Ecology & Zoology

Bats Are Louder Than A Who Concert- But They Never Get Tinnitus

Using microphone arrays and photographic methods to reconstruct flight paths of bats in the field when they find and capture prey in air using their sonar system, Annemarie Surlykke from the Institute of Biology, SDU, Denmark, and her colleague, Elisabeth ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 30 2008 - 12:21am

"You Listed Me As What??" Missing Rat Is Back- After Being Extinct For 112 Years

It seems rumors of the greater dwarf cloud rat's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Sure, he stayed low key for the last 112 years but he really never left his natural habitat. Seeing the little guy once and then declaring him extinct was likely pr ...

Article - News Staff - May 1 2008 - 10:59pm

Moonlight Malagasy Mating May Mean Hitting The Right Notes

Think it's tough for humans to find the right mate? Malagasy mouse lemurs are so similar that picking a mate of the right species, especially at night time in a tropical forest, was thought to be more luck than science, but new research has shown that ...

Article - News Staff - May 6 2008 - 6:33pm

Hermaphrodite Worms Triple Sperm When Competition Is Present

Scientists used to think that hermaphrodites, due to their low position in the evolutionary scale, did not have sufficiently developed sensory systems to assess the “quality” of their mates. A new work has shown, however, that earthworms are able to detect ...

Article - News Staff - May 8 2008 - 12:00am

White Nosed Syndrome- Why Are Bats Dying?

Investigations continue into the cause of a mysterious illness that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of bats since March 2008. At more than 25 caves and mines in the northeastern U.S, bats exhibiting a condition now referred to as “white-nosed syndr ...

Article - News Staff - May 8 2008 - 9:54pm

Odorrana Tormota- Female Frog's Ultrasonic Way Of Asking For Sex

Most female frogs don’t call; most lack or have only rudimentary vocal cords. A typical female selects a mate from a chorus of males and then –silently – signals her beau. But the female concave-eared torrent frog, Odorrana tormota, has a more direct metho ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 4 2012 - 2:57pm

How Accurate Are Mouse Studies In Predicting Effects In Humans?

Mice and humans have genomes that are 85% identical, making them suitable and cost-effective stand-ins for humans in medical research. A recent article by University of Michigan evolutionary biologists Ben-Yang Liao and Jianzhi Zhang discussed how identica ...

Article - News Staff - May 14 2008 - 11:25am

Oekologie, Oekologie, Golly What A Day

Do you like that title? I can't help it, I hear that song from Robin Hood every time I see the word 'oekologie' so hum along with me and enjoy episode #16. First, I can't take credit for finding most of the terrific stuff contained in h ...

Article - Cash Simpson - May 15 2008 - 4:09pm

The Importance Of Habitat Area In Conservation: A Look At The Species-area Relationship

This is the first in a series of posts in which I plan to examine one of the fundamental concepts in ecology- the species-area relationship Species conservation has always been intimately linked with the idea of habitat conservation. While habitat quality ...

Article - Ian Ramjohn - May 15 2008 - 9:30am

An Upside To Global Warming? Greener Mountains

Sweden's mountains are growing greener. At the border between woods and bare mountain, trees that require warm temperatures, such as oak, elm, maple, and black alder, have become established for the first time in 8,000 years. This is shown in current ...

Article - News Staff - May 19 2008 - 2:26pm