Pretending to be one of them, ant-nest beetles trick ants to rear their brood — and then reward their hosts by devouring them. UA entomologists have discovered that the beetles evolve at an astonishing rate.
We’ve all heard the story of the Trojan horse, when unsuspecting Trojans opened their city’s gate to a giant wooden horse, only to find themselves ambushed by the Greek soldiers hiding inside. (more…)
Birds come in astounding variety—from hummingbirds to emus—and behave in myriad ways: they soar the skies, swim the waters and forage the forests. But this wasn’t always the case, according to research by scientists at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum.
The researchers found a striking lack of diversity in the earliest known fossil bird fauna—a set of species that lived at about the same time and in the same habitat. “There were no swans, no swallows, no herons, nothing like that. They were pretty much all between a sparrow and a crow,” said Jonathan Mitchell, a PhD student in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology and lead author of the new study, published May 28 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. (more…)
Study methods may help with future interpretation of evolutionary history.
COLUMBIA, Mo. – The Cambrian Period is a time when most phyla of marine invertebrates first appeared in the fossil record. Also dubbed the “Cambrian explosion,” fossilized records from this time provide glimpses into evolutionary biology when the world’s ecosystems rapidly changed and diversified. Most fossils show the organisms’ skeletal structure, which may or may not give researchers accurate pictures of these prehistoric organisms. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found rare, fossilized embryos they believe were undiscovered previously. Their methods of study may help with future interpretation of evolutionary history. (more…)
People living in northern latitudes have more gut bacteria linked to obesity compared with people living in southern latitudes, a new study has found.
People living in cold, northern latitudes have bacteria in their guts that may predispose them to obesity, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Arizona and the University of California, Berkeley. (more…)
There was an opening ceremony on Feb. 5 for the Yale Institute for Network Science (YINS), dedicated to exploring fundamental properties of networks as they appear throughout the biological, physical, and social sciences.
The interdisciplinary institute will be led by co-directors Nicholas Christakis, the Sol Goldman Family Professor of Social and Natural Science, and Daniel Spielman, the Henry Ford II Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics.
Christakis and Spielman recently met with YaleNews to discuss the nature of networks and the institute’s mission. The following is an edited version of the conversation. (more…)
Why did life forms first begin to get larger and what advantage did this increase in size provide? UCLA biologists working with an international team of scientists examined the earliest communities of large multicellular organisms in the fossil record to help answer this question. (more…)
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Cold-sensitive mangrove forests have expanded dramatically along Florida’s Atlantic Coast as the frequency of killing frosts has declined, according to a new study based on 28 years of satellite data from the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md.
Between 1984 and 2011, the Florida Atlantic coast from the Miami area northward gained more than 3,000 acres (1,240 hectares) of mangroves. All the increase occurred north of Palm Beach County. Between Cape Canaveral National Seashore and Saint Augustine, mangroves doubled in area. Meanwhile between the study’s first five years and its last five years, nearby Daytona Beach recorded 1.4 fewer days per year when temperatures fell below 28.4 degrees Fahrenheit (-4 degrees Celsius). The number of killing frosts in southern Florida was unchanged. (more…)
Trees with smoother bark are better at repelling attacks by mountain pine beetles, which have difficulty gripping the slippery surface, according to a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder.
The findings, published online in the journal Functional Ecology, may help land managers make decisions about which trees to cull and which to keep in order to best protect forested properties against pine beetle infestation. (more…)
