Behavioral Ecology Blog

For the practicing scientist readers. you know that feeling of excitement you get when you read a paper sometimes… That “Holy Shit, this is one of the nicest papers I’ve read in a long time” feeling.. Well hold on, cause if your interested in behavioral ecology, sexual selection, mate choice, birds, biology, ect, this paper [...]

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For FREE, at the NAS website. Here is the HTML table of contents.  While the more militant science bloggers will surely take offense by their “soft” statement on religion (”…the evidence for evolution can be fully compatible with religious faith. Science and religion are different ways of understanding the world”), this is not a [...]

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Although its practice has been questioned, partly because of its abuse in the EvoPsych world- the analysis of human behavior in an evolutionary framework is super interesting and is one of my favorite things to think about. Within the realm of human behavior, particularly interesting are the selective pressures surrounding human mate choice and [...]

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Now I’m no Coleoptera systematist, but it’s hard not to say “Holy Shit” when you look- really look at the evolution of the Coleoptera.
There is a new paper in Science: A Comprehensive Phylogeny of Beetles Reveals the Evolutionary Origins of a Superradiation that is really impressive. Here is the abstract:
Beetles represent almost one-fourth of all [...]

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For the practicing scientists reading this blog (are there any??), you know that there are certain people whose work it pays to take note of. For behavioral ecologists (and evolutionary biologists in general), Tim Clutton Brock (TCB) is one such researcher. His work as spanned multiple decades, and has ranged from hard-core field oriented studies [...]

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There is a cool paper in Evolution this month that demonstrates the power of natural selection. By Kleven, et. al. “Intraspecific Variation in Sperm Length is Negatively Related to Sperm Competition in Passerine Birds“
Abstract:

Spermatozoa are among the most diversified cells in the animal kingdom, but the underlying evolutionary forces affecting intraspecific variation in sperm morphology [...]

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