Trinity College Dublin, Ecology and Evolution
“I wish to register a complaint…” the first six months of my PhD have passed by far too quickly. As the date of departure for my first major data collection trip looms, I’m navigating the exciting but unnerving transition from the planning to action stages of my project. Fortunately the members of NERD club were on hand …
Continue reading “Morphological convergence and disparity in Malagasy tenrecs”
Nazinga Game Ranch is a protected area in southern Burkina Faso, dominated by clear shrub and woody savannah and home to one of the most important elephant populations of the Western Africa. Researchers from the University of Gembloux Agrobiotech in Belgium tested one of the first unmanned aerial surveys to study the wildlife of Nazinga. …
Continue reading “Could the ‘drone’ be a new technology to survey African wildlife?”
At the launch of our recent college Green Week, Trinity College presented the final stages of its bid to secure the Green Flag Award. Part of the assessment comprised a summary of the plants and animals which, along with the rarefied species of Drama studientis and the Lesser Spotted Theoretical Physicist, contribute to campus biodiversity. …
Cats eh? You either love them or you hate them it seems. Well the latest research published in Nature by Loss et al. (2013) will give those who hate them plenty more reason to do so. While those who love their cats may just sit that little bit less comfortably next to their feline companions. …
Why is it that the first things that happen upon seeing a pudgy baby panda, fluffy penguin or tumbling kitten are usually utterances of “squeezing it”, “eating it” or “smushing it”!? We’ve been talking quite a bit about ‘cuteness’ in the department for a while now; what makes an animal cute, animals exploiting that inbuilt …
Continue reading “Punch it in the face! Coping with cuteness…”
Tenrecs are one of the most interesting and fascinating mammal groups yet many people have never heard of them. They are one of only four mammalian groups to have colonised Madagascar, a land filled with evolutionary curiosities. Tenrecs are a striking example of convergent evolution. From a single colonising ancestor, tenrecs have evolved into incredibly …
“Being a paleontologist is like being a coroner except all the witnesses are dead and all the evidence has been left out in the rain for 65 million years” Mike Brett-Surman, 1994 I am very much for palaeontology and the enthusiasm for the science today but there was a time when even the mighty dinosaurs were …
Visualising the tree of life is a challenge for even the most artistically attuned in the scientific community. The problem is the sheer number of species that we need to represent, literally millions. But I think the latest attempt meets the challenge. The developers of OneZoom, the name of the new approach, argue that we …
For over 10 years we have been making regular visits to islands in the Sulawesi region of Indonesia. We trap birds on these islands, collecting morphometric data. Each bird we trap is measured, marked with a plastic ring and released. As our dataset grows we gain more insight into the lives of the birds on …