Hello and Welcome!
Nick and I will be adding posts which relate to the topics that we cover in our module at the University of Reading, Exploiters and Exploited, and our associated book Biological Diversity: Exploiters and Exploited.
We shall be exploring some topics in more details than we could in the book or lectures, and will also try to keep you up-to-date with developments in our topics. There is always something new in our topic areas – that is why we chose them, they are not static but develpoing all the time. To illustrate this, here are links to two new relevant articles on the Guardian website I found this morning.
First, this article describes new research on the sex-life of the squid, something we cover in the Cephalopods chapter. Squids practice internal fertilisation, but not as we know it – the male squid produces sperm packaged in a sac, and uses a pair of modified arms to place the sperm sac in the mantle cavity of the female. That’s the theory: in practice, as this reaseach shows, in the pitch-black deep sea these sperm sacs end up all over females and males – truly a case of fumbling in the dark.
Second: the reintroduction of the red kite into the UK over the last 20+ years has been a great conservation success story (covered in our red kite chapter), and to monitor progress the birds need careful tracking. This is often done using radio transmitters on the birds. This article reports that there are now worries that these transmitters may be damaging the health of the birds.
A red kite flying over Reading in spring 2010. The wing tags tell us that this kite was born in 2009 and is resident in the Rockingham Forest, East Midlands site (Photo: Paul Hatcher)