Wind Farm Design Layout Impacts Species Success
How a wind energy facility is designed can influence the behavior of animal predators and their prey, according to a recent study published in The Journal of Wildlife Management by researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the U.S. Geological Survey. (more…)
UCLA – NPS study is first to investigate where the cats hunt in highly urbanized areas
Los Angeles is one of only two megacities — Mumbai, India, is the other — where large predatory cats live among us, and they’re closer to human development than you might think. (more…)
A ground-breaking study has confirmed the long held assumption that camouflage protects animals from the clutches of predators, and offers insights into the most important aspects of camouflage.
The research, by scientists from the Universities of Exeter and Cambridge, investigated the camouflage of ground-nesting birds in Zambia, using sophisticated digital imaging to demonstrate how they would appear from the perspective of a predator. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — Charles Darwin noted more than 150 years ago that animals on the Galapagos Islands, including finches and marine iguanas, were more docile than mainland creatures. He attributed this tameness to the fact that there are fewer predators on remote islands. (more…)
Scientists have found the fossilized remains of the brain of the world’s earliest known predators, from a time when life teemed in the oceans but had not yet colonized the land.
An international team of paleontologists has identified the exquisitely preserved brain in the fossil of one of the world’s first known predators that lived in the Lower Cambrian, about 520 million years ago. The discovery revealed a brain that is surprisingly simple and less complex than those known from fossils of some of the animal’s prey. (more…)
Most parents will by now wonder how they can protect their children and direct them to child-safe websites. Fortunately a non-profit site, Quib.ly offers a forum where concerned parents, teachers and care-givers can seek out the advice of experts in the field of cyber technology as well as child development psychology. If you visit this site you may well find that your particular concern is shared by others. Experts in their respective fields will be able to steer you in the direction of child-safe websites and you will have the opportunity to share knowledge gained by parents in your position.
You will probably find that most contributors on Quib.ly will suggest that you engage with the child when he or she does web-surfing and then alert the child to sites that may be age-inappropriate, content inappropriate or predatory sites operating under the guise of child-friendly, or “cool”. Educate them to the risks of scam artists, pedophiles, and how to use intuitive and learned skills to avoid them. (more…)
Washington, D.C.— It has long been believed that male lions are dependent on females when it comes to hunting. But new evidence suggests that male lions are, in fact, very successful hunters in their own right. A new report from a team including Carnegie’s Scott Loarie and Greg Asner shows that male lions use dense savanna vegetation for ambush-style hunting in Africa. Their work is published in Animal Behavior.
Female lions have long been observed to rely on cooperative strategies to hunt their prey. While some studies demonstrated that male lions are as capable at hunting as females, the males are less likely to cooperate, so there were still questions as to how the males manage to hunt successfully. The possibility that male lions used vegetation for ambushing prey was considered, but it was difficult to study given the logistics and dangers of making observations of lions in densely vegetated portions of the African savanna. (more…)
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Though scientists have long believed that complex organic molecules couldn’t survive fossilization, some 350-million-year-old remains of aquatic sea creatures uncovered in Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa have challenged that assumption.
The spindly animals with feathery arms—called crinoids, but better known today by the plant-like name “sea lily”—appear to have been buried alive in storms during the Carboniferous Period, when North America was covered with vast inland seas. Buried quickly and isolated from the water above by layers of fine-grained sediment, their porous skeletons gradually filled with minerals, but some of the pores containing organic molecules were sealed intact. (more…)
