News by Subject Policy & Ethics

With individuals weighing in at more than 140 pounds, the critically endangered Chinese giant salamander is well known as the world's largest amphibian. But researchers reporting in Current Biology now find that those giant salamanders aren't one species, but five, and possibly as many as eight. The bad news is that all of the salamanders now face the imminent threat of extinction in the wild, due to demand for the amphibians as luxury food.

Using tools developed to monitor earthquakes, an interdisciplinary team of researchers reporting in Current Biology on May 7 have found that it's possible to eavesdrop on elephants by listening in to vibrations through the ground as they move about and vocalize. The findings support theories that elephants use ground vibrations for long-distance communication among themselves. They might also lead a new kind of alarm system for detecting elephant behaviors, such as panic running.

Horses can read and then remember people's emotional expressions, enabling them to use this information to identify people who could pose a potential threat.

Researchers have used a scanner designed for rockets to collect the first-ever computed tomography (CT) scan of an entire minke whale. By combining the CT scan results with custom-developed computer simulation tools, the researchers model how the whales hear sounds produced by other whales or by human-created (anthropogenic) sources such as ship propellers.

University of Guelph researchers examined lung tissue from 95 racehorses that had actively raced or trained before their deaths and found a majority had inflammatory airway disease (IAD). Previous research suggested the disease occurs in up to half of equine athletes. The first of its kind study suggests even racehorses without respiratory signs could have IAD.

An international team of scientists led by Swansea University biologists describe how novel technologies are transforming our understanding of why wild animals form different groups.