
The world at night – blacklighting: how it works and some amazing photos
Eran Levin is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona. His research is with hawk moths, but catching them means that he gets to see a plethora of other critters.
Felicity Muth is an early-career researcher with a PhD in animal cognition.

The world at night – blacklighting: how it works and some amazing photos
Eran Levin is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona. His research is with hawk moths, but catching them means that he gets to see a plethora of other critters.

How Do Ants Coordinate Moving Huge Objects?
As a child I used to spend hours watching groups of ants move large objects together and wonder how they managed to coordinate themselves. If I had to move some furniture with some friends, I’m sure we’d be talking the whole time about which way we were going and how fast, but as far as [...]

Any Black Bear Experts Out There?
I recently took a trip to Yellowstone national park, which, as expected, was an amazing place. The geysers and hot water pools were beautiful; walking around there you felt like you were on another planet.

Infested female crickets are less choosy in who they have sex with
In most animals, females are generally the ones that choose the males. This is a massive generalisation (for example, it doesn’t apply in this case), but I hope people who work on this topic will forgive me for it.

September 15th: A great day out at Arizona insect festival
I used to have a summer job in Edinburgh’s Butterfly and Insect World. One of the things I would see time and time again would be parents coming in who had already decided that they ‘didn’t like bugs’, and who would influence their children likewise.

More than honey – a review
Last night I went to see the documentary ‘More than honey’, directed and produced by the Swiss film-maker Markus Imhoof. As I work with bees (bumblebees) and have already read a bit about colony collapse disorder and honeybee farming I wasn’t expecting too much from the film: an education on all the crops bees are [...]

Cooling down in honeybees is affected by what others are doing
In my previous post, I talked about how crickets were influenced by who was watching them when they performed a victory dance after winning a fight.

Crickets dance differently with an audience
Humans love their victory displays. You only have to watch a game of football (or soccer to US-readers) to see some victory displays of the most ridiculous kind.

Meeting the locals: science outreach at the Animal Behavior Society conference
After the Animal Behavior Society conference in Boulder, Colorado, myself and some other postdocs and PhD students spent a morning demonstrating various aspects of science to the public.

A trip to the Animal Behaviour Society conference in Colorado
Last week I went to the Animal Behavior Society conference in Boulder, Colorado. This is a meeting where scientists and students working in all aspects of animal behaviour can get together, talk about their work, meet others in their field and share ideas.

How might female butterflies gain an advantage? How about having the ability to taste through their feet

Turtle embryos move inside their eggs to the coolest spots

Are pigs stupid? Perhaps they re just stressed

Left-eyed Lizards

Wasps aren't objective when it comes to fighting

Why do dogs yawn when they see sleepy humans?

Birds arrange eggs in their nests to better detect imposters

Animal culture: insights from whales

Animal culture: insights from vervet monkeys

Homosexuality in female beetles, and what we can learn from it

Building on experience

An Introduction

Drugs and error bars
I've been away from writing here for a while, as recently I've been stuck into a very different type of writing - finishing up my thesis for my PhD.

Animal Minds
I recently attended a meeting in london (‘Animal Minds: from computation to evolution), where there were some really interesting talks.