Ecology & Zoology

Deep-Diving Marine Mammals Get Heart Arrhythmias

Dolphins and seals have had eons to adapt to aquatic life, but they can still be taxed while pushing the boundaries, according to a paper in Nature Communications which found a surprisingly high frequency of heart arrhythmias in bottlenose dolphins and We ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 17 2015 - 12:19pm

Brown-Headed Cowbirds And The Not-So-Great Escape

By: Leigh Cooper,   Inside Science (Inside Science) – Despite their agility in flight, birds often find themselves unable to escape vehicles – a conundrum that puzzles scientists. To solve the mystery, a new study brought brown-headed cowbirds (Molothrus ...

Article - Inside Science - Feb 4 2015 - 10:32am

Functional Gene Transfer: How A Sea Slug Came To Photosynthesize Like A Plant

A brilliant-green sea slug can live for months at a time "feeding" on sunlight like a plant and now scientists have the first direct evidence that its chromosomes have some genes that come from the algae it eats.  Those genes help sustain photosy ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 3 2015 - 4:27pm

How Tiny Termites Hold Back Deserts

If you own a home, termites are the enemy, but if you want to hold back a desert, their large dirt mounds can be crucial to protecting semi-arid ecosystems and agricultural lands. That's obviously important for feeding people and insert obligatory glo ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 5 2015 - 3:55pm

Colony Collapse Disorder: It Could Just Be Stress

A few years ago, another colony collapse occurred. Though it has happened more times than recorded history has been able to log, the concern was that new pesticides, which replaced the old pesticides blamed for the last colony collapse, might be the cause. ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 10 2015 - 10:00am

Masters And Slaves: Locked In A Deadly Relationship

By Tobias Pamminger, University of Sussex Ants have a reputation of being industrious hard-working animals, sacrificing their own benefit for the good of the colony. They live to serve their queen and take care of all essential tasks including brood care, ...

Article - The Conversation - Feb 12 2015 - 8:30am

After 60 Million Year Breakup, Distant Species Produce Love Child

Evolution starts species off on different paths and even if they arrived in one spot from common descent in the past, they can't reproduce. So in modern times an elephant is not hybridizing with a manatee, or a human with a lemur. Tree frogs...well, y ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 13 2015 - 5:00pm

Killer Shrimp: Invasive Species In The Great Lakes By 2063

The Great Lakes have been invaded by more non-native species than any other freshwater ecosystem in the world, and though there have been increasing efforts to stem the tide of invasion threats, they remain vulnerable. Over the past two centuries, more th ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 20 2015 - 5:03pm

Nicotine Reduces Parasite Infection In Bees Up To 81 Percent

In 2006, there was a large die-off in bees and though their numbers quickly rebounded and have continued upward since, scientists have been looking for ways to make the periodic collapses that occur less dramatic.  The cause the last time it happened was t ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 17 2015 - 7:49pm

Plants Survive Mass Extinctions Better Than Animals

At least five mass extinction events have profoundly changed the course of life on Earth- animal life, at least. Plants have been very resilient to those events, finds a new study. For over 400 million years, plants have played an essential role in almost ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 18 2015 - 8:30am