While browsing through Twitter one day, I came across Dr. Zen Faulkes who is a scientist adept at using social media and blogging to communicate his research and ideas.
He is a Canadian researcher living in Texas doing behavioural research on the unusual crustacean creature, Marmorkrebs. He is interested in the evolution of behaviour and nervous systems, and particularly the origin of new behaviours. He uses Marmokrebs as his model organism for the following reasons.
- They give lots of embryos year round, giving lots of research samples
- They don’t need males to reproduce
- They are good to use if you don’t have a lab set-up to maintain sea creatures
- And, they are going to help Dr. Zen answer his evolutionary question: why do crayfish have giant neurons that some other crustaceans don’t have (such as hermit crabs)? (See his review paper: Faulkes, Z. (2008). Turning Loss Into Opportunity: The Key Deletion of an Escape Circuit in Decapod Crustaceans Brain, Behavior and Evolution, 72 (4), 251-261 DOI: 10.1159/000171488)
Marmorkrebs is an all-female species of marbled crayfish that reproduces asexually by parthenogenesis.
To learn more about his fascinating model organism, Marmorkrebs, visit this page:
http://marmorkrebs.org/
To learn more about parthenogenesis in general, check out this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis
Please visit Dr. Zen’s faculty page to check out his many research articles.
http://www.utpa.edu/faculty/zfaulkes/
Visit Zen Faulkes on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/DoctorZen
Tagged: crustaceans, disaptation, Marmorkrebs, model organisms
- Published:
- January 24, 2010 – 9:54 pm
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I don’t know how many of you like to blog about science, but here are some tips. Writing a blog post on a scientific subject is a little different than most other types of posts. You do have to state true facts, but yet you don’t want your post to sound like a formal journal article. It can sometimes be challenging to strike a balance between fact and observation, but you do want to strive to offer your own insights when possible.
Here are a few tips:
- You should try to give your own opinion on the subject when possible.
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Tagged: primary literature, science blogging
- Published:
- January 1, 2010 – 7:34 pm
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I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found it fascinating to sit and watch ants (especially when I was younger and I had more time). I always wondered where it was they were trying to go, and how did they know where to go?
The physicist Richard Feynman had also observed ants, and he talks about them in his book “Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman!” After conducting a few experiments, he concluded that the ants were following some sort of invisible trail, and that “when an ant has found some food, he leaves a much stronger trail than when he’s just wandering around.” He also observed that
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Tagged: ant pheromones, Richard Feynman
- Published:
- December 12, 2009 – 11:44 am
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I enjoy statistics, and so I thought I would try putting some search terms into Google Insights to see if any interesting trends popped up. Keep in mind that Google Insights only has data from 2004 onwards.
You can check out Google Insights here:
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#
Dancing with the Stars:
I thought shows like Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance would increase interest in dancing in general. But maybe that’s not the case?
swing dancing – loss of interest since 2004
salsa dancing – also a general fall in this search term
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- Published:
- November 6, 2009 – 12:35 pm
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