This blog is dedicated to Andreas Kay (1963–2019), a remarkable biologist and natural history photographer, some of whose photographs I have included below. I never met Andreas, but like many people, I followed him on Facebook and marvelled at his photographs documenting the diversity of life in Ecuador. He generously shared over 28,000 of his…
Winter is a time of quiet rebirth. Nature rests and renews itself. Leaves fall and molecules return to the soil; ready to be recycled and reused. There is great beauty in this process of decomposition. The sun stays low in the sky but still provides some warmth on sunny days. A leaf, blown here and…
Animal behaviour / bees / Butterflies / Insects / Morphology / Moths
Insect antennae have been the focus of interest and speculation for as long as people have been observing our six-legged friends. We have seen in previous blogs in this series on Insect Antennae (I, II and III), how they are used for a wide variety of different purposes, from feeding ants, to detecting pheromones and…
Animal behaviour / bees / Biodiversity and conservation / Insects / invasive / Morphology / Photography / Wasps
Insect antennae often play important roles in courtship and mating. Not just for detecting pheromones, as we saw in the last blog, but also for transferring them, and for stimulating the opposite sex. Antennation – using the antennae to touch any part of the body of another insect – occurs for a variety of reasons…
Beetles / Insects / Morphology / Moths
Adult insects rely on their antennae to detect odours (smells!) which tell them all about what’s happening in their neighbourhood. Whether there is anything to eat nearby; whether there are any members of the opposite sex looking for a partner; who else is about, and so on. They wave their wonderful wands around and pick…
Insect antennae are the most wonderful sense organs. They are both the nostrils and feelers – tactile probes – of insects, and are covered with an array of sensory receptors that can be used to detect a host of different things, including: potential mates, hosts, prey items, oviposition sites and much more. They are used…
In humans, about 10% of us are left-handed. It used to be thought that this was a uniquely human phenomenon – for example, there is no conclusive evidence for genuine handedness in chimpanzees – but surprisingly, it seems that most kangaroos are left-handed! Or to put it more precisely, Eastern grey kangaroos and red kangaroos…
Bees get a lot of good press these days, especially for their role as pollinators. And let’s face it, they deserve it! Hard working, unassuming, attractive and useful! They are almost supplanting those poster boys and girls of the insect world: butterflies! But what about flies? Their press is a mixed bag. To some people…
The equinoctial gales washed up lots of nice kelp onto the beaches of Scarborough this year (below). The piles of seaweed were gradually pushed up the beach by the incoming tides, eventually accumulating beyond the strand-line, where it slowly decays and eventually dries out. This gift from the sea is a wonderful bounty which is…
I was never very good at maths! At school I was put into a form who were taught New Maths. Luckily for me, we had a really great teacher who was able to reveal the mysteries of the subject in a way that made sense and I managed to get an ‘O’ level!. The New…
Thanatosis, or apparent death, is when an animal pretends to be dead! Lizards do it, opossums do it (‘playing possum’) and butterflies do it! The idea is to fool the pursuer into thinking you are dead, and hope that they will then leave you alone! Female butterflies sometimes do it to avoid the unwanted attentions…
Iridescence is when surfaces – such as the wings of butterflies – appear to change brightness and colour as the angle of view, or the angle of illumination, changes. The iridescent wings of Morpho butterflies are some of the best examples. The spectral reflectance changes with the angle of incidence – i.e. the viewing angle…
The first time I saw a fly with a droplet of water protruding from it’s mouth (or the tip of the proboscis) I was quite surprised. Why would a fly be blowing bubbles like this? It turns out that flies do this to cool down! They move a droplet of fluid in and out and…
As I bent down over the wasp nest taking pictures with my mobile phone (below) their mood suddenly changed and I saw the wasps flying up towards me! I ran away as fast as I could, but they followed me for over 100 metres, and I was lucky to get away with only four…
What does this strikingly black and red coloured moth say to you? Eat me? Or, don’t touch me because I am poisonous? It should say the latter! Because bright, contrasting colours like this are aposematic. They are universal warning colours which apply throughout the animal kingdom; and if you don’t know them, you will soon…
