Posted 27 Jul 2015 / 0
Urban Wildlife Podcast “Bangkok Pythons and Gotham Whales” This is a really interesting podcast that focuses on the wildlife of cities. This episode is about huge animals that manage to live in close proximity to cities, specifically in their waterways. The section on reticulated pythons — which can grow up to 23-25 feet long — Read More
A Minor Post, Cetaceans, Coevolution, Commensalism, Conservation Biology, Public Outreach, Radio & Podcasts, Reptiles, Urban Ecology
Posted 21 Jun 2014 / 0
Erin McKenney of Duke University talked about three lemur species with different diets: a frugivore (fruit-eater), a generalist, and a folivore (leaf-eater). Not surprisingly their gut morphologies and passing times vary with their diet, but McKenney showed that they also have unique trajectories as infants are colonized by symbiotic bacteria of different types.
A Minor Post, Coevolution, Conferences, Mutualism, Primates, Society for the Study of Evolution
Posted 20 May 2014 / 0
NPR All Things Considered “This Freeloading Bird Brings Help — And The Help Smells Gross” It is hard to believe that feeding an entire extra non-offspring would be in the self-interest of a bird, but as this short points out, costs and benefits are always environment-specific. In this case, the “parasitic” effect of having to raise Read More
A Minor Post, Behavior, Birds, Coevolution, Mutualism, Parasitism, Predation, Quantifying Costs and Benefits, Radio & Podcasts
Posted 11 Oct 2013 / 0
WMAC Northeast Public Radio “Academic Minute: Dr. Alicia Melis, University of Warwick – Cooperation and Chimpanzees” Chimps’ ability to take the perspective of others has been questioned, but this set of experiments seems to show that chimps can mentally put themselves in the place of a comrade, imagining what that comrade should do and then Read More
A Minor Post, Behavioral Ecology, Cooperation, Human Uniqueness, Primates, Radio & Podcasts, Reciprocity, Web
Posted 26 Jan 2013 / 0
WNYC “NYC’s Top Dogs: Mapping Names & Breeds in the City” WNYC “Dogs of NYC” Data sets like these, even flawed by their incompleteness (only 20% of dogs in New York City are registered) are fascinating. The human relationship with dogs has changed radically as we have urbanized as a species: I would suggest that the dominance Read More
A Minor Post, Canids, Coevolution, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Geography, Human Evolution, Human Uniqueness, Mutualism, Public Policy, Radio & Podcasts, Web
Posted 11 Nov 2012 / 0
Current Biology “Social Evolution: When Promiscuity Breeds Cooperation” Current Biology “Promiscuous Honey Bee Queens Increase Colony Productivity by Suppressing Worker Selfishness” What I find so fascinating about this study is that relatedness can actually under some scenarios undermine cooperation, and that when proper policing of cheating is possible, less-related individuals may have more incentive to Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Behavior, Cooperation, Hymenoptera, Punishment, Superorganisms
Posted 20 Sep 2012 / 0
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences “No third-party punishment in chimpanzees” This is pretty astonishing, but perhaps not entirely surprising. As numerous other studies have shown, there are many qualitative differences in the cognition and resulting behaviors of humans and chimpanzees. Whether the fact that chimps do not maintain a sense of ‘social justice’ Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Cooperation, Human Evolution, Human Uniqueness, Primates, Psychology, Punishment
Posted 27 Jun 2012 / 0
Science Now “Building a Bigger Dolphin Brain“
A Minor Post, Brain size, Cetaceans, Cognitive Ability, Genetics, Neuroscience
Posted 25 Jun 2012 / 0
PLoS One “Multilevel Selection and Neighbourhood Effects from Individual to Metapopulation in a Wild Passerine” I am about to dive into a close reading of this paper, but it suggests that perhaps the reason we do not record multilevel selection pressures is in part because we do not go looking for them.
A Minor Post, Birds, Multilevel Selection, Population Growth
Posted 22 Jun 2012 / 0
The New York Times “With Teamwork, Humans Best Other Primates“
A Minor Post, Articles, Cooperation, Human Uniqueness, Primates, Primatology
