Ecology & Zoology

I recently saw the article about the findings of Keiko the killer whale's unsuccessful release in 1998.  This was a result of a public campaign to "Free Willy" and reintroduce him into the wild after 19 years of captivity.  The killer whale was captured at approximately 2 years of age, so had no experience living in the wild, and apparently there was no information regarding the original family from where he was taken. An entry on facebook caught my attention though: "His 5 years in the wild was a definite improvement in quality of life over his previous years in a tank, and many…

Geckos have the uncanny ability to traverse even the trickiest terrain without so much as a slip. Until now, it has been unknown when and how they switch on their they all-foot grip. Scientists at the University of Calgary and Clemson University in South Carolina have discovered that the geckos' amazing grip is triggered by gravity. "Geckos use microscopic, hair-like filaments to attach to surfaces. Only at certain angles do they switch on their traction system, however," says Russell, a biological sciences professor at the U of C. "We are trying to understand this process, which will help…

Scientists at Imperial College London have created detailed 3D computer models of two fossilized specimens of ancient creatures called Cryptomartus hindi and Eophrynus prestvicii that lived around 300 million years ago and are closely related to modern-day spiders. The study reveals some of the physical traits that helped them to hunt for prey and evade predators. The researchers created their images by using a CT scanning device, which enabled them to take 3,000 x-rays of each fossil. These x-rays were then compiled into precise 3D models, using custom-designed software. Both Cryptomartus…

Humans, bah.  Multimodal, egg-headed, tool-using, bipedal, opposing-thumbed existence is so 2008.   Ants are where it's at, to the delight of neo-rationalists everywhere (and Edward O. Wilson too). They can accomplish tasks a lot more rationally than humans, says a Arizona State University and Princeton University study in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences. This is not a case of overall smartness.   Humans and other animals simply often make irrational choices when faced with very challenging decisions, note Stephen Pratt and Susan Edwards. "This paradoxical…

The three-spine stickleback, tiny fish that thrive in oceans and in fresh water, appear to be the same yet ecologists are finding that they are actually a diverse collection of very specialized individuals.   Understanding the ecological causes and consequences of such ecological variation is the goal of a group of scientists meeting at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, July 27-29. Traditionally, ecological theory has treated a population as a homogeneous set of individuals, implicitly assuming that…

University of Haifa-Oranim researchers have managed to make out the “self-irrigating” mechanism of Rumex hymenosepalus, the desert rhubarb, which enables it to harvest 16 times the amount of water than otherwise expected for a plant in this region based on the quantities of rain in the desert - the first example of a self-irrigating plant worldwide. The desert rhubarb grows in the mountains of Israel’s Negev desert, where average precipitation is particularly low (75 mm per year). Unlike most of the other desert plant species, which have small leaves so as to minimize moisture loss, this…

We can learn a lot about extinct giant South American mammals from 30-40 million years ago thanks the random process of fossilization.    Even their ancient 'mega-dung' has a tale to tell scientists and we can thank the unheralded dung beetle. The dung beetle has fallen on hard times. Though once worshipped by the Ancient Egyptians its status has now slipped to being the butt of scatological jokes. Yet a wise few still consider the dung beetle heroic.  Example: if not for the dung-beetle the world would be knee-deep in animal droppings, especially the big herbivores like cows,…

Dogs aren't the only animals that bark, they are just the most famous. Deer, monkeys and even birds also bark but what makes dogs different is a subject of interest in a new evolutionary biology study. In a recent Behavioural Processes paper, researchers have provided scientific literature with what they say is the first consistent, functional and acoustically precise definition of this household animal sound. Kathryn Lord, a graduate student in organismic and evolutionary biology at University of Massachusetts Amherst, says, “We suggest an alternative hypothesis to one that many biologists…

This is my course assignment of Evolutionary Ecology of Stockholm University,Sweden in the year of 2009. Abstract Specialization character of phytophagous insects is one of the key examples of insect-plant relationship. Host specificity of insect is required for their larval development. Several factors like trade-off, characteristics of host plant, insect’s neural system are responsible to an insect for becoming a specialist. Though specialization character of phytophagy increase the vulnerability towards extinction, still insect tense to be specialist for protecting themselves from natural…

If you've read your history and wondered about when the next Ice Age is coming, you can thank global warming it hasn't happened.    But it could be worse.   Earth's 4.5 billion years have seen several instances where temperatures changed dramatically, like in life ending ways, along with asteroids bombarding the planet and any number of species going extinct without a single activist to hunger strike for them. But one of the biggest moments in Earth's lifetime is a positive one - the Cambrian explosion roughly 540 million years ago when complex, multi-cellular life burst out…