The Atavism

Sunday Spinelessness – A Clearwing moth

David Winter • Dec 09, 2012

At last, Dunedin has managed to arrange a proper summer day for a weekend. The extra heat and sun saw plenty of bugs out and about, and I spotted plenty of familiar critters (native bees, cicadas, drone flies and magpie moths) for this fir... Read More

Sunday Spinelessness – Bark Lice

David Winter • Dec 02, 2012

I should have known that the little challenge I put up last week wouldn't so much as wrinkle the brow of the bug-blogo-sphere's best. The Atavism's two homes means there were two winners. Ted MacRae of Beetles in the Bush chimed in at he blog... Read More

Sunday Spinelessness – An ID challenge

David Winter • Nov 25, 2012

OK, here's a chance for the bug nerds to show off. A photo of a strange-looking beast I recently ran into: The challenge to readers is to answer the two questions that went through my head when I first uncovered the creature (1) What... Read More

Sunday Spinelessness – Shocked from sloth by a beautiful spider

David Winter • Nov 18, 2012

Regular readers will know that I've been pretty slack in posting here in recent weeks. Just the same old boring reason - lots of "real" work to get done and, as much as I enjoy it, blogging necessarily floats to the bottom of TODO lists. But I was sho... Read More

All the media!

David Winter • Sep 25, 2012

Oh, hi there. Yeah, it's been a while h'uh? Just been crazy busy lately you know - one thing after another with manuscripts and datasets to analyse, then I got a whole bunch of lab reports to mark. We should totally like, get back to writing/reading ab... Read More

Graduation, nerd blogging and a talk

David Winter • Aug 28, 2012

The most dedicated readers of The Atavism may have noticed a few Sundays have passed without celebration of a spineless creature. Well, you know how blogging is sometimes. A few of the things that have kept me from blogging might be of intere... Read More

Measuring population differentiation in R

David Winter • Aug 09, 2012

This is a little bit different than most posts here. I have a paper out today in Molecular Ecology Resources: "mmod: an R library for the calculation of population differentiation statistics" (doi: 10.1111/j.1755-0998.2012.03174.x). Looking around the web, there aren't many simple expositions of just what a "differentiation statistic" might be, and why the "modern measures of … Read More

Sunday Spinelessness – How snails conquered the land (again and again)

David Winter • Aug 05, 2012

Christie Willcox wrote a nice article this week on how one small group of organisms called "vertebrates" first evolved to live on land. Since you are a vertebrate who lives on land, you should probably go and read Christie's piece. I wouldn't want you, however, to go around thinking those first fish to leave the ocean behind were pioneers … Read More

Sunday Spinelessness – Hairy snails

David Winter • Jul 29, 2012

Here's another of these tiny native snails I talked about last week. Aeschrodomus stipulatus: Not the best photo I'll admit, but it records enough detail to see the two things that set Aeschrodomus apart from most of its relati... Read More

Sunday Spinelessness – New Zealand microsnails

David Winter • Jul 22, 2012

When I tell people I study snails for a living I get one of two replies. There's either some version of the "joke" that goes "that must be slow-going" or "sounds action packed", or there's "oh, you mean those giant killer ones we saw when we went tramp... Read More

About The Atavism

The Atavism is the blog of Dr David Winter, an expert in evolutionary genetics who has departed to the US to further his research.

The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the owners of SciBlogs.co.nz, the Science Media Centre or the Royal Society of New Zealand.