At last, Dunedin has managed to arrange a proper summer day for a weekend.

Labels: environment and ecology, lepidoptera, moths, photo, sci-blogs, sesiidae, sunday spinelessness, Synanthedon tipuliformis

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 blogspot version, correctly identifying the insect as a "bark louse" or psocopteran, and recognizing those stubby white protrusion as yet-to-be expanded wings . Morgan Jackson of Biodiversity in Focus did the same at SciBlogs.

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Labels: bark lice, environment and ecology, psocoptera, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness

Labels: environment and ecology, mystery, photos, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness

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 shocked from my sloth this afternoon when I passed that accursed agapanthus and saw a spider I really had to share with the world:


It's an orb-weaving (araneid) spider, a relative of the familiar garden spiders like the very common Eriophora pustulosa that spin orb-shaped webs and catch unlucky flying insects. I can't be sure on the identification of this one, but I reckon (with some support from twitter's resided spider experts, [1], [2]) its a species a species of Novaranea. According to Ray and Lyn Foster's  Big Spider Book New Zealand Novaranea species are most commonly encountered in in grasslands and tussocks, so perhaps this one blew in from the tall grass that covers some the abandoned gardens in our block.

However it made it our garden, I'm very happy to have encountered a such a neat looking spider, and even done a half-decent job capturing some of its beauty:

Labels: environment and ecology, photos, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness

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 about science though. I'll put something up in a bit and...*

So, things have been a little quite here lately. That wasn't a plan to have me an that ridiculous hat up on the front page for a few weeks - just the result of having little spare time. As it turns out, a few things that might be of interest to readers here have been published over that fallow period, here's the links:

• I'm in a book! As I related last year, my post on the partulids land snails of Society Isalnds was selected for The Best Science Writing Online which is now available from all good book sellers. I'm ridiculously excited by this. There is also a short review in The Listener 
• My latest little piece for stuff.co.nz deals with Colin Craig and his idea that research tells us sexual orientation is a choice, and that this is relevant to marriage equality. 
• I was on the radio - an hour of talking about science, peer review and skepticsm on Radio One, the student radio station.

I guess to complete the set I'd need to make a TV appearance, though I can't see that happening!

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*For people with whom I've had exactly this conversation lately - it's true, I have been busy, I am a terribly friend and we will catch up soon!

Labels: blog blogging, sci-blogs

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 interest to readers here. This weekend was dedicated to the wearing of silly hats, posing somewhat awkwardly and the conferring of my PhD. It was almost a big enough event to make me wear a tie:

So far I've rested the urge to change the name that appears under these posts to Dr David Winter, we'll see how long that lasts.

I've also been working a little on some more software for evolutionary biology. Since I very much aim this blog at a lay-level, and there is no reason on earth why a lay-person ought to care about the computer programs scientists use to collect and analyse their data, I've decided to set up a dedicated nerd blog. The first post their introduces an R library that can help researchers quickly download data from molecular biology and medical databases.

Finally, I should say their probably won't be a new post here this weekend either, as I'll be at the New Zealand Skeptics Conference, right here in Dunedin. I'll be giving a talk about how the the creation-evolution "debate" as it usually plays out has very little to do with evolutionary biology, and how getting past popular misconceptions about the way evolution works makes most creationist objections to evolution into non-starters. I'll also say why I think good old fashioned creationism is a more respectable position than "intelligent design", so that ought to be fun. If you're in Dunedin you can still register for the whole meeting, my talk is on at 9:50am on Saturday in Archway 3 (the best, and perhaps only, way to find this lecture theatre is to walk into the Archway building and wander around opening doors at random).

Labels: blog blogging, sci-blogs

Labels: my research, population genetics, sci-blogs, science

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 making a uniquely difficult transition. By my figuring, onycophorans (velvet worms like peripatus), tardigrades, annelids, nematodes, nemerteans (ribbon worms) and quite a few arthropod lineages have also taken up a terrestrial lifestyle. Many of those lineages were already breathing air before Tiktaalik, Ichthyostega and your other long-lost relatives came along to join them on land. But if you want to talk about transitions from marine to terrestrial lifestyles then you really want to talk about snails. You can find snails living in  almost every habitat between the deep ocean and the desert, and snails have adapted to life on land many different times. In fact, a litre of leaf litter taken from a New Zealand forest can contain snails representing three separate transitions from water to land.

