Archives: Colour

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Peacocking on Parliament Hill

Here’s my poster from the Evolution conference in Ottawa: The colours are a bit off in this shrunken version, but you can download a larger PDF version here. The poster covers some of my work on the lesser-known green peacock (a close relative of the familiar blue variety). Green and blue peafowl have markedly different body colours,... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Life imitates [filmmaking] art

Congratulations to Myra Burrell – her peacockumentary has been short-listed for the Animal Behavior Society’s film festival! Myra, a veteran of the natural history film program at the University of Otago in New Zealand, traveled to California with me in 2010. She helped with peacock field work, capturing more females than anyone thought... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Cuttlefish strike a pose for 3D camouflage

In the game of hide and seek, cuttlefish have the upper hand. These chameleons of the sea are astonishingly good at disappearing: they can instantaneously change the colour of their skin to blend in with the background, matching even the finicky details like the pattern of coloured rocks on the ocean floor. Divers have long known... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

What the?!

Check out the video below (source link). The peacock jumping spider is definitely worth your time, but skip to 2:45 if you’re in a hurry. Unbelievable! Thanks to Barrie Frost for sending this. From May 1,... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Dating the rainbow

The truth is beautiful in Buttermilk Creek. That was the Texas site of a recent major archaeological find. In the village of Salado, just a couple hundred metres downstream from an important cache of artifacts of the early American Clovis people, anthropologists uncovered something just a few centimetres deeper1. In geological terms, that... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Employed science

It’s when applied science gives back, contributing a piece to the basic research puzzle. Jaded grad students like me get a warm fuzzy feeling when we hear about people reaping unexpected benefits – economic or social – from the results of pure science. Last night I was reminded that this can work in the... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Super indelible flower colours

How do you fire a pollinator? That was the question in last week’s Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour departmental seminar. The speaker was James Thomson, an evolutionary ecologist from the University of Toronto who specializes in the interactions between plants and their animal pollinators. His research shows that nectar-addled hummingbirds... More

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