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Amphibians, Reptiles, & Natural History
Amphibians, Reptiles, & Natural History
For over half a century, people in Central Africa have told tales of the fish seen climbing waterfalls, but these claims have never been officially confirmed. Now, these fish have finally been caught on camera, studied more closely, and described in a study published in Scientific Reports.
Researchers Soma Chiyoda, Ko Mochizuki, and Atsushi Kawakita from the University of Tokyo have discovered that nocturnal hawkmoths are the main pollinators of Jasminanthes mucronata, a plant species native to Japan that produces black nectar. This is the first time that a colored nectar flower has been confirmed to be mainly pollinated by nocturnal insects. The discovery thus promotes further research into this so far unexplored ecology. The findings were published in the journal Ecology.
Humans are creatures of rhythms. As far as we know, humans have always sung and always danced. We can recognize a song by its rhythm alone, regardless of whether it is played fast or slow.
August Weismann’s germ plasm theory of the late 19th century posited that only germ cells, e.g., sperm and egg cells in animals or pollen and ovule cells in plants, transmit genetic information to the next generation, and that somatic mutations represent an evolutionary dead end. This theory has been highly validated in animals, whose germ cells are formed and segregated early in the organism’s development.
A new study by Harvard biologists reveals how octopuses feel their way to potential mates with a “taste by touch” sensory system and can even couple at arm’s length without actually seeing each other. In a study featured on the cover of Science, the researchers deciphered how one male appendage serves as a multipurpose organ for seeking, sensing, and seeding—and even continues to respond to female sex hormones after being severed from the body.
Anyone who keeps a bird feeder has likely had the same uneasy thought after seeing a sudden blur of wings in the yard: What was that hawk doing here?
Compounds in psychedelic drugs like DMT, psilocybin, and psilocin are naturally produced in certain plants, fungi, and animals, and have a long history of use in spiritual and therapeutic contexts. Now, a considerable amount of research is going into determining how these compounds can be translated into a therapeutic context for several mental health conditions. But to do this, researchers need to find a more sustainable way to source these compounds, as current methods raise ecological and ethical concerns.
A common antidepressant detected in rivers and streams worldwide is disrupting how fish learn, and the impact is strikingly one-sided. New research led by Monash University shows the drug amitriptyline impairs spatial learning in wild fish, but only in males. Females remain unaffected.
Yunnan Province in southwestern China is a global biodiversity hotspot, accommodating an incredible variety of plants and animals. It is also the heart of China’s coffee industry, with Yunnan accounting for almost all of the country’s coffee production. However, coffee plants are very common hosts for many types of fungi, which can act as harmful diseases, harmless residents, or natural recyclers—these factors can impact the plant’s health and how much coffee it produces.
James Cook University researchers have tested frog housing and nursery preferences in the Wet Tropics rainforest of North Queensland, with frogs finding the thermal regulation of concrete shelters to be the perfect tropical retreat.
Scientists have discovered a new species of miniature marsupial frog in the Peruvian Amazon that carries its young in a natural pouch on its back, a research institute reported Wednesday.
With the arrival of spring a few weeks ago, new buds and colors on the trees started to appear. Along with that new growth, a UBC Okanagan researcher has determined that some trees in spring also provide simple, visual clues—raised or lowered branches—to indicate that they are rehydrating or water-stressed.
Accents are usually thought of as a human trait, indicating where a person has grown up or the communities they belong—and new research shows the same dialects can also occur in Australia’s largest carnivorous bat.
The Mediterranean Sea is undergoing rapid ecological transformations driven by climate change and human-mediated species introductions. Among the most striking processes is the increasing arrival and establishment of non-indigenous species entering through the Suez Canal, a phenomenon known as Lessepsian migration.
In dryland ecosystems, increased environmental stress often triggers a change from a uniform vegetation cover to patchy vegetation patterns. Some theoretical studies suggest that this spatial self-organization of vegetation helps ecosystems delay and avoid desertification. Using a new theoretical framework, scientists from the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf demonstrate that this is not the case in general. They argue that such vegetation patterns can, by contrast, be a sign of reduced resilience.
Superb fairy-wrens are facing “imminent danger,” and a well-studied population in Canberra could go extinct in the next 30 years if we don’t urgently curb greenhouse gas emissions, according to an international team of scientists including researchers from The Australian National University (ANU), James Cook University (JCU) and Hainan University. Their comprehensive, decades-long study published in Nature Communications has tracked a population of fairy-wrens at the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra since 1988.
