Departmental Seminar - MONDAY 9th - 1pm - Basil el Jundi and Dung Beetles

Dr Basil el Jundi will be visiting the department on Monday 9th Oct to give a talk on celestial compass cues and orientation in ball-rolling dung beetles. 

The talk will take place in the life sciences building at 1pm in room G13/14 and there will be opportunities to chat to Basil if anyone is interested.

The Biology of Colour - New paper in Science

In living color

Animals live in a colorful world, but we rarely stop to think about how this color is produced and perceived, or how it evolved. Cuthill et al. review how color is used for social signals between individual animals and how it affects interactions with parasites, predators, and the physical environment. New approaches are elucidating aspects of animal coloration, from the requirements for complex cognition and perception mechanisms to the evolutionary dynamics surrounding its development and diversification.

Find the full paper here

Photo by Justin Marshall (c)

Spectacular changes to color and morphology in a cuttlefish.

Color can conceal or reveal. The giant Australian cuttlefish (Sepia apama) alters the relative size of its pigment-bearing chromatophores and warps its muscular skin to switch between camouflage mode (top) and communication mode (bottom) in under a second.