News by Subject Biology

The bluegill on your dinner plate might have been more social than the rest of its group, according to a new study from the University of Illinois, and its removal from the lake could mean major changes for the remaining population.

The ink has not yet dried on a scientific paper describing a new species of snake, yet the reptile may already be in danger of extinction due to mining. A team of biologists led by The University of Queensland's Associate Professor Bryan Fry discovered a new species of bandy-bandy snake at Weipa on the west coast of the Cape York Peninsula.

Crabs combine the input from their two eyes early on in their brain's visual pathway to track a moving object, finds new research published in JNeurosci. This study of adult male crabs from Argentina's Atlantic coast provides insight into the visual world of a crustacean.

Scientists estimate there are only 84 remaining highly endangered Amur leopards (Panthera pardus orientalis) remaining in the wild across its current range along the southernmost border of Primorskii Province in Russia and Jilin Province of China.

Researchers accidentally observed tree shrews directly and actively consuming chili peppers, despite the deep geographic isolation between the animal and the food. To understand this tolerance for spicy food, they performed genomic and functional analyses on the tree shrew and its TRPV1.

University of Kansas scientists discovered that polyps have no qualms about treating a nonrelated individual like part of the family. This goes way beyond sharing meals or even a roof. Polyps of the marine hydrozoan Ectopleura larynx allow nonrelated individuals to fuse their bodies to the familial colony and share what is essentially skin and a stomach. The findings appeared yesterday in the journal Evolution Letters. 

Biologists at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum characterized new, unknown photoreceptors from the bioluminescent flashlight fish Anomalops katoptron. The photoreceptors known as opsins allow the fish to detect light with a specific wavelength. As published on the July 11, 2018, in PLOS ONE the scientists found new opsin variants, which are specialized to detect low intensity blue light in the wavelength range of bioluminescent light emitted by the fish. The blue light can be used to influence the fish behavior.

Off the coast of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea, many fish farms have been moved into deeper waters -- and on the seabeds beneath their previous locations, the meadows are flourishing once again.

The inclusion of taxon-specific sensitivity to a shifting climate helps us understand species distributional responses to changes in climate.