Almost all the land snails I've talked about here at The Atavism are descendants from just one invasion of the land. We call these species the stylommatophorans and you can tell them from other landlubber-snails because they have eyes on stalks (as modeled here by  Thalassohelix igniflua):

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Most of the description of Cyclophoroids here is taken from:

Barker, GM (2001) Gastropods on land: phylogeny, diversity and adaptive morphology In Barker (Ed.),  The biology of terrestrial molluscs (pp 1—146) CABI Publishing.

Labels: molluscs, native snails, photos, sci-blogs, science, sunday spinelessness

Markus Pfenninger and his colleagues asked just that question by looking at snails from the Northern Hemisphere genus Trochulus (doi: 10.1186/1471-2148-5-59). This genus contains many species that sport very fine and soft hairs. Pfenninger et al.collected ecological data for each species, and used DNA sequences to estimate a the evolutionary relationships between those species. From these data, they were able to infer the common ancestor of modern Trochulus species was probably hairy, and three separate losses of hairyness can explain all the among-species variation in this trait. Moreover, it appears the loss of hairs in Trochulus is associated with a switch for wet to dry habitats. Given this finding, Pfenninger's team hypothesised that, in Trochulus at least, hirsute snails might stick to host plants more effectively than their bald brethren. Indeed, in experiments it took more force to dislodge a hairy shell from a wet leaf than non-hairy one.

Labels: molluscs, native snails, new zealand, sci-blogs, science, sunday spinelessness

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 tramping?". I guess the joke is funny enough, but I want to make it clear that those giant killer snails from the family Rhytidae, cool as they might be, are not the most interesting land snails in New Zealand.

The local land snail fauna displays a pattern that is quite common for New Zealand animals - we have a very large number of species but those species are drawn from relatively few taxonomic families. Since taxonomic groups reflect the evolutionary history of the species they contain, that pattern most likely arises because New Zealand is (a) quite hard to get to, so few would-be colonists make it here and (b) full of ecological niches and geographic pockets that can drive the formation of new species. In total, there are are probably about 1200 native land snail species in New Zealand - about ten times the number found in Great Britain, which is approximately the same size. That diversity extends to the finest scales - individual sites in native forest might have as many as 60 species sharing the habitat. New Zealand forests probably have the most diverse land snails assemblages in the world (although tropical ecologists, who generally hold that diversity in terrestrial habitats almost invariably increases as you approach the equator, have argued against this conclusion).


You may now be asking why, if this land snail fauna is so diverse, have you never seen a native snail. Well, you've probably walked past thousands of them without noticing. Most of our native land snail species are from the families Punctidae and Charopidae, groups that are sometimes given the common name "dot snails". Meembers of these families are usually smaller than 5 mm across the shell, and are restricted to native forest and in particular to leaf litter. But in native forests, where there's leaf litter there's snails. Grab a handful of leaves, or pull up a log and you're likely to find a few tiny flat-spired snails going about their business. Hell, down here in Dunedin you can even find charopids living under tree-fuschia in a suburban garden.


Like so many native invertebrates, we know very little about our land snails. Lots of people have dedicated substantial parts of their lives to documenting and describing the diversity of these creatures, but even so we don't have a clear understanding of how the native species relate to each other or to their relatives in the rest of the world, or even where one species starts and another ends. Without such a basic understanding, its very hard to ask evolutionary and ecological questions about these species, so for now we remain largely ignorant of the forces that have created the New Zealand land snail fauna.


For the time being I can tell you that a lot of them are really quite beautiful. Since most people don't have handy access to a microscope to see these critters, I thought I would share a few photos from this largely neglected group over the next few weeks. The 2D photographs, with the relatively fine depth of field, don't quite record the beauty of these 3D shells, but I hope it's at least a window into the diversity of these snails.


 Let's start with a snail that is very common in Dunedin parks and forests. This is a species from the genus Cavellia (the strong, sine-shaped ribs being the giveaway) but I won't be able to place it to species until a new review of that genus is published. 




This particular shell is from an immature specimen, and is about 2mm across. When flipped, you can see an open umbilicus that lets you see straight through to the apex of the shell.

