News by Subject Biology

A new WCS paper published in the journal BioScience finds that the enormous trends toward population stabilization, poverty alleviation, and urbanization are rewriting the future of biodiversity conservation in the 21st century, offering new hope for the world's wildlife and wild places.

Unlike most hermit crabs, the blanket-hermit crab does not use empty shells for protection, and instead lives symbiotically with a sea anemone. The crab uses the anemone to cover its soft abdomen, and can pull the anemone's tissue over its head to protect itself whenever necessary. Since 1888, this crab had been considered a unique species until a research team recently described five new ones and a new genus in the open access journal ZooKeys.

It might seem surprising that a colony of ants would tolerate the type of guests that gobble both their grub and their babies. But new research shows there's likely a useful tradeoff to calmly accepting these parasite ants into the fold: They have weaponry that's effective against their host ants and a more menacing intruder ant.

By using network analysis to search for communities of marine life in the fossil records of the Paleobiology Database, the team, including researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was able to quantify the ecological impacts of major events like mass extinctions and may help us anticipate the consequences of a 'sixth mass extinction.'

Trees cool their environment and 'heat islands' like Munich benefit from it. However, the degree of cooling depends greatly on the tree species and the local conditions. In a recent study, scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) compared two species of urban trees.

A new study of guenon monkeys in Gombe National Park is the first to provide genetic evidence of ongoing mating between two distinct species. These monkeys have successfully been producing hybrid offspring for hundreds maybe even thousands of years. Prior studies have suggested that the different physical characteristics of these monkeys keeps them from interbreeding. So, if their faces don't match, they shouldn't be mating, right? Wrong, according to this latest evidence.

An international consortium of scientists is proposing a massive project to sequence, catalog and analyze the genomes of all eukaryotic species on the planet, an undertaking the researchers say will take 10 years, cost $4.7 billion and require more than 200 petabytes of digital storage capacity. Eukaryotes include all organisms except bacteria and archaea. There are an estimated 10-15 million eukaryotic species on Earth.

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.