David Winter • Jul 18, 2010 •
Ok, I let my Sunday get completely out of control, so here's a very quick Sunday Spinelessness. Behold, the Worm of the Future! Err, actually I found this little caterpillar in one of the smaller paths in Stanely Park in Vancouver. As every school... Read More
David Winter • Jul 11, 2010 •
I think I've finally got back into the rhythm of life in Dunedin after The Big Trip, so it must be time to get back to spending a little bit of my weekend documenting some of the goings on in the spineless world. Thankfully, having gone to visit the su... Read More
David Winter • Jul 04, 2010 •
... well, the end of Evolution 2010 anyway. The silence that you may very well have failed to notice around here over the last couple of weeks has come about because I've been away attending my very first Proper International Conference in Portland. I ... Read More
David Winter • Jun 13, 2010 •
New Zealand has a pretty benign fauna. We have no snakes, no carnivorous mammals bigger than our little bats and, ever since Haast's Eagle was the driven to extinction, the apex of our natural food webs has been occupied by the karearea. The karearea i... Read More
David Winter • Jun 08, 2010 •
I got a little bit starry eyed writing about the Neanderthal genome the other day. I chose to retrace the arc of scientific progress that links the initial description of Neanderthal man as something different than modern humans to the point reached l... Read More
David Winter • Jun 06, 2010 •
It occurs to me that some readers might be put off by my affection for spiders. I'd be interested to see which creature, the wasp or the spider, you find yourself cheering for at the end of this post. Let's introuduce them. First, the large black hunti... Read More
David Winter • May 30, 2010 •
I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would hav... Read More
David Winter • May 28, 2010 •
Homo sapiens means "wise man". Sometimes it's hard to think that Linnaeus was right in honouring our species with that name. We're the reason the earth is going through its sixth great extinction; people are still routinely killed for belonging the wro... Read More
David Winter • May 23, 2010 •
Chondrocladia turbiformis, a ruthless carnivore hauled from bottom of the sea off new New Zealand by NIWA scientists, has been named among the top ten new species described last year. This abyssal predator isn't a kraken, a plesiosaur that time forgo... Read More
David Winter • May 16, 2010 •
A scene from the garden. On the left, the New Zealand Praying Mantis Orthodera novaezealandiae. On the right, a hover-fly that doesn't know how much trouble it's in. (for those interested in the final result: the hover-fly flew off; the mantis lunge... Read More