Labels: molluscs, native snails, photos, sci-blogs, snails, sunday spinelessness

It's the first week of semester two down here at Otago, which means I will helping with undergraduate labs for the first time this year. I suspect most students end up not liking me all that much, because I find my self teaching in the parts of the genetics program that undergrads like the least. Population genetics, as the name suggests, is the study of the way genes behave in populations, and in many ways its the base from which our understanding of evolution is built. So it's important, but it's also pretty mathsy.


It seems quite a few students have planned their high school and unversity careers in the hope that studying biology meant that could leave maths behind. So, when they are confronted with "p² + 2pq + q² = 1" and asked to do something with it, they are unhappy.

That particular formula is for something called the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and a significant proportion of students roll their eyes and slump their shoulders when you tell them they are going to need to use it for a problem. They think its arbitrary and irrelevant to anything the least bit important, and what's more it looks a little like it's already solved. So, I'm always looking for ways to convince people that Hardy-Weingberg isn't just simple, but actually intuitive and important. So here's my attempt to explain why knowing a little population genetics is helpful.

You may remember last year  a Danish sperm bank had started turning away would-be donors with red hair, since there is little demand for sperm that might contribute to the creation of a readhead. It turns out, if you know a little bit about population genetics you can see that policy will have little effect on the number of red heads the sperm bank helps to bring into the world.

Hair colour is partially controlled by a gene called MC1R. There are different versions of MC1R floating around in human populations, and one of them has a mutation that stops melanin (a dark pigment)  passing into hairs as they grow. Geneticists call different versions of a gene "alleles", so we'll call this flavour of MC1R the "red hair allele" and give it the symbol r.As I'm sure you know, you have two copies of most of your genes, one inherited from your mother and the other from your father. Red hair is a recessive trait, which means in order to have red hair both of your copies of MC1R need to be the r allele: if you have one or two copies of the "normal" MC1R allele (which we'll call "R") you have some pigment passing into your hair and it will be another colour. We call the total genetic make-up of a person their "genotype", and their physical characteristics their "phenotype", so here's a table showing the genotypes and the phenotypes we're talking about in this post:

Genotype	r/r	r/R	R/R
Phenotype (hair colour)	Red Hair	Not Red Hair	Not Red Hair

I know there are a lot of technical terms there (Carl Zimmer will not be happy...), but we do need to be precise when we talk about genetics because, strange as it may seem, there isn't a single definition of the word gene. Once you've got your head around the terms, it's all pretty straight forward: you need two copies of the r allele to have red hair. Think what this means for the Danish sperm bank though. Turning away red headed sperm donors doesn't turn away red headed sperm since there will still be "carriers" with only one copy of r (and, thus, non-red hair) donating sperm and half of those sperm will be "red headed sperm".

How big a problem is this likely to be? First we need to work how common the r allele is, and we can use the frequency of redheads to find that. By long tradition, the frequency of a recessive allele is denoted by "q", so, in a population where one quarter of the alleles are r we'd say q = 0.25. We know that in order to have red hair you need both your copies of the MC1R gene to be the r allele and that you inherit each allele separately. When probabilities are independant we can mutiply them, so the chace someone in this population is a redhead is q x q = q²  = 0.06 .Following the same logic, the frequency of the R/R genotype must be the frequency of R squared (by convention, the frequency of a dominant allele is called "p", so that's p²).

Knowing this relationship, we can work backwards and find the frequency of r if we know the proportion of redheads in a population. In most of Northern Europe, about 4% (0.04) of the populaiton are redheads so  q² = 0.04 and q = √0.04 = 0.2. As you can see, red hair genes can be a lot more common than redheads:

To understand how the sperm bank's policy will we work, we need to know about those 'carriers' with the mixed genotypes (called "heterozygotes" by genetics geeks). It doesn't matter which order your genes come in, so the probability of being a carrier in the population above will be the chance of getting an R then and r (p x q) plus the chance of getting and r followed by an R (q x p). You can simplify that to 2pq. You might recognize that term, because with it we've rediscovered the one in the first paragraph "p² + 2pq + q² = 1". The Hardy-Weinberg equation is just away of moving from allele frequencies to genotype frequencies (or the other way around) and it's based on some very simple observations about the way populations work. We saw that in a population with  4% redheads you get q = 0.2, so p=0.8 and 2pq = 2 x 0.2 x 0.8 = 0.32. Almost a third of the population are carriers, and that's eight times the number of redheads! While the frequency of the red hair allele is low, only a small proportion of the red haired alleles in a population will actually in red haired people:
That's why the sperm banks policy, while prefectly sensible if there really is no demand for sperm from redheads, will do little prevent the creation of red-headed babies.  In the typical case, where 4% of the population are redheads the probability that a donated sperm carries the r allele only moves from 20% to 17% when you exclude red haired donors

It's easy to calculate how the policy would work in populations with more or less redheads:

So, that annoying equation we make the undergrads learn actually tells us something about the world. Obviously, the example I've talked about here is a pretty silly one, but the basic ideas we've discovered above can help us understand some important ideas. Like why genes that cause debilitating diseases aren't completely removed by natural selection, and why inbreeding is a bad idea.

