Ecology & Zoology
The ancient Romans were the first to officially discovered that rotating crops improves plant nutrition and inhibits the spread of disease.
While it's common wisdom today, science is often about confirming why nature works the way it does. A new paper details profound effect crop rotation has on enriching soil with bacteria, fungi and protozoa.
Soil was collected from a field near Norwich and planted with wheat, oats and peas. After growing wheat, it remained largely unchanged and the microbes in it were mostly bacteria. However, growing oat and pea in the same sample caused a huge…
Fish is good for you so health advocates would prefer that people eat more of it. Environmentalists don't want fish to be depleted while natural food advocates don't want food that isn't free-range.
It's a tough culture for fisheries but biologists see a silver lining: Evolutionary changes induced by fisheries may benefit the fishers - and that means everyone else too. They just have to be well-managed. If they are well-managed, everyone wins. If not, there are economic losses as stocks decline from overfishing and further suffer from evolution.
The bad news is that few fisheries are…
Were dinosaurs warm-blooded like birds and mammals and not cold-blooded like reptiles as commonly believed?
Professor Roger Seymour of the University of Adelaide argues that cold-blooded dinosaurs would not have had the required muscular power to prey on other animals and dominate over mammals as they did throughout the Mesozoic period.
In his paper, Seymour asks how much muscular power could be produced by a crocodile-like dinosaur compared to a mammal-like dinosaur of the same size. Saltwater crocodiles reach over a ton in weight and, being about 50% muscle, have a reputation for being…
In North America, the environmental segment of the conservation community regards humanity as the enemy. Not so in South America. They want you to visit - just don't ruin the place.
A team of scientists from the Senckenberg Research Institute in Dresden were doing a study about the ways ecotourism and conservation can cohabitate nicely - and they discovered a new species of frog. As with most new discoveries, this micro-endemic species was immediately declared endangered because no one had seen it before.
Allobates amissibilis (Latin “that may be lost”) exists in a very confined area of…
After nearly 25 years of searching, three scientists have finally found Waldo. No, not the lovable bespectacled character in children's picture books, but rather an unusual clam they have named Waldo arthuri and which was discovered off the coast of California and British Columbia.
Paul Valentich-Scott from the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, and Diarmaid Ó Foighil from the University of Michigan, Museum of Zoology first began discussing this unusual clam back in 1989. Valentich-Scott discovered his strange specimens off the coast of Santa Barbara and Morro Bay, California, while Ó…
A recent article "These fish are evidence that humans aren't the only evil animals" began from the presumption that these fish were intentionally injuring others to avoid predation against themselves.
One problem with this article was the initial silly use of terms like "evil" or "selfish" when clearly that is not what this behavior involved. As mentioned in the paper, there is nothing cognitively intentional about this behavior so to assign these terms is just more sensationalist nonsense.
Instead what we have is an experiment in which these fish were subject to three modes of…
Wind power may be hard on endangered eagles but greater prairie chicken populations are still okay, say ecologists.
The work, led by Kansas State University professor of biology Brett Sandercock concluded that wind turbines have little effect on greater prairie chickens - and that female survival rates increased after wind turbines were installed. Yes, wind power led to great life expectancy for females, a combination which should make this study worthy of the New York Times.
Government subsidies have led to wind energy projects in Kansas and throughout the Plains, so the ecologists got…
Don't be bold. Risky behavior can lead to premature death.
Female mice with the highest life expectancy are less active and less explorative, they also eat less than females with a lower life expectancy. Behavioral biologists from the University of Zurich found a correlation between longevity and personality for female house mice, and a minimum amount of boldness is necessary for them to survive.
Anna Lindholm and her doctoral student Yannick Auclair investigated whether this also applies to animals by studying the behavior of 82 house mice.
They recorded boldness, activity level…
There was a recent article discussing the observation of death and the chimpanzeesattitude towards it.
Of course, this gave rise to the usual round of questions and points regarding human interpretations of these actions and raised the question of anthropomorphism. Yet, this was precisely one of the more absurd elements that was involved in these discussions.
Even the point of raising the question of testable hypothesis, is a false alarm when it comes to interpretation of animal behaviors.
The following quote illustrates the problem precisely:
Are they just animals, or are they…
Why is it that so many scientific stories seem intent on debunking and end by demonstrating that they are just rehashing opinions and have no actual data?
A recent article purported to debunk the story of the Candiru, which supposedly would be attracted to urine in the water and swim up the urethra to anchor itself into a penis to suck the host's blood.
The candiru, apparently cannot get back out of a human host, and cannot be removed because of the spines – so this little fish does horrendous damage, leading to laceration, hemorrhage, bladder destruction, penis amputation, even death!
So,…