News by Subject Biology

Methods used to design F1 cars and spacecraft have played a crucial role in new research into the tags used to track animal movements. Ecologists teamed up with aerospace colleagues at Swansea University to find the best way to reduce the drag of biologging tags -- the recording devices used to track animal movements and behaviour.

A total of 174 chicken breeds are described in a publicly accessible database which scientists from the University of Göttingen and the Friedrich Loeffler Institute in Neustadt-Mariensee have built up in recent years with numerous international partners. This database, the Synbreed Chicken Diversity Panel (SCDP), includes information about a large proportion of the available chicken species and their diversity. The researchers created a family tree of exceptional completeness and detail. The results have been published in the journal BMC Genomics.

New research by an international group of scientists, from Inland Norway University, Bioversity International, Wageningen University and World Agroforestry, examines whether incorporating suitable trees into crop systems or replacing coffee with cocoa could help the thousands of families in Mesoamerica meet future climate conditions.

A new paper examines the rarely explored coral reefs in deep water, where less than 1% of light from the surface makes it through. The research identifies how these corals are able to survive in such a dark place.

Thanks in part to the popular film Finding Nemo, clownfishes are well known to the public and well represented in scientific literature. But the same can't be said for the equally colorful sea anemones -- venomous, tentacled animals -- that protect clownfishes and that the fish nourish and protect in return. A new study takes a step to change that, presenting a new tree of life for clownfish-hosting sea anemones along with some surprises.

A newly identified genus and species of worm-like, freshwater clam, commonly known as a shipworm, eats rock and expels sand as scat while it burrows like an ecosystem engineer in the Abatan River in the Philippines.