symbiosis

Cows are ruminants – mammals with specialised digestive systems that use fermentation processes to gain nutrients from plant material. Cattle, sheep, horses, deer, goats and camels...

Flowers are a common sight in most New Zealand school grounds. They offer a colourful starting point to teach about plant reproduction and adaptation and offer...

Our native forests – ngahere – have complex ecosystems. Within the wider ecosystems are smaller ecosystems, such as the one formed around honeydew. Honeydew is a...

In this activity, students read about pollination using a three-level reading guide and use their ability to locate information to interpret the scientific information. Students apply...

Flowering plants create seeds, which get spread away from the parents and grow into new plants in new places. Pollination has to happen before seeds can...

Sci-fi writers from Arthur Conan Doyle to Ray Bradbury have long speculated about the invisible lighter-than-air creatures that must surely inhabit the realms above the ground....

Cold seeps are places on the seafloor where cold hydrocarbon-rich water escapes. They occur most often at tectonic plate boundaries. Carbonate deposits and communities of organisms...

Hub's writer, Nelville Gardner, talks about our pollination resources. One of the scientists featured in the articles on pollination, Dave Kelly of the University of Canterbury,...

In this activity, students take on the role of flower parts and act out the process of insect pollination By the end of this activity, students...

In this activity, students match native flowers with their pollinators, basing predictions on the main characteristics of flowers pollinated by wind, insects or birds. By the...

Position: field services manager and research assistant, University of Canterbury. Field: Ecology As part of her job as Terrestrial Ecology Technician, at the School of Biological...

Position: Head of research, Plant & Food Research. Field: Honey bees and pollination. For Dr Mark Goodwin, working with pollination has its challenges. Most crop plants...

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are the most important pollinators of many cultivated food crops and other flowering plants. These plants would be in trouble without bees,...

The flowers and fruit of flowering plants come and go as part of their life cycle. Some flowering plants don’t even have stems and leaves all...

Flowering plants need to get pollen from one flower to another, either within a plant for self-pollination or between plants of the same species for cross-pollination...

Most flowers have the same basic parts, even though they come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and colours. Flowers are there to make sure that...

Sexual reproduction is a way of making a new individual by joining two special sex cells, called gametes. In the sexual reproduction of animals and plants,...

Birdlife has been declining in the New Zealand bush for many years, mainly due to introduced predators such as rats and stoats. Professor Dave Kelly and...

In some of the beech forests of New Zealand, bright red or yellow mistletoe flowers stand out in the summer. The colour attracts native birds, which...

Learn about the role of flowers in the life cycles of flowering plants. Discover how flowers ensure the transfer of pollen, and meet some of the...

In this activity, students use a template to make a model of an adenovirus and investigate the different shapes of different viral diseases and the similarities...

It doesn’t breathe, it doesn’t eat, it doesn’t excrete, and it doesn’t grow – so it can’t be alive, can it? It hijacks a living cell...

Ryegrass is an important food for cattle, but it is also a favourite food of competing insects. Can biological control offer a solution? What's so special...