News by Subject Agriculture

Especially male poison frogs piggyback their offspring to pools in the rainforest. Now, researchers from Vetmeduni Vienna, the University of Vienna and Harvard University showed that this parental behavior can be triggered experimentally. With unrelated tadpoles placed on their backs, male -- and even female -- 'foster parents' behave as if they had picked up the tadpoles themselves. This showed for the first time that an external stimulus triggers complex behaviors in amphibians. Journal of Experimental Biology.

Scientists at ITbM, Nagoya University have synthesized a new bioactive small molecule that has the ability to increase stomata numbers on flowering plants without stunting their growth. The team's new discovery could help elucidate the stomatal development mechanism in plants.

Associate Professor Kensuke Kawade at Okazaki Institute for Integrative Bioscience and National Institute for Basic Biology, in collaboration with Professor Hirokazu Tsukaya at the Graduate School of Science, the University of Tokyo, discovered that endoreduplication, which promotes cellular enlargement in the epidermal tissue of Arabidopsis thaliana, occurs randomly as a Poisson process throughout cellular maturation.

Why are there so many more species in the tropics? The 'storage effect' is stronger there than in temperate forests.

In a new study, scientists report significant strides in transferring disease- and stress-resistance traits from wild relatives of several legumes to their domesticated varieties.

new study of the world's seven sea turtle species provides evidence that their numbers are growing overall (unlike many endangered vertebrates), thanks to years of conservation efforts that have played a key role in sea turtle recovery -- even for small sea turtle populations.