News by Subject Biology

Researchers at the University of Washington wanted to know how Magellanic penguin parents in South America balance the dietary demands of multiple chicks. As they report in a paper published Jan. 23 in the journal Animal Behaviour, when a Magellanic penguin parent returns to its nest with fish, the parent tries to feed each of its two chicks equal portions of food, regardless of the youngsters' differences in age or size.

Researchers found that if a squirrel inherits territory from a male rather than a female, it will have about 1,300 more cones in its midden. This stored energy will keep the squirrel alive an extra 17 days. For females it means she will enough food to breed earlier, resulting in her offspring leaving the nest earlier. This shows how the behavior of a complete stranger can impact the genetic contribution of another.

Does a drier and hotter climate present a threat to the meerkats in the Kalahari Desert? Researchers from UZH and Cambridge show that climate change is likely to impact meerkats, and seasonal rainfall and temperature will be the key factors.

A new species in the family of Softshell Turtles is described from Northern Vietnam and China by a Hungarian-Vietnamese-German team of researchers. The newly discovered reptile has a distinctly blotched shell and is so critically endangered that it is close to extinction. The study is published in the scientific journal ZooKeys.

A new to science species of tarantula with a peculiar horn-like protuberance sticking out of its back was recently identified in central Angola, a largely underexplored country located at the intersection of several Afrotropical ecoregions. Collected as part of the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project, the new arachnid is described in the open-access journal African Invertebrates.

A new species of puddle frog (order: Anura, family: Phynobatrachidae, genus: Phrynobatrachus), has just been discovered by NYU Abu Dhabi researchers at the unexplored and isolated Bibita Mountain in southwestern Ethiopia. The research team named the new species Phrynobatrachus bibita sp. nov., or Bibita Mountain dwarf puddle frog, inspired by its home.