When a University of Washington researcher listened to the audio picked up by a recording device that spent a year in the icy waters off the east coast of Greenland, she was stunned at what she heard: whales singing a remarkable variety of songs nearly constantly for five wintertime months. (more…)
The number of basking sharks recorded in Britain’s seas could be increasing, decades after being protected from commercial hunting in the late 20th century.
The most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of basking shark sightings in UK waters, by the University of Exeter, the Marine Conservation Society (MCS), Cornwall Wildlife Trust (CWT) and Wave Action, is published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.
The northeast Atlantic hosted an extensive commercial fishery for basking sharks, mainly in Norway, Ireland and Scotland, where more than 81,000 were killed between 1952 and 2004, hunted largely for their liver oil. Large-scale hunting ended in the UK in the middle of the twentieth century, though it continued at low levels in Norway until 2000. (more…)
Researchers at Yale have identified an ancient slithering creature from the time of T. rex as the most primitive known snake, a finding with implications for the debate over snake origins.
“It’s the missing-link snake,” said Nicholas Longrich, a postdoctoral fellow in Yale’s Department of Geology & Geophysics and the lead author of a paper about the lizard-like snake published July 25 online in the journal Nature. “It’s the ‘Lucy’ of snakes.”
The paper argues that snakes descend from terrestrial rather than marine ancestors, as recently proposed by others, and that snakes emerged once lizards developed long, limbless bodies for burrowing. (more…)
Many of the protected areas in tropical nations are struggling to sustain their biodiversity, according to a study by more than 200 scientists from around the world. The study, which will appear Thursday in the journal Nature, found that deforestation is advancing rapidly in these nations and most reserves are losing some or all of their surrounding forest. (more…)
Rodents may have taken over seed-dispersal role of now-extinct mammals
Big seeds produced by tropical trees such as black palms were probably once ingested and then left whole by huge mammals called gomphotheres.
Gomphotheres weighed more than a ton and dispersed the seeds over large distances.
But these Neotropical creatures disappeared more than 10,000 years ago. So why aren’t large-seeded plants also extinct? (more…)
Social birds that forgo breeding to help to raise the offspring of other group members are far more likely care for their own close relatives than for more distant kin, a new study has found. (more…)
Studies of frogs may lead to better hearing aids
When Mark Bee talks to his 106-year-old grandmother alone, her two enormous hearing aids enable her to understand him well.
“But at a table at Thanksgiving, with everybody talking, the devices don’t do well,” says Bee, an associate professor of ecology, evolution and behavior at the University of Minnesota.
Her difficulty in a noisy situation is called the cocktail party problem, after the background babble that stymies many hearing-impaired people trying to pick out individual voices at a party. But in ponds all over the world, frogs handle a similar problem, and Bee hopes to learn enough about how they do it to put the principles to work helping people like his grandmother. (more…)
If you’re a male born to a father who’s a strong and enduring community leader, you’re far more likely than your less fortunate peers to become a leader yourself, due to the wide range of social advantages accruing from your dad’s position. (more…)
