alex.m.thompson
  • Home
  • Biography
  • Publications
  • Photos
  • Research
  • Collaborators
  • Blog

my thoughts on science

STEM: is it the answer?

6/16/2016

1 Comment

 
I went to a great conference this week: STEMtech. It was a wonderful showcase of teaching tools and techniques to get kids interested and engaged in science, technology, engineering and maths. We heard industry speakers detailing the skills gap that exists and is predicted to worsen in regards to producing engineers. We heard about how engineers will be key to the economy of the future. We heard that 65% of the jobs that currents students will be doing don’t exist yet. But is STEM the answer?


Firstly, I really enjoyed the conference. I was engaged and enthused to try out some of the things that I had seen. However, my first impression was that this wasn’t STEM, it wasn’t science, technology, engineering and maths. Instead, it was physics, technology, engineering and maths. There was very little chemistry in the whole day and absolutely no biology. Biology and chemistry are key components of many growing industries and parts of problems, and the solutions to those problems, of the future. I’m a biologist and so this irked me slightly. I’m fully aware that zoology isn’t going to make lots of money or greatly grow the economy, but the biotech industries are flying at the moment with potential breakthroughs like CRSPR changing the way we interact with living organisms.


To me the issue, as this may have just been for this conference, is with how and which industries are trying to intervene in our education system. They tend to be big engineering companies, and for them the physical sciences are likely to be more important. For them their bottom line will be improved if more students graduated school and university with the skill sets they require. They want engineers, and they want lots of them and they want them now and tomorrow. But is that what is best for the country and society as a whole?


In one way I would say yes and in another no. The industry people who spoke at the conference spoke about how they wanted graduates who were good at problem solving. This is a huge part of education, students should be taught to use their knowledge and apply it to novel situations and to be able to link seemingly desperate areas of their knowledge together (i.e. bits of chemistry to biology, maths to physics, physics to biology etc.). The ability to mentally break out of the silos of subjects and topics is hugely important but it isn’t something that is unique to working in industry. One of the speakers spoke about how our education system is set up to create professors and not engineers, but these cross disciplinary and problem solving skills apply equally to both groups of people. These are abilities that should be taught to students regardless of the STEM movement or interventions by industry, they are core to producing young people with inquiring minds. I worry that the drive for STEM is actually aimed at creating graduates specifically to go into the work place, all of the talk of the jobs of the future seems at odds with the direct applied skills that are being pushed that seem so focused on the jobs of now. Breakthroughs in science and industry are often from pure research that isn’t searching for direct applied results but that has unintended consequences that change the world, e.g. laser technology. By focusing purely on applied skills there is a risk that such breakthroughs in the future may not happen.


What I have taken from this conference and my view on STEM is that I personally want to keep industry at arms length. The money is wonderful but the drive for graduates to fit their needs risks shaping a curriculum that may in the long run damage our industries. Taking the best aspects of the STEM movement (cross curricular approach, problems solving and team work) are things that would benefit everyone, from engineers to business and industry to universities. Fostering creativity and an ability to see the wider picture is the key, and the STEM call to break down subject silos would help (although you still need to learn the basics of each subject before many of these links can be seen/formed). In addition, engaging the humanities departments and the art departments with any STEM projects would prevent resentment developing inside schools, where some faculties may feel side-lined. Even asking the ethical questions surrounding some STEM projects would be a useful exercise in bringing those who are not scientifically minded into this world.


Plus we need more BIOLOGY in STEM!!!


I hope that rambling rant holds some semblance of reasoning that can be discerned by readers.
1 Comment

Science and the EU

6/15/2016

0 Comments

 


The EU referendum is almost a week away. On 23rd June the UK public will decide the fate of our nation. Thus far the referendum has been a farcical show of over blown, often bogus facts, belligerent argument, diversion, dishonesty and occasionally thinly veiled xenophobia. For anyone interested in impartial comments and facts I would recommend FullFact. FullFact are an independent fact checking organisation, who have done an amazing job over the years of clearing up the fog that politicians put into the political debate.

