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It’s been a while… 8 May 2013 | 03:09 am
I’ve been away in Burma with the BBC for some time looking for animals and since getting back I’ve been thinking it was high time to put together a proper website that could incorporate my blog. So, h...
Reproduction: Russian doll style… 26 Oct 2012 | 01:48 pm
Parasitic platyhelminthes, particularly the flukes, have the most complex life cycles of any animal, involving two or more hosts and an elaborate sequence of developmental stages that allows each egg ...
Magnificent mouthparts 16 Oct 2012 | 10:58 pm
The Stenus rove beetles have featured in a couple of other posts, but the photos below are worthy of revisiting these fascinating little insects. I had these images done by a chap who has a SEM in his...
Time travellers 13 Oct 2012 | 03:42 am
When I was working on the book I’ve just finished I became a little fixated by the rotifers and I blogged about them previously, here and here. However, these two posts are not enough and I feel like ...
Unfeasibly large gonads… 12 Oct 2012 | 10:58 pm
This post isn’t about the famous Viz character, rather the mind-boggling diversity of nematodes, which I touched on in a previous post. One nematode that beautifully illustrates the bizarre life histo...
Pin head 23 Sep 2012 | 10:29 pm
Last year in northern Spain we crashed our hire car, but after exercising our rudimentary knowledge of the Spanish language we eventually found a friendly mechanic to repair it. The next day we had to...
Mini-hawks 20 Sep 2012 | 12:39 am
In one of my older posts I banged on about the hunting prowess of some of the solitary wasps and I alluded to the visual acuity of these mini-hawks. This post concerns Ectemnius wasps in particular. T...
A grisly end for an earthworm… 7 Sep 2012 | 08:52 pm
Whilst camping in Cornwall recently we found this earthworm thrashing about in the turf. I thought nothing of it initially, but on closer inspection the poor worm was writhing about to shake off an at...
A tiger beetle on steroids 5 Sep 2012 | 11:18 pm
Tiger beetles come in all shapes and sizes, but on the whole they’re rather elegant, fine-limbed animals. With this said, some of their number are real brutes and perhaps the most brutish of all are t...
Microfauna 2 15 Aug 2012 | 06:05 pm
In the last post we touched on the fact that many animals are smaller than single-celled organisms, so below is a short video to illustrate the point. Here, on the right is a rotifer, an animal with a...
