News by Subject Biology

Some flowering crops, such as beans and cotton, carefully manage the amount and sweetness of nectar produced on their flowers and leaves, to recruit colonising ants which deter herbivores. This strategy balances their needs for defence and reproduction.

Marine seismic surveys used in petroleum exploration could cause a two to three-fold increase in mortality of adult and larval zooplankton, new research published in leading science journal Nature Ecology and Evolution has found. Scientists from IMAS and the Centre for Marine Science and Technology (CMST) at Curtin University studied the impact of commercial seismic surveys on zooplankton populations by carrying out tests using seismic air guns in the ocean off Southern Tasmania.

The anchors that hold Venus' flower basket sea sponges to the ocean floor have an internal architecture that increases their ability to bend, according to a new study. Understanding that natural architecture could inform future human-made materials.

On polygamous females and single-parent males Behavioral researchers at Bielefeld University are studying plovers Male plovers survive more successfully in the wild than females. Behavioral researchers at Bielefeld University have studied how sex biases develop across the life span of the plover. They report on the consequences of the surplus of males for rearing chicks in the research journal 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'.

Honeybees may not need key brain structures known as mushroom bodies in order to learn complex associations between odors and rewards, according to new research published in PLOS Computational Biology.

While more than 13,000 cases of Chikungunya viral disease were reported in Brazil in 2015, scientists had never before detected the virus in a captured mosquito in this country. Now, researchers reporting in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases have identified a mosquito -- caught in the Brazilian city of Aracaju -- that's naturally infected with the East-Central-South-African (ECSA) genotype of Chikungunya.