Giant, fluorescent pink slugs found near Narrabri

  Giant, fluorescent pink slugs found near Narrabri.   There’s a reason I have a “strange creatures” category of posts. This isn’t the only hot pink creature around, either.  In 2008, a hot pink millipede was named # 3 in the Top 10 New Species of 2007:   So, before you say you won’t eat something…

Journal Club: Scarlet macaw genome sequenced | Maniraptora

  Journal Club: Scarlet macaw genome sequenced | Maniraptora.   One of the questions we spend a chapter discussing is what makes a species unique.  We talk about DNA and speciation and chromosome copies.  This research is interesting from an evolutionary perspective, because it shows how the scarlet macaw is different from a chicken: how…

Sex & HOX genes: learning about basic reproduction

Mosses Make Two Different Plants From the Same Genome, and a Single Gene Can Make the Difference | The Artful Amoeba, Scientific American Blog Network. This article is pretty amazing and is VERY well-written.  I just posted one about fish and asked why they couldn’t just asexually reproduce.  Well, this kind of starts pointing you…

Tracking whole colonies shows ants make career moves : Nature News & Comment

    Tracking whole colonies shows ants make career moves : Nature News & Comment.   One of the things we discuss in class is social living, particularly among social insects.  For this to work, individuals must give up independent reproductive success–one of the key components to evolutionary fitness.  Occasionally, even individual foraging for food…

Can Evolution Beat Climate Change?: Scientific American

    Can Evolution Beat Climate Change?   This particular article should be interesting to my students because we talk about a lot of this in class. Not specifically about sea urchins, true, but about the topics that tie into this.  One of the things that we discuss in class is the idea of latent…