Ecology & Zoology

In early times, a raven could be a bad omen, and a new study finds that ancient people were not wrong in thinking the raven might be planning on using a negative event to full advantage. It turns out, according to the paper, they plan ahead, just like humans, and can even forgo an immediate reward in order to gain a better one in the future, which at least some humans do. Great apes too. Ravens and great apes have not shared a common ancestor for over 300 million years, so what explains it? Evolution is not a straight line and the authors speculate that the cognitive "planning" abilities they…

There has been some ongoing concern about bee colonies, even fears of an impending "colony collapse disorder", but both the fears and the causes have been misplaced, recent studies have shown. Rather than being a mysterious effect due to pesticides (like neonicotinoids) slight variations in bee populations remain the fault of parasites. Yet that brings its own mystery. Varroa mites, the biggest culprit, are not very mobile.  A new paper has a possible answer. In response to a pollinator crisis that never happened, amateur beekeeping has taken off as a fad. And that means lots of bees are…

A newly named species, a giant, black, mud dwelling, worm-like animal, doesn't seem to eat much, instead it gets its energy from a form of sulfur.  The public is often confused what 'discovery' means in science. It means it is being identified as a new species, not never seen before. The three- to five-foot long, tusk-like shells that encase the animal were first documented in the 1700s and are fairly common, it's the living animal inside that is being identified as a new species.   The animal's preferred habitat was unclear, but the research team benefitted from a bit of…

Colony Collapse Disorder, the belief that honeybees, an important pollinator, are being killed off in droves, has been good for environmental fundraising but hasn't had a scientific foundation. Nonetheless, it has persisted for 10 years despite data showing that periodic die-offs in bees are as common, and therefore predictable, as solar cycles and California droughts. From the time that records of bees were formally kept, there were reports of mass die-offs without explanation, a thousand years before pesticides even existed. But pesticides are the moneymaker. Activists can't gather $1…

Let's be honest, most human dads do less work raising the kids than human moms. That's not true in all species, though. In a few, fathers care for their developing embryos more than mothers, and biologists speculated that this paternal devotion had evolved from ancestors entirely lacking parental care. A new paper provides a new wrinkle. When fathers are more involved, parental care gets a lot more elaborate. Glassfrog eggs, laid on leaves hanging over streams in tropical rainforests, are tasty snacks for snakes, insects, and other predators until they hatch and drop into the streams to begin…

This is the first of a series of articles on Huanglongbing (Citrus Greening Disease) that is devastating Florida. Subsequent articles will explore its causes, effects and potential cures.  When I started my job as a professor at the University of Florida in 2002, one of the simple joys was taking a drive through the state.  It seemed like everywhere I drove south of Interstate 4 there was a glorious aqua-blue sky that was the backdrop for dark-green foliage of Florida’s citrus industry.  The trees were lush and dense, and punctuated with bright orange fruits throughout…

The line between deliberately manipulating a story and poorly reporting the facts is perilously thin. During Sunday’s Oscars, what is colloquially called the United States’ ‘paper of record’, the New York Times, launched an advertising blitz positioning itself as the highbrow ethical responder to the spate of so-called ‘fake news.’ “The truth is hard…to find…to know,” the ad, widely circulated now on YouTube, proclaimed somberly. It’s a powerful message, one that the public and the media should reflect upon—including the leadership at the Times itself. That a journalist can present a story…

Its not a great idea to use surveys, but sometimes those are all we have. After environmental groups drummed up publicity about a colony collapse disorder in honeybees, for example, concerned amateurs began taking up beekeeping. Since nature is not a perfect system, and the new folks didn't know what they were doing, these amateurs killed off a lot of bees, but there is no checkbox on the survey for that, so they blamed pesticides. Declaring things endangered, even species that were only just discovered, is good for business, and a species of hummingbird has been added to conservation…

In Insectivorous Plants, Sir Charles Darwin pondered carnivorous plants. They live in habitats poor in nutrients, mostly on nitrogen and phosphorous, and have compensated this lack with the ability to digest animals such as insects and other arthropods. Adapting and surviving with a carnivorous diet in nutrient-poor soils is an evolutionary process that some evolutionary unrelated species have been going through, repeatedly and independently, from the same set of genes and proteins, according to a new study in Nature Ecology&Evolution. All plants are photosynthetic organisms, that is…

A new test with molluscs - freshwater mudsnails (Potamopyrgus antipodarum) - may enable manufacturers of chemicals and drugs to check their products for harmful effects on reproduction, and avoid the hype and scaremongering of environmental groups.  New chemicals which have not yet been approved and harm the mudsnail in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Test No. 242 in the laboratory would have the same effect on it and related species in the wild. Since molluscs, after insects and crustaceans, are the second most species-rich group in the animal kingdom, the…