News by Subject Biology

Researchers from the University of Konstanz, the University of California-Los Angeles, Tel Aviv University and the Inter-University Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat gain new in-sights into how phenotypic complexity influences diversification among Lake Malawi cichlid fish.

A researcher searching the shoreline of the Panama Canal for fossil plants instead found an ancient sea cow. An 'emergency fossil excavation' due to rising water levels yielded a remarkably complete skeleton of a new genus and species of dugong, estimated to be about 20 million years old, the first evidence of a marine mammal from the Pacific side of the canal.

To help smallholder farmers adapt to climate change, scientists need to provide recommendations of crop varieties suitable to farmers' marginal and heterogeneous environments. However, existing on-farm approaches are difficult to scale. A novel scalable method using crowdsourced citizen science was employed on 12,409 trial plots in Ethiopia, India and Nicaragua. The results showed the potential of crowdsourced citizen science to improve variety recommendations and help farmers respond to climate change.

Australia has the highest rate of mammal extinction in the world. Resettlement of indigenous communities resulted in the spread of invasive species, the absence of human-set fires, and a general cascade in the interconnected food web that led to the largest mammalian extinction event ever recorded. In this case, the absence of direct human activity on the landscape may be the cause of the extinctions, according to a Penn State anthropologist.

While previous studies showed elk often move into areas disturbed by fires or timber harvest to take advantage of new plant growth, that isn't happening in Wyoming's Sierra Madre Mountains, where elk strongly avoid beetle-killed areas in the summer.

New research has revealed the fascinating adaptation of some Australian sea snakes that helps protect their vulnerable paddle-shaped tails from predators.

Aloe sanguinalis, or Somali Red Aloe, forms large, conspicuous clumps and has blood red sap. Its clumps can easily be spotted from the road, but the species has only just been named and described in the open access journal PhytoKeys.