Author: Christopher Terrell Nield, Principal Lecturer, Bioscience, Nottingham Trent University

Slugs. They eat your lettuces, chew your cabbages, defoliate your dahlias and assassinate your asters. Even the name “slug” is unpleasant. It comes from the Middle English “slugge”, from a Norwegian word for a heavy, slow-moving or sluggish person. Slugs clearly have a PR problem, so let’s try and put things right. First, they have […]

An insect bites off another insect’s leg. Is this predatory behaviour, aggression, defence, competition or something else? In the case of carpenter ants, it’s for the good of the amputee and to the benefit of the colony. A July 2024 University of Lausanne study found carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus) carry out lifesaving amputations on their […]