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Sunday Spinelessness - What's brown and sticky?
Yup, I'm continuing with last week's theme of terrible jokes. Of course you know the punchline for this one, what's brown and sticky? A stick: Both the objects in that photograph are brown and fairly...
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Sunday spinelessness - live-bearing land snails
People seemed to like the idea of a marsupial land snail, so today I thought I'd go one step further, and introduce you to land snails that give birth to live young. I was lucky enough to spend a...
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Sunday Spinelessness - Each thing by its right name
In Dr Zhivago Boris Pasternak describes an epiphany that sneaks up on one of his characters thus: For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of...
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An object lesson in the danger of poor science reporting
As you may have seen, stuff.co.nz, the online portal for the Fairfax conglomerate of papers, has launched a science section. I would like to think one of the largest news websites in the country...
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Sunday Spinelessness - Lazy Link Blogging Edition
I though I'd do something a little bit different today. Instead of coming up with anything new to say or show you I'm going to steal from give a shout-out to a few New Zealand organisations that...
View ArticleSelling out to the mainstream media
The other week when I wrote that post about a poorly reported story in Stuff's new science section I emphasised that I really thought it was important that news sites with a large and non-specialist...
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Sunday Spinelessness - Even their eggs are spikey
I really like the leaf vein slugs (Athoracophoridae) that live in our garden and have featured here in the past. Here's the latest one to pass under my camera: As much as I like them, I have to admit...
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Sunday Spinelessness - Nothing to see here
I'm off to the Transit of Venus Forum next week. I'm looking forward to meeting all sorts of clever and interesting people (and escaping the coming snow), but travelling and conferring won't leave...
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Sunday Spineless - How some snails became red-blooded
Here's something cool that I've meaning to write about for a long time. A native Powelliphanta land snail with an apparently pigment-less foot and head: That snail (a close relative of speedy carnivore...
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Sunday Spinelessness - The other mollusc shell
Here's a really cool animal, a female argonaut (sometimes called a paper nautilus): It may not be immediately obvious from the photo, but argonauts are octopuses. Strange octopuses, because the seven...
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Sunday Spinelessness - Cuttlefish in drag deceive their rivals
One awesome mollusc deserves another, so let's follow up last weeks octopus post with one on that group's close relatives the cuttlefish. Cuttlefish are relatively small (the largest grow to 50cm)...
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You can't ban redheaded sperm
It's the first week of semester two down here at Otago, which means I will helping with undergraduate labs for the first time this year. I suspect most students end up not liking me all that much,...
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Sunday Spinelessness - New Zealand microsnails
When I tell people I study snails for a living I get one of two replies. There's either some version of the "joke" that goes "that must be slow-going" or "sounds action packed", or there's "oh, you...
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Sunday Spinelessness - Hairy snails
Here's another of these tiny native snails I talked about last week. Aeschrodomus stipulatus: Not the best photo I'll admit, but it records enough detail to see the two things that set Aeschrodomus...
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Sunday Spinelessness - How snails conquered the land (again and again)
Christie Willcox wrote a nice article this week on how one small group of organisms called "vertebrates" first evolved to live on land. Since you are a vertebrate who lives on land, you should...
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Measuring population differentiation in R
This is a little bit different than most posts here. I have a paper out today in Molecular Ecology Resources: "mmod: an R library for the calculation of population differentiation statistics" (doi:...
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Graduation, nerd blogging and a talk
The most dedicated readers of The Atavism may have noticed a few Sundays have passed without celebration of a spineless creature. Well, you know how blogging is sometimes. A few of the things that have...
View ArticleAll the media!
Oh, hi there. Yeah, it's been a while h'uh? Just been crazy busy lately you know - one thing after another with manuscripts and datasets to analyse, then I got a whole bunch of lab reports to mark. We...
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Sunday Spinelessness - Shocked from sloth by a beautiful spider
Regular readers will know that I've been pretty slack in posting here in recent weeks. Just the same old boring reason - lots of "real" work to get done and, as much as I enjoy it, blogging necessarily...
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Sunday Spinelessness - An ID challenge
OK, here's a chance for the bug nerds to show off. A photo of a strange-looking beast I recently ran into: The challenge to readers is to answer the two questions that went through my head when I...
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