Everybody loves slime, even more so when it’s clever problem solving slime. But no, I am not talking about ghost busters, this stuff is the real deal mmm slimey Slime moulds are single celled organisms, but can stretch many centimetres across. Packing millions of nuclei, they are currently considered protists (a group of life pretty much […]
If my previous blog hinted at a degree of panic, then that is only representative of how I actually felt. Back then I was about to embark on 6 weeks of field work in Spain, which was closely followed by a week-long workshop in Switzerland. In Spain I was collecting data and setting up cameras […]
I have spent the last fortnight voluntarily imprisoned in a research centre in Cambridge, along with 40 other human guinea pigs, to take part in a medical trial investigating flu transmission. Why? I hear you ask, would you agree to spend two weeks locked up with strangers in a hospital ward, especially when […]
Have I got everything? Charity shop trousers, charity shop shirts (just for field work, honest) everything various shades of green, brown and beige to best hide the accumulated dirt. Where the hell did I leave the European plug adapter? Passport, still in data *phew* imodium (crickets wait for no man, or his bowels…). Travel? EasyJet […]
Teach a man to fish, and he will probably break your rod before catching anything. as analogies go, I’m pretty underwhelmed At least that is what used to be my feelings about teaching. Not being blessed with a great deal of natural patience, I always felt teaching was, while highly valuable, simply not for me. […]
Is it cheating that I chose to bring a blog and a podcast to the journal club table? Well no! These formats are popular ways of putting your work and experiences out there, and I would think that they are more likely to reach a greater and more varied audience than published papers would do […]
Our group’s discussion this week was based on a topic I’ve always found fascinating: the ant aphid mutualism. Basically aphids eat loads of plant material (much to the chagrin of those with green thumbs) to get enough nitrogen in their diet (essential for building and repairing body tissue), but by a quirk of their metabolism the waste […]
As many of you may or may not know this Tuesday was the 203rd anniversary of the birth of the great Charles Darwin (FRS). As his theory of evolution by natural selection is the basis for our current understanding of the natural world and everything that we do at the CEC we celebrate this yearly […]
Last weeks excuse for some hearty biscuit eating and sometimes on-topic science chat was a recent paper on prey choice in fish by Miller and Pawlik published in the latest edition of Animal Behaviour. Using prey choice experiments the authors found that bluehead wrasse (Thalassoma bifasciatum) were able to learn to avoid unpalatable prey based […]
Last month, here in deepest Cornwall, we were lucky enough to have a talk given by Kyle Summers about his work on the evolution of monogamy in Peruvian poison frogs. The talk was so good we decided to discuss a recent paper by the man himself at our weekly Journal Club. For me, the best […]
Wild Lab 