Elephant seals are more social than we thought…

15 September, 2015 by

For male elephant seals, the fight to secure a mate can be vicious, even deadly. So they try everything they can to avoid it. This is a pattern biologists see again and again – across the animal kingdom, males have evolved to use signals to assess each other’s prowess and avert costly physical confrontations. In most cases, these signals are honest – they accurately convey an individual’s size, strength or dominance. But new research shows this is not the case for Elephant seals, which have evolved a more sophisticated system.

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Is Organic Farming Really Better for the Climate?

26 August, 2015 by

Organic food is often sold as being the greener alternative. By not pumping toxic chemicals into the environment, we expect that organic farms should do less harm to our wildlife, health and the climate. But new research suggests that current organic farming practises are actually worse for the environment.
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Beetles Escape Extinction Because They’re Hard

17 August, 2015 by

The brilliant mathematician and biologist JBS Haldane is famously quoted as once having said, “God had an inordinate fondness for beetles”. He was referring to the fact that nearly half of all insect species known are beetles, but over 50 years after his death, scientists are still gaining new insights into their amazing success. A new study reconstructing the beetle family tree suggests that it is the versatility of beetles that has allowed them to survive even the most testing of times.

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Stink Bugs Provide Sunscreen for their Eggs

10 August, 2015 by

One scientist found his laboratory stink bugs were laying different colour eggs on the black and white squares of a crossword printed on the newspaper lining of their cage. This small observation led him to begin a series of experiments that show how female stink bugs are able to selectively provide sun protection for vulnerable eggs.
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Evolution Shaped these Plants to Resonate with Bats

14 July, 2015 by

A new paper published in Current Biology this month shows how one species of pitcher plant has evolved to attract a species of bat and use it as a source of fertiliser.

The Bornean pitch plant in question (Nepenthes hemsleyana) is part of a mutualistic relationship with the Common woolly bat (Kerivoula hardwickii), in which the pitcher offers the bat a safe place to roost, and in return the bat provides fertiliser in the form of guano (bat poop). Dr Michael Schöner and his team tested the pitcher with a sonar beam and found that it acts as a multidirectional ultrasound reflector. They then experimentally modified the shape of the pitcher, and found that one particular region, known as the orifice, helped bats locate the pitcher.

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What is a Nut?

28 June, 2015 by

Question:

What is a Nut?

Answer:

In Botanical terms, a nut is a hard-shelled fruit, which does not open to release its seed. There are relatively few true nuts because dehiscent fruit (where the shell does split open) is far more common; true nuts include chestnuts, pecans and hazelnuts. Not all nuts are closely related to each other on the family tree of plants though – indehiscence has evolved multiple times as a strategy for seed dispersal.

However, the word nut is used to refer to a huge range of hard fruits and seeds, from legumes (e.g. peanuts) to drupes (e.g. coconuts and cashews).

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Jurassically Inaccurate

12 June, 2015 by

The time is finally here. After fourteen years, Spielberg has opened up the Jurassic World for us again, and everybody’s talking about it. In the twenty years since the release of Jurassic Park, we’ve learned a huge amount about how dinosaurs looked, moved, behaved and reproduced. We’ve learned about how their appearance changes through development, about their social behaviour and how they held themselves, and we’ve learned more from their genetics than we ever thought imaginable when Michael Crichton was writing his Jurassic novels.

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Why Does Sour Food Make us Cringe?

27 May, 2015 by

Question:

Why Does Sour Food Make Us Cringe? (asked by Anonymous)

Answer:

Turns out, not many people have directly looked at this – the scientific literature has relatively little to say on the topic of cringing at sour food. However, what it does say is this: the cringing facial expressions are part of a general ‘disgust’ response that we make towards unpleasant smells and tastes. Some aspects of the face we pull when we eat sour sweets or a particularly tart tangerine are also produced when we smell off milk or bite into a rotten apple. The disgust response is designed to stop us from eating poisonous or rotten food, and to communicate with others around us that the food is bad. It probably formed a key part of social foraging, enabling early humans to avoid bad food and share information within their social group.

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