Ecology & Zoology

Introducing 'Natchez', the twelfth release in a series of erect-growing, high-quality, productive, floricane-fruiting blackberry (Rubus L. subgenus Rubus Watson) cultivars developed by the University of Arkansas. According to John R. Clark and James N. Moore of the Department of Horticulture at the University of Arkansas, the new blackberry is a result of a cross of Ark. 2005 and Ark. 1857 made in 1998. The original plant was selected in 2001 from a seedling field at the University of Arkansas Fruit Research Station in Clarksville, and tested as selection Ark. 2241. 'Natchez' produces large…

A York University research team has tracked the migration of songbirds,  the most common type of bird in our skies, by outfitting them with tiny geolocator backpacks – a world first and interesting because they are too small for conventional satellite tracking.    They now say we have underestimated the flight performance of songbirds dramatically. Bridget Stutchbury, a professor of biology in York's Faculty of Science&Engineering, and her team mounted miniaturized geolocators on 14 wood thrushes and 20 purple martins, breeding in Pennsylvania during 2007, tracking the…

With pressures hundreds of times that at sea level and temperatures nearly freezing, it's amazing that anything can survive in the deep ocean. The vast amount of space and correspondingly sparse distribution of living organisms simply adds to the seeming impossibility that anything could survive in such an environment. However, many spots in the deep ocean contain life highly adapted to the specific harsh environment, and manage to find food and reproduce despite the odds against it. How do animals find food in the deep ocean, where there is virtually nothing to stimulate a sensory system?…

It seems that a new study is always uncovering new health benefits of hot peppers. Garnering a high-profile endorsement  from Hillary Clinton as well as doctors and scientists, peppers' heat producing chemical capsaicin has been linked to benefits ranging from anti-inflammatory properties to cancer killing.  Though capsaicin is beneficial to humans, packing heat isn't a cure-all for the peppers themselves.  A recent study busted the myth that hotter peppers are more resistant to Phytopthora blight. Phytophthora blight, also known as root rot, is caused by a fungal…

Excavations in Colombia co-organized by Carlos Jaramillo, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Florida's Florida Museum of Natural History, have unearthed fossil remains of a new snake species they named Titanoboa cerrejonensis.  Surrounded by huge trucks extracting coal from Cerrejon, one of the world's largest open-pit mines, researchers discovered fossilized bones of super-sized snakes and their prey, crocodiles and turtles, in the Cerrejon Formation, along with fossilized…

Scientists today announced the discovery of 10 amphibians believed to be new to science, including a spiky-skinned, orange-legged rain frog, three poison dart frogs and three glass frogs, so called because their transparent skin can reveal internal organs. The species were discovered during a recent Rapid Assessment Program (RAP) expedition in Colombia's mountainous Tacarcuna area of the Darien, near the border with Panama. The expedition was led by herpetologists from Conservation International (CI) in Colombia and ornithologists from the Ecotrópico Foundation, with the support of the local…

Most animals, like humans, have separate sexes.  We are born, live out our lives and reproduce as one sex or the other, but some animals live as one sex in part of their lifetime and then switch to the other sex, a phenomenon called sequential hermaphroditism.   Yale scientists believe the bigger puzzle is why the phenomenon is so rare, since their analysis shows the biological “costs” of changing sexes rarely outweigh the advantages. This process is even evolutionarily favored, they say, so its rarity cannot be explained by an analysis of the biological costs vs benefits.…

A new find in Arctic Canada strongly suggests that animals migrated from Asia to North America not around Alaska, as once thought, but directly across a freshwater sea floating atop the warm, salty Arctic Ocean.   In 2006, John Tarduno, professor of geophysics at the University of Rochester and leader of the Arctic expedition, led an expedition to the Arctic to study paleomagnetism—the Earth's magnetic field in the distant past. Knowing from previous expeditions to the area that the rocks were rich with fossils, Tarduno kept an eye out for them and was rewarded when one of his…

Name it and the milk will come, say scientists at Newcastle University.  It's not "Field of Dreams" it's Milk of Dreams.   Or whatever analogy you want to use for a correlation-causation fantasy that leads to a conclusion that a cow with a name produces more milk than one without. Drs Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson say they have shown in their study in Anthrozoos ("A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People and Animals"!!) that by giving a cow a name and treating her as an individual farmers can increase their annual milk yield  - by over 60 gallons. I…

Plants' ability to sprout upward using their own woody tissues has long been considered one of the characteristics separating the land kind from aquatic plants, which rely on water to support them. But Lignin, one of the chemical underpinnings vital to the self-supporting nature of land plants and thought unique to them, has now been found in marine algae by a team of researchers that include scientists at Stanford University and the University of British Columbia.  Lignin, a principal component of wood, is a glue-like substance that helps fortify cell walls and is instrumental in the…