One of the nice things about going on holiday for a reasonable period of time, without computer, e-mail, cellphone etc, is that you can settle down for a bit of serious reading. In a fairly full 7 days I still managed to complete 2 books & start another. One was detective fiction (PD James rocks!). […]
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re-post: a worm, but not as we know it
This is a re-post of an item I wrote a couple of years ago, when I was just getting into blogging. (Hopefuly it will encourage some of you to peruse my back catalogue!) Anyway, I think it’s a nice little story about a rather neat piece of taxonomic detective work, so I thought I’d share […]
Continue readingsome interesting links to follow
Casting around for something to read, I’ve come across several interesting posts on various blogs. So I thought I’d share them with you 🙂 For those interested in competition & its effects on plant growth forms & also plant diversity, check out Taking below-ground processes seriously: plant coexistence and soil depth at The EEB & flow. We […]
Continue readinggannet monogamy model moot
When you studied animal behaviour in year 13 you probably learned about the different mating systems: polygamy (polygyny & polyandry), promiscuity – & monogamy: a bond between a single male & a single female. You may also have heard that in some species, such as swans, that bond is life-long. It turns out things are more complex than […]
Continue readingmoa evolution & new zealand’s geological past
The Level 3 & Scholarship examiners often ask you to discuss the evolutionary history of a group of organisms (Hebe, cockroaches, cicadas etc) in relation to the geological history of New Zealand. Geological changes such as the widening of the Tasman Sea, and the uplift of mountain ranges including the Kaikoura ranges & the Southern Alps, […]
Continue readinghummingbirds & the high cost of s*x
One of the nice things about reading books by great science writers is that I just know I’m going to learn lots. I’ve just got back into Nick Lane’s latest book Life Ascending (it’s been my lunchtime reading at work & recently other things have intruded…). Lane has a lovely lyrical way of writing that I really […]
Continue readingthings that go BANG!
No, this has nothing whatsoever to do with biology… well, that’s not quite true – there’s an exploding whale included 🙂 I remember that one year, early in my secondary schooling (yes, a loooong time ago!), there was a rumour that some young man at Hastings Boys High had disposed of some illicitly-acquired sodium by […]
Continue readingtopical 1080
A couple of years ago now, we held a Cafe Scientifique with the topic 1080 – friend or foe? Topical then (it drew a large crowd, wtih people from both sides of the debate) & just as topical now. On the one hand, 1080 is promoted as our current best option for the control of possums, […]
Continue readinglumping, splitting, and the morphological species concept
A couple of weeks ago Marcus Wilson & I were down in Taranaki to run a Scholarship preparation day. During one of my sessions the biology students & I were discussing the concept of ‘species’. Most of you are probably familiar with the idea of a ‘biological species’, defined by its lack of ability to interbreed […]
Continue readinga question of isolation
I spent a lot of last weekend marking exam papers from my first-year bio students. Most of them chose one of my essay questions (it’s a team-taught paper & they had a choice of 3 essays in my section), & today one of the class told me that she’d really liked that question because it […]
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