Profs Featured in Toronto Star
July 26, 2010 - In the News
Prof. Rob McLaughlin's recent research showing that foraging behaviour of brook trout is related to the size of a particular region in the fish's brain was featured in Sunday's Toronto Star.
The integrative biology professor found that fish that swim around in the open in search of food have larger telencephalons than fish that sit along the shoreline and wait for food to swim by in the water. The telencephalon is the brain region involved with fish movement and use of space. These findings reveal there is a correlation between foraging behaviour and brain morphology.
Published recently in the journal Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology, this study is a followup to previous research that discovered brook trout display two personality types: fish that are active foragers and appear to be risk takers, and those that are sedentary and apparently more timid.
Sunday's Toronto Star also featured an opinion piece written by geography professor Barry Smit and PhD student Tristan Pearce on the science of climate change.
In the article, Smit and Pearce discuss how the recent media coverage of the climategate controversy has directed attention away from the fact that the climate is changing and human activities are a major influence.
They also counteract recent attacks by climate change skeptics against the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by arguing that the IPCC is made of the world's top scientists and the reports produced are among the most thoroughly and comprehensively reviewed scientific assessments.
