Alison Campbell • Apr 02, 2019 •
People tend to think that plants don’t do much from day to day – certainly when I asked my first-year students at the start of the course, they were far more interested in animals than in plants. Poor plants! But then, to the casual eye, I guess they’re fairly static creatures However, it turns out that their responses to the … Read More
Alison Campbell • Oct 17, 2017 •
Like probably everyone reading this, I have always thought that spiders are carnivorous, sucking the precious bodily fluidsA from their prey. I mean, those fangs! And I was wrong, for it seems that some spiders eat some plant material alongside their liquid meals – and some are almost fully vegetarian. A just-published paper (Painting, Nicholson, Bulbert, Norma-Rashid & LI, 2017) … Read More
Rebecca McLeod • May 25, 2010 •
New Zealand has suffered a dramatic and well documented decline of native birds. I began to wonder whether ecologists here have ever tried to quantify the potential impact of this decline on the health of our native forests. Here we are all worrying about possums! Could out-of-control insects be doing more damage? … Read More