December 11, 2020 marks the centenary of the death of well-known South African writer and women’s rights advocate, Olive Schreiner. She passed away on December 11, 1920 at the relatively young age of 65. Schreiner may be described as a “rebel with many causes” who felt herself severely restricted by the conventions of the Victorian age.
During the Late Carboniferous geological period, just over 300 million years ago, a group of animals called amniotes evolved from amphibians. These animals differed from amphibians in that they laid a different kind of egg, called the amniotic or cleidoic egg. This special egg allowed amniotes to colonize the land as it could survive out of water, allowing these animals to expand into drier areas.
During August 2020 I underwent bird ringing training at the Oliewenhuis gardens. I was trained in all aspects of bird ringing such as setting up nets and traps, removing trapped birds from nets without injuring the bird, taking measurements and recording data, and putting a ring on a bird. Museum ornithologist Dawie de Swardt conducted the training.
The world mourns the passing of well-known human rights lawyer George Bizos on 9 September 2020 in Johannesburg. George Bizos was a well respected Greek-South African human rights lawyer who campaigned against apartheid in South Africa and played an important role in the liberation struggle.
What are dung beetles?
Well, beetles that feed on dung. But while this is largely true, the definition of dung beetle is actually more complicated, being a mixture of an ecological trait (coprophagy) and a taxonomic classification (belonging to the scarabs). So dung beetles are those species of the large superfamily of scarab beetles (Scarabaeoidea) that feed on manure or belong to a taxonomic group that contains mainly dung-feeders. Dung feeding (coprophagy) has evolved several times within the scarabs, with the major groups being the Geotrupidae (dor beetles; ~150 species), the Aphodiinae (dung dwellers; ~3,500 species, Figure 1), and the Scarabaeinae (the dung beetles proper; ~7,000 species, Figure 2).