May 2013
Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?
In popular culture, especially literary references, wolves are usually sly, cunning and vicious. Think of the fairy tale wolf villain who used his drag queen and voice modulation skills to fool Little Red Riding Hood into thinking that he was her aged grandmother. Some literary wolves are more than a little bit gullible; thwarted in […]
Do badgers play Friesian tag?
While there is irrefutable evidence for the transfer of bovine TB between badgers and cattle, the mechanisms of transfer are not clearly documented. In order to reduce such transfer, it is obviously important to understand how infection takes place. With such questions in mind, data from a study of free-ranging badgers was combined with detailed […]
IUCN Red Listing Ecosystems Workshop
Many of us attended a fantastic seminar on Friday the 17th of May, given by Dr Ed Barrrows - IUCN Red List of Ecosystems: An evolving tool for risk assessment, priority setting and landscape action. Dr Ed Barrows is a former graduate of Trinity’s Zoology Department and is currently the Head of Ecosystems at the IUCN. The focus of […]
May I take your order?
My PhD involves studying the foraging behaviour of vultures. So far I’ve done theoretical work and also had the luck to get some second hand empirical data. But I’d like to be able to get some field data first hand. To that end I’m setting off to Swaziland on Saturday with the intention of building […]
Science be praised, please cure me of my Yoda Complex
My former PhD student, Luke McNally and I authored a paper published recently showing how “Cooperation creates selection for tactical deception”. Using a combination of mathematical models and analysis of empirical data from 24 primate species, we show that acts of deception are more likely to occur when the individuals in the group show greater cooperation. In […]
The VIP Tweetment
As part of an ongoing census of the birds of Trinity College, we surveyed their diversity just outside our door. Authors Trinity College Zoology Students Photo Credit Trinity College Zoology Students
We need Tarzan to fill the gaps!
Nature News published a new post about our origins. It's promoting Stevens et al’s 2013 paper that published the description from two new granddads/grandmas in our already complicated family tree. These guys, Nsungwepithecus and Rukwapithecus (it's not that hard to pronounce, try it) are considered by Stevens and his team as the oldest crown Catarrhines […]
Sentenced to death: how not to communicate science
I like to think the purpose of language (poetry excluded) is to convey information. Doing so in science is complicated somewhat by the vocabulary that every field accumulates. But, from my experience, most of this jargon takes the form of nouns and these are easy to explain when necessary. […]
Monsterology
Monsters and fantastical creatures are integral components of every culture and society. It’s easy to dismiss fantastical beasts such as Cyclopes, unicorns and mermaids as fanciful creations of story tellers with over-active imaginations. While this may be true, there are also often plausible explanations of either extinct or […]
Surviving experiments
Having just come through a particularly long and intense experiment (relatively unscathed) I thought I’d contribute some of the things I’ve learned and advice I’d give to other poor souls embarking on the exciting and terrifying world of empirical science. 1. Be organized! I know this is a bit of a cliché but taking the […]