Before cutting down forest, land managers in drought prone areas might first consider the birds in the trees.
According to a new study by biologists at Virginia Tech and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, the offspring of a certain songbird, the wood thrush, are more likely to survive drought in larger forest plots that offer plenty of shade and resources.
These results were published Oct. 18 in The Auk: Ornithological Advances, a journal of the American Ornithological Society.
It’s out there. Lurking, ready to feast on the blood of its victims, like the mythological vampire. And it’s real.
University of Manitoba biologist Dr. Margaret Docker in the Faculty of Science has been studying this group of ancient vertebrates for more than 30 years. When asked why she is attracted to such a creature, she says, “Well, I’ve always been a bit of an apologist for the underdog.”
Environmental disturbances such as El Niño shake up the marine food web off Southern California, new research shows, countering conventional thinking that the hierarchy of who-eats-who in the ocean remains largely constant over time.
The new research published in the journal Science Advances examined the skin cells of common dolphins for chemical clues about the length of the marine food chain, which begins with tiny plankton and continues as species eat them, and other species eat those species. Large predators such as dolphins occupy the top of the food chain, their cells carrying chemical information from all the species beneath them.
A diver separated from his boat off the coast of Australia said Sunday he was lucky to be alive after being forced to swim miles back to shore—shadowed by a large tiger shark.
The spear fisherman, named in local media as John Craig, was underwater off Western Australia state Friday when his boat was swept away due to engine problems and strong currents.
“I put my head in the water to check I was in the same place and suddenly saw a huge four-metre (13-foot) tiger shark approaching within arm’s reach,” Craig told commercial broadcaster Channel Nine.
A leading expert in fish behaviour argues that our fundamental understanding and assessment of animal welfare must be changed to consider fish, or risk continued catastrophic impact on their welfare, in an article published today in Animal Sentience.
Animal welfare is assessed on the basis of whether animals think and feel and therefore their potential to suffer, however how we assess animal sentience is still debated. “There is growing concern around the world about how we treat animals, particularly as part of the food production line.
Researchers trying to catch and enclose the last survivors of the vaquita porpoise species captured a calf but released it because it was too young to survive without its mother.
Mexico’s Environment Department said veterinarians determined the calf was too young and experts said it was showing signs of stress after capture. The experts with Mexican-led international effort known as VaquitaCPR still saw hope in the calf’s capture.
North American walnut sphinx moth caterpillars (Amorpha juglandis) look like easy meals for birds, but they have a trick up their sleeves—they produce whistles that sound like bird alarm calls, scaring potential predators away.
At first, scientists suspected birds were simply startled by the loud noise. But a new study presented at the International Symposium on Acoustic Communication by Animals in Omaha in July suggests a more sophisticated mechanism: the caterpillar’s whistle appears to mimic a bird alarm call, sending avian predators scrambling for cover.
“This is the first instance of deceptive alarm calling between an insect and a bird, and it’s a novel defense form for an insect,” says Jessica Lindsay, the study’s first author and a graduate student in the lab of Kristin Laidre at the University of Washington. “I think that’s pretty wild.”
Pieces of plastic and other ocean debris gave coastal critters a ride to other continents following the enormous earthquake-generated tsunami that hit the coast of Tohoku in Japan in 2011. Researchers studied the marine life attached to plastic fragments, fishing vessels, and large docks carried into the Pacific Ocean after the temblor and found that hundreds of species had rafted thousands of kilometers in the longest hitchhike of coastal species ever recorded.
“We have known for many years that oceanic rafting is happening and has happened throughout the history of our Earth,” Martin Thiel, a marine biologist at Catholic University of the North in Chile, tells The Scientist by email. “What is surprising is the magnitude of this event and that we can document this as it happens.”
Thiel, who was not involved in the new study, explains that in the past, scientists have relied on genetic markers to identify previous rafting events. In the new work, published today (September 28) in Science, Williams College marine scientist James Carlton and colleagues recorded the diversity of animal communities on 634 pieces of Japanese tsunami marine debris, including vessels, docks, buoys, crates, wood, and other objects that turned up on US shorelines.
Having traversed roughly 7,000 kilometers across the Pacific, the material carried with it living animals from 289 Japanese coastal marine species, representing 16 phyla. Five invertebrate groups—mollusks, annelids, cnidarians, bryozoans, and crustaceans—made up 85 percent of the species diversity.
In every animal community, several species in the same group often share habitats. An international team including scientists from Catalonia in Spain has created the largest public-access database on the cohabitation ants. The goal is to understand their tricks for coexistence and how they respond to invasive species and climate change. Ants make up a large fraction of the planet’s total biomass, and they are responsible for ecological functions such as seed dispersal and pollination. Despite their great diversity, thanks to the collections of museums around the world they are a well-described group in which different species can coexist in the same habitat.
We may be underestimating the long-term impact of oil spills on fish, particularly their ability to tolerate low oxygen environments, according to research from the University of British Columbia (UBC), the Université de Bretagne Occidentale (UBO) and L’Institut Français de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer (Ifremer). The new study tested the capacity of European sea bass to perform not just in typical seawater but also in low-oxygen level sea water. Researchers used a novel integrated respiratory assessment paradigm (IRAP) to screen both the fish’s aerobic capacity and tolerance for low-oxygen (hypoxic) levels, grouping the fish into hypoxia tolerant and hypoxia sensitive phenotypic groups. They then exposed the fish to dispersed crude oil for 48 hours.
