Climate change set to shrink fish

Through most of last year I spent my days researching climate change for my dissertation project. When I started I thought I ‘knew about Climate Change’ – how wrong I was! My dissertation looked at the way in which climate change is predicted to change the global distribution of malaria in the future (click here). Disease is not something that you would necessarily associate with climate change and here is another example of something you might not think was associated with climate change – size.

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Too many mouths and too little time

Just a quick apology to all my regular readers. Over the last 2 months I have been taking the final exams for my degree and deciding what to do with my future! As such I have been unable to blog as frequently as I would have liked. I will be regularly posting from now, so your summers are already looking brighter!! Thanks for your patience, and feel free to get in touch!

Most (if not all) of the people reading this post consider supermarkets, greengrocers or corner shops a necessity, something that is just part of everyday life. The commotion caused when these shops close for bank holidays only emphasises that fact. During these public holidays shelves are often left empty and fresh goods go short. But what if this was more common than just on bank holidays? What if there was a national food shortage? Where would you get your food from?

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Ready or not, here European malaria comes … are we ready?

The questionnaire linked below is now closed. Thank you for your participation, I truely appreciate it.

To those of you who are not familiar to my blog, my name is Victoria Ellis and I am in my final year at the University of Manchester studying Zoology. As part of my final year project I am required to write a post on my blog and access how useful the post was to my readers. To do this I have created a very small questionnaire (7 questions), that simply requires you to answer questions on various aspects of malaria before and after reading this post. This is not a test of your knowledge, but a test of how your knowledge has changed as a result of reading my blog post. I would really appreciate it if you took the time to do this; it will only take a couple of minutes and is completely anonymous.

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Mosquitos – To kill or not to kill, that is the question.

The climate we live in today is one of change. There is a huge debate as to if that change is for the better or worse, but the fact remains the climate is changing. This is not a new phenomenon. The climate has radically changed since the beginning of life some 3.6-3.8 billion years ago. However, no single species has ever been directly responsible for changing the climate – until Homo sapiens rocked up. We are changing the climate so quickly evolution can’t keep up. This means many species are struggling to survive, leading to a significant number of species extinctions. We are very quick to jump to the needs of endangered species, particularly those that are beneficial to us. But what about the species we don’t like? What about mosquitos? How many times have you been on holiday and got a nasty bite, or been forced to religiously take anti-malaria tablets? Mosquitos are irritating disease spreaders, so why don’t we just get rid of them?

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