A lot of rare diseases are caused by recessive alleles. They remain rare for the obvious reason that people with such diseases are unlikely to pass on their genes. But they remain present in populations because, as we've found, once recessive alleles get rare the overwhelming majority of them are found in carriers. In this way, rare recessive alleles are seldom exposed to selection so they stick around for a long time.*

Because disease causing genes stick around in populations, there is a pretty good chance that you carry a few alleles that would cause a debilitating disease in someone who had two copies of them. The same applies to anyone you might be hoping to have children with. Thankfully, its very unlikely that your prospective mate with have disease-causing alleles for the same genes that you do. That is, as long as you look beyond the family tree when you look for a mate. If you have a child with someone who is closely related to you, you will have each inherited some of your genes from the same source, which increases the chances you share disease alleles.

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*In fact, they often reach a point called "mutation-selection balance" in which the frequency of the allele remains static because new mutations re-create the allele as quickly as selection removes it. JBS Haldane was the first person to notice this, and he used his theory to create a very accurate estimate of the human mutation rate well before we knew what genes were made of!

Labels: genetics, population genetics, sci-blogs, science, teaching

One awesome mollusc deserves another, so let's follow up last weeks octopus post with one on that group's close relatives the cuttlefish.

Cuttlefish are relatively small (the largest grow to 50cm) squid-like cephalopods that present a nice soft and digestible meal to predatory fish and marine mammals. Having lost the shell that most molluscs use to protect themselves cuttlefish have had to develop other defences. Most strikingly, cuttlefish are masters of camouflage


Just this week, researchers have reported evidence for a other trick that cuttlefish can pull off. When males of the Austrian Mourning Cuttlefish (Sepia plangon) see a female they put on a show, producing striped patterns that evidently impress the female. But these animals form male-dominated groups, and rival males often interrupt would-be woo-ers  in mid-display. So, when they spy a receptive female, males want to put on their flamboyant show for her to judge, but also want to make sure they don't attract the attention of rival males that might want to spoil the party. The male Mourning Cuttlefish's answer to this problem? Using only half of his body to put on the female-impressing show, and throwing would-be spoilers off the scent by mimicking a female with the other half.




This gender-splitting  tactic seems to be pretty common. In aquarium experiments about 40% of males would  attempt the deceptive signal when they were displaying in the presence of a rival. Just as the cuttlefish camouflage response requires information from the physical environment, the gender-splitting trick is influenced by what the male can learn of the social environment. If more than one female is available the male will display to both  without bothering to hide his intentions for observers (probably because working out an angle from which he could excite two females while staying under the radar is just not possible). Likewise, if more than one rival male is about that don't bother with the deception - since it wouldn't be possible to maintain the illusion for two rivals viewing from different positions.

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Brown, Garwood & Williamson (In press) It pays to cheat: tactical deception in a cephalopod social signalling system. Biology Letters. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2012.0435w

Labels: cephalopods, molluscs, sci-blogs, science, sunday spinelessness

I don't want to talk too much more about the purpose of the argonaut shell, partly because it has already been well covered. Ed Yong wrote a predicably clear and interesting post on the research which uncovered it (which also produced an interesting comments thread) and the lead researcher, Julian Finn from Museum Victoria in Australia, also discussed his work in a really great video.


Instead, I want to talk about the origin of the argonaut shell. Octopuses are molluscs, part of a group of soft-bodied animals that includes clams and mussels and snails. Most molluscs have shells. In fact, despite being arugably the most morphologically diverse of the 35 animal phyla, only a few small groups of molluscs don't contain at least some species that produce shells. The easiest way to explain the presence of shells in so many different molluscan groups is to hypothesize that the last common ancestor of all molluscs had a shell, and most of that ur-mollsuc's descendants have retained this organ. 