I personally think we should stay in the EU, flawed as it is. The risks of leaving are varied, great and many. However, science potentially has the most to lose. Since the recession funding for science has been decreasing due to the austerity led funding cuts brought in by the coalition and Tory governments. The EU is a huge source of funding for British science. Our universities benefit greatly from this money and also the free movement of people within the EU. Sure there are lots of barriers to non-EU researchers coming to the UK, and that is detrimental to our research, but these barriers are imposed by the British government and not the EU. Between 2007 and 2013 the UK was a net beneficiary of £2.7bn in research funding from the EU (receiving £7bn but giving £4.3bn). If we leave the EU there is no guarantee that any government will match the money currently funding UK research, with a Tory government likely to gain a consecutive term funding cuts would be my prediction. At a time when science is arguably more crucial industrial innovation and the economy as a whole, it seems ridiculous to roll the dice and risk losing this type of funding.

I decided to sign this letter from Scientists for EU as a sign of my commitment to staying in the EU for the benefit of UK science.

http://scientistsforeu.uk/sign-save-science/

If you want to read more then I recommend the Royal Societies report on UK Research and the European Union: https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/uk-research-and-european-union/

0 Comments

Science for the kids

3/19/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
OnOmYesterday I went to the Big Bang Fair at the NEC in Birmingham. This isn't my usual topic for blogging but I thought I'd share some cool science stuff for kids.

The fair is a huge science expo designed to get young people interested in the sciences. There are stands as diverse as the new fastest car in the world attempt, the army engineers, a fully dissected pig and as many robots as a tech head could want. There were thousands of students present, even some exhibiting there own research, and they were loving it. Seeing so many inventive ways to bring science to life was awesome, even if there wasn't much biology. I suppose this is because most of the money in biology is to be made in biomedical fields, something that is really important but I just don't find enthralling.

The thing that blew my mind the most was a 40min show by the Gastronaut. He's a YouTube science communicator and together with his Quantum Mechanical Chocolate Factory they collide fairly high level science with food in an engaging way. Through food the explained crystalline structures, fluid dynamics, diffusion, UV and phosphorescence. Any teacher who wants to bring chemistry alive should check it out.

Gastronaut YouTube channel:
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC0f5hnnSGWXhNQxDJdxlPsQ

​
On this channel you can watch videos about how to extract iron from bran flakes, how to make dry ice and how to make your own chewing gum, all in your own kitchen. These are really cool experiments that can be transferred easily into the class room to make science fun for young kids. But even if you are not a teacher, just someone with small children or nieces and nephews, then these are fun things you can do to get children interested in science.
0 Comments

How Science Works

12/6/2015

0 Comments

 
​I’ve recently started as a science teaching assistant, I’m deciding on whether teaching is something I’m any good at and a career that I’d like to pursue. But in my first few weeks I have noticed something about how the students view and understand the information they are taught. There is no distinction between the way they view science and highly subjective subjects like English and RE. Student’s view someone’s opinion on why Shakespeare used a certain turn of phrase in a sonnet in the same way that they view atomic structure. To them both are equally valid, just someone’s idea. I think this stems from a lack of understanding of what science is and how it works. So in the rest of this blog I’m going to give a lay explanation of how science works. For those of you who are academics this will skirt over issues about whether peer review is the best way or that negative results are under reported and published. The idea is just to lay out that science is a systematic and self-correcting way of understanding the world.
 
Firstly, most science is done by conducting experiments. Researchers will get an idea from observing things in nature or from what we already know about how the world works and want to test if their idea is right. These ideas are hypotheses. This is done by changing one variable and seeing what effect this has, but also comparing it to when nothing is changed (called a control). This allows the scientists to see the impact this variable, be is temperature in a reaction or how much food a father blue tit has available to feed his offspring, has on the system. The researchers the record their results and write them up in a scientific paper, usually structured: abstract (summary), introduction (why we’re looking at this and what similar things have been found before), methods (how we ran our experiment), results (what we found) and discussion (how we interpret what we’ve found).
 
Secondly, the scientists will submit their research to an academic journal in the hope it gets published. There work will be sent off to experts in their field of research, be it astrophysics, marine biology or material science. These experts will then look at how the experiment was done: was it a careful and well-designed experiment? Did they use a big enough sample size? Did they use the right statistics to determine if what they found was statistically significant? They will also look at the discussion to see if the researchers interpreted their findings correct or if they are claiming to have found things that their results do not support. This process determines if this bit of research becomes published or not. These are the types of science that you hear about in newspapers and on the TV. This is cutting edge research and you’ll learn about it at university but not in school.
 
