We're back from our field trip out to look at Holcocephala fusca in Pennsylvania in the US! Paloma, Sam, Jack, Sergio and Mary went out for five+ weeks for the end of the fusca season. We recorded some really interesting behaviour and got a lot of data from the electrophysiology rig that we took out with us, as well as getting a really fun insight into American life! Watching the eclipse through reflections off mirrors used for flies was particularly memorable. A very short stopover in Iceland also netted us a trip round the geysers and Gulfoss, for a nice change of pace! Hopefully over the rest of the year we can get into all the data we collected and analyse it into something truly exciting!
 The lab had a lot of interest at our stall at the Cambridge Science Festival, this March 18th. Featuring the chance to make an ommatidia to build up a compound eye, hunt like a mantis shrimp, and an augmented reality setup so you can see the world through the eyes of a fly! We have a new paper out in Current Biology! As part of our research on the predatory flights of the robber fly Holcocephala fusca http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982217300854 There's been a new paper published in Current Opinion in Neurobiology, detailing the limitations of small size in terms of insect predators and how they have adapted to cope with these.
The paper is available here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959438816301180 The lab was featured on the front cover of the Neuroscience spotlight issue of Research Horizons, the University of Cambridge journal, and had an article detailing the efforts to understand the neural circuits and how they deal with miniaturisation. ---
Paloma gave a public talk at the Cambridge Science Festival, entitled "What can tiny nervous systems do?" ---
The lab's killer flies are featured in an article on the Killer Fly Hunger Games, including a video of a hunt.
The article can be found at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34390345 The paper "The Killer Fly Hunger Games: Target Size and Speed Predict Decision to Pursuit" is now published in Brain, Behaviour and Evolution. ---
|
Archives
October 2017
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