In evolutionary biology we call traits that are shared between organisms as a result of their shared evolutionary history "homologies". Homologous traits are often compared with "analgous" ones, parts of organisms that are similar as the result of independent innovations in different evolutionary lineages. We can illustrate the concept using a bat's wing as an example. The forelimbs of bats and whale are made up of the same bones, despite the fact that whales swim and bats fly. That's because bats and whales are both mammals, and they inherited their forelimb bones from a common ancestor before each group radically repurposed their limbs. On the other hand, despite the fact that both bats and stoneflies fly, the insect wing and the bat wing are separate evolutionary inventions and not something the two groups share as a result of shared evolutionary history:

Labels: argonauts, cephalopods, molluscs, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness

Here's something cool that I've meaning to write about for a long time. A native Powelliphanta land snail with an apparently pigment-less foot and head:

That snail (a close relative of speedy carnivore featured here) popped up in Kahurangi National Park at the end of last year. Apart from just being kind of cool, the un-pigmented individual is interesting for a geneticist that studies land snails. For the most part, dark pigmentation in snails results form melanin  (which is perhaps the most common pigment in the animal world). That's true for pigmentation of the shell as well as the animal that caries it around. As you can see, this snail has normal pigmentation on its shell, so clearly its still able to make melanin. The genetic mutation (or developmental defect) that has left this snail white hasn't broken the genes for pigmentation, just the mechanism that moves that pigment around the body wall of the snail.

The ghost Powelliphanta is a pretty cool snail, but there's actually an albino snail that's even more interesting. Every now and again a truly albino individual of the freshwater snail Biomphalaria glabrata pops up. Looking at these mutants we can learn something about the evolutionary history of the these snails:
Photo is CC 2.5 and comes from Lewis FA, Liang Y-s, Raghavan N, Knight M et al in PLoS Tropical Diseases


Free from the pigments that would usually make shell opaque we can see the feature that sets Biomphalaria and other species form the family Planorbidae (ramshorn snails) apart from every other snail. The planorbids are the only red-blooded snails on earth. So why are these snails so different?

As we all know, in order to live animals need to get oxygen from their environment into their bodies. For small animals this doesn't represent a huge problem. Oxygen will flow form areas of high partial pressure (a concept analgous to concentration, but accounting for some of the weird ways gasses behave) to areas in which Oxygen is being used up. So, for instance, most insects pull air directly into their bodies with a set of open tubes (called tracheae). Once the air makes it into those tubes oxygen will passively diffuse into the insect's tissues.

Big animals have a much bigger problem*. Not only do larger animals need much more oxygen to fuel their bodies, they also have to actively transport that Oxygen because the distances it is required to travel can't be achieved by passive diffusion. Lungs and gills are both organs dedicated to pumping more oxygen into animal bodies, and many  animals use blood, and special proteins dissolved in blood, to move oxygen about.

In vertebrates the oxygen-carrying protein is called hemoglobin. Very simply, a hemoglobin molecule is   a cage used to hold iron atoms in such a way that they will bind to an oxygen atom. The iron containing group in the hemoglobin protein (called heme) gives our blood its red colour and its hemoglobin circulating through that snail's body that makes it red.


As with every problem life faces, invertebrates have come up with many more interesting ways to move oxygen around than their spined relatives. Annelids (earthworms and their kin), brachiapods and spoon worms have a whole set of iron-containing proteins to do the job. Even more interestingly, molluscs and some arthropods have a protein that uses Copper rather than Iron atoms to co-ordinate an oxygen molecule. This molecule, called hemocyanin, takes on a green-ish blue hue when oxygen binds to it and changes its conformation.

Most snails get through life fine with hemocyanin as the only oxygen-carrying molecule in their blood, so why have Biomphalaria and their cousins become red-blooded? Part of the reasons lies in their lifestyle. Planorbid snails breath with lungs (which only work in air) but live underwater. If you make your living by holding your breath while diving then you really want to have some way of holding on to as much of the oxygen you get form each breath for as long as possible. It seems that Biomphalaria hemoglobin is more efficient at using the oxygen stored  in lungs while diving than any hemocyanin could be.