Thirdly, cutting edge research is great and it is the stuff that breaks new ground but it isn’t always correct. To really know if something that has been found is real it needs to be repeated by other researchers. This is where science differs from other subjects. Experiments are repeated by other researchers and published and their results are compared to those of the first. Gradually knowledge about something builds up and something called a meta-analysis can be done. This involves looking at all of the research in a specific area and finding out what it all means, because comparing a large amount of studies is more accurate than just using one to decide if a scientific hypothesis is true. Often initially exciting and extreme finding are tempered, or they can be found to be untrue and in this was science is self-correcting. However, if all the repeated experiments show the initial idea to be true then it will change from a hypothesis to a theory. Theory is a term that is often misunderstood outside of science because it sounds like it’s just an idea but a scientific theory is a In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses [1]. Theories are the end point of science not the beginning.
 
Fourthly, and finally, these new areas of science are taught in schools. This can take a long time and typically depend on what the government in your country decides is important. But before it gets to the school text book science has been rigorously tested and shown to be repeatable and true in a way that someone’s opinion on why a certain ruler in the 19th century decided to do x or y just simply haven’t. I am not advocating for C.P. Snow’s two cultures or trying to devalue arts subjects, as they are crucial to education and provide a form of thinking that is critical to learn. I also believe that children should be taught to have a critical mind and ask questions of everything they are taught. However, when students are taught evolution by natural selection or atomic theory they shouldn’t be do I believe this, as they should of a literary critic’s opinion of Wordsworth, but instead how did scientists find this out and what is the evidence? They are subtly different but crucially different questions. There is also beauty in the scientific method!
 
0 Comments

The joy of podcasts

11/19/2015

0 Comments

 
If you need some background sound while you’re crunching numbers, coding in R, walking back from a field session or just when you’re cooking, podcasts are a great idea. For me the best combine information and entertainment. Podcasts are ideal not only to just fill silence and let you get on with things that are mundane but also for providing random topics of conversation: I have no idea of the number of people I told about the molasses explosion in Boston. They’re a simple way to keen up-to-date with topics you’re interested in but don’t have the time to research or to find out new areas of interest.
 
Below are my top four podcasts and a brief explanation of what they are and why I like them:
 
Radiolab
I was first told about Radiolab by an old work colleague. I first thought that it’d be a typical science podcast that talks about new research etc but it is so much more. There are two main presenters (Jab and Robert) but a plethora of guest presenters and producers make it highly varied. Each episode is typically one or more detailed reports into a huge variety of topics, often taking unexpected looks at things you may think you know a lot about. The podcast isn’t just science, it looks at history and often blurs the lines of traditional divides between the sciences and the arts. Radiolab also has a great acoustic element to it, with lots of really good sound production that brings it to life. It’s awesome!
http://www.radiolab.org/
 
Stuff You Should Know
This is the first of two podcasts that I love from How Stuff Works. The best part about SYSK is that it is presented by Chuck and Josh. Initially it took me a while to warm up to them, as they have an amazing ability to go off on tangents but that is precisely why I think they’re great. Their personalities really bring the subjects they talk about to life. SYSK covers a huge range of subjects from ejector seats to Jack the Ripper. If you want to listen then go to their website rather than itunes, as it has all of their episodes not the last few hundred. I love this podcast but I would take some of what they say with a pinch of salt, having listened to a number of episodes that I am knowledgeable about I found a few holes or misconceptions in what Chuck and Josh said (but don’t let that put you off, it’s awesome).
http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/
 
Stuff You Missed in History Class
Missed in History is another How Stuff Works podcast but it is so different to SYSK. The current presenters, Holly and Tracey, religiously prepare and research each episode. Where SYSK is a fly by the seat of your pants affair, missed in history is well planned and is a brilliant ride through random bits of history you’ll never have heard of. History is something that I’ve always loved but fell by the academic wayside, so this is a guilty pleasure. The show has a penchant for exhumations, missing ships/people and serial killers/unsolved murders. They have also enlightened me about some amazing women from history like Ada Lovelace and Freya Stark. Binge listen to Missed in History while measuring skulls on the Isle of Rum!
http://www.missedinhistory.com/podcasts/archive/
 
