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Wild Biology News - November 2009 Archives
 | Why hammerhead sharks have their distinctively shaped heads has puzzled scientists for generations, but now Michelle McComb and Stephen Kajiura from Florida Atlantic University and Timothy Tricas from the University of Hawaii at Manoa have discovered that hammerheads' wide heads give them an impressive stereo view. The team publishes their discovery on Nov. 27, 2009, in the Journal of Experimental Biology. ...> Full Article |
 | "It has long been shown that animals use cryptic coloration (camouflage) as a defense mechanism to visually match a component of their natural environment, which facilitates predator avoidance," Dr. Matthew Klooster said. "We have now experimentally demonstrated that plants have evolved a similar strategy to avoid their herbivores." ...> Full Article |
 | En route to historic first global Census of Marine Life (Oct. 2010), scientists have inventoried an astonishing abundance, diversity and distribution of deep sea species that have never known sunlight -- creatures that somehow manage a living in a frigid black world down to 5,000 meters (three miles) below the ocean waves. ...> Full Article |
 | A new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society says that western lowland gorillas living in a large swamp in the Republic of Congo -- part of the "mother lode" of more than 125,000 gorillas discovered last year -- are becoming increasingly threatened by growing humans activity in the region. ...> Full Article |
 | Researchers reconstruct the evolution of bat migration with the aid of a mathematical model. ...> Full Article |
 | Rocket science is opening new doors to understanding how sounds associated with Navy sonar might affect the hearing of a marine mammal -- or if they hear it at all. ...> Full Article |
 | A journey that started with a box of bird feet carried three Montana State University graduate students into the gruesome world of raptors and led to their findings being published. ...> Full Article |
 | A new species of chameleon has been discovered in a threatened forest in Tanzania. ...> Full Article |
 | The Wildlife Conservation Society announced today a report revealing that the last remaining population of Siberian tigers has likely declined significantly due to the rising tide of poaching and habitat loss.
...> Full Article |
A butterfly's proboscis looks like a straw -- long, slender and used for sipping -- but it works more like a paper towel, according to Konstantin Kornev of Clemson University. He hopes to borrow the tricks of this piece of insect anatomy to make small probes that can sample the fluid inside of cells.
...> Full Article
A series of studies carried out at the University of Haifa have found that rodent, reptile and ant lion species behave differently on either side of the Israel-Jordan border. "The border line, which is only a demarcation on the map, cannot contain these species, but the line does restrict humans and their diverse impact on nature," says Dr. Uri Shanas.
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Leaf-cutter ants, which cultivate fungus for food, have many remarkable qualities.
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 | A new study finds that a species of sea star stays cool using a strategy never before seen in the animal kingdom. The sea stars soak up cold sea water into their bodies during high tide as buffer against potentially damaging temperatures brought about by direct sunlight at low tide. ...> Full Article |
 | Males have more pronounced personalities than females across a range of species -- from humans to house sparrows -- according to new research. Consistent personality traits, such as aggression and daring, are also more important to females when looking for a mate than they are to males. Research from the University of Exeter draws together a range of studies to reveal the role that sexual selection plays in this disparity between males and females. ...> Full Article |
 | Increasing temperatures at high altitudes are fueling the post-1950 growth spurt seen in bristlecone pines, the world's oldest trees, according to new research. The pines near treeline have wider annual growth rings for the period from 1951 to 2000 than for the previous 3,700 years. Regional temperatures, particularly at high elevations, have increased during the same 50-year time period. The finding is another example of changes in high-elevation ecosystems that are linked to warming temperatures. ...> Full Article |
 | Are ladybugs being overtaken by wasps? A University of Montreal entomologist is investigating a type of wasp present in Quebec that forces ladybugs to carry their larvae. These wasps lay their eggs on the ladybug's body, a common practice in the insect world, yet they don't kill their host. ...> Full Article |
 | Recording hundreds of thousands of individual uplinks from satellite transmitters fitted on penguins, albatrosses, sea lions, and other marine animals, the Wildlife Conservation Society and BirdLife International have released the first-ever atlas of the Patagonian Sea -- a globally important but poorly understood South American marine ecosystem. ...> Full Article |
 | The invasion of this new species of ants has scientists intrigued, businesses concerned and fire ants running for the hills, said Jerry Cook, an entomologist at Sam Houston State University. Cook and other scientists are at a loss to explain the fast and furious spread of the rapacious ant, which is named after exterminator Tom Rasberry, who discovered the ant in 2002. ...> Full Article |
A study by scientists from the University of Valencia sheds new light on how the cockroach organism works. A research team from the Cavanilles Institute for Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, led by professors Amparo Latorre and Andres Moya, has shown why the German cockroach (Blatella germanica) eliminates excess nitrogen by excreting ammonia, in contrast to most terrestrial insects that commonly produce uric acid as a waste compound. The research is published Nov. 13 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.
