Recently in ecology Category

 Over on 'of trees and birds and other things' Jarrod points out why it's not a terribly good idea to base your view of a scientific issue on a single story in the popular press... (& hat-tip to David Winter on the atavism, who alerted me to this new evolutionary blog!) For the teachers & students who read my blog: Jarrod has an interest in forest ecology & his research area is evolutionary ecology, so I think it will be well worth dropping over to his place from time to time :-)

PS apologies for the original 'dud' link - all fixed now :-)

My post about zeolite & the supposedly 'chemical-free' nature of various dietary supplements containing the stuff led to some interesting comments, & generated a few 'I wonder if...' moments. After all, as Krebiozen said (in the comments thread to that post):  With the right sales pitch you could probably persuade some people that eating feline 'tootsie rolls' is good for them. They are 100% natural after all!

We've just got back from a holiday over in Australia - hence the lack of blogging after the last burst. (If I'd done anything work-related I suspect I'd have experienced a rapid divorce!)

Of course, before we left our friends were all saying "we hope you spot some koalas." We hoped so too, but after a fair bit of driving through various eucalypt forests we were beginning to wonder. Until we went down to the Cape Otway region & headed down to the Cape Otway Lightstation. 

I spent Saturday down in Hawkes Bay, running at Scholarship Biology preparation day at Lindsfarne College. (I would have spent Sunday happily idling through the lovely Art Deco parts of Napier, & visiting a few vinyards, but the weather forecast made me reconsider this option & I ended up driving back to Hamilton once the teaching was done. But I still managed a most excellent very late lunch at Crab Farm Winery, nomnomnom. The wines are also excellent.)

Anyway, we finished the session by working through one of the questions in last year's Schol Bio paper, on whether mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) could, & should, be brought back from the dead (as it were). As for the other two questions, candidates were provided with a lot of resource material about the biology, ecology and phylogenetic relationships of mammoths, and were asked to

Discuss how a modern biological technique could be used to bring mammoths back to life, and the implications of having mammoths living again. In your answer:

• explain biological techniques that could be used to bring back the mammoth and produce a self-sustaining wild population. Evaluate the likely success of this process.

• Analyse the evolutionary and ecological implications of having a population of mammoths living on earth again and justify whether or not we should bring back the mammoth.

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 totally obsessed with s*x. This is not true. But related stories do tend to focus the attention.)

Anyway, I was chatting sbout it with some of our grad students this morning and they said, oooh, we wouldn't might reading more about that. Various people (including me & Grant) have blogged them all before, so I'll bring all the links together in one place but won't fill in too many of the gaps.

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.

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?

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, & then other things cropped up...