Pick and Mix 33 – resilience, entomophagy, entomology, the windscreen phenomenon and writing habits

How resilent is your garden?

Angela Saini’s third book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, makes the compelling case that scientific racism is as prevalent as it has ever been, and explores the way such backward beliefs have continued to evolve and persist and here is a review

They may be small but they can move very large distances – insect migration in the news

Edible insects? Lab-grown meat? The real future food is lab-grown insect meat

Good advice from Megan Duffy on writing your discussion – to be sure

Aphids are wonderful – a long time ago they borrowed some virus genes to help them decide when to produce winged individuals

Here Stephen Heard defends the use of parenthicals

Botanists are arguing amongst themselves as to whether plants have brains or not – what do you think?

What sort of conservationist are you?

Manu Saunders on the windscreen phenomenon – another viewpoint on insect declines

 

Pick and Mix 30 – to amuse and inform

Picture from Erica McAlister’s (@FlygirlNHM) Twitter stream –  Picture held in the NTNU University Museum, Norway

 

Eradicating invasive vertebrate predators could help save rare insects

Are you bringing something nasty back with you from your exotic holiday?

We really must stop using plastic so much – it gets everywhere ☹

Insects as a protein source

Many people’s first memories of the countryside come from visiting a National Park.

Great article by Christie Bahlai and colleagues – Open Science Isn’t Always Open to All Scientists – You can follow Christie on Twitter @cbahlai

Finding and climbing the tallest tree in the World!

A lament for declining wild bee populations

Interview with Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson about her new book Terra Insecta and the title change forced on her by her Amercian publishers

Bees seeking blood, sweat and tears is more common than you think Manu Saunders (@ManuSaunders) and Toby Smith cast a critical eye on the recent story of the eye-dwelling bees

 

Pick and mix 24 – pretty much all about insects this time!

 

Using Twitter for ecological research – lots of great examples

An excellent explanation by Stephen Heard of how to present statistics in scientific writing

Some great ant pictures

Fascinating – insects made from discarded circuit boards – the art of Julie Alice Chappell

How insects cope with winter

Half of the UK’s aquatic insects now contain microplastics!

A nice article about a weevil that pretends to be a fly!

Would you eat insects to prevent global warming?  An interesting paper on ways in which consumers might be persuaded to do so

More about the alarming decrease in insect numbers worldwide – link to the original article here

An excellent analysis of the same article by Manu Saunders and why it is so important

Pick and mix 12 – Ten largely entomological and tree-related links

All sorts

 

Plants for bugs – making gardens insect friendly

Bugs for humans – making insects more attractive as food

Bugs for bugs – making carrion diets better for their offspring

Bugs for tourism – fireflies keeping a Mexican town alive

Dead trees for bugs – a free issue on saproxylic insect conservation

How trees can help cool cities and a link to the full report

Courtship behaviour of the Grayling butterfly via Ray Cannon

The chemistry of autumn colours – with a nice downloadable graphic

Why natural history teaching needs to be an increasing part of university education

Good news for those of us who like butter, cheese and meat 🙂

Autumn is on the way

Pick and mix 10 – ten more links to look at

Links to things I thought interesting

 

Why conservation needs to work around people’s values

If you ever wondered why so many plants have wort in their name.

The academic work-life balance is so wrong.  Errant Science takes a humourous look at a very serious subject.

Learn about the biology of peaches and how to cook them

Interesting commentary on a  paper about how walnuts have invaded forest ecosystems

Continuing with the food theme, how a Swedish countess introduced potatoes to the European diet

Have you ever heard a hawk moth squeak?  Now you can and they use their genitals to make the sound 🙂

If you ever wondered how beetles fold their wings, then here is the answer.  Full details about a complex subject.

Polish scientists are looking at ways of making eating insects more appetizing

Finally, William Playfair the Scottish scoundrel who invented all the graphs we love to hate

Pick and mix 8 – another pick from the mix

Links to some interesting stuff – well I thought so anyway

 

An interesting idea of how scientists might reach politicians using Twitter

Similarly, Trump, Brexit and a crisis of participation in universities

For those of you interested in the press coverage of the UK General Election, an analysis of the newspaper coverage.  I guarantee that you will be surprised as to which were the two most impartial papers.

Once upon a time we had the milk lake and the butter mountain, but now a butter shortage means bad news for croissant lovers in France

According to the Financial Times, a lot of companies are interested in starting companies to produce and market insects as food

A post by one of my former students @annaplatoni, about her bee work

On why you shouldn’t be dismissive of the “dead grandmother” excuse

Inspiring young Victorians to enjoy entomology through sport

Seven visions of London as a National Park City

I very seldom recommend anything about birds this article about the shape of bird eggs is worth reading just for the graphics

Pick and mix 2 – more eclectic links

Ten more links to peruse or not.

Not just British hedgehogs, but French hedgehogs are also on the decline

If you are a lover of Wisteria then this is definitely for you

A very thoughtful piece from Terry McGlynn on the ethical and moral stances that scientists take

Here is a report of a workshop run by an ex-PhD student of mine to discuss the future of farming insects for food in the UK

A really interesting paper describing how competition between two parasitic wasps can be influenced by the presence of an endosymbiont

Here is a paper of great relevance to farmers and policy makers but as usual has been published in a high impact journal that farmers and agronomists won’t read; as scientists we have to be more open to publishing in ‘lower scientific impact’ venues but that have a high impact in the real world

BioMed Central highlighting ways in which food crops might be protected against drought caused by climate change

According to Sir John Marsh the future of the countryside depends on economics

Chris Sandbrook asks what is meant by biodiversity in a conservation context

Like Manu Saunders I am a great believer in having others read my papers before submission, their chances of getting through the peer review process relatively unscathed are much improved