Guardian Science Weekly
This is a fairly straightforward science news podcast. However, the presenters and reporters really bring things alive with their enthusiasm for the job they do. It fun and entertaining while at the same time keeping you up-to-date with the latest innovations in science. Because it’s made by the Guardian it’s of a high standard and you can trust what you hear.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/series/science

0 Comments

strange science stories from the times

7/7/2015

1 Comment

 
As part of my job at Sense About Science, I have to read one of the UK's many newspapers every morning. We switch regularly, and so I've had the complete frustration of the Telegraphs science reporting, the bombasticness of the Daily Mail and the complete lack of any science reporting in the propaganda rag that is the Express. At the moment I'm on the Times, which seems to do a fairly good job, Tom Whipple seems to have his head screwed on. Most of what we are looking for is related to human health type stuff, whether it's chemical scare stories or misreporting on vaccines and the safety of drugs. As a zoologist I'm more interested in the stuff to do with animals or behaviour and so have started keeping stories that are in that field, not misreporting stuff but just interesting. 

So I'm going to start a series of blogs that are my take on a few stories clipped from the Times!

First up, yesterday's (6/6/15) reporting on a study that looked at how men behaved after they were 'shown' to be weak.Researchers tweeked the data they presented to 50 male participants after they had them do a hand strength test, telling half they were average and the other half they were below average, the same as the average woman. The test subjects had been informed that the test was of "the effects of exertion on decision making." They then had to fill out a form about themselves, which had some interesting results. Those who were told they had thee strength of a woman exaggerated their heigh by ~0.78 inches and reported twice as many previous relationships as the other group, in addition they claimed higher levels of aggressiveness and athleticism. 

This is a really cool study that shows that slights to a man's masculinity can result in him overcompensating. As the researchers point out, this is not just an interesting aspect of our behaviour but something that has everyday impacts in the world. In many societies men wield a large amount of power and how they perceive slights effects their behaviour. There are probably a number of evolutionary reasons for this relating to intrasexual conflict, but that's a can of evolutionary psychology worms that I will steer clear of!

Story two, ugly men can get good looking women but they have to be persistent (and vice versa)! Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin found that when a couple was asymmetric in attractiveness that it took longer from their first meeting to their first date. Couples who had 'love at first sight' were usually very closely matched in attractiveness, while those who took more than 9 months to get together didn't correlate at all. This is interesting as it raises lots of questions about the different features that inform mate choice in humans, do we perform assortative mating? and when we don't what are the features that we use, money? social status? or more intangibles like humour? or smell? This gives me the very tangential opportunity to link to a cool study that showed a link between physical ability and attractiveness!


Final story, spiders at sea.This was a cool little piece about why spiders are so good at colonizing new places, as they are frequently the first colonizers of new land. They do this by ballooning (video of it LINK), where they let out strands of silk that carry them away. Ballooning can result in spiders landing on water, be it lakes or the sea, but new research has shown that spiders are not only able to balloon but they can sail too! By dropping spiders from 21 species onto water researchers found that the spiders 'sailed' using their raised front legs to slide across the water, or 'anchored' themselves by releasing silk to stop themselves being blown away. Species that used ballooning more frequently to disperse were 'more eager' to using sailing. This is just some cool natural history that helps in understanding dispersal.


Hope some of those stories were interesting.
1 Comment

Some cool blogs

6/30/2015

0 Comments

 
Here are some links to some interesting blog posts that I've read recently. They vary from the psychology of 'believing' in evolution to the language of birds. I think they're cool, so some other people might too!

