Ecology & Zoology
Social bonding in vampire bats is no surprise, they have roommates. What is uncommon is that they demonstrate behavior some might call friendship; unrelated vampire bats engage in social grooming and food sharing to form life-saving bonds that can last a lifetime.
Vampire bats sustain themselves on only blood, and if a bat is unable to feed for 3 days, it runs the risk of starving. Like early man, they have a 'boom and bust' foraging lifestyle, so they either hit it big and get a large blood meal or they're starved for that night.
If they starve three nights in a row there is a…
Scientists have discovered a non-oxygen breathing animal, a tiny, less than 10-celled parasite named Henneguya salminicola which lives in salmon muscle.
As it evolved, the animal, a myxozoan relative of jellyfish and corals, gave up breathing and consuming oxygen to produce energy.
Aerobic respiration is a major source of energy but organisms like fungi, amoebas or ciliate lineages in anaerobic environments have lost the ability to breathe over time. This is the first discovery of an animal that gave up this critical pathway, possibly because the parasite happens to live in an anaerobic…
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You might know blue whales are an endangered species while pandas are not. Yet there are 25,000 blue whales and only 2,000 pandas. There are 100,000 sea otters yet they are still classified as endangered. Who drew that line between endangered and not endangered? And why are there suddenly so many more endangered species? A new tiny species might be discovered and someone is immediately petitioning government to declare it endangered, even though there may be lots of them and western ecologists just don't know it.
The government definition of endangered has morphed over time, and its…
Despite what you've heard, birds of a feather often don't flock together. In the real world, multiple bird species are often flying and feeding together. In the Amazon, 50 species may travel as a unit.
But are birds in these mixed flocks cooperating with one another or competing?
A new study suggests both. Just like a K-pop band such as BTS, Blackpink, or Red Velvet.
A tortured analogy? Not at all. K-Pop bands all work together while having their own style and expertise. You often have a leader, one who raps, one dancer better than the rest, a guitarist. "It's the same with…
Mosquitoes rely on sense of smell to get what they need to survive. Females need blood to produce their eggs, so they find a host to bite and spots to lay eggs, while both males and females feed on nectar.
Their dominant source of food is nectar from flowers yet scientists know little about the scents that draw mosquitoes toward certain flowers, or repel them from others. Discovering this could help develop less toxic and better repellents, more effective traps, and lead to an understanding of how the mosquito brain responds to sensory information -- including the cues that, on occasion…
As desert locusts ravage African crops, EU-funded NGOs maneuver in
the Kenyan parliament to leave farmers defenseless. Caught flat-footed by the emergency, the FAO struggles to purchase
enough pesticides to avert catastrophe.
Experts fear it may be too late to avert famine.
The worst locust swarms in 70 years descended on East Africa
barely a month ago and have already devoured hundreds of thousands of acres of
staple crops throughout the region. Every day, the swarms grow larger and
travel further into the African
continent. As the crop losses mount, experts fear that this new plague,
which…
Pyrus calleryana (Callery pear) is a tree native to China and Vietnam that California government introduced a hundred years ago after natural fire blight wiped out much of the European pear crops grown in the state.
Since the callery pear was highly resistant to fire they wanted to graft it to the European pear trees, so researchers traveled to China, then took a four-day boat ride from Wuhan up the Yangtze to where the natural trees grew in abundance. As a bonus, they found it could grow anywhere, and that meant it could grow as landscape even in a state that is mostly desert and…
Microsoft has declared they will become carbon neutral regarding their energy usage by 2030. While their details were sparse, they included electric cars, which still create emissions because 81 percent of electricity is generated using fossil fuels, and charging themselves an internal carbon tax which they would then use to invest.
If the investment is in a carbon credits company, which plants new trees to absorb carbon as they grow, a new study says they may be doing more harm than good. Planting large numbers of trees in new regions depletes existing rivers within a decade, and those…
Sailors have told tales of giant tentacled sea monsters for millennia. In ancient times, it was the Kraken. In more recent work, Jules Verne delighted and terrified the public while reading 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
The monstrous Architeuthis dux, the giant squid, must have been terrifying to ancient mariners. They were the size of modern school buses, never a good thing when you are in a wooden trireme, with eyes as big as dinner plates and tentacles that can snatch prey 10 yards away.
During an evolutionary scale when most creatures got smaller, how did this squid get so big?Publication…
You may be aware that film runs at 25 frames per second because humans will then not see it as individual images. These 'blinks per second' are measured in Hertz and some humans can see up to 60 Hz.
You may not sleep well if you have a light blinking all night. And a new study shows that in bird care, light control is even more important than realized.
A new study has found that birds of prey have much greater visual acuity but a peregrine falcon is over twice as adept as humans - 129 Hz, which would be like being able to see the details of a race car driver's face as they zoom by you at 200…