Insects and plants are intimately linked in terms of their ecology and evolution. Insects and vascular plants both first appear in the fossil record around 400 MY ago, at the beginning of the Devonian, as terrestrial ecology changed to allow the colonization of the land. Then about 20 MY later, the first arboreal plants appear, [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Insects’
06/11/2009
A FLYING ADVERT
The recent Frankfurt Book Fair saw this rather unusual living advert – little flyers attached to flies. They were released into the Book Fair to delight (or irritate) the worthies of the book world who were there to wheel and deal. What are the ethics of this? Where should it stop? Here, or with the [...]
02/11/2009
A silly fruit fly song
In 1907-8, Thomas Hunt Morgan began to study Drosophila melanogaster in the laboratory. Morgan wasn’t the first to focus on the tiny fruitfly – in 1901 William E. Castle had begun breeding flies in Harvard. Mendel’s laws had been rediscovered in 1903, but Morgan wasn’t interested in inheritance – indeed he was unconvinced about what was [...]
05/05/2009
BIG INSECTS
November 2007 One of the main theories that explains the existence of large arthropods in previous epochs is the fact that oxygen levels were sometimes much higher, allowing organisms which depend on passive diffusion, like insects, to grow larger. (This was a key aspect of a plot in last year’s TV hit Primeval which featured an unfeasibly large [...]
05/05/2009
ROBOT ROACHES
November 2007 Those Final Years who have done the Animal Behaviour course may remember me showing videos of robots behaving like ants. The same Belgian group led by Deneubourg has now turned its attention to cockroaches, as shown by their article in this week’s issue of Science. If you cover a robot with cockroach pheromone, the real roaches follow [...]
24/04/2009
BIOMIMICRY
November 2007 Can we use animals as inspiration for new technology? Here are some thought-provoking examples. Guardian pictures of butterflies, geckos and the like, and their potential applications. BBC Radio 4 programme about the Bombardier beetle and why materials science folk are studying it (click on “listen again”).
23/04/2009
WHY ARE THERE NO MARINE INSECTS?
October 2007 There are no insects that spend their whole life cycle under the surface of the sea, and very few that spend even part of their life on or in the sea. Why not? This student-built website takes you through the various hypotheses (salinity, competitive exclusion etc) and provides you with lots of thought-provoking ideas. NB You can’t [...]
22/04/2009
BUZZ OFF ELEPHANTS!
October 2007 If you live on the edge of or in an African National Park, elephants can be a major garden pest. A group from Oxford has discovered that you can drive them away with the sound of bees… DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! Original open access article in Current Biology (includes link to film, at [...]
22/04/2009
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PEPPERED MOTH
October 2007 You all probably learnt about the peppered moth (Biston betularia) being an example of evolution by natural selection. The melanic (dark) form increased in frequency with the industrial revolution. A few years ago, doubts were cast on some of the experiments, and were seized upon by creationists to suggest that the whole story was rubbish. Prof Mike [...]
22/04/2009
CAN ANTS TEACH?
September 2007 One of the main distinguishing features of humans is that we teach. Even chimps, which use tools for example to fish out termites, don’t teach their offspring – learning takes place by observation. Nigel Franks (Bristol) argues in this article in Current Biology that “tandem running” in ants is a form of teaching…
