While studying towards his doctorate of philosophy, Anders Jørgensen discovered a previously undescribed species of parasite that infects farmed fish and produces serious disease. Single-celled…

In response to Wright and Muller-Landau’s paper on the future of tropical forests (which suggests that declining rural populations can allow forest recovery; see my previous post), Sloan pointed out…

Nothing would seem to be stranger than bats flying without their special radar. They would be the Keystone Cops of zoology. But the discovery of a remarkably well-preserved fossil representing the…

The traditional idea of the balance of nature gets quite a beating by a study that appears in the current issue of Nature. Using a long-term laboratory experiment, the authors conclude that, even…

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…