3-D printed lizards, monitored from high above by drones

Anole Annals tells of current research work—involving aerial drones and non-aerial 3-D printed lizards—by Emma Higgins of the University of Nottingham: Anoles and Drones, a Dispatch from Island Biology 2019 … Emma’s work involves collecting data both at anole-level as well as above the canopy. She uses a DJI Phantom 4 drone platform fitted with […]

Lizards That Fell to Earth [podcast 60]

Lizards  — lizards that fall from the sky, more or less — find their way into this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams  —with dramatic readings by Daniel Rosenberg — tells about: Lizards that fall from above (1) — “Arboreal Sprint Failure: Lizardfall in a California Oak Woodland,” William H. Schlesinger, Johannes […]

A rock, a paper, a scissors, a bunch of lizards

Hannah Fry, in this Numberphile video, tots up the cases of rock-paper-scissors mathematics as applied to lizards: This goes back, more or less, to a sex study published in the year 2000: “Polygyny, mate-guarding, and posthumous fertilization as alternative male mating strategies,” Kelly R. Zamudio and Barry Sinervo, PNAS, 2000 97 (26) 14427-14432. Here’s a photo of rock-paper-scissors/lizards […]

Sherlock Holmes and toe loss in lizards

Fuelled with curiosity, some scientists exploit – lovingly, proudly – the investigative trick featured in Arthur Conan Doyle‘s 1892 story Silver Blaze. There, a baffled police inspector seeks help from the great autodicact/detective Sherlock Holmes: [Inspector Gregory:] “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” [Holmes:] “To the curious incident of the […]

Cats’ tongues and Lizards’ feet

Q. Cats’ tongues and Lizards’ feet – what links them? A. Froude mechanisms. * MIT’s Elasticity, Geometry & Statistics lab (EGS) specialises in – ‘Understanding the mechanics of thin objects’. Prompting them (along with colleagues at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Princeton University) to undertake a now-famous 2010 study with the objective of explaining the mechanics […]