our native plants and animals would be lost." So I thought this was a good time to re-post something I wrote earlier on the subject of 1080.
Continue readingwaiter, there’s a fish in my cucumber!
My sea cucumber, that is. I was going to write something full of snark about the current brouhaha around predictions that the world is going to end on May 21st. But Darcy has beaten me to it! So instead (from the Echinoblog, and via PZ) I offer you… [drumroll]… the sea cucumber with fish residing in its nether […]
Continue readingmy mother said…
… not to put beans in your ears. But in the case of our fruit-loop of a burmese cat, Fidget, the operative word should have been ‘blowflies’.
Continue readingcan ducks count?
I’m beginning to think there should be 36 hours in a day – I might be able to catch up with things then! Anyway, I was talking with a colleague this evening about a seminar he’d just done with his MSc students, & he said he’d begun with ‘that duck paper’ as it was a […]
Continue readingsomething old & something new
Due to popular request (oh, all right, one of my colleagues asked), I thought I’d upload some pictures of the old & new fishponds. Meant to do it when I first wrote about the Great Goldfish Shift but for some reason our VPN server kept cutting me off when I tried to upload the images, […]
Continue readinggoldfish & duckweed
Well, our happy expectations of duckweed & waterfern carpeting the top of our nice new goldfish pond have been dashed – the little beggars (fish) scoffed the lot! We’ve restocked with weed from the old pond but somehow I suspect we might be doing that for a while. Which shows how ignorant I am about […]
Continue readinghappy new year, & thanks for all the fish
Or so our cats might be forgiven for thinking. For among the many things that have occupied the family’s time in the last couple of weeks (along with moving house, having elderly relations to stay for Christmas, & cleaning up the old house for sale) has been the Great Goldfish Shift.
Continue readingAlgae & isopods – a unique symbiosis
When I set essays for my first-year students to write during the semester, I try to give them a scientific paper on each topic to start them off. This means that I need to do some extra bedtime reading as I need to select those papers carefully. Today’s post is based on one of those: […]
Continue readingbats and exam questions
The third question in last year’s Schol Bio paper was about bats – specifically, the ecology, behaviour, and evolution of New Zealand’s only two extant native land mammals, the lesser short-tailed bat & the long-tailed bat (Mystacina tuberculata & Chalinolobus tuberculata respectively). The long-tailed bat is a relatively new immigrant, arriving from Australia ‘just’ a […]
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