Researchers at Yale and the Smithsonian Institution say it’s time to settle a very old food fight.
In a study published March 18 in the journal Ecology and Evolution, authors Matt Davis and Silvia Pineda-Munoz argue that scientists need to focus as much on “when” animals eat as they do “what” animals eat. Without the proper time context, they say, an animal’s diet can tell very different stories. (more…)
UCLA life scientists and colleagues have produced the most comprehensive mathematical model ever devised to track the health of populations exposed to environmental change.
The research, federally funded by the National Science Foundation, is published Dec. 2 in the journal Science.
The team’s groundbreaking integral projection model, or IPM, unites various sub-disciplines of population biology, including population ecology, quantitative genetics, population genetics, and life-span and offspring information, allowing researchers to link many different data sources simultaneously. Scientists can now change just a single variable, like temperature, and see how that affects many factors for a population. (more…)
*Climate change will force them south, where they are unsuited for the diet*
A polar bear breaks through thin Arctic Ocean ice Aug. 23, 2009. Image credit: Canadian Coast Guard/USGS
Will polar bears survive in a warmer world? UCLA life scientists present new evidence that their numbers are likely to dwindle.
As polar bears lose habitat due to global warming, these biologists say, they will be forced southward in search of alternative sources of food, where they will increasingly come into competition with grizzly bears.
To test how this competition might unfold, the UCLA biologists constructed three-dimensional computer models of the skulls of polar bears and grizzly bears — a subspecies of brown bears — and simulated the process of biting. The models enabled them to compare the two species in terms of how hard they can bite and how strong their skulls are. (more…)
