Trinity College Dublin, Ecology and Evolution
On the 15th and 16th April we had one of my favourite events at Trinity College Dublin: the annual School of Natural Sciences Postgraduate Symposium. Over the course of two days many of our PhD students presented their work to the School. We also had two amazing plenary talks from Dr Nick Isaac (CEH) and …
Continue reading “School of Natural Sciences Postgraduate Symposium: Part 1/4”
Natalie Cooper and Sive Finlay already posted on this blog about the amazing old stuff you can find in a Natural History Museum (here and here). Palaeo collections are also special, I spent one week in the Smithsonian Institution Paleobiology collections to measure some Eocene American primate teeth and I was amazed by the quality …
As oil prices sore and the future of world energy is uncertain, there is rising demand for alternatives to fossil fuels. From solar energy to wind to algae fuel and biodigestion, the alternatives are numerous. One alternative that has received substantial media attention is the use of bioenergy which involves the production of energy from …
On the 31st January, stimulated by a European Food Safety Authority report, the EU proposed banning three neonicotinoid insecticides which have been implicated in causing honeybee decline. These insecticides are widely-used, systemic (i.e. soluble enough in water to move around the plant’s vascular system to nearly all plant tissues), and, like nicotine, affect the insects’ …
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 …
Some of the most successful animals on earth live in societies characterised by a division of labour between reproducing and non-reproducing castes. One role non-reproducing members may undertake is defence. Spectacular examples include the heavily armoured termites and ants. Recently a soldier caste was discovered in an entirely new and unexpected battleground, inside the bodies …
For the longest time floral nectar was considered to be made of two components: simple sugars (such as sucrose, fructose and/or glucose) and water. Research carried out in the past two decades however has repeatedly shown this paradigm to be incorrect. As analytical techniques such as high resolution GC-MS and HPLC have become commonplace, the …
Continue reading ““Toxic” nectar and pollen in an invasive plant species”
A new study has been published online in Ecology Letters by Mirkka Lahdenperä and colleagues, which suggests that competition between grandmothers and their daughters-in-law may explain the evolution of menopause. The study used a 200-year dataset of births, deaths and residency patterns in pre-industrial Finland to show that competition between unrelated females of different generations …
Continue reading “Hot heads lead to hot flashes: the evolution of menopause”