...> Full Article
 | Coral reefs live in some of the most nutrient deficient waters on the planet, so how do they survive? Jasper De Goeij has discovered that Halisarca caerulea sponges could be the key to reef survival. They recycle dissolved organic carbon that is unavailable to other reef residents and De Goeij publishes his discovery on November 13, 2009, in the Journal of Experimental Biology. ...> Full Article |
 | Predators with experience of skunks avoid them both because of their black-and-white coloration and their distinctive body shape, a new study has found. ...> Full Article |
 | They may only be 1.5mm in size, but the tiny wasps that pollinate fig trees can travel over 160km in less than 48 hours, according to research from scientists at the University of Leeds. The fig wasps are transporting pollen ten times further than previously recorded for any insect.
The fig wasps travel these distances in search of trees to lay their eggs, which offers hope that trees pollinated by similar creatures have a good chance of surviving if they become isolated through deforestation.
...> Full Article |
 | Tree-dwelling ants generally live in harmony with their arboreal hosts. But new research suggests that when they run out of space in their trees of choice, the ants can get destructive to neighboring trees. ...> Full Article |
 | Breaking up may not be hard to do, say scientists who've found a population of tropical butterflies that may be splitting into two distinct species. The cause of this particular break-up? A shift in wing color and mate preference. In a paper published this week in the journal Science, the researchers describe the relationship between diverging color patterns in Heliconius butterflies and the long-term divergence of populations into new and distinct species.
...> Full Article |
 | For the insects called water striders, the pushiest guys don't always get the girls, according to a research team led by a University of Arizona scientist. The finding provides support for the theory of multi-level selection and contradicts previous laboratory experiments that suggested that the most aggressive males are the most successful at reproducing. ...> Full Article |
 | A tracking study of white sharks in the northeastern Pacific Ocean shows they adhere to a rigid route of migration across the sea, returning to precisely the same spot along the California coast each time they come back, according to a team of researchers including some from Stanford University. Over time, this behavior has made the population in the northeastern Pacific genetically distinct from other white shark populations.
...> Full Article |
 | Colonies of army ants, whose long columns and marauding habits are the stuff of natural-history legend, are usually antagonistic to each other, attacking soldiers from rival colonies in border disputes that keep the colonies separate. But new work shows that in some cases the colonies can be cooperative instead of combative. ...> Full Article |
Robert van Woesik, a biologist at the Florida Institute of Technology, explains why corals spawn for just a few nights in some places but elsewhere string out their love life over many months.
The study shows that corals spawn when regional wind fields are light. When it is calm, the eggs and sperm have the chance to unite before they are dispersed.
...> Full Article
 | The legendary "man-eating lions of Tsavo" that terrorized a railroad camp in Kenya more than a century ago likely consumed about 35 people -- far fewer than popular estimates of 135 victims, according to a new analysis led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The study also yields surprises about the predatory behavior of lions. ...> Full Article |
 | Moose eat plants; wolves kill moose. What difference does this classic predator-prey interaction make to biodiversity? A large and unexpected one, say wildlife biologists from Michigan Technological University, reporting in the November 2009 issue of the journal Ecology ...> Full Article |
 | Research at the universities of Liverpool and Oxford into the finger length of primate species has revealed that cooperative behavior is linked to exposure to hormone levels in the womb. ...> Full Article |
 | Ever since the Falklands wolf was described by Darwin himself, the origin of this now-extinct canid found only on the Falkland Islands far off the east coast of Argentina has remained a mystery. Now, researchers reporting in the Nov. 3 issue of Current Biology who have compared DNA from four of the world's dozen or so known Falklands wolf museum specimens to that of living canids offer new insight into the evolutionary ancestry of these enigmatic carnivores. ...> Full Article |
 | Unnoticed by the nearby residents of St. Johnsbury, Vt., tiny leaf beetles that flit among the maple and willow trees in the area have just provided some of the clearest evidence yet that environmental factors play a major role in the formation of new species. ...> Full Article |
Reporting in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, Dr. Lindsay Young of the University of Hawaii and her colleagues examined whether Laysan albatrosses nesting on Kure Atoll and Oahu, Hawaii, 2,150 km away, ingested different amounts of plastic by putting miniaturized tracking devices on birds to follow them at sea and examining their regurgitated stomach contents. Surprisingly, birds from Kure Atoll ingested almost ten times the amount of plastic compared to birds from Oahu.
...> Full Article
 | Canines and a bio-control organism come to the rescue of Guam's coconut trees in efforts to control an invasive species plaguing the island. ...> Full Article |
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