Move over, Flipper. Southern elephant seals (Mirounga leonina) have been drafted into the fight against climate change and are helping scientists unravel key mysteries about the most remote waters on earth.
As detailed in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of international researchers, including Jean-Benoît Charassin of the Paris Natural History […] Read More »
Underwater droids monitor whales, track pollution, and map sea caves
Researchers have spent years hunting for a more efficient way to track targets that travel underwater. While methods such as tagging dolphins or dispatching boats to take water samples are effective, they’re also expensive and labor-intensive. Now, the University of Washington’s Kristi Morgansen may have […] Read More »
Cow belches, one of the strangest contributors to global warming, may have an even stranger cure: low-burp grass. Cows’ digestive systems contain special microbes that help break down grass, allowing the animals to subsist on an all-grass diet. But this digestion process also produces methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, which is released when the […] Read More »
When Kevin McGarigal started studying marbled salamanders, he ran into a problem that left him feeling cross-eyed. A biologist at the University of Massachusetts, McGarigal needed to track individual salamanders as they moved between vernal pools. But the spotted creatures are hard to tell apart, so McGarigal’s team would spend painstaking hours poring over […] Read More »
Alexei Vyssotski’s search for a new way to monitor animal brain waves began in 2002 when he was trying to figure out how homing pigeons, Columba livia, navigate. A researcher at the University of Zurich, Vyssotski wanted to see how the birds’ brain activity changed when they encountered landmarks. But he needed a device […] Read More »
It’s the perfect storm. Climate change, poverty, and the fact that there are so many of us on the planet mean that millions of people are being forced into ever more marginal and vulnerable areas. According to Oxfam International, natural disasters and their associated humanitarian impacts marked 2007 as one of the worst years […] Read More »
By Carl Zimmer
October-December 2008 (Vol. 9, No.4)
Every science has its icon. Genetics has the double helix of DNA. Particle physics has the spiraling tracks of electrons and protons. And if you had to sum up modern ecology in a single picture, it would be the dense mesh of arrows and circles that […] Read More »
By Fred Pearce
October-December 2008 (Vol 9, No. 4)
Pity the banana. Despite its unmistakably phallic appearance, it hasn’t had sex for thousands of years. The world’s most erotic fruit is a sterile, seedless mutant—and therein lies a problem. The banana is genetically old and decrepit. It has been at an evolutionary standstill ever […] Read More »
Munson, L. et al. 2008. Climate extremes promote fatal co-infections during canine distemper epidemics in African lions. PLoS ONE 3(6):e2545.
Studies of disease ecology have shown that shifts in climate can alter relationships between disease-causing organisms and their animal hosts, thus leading to unexpected epidemics. A new study of lions in Africa, appearing in […] Read More »
By Douglas Fox
October-December 2008 (Vol. 9, No. 4)
One cool day in January 2006, eight students from Stanford University went on a shopping binge—and not for the latest iPods or Levi’s. They visited two dozen grocery stores, fish markets, and sushi restaurants and brought home 77 fillets of Pacific red snapper.
Back at […] Read More »
