Ecology & Zoology

According to the Chinese proverb, a bird sings because it has a song, not because it has an answer. A team of French and Brazilian researchers, however, may have the answer as to how the song of…

In a fairly optimistic paper published in Biotropica in 2006 Joseph Wright and Helene Muller-Landau suggested that declining rates of population growth in tropical countries, coupled with increased…

The colugo doesn't fly and is not a lemur but it's still called a "flying lemur" - and it's the champion of all gliding mammals, able to drop from the forest canopy in Malaysia, glide more than the…

Anyone who has conducted field research knows that the very process of collecting data alters the system that you are studying. As you walk across a field, forest or stream to collect data, your…

Anoop Sindhu and colleagues report on a gene that may have played a key role in the evolution of grasses. The gene, Hm1, provides resistance against Cochliobolus carbonum race 1 (CCR1), a fungus that…

A study by UC Irvine ecologists finds that excess nitrogen in tropical forests boosts plant growth by an average of 20 percent, countering the belief that such forests would not respond to nitrogen…

A 'barcode' gene that can be used to distinguish between the majority of plant species on Earth has been identified. This gene, which can be used to identify plants using a small sample, could lead…

An unusual new species of whirligig beetle from India is being named Orectochilus orbisonorum in honor of the late rock ‘n’ roll legend Roy Orbison and his widow Barbara. Arizona State University…

Tropical forests are immensely species-rich. The question of what causes this diversity is a perennial one in tropical biology. In the 1970s Daniel Janzen and Joseph Connell independently came up…

Although there is unquestionably much left to be discovered about life on Earth, charismatic animals like mammals are usually well documented, and it is rare to find a new species today—especially…