October 2007 Definitely a video that will make you laugh! The male red-capped Manakin (Pipra mentalis), a bird found in Costa Rica and Belize (watch out for it if you go there on the Field Course), does a rather cool moonwalk as part of its courtship ritual. It also produces some rather bizarre clicks with its wings. Two YouTube [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Sex’
22/04/2009
SURVIVING WITHOUT SEX
October 2007 The advantage of sex, we are told, is that it increases genetic variability and enables organisms to cope with changing environments. There is a rotifer (small freshwater invert) which has done without sex for 80 million years… How do they cope? BBC summary, original article and magazine article in Science (both need you or your institution [...]
22/04/2009
WHY DO FEMALES PREFER MALES OF THEIR OWN SPECIES?
October 2007 Seems like a daft question, but the genetic bases of these effects can be quite simple. This article from Science (subscription needed to get past abstract) gives an example from pied flycatchers and shows that the genes are sex-linked. There’s also this summary in the same issue (same rules apply). Thanks to Per Smiseth for [...]
22/04/2009
WHAT ARE WE DOING ABOUT THE LYNX?
September 2007 Interesting thought piece from BBC journalist Mark Mardell about the contradictory effects of EU policies on the Iberian Lynx. Includes sound of lynx love-making!
21/04/2009
WHERE DID THAT BABY SHARK COME FROM?
May 2007 A female bonnethead shark (part of the hammerhead family) gave birth to a pup (yes, some sharks are viviparous – this was very important for realising that mammals have eggs. Read my book!). What was interesting is that she had not been in contact with a male – it was a case of parthenogenesis, unusual in such [...]
21/04/2009
SEXUAL SELECTION
May 2007 One of the key areas of evolutionary biology that is crying out for experimental data is sexual selection. This magazine article describes a recent article in Current Biology, which sheds new light on the “lek paradox”. Do male sexual traits (eg peacock “tails”) directly confer a genetic advantage or not? How can they if they are subject [...]
21/04/2009
MATE CHOICE PRIMER
May 2007 Just the thing for final year students wanting to do some general revision - a Current Biology “primer” article on mate choice. The rest of you should read it, too!
21/04/2009
LUMINOUS SQUID ON THE BEACH
April 2007 Cool video of Firefly squid coming to shore in Japan in order to lay their eggs. (BBC news, may not work outside UK.)
20/04/2009
GETTING ZOO ANIMALS TO MATE
March 2007 Radio 4 programme about the difficulties faced by captive breeding programmes, in particular for the white rhino. Can be downloaded as MP3.
