Recently in animal behaviour Category

Wouldn't that make a great name for a band?

Rather to my surprise, I've discovered that 'sarcastic fringeheads' are actually...

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 regions!

... 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'.

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 session on resource use. I liked that paper when I blogged on it originally, so I thought I'd re-post it to share it with my newer readers.

Of course they can't - they're birdbrains! Right?

Poppa's been in hospital for the last two weeks. Until he was transferred to a hospital closer to his home we were visiting him regularly, but there was one member of the family that he couldn't have cuddles with, & he really missed that.

And who was he missing? Ben, the little poodle.

With the new house came a long drive lined with agapanthus. My mother would have said, "the dreaded agapanthus", & she wouldn't have been far wrong. I don't like the things very much; they spread very vigorously & I tend to view them as a weed. (I see from Te Ara that Biosecurity New Zealand was looking at calling for a nationwide ban on the plants, back in 2007. I wonder what happened with that? Where we live now, every second house has agapanthus in the garden.) Still, we haven't really given any thought to what we might replace them with, so the agapanthuses (agapanthi?) have had a reprieve for the moment. And this means that I have to cut back all the spent flowerheads - a bit before they've finished flowering, actually, so as to minimise the chances of them setting (& spreading) seed.

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 goldfish, really. Back at the old house we were removing great handfuls of weed from the top of the pond, pretty much every second day. (The pumpkins grew very well on this.) Same fish, same amount of commercial goldfish food every day. The only difference I can think of is the lack of any real functioning ecosystem, in the sense that until all sorts of invertebrate life colonises the new pond, there isn't anything other than the weed to supplement our feedings if the fish get peckish between meals. So maybe we'll just have to feed them more... And keep some weed growing in a separate bucket, as this goldfish afficionado suggests.

I should have looked into it more deeply, really, as it seems that goldfish adore duckweed... (Which just goes to show that data trump personal anecdote every time!)

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.

I'll bet that got your attention!

A little while ago I was running through a seminar with a colleague. It was an end-of-semester trip through various 'oddities' in the biological literature, including things like the amazing corkscrew penises of mallard ducks & the tendency of some tree shrews to use pitcher plants as potties. 'Hmmm,' said my colleague, 'why don't you include the one about necrophilia by a mallard drake?' I must have given him a rather funny look because he hastened to assure me that this was totally true & had even won an Ig Nobel award for the scientist who described it.

Now, I know that mallard drakes are randy little devils and that groups of them will harass hapless females for forced copulations, particularly later in the breeding season. But this did sound a bit over the top. So, in the interests of completeness & also to check this story for myself, I went looking. and found...

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: a paper about a fascinating mutualistic relationship between marine algae and a species of isopod (the same crustacean group as the more familiar slater).