Don't Believe in Evolution? Try Thinking Harder
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/06/29/418289762/don-t-believe-in-evolution-try-thinking-harder?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150629

Gentle Sex? Females Just As Feisty As Males Over Reproduction
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630270.300-gentle-sex-females-just-as-feisty-as-males-over-reproduction.html (behind a pay wall)

What Can Be Done to Make Sure That Wind Energy and Africa’s Vultures Co-exist
http://theconversation.com/what-can-be-done-to-make-sure-that-wind-energy-and-africas-vultures-co-exist-43677

Babbler Birds Use Primitive Language to Communicate With Meaning, Study Show
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-30/outback-babbler-birds-use-primitive-language-study-says/6582860
0 Comments

Hard working weavers and lazy journalists

9/4/2014

0 Comments

 
One of my friends (Dom Cram) has just had a paper come out in Functional Ecology. It's a really well designed experimental study looking at the effects of dominance and effort on oxidative stress in white-browed sparrow-weavers. His research found that dominant females, who work the hardest to provision young during the breeding season, suffered a large decline in antioxidant protection over the course of the breeding season. Antioxidants are the compounds that health professionals keep going gaga over in various 'super-foods', as they help to reduce free radicals which build up due to the cells natural processes and can damage DNA and thus potentially make individuals vulnerable to ageing and lots of other nasty things. So the study hints that individuals that work hard could be at risk of increased ageing and a variety of other future problems. The abstract and link are pasted at the end of the blog.

Dom has rightly received a fair amount of media attention for this piece of work, and rightly so. This is important, as the public need to know what their taxes are funding and how this work fits into our broader understanding of the world. He was even interviewed on BBC radio:

https://soundcloud.com/dom-cram/dom-bbc-radio-interview-sept2014

This coverage though has been very varied, even within the ams newspaper. The Telegraph, link pasted below, covered it well but for some unknown reason decided to lead with a picture of elephant seals.... even though the work was done on a small desert dwelling bird. They also lead with "Alpha males..", even though the abstract clearly states that males showed a decline but it wasn't related to rank, the main result was for females. Well it was a good attempt. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/11070219/Alpha-males-and-females-at-risk-of-ill-health-and-premature-ageing.html
Picture
Above is the reporting from the Times, and this again is pretty good, even has the correct species pictured (and a lovely comic). But if you read the scanned image below you'll see that some one else at the same news paper decided not only to get the species wrong but to link it massively to humans, a gross overstatement, but then also to Bertrand Russell, Francois Hollande and John Maynard Keynes. This is a prime example of awful reporting and exaggeration from what is a well respected newspaper, this is what lay people read and where the get their information. We need better reporting by people who actually understand science, so that the public is better educated and so able to help the government make better science and environmental policy decisions.
Picture
Here is the abstract:
Cram et al (2014) Oxidative status and social dominance in a wild cooperative breeder. Functional Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.12317http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12317/abstract
  1. Oxidative stress has been proposed as a key mediator of life-history trade-offs, yet the social factors that affect patterns of oxidative status amongst individuals in animal societies remain virtually unexplored.
  2. This is important, as rank-related differences in reproductive effort in many social species have the potential to generate, or indeed arise from, differences in oxidative status across dominance classes.
  3. Here, we examine rank-related variation in oxidative status before and after a lengthy breeding season in a wild cooperatively breeding bird with high reproductive skew, in the semi-arid zone of Southern Africa; the white-browed sparrow weaver (Plocepasser mahali).
  4. Our findings reveal that prior to breeding, neither sex showed rank-related differences in markers of oxidative damage or antioxidant protection, suggesting that dominants' reproductive monopolies do not arise from superior pre-breeding oxidative status.
  5. After breeding, however, females (who provision young at higher rates than males) suffered elevated oxidative damage, and dominant females (the only birds to lay and incubate eggs, and the primary nestling provisioners) experienced differential declines in antioxidant protection.
  6. While males also showed reduced antioxidant capacity after breeding, this decline was not dependent on rank and not associated with elevated oxidative damage.
  7. Our findings suggest that divisions of labour in animal societies can leave the hardest-working classes differentially exposed to oxidative stress, raising the possibility of hitherto unexplored impacts on health and ageing in social species.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12317/abstract
0 Comments

