Ecology & Zoology
Bees face a variety of challenges in the modern world. Changes to land use and evolving parasites have always been significant issues. For as long as beekeeping records have been kept, 1,100 years, there have been accounts of colony collapse disorder. Just about the only thing science has determined is not killing them off periodically are neonicotinoid pesticides, the one thing environmentalists insist is the problem.
While not in crisis, they rebounded fine after the latest periodic blip in numbers, it's good to think about how to prevent losses without incurring the cost of chemicals. One…
We're going to learn a lot more about how bats do all of the things they do, in part due to the work of the Bat1K consortium to sequence the genome of six widely divergent living bat species.
Other bat genomes have been published but these genomes are 10 times more complete than any published to date.
Most relevant during the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 it brought in humans is showing evolution through gene expansion and loss in a family of genes, APOBEC3, which is known to play an important role in immunity to viruses in other mammals. The details in the paper that explain this…
Leeches are found on every continent in freshwater habitats where there is little flow. They are popular bait for fishing, and doctors continue to use them in medical treatments. Environmentalists have even been using them to advance their beliefs that trace levels of "endocrine disrupting" chemicals are harmful.
What is known about leech reproduction is that they are hermaphroditic, so they have both male and female sex organs, and some families of leeches demonstrate protrandry (they start life as a male and then change into a female), while others self-fertilize, brood eggs and show…
Panic-stricken headlines about “murder hornets” are thankfully mostly behind us. The nickname may have staying power, but it is certainly unearned.
First spotted in British Columbia in August 2019, the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) poses little threat to humans. In its native range in East Asia, the giant hornet is chiefly a menace to the livelihoods of beekeepers, provoking concern that it could cause similar problems in North America.
As a result, giant hornets are still very much top-of-mind for agricultural authorities in Washington state and British Columbia: this spring, the…
We know dogs will try to rescue humans, those Lassie stories were based on events that have happened for as long as humans and dogs have co-existed, but simply observing dogs rescuing someone doesn't tell you much about dogs' actual interest in rescuing humans
So psychologists at Arizona State University set up an experiment assessing 60 pet dogs' propensity to rescue their owners. None of the dogs had any kind of rescue training.
In the main test, each owner was confined to a large box equipped with a light-weight door, which the dog could move aside. The owners feigned distress…
There is a rare condition in humans and other vertebrates where they genetically belong to one sex but also have characteristics of the other.
Decades ago, scientists found that Oryzias latipes (Japanese rice fish, also called medaka) often undergo sex reversal in the wild and new exploratory research may lead to insight in humans.
In medaka fish. sex reversal involves genetically female larvae (meaning they have two X chromosomes) going on to develop male characteristics, or vice versa. Scientists had already discovered that environmental factors, such as temperature changes in the brackish…
The biggest cause of bee die-offs is just random luck. For as long as bee numbers have been reported there have been reports of sudden, large-scale die-offs. Nature is out to kill them like it is all of us. Yet more recently, it has been found that we can help bees make their own luck. Pesticides wipe out varroa mites, the greatest enemy bees have.
A new study on how bee pathogens spread shows that agriculture also has a positive impact, a much different scenario than that promoted by environmental lawyers. It used empirical data and mathematical modeling to try and determine how surrounding…
Hank |
A new series of experiments by an Alphabet (the parent company Google created) group shows lab-bred mosquitoes that cannot successfully reproduce might be able to stop malaria and other mosquito-spread diseases in countries where those are still endemic - two billion people per year.
Malaria is not endemic to the U.S. any more and we can thank DDT for that but we still face risk of numerous diseases from mosquitoes. Other countries where diseases like dengue, chikungunya, Zika, and yellow fever are common barely blink at the coronavirus pandemic that has paralyzed the U.S. after only…
COVID-19 resulted from a coronavirus that originated in a horseshoe bat in China but with at least two dozen species of horseshoe bats in China (no one knows how many there really are), no one can determine which species was involved.
Bats carry diseases, but unlike the useless disease vectors known as Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, bats have ecological value also; they can pollinate crops and eat disease-carrying mosquitoes.
In the last 15 years, the known species of bats have increased 25 percent, but cataloging them is only the beginning. We know little about how they evolved or how to…
The leaf beetle Ophraella communa can significantly reduce pollen and that may mean a more cost-effective way to reduce allergies and their health care costs using science, while still appealing to activists that otherwise would oppose it.
Ambrosia artemisiifolia, ragweed, causes sneezing and itchy eyes in those with an allergy and aggravates conditions such as asthma and eczema.
Prior to the arrival of the leaf beetle in 2013, some 13.5 million people suffered from ragweed-induced allergies in Europe, causing economic costs of approximately Euro 7.4 billion annually. Just this once, an…