The thought of an orca playing with its food – a cute seal – can be a grim one. But is it useful to project our ideas of morality onto other species? In this guest post, Mary Shuttleworth looks at the problems with interpreting animal behaviour the way we would interpret our own,
There seems to be a pattern of thought currently floating around regarding sustainable living. The take home message goes something like this: “it makes no difference whether an individual tries to live sustainably, big corporations are the ones making all the difference anyway”. I want to challenge the notion that the actions of individuals are meaningless.
Go through any scientific paper and you’ll find it littered with uncertainty. Scientists qualify parameters, give standard errors, make way for random processes even when experiments have been planned to the finest detail. So why is uncertainty such a crucial part of science? How does this affect the non-scientific public’s perception of science? And does this relationship with knowledge need to change in the future?
You read that correctly, birds are reptiles. Now, I can hear you saying “but we learned that they are a different group of organisms, and that reptiles are just those scaly animals that have cold blood?” While reptiles don’t have cold blood per se, some of them DO have feathers. And can fly. But birds belong with the snakes, lizards, crocodiles, and turtles in the reptile group.
Today is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Rather than go into depth about gender in ecology myself, I thought that I’d share some of the thoughts of prominent female ecologists that we’ve spoken to over the last year. We asked these scientists two simple questions. Has the gender gap closed during your time in the discipline, and what needs to happen to close it further?
A short follow-up to last week’s interview with invasion ecologist Mark Davis.
We look at the difference between natural selection and evolution, in a study investigating natural selection on mice colour.
