News by Subject Biology

Three new species of toads have been discovered living in Nevada's Great Basin in an expansive survey of the 190,000 square mile ancient lake bottom. 'We've found the toads in small, wet habitats surrounded by high-desert completely cut off from other populations,' Dick Tracy, renowned biology professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, said. 'These are absolutely new, true species that have been separated from other populations for 650,000 years.'

Citizen science has revealed the spread of the invasive giant slug Limax maximus and its potential native predator in Japan, providing new insights into predator-prey dynamics between introduced prey and native predators.

Small mountain glaciers play a big role in recharging vital aquifers and in keeping rivers flowing during the winter, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. The study also suggests that the accelerated melting of mountain glaciers in recent decades may explain a phenomenon that has long puzzled scientists -- why Arctic and sub-Arctic rivers have increased their water flow during the winter even without a correlative increase in rain or snowfall.

Vast swaths of Pennsylvania forests were clear-cut circa 1900 and regrowth has largely been from local native plant communities, but a team of researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences has found that invasive, non-native plants are making significant inroads with unconventional natural gas development.

A Northern Illinois University study finds that tallgrass prairie restoration at a large Illinois preserve is working at a foundational level -- in the soil. Bacteria in the soil are recolonizing and recovering on their own to resemble soil found in remnant prairies. The study shows that a carefully managed restoration can produce successes even beyond plant and animal biodiversity.

A study conducted by a UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country research group within the framework of the European Globaqua project proposes going beyond the study of river ecosystems and incorporating into the studies routinely carried out a set of processes that regulate not only the fluxes of matter but also the fluxes of energy within an ecosystem. In a recently published paper, the group is proposing a new working framework to study the status of rivers.