It's all well talking about why an animal might have evolved a particular trait. But in evolutionary biology it's generally much more intresting to try and work out how. How does an air-breathing snail make its own hemoglobin from scratch? A team lead by Bernhard Lieb asked just that question a few years ago, and found the answer: Biomphalaria hemoglobin was made by cobbling together parts of existing proteins. When Lieb et al (2006, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0601861103) isolated hemoglobin from red-blooded snails they found it was made up of two different components (called peptides), each of which has 13 different sub-components (called domains). When the team compared the sequence of those peptides and their domains to other molluscan proteins they found similarties between the hemoglobin sequences and another iron-containing protein called myoglobin.

Myoglobin is a small molecule that is usually restricted to muscles where is acts as a store of Oxygen (in snails, myoglobin is most commonly found in the muscles that drive the radula, the rasp like organ used to break down food). The Biomphalaria hemoglobin sequences are more closely related to each other than they are to myoglobins from any other species. This pattern suggests the sequences that make up the snail hemoglobin descend from a single common ancestor. Subsequent changes to each of these descendants have allowed the descendants proteins to group together and become "super myoglobins" capable of transporting oxygen through the body.

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*The huge number of ways size matters in biology were wonderfully explained by JBS Haldane. I'd reproduce the most famous passage here, but it's probably even better if you discover it by yourself.

Labels: sci-blogs, snails, sunday spinelessness

Labels: environment and ecology, phoning-it-in, photos, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness

I really like the leaf vein slugs (Athoracophoridae) that live in our garden and  have featured here in the past. Here's the latest one to pass under my camera:

As much as I like them, I have to admit these guys are actually one of the more boring leaf vein slug species in New Zealand. Some of their relatives are much larger or more colourful and quite a few of them sport large wort-like growths (technically called papillae) that pattern their bodies in various ways. Te Ara and Soil Bugs both have galleries that let you get an idea of their diversity.

A couple of weeks ago I made a little discovery. Some of these slugs also have eggs that are covered in papillae

Labels: environment and ecology, leaf veined slugs, photos, sci-blogs, science

The other week when I wrote that post about a poorly reported story in Stuff's new science section I emphasised that I really thought it was important that news sites with a large and non-specialist audiences did a good job on science. I was pleased that the people behind the stuff story took the criticism on board, and amended their story.

They also asked me if I'd consider offering my on analysis of science in the news from time to time. Being of the opinion that its always better to do something about a problem rather than simply complain about it, I happily agreed. Here's the first piece to appear, a quick summary of the recent result that coffee isn't killing you and might even be prolonging your life.

I was prepared for a barrage of comments amounting "what does some evolutionary biologist/bug nerd know about medicine", but so far everyone that's taken the time to write something has been very supportive!

Labels: me elsewhere, sci-blogs, science and society, science communication, stuff

I though I'd do something a little bit different today. Instead of coming up with anything new to say or show you I'm going to steal from give a shout-out to a few New Zealand organisations that highlight  some of the amazing ways that spineless creatures get on with business of living.

Let's start with Landcare Research (Manaaki Whenua), the Crown Research Institute that focuses on bioiversity and environmental issues. As you'd expect, Landcare do lots of work on invertebrates an that's refelected in their public face. Their "What is this bug?" site is a great starting point for anyone trying to put a name to some weird critter that's crawled out from the garden, and topic pages on some of our most interesting creatures (Onychophora, stick insects and our amazingly diverse moth fauna) make for a nice introduction to these groups.

The Landcare site I really want to pull out for special focus is their recently developed guide to freshwater invertebrates. Freshwater invertebrates are often use as "indicator species". Because certain groups of stream invertebrates are very susceptible to pollution or changes to a stream's natural flow, the presence or absence of these groups in particular stretch of water can give us an idea of the health of that water. In order to help community groups or landowner monitor their streams, Landcare has produced some beautiful photographs of stream invertebrates (along with information on how to sample them, and how well each species acts as an indicator). You really should check out the whole site, because some of them are quite beautiful, I'll just give you a taster here:

Labels: phoning-it-in, photos, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness

As you may have seen, stuff.co.nz, the online portal for the Fairfax conglomerate of papers, has launched a science section. I would like to think one of the largest news websites in the country increasing their focus on science could only be a force for good. I'm afraid the initial offerings have lurched from underwhelming to utterly ridiculous.

The thousands of viewers who found themselves reading the front page of stuff this afternoon would have been met by a giant graphic of a blue sun and a headline claiming

Labels: climate change, media, sci-blogs