Kardashian controversy 

8/14/2014

0 Comments

 
A recent paper has come out in Genome Biology by Neil Hall, the paper investigates what Hall terms the Kardashian index (number of twitter followers/scientific citations). This has gotten a lot of people upset, and potentially rightly so. I've put a link to the Nature web page with an article on the paper. Science communication is a crucial part of modern research and is a great way for young scientists to communicate their work (and potentially increase their citation rate in the process) to the wider scientific community and the public in general. Many disciplines, behavioural ecology included, have journals with low citation rates but are investigating aspects of science that the public find interesting. Genomics, Dr Hall's field, is probably the other way around: with lots of publications in high impact biomedical journals but being a complicated and often difficult field to explain to the lay person. One criticism that has been laid at the paper is that it's sexist, especially with the use of Kim Kardashian's name for the index. I disagree, as the only male celebrities that I can think of who would fit into that category are on TOWIE and MIC and I don't even know their names, so why would someone in the US or Switzerland know who they are? It's good that people are discussing how best to measure scientists impact and this sort of discourse can only benefit science. I disagree with the K-index but can see it has some measure of merit, maybe it needs to include the number of years that the researcher has been publishing for? Possibly a K+ index (twitter followers/(scientific citations/years publishing))?? Food for thought.

Nature article:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7513/full/512117e.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews


Hall (2014) The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists. Genome Biology, 15:424
In the era of social media there are now many different ways that a scientist can build their public profile; the publication of high-quality scientific papers being just one. While social media is a valuable tool for outreach and the sharing of ideas, there is a danger that this form of communication is gaining too high a value and that we are losing sight of key metrics of scientific value, such as citation indices. To help quantify this, I propose the ‘Kardashian Index’, a measure of discrepancy between a scientist’s social media profile and publication record based on the direct comparison of numbers of citations and Twitter followers.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7513/full/512117e.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews
0 Comments

New paper....

7/30/2014

0 Comments

 
So after finishing my PhD I went back the kalahari to help Tom Flower out with some cool work investigating deception tactics and learning in fork-tailed drongos. While I was there I also had a chance to help his honours student, Bruce, out with his research investigating the relationship between drongos and sociable weavers. The kalahari is full of cool inter-species interactions (I'll put a couple of papers below). Bruce's work has just been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, I have put the abstract and a link to the paper below. The work was really fun to do and highlights how conflict and cooperation have to coexist in both and ecological and evolutionary setting, and that this can lead to cool things evolving.

Baigrie, Thompson & Flower (2014) Interspecific signalling between mutualists: food-thieving drongos use a cooperative sentinel call to manipulate foraging partners. Proc R Soc, 281:20141232
Interspecific communication is common in nature, particularly between mutualists. However, whether signals evolved for communication with other species, or are in fact conspecific signals eavesdropped upon by partners, is often unclear. Fork-tailed drongos (Dicrurus adsimilis) associate with mixed-species groups and often produce true alarms at predators, whereupon associating species flee to cover, but also false alarms to steal associating species' food (kleptoparasitism). Despite such deception, associating species respond to drongo non-alarm calls by increasing their foraging and decreasing vigilance. Yet, whether these calls represent interspecific sentinel signals remains unknown. We show that drongos produced a specific sentinel call when foraging with a common associate, the sociable weaver (Philetairus socius), but not when alone. Weavers increased their foraging and decreased vigilance when naturally associating with drongos, and in response to sentinel call playback. Further, drongos sentinel-called more often when weavers were moving, and weavers approached sentinel calls, suggesting a recruitment function. Finally, drongos sentinel-called when weavers fled following false alarms, thereby reducing disruption to weaver foraging time. Results therefore provide evidence of an ‘all clear’ signal that mitigates the cost of inaccurate communication. Our results suggest that drongos enhance exploitation of a foraging mutualist through coevolution of interspecific sentinel signals.
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1791/20141232.abstract

Other cool interspecies interactions:

Pied babblers and scimitarbills:
Ridley, Wiley & Thompson (2014) The ecological benefits of interceptive eavesdropping. Functional Ecology, 28: 197-205

Drongos and pied babblers:Flower (2011) Fork-tailed drongos use deceptive mimicked alarm calls to steal food. Proc R Soc, 278:1548-1555
0 Comments
<<Previous

    Author

    I am a behavioural ecologist, my main interests revolve around familial conflicts and their resolutions. However, my scientific interests are fairly broad.

