Ecology & Zoology

Researchers have captured the bioelectrical signals necessary for normal head and facial formation in an organism and  captured the process in a time-lapse video that reveals never-before-seen…

A comment thread on my last post has gotten me thinking about the summer of 2009. I lived in La Jolla for a couple of months, sorting baby squid out of old preserved plankton tows, and then…

My paper on Squid Babies (which started out as a dissertation chapter) just got accepted! Well, technically it's Accepted with Revisions, which, for the non-academics in the room, means my co-authors…

Pesky animal rights activists may complain if you eat veal but they can't complain if you eat larvae, right?    Those are bugs and people sitting in trees have to eat something while they…

Check out this photo, taken a few weeks ago in La Jolla, Southern California. What do you think is most striking about it? Some people might be surprised by the sheer number of squid in the photo--…

Good morning/afternoon/evening, and welcome to the Spider News. Today, we have two arachnid novelties for you. Firstly, old age affects us all, even spiders. Researchers have found that, as spiders…

I don’t care how long (or short) of a time you’ve spent lounging in the Stanford bubble. If you haven’t popped out yet to see a sea otter, I have an assignment for you: Drop everything and get to the…

Once upon a time, tool use was considered to be a uniquely human feature, setting us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. But, when Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees using sticks to ‘fish’ for…

Apparently, the female ancestor of present-day polar bears was a brown bear, living in what presently corresponds to Ireland. An international research team has used mitochondrial DNA (see figure 1)…

It's totally a thing! The vast majority of squid caught off the west coast of the Americas, both North and South, is shipped to the other side of the Pacific Ocean to be processed in Asia. Much of it…