News by Subject Biology

Many of North America's migratory songbirds are declining at alarming rates. For conservation efforts to succeed, wildlife managers need to know where they go and what challenges they face during their annual migrations. Researchers in six states recently assembled an unprecedented effort to track where Prothonotary Warblers go in winter, and they found that nearly the entire species depends on a small area in Colombia threatened by deforestation and sociopolitical changes.

New strategies for river management are needed to maintain water supplies and avoid big crashes in populations of aquatic life, researchers argue in a perspective piece published today in Nature.

New research publishing June 18 in the open-access journal, PLOS Biology, led by Dr. Lucy Taylor from the University of Oxford's Department of Zoology now reveals that homing pigeons fit in one extra wingbeat per second when flying in pairs compared to flying solo.

The common perception that pesticides reduce or eliminate target insect species may not always hold. Jennifer Weathered and Edd Hammill report that the impacts of agricultural pesticides on assemblages of aquatic insects varied resulting in distinct ecological winners and losers within aquatic communities.

Scientists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Vanderbilt University and Clark University have shed new light on the genomic foundation of the polar bear's ecological adaption by pinpointing rapid changes in the bear's gene copy numbers in response to a diet shifting from vegetation to meat.

A team of scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) collected data and samples (feces, hair) from the Caucasian Lynx (Lynx lynx dinniki), in a region of Anatolian Turkey over several years. The results of the genetic analyses indicated an unexpectedly high genetic diversity and lack of inbreeding despite the recent isolation of the study population.