Check out our contribution to the Bug of the Year 2024 campaign, where we championed the Rangatira Spider:

These posters (above) summarise part of our Marsden funded research on the mating behaviour of Dolomedes fishing spiders. These posters were made specifically for the Rēkohu/Wharekauri/Chatham Island community. The poster on the left uses Moriori kupu (words) for the islands, while the poster on the right uses Māori kupu. Posters were made by the talented Lucy Howell.

Anita Weissflog made this clever and fun animation to explain our recent publication in Functional Ecology on the New Zealand giraffe weevil and how large males maintain large weapons

Chrissie’s plenary for the Australasian Society for the Study of Animal Behaviour in 2020 has been published if you’d like to hear about sexual selection research in New Zealand and her experiences returning to work after having a baby.

Here are few videos of those crazy giraffe weevils doing what they do best – fighting, sneaking around & mating!

A classic grappling battle between two males – female not so interested

A smaller  (sneaky) male wedges his way in between a guarding male & a female – and gets to mate while the other one tries to pull him off in confusion

A great moment half-way through video when a male gets picked up and dangled off the tree by his leg!

And finally, Chrissie did a stint playing around with making short science vids using a smartphone. Here’s one featuring Leilani Walker, who was a PhD student working on weapon evolution in NZ sheet-web spiders

Here’s PhD student Simon Connolly’s 3 minute thesis talk – winning the People’s Choice Award in 2021.