Guest Author • Apr 01, 2021 •
Matt Parker, University of Portsmouth You’ve probably heard that fish have a three-second memory, or that they’re incapable of feeling pain. Neither of these statements is true, but it’s telling that these misconceptions don’t crop up for other vertebrates. Perhaps it’s because fish appear so different from us. They don’t seem to have any capacity for facial expression, … Read More
Alison Campbell • Jun 11, 2020 •
Midas cichlids (Amphilophus spp.) are a popular aquarium fish, but in the wild they’re found in South America, ranging from Nicaragua to Costa Rica. The 2018 Schol Bio paper included a really interesting question about a Nicaraguan ‘species complex‘ of these fish, based on a paper in Nature Communications. and a monograph in Cuadernos de Investigacion … Read More
Nic Rawlence • Jul 10, 2018 •
I’m lying on a beautiful golden sand beach. The bright sun is beating down upon me. I could be on an isolated, tropical island, if not for the lone giant moa sculpture looming above my head. This sentinel to a lost world stands at the aptly named Old Bones Backpackers at Awamoa, (originally named Te Awa Kōkōmuka), south of Oamaru. Read More
Guest Author • Apr 26, 2018 •
Jefferson Keith Moore, University of California, Irvine This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Climate change is rapidly warming the Earth and altering ecosystems on land and at sea that produce our food. In the oceans, most added heat from climate warming is still near the surface and will take centuries … Read More
Guest Author • Apr 13, 2018 •
Adam Crane, University of Saskatchewan and Maud Ferrari, University of Saskatchewan This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. When the famous explorer Jacques Cousteau released The Silent World, a documentary of his underwater adventures in 1953, he inspired generations of scientists to study the world’s oceans. We now know … Read More
Guest Author • Apr 02, 2018 •
Madeleine De Gabriele, The Conversation This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Rising ocean temperatures may result in worldwide change for shallow reef ecosystems, according to research published yesterday in Science Advances. The study, based on thousands of surveys carried out by volunteer scuba divers, gives new insights into the … Read More
Nic Rawlence • Mar 19, 2018 •
It’s the height of the Central Otago summer – barren, dry and dusty. Driving down the gravel road to St Bathans, we’re travelling back in time, down the rabbit hole to a world long gone. Only ghosts remain of this lost world and that’s what we’ve come here to find. The fossilised bones of a myriad of animals dating back … Read More
Guest Author • Mar 07, 2018 •
Cecilia Gontijo Leal, Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Belém This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. The first time I traveled to the Amazon, in 2010, I had no idea what to expect. A doctoral student from the far-off Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, I imagined that my field work – studying … Read More
Alison Campbell • Feb 08, 2018 •
No sooner have I written a post about the synergy between FB and blogging then it happens again 🙂 Again, hat-tip to Yvette d’Entremont, who posted a link to an article purporting to tell consumers how to distinguish between GM and ‘regular’ tomatoes. The writer of that article certainly wears their heart on their sleeve – just look … Read More
John Kerr • Oct 18, 2017 •
New Zealand’s first marine reserve doesn’t just protect snapper inside the reserve, it also acts as a snapper super-nursery, contributing ten times more fish than expected to the surrounding areas. The findings come from a new study examining the genetic relationships between fish inside and outside the boundaries of the Goat Island Reserve – a Marine Protected Area (MPA) … Read More