Ecology & Zoology

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

Top 10 List Of Coolest New Species From 2007

People love Top 10 lists and a Top 10 list of new species is no exception. We love the idea so much we took the 2007 choices from the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University and an international committee of taxonomists ...

Article - News Staff - May 25 2008 - 11:58am

Why Is Shrimplike Diporeia Disappearing From Lake Michigan?

Throughout the overlooked depths of Lake Michigan and other Great Lakes, a small but important animal is rapidly disappearing. Until recently, the animal- a shrimplike, energy-dense creature called Diporeia- was a major food source for commercially importa ...

Article - News Staff - May 28 2008 - 10:37pm

Cyanobacteria And The Nitrogen Factor In Long Term Forest Productivity

Nitrogen is the primary nutrient that dictates productivity (and thus carbon consumption) in boreal forests. In pristine boreal ecosystems, most new nitrogen enters the forest through cyanobacteria living on the shoots of feather mosses, which grows in den ...

Article - News Staff - May 30 2008 - 9:49am

Altruism In Insect Colonies A Family Issue

The contentious debate about why insects evolved to put the interests of the colony over the individual has been reignited by new research from the University of Leeds, showing that they do so to increase the chances that their genes will be passed on. A t ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 2 2008 - 8:30am

Nautiloids, The 'Living Fossils' Of Cephalopods, Have Long- And Short-Term Memory

Nautiloids are the sole surviving family of externally-shelled cephalopods that thrived in the tropical oceans 450–150 million years ago. However, in the intervening years their modern soft bodied relatives dumped the shell and developed complex central ne ...

Article - News Staff - May 31 2008 - 8:30am

The Globalization Of The Ecosystem

Ecosystems are constantly exchanging materials through the movement of air in the atmosphere, the flow of water in rivers and the migration of animals across the landscape. People, however, have also established themselves as another major driver of connec ...

Article - News Staff - May 31 2008 - 11:41pm

Toxic Algal Blooms May Cause Seizures In California Sea Lions

Scientists, reporting in the current issue of the online journal Marine Drugs, state that an increase of epileptic seizures and behavioral abnormalities in California sea lions can result from low-dose exposure to domoic acid as a fetus. The findings follo ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 9 2008 - 9:51am

Photosynthesizing Tree Leaves Control Their Own Temperature

The temperature inside a healthy, photosynthesizing tree leaf is affected less by outside environmental temperature than originally believed, according to new research from biologists at the University of Pennsylvania. Surveying 39 tree species ranging in ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 11 2008 - 1:23pm

High Testosterone Plus Survival Instinct Makes The Nazca Booby Kill Its Siblings

The Nazca booby, a Galápagos Island seabird, emerges from its shell ready to kill its brother or sister. Wake Forest University biologists and their colleagues have linked the murderous behavior to high levels of testosterone and other male hormones found ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 18 2008 - 4:21pm