So much has been written about the ‘insect apocalypse’; so many books, papers and articles are appearing all the time, that it can be difficult to make sense of it all. Unfortunately, and although there are a lot of ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ and caveats, things do look rather alarming, particularly when we take a global…
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…
This site was created following the demolition of the old Futurist theatre on Scarborough seafront. Demolition of the building began in June 2018 and was completed in August 2018. A process called ‘slope stabilisation’ created an area of sloping ground (below) which, in this year of lockdown, has filled up with wild flowers. Some might…
There are said to be about 460 species of dung beetles in Europe (Byk & Piętka, 2018), with about 60 of them occurring in the UK. They carry out the important job of breaking down and degrading dung pats and they also boost the productivity of a pasture by enhancing the activity of soil microorganisms.…
If insects could talk – English preferably! – I would like to ask them what they think is the key to their great success! In particular, I would like to ask a member of each Order of insects, to describe the main innovations and adaptations which have led to the success of their particular group.…
We have heard a lot in the news lately (Aug 2019) about the terrible forest fires burning in the Amazon. The forests are being cleared in order to grow ‘cash crops’, things like palm oil, soy bean, cattle and eucalyptus trees. The mega-diverse rain forests are being destroyed to plant these monocultures, whch have been…
These beautiful dung beetles are relatively common in NW Spain, and can often be seen flying purposefully through the pine forests, like tiny green helicopters, on a mission to find a cow pat or some horse droppings. They are a variety of Dor beetle, (Trypocopris pyrenaeus var. coruscans), similar to a couple of Dumble Dor beetles…
There are thought to be about 200,000 sperm whales in the world, but there is considerable uncertainty about the figure, which may be anywhere between 200,000-1,500,000 according to one site (1). The IUCN Red List states that the pre-whaling global population of sperm whales was about 1,100,000, so the number is probably much lower than…
What would you rather have: elephants or Beethoven’s Sixth symphony? Well, yes, it’s a ridiculous question I know, and of course we can have both, but it does throw up a number of issues facing us on the planet today as I hope to show. There are 400,000 elephants in the world, but their numbers…
Ray Cannon's nature notes 