Study of body size, feeding rates has implications for ecosystems, food supply
How can blue whales, the largest animals on the planet, survive by feeding on krill, shrimp-like creatures that are the size of a penny? According to UCLA life scientists, it’s all a matter of dimensions. (more…)
COLUMBUS, Ohio – An Ohio State University graduate student’s study of the unprecedented reproductive practices among unisexual salamanders has earned the support of the national research crowd-funding initiative known as the SciFund Challenge. (more…)
Scientists believe they’ve pinpointed the last crucial piece of the 80-year-old puzzle of how plants “know” when to flower.
Determining the proper time to flower, important if a plant is to reproduce successfully, involves a sequence of molecular events, a plant’s circadian clock and sunlight.
Understanding how flowering works in the simple plant used in this study – Arabidopsis – should lead to a better understanding of how the same genes work in more complex plants grown as crops such as rice, wheat and barley, according to Takato Imaizumi, a University of Washington assistant professor of biology and corresponding author of a paper in the May 25 issue of the journal Science. (more…)
UCLA life scientists have discovered new laws that determine the construction of leaf vein systems as leaves grow and evolve. These easy-to-apply mathematical rules can now be used to better predict the climates of the past using the fossil record.
The research, published May 15 in the journal Nature Communications, has a range of fundamental implications for global ecology and allows researchers to estimate original leaf sizes from just a fragment of a leaf. This will improve scientists’ prediction and interpretation of climate in the deep past from leaf fossils.
Leaf veins are of tremendous importance in a plant’s life, providing the nutrients and water that leaves need to conduct photosynthesis and supporting them in capturing sunlight. Leaf size is also of great importance for plants’ adaptation to their environment, with smaller leaves being found in drier, sunnier places. (more…)
Findings show it’s best to be “top baboon”
Turns out it’s not bad being top dog, or in this case, top baboon. (more…)
UD’s McCarthy part of group that films rare striped rabbit in Sumatra
With cameras set up in Sumatra looking for medium- and small-sized wild cats, such as leopards, a research group involving the University of Delaware’s Kyle McCarthy, found images of something else entirely — a rabbit. Not just any ordinary rabbit, but a Sumatran striped rabbit, one of the world’s rarest species and one that had been captured on film only three times before. (more…)
Environmental change is the selective force that preserves adaptive traits in organisms and is a primary driver of evolution. However, it is less well known that evolutionary change in organisms also trigger fundamental changes in the environment.
Yale University researchers found a prime example of this evolutionary feedback loop in a few lakes in Connecticut, where dams built 300 years ago in Colonial times trapped a fish called the alewife.
In a study published May 23 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Academy B, the Yale team describes how this event fundamentally changed the structure of the alewife and, with it, the water flea that the alewife feeds upon and the food chain that supports them both. (more…)
Pollination could be a chaotic disaster. With hundreds of pollen grains growing long tubes to ovules to deliver their sperm to female gametes, how can a flower ensure that exactly two fertile sperm reach every ovule? In a new study, Brown University biologists report the discovery of how plants optimize the distribution of pollen for successful reproduction.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Next Mother’s Day, say it with an evolved model of logistical efficiency — a flower. A new discovery about how nature’s icons of romance manage the distribution of sperm among female gametes with industrial precision helps explain why the delicate beauties have reproduced prolifically enough to dominate the earth.
In pollination, hundreds of sperm-carrying pollen grains stick to the stigma suspended in the middle of a flower and quickly grow a tube down a long shaft called a style toward clusters of ovules, which hold two female sex cells. This could be a chaotic frenzy, but for the plant to succeed, exactly two fertile sperm should reach the two cells in each ovule — no more, no less. No ovule should be left out, either because too many tubes have gone elsewhere, or because the delivered sperm don’t work. (more…)