    View my profile on LinkedIn

    Archives

    October 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012

    Categories

    All
    90
    99 Percent Invisible
    99pi
    Africa
    Alien Species
    Allee Effect
    Altruism
    Amazon
    Andreas Wagner
    Anthropocene
    Apostle Bird
    Arabian Babbler
    Attenborough
    Babbler
    Badger Cull
    Badgers
    Banded Mongoose
    BBC
    Bee
    Big Bang Fair
    Bighorn Sheep
    Biodiversity
    Biological Control
    Biology
    Biology Letters
    Bird For Britain
    Birds
    Birthday
    Black Sparrowhawk
    Blogs
    Book
    Book Review
    Breeding
    Brood Parasitism
    Brown Tree Snake
    Burying Beetles
    Butterflies
    Butyric Acid
    Camel
    Cane Toad
    Chemicals
    Chernobyl
    Chimp
    Chronotype
    CITES
    Climate Change
    Cod
    Collaborations
    Color
    Colour
    Colour Vision
    Common Misunderstandings
    Communication
    Competition
    Conference
    Conflict
    Conservation
    Conservatism
    Conservative
    Cool Papers
    Cool Research
    Cooperation
    Crime
    Crows
    Cuckoo
    Dad Media
    Dailymail
    Dalai Lama
    Darting
    Darwin
    Darwin's Finches
    Deception
    Deception Africa
    Decision Making
    Deer
    DES
    Dieter Lukas
    Disney
    Diving
    Documentary
    Dominance
    Drongo
    Eavesdropping
    Economics
    Education
    Elephants
    Epigenetics
    EU
    Evil
    Evolution
    Evolutionary Approach
    Extracurricular
    Fear
    Fennec Fox
    Filming
    Fish
    Fittness
    Fitz
    Football
    Foraging
    Fork Tailed Drongo
    Fork-tailed Drongo
    Free Radicals
    Future
    Gastranaut
    Good Genes
    Ground Squirrel
    Group Living
    Grouse
    Guardian
    Hands
    Hedgehog
    Hero
    Home Advantage
    Honeyguide
    Hornbill
    Hot Birds
    Human
    Human Impact
    Human-wildlife Conflict
    Hummingbirds
    Inbreeding
    Intelligent Bird
    Interesting Research
    Intrasexual
    Invasive Species
    Isbe 2014
    Ivory
    Kalahari
    Kardashian
    Kenya
    Kids
    K-index
    Koala
    Language
    Larks
    Learning
    Long-term
    Male-male Competition
    Male Tenure
    Mantis
    Mating
    Meerkat
    Meta-analysis
    Mice
    Misconceptions
    Miya Warrington
    Mongoose
    Moths
    Mysogyny
    Natural Selection
    Nepotism
    Nestling Growth
    New Papers
    New Research
    Niche
    NO2
    Nuclear
    Old Boys Club
    Olfaction
    Ornithology
    Overfishing
    Owls
    Oxidative Stress
    Parental Care
    Peer Review
    Percy FitzPatrick Institute
    Pest Control
    Pesticides
    Phd
    Phd Comics
    Phenotypic Plasticity
    Pheromones
    Pied Babbler
    Pied Babblers
    Pied Crows
    PLoS One
    Poaching
    Podcasts
    Politcians
    Political Views
    Polymorphism
    Poor Reporting
    Population Change
    Population Decline
    Population Dynamics
    Precautionary Principle
    Public Understanding
    Raccoon
    Radiolab
    Raihani
    Random
    Raptors
    Reciprocity
    Red Deer
    Referendum
    Regulation
    Research
    Resource Dispersion Hypothesis
    Robin
    Rum
    Running
    Schools
    Science
    Science Education
    Science In The News
    Scientific Method
    Scimitarbill
    Scotland
    Seagull
    Sexism
    Sexual Conflict
    Sexual Selection
    Shrikes
    Signalling
    Singing
    Smell
    Sociality
    South Africa
    Speach
    Spring
    Stealing
    STEM
    STEMtech
    Stuff You Missed In History Class
    Stuff You Should Know
    Suppression
    Syntax
    SYSK
    Tamarisk
    TBT
    Teaching
    Temperature
    Theft
    Theory Of Mind
    The Telegraph
    The Times
    Tigers
    Tim Peake
    Top 10
    Tories
    Trees
    Uganda
    UK
    Urban
    Urban Animals
    Urbanisation
    Weaver
    Wheel
    Wild
    Winning
    Wood Wide Web
    World Cup
    World's Sneakiest Animals
    Wrinkle
    Youtube Channels
    Zebra Mussel

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.