Most predators slow down when ocean temperatures shift. Great hammerhead sharks don’t—not significantly anyway. These ocean predators are masters of the “thermal hustle,” maintaining peak hunting performance across a surprisingly wide range of ocean temperatures between winter and summer months, according to new research published this week in Journal of Experimental Biology.
Taxonomic endemism and phylogenetic endemism are both important measures of biodiversity. The former describes the number of distinct species found nowhere else, whereas the latter shows the amount of evolutionary branch length unique to a particular area. A comprehensive phylogeny provides the essential evolutionary framework for delineating centers of paleo- and neo-endemism across both measures.
Using zebrafish, researchers from Osaka Metropolitan University (OMU) have identified the tegmentum region in the fish midbrain as the area where light input from both the fish’s eyes and the pineal organ—the “third eye”—is integrated. Their findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that fish use the integrated light signals in this region to swim up or down in response to differences in the wavelength of light.
A new study has revealed that improving the landscapes surrounding forest remnants can dramatically increase their ability to retain bird species—even when the forest fragments themselves are small or isolated. For decades, traditional ecological theory has treated isolated habitat remnants as “islands,” predicting species’ survival largely through area size and isolation. But these models have long overlooked the nature of the “matrix”: the farmland, vegetation, or open areas surrounding these habitat remnants. This surrounding landscape is critical, as species must move through, use, or avoid it when navigating between forested areas.
The rainforests of northern Australia are home to extraordinary ant colonies. Instead of dwelling in underground burrows, these ants inhabit canopies of trees, dozens of meters above the ground, inside hollow spheres they construct from tree leaves. During the building process, the ants link their bodies together to form living tools, eventually weaving the leaves into nests using silk threads produced by their larvae—hence their name: weaver ants.
Seals are carnivorous marine mammals that are well adapted to hunting for fish underwater, where visibility is poor. In such conditions, seals rely on their highly sensitive whiskers to detect tiny water movements left behind by swimming fish. Like rats and cats, seals also move or “whisk” their whiskers back and forth, but the benefit of this motion was long unclear. New research by University of Groningen Ph.D. student Chinmay Gupta, Professor Ajay Kottapalli, and colleagues shows that active whisking improves sensing, helping seals accurately follow underwater trails. The findings are published in the journal npj Flexible Electronics.
Museum collections have underpinned scientific research for centuries. But physical specimens in boxes and drawers don’t easily lend themselves to the research techniques of the new millennium. “How can we apply these techniques to natural history collections, especially when much of the intrinsic information a specimen has to offer is difficult to quantify?” asks Katja Seltmann, director of UC Santa Barbara’s Cheadle Center for Biodiversity & Ecological Restoration. Enter the Big Bee Project: a pioneering initiative to bring natural history collections into the century of AI, big data and networked databases.
It’s fairly common for members of the public to ask bug experts if ticks that hitchhike into a house on people or dogs can actually survive indoors for any length of time. A new study provides the first scientific evidence that the answer is yes, showing that two species of ticks can live at least one week, and up to about three weeks, on hard-surface and carpeted floors.
It is not unusual for laboratory monkeys to engage in abnormal repetitive behaviors (ARBs), such as pacing and hair-plucking. Conventional thinking is that these actions are linked to recent stresses or current housing conditions. But a new study published in the journal Biology Letters suggests the causes are often cumulative negative experiences that build up over an animal’s entire life.
An international research team led by the University of Vienna has produced, for the first time, high-resolution global maps of invasion risk for thousands of alien plant species under current conditions and future climate and land use scenarios. Their results show that global hotspots of plant invasion risk will shift geographically, with temperate regions facing increasing risks, while risks may decline in some subtropical areas. The study was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
In 2014, Felicity Newell joined the Florida Museum of Natural History as a doctoral student, then promptly left the country in search of a tropical spring. It’s a concept she started thinking about while doing biological surveys in Honduras. There, a colleague told her about the work of Alexander Skutch, a renowned ornithologist who spent 20 years studying the breeding habits of birds in Costa Rica. Based on this work, he became “convinced that the birds … have a definite nesting season, and its beginning coincides with the return of spring.”