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When ants 'move house'
A Myrmica rubra nest under a stone. Photo courtesy of the author. It isn’t commonly known that Myrmica rubra workers lay eggs, too. These tiny, white eggs are unfertilised and develop into males or are used as a food source. Queens lay eggs that are...
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Dangerous drivers
bomb. Gene drives do not work only in Drosophila. Researchers at Imperial College have created mosquito gene drives that stop egg production. In near-natural laboratory conditions a large population of mosquitoes disappeared in less than a year....
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The biology of grandmothers
process. Human females are born with anywhere from 35,000 to 2.5 million follicles in situ, each capable of producing an egg. This supply declines steadily throughout life: by the time sheis twenty, the average female has around 100,000 follicles...
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Puppy love? More like Puffin love – Photos of feathered friends win RSB Photography Competition 2022
Polwatta Siriyalage Chamara Sulakkhana Location: Ambalangoda, Sri Lanka Photographer of the Year: Shortlisted Title: Montane Egg Eater Photographer: Robin James Backhouse Location: Nairobi, Kenya
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Restoration Dramas
Effects of a beach nourishment project in Jamaica Bay, New York, on horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) spawning activity and egg deposition. Estuaries Coast 41, 974–987 (2018). 11) Lovelock, C.E. & Duarte, C.M. Dimensions of blue carbon and emerging...
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Safe Haven
in biology under Max Hartmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin. His interests were in manipulating egg cells, and studying variability of the sexuality and chromosome numbers of newts and other amphibians. Huxley gave him...
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Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature
conclusions reached, and exploring how the female cuckoo is able to mimic the specific song patterns, plumage, behaviour and egg colouration of her hosts. Personal accounts from Davies – of nest hunting forays, the imaginative use of fake eggs to test...
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All change: Metamorphosis
approximately three weeks so if the line were extended in both directions, the 18 week development would include a 10mm long egg and a 16cm long adult female, over half as long again as her fifth instar moult. Common to all insects is the exoskeleton, a...
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It could be another year of big spiders - get to know your house guests
mating with her repeatedly. The female then overwinters with stored sperm, and the next spring she can produce more than 10 egg sacs, each containing around 40 to 60 eggs. The ‘Spider in da house’ app is a collaboration between the Royal Society of...
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Plaque celebrating IVF pioneers unveiled in Oldham
vividly remember coming with my father to Kershaw’s on my visits from Oxford or London, often late in the evening to observe egg implantation or oocyte removal. What struck me was the cheerfulness of the women who underwent these procedures, their utter...
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Photographer of the Year Shortlist Announced
Home, Habitat and Shelter and we received nearly 800 entries. Shortlisted images include; a chick embryo growing inside its egg, an underwater image of a sea turtle eating a jellyfish, and parasitoid wasps building clay pots to protect their young....
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The Silk Route
for each different use: Web frame Core fibres of adhesive spiral Joining fibres Web reinforcement Cocoons Swathing and egg sack Foreign expression and the E. coli workhorse A wide range of host organisms can be used to express spidroin proteins,...
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Identify house spiders with new free app
mating with her repeatedly. The female then overwinters with stored sperm, and the next spring she can produce more than 10 egg sacs, each containing around 40 to 60 eggs. The 'Spider in da house' app is a collaboration between the Society of Biology...
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What is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology
almost forensic, analysis, he confronts crucial issues, such as the conceptual gulf between the biochemist's chicken and egg problem: i.e. whether replication precedes or follows metabolism (where he argues persuasively for the former) and the...
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An evening with Alec Jeffreys
myotic recombination. When your maternal and paternal chromosomes line up and are separated and passed into a sperm or egg, the DNA is shuffled, and that can go wrong and can drive variation. The technology moved on and we moved to more simple sections...
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Lessons from larvae
of research in which they continue to be important: developmental biology and neuroscience. Scientists investigated how a fly egg turns into a maggot, revealing the patterning of developmental control genes ('Hox' genes) in the embryo, and the way that...
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An evening with Sir Alec Jeffreys
myotic recombination. When your maternal and paternal chromosomes line up and are separated and passed into a sperm or egg, the DNA is shuffled, and that can go wrong and can drive variation. The technology moved on and we moved to more simple sections...
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Pregnant pygmies
if a small male mated with a large female, there would be insufficient space in his pouch to accommodate her full clutch of eggs and some would go to waste. Over time, the preferential mating of smaller seahorses with other smaller seahorses has pushed...
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Britain’s Spiders: A Field Guide (Second Edition)
to spider anatomy, biology and study, together with well-illustrated keys to families and genera, and to web types and egg sacs. The bulk of the book comprises the species accounts, which are beautifully illustrated with photos. Key features are briefly...
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Replace, refine, reduce
around the world, from back-garden henhouses to commercial farms. Infestations have a big impact on both hen welfare and the egg industry. Moderate infestations (up to 50,000 mites per hen) can cause restlessness, feather pecking and cannibalism, while...
