December 2012
No animal is an island
No man is an island; the same could be said for the millions of life forms that populate our planet. Think of all the ways in which organisms interact with each other through predation, parasitism and the countless symbioses. Sometimes a pair of interacting partners can become inextricably linked such is their mutual dependence. Each […]
Friends with benefits
With the apocalypse come and gone we can still theorise about how our downfall will come about. E. O. Wilson wrote that ‘‘sex is an antisocial force in evolution’’. Charlie Cornwallis, his colleagues at Oxford and their promiscuous birds illustrated why this is so. As is so often the case in evolutionary theory the question […]
The 12 days of NERD club
NERD club, for the uninitiated, is a weekly meeting of the Networks in Ecology/Evolution Research Cluster Dynamic of the School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin. We present and discuss our research and also general aspects of academia such as science communication, job hunting and using twitter. The members include interns, PhD students, postdocs and […]
World's ending: enough time to read this?
What will happen today on the last day of the world (21st)? Will some giant asteroid hit the Earth? Will massive tsunamis ravage all the coast lines? Will climate suddenly be way to warm for life? Will methane bubble out of the oceans and asphyxiate everybody? Or are aliens going to take over our planet? […]
Smoking nests
We all know that cigarettes and smoking are bad for you. However, a recent Biology Letters paper which was featured on BBC Nature suggests that the discarded remains of cigarette butts may help to maintain the health of some urban birds. Researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico found that smoked cigarette butts incorporated […]
Hippo Critical
Hippopotami have been the talk of the Trinity College Zoology department’s tea room recently. Mainly because a number of staff are about to embark on a field trip to Kenya with some undergraduate students and hippos have featured highly on the list of possible animals which an encounter with might result in death or injury, […]
Gorillas and/or potatoes?
If you were given a resource that could guarantee revenue of $30 million every year, with almost triple that amount additionally coming through ancillary spending, would you ignore it? If this resource then had the power to lift some of the most marginalised people on the planet out of poverty, you would even think twice? […]
A Christmas Story…
As the festive season draws upon us, Pope Benedict XVI is attracting increasing attention in the international press. Today (12th December) is scheduled to see the first tweet issued by the pontiff, a message which is predicted to reach at least 1 million followers; a remarkable number which fades in comparison to the 32 million […]
Sex on the beach?
Mr Garrison taught South Park Elementary children (season 10, episode 12) the good old fashion way of seeing evolution; “we are the retarded children of some retarded frog-fish-squirrel...”. This is the gradualist way of seeing evolutionary processes; leading from uninteresting jelly fishes to the mighty Arnold Shwarzenegger. Many scientists reject this gradualist view in favour […]
The undiscovered island
Early ecological research relied on adventurous naturalists striking forth into unknown territory and expanding our knowledge of the natural world. This exploratory work is far from complete and many species new to science are still being identified. However, in order to study and investigate the remaining unexplored frontiers, knowing where they are is a fundamental […]